Recording - June 2021 - 66

R&R

REVIEWED &
REVISITED

Ableton Live 11

This popular DAW gets new macros,
instruments, effects and more
Organization

REVIEW BY DAVID BLASCOE

ast January we took a sneak peek at a prerelease build of Ableton Live
11. Building on the now-classic workflow that Live users have come
to love, Live 11 is packed with a multitude of improvements and tons
of new built-in stock sounds, making it, in my opinion, the best edition
yet. I covered most of the headline features in January, such as the longawaited Take Lanes (comping), linked track editing, MPE, and more. You
can read that review at recordingmag.com/resources/featured-reviews/
january-2021-ableton-live-11. Today, we'll dig into some additional
new features that have since come alive in Live 11.

Spitfire Audio

One of the additions I was dying
to get my hands and ears on was the
new Upright Piano, String Quartet and
Brass Quartet virtual instruments, courtesy
of Spitfire Audio. These meticulously
multi-sampled instruments are stunning.
The Upright Piano is now my go-to
piano instrument. Organic and realistic,
it comes with brilliant preset macros (a
Spitfire hallmark). It's super easy to dial
in the right blend of mechanical aspects
(hammer, pedal, and release levels),
and then further sculpt the sound with
dedicated reverb and tone shaping
controls. The Brass Quartet and String
Quartet samples are hyper-realistic and
66 RECORDING June 2021

highly tweakable. For me, the star of the
show is the fool-the-ear String Quartet.
Software strings often sound unnatural or unconvincing when it comes to
playing transitions between notes and
chords. Ableton and Spitfire have nailed
this issue. Common to both String Quartet
and Brass Quartet is the Technique control, an automatable feature that alters
the playing technique. With brass, this
control can conjure soft, breathy notes or
loud piercing stabs. With strings, you can
transition from light, feathery bowing all
the way over to highly aggressive tremolo.
Automating the Technique control provides realtime style changes to add even
more nuance and realism.

Audio effects are now sub-categorized
into groups rather than indexed alphabetically. The eight new folders are Delay &
Loop, Drive & Color, Dynamics, EQ &
Filters, Modulators, Pitch & Modulation,
Reverb & Resonance and Utilities. At first,
I found myself stumbling around when
searching for a particular plugin to use,
forgetting which folders things are in. For
example, Drum Buss is under Drive & Color, whereas I think of a Drum Buss more as
a bus compressor. I'll get used to it!

Macro Variations

A feature I didn't even know I needed until now is Macro Variations. Instrument and
audio racks now gain the option to have
from one to sixteen macros (up from eight).
Macro Variations are custom-tailored presets populated with only the controls you
need. Many audio racks and instruments
come preloaded with newly created
macro presets ready to go, or you can
create your own. For example, I took the
new Upright Piano, maxed out the pedal
noise and hammer volume, set the tone for
maximum darkness and warmth and then
saved a macro variation called 'Old Piano'. Then, for another variation, I turned the

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Recording - June 2021

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