Even better? It works beautifully.įurther evidence of the broadened focus might be seen in three new instruments: upright piano, brass quartet, and string quartet - the latter two of which are rarely used in EDM production - but more about those later. I’ve always found it a bit cumbersome to record vocals in Live, in particular, so this is an especially welcome new capability. The new take recording and comping feature lets you capture multiple takes of either an audio performance (such as vocals) or a MIDI performance (such as live keyboard playing), then easily choose and commit the best parts of recorded takes. With Live 11, Ableton has taken a slightly different tack by providing new functionality for capturing the perfect take, something that it seems would be of interest primarily to conventional musicians, such as singer/songwriters. But Ableton’s positioning always made me feel like it wasn’t really made for what I was doing - even if it was perfectly capable of it. I’ve personally used Live to create electronica, but also to produce beds, bumpers, stingers and other cues for sync trade-show-presentation background music and even country music. That Ableton isn’t holding my music hostage is a plus, but then, so is the array of new functionality that they’ve introduced in the long-awaited Live 11.īroadening the Range: Perhaps it’s just me, but for the first time I can remember, Ableton seems to be positioning Live as a DAW (digital audio workstation) that’s designed for more than just electronic and EDM musicians. Of course, that means that companies like Ableton have to tempt you every year or two to spend more money on major upgrade releases to keep money coming in the door.Ĭall me old-school, but I’d rather pay in three-digit chunks every few years than two-digit chunks every single month - with the latter presenting the risk that when I stop paying, I stop being able to work on my own music anymore. That means you buy the software once and can use it perpetually without paying again. Second, in the face of so-called “agile” software development practices that have in turn spawned app stores and the regular update cycles we’re all accustomed to on our phones and tablets these days, and in the face of increasingly popular (but consumer-hostile) subscription-based business models, the company steadfastly sticks to a traditional model, what software people call a “perpetual-license” model. First, that they seem to take a very slow, deliberate approach to releasing software. I credit the good folks at Ableton for a couple of things. Could it possibly have been three years since Live 10 was released? It had been five years at that point since Live 9 was kicked out of the nest. Indeed, Live’s so-called Session View was the “different approach” that finally unlocked my brain and enabled me to successfully make my first forays into music production.įast forward to the last time I reviewed Ableton Live: 2018. The year was 2004, and the software was Ableton Live, which had just had its fourth version released. It just doesn’t seem that long ago that after unsuccessfully trying for years to make electronic music, I decided to try a new piece of software out of Germany that held promise for a different approach. It’s said that time flies when you’re having fun, and boy, how it flies.
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