Alien Technology

Ableton Live – My New DAW

For the past 5 years I’ve been using FL Studio (Fruity Loops) for producing music, I like the way it encourages you to make loops, duplicate them, change them and layer them up. It’s easy to make drum parts and drag and drop different sounds to change the sounds until you are happy with the sound.

I tried Ableton Live 6 and 7 when they were released as I’ve heard lots of hype about them. I wasn’t really happy with the feel of working with it, it felt like it took me 3x longer to do anything than I could do in fruity.

I tried Ableton Live 8 and I have to say it’s much improved. I love the warping engine, it makes auditioning samples over your existing project very simple as it matches the tempo and makes it fit. If it doesn’t sound right on Auditioning, it won’t sound right when you drag it in and it saves a lot of time when trying new sounds.

I’ve been using the drum racks and It’s very powerful, you can send individual drum instruments to FX so you can compress just a kick. When side-chaining you can choose the whole drum part to trigger a ‘pump’ or you can choose individual instrument, e.g. Kick to pump the compressor on another track (for example a bassline) this is something I love about FL studio and a technique I used frequently. Now I’ve discovered the way to do this with Ableton, I am happy to say it’s even more intuitive than FL Studio.

You could probably do these things with previous incarnations of Ableton Live but I have never got that before without sacking it off and going back to Fruity.

The only problem now Is I now have a windows PC and sold my Mac Pro and kind of wish I still had it so I could of use the Mac Version of Ableton Live with that. It supposedly supports VST instruments on Mac, which (if I haven’t misread) means I could of used my favourite VST plugins with the Mac. I could always use my Macbook but my Windows PC is more powerful than this so I guess I’ll stick with Windows.

I have a BCF-2000 and Axiom 49 so I have plenty of Knobs and Faders to experiment with some live playback, who knows I might be able to get a grips with that and do some live stuff instead of just DJing and Studio Production. That could be good Fun.

It’s old news but Orbital have got back together after doing their own side projects and now use Ableton Live for the heart of their live Rigs. It is designed at heart to be a live tool but it’s just so clean and manageable that it’s an extremely powerful DAW for using for production as well, this is what I love about it.

I used Sonar for a bit and I probably still will for somethings but I don’t know If I will go back to Fruity. I just feel the sound I get from Sonar and Ableton is like the difference between a Sportscar and a Supercar. I’m using 192khz/24bit on my Edirol FA-66 interface and It sounds so much warmer than 44.1khz/16bit I used to use with Fruity, I know it will do 192khz/24bit but I never noticed a difference so I didn’t bother.

Ableton is more intuitive than Sonar so I’l stick with this for a bit, learn the software so I can use it as well as I can use FL Studio, that way it’ll be the ultimate tool to sit at the hart of my studio.

Tags: ableton, edirol, fl studio, roland, sonar

Ableton Live

I’ve installed Ableton Lite 6 this morning which came with my M-Audio Axiom 61 keyboard. I was expecting it to have a bit more functionality than it does have. It seems to have 4 channels, which is about enough for… well 4 instruments. That is by no means a complex tune. I went round to Jody’s to help him finish off “Vicious Intent” which is a dirty, gruleing, techy house track. I advised on some level adjustments and we’ve got it sounding ace. To be fair the hard work was done by Jody in the composition of the track it was pretty damn good but now it’s perfect.

He’s running Ableton 7 on Windows which I might end up having to do as I can’t get it to work on my Mac. I was going to check all the levels through my studio monitors and make sure it sounds level as it was produced on a big pair of B&W floorstanders which make the bass sound warmer than it probably is. I’ve got Ableton Live 6 now but it won’t play his live 7 project. That is annoying but normally the case.

I’ve been making all my samples in FL Studio 8 and then exporting them to WAV for ACID Pro recently. I don’t think the transition from ACID Pro to Ableton will be too hard. Ableton is a lot more ‘ABLE’ to be fair. It has some really neat looping and reversing functions at the click of a button. If I get into using it I think i’ll get the full Ableton Live 7 for Mac. It’s about £175 if you pay in USD$$$. Maybe in a few months!!

I’m half way through a dirty electro track at the moment which I think i’m going to redo in Ableton. I will use all my original samples and loops I’ve made in FL Studio but I’ll arrange them in Ableton with ACID Pro on my other screen for a guide.

Jody is pretty much there with ‘Vicious Intent’ and hopes to play them both during his Set at ‘Vinyl Foreplay’ @ Town Mill, Mansfield, in November.

Tags: ableton live, acid pro, fl studio