Ableton Live 6

Overview

Once a niche tool, Live 6 makes good on promises to a growing range of users, from DJs to composers to electronic musicians to people who want a songwriting sketchpad or a way to play interactive drum tracks as they sing. Rather than hanging this upgrades appeal on a banner feature that eclipses all others (like Live 4’s “Now with MIDI!”), Live 6 addresses many of those users’ specific needs. The upgrade boasts new and improved instruments and effects, enhanced performance on multi-core CPUs like Intel’s Core Duo, seamless freezing of clips, video import for film scoring, an overhauled file browser, and numerous usability tweaks. Right up to its release, Ableton squeezed in new features, like the eleventh-hour addition of custom crossfade curves. Is any one of these features enough to warrant an upgrade? That depends on how you make music. If one feature stands out, it’d be the new Device Racks.

DEVICE RACKS AND MIDI IMPROVEMENTS

For all the power of making music on computers, there’s one major problem: Human beings can only really control one thing at a time. Yet most software makes combining various effects and instruments into a single, controllable device a difficult task. Propellerhead Reason 3’s Combinator is a notable exception, and the Device Racks feature in Live 6 is on a similar mission. Like Combinator, Device Racks let you combine effects and instrument chains into a single piece of virtual gear, with support for MIDI mapping and macro knobs. Live 6 improves upon Reason 3, however, in four important ways. First, Live lets you combine and configure devices more quickly via a clever, collapsible interface. Second, the Device Rack is more flexible in that it implements key and velocity scaling and a “chain” function to switch or fade through chains of devices with full MIDI control of everything. Third, you get eight macro knobs to Reason’s four. Fourth and most importantly, Device Racks work with all your plug-ins as well as the internal Live instruments and effects.

The payoff is that you can layer and combine all your instruments and effects and fluidly switch between them at a gig. For example, you could change effects with a knob, or crossfade between instrument presets with an expression pedal during a solo. You can even nest Racks inside Racks, dropping ones from different songs into a master Rack for your set. They may prove insufficient for more complex routing, as Live is a far cry from modular sound design environments like NI Reaktor. But Live is now the easiest tool by far for combining different instruments and effects in immediately gratifying ways.

Every other aspect of MIDI control has improved as well. A new global mapping view for controller and keyboard assignments is where you map a single knob to multiple parameters, scale maximum and minimum values, and perform lots of other essential functions. Improved MIDI controller support covers most of the M-Audio line, Mackie Control, Korg’s Kontrol49, and the Novation ReMote SL; props to Ableton for resolving most of the issues I raised in our Sept. ’06 review of the ReMote SL. But even if you have an unsupported device, you’ll find MIDI control is much easier in Live 6. A new “take-over” mode either waits for you to move a fader or knob to the on-screen position before changing the parameter, or scales relative values based on a controller. This prevents non-motorized controls from jumping from one value to another.

Taken together, these features work to ensure you spend more time playing actual hardware and (with some prep work) little or no time reaching for the keyboard and mouse.

VIDEO SCORING

If you’ve wished you could use Live for scoring, but were stopped by the lack of a video player, you’re in luck. Live 6 now supports QuickTime video and synchronized playback in a window or on a second monitor. Since Live implements markers and can trigger them easily like clips, it’s an ideal environment for sketching scoring ideas. As you’d expect from Live’s warping facility, you can now warp your sounds to, say, perfectly map beat-driven music to picture. The only thing you can’t do is trigger video clips from the Session View, so if you planned on using Live 6 for VJing — not yet. But it could be ideal for projects in which advanced features like integrated notation, robust surround support and export features, and more complex marker lists are overkill. The orchestral feature-length film score might be a job for MOTU Digital Performer, but the 30-second ad spot due tomorrow could be just right for Live.

SAMPLER

Sampler, a new multi-sampling soft instrument, joins Operator as an add-on to Live. As with Operator, you’ll need to pay extra to unlock it, and the overriding design principle is to pack features into a minimalist interface that fits seamlessly into Live itself. However, Sampler feels even more like a natural extension of Live’s user interface than Operator. Drag a clip from anywhere in your project onto Sampler, and you can instantly map it to zones on your keyboard to create a new patch. At this point, you could use Sampler just like Simpler (Live’s included instrument) on steroids: drag in audio, play with loop points, then mangle sounds with the filter and modulation. But Sampler is a true multi-sampler: click the zone button, and a pane appears for mapping samples by pitch and velocity. The Zone editor mirrors the design of the Device Racks, so it’s easy to learn (see Figure 1 at right). Sampler can also import libraries that are in Apple Logic Pro’s EXS24 (also used by GarageBand instruments), NI Kontakt, and Akai CD formats.

Aside from being a semi-universal sampler instrument, Sampler’s other big plus is its extensive modulation and filter section. With three LFOs and multiple envelopes and custom routing for these, you can turn it into a playable effects processor as much as a sampler. The best feature is Sampler’s filter, which boasts both a built-in waveshaper and continuous morphing between bandpass, highpass, lowpass, and notch modes. Since you can control the filter with LFOs and/or automation and clip envelopes, you can create subtly morphing timbres or push the envelope into the realm of screaming, distorted sounds.

If Sampler generates a complaint, it’s that Operator didn’t get upgraded with some of the same features. Many Sampler presets are synthesized waveforms, so its morphing filter would be a terrific addition to Operator. Sampler’s preset library is also sparse, but fortunately, you can convert multisamples from the Essential Instrument Collection described below and edit them in Sampler. It’s hard to complain, though, as the budget price (for the features provided) and tight integration with clips makes Sampler a must-have.

INSTRUMENTS AND EFFECTS

A number of other instruments and effects in Live 6 are either new or improved. The Dynamic Tube effect adds new possibilities for distortion; it’s capable of a wide range from subtle warmth to extreme harshness. Saturator, introduced in Live 5, expands its repertoire with new curves and wave-shaping. Operator gets new 24dB filter modes and two more FM algorithms.

The most useful new effect is EQ Eight, a full-featured 8-band EQ. There’s even a mid-side mode that lets you EQ specific parts of the stereo field, useful for remix artists removing vocals or creating karaoke tracks, or for gaining finer control over your sound.

Also, as long as you spend a little extra for the boxed edition, Live now comes with a complement of multisampled instruments called the Essential Instruments Collection. (You can play the instruments in Simpler, but to edit the multisamples you’ll need to purchase Sampler.) EIC’s sound quality is very good, with some creative applications of Device Racks. The selection is pretty basic, but covers keyboards, orchestral instruments, guitars and basses, mallets, and choirs. It’s a decent way to get started and makes going for the boxed edition a no-brainer.

IN USE

It’s easy to suffer from software upgrade fatigue these days, but Live 6 — more so than Live 5, even — has changed how I work for the better. I began working with Live 6 from the second I could get my hands on it, and never for a moment wanted to go back.

Performance alone is good reason to upgrade. On both a dual 2.7GHz Apple G5 and a dual-core AMD Athlon 3800 X2 PC, the CPU meter ran noticeably lower, and I stopped having to think about CPU usage. But mostly, I find working in Live 6 easier and more efficient. With Racks, I’m finally able to create extensive performance setups I can take out and play, and I can even combine multiple songs into one streamlined, playable set, focusing on my keyboard performance rather than my computer. Deep Freeze makes it much easier to produce editable audio clips. While I was initially skeptical about Sampler, its drag-and-drop multisampling, filter, and modulation section have since proven irresistible.

Live’s radical simplicity can be limiting in some cases, even with the latest improvements. Having just one global swing setting pales compared to the multiple groove quantize options we’ve taken for granted from MIDI sequencer apps for years. Live 6 has a fantastic new feature that maps tempo to a master clip in Arrangement View, which can let you sync an entire arrangement to the feel of a single track or video file. But there’s no way to extract that groove and apply it elsewhere, or to change the feel of clips in the Session View. That’s too bad, because competing DAWs have added “extract-groove-from-audio” features. It’s also frustrating that after all these releases, you can’t insert true meter changes in Session View, or control the master meter via MIDI or keyboard shortcut. And given Live’s otherwise fantastic and intuitive routing, the lack of a real sidechain input for its internal effects is a bummer. All that said, however, Ableton seems largely in tune with their users’ wants, and Live remains the one music tool I always come back to the most.

Other improvements? In terms of sheer number, Live 6 is one of Ableton’s biggest upgrades to date. Here are some highlights: Mixer channels are now sizable, so you can see your level more clearly, and you can now render (i.e. bounce) individual tracks. Overhauled file management provides easier access to presets, easier transfer of clips and presets between projects, and powerful tools for managing and hot-swapping samples.

CONCLUSIONS

For live performance with a computer, or for getting around creative blocks and getting straight to developing ideas, Live 6 is unparalleled. In my opinion, this upgrade is the one that will make you feel that Live has come of age. Device Racks, video scoring with warping, Deep Freeze, and Sampler all build upon existing design features, but demonstrate more clearly than ever why that foundation made sense. You’ve heard this before, but by getting out of your way as you work seamlessly with clips, instruments, and effects, Live 6 is one of the few programs that can actually transform how you make music — in a way no other product does. Hands down, it’s a Key Buy.