The Realtime Emperor's New Groove
Scroll down for videos on Live's vocoder and new Collision instrument!
HANDS-ON [Click image above for larger version.]
1. The Groove Pool stores Live’s new Grooves – extract musical feel from audio, then apply it to a MIDI or audio clip interactively and non-destructively. Your music will only sound robotic if you want it to.
2. Live 8 ships with a library of groove, organized by genre and classic hardware and software. Yes, the one shown is from Notator, the ancestor of Logic!
3.Here’s the pop-up menu where you can extract groove and feel information directly from audio clips.
4. Track Groups organize tracks visually. You can trigger groups of clips in a Track Group – just as with Scenes.
5. The new Looper instrument allows powerful overdubbing features, and sets the Project Tempo accordingly.
6. Frequency Shifter is capable of special effects and subtler timbres alike.
7. You can now more effectively manage third-party presets with large numbers of parameters by selecting which parameters matter, as here with Reaktor.
8. Color coding and interface scaling (seen here at 125%) make your projects easier to see.
PROS
New Grooves get the feel back in your music. Improved warping. Looper is just brilliant. Powerful, elegant track grouping. Rich new sound design and instrumental possibilities. Tweaks make the best realtime host better.
CONS
Assigning hardware MIDI controls can be a pain. Some tools for navigating large groups of clips require having an Akai APC40 controller. Crossfades are nice, but there are still no real automation curves. No follow actions for Scenes.
INFO
Live 8: $599 list/approx $500 street;
Suite 8: $999 list/approx. $800 street,
ableton.com
NEED TO KNOW
What is it? Originally described as a “live sequencing instrument,” Live is particularly well-suited to live performance involving all manner of manipulation of audio clips and MIDI. It’s also perfectly happy to act as a more traditional multitrack DAW.
What do I need to run it? Mac or Windows (XP or 32-bit Vista), 1GB RAM, and a 1.25GHz or faster processor — 2 GB RAM and a recent Intel processor is recommended.
Should I get Live Suite? How about LE? LE is still at version 7, so you probably want the full Live version. Get Suite for more instruments: Operator, Sampler, the new Collision mallet instrument, Electric keyboard, Tension physically-modeled string synth, and virtual Analog instrument, plus more sampled drums and percussion.
What about Max for Live? Share? Max for Live is a special version of Cycling ’74 Max/MSP/Jitter that puts the full mojo of this modular patching environment into Live. Share is an online collaboration tool. Both are in beta, but pricing has not been announced; expect to see more later this year.
Imagine seeing Ableton Live as if for the first time. You’d see an interface built around a mixer and set of rectangular slots for clips of musical material. In this view (Session View), Live is part mixer and part sample workstation, triggering musical clips interactively and providing a tabbed view of all the effects and instruments you might use. Switch to Arrange View, and Live presents a linear arrangement of your music that looks more like the tracks window in other DAWs. If you looked at Live some eight years ago, you’d see almost the same interface, save slightly-tweaked hues of gray and a few less widgets. Squint, and you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
Just as remarkable as Ableton’s commitment to that user interface is the fact that eight years later, there’s still not a competitor that does quite what Live does. That is, Live not only does the things you’d expect from a multitrack workstation program, but does it in realtime in a way that blurs the line between studio and stage. This can make Live hard to review, if only because there’s no immediate point of comparison, and because Ableton’s visual consistency can make it easy to lose the nuance of changes. Live 8 does have big changes — arguably the most significant in recent years. To really consider what those mean, let’s look at them alongside what Live — the entire package — has become, and what it hasn’t.
EFFECTS AND INSTRUMENTS
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Live comes with a rich selection of effects — even before you consider the extra instruments in Live Suite. Live 8 refines and adds to the tools. For mastering, there’s a much-needed Multiband Dynamics processor, plus a Limiter and Overdrive. The Frequency Shifter is capable of some unique timbres, from conventional ring modulation to special effects to subtler coloration. Vocoder is a logical choice for integrating with a host because of its unique routing, and has a variable number of bands and can operate as a formant shifter. Live 8 also comes with the Essential Instrument Collection in the boxed (not download) version only.
If you get Suite, Collision (shown in the first video above) is built on physical models of percussion instruments and resonators. It’s particularly good at marimbas, vibes, toms, and unheard-of sounds. As with other modeling instruments, the results can be unpredictable, but that’s half the fun, and the resonators double as a useful effect. Also on hand are modeled electric pianos, strings, and virtual analog synths from Applied Acoustics, who have produced some of the most organic-sounding soft synths anywhere — a big draw for Suite. Operator now has new filter types, drawable partials for additive synthesis, and more modulation routings — enough new stuff that it feels like a new synth.
HIGHER WARP FACTOR
For many, the ability to warp, slice, and time-stretch audio has been central to Live’s appeal. The way in which you apply audio warping has been revamped in this version, essential to artists wanting to remix and manipulate recorded loops. More importantly, though, a new groove feature could appeal to all artists — regardless of whether they’re DJs or interested in remixing — who found Live’s quantization overly mechanical.
In order to conform audio clips to a desired tempo in any tool, you need a way to match up events or transients in the sound, such as the attack on a high hat, with the musical timeline. Live’s mechanism for this is its Warp Markers, which are points that indicate how your sound will be stretched and squeezed to fit the tempo. In previous versions, the waveform was fixed, and warp markers could be placed and moved around it. The basic workflow: Make the markers line up with the waveform to get the audio in line with tempo. Now, that relationship is reversed: The time ruler indicating bars and beats stays in one place, and the Warp Markers are fixed to their position in the sound (click screenshot below for larger version). As you move Warp Markers, the waveform itself stretches and compresses in relation to the timeline’s beats, and the Warp Markers move with transients in the Sample Display. This may confuse veteran users at first, but it means the waveform now visually represents what’s actually happening — it’s the sound that’s being stretched and compressed.
Ableton also reworked and expanded its Warping Engine. The “Complex Pro Mode” produces higher-quality results; the effect is nuanced, but continues a long progression from the relatively primitive audio warping in Live’s early versions. Beats Mode adds options for controlling looping and preserving transients to improve the results of percussive content. You can quantize the audio directly, with a percentage offset, to tighten a clip all at once. Also, you can finally slice your audio to transients, and not just fixed beats and bars, which makes slicing up audio samples for Drum Racks much more fun. Some of these changes are long-overdue. Warping is more integrated with Live than it is in just about any other music software; with Live 8, you really feel as though it’s a feature you can control.
GROOVES
The challenge of all this warping-to-the-beat is that the results can sound mechanical. If you were waiting for Live to have proper groove quantize as you’d expect in a MIDI sequencer, you finally get your wish — and then some. In contrast to a one-dimensional “swing” parameter, a Groove represents an entire rhythmic pattern, with all the details of feel that music may contain over a bar. True to Live’s clip paradigm, these are contained in a Groove Library in the Browser and can be dragged on top of any clip. That lets you apply grooves to warped audio or any MIDI pattern. It’s non-destructive as well.
There are two ways to find the groove you want. Live 8 ships with a library of useful grooves, including exact replicas of classic groove quantize presets like the Akai MPC, the E-mu SP1200, even Emagic Notator. You also get basic quantize templates and genre-specific grooves for styles like hip-hop and Latin. The real fun, though, is extracting grooves from existing audio clips. That allows you to mimic the feel of your favorite hardware, sampled loops, or your own performances. The extract feature works perfectly, so there’s no excuse for robotic-sounding tracks unless they’re what you’re trying to achieve.
Live’s Groove Pool also provides parameters for base metric value (quarter note, eight note, and so on), quantization, timing, and velocity and randomization controls. These can make even a generic groove template powerful. One gripe: You can’t MIDI-learn any of the Groove Pool parameters to hardware controls. That aside, in version 8 Live has gone from inadequate in the groove department to having one of the most powerful and integrated implementations anywhere.
MIXING AND EDITING
While warping and realtime performance are Live’s most obvious draws, it’s hard to overstate how appealing its one-window simplicity has been to musicians who want conventional workflows with less fuss. The tradeoff has often been that some features are stripped down or simply missing when it comes to fine-tuning your edits. Live 8 finally addresses some key workflow details, without disrupting the all-important simplicity.
Grouping tracks seems a natural fit for Live’s triple purpose as a sampler, live performance tool, and mixer-centric studio editor. Live 7’s Drum Racks and Live 6’s Device Racks already provided a glimpse of how powerful grouping tracks could be. Live 8 finally lets you group any tracks, not just Drum Racks: Select multiple tracks, right-click, and choose “Group Tracks.” As expected, you can conveniently fold the view of those tracks to treat them as a submix, with fader controls and audio inserts that apply to the group. What you might not expect is that clips stored in the group can be triggered all at once, meaning you can create groups of clips for launching within a group of tracks, without using Scenes.
A significant complaint about previous versions of Live was that you couldn’t draw automation curves in arrangements. That ability is still missing, which means that to visually fine-tune your automation, you’re still limited to linear curves or what you can perform on your control surface. However, you can now apply volume fades to clips and crossfades between adjacent clips (click screenshot below for larger version).
You can also have Live automatically create short (4ms) fades to avoid clicking artifacts. You have to create crossfades manually; you can’t have them automatically added when you drag overlapping clips as with many other DAWs. Live 8 is a big improvement, but when it comes to editing your arrangements, it still doesn’t stack up to conventional DAWs on some of these details.
There are improvements to MIDI as well as audio. The MIDI Editor allows precise inserts at specific locations, and some new keyboard shortcuts make editing much faster. You can also do simple step entry from the QWERTY keyboard. Generally, Live’s interface feels more polished. You can preview files in the browser, adjust mixer parameters across multiple tracks at once (even without grouping), color-code tracks, scenes, and macros, and make sure macro parameters always display their name.
LOOPER AND LIVE USE
Fast editing is great, but the one area that has always differentiated Live the most is right in its name: How fluid it is to use in live performance.
The biggest news here is the Looper instrument. It overdubs loops and can set the tempo for your entire project based on an incoming loop, mimicking hardware like Boss’ classic RC-20 pedal. The idea isn’t new, but Looper’s implementation is the one Ableton users have been waiting for. You can prepare for overdubbing in advance by setting a tempo first or even importing a loop. Or you can just turn it on, start recording, and play. For guitarists, vocalists, instrumentalists, vocal beatboxers, and anyone else who does realtime loop recording in performance, this is a quantum leap past previous Live workflows and reason enough on its own to buy the upgrade.
Other subtle changes are significant to both control and live performance. Third-party plug-ins with lots of parameters can now be fully controlled and automated easily. Click “Configure” on any VST or AU plug-in, and you can choose which parameters to control and automate simply by clicking on them in the interface.
Tired of hunching over your laptop? You can now increase the size of the interface. This works well, but it’s too bad the setting is buried in the Preferences dialog — it’d be nice to have a zoom slider in the UI itself, or a shortcut for accessing this setting.
Unfortunately, when it comes to controlling Live with external hardware and making use of clips, there are still significant limitations that aren’t addressed in this update. Ableton promises extensibility and scripting-style features in the upcoming Max for Live, but it’d be nice to see that kind of power integrated with Live’s famously elegant interface. Clip Follow Actions were one way of doing this, but that idea has been untouched in recent versions, and there are still no Follow Actions for scenes.
Most significantly for a program called “Live,” control is still harder than it needs to be. Managing large groups of clips can be a challenge. Akai’s Live-centric APC40 controller adds visual feedback on clip status, in the form of color-coded backlit buttons and an onscreen overlay that lets you select groups of clips. However, you only get this overlay with an APC40 connected. MIDI assignments with any controller can be challenging — MIDI learn works well enough, but you can’t manually type in a control change number. If a control sends multiple messages (e.g. an X/Y touchpad as on Novation keyboards) it can be hard to differentiate which MIDI message you want to use. Some of these limitations come from MIDI, so as live visual apps and iPhone apps add support for OpenSoundControl, OSC in Live would be a logical next step.
CONCLUSIONS
Few applications mature as gracefully as Ableton Live, which has remained true to its elegant, unique interface since its first release. Live 8 is unquestionably a must-buy upgrade, thanks especially to beautiful new sound design and instrument possibilities, the deep Groove feature, the Looper for live overdubbing, and many workflow-improving details. Live isn’t for everyone, or for every task — when it comes to conventional multitrack editing, it trades some functionality to retain its simplicity and realtime performance. Nonetheless, Live 8 continues to make a Key Buy-winning argument for being different, as it’s still the best tool out there for making music production a realtime affair.