Ableton Live
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Ableton Live 4
Ableton Live is a loop-based software music sequencer for Macintosh and Windows. The latest major release of Live, version 4, was released at NAMM in the summer of 2004. Relative to other software sequencers Live is designed around the notion of being as much an instrument for live performances as a tool for composing and arranging – hence the name.
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History
Live was originally sketched in Max/MSP. Upon deciding to take the software in a commercial direction, Ableton was founded in 1999 by Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke of Monolake and Bernd Roggendorf. Live was rewritten in C++ as a commercial piece of software, and the first version was released in 2001. As of June 2005, 4.1.4 is the current version. Ableton has also spawned a second product, Operator, which is used as an audio synthesis instrument inside of Live. Behles remains the chief executive of Ableton, while Henke remains in a role of technical leadership and focuses on Live's included effects and instruments. Ableton's office is located in central Berlin. At the end of May 2005, Ableton announced the forthcoming release of version 5 of their software. Beta testing will begin in June.
Features
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Much of Live's unique interface comes from being designed to use in live performance. As such the interface is more compact that most sequencers and clearly designed for use on a single screen. Overwhelmingly there are no pop up messages or in fact dialogs at all. Portions of the interface are hidden and shown based on arrows which may be clicked to show or hide a certain segment (i.e. to hide the instrument / effect list or to show or hide the help box). Additionally because of the performance aspect of Live's design, all of the processing is done in real-time, rather than rendering effects prior to playback as is typical in many sequencers and sample editors.
Views
There are two views which are central to Live – the arrangement view and the session view. The session is primarily used to organize and trigger sets of sounds called clips. These clips may be arranged into scenes which may be triggered as a unit. For instance a drum, bass and guitar track might might comprise a single scene. When moving on to another portion of the composition – a new scene – some or all of those parts might differ and could be triggered in parallel.
The other view is the arrangement view, which is used for recording tracks from the session view and further manipulating their arrangement and effects. This view is fairly similar to a traditional software sequencer interface.
Clips may either be based on an audio sample or one of Live's built in instruments. Live comes by default with two instruments – Impulse and Simpler.
Instruments
Impulse is a more or less traditional drum sequencing instrument which allows for defining a kit of up to eight drum sounds. There are a number of options available for preprocessing these samples such as basic equalization, attack, delay, pitch shift, etc. Once the kit is defined these samples are arranged into groups of measures using a piano-roll interface.
Simpler is a relatively easy to use sampling instrument. It is based on working with a single sample, applying preprocessing and then arranging it in a piano roll interface. In this case, rather than the notes representing different samples as in Impule, the samples are pitch shifted to the selected note.
Operator is an additional product which may be purchased in addition to Live. It is designed for synthesizing sounds via a wide range of controls.
Effects
Most of the effects are fairly familiar effects in the digital signal processing world which have been adapted to fit Live's interface. They are however fairly obviously tailored for the target audience of Live – electronic musicians and DJs – rather than, say, post processing a guitar rig.
The audio effects shipped with Live are:
- Audio Filter
- Chorus
- Compressor I
- Compressor II
- EQ Three (Band)
- EQ Four (Band)
- Erosion
- Filter Delay
- Gate
- Grain Delay
- Ping Pong Delay
- Redux
- Resonators
- Reverb
- Simple Delay
Additionally there are a handful of MIDI-only effects:
- Chord
- Pitch
- Random
- Scale
- Velocity
In more recent versions Live is also able to use VST and Audio Unit effects.
Working with audio clips
In addition to the instruments mentioned above, Live can work with samples. Live attempts to do beat analysis of the samples to find their meter, number of bars and the number of beats per minute. This makes it possible for Live to shift these samples to fit into loops that are tied into the piece's global tempo.
Additionally Live's Time Warp feature can be used to either correct or adjust beat positions in the sample. By setting warp markers to a specific point in the sample, arbitrary points in the sample can be pegged to positions in the measure. For instance a drum beat that fell 250 ms after the midpoint in measure may be adjusted so that it will be played back precisely at the midpoint.
Envelopes
Almost all of the parameters in Live are controlled by envelopes which may be drawn either on clips and will be used in every performance of that clip or into the arrangement so that they vary at different points in the playback of a composition. The most obvious examples are volume or track panning, but these are also used in Live to set things like the root note of a resonator (see screenshot) or the delay time or feedback amount for a delay effect. Essentially these map to most of what would be a knob on an effect in a traditional audio processing rack and in fact they may be mapped to knobs on MIDI controllers.
Notable users
- Akufen
- Avi Bortnick (rhythm guitar in John Scofield Band)
- Berliner Ensemble
- Carmen Rizzo
- Chicks On Speed
- Darren Price
- Dirty Vegas
- Eivind Aarset
- Front 242
- Future Loop Foundation
- James Zabiela
- Mogwai
- NIN's Charlie Clouser
- Rennie Pilgrem
- Richard Devine
- Sasha
- Steve Stoll
- Tom Salta
- Vernon Reid
- Vladislav Delay
See also
External links
- Ableton's Official Website (http://www.ableton.com)
- Ableton Live Yahoo User Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ableton_live/)