Looking for:
Ableton Live 9 & Push
Live 9 has been a long time coming, but, along with Ableton’s new Push controller, has ableton live suite 9 review free download potential to revolutionise music-making. Live 9 is the first major release of Ableton’s flagship DAW for three years. Previous versions, from Live 1 upwards, have emerged at roughly annual intervals, so it’s been a long time in the making. Alongside Live 9, Ableton have also launched a brand new hardware product: ableton live suite 9 review free download Push control surface.
Dedicated third-party Live controllers from Akai and Novation have been around for a while, but this is the first time Ableton have brought out something under their own name. For this review, Ableton supplied both Live 9 and ableton live suite 9 review free download Push, and I’ll cover them each in turn. Live 9 also marks a gradual shift by Ableton towards embracing libraries developed by third-party sound designers. Many of these now feature directly on Ableton’s web site, alongside Ableton’s own sound packs, as either free or paid downloadable products; Ableton are taking on something of a curatorial role in presenting this material.
Like earlier Live versions, Live 9 ships in multiple editions, depending on your requirements and budget. Live 9 Intro is the cut-down, two-channel-only, entry-level version, while Live 9 Standard and Live 9 Suite are the full application, differing only in terms of the instruments, effects and content packs included. Max for Live, the package that extends Ableton live suite 9 review free download with Cycling ’74’s Max audio and video toolkit, has been updated to use Max version 6, and is перейти на страницу an integral part of Live Suite.
In Live 8, Max for Live was always an additional, pay-to-use product, even for owners of Suite. Finally, Live 9 now ships in and bit versions. The core Live application looks, feels and works very much like Live 8, and at first glance there are no glaring changes that leap out. I said much the same about Live 8 versus Live 7; Ableton go very much for windows media player download free free development ableton live suite 9 review free download than revolutionary redesign.
The changes are, by and large, at the level of isolated alteration and refinement of specific features, although some of that alteration runs deep. First off, the Browser has been completely overhauled, and works differently. The changes here are significant and we’ll look at them in some detail in a moment.
Some of Live’s core audio effects have been enhanced, and there’s a new analogue-style compressor. There’s a lot of new content instruments, sample setswith more available directly from Ableton’s web site.
There’s an audio-to-MIDI feature for analysing recordings and rendering them in note-sequence form. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, editing and control have been improved. MIDI editing is more ableton live suite 9 review free download, and the automation machinery has been upgraded, allowing — at last — individual clips to carry their own automation data, which can be transferred between Session and Arrangement.
Live Sets and Projects are organised in pretty much the same way in Live 9 as in Live 8. The way in which the files comprising a Live Set are handled on disk is unchanged, as long as the Project is self-contained. Library and Live Pack management, however, is somewhat different. The release of Live 9 involves a bit of a visual make-over.
Ableton’s web site is now all pastel colours and Futura font, and the Live application’s logo and launch panel are a plain and cheerful pink, rather than the rather austere-looking black of Live 8. My Ableton gig bag now looks so здесь season! The default colour theme, or ‘skin’, is a new minimal, designer grey, but the bundled alternatives include the Live 8 scheme for maximum familiarity.
New preference controls for brightness, colour intensity and tint provide plenty of scope for the displacement activity of getting the decor looking just so. To be fair, a brightness control makes a lot of sense when taking a set onto a darkened stage. Aside from the reinvented Browser, the only other obvious change is in the Control Bar.
The transport controls have a few new buttons next to them, partly reflecting changes in the way automation is managed, and partly, as we’ll see, the way the Push controller works. Live’s Browser is its window into all the resources available for use in a Live Project: Live Sets, tracks, clips, devices, presets, samples and so on. Some of these resources are actual files on disk, while others are component parts of libraries or of other Live Sets.
As it was configured in Live 8, the Browser presented five mutually exclusive views: Live Devices, Plug-In Devices VST and Audio Units plug-insand three identical file browsers for examining and loading files ableton live suite 9 review free download больше информации, or tracks and clips within Live Sets.
A drop-down menu shared between the file browsers allowed user-defined directories, including the Live Library, to be examined and searched. Everything was presented in a single tree view. A tale of two Browsers: in Live 8, top, panes were selected using buttons on the left, and a drop-down menu switched location.
In Live 9, above, Categories and Places streamline navigation of devices and sounds. Live 9’s Browser represents ableton live suite 9 review free download rethink of the way Live’s resources — and yours — are presented. The View selection buttons are gone, and there are now two panes side-by-side.
The right-hand ‘content’ pane contains a familiar-looking tree of items, but the left-hand pane is new and holds two sets of items, labelled Categories and Places. Categories partly replaces the three kinds of Browser pane in Live 8. Max for Live’s devices now have ableton live suite 9 review free download own Category, whereas Live 8’s Browser presented them just like its other devices. It’s not clear where these labels come from — I assume they’re hard-wired into Live’s Library — and it doesn’t seem possible to label one’s own presets.
While Live’s own instruments, and many in third-party packs, seem to be categorised, the MIDI effects aren’t, and the audio effects aren’t except for the effect racks.
Nothing in Max for Live is categorised, and your own presets will end up with the label ‘Others’, which isn’t terribly informative. Personally, though, I посмотреть еще make a lot of use of sound categories, and Live 9 does at least categorise the core library and Live Pack content, which is most important.
The Places area of the sidebar replaces the drop-down menu of folders in Live 8. Three of the Places entries are hard-wired: Packs is for for library packs, User Library is for your own generated content and presets, and Current Project is pretty self-explanatory. Below these ableton live suite 9 review free download, you can add arbitrary folders: particular Live Projects, external disks, sample DVDs and so on. These folders don’t have to be permanently available, as Live 9 is smart enough to ignore disks that aren’t currently mounted when it launches.
Cleverly, Live will notice if a disk is mounted по ссылке a session, and will even allow disks to be unmounted again, assuming that the Live Set isn’t using any samples on the disk at the time. When browsing, you can start from a Category, or from a Place: they’re mutually exclusive. The content pane is multi-column: the tree view is in a column called Name, while a second column can display Place, Date Modified, Size, Type device, preset, clip, sample format, and so on or Rank.
The Rank column shows a small histogram which presumably indicates how popular, or well-used, an item is, but it wasn’t clear to me how this worked. The contents of the Place column depend very much on how you organise folders in the Places list.
I initially added a single folder called ‘Sequences’ containing all of my Live Projects, only to have the Place column dutifully report ‘Sequences’ for all of my presets and sample files, with no indication of which Project or Set they were in.
Adding individual Projects to Places would be more sensible, but I feel that the Browser needs to provide a few more hints — down in Live’s Status Bar, perhaps — to indicate where particular items are inside Projects. Rather disappointingly, the Browser can only show two columns at once, one of which is always Name. Live 8 allowed multiple columns, so this seems to be a step backwards. However, searching has been improved dramatically in Live 9.
Again, it’s worth a quick look at how things worked in Live 8: any of the three folder views could be put into ‘search mode’ by entering a search term, and would then do a search in the background, which could take several seconds, or even minutes. Live 9’s search is more immediate, and operates more as a filter on the Categories and Places in the sidebar. Start typing into the search area at the top of the Browser, and the content pane immediately changes to just show items matching the search.
The highlight colour in the sidebar also changes to show that a search filter is active. Searching — or, if you prefer, filtering — is fast: when a folder is added to Places, Live indexes it immediately rather than waiting until search time.
Search will find things by file name samples, Live Sets, exported clip files and so on and also by sound category, and you can also search by device name. A search for ‘Operator’ Live’s FM synth found me a ableton live suite 9 review free download of Operator presets as well as entire device racks which just happened to contain an Cursorfx free for windows 10 instance, which is clever. You can even search for VST and AU plug-ins by name, if you happen to own too many to keep track of, but alas, there’s still no searching within Live Sets for track names, clips within tracks, or devices.
Clips and device presets are only seen if exported. Finally, the preview area at the bottom of the Browser has learned a new trick. While Live 8 http://replace.me/21726.txt preview samples and clips including MIDI clips, by means of loading devices and plug-ins on demandLive 9 can preview instruments directly.
However, this feature is restricted to presets in the Live Library or Live Packs — presumably the MIDI ‘demo’ sequence for the preview is bundled specially — so the function is lost for user-created presets or old libraries. Live’s Library has been restructured. In Live 8, a fresh installation ableton live suite 9 review free download result in a large folder containing all the devices, presets, samples comprising the Live Library, arranged as a set of Live Packs — nearly 50GB worth, in the case of the boxed Live 8 Suite.
Live 8’s workflow would encourage you to add to this library. Additional Live Packs from third parties would be installed here, and clicking the ‘save preset’ button on a device would create a preset file in the Live Library as well, copying samples as required. While some people were happy having their own content added to Ableton’s large body of material, the system had drawbacks: it was hard to tell exactly where your own material was the lack of a Live Pack name was pretty much the only clueand the entire Library would have to be periodically backed up as a unit.
Live 9 completely splits the Core Live Library, the third-party Live Packs, and user-generated content. User-generated content goes into User Library, so the Core Library and Live Packs aren’t altered when you create and file your own material. Automation support in Live 8 was solid, but with a blind spot: it only worked in Live’s timeline-based Arrangement View.
In this context, it was clearly useful, as the Arrangement is almost certainly where you’d be laying out a complete track and wanting to apply automation to perform fades, make gradual effects ableton live suite 9 review free download, and so on. The grid-oriented Session View is traditionally for live performance, or for improvising with ideas and material before it gets to a longer, song-oriented form — so why would you need automation support here?
A few reasons present themselves. Firstly, you sometimes want to take material in a partially mixed-down form from the Arrangement and put it back into the Session, perhaps for live performance, or for freeing up the song structure to try out new ideas.
While Live 8 allowed you to copy and paste clips freely between the two Views, automation data lived purely in the Arrangement, and any automation associated with clips in the Arrangement would be discarded if they were copied back into the Session. Secondly, in the intricate world of electronic sound design, the way in which instruments and effects are controlled can be as important as the MIDI notes or audio that goes into them, and that control information can be part and parcel of every section of a song, right down to individual clips, so it makes sense to allow automation at this level.
Thirdly, it’s now possible to create and apply small chunks of automation in the Session for performance. If you want to fade up a track under direct automation control in the Session, you can now do so. Lastly, automation data in the Session can be recorded and edited using Push. I suspect that the requirement for Push to work with automation was part of the motivation behind Session ableton live suite 9 review free download.
In fact, Live 8 already supported automation within clips after a fashion — allowing, for example, a facsimile of the fade-up effect I mentioned above. Clip Envelopes could be created to apply modulation to device, clip ableton live suite 9 review free download mix parameters, in a manner which offset the ‘real’ value.
Live 9 maintains these modulation Clip Envelopes, but also brings real automation right into the Session View. The need for modulation envelopes is perhaps a little less obvious now that automation is supported in the Session — ableton live suite 9 review free download modulation might be applied, LFO-like, to some clip-based parameter within a broader automated Arrangement — but, for now at least, both mechanisms exist side by side.
In Live 9, working with automation is the default, and if you want to work with modulation instead, you select it from the pop-up menu.
Ableton live suite 9 review free download
Packed with improvements for Push, Live 9. New sampling features and workflows mean making beats is better than ever, and even more is possible without taking your hands off Push.
The latest free update for Live 9 users brings more sample slicing options, a new drum layout and on-screen display improvements to the hardware. Plus you can now route audio or MIDI right from the unit, alongside other features. Find out more and watch the feature demos. Powered by Simpler, the new slicing functions can be used in all editions of Live 9. They also work with the first Push — for full details of the new features, c heck out the release notes.
Live 9. Alongside the new release we’ve updated our series of video tutorials that show how to use some of the key features of Live and Push. Watch them at the Learn Live or Learn Push pages. Find out more and watch the feature demos Features for Push 1 and Live 9 Powered by Simpler, the new slicing functions can be used in all editions of Live 9. Free for Live 9 users Live 9. Learn Live and Push Alongside the new release we’ve updated our series of video tutorials that show how to use some of the key features of Live and Push.
News Live 9.
Compare Live editions | Ableton
After spending a month with Ableton Live, watching almost a zillion tutorials which I found on YouTube, I became a bit addicted and have already made a few songs. They are simply not the same. During all those years of making music, I came to the conclusion that the work-flow has the biggest influence on the end result.
Different approaches and different tools will simply lead to the different results. Ableton Live is a DAW for the 22nd century. If you intend to record a country band or a symphonic orchestra, then choose Cubase, Logic or Pro Tools. It can be done also with Ableton Live, but this is not the point of that software. If you want to write a whole song on a plane, from a sketch to the finished product — the professionally produced, up-to-date modern song — then Ableton Live is your tool.
Ableton Live is absolutely the most advanced tool for modern contemporary production. Cubase, Logic and Pro Tools are the most advanced recording studios that money can buy, and they offer everything you need to start and finish your song on a highest possible level, but for all sorts of modern mixture of electro genres Hip hop, IDM, Electro, Dance, Trance, Chill, Dubstep etc. Ableton Live is unbeatable.
One thing is for sure, Ableton Live is not just a four-on-the-floor machine. You can produce anything you want with it, the sky is the limit; it just offers a different working approach and different tools and a very adorable, handy work flow that will bring fresh air into your production, where everything can be done more intuitively, without breaking your creative process. I got Ableton Live 9 Suite, which is a bit pricey, but when you sum up all the things that you get along with main software, you will soon figure out that it is very fairly priced.
Also the Suite version brings us some additional Live instruments that really make a difference — Operator and Sampler. So, if Ableton Live Suite is the first thing that you have ever bought, it could easily became also the last one, not to mention all those free packs that comes almost daily on Ableton blog site. Some of them are really good.
It is the perfect tool for live playing; also, it is unbeatable for trying different combinations, but the main strength lies in the arrangement window which at first sight looks similar to the other arrangement windows in other sequencers. When you start layering things you will notice the difference very soon. After watching all those tutorial video clips, I made my first composition in a less than half an hour.
I browsed through my base of free drum loops that I have compiled over the years, and after finding the right one, dragged it to the MIDI track. Ableton asked me if this is a harmony, melody or drum clip. I dragged the same loop to an additional audio track all loops are automatically stretched to the sequencers speed , pressing the button for converting the speed to half time, then cut some low ends with Live EQ, making a nice background rhythmical noise out of a normal rock loop.
You simply cannot believe what you can get out of a boring drum loop. I dragged Operator onto a new lane, and using the default settings, playing some bass line, then added another plucked preset from the Sampler, making some sort of lead line. My first Ableton piece is done. My first Ableton song done in less than half an hour. You could even try to make a song without touching the keyboard: Convert one orchestral loop to a MIDI clip, taking the lower part for the bass in combination with Live arpeggiator and taking the mids and highs for the lead line Operator.
Spice it up with one drum loop, also converted to a MIDI clip till now, it is a two minute business and the background is almost done , then add a few appropriate additional chords. Now add a catchy vocal line and…. Does it sounds familiar to you? Maybe, like a number one U. K Top 40 hit from January ? You can simply select any part of a loop or phrase, then delete or just copy and paste it anywhere else in project. It is like ripping a piece of paper out and gluing it onto some other place.
This method allows you to fine-tune any loop, combining various parts together on different lanes. If you use a drum rack, then you can just select the appropriate pad and add any effect you want to just that pad. Reverb and compressor to snare, EQ to hi-hats, EQ and bass buster to kick, along with shaping every separate hit in very tiny detail with the included controllers inside the drum rack.
Contemporary music is all about the beat, but this is not big news; that is the case with all music for the last 50 years. Good drummer, good band; bad drummer, bad band. With Ableton Live you can really make your beat rocking. Sidechaining in Ableton Live is pure joy. Just add a compressor and choose which track will be the carrier. In less than a minute you can sort all sidechains for all tracks. Ableton Live 9 brings one additional compressor, Glue Compressor, which I initially thought is just another toy with a fancy name, but after seeing it in action video tutorial and trying it inside my arrangement, I figured out that it can really add a pro-sounding touch on a drum group channel yes, you can group tracks in Ableton or on a buss channel, the same as on the main channel.
The most interesting thing with most of the Ableton Live effects is that all of them give great results even with the default setup. Ping-pong delay is already filtered properly, so in the most cases you just need to set up the amount of the effect, and the same goes for all other effects.
The next extraordinary and unique feature is the way you can manipulate audio or MIDI sounds. Doing a standard pop production, your vocalist can save the day, but when you try to make some instrumental stuff, you suddenly find how some static background can sound so uninspiring and dead. With Ableton Live you can go absolutely crazy filtering, automating, changing and evolving sounds from second to second.
Everything can be linked to almost anything, and if you are too lazy to do some automation, just insert an LFO Filter effect as an insert effect, set the treshold frequency and rate. Your basses, pads or whatever will go crazy, rhythmically filtering to create a desired sound. Adding any effects is a one-second job.
Just drag it to the arrangement lane or to the bottom of the main window. The most used ones are always close to the main graphical window, while lesser used and additional ones are in a rank after the most used, so if you just grab the first one near the main window, you will do the job, at least in most cases.
Also, I found some unique functions like reverse all MIDI notes in a clip, allowing me to record a MIDI loop, reverse the loop with one click, render as audio, then reverse the audio back to normal getting sucking sounds where attack is at the end of the note.
Simply brilliant, and it is a matter of a less than a minute. Also, it takes one click to halve the speed, another to double the speed. Drawing one note over another automatically deletes overlapped notes very handy for making pads out of some syncopated notes.
The Legato function makes all notes legato with one press. There is an Invert function and various others like selecting a range and changing it with one move. A handy trick for the 22nd. So, all in all, not your everyday beggary of MIDI tools you are used to, but pretty different ones that you need some time to learn. In the past, I was never to keen to program synths, but after I saw a few video clips about Operator, I changed my mind and started tweaking various things inside this simple-looking, ultra-powerful synth.
Creating crazy, Skrilex-like pulsating, evolving, wobbling basses is shamefully easy with Operator. For a pure wobbling bass, you can always use an LFO limiter as the audio effect on any instrument or sound. The default sound will be just more than perfect. Record some simple bass line, and then just start moving the level knobs that are nearest to the main window. There are four level knobs for the four oscillators. A few trials and errors later, you will have your first Skrilex-style bass line.
It is a fully featured sampler where you can go mad multi-layering various sounds, just to get more buffed sound or to rank them through various velocity ranges. Making all sorts of gymnastics with samples is pretty easy, selecting the loop range or toying with start, decay, release or anything else sample-related. The next thing that is very user-friendly after you get used to it is the browser where you get all your sounds, internal tools, external tools, or whatever you define, ranked in a very tidy way.
All loops can be previewed at the host tempo, and all sounds can be previewed before you drag them in, the same for drum kits where you can even hear some basic drum loop to listen to the various elements in the kit as you audition it. I presume this will be implemented in the next version.
Very impressive — my playing skills, of course. I put in group all that and added it to my user library directory. Obviously Ableton Live 9 is a tool that invites you to start your traveling without any idea what you will do during the flight, lending with a mastered masterpiece two hours later at some other destination. Just you, your notebook and Ableton Live 9 suite. With Ableton Live you can do literary everything, but not in the same way as you are used to doing.
Different approaches brings different results. A perfect tool for the next century and we barely started this one. It is like a Mary Poppins bag.
Everything you will ever need is there. The only third party addition that you will need is you. Ableton developed Push, a good-looking, handy pad controller for Ableton Live which could possibly be the only controller that you will ever need.
It has a bunch of small pads and various menu buttons aside which allow you to attach various functions to those pads, like choosing a tonal scale, so you can even play keyboard solos with it.
Programing new drum patterns is a piece of cake, the same for adding new scenes or tracks, recording and manipulating clips, and adding or even deleting notes.
It looks very impressive and as soon as my bank account shall recover, I promise that you will get a detailed review. It is a piece of hardware that makes you slobber. At the Ableton site you can find the Packs directory where you can hear demo clips for more than one hundred packs. Some are free, other are cheap, a few are more expensive, but all in all there is a bunch of a good choices for every taste.
From orchestral through the exotic ethno ones, then on to drums and ambient sounds, real instruments, fake instruments — it is almost like being in a supermarket. The truth should be told, that there are many more additional Ableton Packs which are not presented directly on that subsite, but you can find trails through the Ableton blog.
Some of them are really adorable, so it is not such a bad idea to spend some additional time searching around the site. A few days ago I got a new toy from my friends at Liquid Notes. It is a version of their harmonizing software specially made for Live. Upon installing the program and copying two files into your Max directory, you get a new powerful tool integrated directly into the sequencer. Following the instructions from the video tutorial, I got my first results after a few minutes of suspense did I set everything right or not?
Leave a Reply