If you are looking for a digital audio workstation then Ableton Live is your answer. It is developed by the German company Ableton and it is a digital audio workstation. It works perfectly with Windows and macOS.
This software is designed for live performances and for composing, arranging, recording, mixing, and mastering. This software is a right-hand tool for DJs.
What is Ableton Live?
This app is one of the first music applications to automatically beat match songs. Its live feature is available in three additions:
- Intro (with Limited Key Features)
- Standard
- Suit
It offers a suite of control for the beatmatching, crossfading, and other various effects used by the turntablists (the art of manipulating sounds). Ableton live has become a perfect tool for musicians for music creations with an eye toward live performance. According to the musicians, it is enough for creating millions of songs, and you‘ll never need another music editor.
This software was created in the 1990s by Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke, and Bernd Rogendorf. The first version of the Abelton was designed to perform with the loops. It offered tools for triggering loops, playing some samples, and time-stretching audio, and it became popular among musicians.
Features of Ableton Live:
There are various features in this software, best-fitted for creating music. Let’s have look at the features:
Views
The live’s user of the interface consists of two types of views.
- The arrangement view
- The session view
The Session View presents a grid-based representation of all the clips. These clips can also be arranged into scenes which later can be triggered as a unit. For Example, a drum, guitar, and bass may comprise a single scene, and moving forward to the next scene which is the synth bassline, the musician will trigger the scene and activate the clips for that scene.
The Arrangement View presents a horizontal view of the musical timeline of the clips that is almost similar to the traditional software sequencer interface. This view is utilized for recording tracks from the session view and further adding more effects and arrangements.
Instruments
The intro version of Ableton live includes four instruments. The standard version further includes external instruments with the users having the option to buy more instruments.
The Four instruments that are included in the Intro versions are:
- Impulse: a traditional drum instrument that allows users to add eight different drum sounds.
- Simpler: Its function is to use a single audio sample and apply simple audio effects and then use pitch transformations.
- Drum Rack: a sampler for the drums, anything can be dropped to or from the drum rack, for instance, one can drop an audio clip from the drum rack or can add it to the drum rack.
- Instrument Rack: It allows users to integrate multiple instruments and effects into a single device
The other instruments that are available with the other two versions d of the Ableton live are given below:
- Analog
- Bass
- Collision
- Sampler
- Poli
- Tension
- Wavetable
- Operator
- Drum Synths
- Electric
- Session Drums
- Orchestral Instruments Collection
- Essential Instruments Collection
Effects
The common effects in digital signal processing are already in most of Live’s effects. These effects are tailored to suit live’s target audience, DJs, and electronic musicians but they can also be used for the simple recording task. The effects that are in Ableton Live are categorized into two parts: MIDI effects and Audio Effects.
The effects that are included in audio effects are:
- Auto filter
- Auto pan
- Beat Repeat
- Cabinet
- Corpus
- Compressor
- Chorus
- CV instruments
- CV shaper
- CV triggers
- CV LFO
- Limiter
- Looper
- Pitch-Hack etc
Some of the MIDI effects are:
- Scale
- Shaper
- Velocity
- Cord
- Envelope
- Expression Control
- Note Echo
- Note Length etc.
Working with Audio Clips
It can work with the Sample clips as well. It attempts to do the beat analysis to find the samples’ meter, number of bars, and the number of beats per minute. This is done to shift these samples to fit into loops.
Abelton’s Live Tiem Wrap feature can be utilized to correct and adjust beat positions. This also supports audio to MIDI, which allows converting the audio samples into MIDI notes. It used three different conversion methods such as:
- Melody
- Harmony
- Rhythm
Interface
The interface of this software is designed in a way that it can be used in a live performance. The portion of the interface is used by the arrows which may be clicked to appear or hide portions of this software.
Envelopes
All the parameters can be automated by the envelopes. Envelopes are used in audio and track panning but most of it is used in live to control the parameters of the audio devices.
Conclusion
According to a musician if you are using Ableton live then it requires a different way of thinking to create a piece of music. If you are this software’s user then version 11 is a worthy update. In this version, you will get the most countless workflow improvements and new sounds as well.
