Last week I shared my Ableton Live life history with you. You can tell this amazing program has had a big impact on my music-making life (as I’m sure it is having on yours too!).
There are a number of reasons why so many people love working with Ableton Live so much. Here are just a few of them below. You’ll no doubt agree with me if you’re familiar with the program to some degree already. If you’re not there yet, you’ll love it when you get deeper into it, trust me.
1. Workflow
Ableton has a unique view called Session View, that let’s you quickly combine different combinations of tracks together to see how they’ll sound in your track, and build scenes to trigger a group of tracks all at once.
Once you’re done creating different scenes, you can record them into the Arrangement View, which gives you a more typical ‘left-to-right’ movement through time, rather than the vertical movement of scenes in Session View.
Many Live users still don’t know about many of the hidden features in Live, like how to use the Launch Box feature in clips in Session View, or Follow Actions, which can create some crazy and totally unexpected melodies that you would never come up with by yourself.
But it’s not just Session View that makes Ableton’s workflow so intuitive… introducing:
2. Live’s Powerful Racks
There are three types of racks that we can create in Live, which take the possibilities to dizzying new heights each and every time:
- Instrument Racks
- Drum Racks
- Effect Racks (both audio effect racks and midi effect racks)
The problem is, even after working with Live for years, a lot of producers still don’t fully understand how to take maximum advantage of Live’s racks. These things can do a LOT more for your music than meets the eye…
3. Killer Instruments And Audio Effects
Live’s instruments are incredibly nice to work with and can create some truly unique and sophisticated sounds, if you know how to use them properly.
Sadly, many users spend a lot more time trying to figure out old soft synths like Massive, FM8 and so on, and completely overlook synths like Operator, Analog and other amazing instruments that come with Live. Once you know what you’re doing with these instruments, not only are they easy to work with, they can create some amazing sounds for your music.
Unlike a typical ‘Massive Bass’ sound, that you can often instantly tell is made with Massive, you’ll be less likely to have your music criticized in this way by getting to grips with Live’s instruments.
4. Midi Effects
Another set of powerful tools that many Live users never experiment with are Midi Effects. You’ve probably seen them in your Live browser before, but never tried using each of them yet. Perhaps you’ve used a couple of them, but don’t really know how to get the most out of them for your music.
Imagine being able to manipulate midi data before it is passed from your midi clips to your instruments in all kinds of amazing ways.
If you struggle with music theory, these puppies will have you smashing out coherent chord progressions in no time, taking your music to new heights instantly.
5. Convert Audio To Midi, Freezing & Flattening
Have you ever wanted to extract a melody, harmony or even a drums rhythm from a piece of audio and then work with it using your own instruments and effects? Well Live makes that possible. It allows you to work with samples more effectively, layering new sounds over them or completely replacing them with your own sounds.
Freezing your midi tracks allows you to save lot of CPU, as your computer now has to do far less calculations each second to play the music you have created. Flattening frozen tracks allows you to render them to audio clips that no longer require instruments or effects. This opens up all kinds of resampling possibilities, now that you can work with audio clips to manipulate your sounds in new ways that were not possible while they were midi tracks.
Again, resampling is a vast topic that many Live users don’t know how to use to their full advantage.
6. Warping
Live’s timestrecting algorhithms make it a breeze to change the timing of any audio file, and experiment with the various warp modes, which can add different timbres and textures to your sounds. Again, lots of users don’t know how to use this to its full advantage, and many people struggle with even the basics, like how to warp an acapella for a remix. Once you know some techniques for timestretching though, it becomes easy.
7. Max For Live
For many years, a company called Cycling 74 has been making devices for Ableton Live. With Live 9 Suite, Max For Live is included and takes your music making to new levels. There are all kinds of new devices being created every day, by independent whizz-kids who are able to build their own devices with Max For Live.
But this is some fairly advanced stuff. Even then, there are many users who don’t know what to do with all of the Max For Live devices. Some of my favourite include the convolution reverb, Granulator II, the LFO tool and the Envelope tool.
In Conclusion
You can see that Live has some very nice unique features, which attract a lot of seasoned producers to make the switch from other DAWs. If you’re new to music production though, Live’s many features can be daunting, and many producers never get round to learning how to get the most out of this powerful workstation.
There are other things to love about Ableton Live of course, but these are the main ones in my opinion.
That’s why after working purely in Live since version 1 in 2001, I decided to finally create a comprehensive course, that covers all of the main features of Live and how to work with it. It’s called the Ableton Live Skill Builder Course, and it’s a total of 8 hours and 14 minutes. In this course, as I show you how to use every feature of the software, I’ll be building a track from scratch, so that you get to see every new feature in action, as I use it to build this song.
If you want to listen to the song created in this course, you can check it out here:
Click here to listen to the final track
This is the final ‘thank you’ video of the course.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy listening to the track.
Talk soon,
Luke