Whenever we’ve featured Ableton Live in Audio Pro International, it’s tended to raise questions to the tune of: ‘Why are you writing about consumer audio products?’ The simple answer is that, while it’s true that Live is unquestionably aimed at the consumer market, it also belongs squarely in that rare category of gear that crosses over effortlessly into the pro sector.

First released in 2001, Live was designed for performers who needed a sequencer they could use ‘on the fly’ and as such it instantly found favour with electronic musicians who wanted to recreate and remix their tracks live on stage. Naturally, it was swiftly picked up by DJs who saw the potential of the software to allow them to expand the creative flair of their sets way beyond anything made possible by the standard two decks and a mixer.

With several years of development under its belt, it was beginning to be recognised as a powerful sequencer in any situation and had become the DAW of choice for many studio-based musicians. Now in its eighth incarnation, the program has been refined to such a point that it provides serious competition for market-leading hardware DJ tools by the likes of Pioneer and also studio software such as Logic and Cubase.

Ableton Live does not purport to compete with established pro audio products. Instead, it quietly offers a solution to a small number of situations that aren’t catered for by anything else.

For example, in the studio, Live might not offer the freedom and flexibility as Pro Tools at the recording or mixing stages, but for throwing ideas together, trialling sounds and generally arranging tracks, it is unrivalled in its efficiency. The basic reason for this is Live’s ability to ‘warp’ individual tracks to a global tempo and slot them into the project in perfect sync with one another, requiring the user to do nothing more than drag and drop a file in the arrangement window. For this reason, the software is often used for ‘brainstorming’ a track, roughing up a mix, or auditioning patches and effects for the artist, before the final parts are transferred to a dedicated studio DAW.

In a live situation, Ableton’s software provides this ability to automatically sequence a plethora of sounds with unparalleled stability. Kerry Hopwood, the live programmer/musical director for Depeche Mode, uses the programme in place of a mixer and outboard to process live drums while touring with the band. He comments: “We treat Live a bit like a mixing desk, but a desk with any plugin we want. We need to use tools that just work, because while this isn’t necessarily the most hostile environment, it certainly isn’t a studio and at nine o’clock we’ve got to do a show, so it’s got to work. We can’t go: ‘hey crowd, hold on, we’ve just got to fix something’. Live has stood up so far; it’s toured really well. We’ve tried to use desks and outboard, but so far, this has worked far better than anything else.”

Rather than take Hopwood’s word for it, we decided that we’d put Ableton Live to the test ourselves and left it in the very capable hands of Wes Maebe, who, as both a live and studio engineer, is well qualified to give us a reliable verdict…

Ableton Live – an engineer’s point of view
We engineers live and work in an opinionated industry. We either love or hate certain pieces of gear, only use a certain brand of CD-Rs, guitars, amps or microphones and we either swear by a software package or completely dismiss it.

Ableton Live has the reputation of being liked by DJs and artists who are just starting out, so it was interesting to be asked to give my opinion on it as a studio and live engineer.

Using Apple’s Logic and Avid Digidesign Pro Tools on a daily basis, I have to say that diving into Ableton Live seemed like a daunting task. Where I tend to use a sequencer more as a tape machine and therefore think in a horizontal way, Ableton Live uses blocks, loops and audio in a vertical line up. I have to admit that, even after sitting through a few of the Ableton instructional videos, I couldn’t make it do what I wanted to achieve. In the end I reeled in the help of my colleague, Jules Dickens from Abstract Source, who is well versed in Ableton Live.

Rather than treating this as a ‘let’s sit down and show me’ session, we decided to have some serious fun in the process and got stuck into creating a song.  First, I had to get my head around Ableton’s way of thinking and I ended up laying down some bass parts, percussion loops and pads.

As Ableton Live is a grid and beat-based program, I ended up with a cool but rather repetitive track. Once Jules had introduced me to Ableton’s extensive plugin library, I found that I had many more options open to me, such as taking what was initially a bland snare track and filtering it and sending it through an arpeggiator, which had the result of turning it into a melodic component.

We moved on to create different variations of the drum patterns and bass parts and then drop them into their respective channels. What started off as a boring song with eight tracks ended up being a 25-track psychedelic journey.

I still went back to Logic to drop in a few live keyboard performances, but in general we stayed in the Ableton Live territory. Once the Hammond and synth pads were down, we dragged them into Ableton Live to arrange them and recorded vocals and guitars.

One of the main things I love about Ableton’s arrangement features is the ‘key’ function in the session window.  This allows you to assign samples and loops to individual keys on your computer keyboard or any MIDI/USB keyboard. Within seconds I was transported back to my Akai S3000 days. Personally, I think this is Ableton’s strongest feature. In a music creation scenario, this makes for extremely fast sketching. Once your samples are in, you can then switch to the arrangement window and lay down a live performance and, of course, it needn’t stop there. You can lay down a variety of performances and then edit them together. This leads us into the live area. If you need to trigger backing tracks or individual samples, your monitor engineer, front of house engineer or anyone within the crew could set them running for you within Ableton Live.

My main little annoyances with the programme are the fiddly controls, a lack of zoom control and then long export time.  However, if you want a quick sketch pad to put down ideas or a powerful ‘sampler’ to run your backing tracks live, Ableton Live will do the job for you. Ableton Live is now part of my software arsenal and in constant use.
www.ableton.com