Ableton Live 8 – Modest but Balanced

Ableton recently released Live 8, and we have now added a new training course for Live 8 as well as updating our DAW Shootout. This upgrade is fairly modest in terms of the number and scope of new features, but it does provide updates for both the basic Digital Audio Workstation functions as well as new functionality for performers and the Electronica music crowd.

Grooves – Somebody Finally Did It Right

By far the most impressive new functionality in Live 8 is a collection of features related to grooves. Now you can capture grooves from either MIDI or audio clips, edit them, and apply them to either MIDI or audio clips. Each Live set now has a Groove Pool to help you manage all the grooves in a project and a good collection of pre-defined grooves has been added to the Live Library.

I suspect that not too many of you use grooves in the first place. And if you don’t, it may well be because you took a look at grooves in your main DAW and decided that using grooves was more complicated than you really wanted to tackle. Sonar and Cubase and, for that matter, most other DAW’s already have the groove features that Live 8 added. However, in many of the other DAW’s these functions have been added over the years with little attempt to maintain consistency, resulting in a jumble of confusing processes. Live may be late to the groove game, but they did it right We elaborate on these features in our new course and have also created a YouTube video on Live 8 grooves.

Beefed Up Mastering Tools

Live 8 has beefed up its mastering tools with a multiband compressor and a brickwall limiter. In the past Live has included various compressor-based presets and rack combinations which claimed to provide this functionality, but which were not really all that good. These two plug-ins on the other hand are the real deal and provide the smooth multiband compression and lookahead limiting needed for mastering. We demonstrate how to use these two plug-ins in our tutorial on mastering.

Guitar Goodies – Pedals Not Included

Live 8 includes two goodies oriented toward the guitarist: Looper and Overdrive. Looper is a software emulation of a hardware overdub stomp box such as the DigiTech JamMan. The idea is that you can record a riff and it will immediately play back as you continue to jam. You can then decide whether to re-record the riff or to overdub additional parts onto the loop. Overdrive is a guitar amp simulator designed to simulate the harmonic distortion produced by hardware guitar amplifiers. Software guitar amp simulators have become popular in recent years with products like IK Multimedia’s Amplitude and Native Instruments Guitar Rig. Although Overdrive is OK so far as it goes, it’s really not in the same league as the guitar amp simulators included with most other DAW’s. If you’re a real guitarist performing live, you can control both of these plug-ins by using Live’s existing MIDI mapping function to map the controls to pedals or stomp boxes.

Distorted Reality

Finally, Live 8 includes two new distortion plug-ins: the Vocoder and the Frequency Shifter. Vocoders were originally developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1930′s and separate the intelligible sounds (the “modulator”) of the human voice from the tonal sounds (the “carrier”). You can then combine the modulator with practically anything as a carrier to produce otherworldly-type voices. Vocoders have been used in music by everyone from Robert Moog to Pink Floyd and Madonna. Our Digital Producer course includes a more complete examination of vocal processing including vocoders.

The Frequency Shifter could probably be described as a phaser or flanger on steroids. It shifts the frequency of a signal up or down by a small amount which can be varied by applying LFO’s. These types of FX were first used as psychedelic FX in the 1960′s and have been popular in Electronica music genres ever since. Our Mixing & Mastering course includes a more complete examination of these type of distortion FX..

The Laundry List – Beware the Library Cleanup

As in most new software releases there is a laundry list of features. Below are the ones discussed in our new course. Notice that the Live Library is included in that list. Ableton developed an entirely new set of samples and presets for Live 8. However the problem, at least as some of us view it, is that they declared a lot of goodies in the Live 6 and 7 library as “legacy”. If you follow the standard install procedure, you wind of getting rid of most of that content. In particular there were a lot of great instrument and FX presets that have disappeared. Fortunately, there is a Live 7 Legacy Pack which you can download from the Ableton website and install. I highly recommend it.

Mind Share, Not Market Share

For a long time I have characterized Live as a product which has a greater mind share than its market share. While you can debate how well our Music Software Popularity Survey measures market share, Live has always ranked near or below the bottom of the top ten software products. It also does not come out very well when measured against the standards that we apply for full Digital Audio Workstation functionality in our DAW Shootout. Yet it continues to have a huge intellectual influence on musicians. Berklee offers courses on Live and trade magazines constantly extol its virtues. As I’ve speculated before, I think the main reason for this influence, as well as why people buy it, are its two unique features: the Session View and Racks. Live established its turf with those features, and Live 8 continues to flesh out its features as a DAW.