Ableton Live 5

DAW/Live Sequencer. Available through www.ableton.com as well as ordinary retail. Runs on Mac OSX.2 and later and Windows 2000 and XP. Test equipment; AMD K7 1.8 ghz with 1 gb ram running windows XP and emac G4 700 mhz with 768 mb ram running OSX.2.8. Rewire compatible as both master and slave. Reviewed by David Mondrup.

History
What is Live? No, this isn't a misspelled attempt at bringing existentialism into the realms of software reviews, but a question that I kept asking myself before getting my hands on the application and getting the application on my computer. Even if it is a fairly simple program to use, at least compared to other music software in general, the concept was originally different from other concepts in computer aided music making, and as such you really had to try it to understand it. Not knowing if I really had any use for it, I never picked it up until I was asked to review it, and even then it took me a while to completely get my head around it.

However, as the concept is really strong and well executed, Live has grown to be one of my main tools right up there next to my traditional audio/MIDI sequencer and my wave editor, and so, hopefully the words printed from here onwards will help others get over the confusion I felt when I first heard of Live.
Back when I received Live 3 (my first encounter with the program), it was - rightfully - labeled a "Sequencing Instrument". The general gist of this was (and is) that you can use the program to put together, record and manipulate musical elements, such as loops, sound fx, melodies and arrangement parts - all of it fast and without halting playback, thus making it easy to assemble music on the computer live on stage (as opposed to spending hours in the studio doing the same thing). Assembling music like this is what is usually labelled as "sequencing", and thus the term "Sequencing Instrument" makes sense.
Lots of stuff has happened through the course of the coming incarnations of Live, and recent developments has seen it grow towards becoming a full DAW, complete with audio/MIDI sequencer, multitrack recording and flexible routing possibilities. Still the core of Live is the innovative "Session View", which is where the realtime sequencing is done, and the advanced possibilities that comes with the concept of the "Clip" (Live's common name for MIDI and audio building blocks).

So we'll take a look at what tools Ableton offer us with Live, while also checking out Ableton's general philosophy, that Live should be simple to use but still give the user powerful and advanced possibilities.

Sequencing instrument
To get to grips with the core of Live, we need to take a look at the architecture. Live consists of two main screens, the Session View and the Arrangement View. While the latter is pretty much an arrange window as we know them from nearly any other sequencer on the market, the Session View acts as a combined mixer and sample player/trigger, where the "sample" can be both audio and MIDI, playing both software and hardware instruments.

Live can be used simply as a good oldfashioned sequencer, but to gain the full use of this app, one needs to explore the concept of the "Clip". Clips are the building blocks that make up your music, and can contain either MIDI or audio data.

You get a lot of settings right there making it easy to use the clip launching pad that the session view is in a musical way.

• you get the ability to set the quantise value for launching clips, making sure that new clips are always launched in sync with the music
• you get the ability to launch a bunch of clips at once
• you can get clips going playing along with the sequencer, enabling you to prepare part of your show in advance
• you can use clips to set a new tempo for the song
• you can, with some creative routing, use clips to launch automation of effects processing the sound of other clips
• you can make sequences of clips playing after one another, in pre-programmed order or randomly (with controls to set the amount of randomisation)
• you can set up all this so that it can be controlled by keys on the computer keyboard, or by MIDI keys and controllers, enabling you to really "play" the instrument rather than mousing around to get to everything on time.

It all comes down to how you set up the launching pad and your clips, and as the thing should be (and is) simple to use, it doesn't give away all of it's secrets right away. Not everything listed above here is exactly described in the manual, as the possibilities of the Session View only reveal themselves fully after you begin to see the need for different ways to do things, and discover that with a little creativity, there's only little that the Session View can't do when it comes to creating music by launching clips. Other power users would undoubtedly have a whole different list of favourite ways to use the Session View, many of them unthought of by me (and possibly also by the Ableton crew).

However, I find that what really makes Live stand out is the Clip itself, and so we need to dive a bit deeper into the "Clip". It is very easy to see the clip simply as Live's version of what is called parts, sequences and regions in other apps, but there's a lot more to it than that. The thing that makes the Clip stand out from it's counterpart in other sequencers is primarily the sheer amount of modifications that can be made to the sound emanating from the Clip by manipulating the Clip features.

As mentioned, the clip can contain either audio or MIDI data, and the available parameters vary depending on the type of data involved. However, excepting the Warp feature (which we'll get to in a bit), most of the significant features are common between the different data types that can be contained in a Clip. These features include:

• settings for launching the clip when using Live, well, live, such as which quantise value it should snap to when launching, how it should behave after playing the clip, velocity settings when triggering the clip using a velocity sensitive controller.
• settings for how the clip should play when launched, such as loop points and starting point within the data in the clip.
automation settings, storable within the very clip, even in lengths that don't necessarily fit the clip itself. This is very cool, meaning you can have eg. slow filtersweeps happening over whole minutes of playback of a clip that in itself is only a few seconds long, all of it programmed within the clip, and thus usable in a live-on-stage situation.

Here's a little real-life story that serves as an example of one of the many things one can do in the session view. I had the luck of helping cleaning up my grandfathers house when he died some years ago, and I secured some old cassettes for myself, containing an italian language course. While working with Live, it occurred to me that the session view might be able to build me a gibberish-talking machine. So, I recorded one of the tapes to my DAW, cut it up in pieces containing one syllable each, and loaded these syllables into live as clips on two tracks (one for the male voice and another for the female). I then programmed each clip to jump to any other random clip as soon as it finished, inserted a few clips with pauses in different lengths, et voila - as soon as I pressed play I had complete nonsense with an italian accent coming out the speakers! I bet the team at Ableton hadn't envisioned that usage (or maybe they had ... ). Listen here for an example.

As I did this in Live 4, it took me quite a while to do this, since I had to program each of the 161 clips individually. Live 5 has added the ability to program clips in bulk, which would have saved me quite some time doing this. A very neat addition indeed.

Audio manipulation
Audio clips will adjust to the song tempo, non-destructively and in real time.This in itself pretty cool, and even if it's becoming a standard with both looping apps and more traditional DAWs, Live has had this ability for ages. The process of adjusting the audio's tempo to the current situation is called "warping" in Live terminology, and it can be performed by a variety of adjustable algorithms, giving you a greater chance for achieving usable results. The new incarnation of Live, version 5, introduces a new algorithm called "complex", meant as a sort of catch-all, for those situations where none of the other algorithms will do, such as full ensemble recordings and other such finished productions. I tried it out on a number of different types of source material, and while I did find that I do lose a bit of transients on drumloops (which can then be processed by the "beats" algorithm instead with much better luck), it works remarkably well on full band recordings.

To help you aid Live in getting the results as good as possible, the warp marker comes into play. It's a nifty little feature, in which you tell Live how to interpret the information in the audio file, by telling Live exactly where any of the 16th subdivisions in the bar are located in the audio. This way you can effectively quantise the audio. 16ths is the only subdivision you can set, and this is in my book a pretty serious flaw in an otherwise brilliant concept. Ableton ought to do better here; not all loops are of the disco or Detroit techno variety, especially not as loopbased music is spreading it's ground into lots of new genres. Getting the option to choose 12ths and 24ths here should be a minimum, and preferably one should be able to set any subdivision one could wish for.

Apart from this one flaw in the execution of the warp marker concept, one has to acknowledge that the concept itself works very well, and is very easy to use. And misuse ... of course, one could use this to merely tighten up the loops and make sure they align properly, but lots of electronica producers have since long put this feature to creative use, stretching and truncating audio by ridicolous amount by dragging warp markers way beyond their initial starting point. The stuttering effects of stretching some audio way too far in "beats" mode is well documented on modern electronica albums. Making melodic movements in an otherwise monotonous loop by spreading warp markers unevenly in "retune" mode is another option (although that will disturb timing, so it will be better done on non-rhythmic material). And simply making one rhythm into another by moving warp markers around is another obvious choice, as documented in this audio clip - first the original audio (me playing a metal waste basket with a dishwasher brush), then what it can be turned into simply by inserting warp markers at the right places.

Sequencing with Live
Having looked at the session view (and a bit more), let's turn our attention to the other main screen in Live; the arrangement view. In the manual for my first version of the program, Live 3, this was presented as an opportunity to record your sessions in the session view to a multitrack environment, for further editing afterwards, and not much more than that. Recording sessions to multitrack still works, but the concept has grown quite a bit since that, becoming more and more like a traditional DAW as we know it. Live 4 saw the addition of MIDI and software instruments, and todays incarnation of Live has capability for multitrack audio recording and playback (through proper multitrack hardware), controlling outboard hardware through MIDI, automation on track basis (rather than "only" per clip) and many other features also found in other DAWs. In all fairness, Live has reached the point where you can actually record, mix and render a traditional multitrack studio session including VSTi overdubs, all of it easily and intuitively done, but I don't envision any experienced users of Logic, Cubase or Pro Tools ditching their apps to do all their sequensing in Live. For that time to come, Live still lacks in too many departments; as a Logic user, I miss advanced MIDI quantise functions, ability to change time in midsong, proper MIDI controller data handling and numerous other things. This may come down to a conflict of usability philosophy versus feature development. Live wants to be a dead easy program to use, and it is - going through it's included tutorials will have you up and running in less than an hour - but at the same time, I figure Live also wants to be competitive in the DAW department. The possible source of conflict here is that a DAW that will satisfy advanced users is never easily laid out. You can't put all info that pro users require into two screens and keep things easy to navigate through at the same time. The bottom line here is that Live can do enough to be used to gain the same results you would expect from any other DAW, but it's not quite up to being a fully featured DAW yet. If it will go that route or not will be seen in years to come.

Still, this doesn't render the arrangement view useless - far from it. The arrangement view is a very useful second half of Live, and I've actually seen myself finish quite a few projects in Live, more and more so over the past months. First and foremost, the arrangement view is the obvious choice for sequencing the clips you've been preparing in the session view, arranging, mixing, adding any extra tracks as needed, and rendering the result to get your final master. But apart from this obvious use, here is a rundown on some of the other uses of the arrangement view:

• the arrangement view is an excellent scratch pad for arranging your tracks; press record, perform a session, and review the session. Using the arrangement view's quantised scrub abilities, reviewing different orders and lengths of section parts is a breeze.
• when running live in rewire, having things laid out in the arrangement is a huge advantage.
• since clips can be dragged forwards and back between session and arrangement view, one can use the arrangement view to arrange or mixdown clips to make new clips. Want to insert an extra bassdrum in the beat you're using? Unless the beat happens to be a MIDI clip, this is quite hard to do in session view, but drag the clip to arrangement, copy the bassdrum from wherever it is to it's new place, consolidate the result to make it one arrangement part and drag it back to the session view.
• use the arrangement to build your tracks; users of loopbased apps such as Acid will find themselves on familiar ground here. You simply put the audio onto the tracks and paint them out to loop for as long as you wish. If you want to make a break, you just highlight the part you want to go away and hit delete.

Apart from the scrubbing facilities, Live 5 added the ability to automate the song tempo within the arrange view. For someone like me who loves loops but tires quickly of the monotomy of listening to a completely static tempo, this is a godsend. It works just as well as I could expect and want it to, making it easy to utilize tempo changes to create oldfashioned tempo dynamics such as ritardandi or accelerandi, or make new and interesting effects by abusing tempo changes way beyond what is usually played in real life. And yes, I know, computers are real too; real life is only used here as the generic term for anything that takes place outside your DAW.

Another addition in the latest version is the markers function. While this seems a basic requirement for any half-serious DAW, this marker implementation has the special feature that it quantises to whatever global quantisation setting you have when used while in playback, adding extra usability to the arrangement view in live situations.

Common parts:
The mixer in Live is found in the bottom half of the Session view, but is universal to both views in Live. It is fairly easy to navigate, with controls for volume and pan right at your fingertips, as you would expect it. Applying effects is as easy as you would expect it from a computer application, and somehow quite easier than what I've seen in other DAWs. Simply drag from a list of effects (or better still, a list of effect presets and effect chains) and drop it right on top of the audio, and the effect(s) according to your choice will be inserted, ready for use as is or for further tweaking.

Sends for fx busses are avilable from all tracks (except the Master Out), including from one fx bus to another, or even from one fx bus to itself, which can actually create very cool feedback effects for anyone into more noisy types of music.

Creating new tracks is a simple menu entry and/or keyboard shortcut. Multitrack audio interface users may find it useful to create aux tracks that correspond with the individual outs on the interface, using these as control objects for the audio output from live to each of the channels.

The effect plugins that come with the program fall in two categories; the bread'n'butter effects you'd expect from any DAW, and then some special fx.

We'll get to the special fx as soon as I'm over mentioning that the standard effects in Live come in pretty high quality, as included plugins go. Quite a few serious DAW users report that they aren't used to being able to use any DAWs included effects for anything, with one or two odd exceptions. As such, it's a pleasure to report that the dynamic processors, timebased effects and different filters and equalisers are more often than not worth a try, before turning to 3rd party plugins or outboard units. Especially worth mentioning is the reverb, which has a surprisingly useful output, even if it does use a lot of CPU. I also find the gate very easy to program to give me the desired results.

As for the more esoteric plugins, these once again reveal that Live is aimed more at the electronic scene than anything else. Most plugins are capable of producing some really far-out manipulations to your audio - that goes for the special fx, but even the bread'n'butter section has features implemented in the processors that will produce unusual results. Some of the very cool manipulation options are offered by plugins like:

Beat Repeat; basically a tempo synched sampler/retrigger, but with some extras included, such as a bandpass filter, some randomization functions, and timing options for the repetitions.
Grain Delay; anyone familiar with the terms "grain" and "delay" might work out how this works; delaying ultra-short particles of the sound, producing pretty alienating effects.

Resonators; an effect that produces results similar to what you'd get from a vocoder - only it works in a different way, and thus can create some other manipulations too. Some of these manipulations are simply downright weird, which, in this reviewers humble opinion, is very good.

A small bunch of MIDI effects to manipulate note data, including a chord generator, a scale corrector, a velocity mapper and more. Again, these can be used as they would normally be, but they also feature the parameters that invite abuse (or creative use, if you wish). Try, for instance to randomize the scale correction to make everything play at different pitches than what was recorded. Or, how about reversing the velocity curve?

The list could go on far longer, describing effects such as Erosion, Auto Filter, Vinyl Distortion and Filter Delay; let me just add that these effects all come with just the right amount of parameters to not appear impossible to overview, yet inspire creative uses beyond what the effects name promises right off, and all parameters can be mapped to MIDI hardware controls. There is a lot of inspiration for the electronic composer to be found in Live's effect section.

If none of the included plugins do the trick, luckily Live supports 3rd party plugins in the VST format, as well as Audio Units, obviously only in the OSX version. No DAWs that I know of are immune to crashes or buggy behaviour caused by poorly written 3rd party plugins. My experience with other DAWs is limited, at least when it comes to experience of the kind where I can speak with any authority about plugin implementation, but for what it's worth, let it be my statement here that for me, 3rd party plugins are generally more stable in Live 5.0.2 than they are in Logic Platinum 5.5.1, and certainly way more than they are in Adobe Audition 1.5. All parameters are automatable, and to top it off, you can select 2 parameters for each 3rd party plugin to be mapped to MIDI hardware controllers, or to be manipulated live using the mouse on a graph on the screen varying the 2 parameters in an X-Y field.

The Usability Factor
Ableton obviously wants Live to be an easy-to-use program, and one would have to admit that they've succeeded in creating just that; a program that can be learned and used pretty quickly. Following the included tutorials, I was able to start producing and recording in less than an hour. Even if I'm not a complete newbie with computers and DAWs, a learning curve that brings you to put the application to actual use in an hour is pretty impressive. That said, I'm still learning things that can be done with Live, even if I have been using it for a couple of years now. There seems to be a lot of possibilities hidden in Live, and more than once have I experienced seemingly finding the limit for Live's abilities, only to find that with a few days extra thinking about how to achieve this or that, the solution suddenly pops up in my head.

I like to be creative with digital audio. I like to drag in some sample, cut it up in unusual slices, mangle it's timing, pitchshift, timestretch and process it dynamically to alter the sound of it completely and to get something that will help me hear whatever the sample came from in a whole different way. Doing this previously included going back and forth between Logic, Audition and Recycle, which again meant a whole lot of time spent booting and closing programs, keeping track of files, setting up effects chains and sampler instruments and lots of other time- and creativity consuming tasks. Now, I find that a lot of the things I want to do can often be achieved in Live pretty quickly. Simply drag in the audio, put it in arrange view to move the audio around in fragments, take it back to session view to make strange transpositions, automate gain and sample offset, and warp it to offset timing and make extraordinairy stuttering effects. This all happens in the same program, meaning you can keep the creative juices flowing, and don't have to get yourself involved in other system acts than remembering to hit the "Save" shortcut every now and then.

As for actual live use, as a full time teacher I don't get a lot of time to gig myself, and so my experience with that part of the application is limited. However, I've seen several of my students set up Live sessions to be used on stage, all of it relatively easily and with rock stable results. The MIDI implementation seems to be solid and working as promised, and I've even witnessed a couple of students doing a show with two computers synched via MIDI, bith of them running Live. The fact that one of them were able to play the guitar while performing his part tells me that Live performs as it should (and that I have talented students - but I knew that already...). A nice touch when using the program in a live situaution is the ability to change the colour scheme of the GUI, which enables you to use your computer in for instance a theater band and choose a skin in dark colours that will not glow too visibly and thus distract attention from the stage.

Live combines tradition with innovative thinking whenever the computer platform offers solutions that makes things easier that used to be difficult when making music on studio hardware. The mixer, for instance, looks familiar enough to be immediately accessible to anyone who has ever worked with a hardware audio mixer, but you won't find that you have to drag virtual cables to hook up effects. Now that we can finally get rid of cables, why put them on screen? Everything seems to be made with that approach in mind. When looking at an effect interface, you get knobs where you're used to seeing them, but you won't have to mouse them in circles; you adjust them by moving the mouse up and down or simply entering numerical values, as is natural for computer users.

Conclusion
As I said in the beginning, Live has sprung from being yet another thing to check out for a review to being one of my main tools in the time that I have known the application. The reasons for this are manyfold;

• good timestretch algorithms
• ease of use
• access to VST instruments that are for this and that reasons unavailable to me in my other main DAW (Logic Platinum 5 ... I know, I know, it's outdated, but my primary DAW workhorse is still a PC).

But first and foremorst, Live is to me a very inspirational program. When working in Live, one thing leads to another very easily, and, with a little practice, accomplishing what I set out for never takes so long that I lose my inspiration in the process. Even if a lot of things can be said about how moving into traditional DAW areas make Live a more complicated program, operating it is still easy enough that solutions spring out at you easily.

I do have a few minor wishes for future releases, and these are mentioned in the text above, but when I say that my major concern remains the lack of other subdivisions than 16ths when warping samples, it is evident that most of my wishes are in the minor department.
I will recommend Live for

• all my newbie students, due to its ease of use.
• anyone interested in a DAW that does more than act as a computerbased tape recorder, particularly those working within the broad spectre of styles that we have come to know as "electronica".
• anyone wanting to do computerbased music live on stage. Especially in cases where "computerbased" means "loopbased", Ableton Live is an indispensible tool.