All Topics  
Ableton Live

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Ableton Live
 
 
  Topics Ableton Live Topic Home

Ableton Live is a professional loop
Music loop

In electronic music, a loop is a sampling which is repeated. Loops may be repeated through the use of tape loops, delay effects, cutting between two record players, sampling , a Sampler or with the aid of Computer Based Looping Software....
-based software music sequencer
Music sequencer

A music sequencer is software or hardware designed to create and manage computer-generated music.Originally, music sequencers did not include the ability to record audio....
 for Mac OS
Mac OS

Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems....
 and Windows
Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces ....
 by Ableton
Ableton

Ableton Aktiengesellschaft is a Berlin-based music software company that produces the production and performance suite Ableton Live and a collection of related instruments and sample libraries....
. The latest major release of Live, Version 7, was released in November 2007. Unlike other software sequencers
Music sequencer

A music sequencer is software or hardware designed to create and manage computer-generated music.Originally, music sequencers did not include the ability to record audio....
, Live is designed around the notion of being as much an instrument
Musical instrument

A musical instrument is an object constructed or used for the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument....
 for live performance
Performance

A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which one group of people behave in a particular way for another group of people ....
s as a tool for composing
Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, usually in the medium of musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music....
 and arranging
Arrangement

In music, an arrangement is either a rewriting of a piece of existing music with additional new material or a fleshing-out of a compositional sketch, such as a lead sheet....
. It is also often used for precision mixing of tracks by DJs.

ton Live is written in C++
C++

C++ is a general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as a middle-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level programming language and low-level programming language language features....
 with the first version released in 2001 as a commercial piece of software.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Ableton Live'
Start a new discussion about 'Ableton Live'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Ableton Live is a professional loop
Music loop

In electronic music, a loop is a sampling which is repeated. Loops may be repeated through the use of tape loops, delay effects, cutting between two record players, sampling , a Sampler or with the aid of Computer Based Looping Software....
-based software music sequencer
Music sequencer

A music sequencer is software or hardware designed to create and manage computer-generated music.Originally, music sequencers did not include the ability to record audio....
 for Mac OS
Mac OS

Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems....
 and Windows
Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces ....
 by Ableton
Ableton

Ableton Aktiengesellschaft is a Berlin-based music software company that produces the production and performance suite Ableton Live and a collection of related instruments and sample libraries....
. The latest major release of Live, Version 7, was released in November 2007. Unlike other software sequencers
Music sequencer

A music sequencer is software or hardware designed to create and manage computer-generated music.Originally, music sequencers did not include the ability to record audio....
, Live is designed around the notion of being as much an instrument
Musical instrument

A musical instrument is an object constructed or used for the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument....
 for live performance
Performance

A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which one group of people behave in a particular way for another group of people ....
s as a tool for composing
Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, usually in the medium of musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music....
 and arranging
Arrangement

In music, an arrangement is either a rewriting of a piece of existing music with additional new material or a fleshing-out of a compositional sketch, such as a lead sheet....
. It is also often used for precision mixing of tracks by DJs.

History

Ableton Live is written in C++
C++

C++ is a general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as a middle-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level programming language and low-level programming language language features....
 with the first version released in 2001 as a commercial piece of software. Contrary to popular belief, Live was not prototyped in Max/MSP, although it was used to model some of the audio devices. The German Company "Ableton AG" is run by Gerhard Behles (CEO), formerly a member of Monolake
Monolake

Monolake is an electronic music act based in Berlin, Germany. Originally consisting of members Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke, Monolake is now perpetuated by Henke while Behles focuses on running music software company Ableton Live....
, and Bernd Roggendorf (CTO), its original founders, and Jan Bohl (COO/CFO).

Features

Much of Live's unique interface comes from being designed for use in live performance as well as for production. As such the interface is more compact than most sequencers and clearly designed for use on a single screen. There are few pop up messages or dialogs. Portions of the interface are hidden and shown based on arrows which may be clicked to show or hide a certain segment (e.g. to hide the instrument/effect list or to show or hide the help box).

Views

Live6 Arrangement
Live is composed of two "views" – the arrangement view and the session view. The session view is primarily used to organize and trigger sets of sounds called clips. These clips may be arranged into scenes which may be triggered as a unit. For instance a drum
Drum

The drum is a member of the percussion instrument group, technically classified as a membranophone.. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with parts of a player's body, or with some sort of implement such as a drumstick, to produce sound....
, bass
Bass guitar

The electric bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb , or by using a plectrum.The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, but with a larger body, a longer neck and Scale length, and usually four strings tuned to the same pitches as those of the double bass, whic...
 and guitar
Guitar

The guitar is a musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles. It typically has six Strings , but Tenor guitar, Seven-string guitar, Eight-string guitar, Ten-string guitar, Eleven-string guitar, Twelve-string guitar, Thirteen-string guitar and doubleneck guitar string guitars also exist....
 track might comprise a single scene. When moving on to another portion of the composition – a new scene – some or all of those parts might differ and could be triggered in parallel. In Live 6, there is also the addition of "racks" which allow the user to easily group instruments and effects.

The other view is the arrangement view, which is used for recording tracks from the session view and further manipulating their arrangement and effects. This view is fairly similar to a traditional software sequencer interface.

Clips may either be an audio sample
Sampling (music)

In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an musical instrument or a different sound recording of a song....
 or MIDI (triggering one of Live's built in instruments, third party VSTs instruments or external hardware). Live comes by default with two instruments – Impulse and Simpler.

Instruments


Built-In

  • Impulse is a more or less traditional drum sequencing instrument which allows for defining a kit of up to eight drum sounds. There are a number of options available for preprocessing these samples such as basic equalization, attack, decay, pitch shift, etc. Once the kit is defined these samples are arranged into groups of measures using a piano-roll interface.


  • Simpler is a relatively easy to use sampling
    Sampling (music)

    In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an musical instrument or a different sound recording of a song....
     instrument. It is based on working with a single sample, applying preprocessing
    Digital signal processing

    Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of the signal s by a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals....
     and then arranging it in a piano roll
    Piano roll

    A piano roll is the music storage medium used to operate the player piano, pianola or a reproducing piano. The piano roll was the first medium which could be produced and copied industrially and made it possible to provide the customer with actual music fast and easily....
     interface. In this case, rather than the notes representing different samples as in Impulse, the samples are pitch shifted to the selected note.


Add-On

There are a number of additional instruments which may be purchased separately or as part of the Ableton Suite.

  • Sampler is an enhanced sampler
    Sampler (musical instrument)

    A sampler is an electronic musical instrument closely related to a synthesizer. Instead of generating sounds from scratch, however, a sampler starts with multiple recordings of different sounds added by the user, and then plays each back based on how the instrument is configured....
    .
  • Operator is an FM synthesizer.
  • Electric is an electric piano
    Electric piano

    An electric piano is an electric musical instrument. The popularity of the electric piano began to grow in the late 1960s, reaching its greatest height during the 1970s....
     instrument.
  • Tension is a string physical modelling synthesis
    Physical modelling synthesis

    In sound synthesis, physical modelling synthesis refers to methods in which the waveform of the sound to be generated is computed by using a mathematical model, being a set of equations and algorithms to simulate a physical source of sound, usually a musical instrument....
    er.
  • Analog simulates an analog synthesizer
    Analog synthesizer

    An analog or analogue synthesizer is a synthesizer that uses analog electronics and analog computer techniques to generate sound electronically....
    .
  • Drum Machines is a collection of emulators for classic drum machines.
  • Session Drums is a collection of sampled drum and percussion instruments.
  • Essential Instruments Collection is a large collection of acoustic and electric instrument samples.
  • Orchestral Instrument Collection is a collection of four different orchestral libraries, which can be purchased individually or as a bundle. They are as follows: Orchestral Strings, Orchestral Brass, Orchestral Woodwinds and Orchestral Percussion. The Orchestral Instrument Collection is not included in Live Suite.


Effects

Most of the effects
Sound effect

Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media....
 are fairly familiar effects in the digital signal processing
Digital signal processing

Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of the signal s by a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals....
 world which have been adapted to fit Live's interface. They are however fairly obviously tailored for the target audience of Live – electronic musician
Electronic musician

An electronic musician is a musician who composes or plays music from Synthesis sounds generated with synthesizers, sampler , drum machines or music sequencers....
s and DJs – rather than, say, post processing a guitar rig.

The audio effects shipped with Live (version 6) are:

Additionally there are a handful of MIDI-only effects including arpeggiator, chord, pitch, random, scale, and velocity. In more recent versions Live is also able to use VST
Virtual Studio Technology

Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology is an interface for integrating software Sound_recording_and_reproduction synthesizer and audio effect plugins with audio editors and hard-disk recording systems....
 and Audio Unit (AU)
Audio Units

Audio Units are a system-level plug-in architecture provided by Core Audio in Mac OS X developed by Apple Computer. Audio Units are a set of application programming interface services provided by the operating system to generate, process, receive, or otherwise manipulate streams of audio in near-real-time with minimal latency....
 effects.

Working with audio clips

Sasha3
In addition to the instruments mentioned above, Live can work with samples. Live attempts to do beat analysis of the samples to find their meter
Metre (music)

Meter or metre is a concept related to an underlying division of time characteristic of western music. The concept provides that the pattern, is usually 2, 3, or 4 beats long, , and each beat may be normally divided into 2 or 3 basic subdivisions ....
, number of bars and the number of beats per minute
Beats per minute

Beats per minute is a unit typically used as either a measure of tempo in music, or a measure of one's heart rate. A rate of 60 bpm means that one beat will occur every second....
. This makes it possible for Live to shift these samples to fit into loops that are tied into the piece's global tempo
Tempo

In musical terminology, 'tempo' is the speed or pace of a given musical piece. It is an extremely crucial element of composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece....
.

Additionally Live's Time Warp feature can be used to either correct or adjust beat positions in the sample. By setting warp markers to a specific point in the sample, arbitrary points in the sample can be pegged to positions in the measure. For instance a drum beat that fell 250 ms after the midpoint in measure may be adjusted so that it will be played back precisely at the midpoint.

Some artists and online stores, such as The Covert Operators and Puremagnetik, now make available sample packs that are pre-adjusted, with tempo information and warp markers added. The audio files are accompanied with an "analysis file" in Live's native format.

Envelopes

Almost all of the parameters in Live are controlled by envelopes which may be drawn either on clips and will be used in every performance of that clip or into the arrangement so that they vary at different points in the playback of a composition. The most obvious examples are volume or track panning, but these are also used in Live to set things like the root note of a resonator or the delay time or feedback amount for a delay effect. Essentially these map to most of what would be a knob on an effect in a traditional audio processing rack and in fact they may be mapped to knobs on MIDI controllers.

Live LE


As of Live 4, Ableton also offers a stripped-down version of Live targeted at the non-professional market. It has limitations on the number of audio inputs, effects used and does not feature some of the synchronization (MIDI Clock, ReWire
ReWire

ReWire is a software Protocol , jointly developed by Propellerhead and Steinberg, allowing remote control and data transfer among digital audio editing and related software....
) of the full version. The current Live LE version is 7.0.14

Live 8


On January 15, 2009, Ableton announced version 8 of Live. Live 8 includes a wealth of new features, including an integrated Max/MSP platform, internet collaboration features, and many new effects and workflow enhancements. Also announced was a dedicated hardware controller developed in collaboration with Akai
Akai

Akai is a consumer electronics brand, founded as , a Japanese manufacturer in 1929. It is now headquartered in Singapore as a subsidiary of Grande Holdings, a China Hong Kong-based conglomerate, which also owns the formerly Japanese brands Nakamichi and Sansui....
, called the APC40. Live 8 is slated for release in the second quarter of 2009.

See also

  • Music sequencer
    Music sequencer

    A music sequencer is software or hardware designed to create and manage computer-generated music.Originally, music sequencers did not include the ability to record audio....
  • Digital audio workstation
    Digital audio workstation

    A digital audio workstation is an electronic system designed to sound recording, sound editing and play back digital audio. A key feature of DAWs is the ability to freely manipulate recorded sounds....
    Category:Ableton Live users


External links