Ableton Live 8!!!
I’m excited!
So I’m still on Live 6 since I didn’t see anything in Live 7 that made me want to make the jump. Live 8 has wooed me over, and the update definitely earns the version change from 7 to 8.
There are far too many features for me to write an in depth take on each, so I’ll list my favorites out and give some more details later:
NEW EFFECTS:
VOCODER. We won’t be stuck routing MDA Stereo and Vocoder around now, as Live 8 includes it.
MULTIBAND COMPRESSION. Select up to 3 bands to compress different frequency bands to varying degrees.
OVERDRIVE. Basic drive modeler.
FREQUENCY SHIFTER. Ring modulator and flange effects.
LIMITER. New “brick wall” limiter.
EASY LIVE LOOPING:
No more tedious session view sets or external programs to assign complex key commands to single midi notes. The new live looper auto-detects your tempo so that you no longer need a click track to loop yourself live. All features are controllable from a single footswitch.
CROSSFADES IN ARRANGEMENT VIEW:
One of the few things that slowed me down when working and editing in live (versus ProTools) was being able to comp takes together with quick crossfading. Live 8 has it. Maybe I’ll cancel my PT8 order…
TRACK GROUPING:
Again, something that held my main editing to PT. Link tracks together to preserve the relationships between them, but adjust overall parameters with ease.
SCREEN MAGNIFICATION:
Pretty self explanatory. This will help a lot when playing live.
SAMPLE SCRUBBING AND PREVIEW:
Listen through a sample without having to drag it into the session. I used to use SoundHack Instant Player for this. Now that it’s embedded in Live, working should go much faster.
SHARING!!!
Share live sets with others. Click “Share Live Set” to have your live set uploaded to the Ableton server. You can make it private or publicly accessible. It gets a dedicated webpage on the Ableton server that you can send to collaborators to give them access to the files. It only updates the files that have changed since you last worked on the session to keep upload time to a minimum. It also lets you continue working on your set while it uploads in the background. Collaborators can then download the set and upload their versions, again only having to download or upload the files that have been modified to save time. Brilliant.
MAX/MSP INTEGRATION:
I’ve been a user of PD for years, and have loved MAX/MSP for creating custom plug-ins that I couldn’t find on the market. This will be a HUGE bonus to Live 8 for me, so much so that I’ll need to create another post for it in the future.
HARDWARE INTERFACE AKAI APC40:
Think of it as a fully programmable MPC controller, custom tailored to Live. Ditch your mouse and keyboard during live sets. The APC40 makes Live use much more intuitive and natural in a live environment. More on this one to come too.
There are some great details and videos on Ableton’s site.
This has easily become the first thing I will pick up of all the things at NAMM 2009.
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