My first experience with music sequencers was back in the mid 90’s using Cubase on an Atari ST520. Due to the Atari’s rather pathetic 520Kb of memory and storage of all tracks on 3.5” floppy disks Cubase was only capable of midi sequencing. Having said that, not that much changed with midi sequencing between Cubase and Cubase VST however once I started using VST on a PC with decent memory and a large hard drive it opened up a lot more options to me with its audio recording capabilities. The only problem was that I felt limited, certain things seemed like a lot more work than you would like them to be. Recently I have been reading a lot about Ableton Live and decided it was time to put it through its paces to see how much power lies behind the simplified looking user interface. For this review I installed Ableton Live 7 and the Essential Instruments Collection 2.

I’m a very impatient person, once I install something I want to start using it immediately and don’t want to be bogged down with reading the manual. With Cubase VST this simply wasn’t the case I remember falling at the first hurdle trying to work out how to record audio. I installed Abelton Live 7 and as soon as it was open I started dragging things around to see what would happen. I started off with the Session view which is a little different to the arrangement view I am used to, but flicking between the two is as easy as pressing TAB, however I like using Session view to begin throwing ideas together. I dragged a drum kit and a couple of Ableton’s midi instruments onto a track and was recording within seconds. It is SO easy to use! There is a massive collection of midi and audio effects that you just drop on the instrument track and have immediate access to all the parameters. When you are recording in Arrangement view and click record you can tweak every knob of the instrument panel and each effect in the chain that you create and record the changes as it plays or stop and draw the envelopes. If that sounds complicated, believe me, it isn’t, you don’t even need a keyboard controller to create professional tracks (although it is nice to have). You can use the computer keyboard for playing a single octave (C3 - C4) and then drag around to the octave you want or copy and paste to layer your midi notes or simply use the pen tool to draw the notes into the editor.

One of the great features of Ableton Live 7 is ‘Impulse’ (above). I’m going to quote the manual on this one because it describes it way better than I could, “The eight drum samples loaded into Impulse’s sample slots can be time-stretched, altered and processed by envelope, saturation, pan and volume components, nearly all of which are subject to random and velocity-based modulation.” It is a very clever module, you allocate instruments such as one of Ableton’s Kick drums or even an audio samle to a pad by dragging and dropping and immediately this is available either on your keyboard controller or between the ‘a’ and ‘k’ keys on your computer keyboard. This instrument makes it incredibly easy to create custom drum kits in seconds and of course you can chain as many effects as you want simply by dragging and dropping. Check out this video tutorial on Impulse to see just how easy it is to use!

Once your instrument is loaded and you switch to track detail view (SHIFT - TAB toggles this mode, see above) you see a simple little panel with (usually) 8 control knobs mapped to certain parameters. This alone is very cool, as I mentioned before you can record all the filter tweaks and effect tweaks in realtime so that they automate on playback. At the click of a button inside this macro panel you can expand to see what is behind the instrument’s sound. For example I dragged an instance of the Synth Instrument ‘Juno Style’ which when you expand you see a ‘Simpler’ instance called ‘Sawtoothy’ and a couple of effects, in this case a chorus and auto filter. Every part of this instrument is editable, its just a case of clicking on controls, turning them and finding a sound/effect you like.

Recording audio is just as easy, it really is as simple as creating a new audio track, selecting the input source, arming the track to record (click on the little record button in the track) and then click on the main record and play buttons. As you record you see (in Arrangement view) the waveform appearing as you play. You can zoom into this audio clip to edit and apply envelopes. This can be as simple as a volume fade or altering an effect parameter, just as you do with a midi instrument. Applying effects is just as easy, simply drag and drop each effect to the track and it will be added to the chain, which can be reordered at any time by the way. You can then add as many envelope lanes as you like to add more automation to the track.

So this probably all sounds very complex so let me break it down into terms any guitarist will understand. Simply put Ableton Live 7 lets you plug in, record, edit and arrange your music in a very simple way. The built in midi instruments allow you to play (with a controller keyboard) or program in the editor, drum loops and bass lines with ease. You can drag and drop drum samples and Ableton instantly time stretches it to make sure it fits your song’s tempo and allows you to chop it up and make it your own. Just as importantly Ableton Live 7 makes it very easy to create sets of music which you can mix on the fly with the use of an external foot controller so you could use this for a one man performance, you just need a guitar and a laptop to make each performance unique by arranging as you play. It is easy to see why bands such as Daft Punk use Ableton for live performances.

Having used this product for a pretty short time I already feel pretty comfortable but I know there is a lot more power waiting to be unlocked, I just need to have a dig through the manual and experiment a little. I have already set myself the task of producing 2 albums by the end of the year confident that Ableton will help me achieve this goal. The first will be a rock guitar album, the second will be an ambient techno album. I will release streaming excerpts as I finish them, this is going to be fun!

I’m quite lazy it has to be said. I’ve owned a mac or two for the last 3 or 4 years and not once have I recorded anything in GarageBand, why? Well by the time I’ve loaded it up and plugged in my Takamine I’ve started to lose interest. Then I’m searching around for a decent drum loop to jam to and well its all over and I’m online searching for cool guitars before I know it. Well I don’t have that excuse anymore because I am now the proud owner of Sonoma Wireworks - Riffworks! If you haven’t heard of this product I encourage you to watch this video or search YouTube for videos tagged with “Riffworks”.

Ok done that? Impressed? Skeptical? Ok so that video is edited a little in order to make it nice and snappy but believe me the first 2 riffs the guy lays down are realtime, Riffworks only records a new layer when it has a signal so you can wait for a couple of repeats then start playing and it will instantly record your next take. Ok I’m getting ahead of myself… This is a really fun bit of software, it really takes me back to when my brother and I got our first 4-track (Yamaha MT100II) and started recording song after song. The key to Riffworks is that it has been tailored to creating songs by Riffs (not suprisingly!). So you can just keep adding layer after layer without touching the computer and it keeps each take which you can also set to mute as it finishes so that you can do multiple takes. The next thing that makes it so great is a little feature called Instant Drummer™ which lets you dial up a drum loop and with the turn of a dial alter the intensity of the playing and the variation of the pattern. This is left to the creators of the drum patches to interpret as they wish but it is so easy to find a drum track to jam along to. These drum patches are available as add-ons from the website at $9.99 a set so be prepared to outlay a few extra dollars to get the right mix of loops to keep the creative juices flowing.

When you create a layer, say an 8 bar riff in 4/4, you can add and remove effects to this layer. The effects are pretty amazing, you could quite literally use riffworks as your main signal processor for recording without using any other features they are that good! They aren’t just your run of the mill reverbs and delays either there are some very creative units like the Attaq and Tempest modules. I was stuck playing with those two for hours!! Oh and did I mention that the standard version comes with Amplitube 2 Live? Oh my… When you plug in to Riffworks you can choose to use hardware monitoring or if you prefer, run it through the effects first. Please, please make sure you do this it is soo good. Select Amp and use Amplitube to create a head and cabinet to get your sound started, then you can either use Amplitube’s stomp boxes which are good or you can use Riffworks effects which are great. Although I found myself making silly noises far too often because it was fun! I plugged my Takamine TEAN46C directly into my Macbook Pro and used Amplitube to create a nice Amp and then played around with Riffworks effects to create a couple of tracks and a bass track using the Tripwire effects module to detune my guitar an octave. You can hear the results of an hours messing around here and believe me it really doesn’t do this software justice!!

Once you create a riff it is really easy to then put them together to create a song, just by dragging and dropping onto the song timeline. You can even create songlayers which are not riff based so that you can lay down solos or vocals. However this is not Riffworks’ main focus and it is tricky to edit the volume throughout a songlayer for instance if you wanted to splice two together, you might be better creating a few and then exporting them to Ableton Live or something for more detailed wave editing. I think if I coupled this with something like Abelton Live I would pretty much have a perfect set up for a very small amount of cash. There is a lot more to this software like the online collaboration and sharing functionality but I really recommend you just download the demo and check it out for yourself. I’m off to try and emulate Eddie’s “Brown sound” and write me a VH classic!

When it comes to writing down your latest creation most of us would probably scribble a few chords on a scrap of paper and hope we can remember it the next time or if it is for someone else… well just hope for the best or supply a recording with it. The more adventurous guitarists out there might actually write it down in TAB notation either on paper or in ASCII in your favourite text editor (a very tedious task!). I have come from a background of using Steinberg Cubase first on an Atari ST520 and then VST on PC and there were basic scoring features in these programs but it didn’t translate to Guitar. So I was really excited to get my hands on Progression by Notion Music.

Notion Music specialise in Music Scoring software, their flagship product Notion 2.0 uses samples of the London Symphony Orchestra recorded at Abbey Road Studios for authentic playback instead of nasty MIDI instruments. Progression also uses sampled sounds in order to make it easier to get realistic sounding scores but they are specifically tailored to Guitarists needs. For a start you have a choice of Guitars and Basses, Keyboards and Harps and a Drum Kit. Ok say you choose an electric guitar, lets face it that is where most of us start and you drag a couple of notes onto the stave or tab to see how it sounds. It sounds like a clean guitar, obviously. But, and this is where Progression is really different from normal TAB software, you have 3 FX banks per instrument. If you open FX1 you have a choice of amps, a speaker simulator, Chorus, Delay and Reverb units. There are also lots of presets from Clean to Rock and you can modify any of the parameters by changing the settings on the effects units or by adding and removing effects modules very easily.

Now the real job of this software is to notate your compositions so how do we do that. Well there are 3 methods. The first and primary method is using a MIDI guitar, something that unfortunately I don’t own and therefore couldn’t test but I think this is where this software would really shine. The second method is using a MIDI keyboard ,alas again which is something I don’t own. So I had to use the 3rd and quite frankly least preferable method of drag and drop. Now I’m not a very patient person so I found this pretty tricky. I knew what I wanted to do but it seemed a bit of a chore to actually do it. My advice is use a keyboard if you have one, but a MIDI guitar would be a lot easier. Saying that when you see what can be achieved with a little patience and know how in the demo files it is pretty impressive and you could use it create jam tracks using the built in drum sample tracks and throw some chord progressions in there. The only thing I was a bit disappointed about was that you can’t convert the chord diagrams to TAB, this would be a nice addition for quickly creating tracks.

I am going to have to put in some time in to see if I can learn how to create notation with minimum effort and no external MIDI input device. That said, this is an incredibly powerful software application if you are prepared to take the time to learn. Teachers in particular will probably find this indispensible once they use it. If you just wanted to notate scales and chord changes it is actually really easy there is a Chord diagram section at the bottom of the application where you choose the key and it shows all the chord variations which you can drag and drop into your score, these are visual elements only. If you want to TAB a C Major scale you can click on the strings in the TAB and type the fret number into the box that appears, very simple. And I suppose if you start out with these tasks you will slowly start expanding on your knowledge and start creating multi-voice multi-instrument scores in no time.

I just came across this app for OS X called GuitarLog, I haven’t tried it yet but it looks pretty cool. The idea is that you structure practice sessions by using stored exercises. Each take remembers the “state” of your performance of an exercise and increments the BPM each time unless you specify otherwise.

“If you haven’t practiced an exercise for a while and don’t want to waste time listening to mistakes, you should rate all of your takes. It only takes a simple keystroke to set a rating, but can provide you with so much information as you review your practice sessions. It can also be used from the Statistics view to quickly recall the fastest tempo you’ve achieved in a particular exercise.”

You can also track which guitars were used on specific takes and see statistical graphs of your improvements. So far it is heavily geared toward reaching maximum tempo per exercise but apparently this application is still evolving so maybe it will analyse precision in the future? That would be very useful, say you had an mp3 of a riff and it checked your version against theirs at different tempos?

Anyway I can’t really tell how useful it is until I try it, so that is my plan for this weekend!