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!