Ableton has produced a fifty-minute YouTube video, which you should check out here if you’re an existing Live user.
If you want a quick preview of what the video talks about, and some of the interesting new features, here’s a spoiler list:
- Over 1.8 million people world-wide are now using Ableton to produce music.
- AL9 will analyze an audio clip (say some humming, or a saxophone solo) and extract a MIDI version of the melody.
- Same concept with audio clips as a “convert to drums” option.
- Instrument rack presets now preview in the enhanced Live browser (actual instruments, if you’re confused by thinking this was possible before).
- Three thousand new instrument racks in Live Suite (did I hear that correctly? Three thousand?)
- Lots of new Max for Live effects modules.
- Max for Live is now integrated into Live Suite, not a separate entity.
- Recording of automation in Session view.
- Automation curves. Finally. Both in session clips and arrangement view.
- Real-time gain reduction graph output in the compressor, which can be useful, for example, for playing with sidechain parameters.
- Consolidate a time range in the arrangement view and print all of the data within that range back into a scene in session view. So cool! Essentially, you can create your final song in arrangement view and then quickly re-create it as a number of scenes in session view.
- Single-click to create break-points in envelope editing, a minor detail that I like.
The video also demonstrates Ableton’s “Push,” a hardware controller that might potentially become as ubiquitous to Live as the APC40 did for many producers and performers.
You really need to see that part yourself, rather than have me try to fully describe it. If you didn’t want to watch the entire video above, go directly to the 32:40 mark, where there is ten minutes devoted to describing Push. For the gear junkies out there, it’s pretty slick. And quite intuitive, from the looks of things.
That should be enough to whet your appetite. I did a couple of DJ-related tutorial videos this past spring about Ableton Live 8, which have received over a hundred thousand views already. You can see those by checking out this post. I'll be spending some time in the studio this winter to cover a number of other topics, including:
- Live performance DJ'ing using Ableton Live.
- Creating and programming kick drums.
- Creating and programming bass and pads.
- Producing house/trance/techno tracks from scratch.
- and a whole bunch of other ideas.
For now, check out more at the Ableton website:
I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia. Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production? If so, visit:
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YouTube: youtube.com/djbolivia
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Main Site: www.djbolivia.ca
