Ableton Live 12
My inital thoughts on the new release
Live 12 arrives. The complete studio (with over 71GB of sounds, Max for Live and all instruments and effects) is selling for 749 US dollars or roughly £582.50 in GBP. As I suspect is the case with every numerical iteration of this DAW (and others) it becomes a more complicated program to use and a more power-hungry one. Happily, all this added functionality is potentially very helpful for the user but Live 12 will require some study.
The changes to this program focus to a large extent on the Clip Editor. This is your MIDI note editor. Traditionally, back when I was a lad (-ish), you'd use your computer mouse as the pencil and dot in all these notes. Things have come a long way, especially with this latest update that effectively introduces some algorithm to create or generate the notes (if that's what you want) based on your settings. You set the preferences for ranges covering things like Density, Spread, Scale, Jitter, Velocity and Randomisation (so you have to get used to what all these things mean). And based on those settings, Live will come up with a tailored yet ‘playful and original’ set of MIDI notes. Does that make any sense?
This is great, really. Pretty fun. There are four different methods for generating a MIDI line (Rhythm, Seed, Shape and Stacks) and all are quite novel, strange methods for making music. So writing MIDI lines becomes something like using a synthesiser, as in not really knowing what you're doing you twist a few dials and see what happens. It generates something pretty musical but it's hard to quite pin it down and focus it where you want it to go. Great for generating ideas is, anyway, the idea.
Then there are eight different methods to transform the MIDI notes: Arpeggiate, Connect, Ornament, Quantize, Recombine, Span, Strum, and Time Warp. You can also create your own MIDI Generate and MIDI Transform devices using Max For Live.
There's a lot going on here. It's tricky to learn because there's a lot to learn. These developments introduce a whole host of new creative possibilities which likely will fit into the Ableton workflow very well. Less major changes outside of the Clip View aid this new approach such as the introduction on the control bar of a Scale button which maps all of your devices to a global scale.
Navigating around the new Live feels easy and smooth. Visually the program has a slightly warmer, more rounded look. Ableton has always been good at making its DAW seem wholly connected and not a collection of disparate windows or views but somehow it feels even more unified now. Seasoned users will quickly get the hang of things like stacking the Device View above the Clip View or seeing Arrangement and Mixer on the same page. Minor changes but helpful.
A new release of Live nowadays introduces a new feature synthesiser and I expect Meld, with its extensive modulation matrix table, is brilliant. I'm not going to review it because I wouldn't really know where to start. Roar is a powerful distortion, saturation, and feedback device, according to Ableton, and they're probably right about that too.
I will talk about changes to the Browser, having always struggled with this in the past. There has been substantial development here but luckily all we need to know about this is the introduction of a new tag-and-filter system. Ableton have effectively introduced their own new library of tags for the 71GB+ of sounds that ship with the full Suite program. The filter system for seeking out similar samples and devices is pretty self-explanatory. It sits near the top of the browser window and the idea is you pick the kind of sound you want based on the actually quite comprehensive tagging system Ableton has introduced.
This is far easier to use, in my view, for finding a useful instrument or sample than the browser ever was before. The old browser functionality hasn't changed. All that is still there with its confusing three browser sections of Collections, Library and Places. The search bar remains too of course. The new filter system has been cleverly introduced into the same browser window without completely taking over. It's really easy to use and searching for suitable samples, presets, instruments and devices in Live now looks to be a far smoother experience.
Not only is this new tags and filter system in place but there's also something somewhat haplessly called Sound Similarity Search. Rather than working with this new library of tags, Sound Similarity Search is a completely different, AI algorithm that analyses sounds and then suggests similar alternatives. I haven't played with it much. The old Hotswap button is still there and this Sound Similarity thing is a similar button on the top of devices with left and right arrows to toggle through the alternative sounds. Which is potentially pretty cool. I worry a bit how much computing power this background analysis takes up but it is easily switched off in Preferences -> File & Folder.
And more... the Granular Synthesiser has been updated to its third version now. There is a lot of added functionality for manual editing of MIDI notes. Select the required notes and you can apparently arrange them by pitch, velocity or duration (I’m not sure what this means). ‘Stretch, split, chop or join notes in new ways; shape the velocity of notes; transpose them into a scale; or add intervals chromatically or in key,‘ says Ableton. Again we're back to Clip View (or the MIDI editor) and yet more additional functionality there.
This is the first time I've been present for a new release of Live (12) as a user of the outgoing version (Live 11). It looks and behaves much like the old Live - Session View and Arrangement View have seen no significant changes - but the creative possibilities introduced by this update seem genuinely exciting. I've still much to learn about how to skilfully use these new generate, transform and note-editing MIDI tools. The changes don’t seem straight-forward or self-explanatory so further study will definitely be required.
I'm also very pleased on first impressions with the new tag-and-filter system in the browser. There are a lot of changes I haven't explored, particularly the new and updated devices (Meld, Roar and Granulator III). I'll have a play at some stage but I’m not the person to review them, knowing relatively little about synths really. I imagine they are pretty exciting new tools for many Live users.
A handful of further Sample Packs are supplied and these include, perhaps most interestingly, something called Performance Pack by Iftah. Targeted primarily at those using Live in a performance setting but also potentially useful to home studio musicians, I think this allows you to create variations of arrangements (these variations are captured as snapshots… the dictionary must be plundered for each new layer of Live functionality). ‘Controlling multiple parameters with layered macros and curves’ is probably going to appeal to more technically adept users of Live than me.
Max For Live functionality doesn’t seem wildly expanded beyond the ability to create new MIDI transformations and generators. That’s probably quite a big thing in itself, moving Max closer to the mainstream workflow in Live. Along with the new changes for keeping everything in the same key or scale, alternative tuning systems (outside of the traditional Western 440Hz basis? ‘outside the 12-tone equal temperament system’ it says here) can be used. You can probably even design your own if you so desire (I really don't know).
Twelve new tutorial videos have been added to Live's website for this update. They still don't seem to have an introductory pathway of videos for beginners so you might like to see the one I curated from official videos the other year. If you’re interested in using Live they are currently offering a free 30-day trial of Live 12. Alternatively, you could try to get hold of something like Ableton Lite which is a good introduction to the software and workflow of Live. Ableton’s website (worth signing up to for price reductions) has a useful page on integrated hardware which specifies popular MIDI keyboards and pad controllers that will work with the program.
This journal is completely unofficial and not associated with Ableton in any way. Live is just the DAW I happen to use. Most DAWs are pretty good; some free ones are really good in fact. This journal is chiefly about trying to make music which I’m well aware doesn’t always come easily.
Anyway, those are my initial thoughts on Live 12. I’m going to have to study it quite a lot more (a little frustrating) but it does look like a lot of fun.