Ableton Forum

I'm thinking of upgrading and curious why there is so much talk of 3rd party plugin? The Suite version comes with a plethora of sounds. I'm looking for realistic acoustic and electric piano. I assume Ableton Suite has this covered? I found a hard time getting reviews of Ableton packs compared to Kontact or SampleTank for example. Any thoughts?

jlafber wrote:I'm thinking of upgrading and curious why there is so much talk of 3rd party plugin? The Suite version comes with a plethora of sounds. I'm looking for realistic acoustic and electric piano. I assume Ableton Suite has this covered? I found a hard time getting reviews of Ableton packs compared to Kontact or SampleTank for example. Any thoughts?

There is really a lot stuff within Live 9 Suite. But you need to find out on your own if PlugIns from e.g. u-he, NI, all those Kontakt libraries make the difference for you. Try the demo versions and listen.

You’ll probably be good upgrading to suite, but Ableton primarily makes a DAW and they provide you with sound content to get things started as do other DAW developers. 3rd party developers focus primarily on sound content so odds are they are going to be of varying degrees of higher quality.

jlafber wrote:I'm looking for realistic acoustic and electric piano.

Electric and Operator has some nice electric pianos, also Suite version came with a nice Grand Piano. But if those two are your main concern, there are a lot of better alternatives.

For me the electric instrument included in Suite for EP is excellent and I like it a lot more since it is modeled, not sampled based. it is light, very tweakable and plays really good.

The acoustic grand piano included on Suite is sampled based and to me it is quite mediocre compared to 3rd party stuff.

For acoustic piano I am using NI Definitive Piano collection, which includes 2 grands and one vertical sampled based pianos. There are other options but for the price to me this are the best.

If I had money I would probably pick Pianoteq Standard, but is a little bit expensive right now. I like that Pianoteq is modeled and it plays incredible well.

There are other expensive and huge libraries for piano: Ivory, Garritan, Galaxy, Soniccouture, and UVI are some developers which offer different flavours: steinways, yamaha, fazioli, etc.

but be aware that bigger libraries are not always better, they use more resources and the difference bet ween 10gb and 50gb might not be that huge, and some go up to 120gb, which is a lot and ends up costing valuable space on your hard drive. Also some are very RAM hungry so you might need to upgrade your computer.

I personally like smaller libraries, likes the ones by NI, which are more convenient and sound quite good.

And Live synths are good but maybe a bit basic, Operator now sounds better with the new filters but it doesn't have that many modulation options. I like U.he diva for analog synth sounds and Waldorf largo for other synth sounds.

login wrote:For me the electric instrument included in Suite for EP is excellent and I like it a lot more since it is modeled, not sampled based. it is light, very tweakable and plays really good.

I agree with this. It's not often I need an Electric Piano type of sound, but when I do I think it does the job really well.

As for Pianos modeled pianos are very interesting as sampled pianos ring quite strange unless all you do is play in a staccato fashion so you don't notice as easily.

Modeled "prepared" — i e physically tampered with — pianos would be very interesting indeed.

Stromkraft wrote: Modeled "prepared" — i e physically tampered with — pianos would be very interesting indeed.

Pianoteq (especially the pro version) has extensive per-note customisation, so it's certainly possible to create 'prepared' pianos (there are a few in the standard patches)...

I use the grand piano in suite quite a lot, and like it for when it is part of the general accompaniment. However, if I was looking for a piano to "stand alone" I would probably look elsewhere. PianoTeq IS really good, if you have the money.

Personally I have never found the sound of the Ableton synths to be that amazing. A bit plasticy and thin... and have never been able to get rich, impressive synth sounds from them. So I have ended up adding other synths like Waves Element 2 (which really chews processing power but sounds great). I have come to the conclusion that the internal sounds suit minimilist techno / avantgarde, but not much else. One area where they shine is they are light on processor power.


Bottom line is I concur with an earlier post... before spending money on any instrument plugs download the demos and really put them through their paces. You will spend your money a lot more wisely that way

ableton suite cover piano and electric piano with this two packs :
https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/grand-piano/
https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/electric/
the Grand Piano was created in cooperation with e-instruments, so look for reviews of their instruments
http://www.e-instruments.com/instruments/pianos/
the Electric was created in collaboration with Applied Acoustics Systems (AAS) and is based on the same advanced physical modeling synthesis technology found in their acclaimed Lounge Lizard instrument, so look for reviews of this instrument
https://www.applied-acoustics.com/lounge-lizard-ep-4/

ableton suite come with so many packs and instruments without forgetting max4live ...

Haven’t looked into Pianoteq in years. Damn, $800 for the full package. I buy an irresponsible amount of plugins but I draw a line. That easily crosses it for a single instrument type. And I know there are options for less models for less money but I’m willing to bet that most users don’t know the difference to decide which would work best for the song in their head. Hell, if you’re on a Mac you get some decent pianos for $200 that just happen to come with Logic with your purchase.

fishmonkey wrote:

Stromkraft wrote: Modeled "prepared" — i e physically tampered with — pianos would be very interesting indeed.

Pianoteq (especially the pro version) has extensive per-note customisation, so it's certainly possible to create 'prepared' pianos (there are a few in the standard patches)...

Interesting. Thanks.

Why are there not more Live Packs available for the Live instruments? That's easy...unless you buy Suite the only instruments you get with Live are Impulse and Simpler. I have no idea how many people buy Suite compare to those who buy Standard, Intro or run one of the versions of Lite but I'm sure that the majority of Live users have only those two instruments. That's why most Live packs run on Simpler.

It's not just Live users who feel they need to buy third party plugins. Outside of Reason (and now Logic), DAWs ship with few software instruments and most are pretty basic...sample player, drum machine and maybe a VA synth. This is where the market for third party plugins comes from. Buy Komplete, Omnisphere, Nexus, Rob Papen, etc. and you have thousands of sounds ready, never needing to program anything yourself unless you want to.

If having immediate access to thousands of killer presets is your goal, the extra few hundred dollars for the right third party instruments is easily worth it. Komplete only costs $500 for the standard version, Omnisphere is $480, Rob Papen has bundles from $350 to $600. Paying $300 to upgrade to Suite for the sounds doesn't compare...what does make the upgrade worthwhile is M4L.

I had no idea about the Rob Papen stuff - looks and sounds fantastic. Dang it.

beats me wrote:Haven’t looked into Pianoteq in years. Damn, $800 for the full package. I buy an irresponsible amount of plugins but I draw a line. That easily crosses it for a single instrument type. And I know there are options for less models for less money but I’m willing to bet that most users don’t know the difference to decide which would work best for the song in their head. Hell, if you’re on a Mac you get some decent pianos for $200 that just happen to come with Logic with your purchase.

unless you are an utter keys geek you do not need the full package. that includes the Pro version which is complete overkill for most people...

The standard version is the usable one, it comes with two models and costs 350, still expensive compared to other pianos, I think Moddart is a little bit high, 250 would be ideal. And then the price for the physical copy you can found at EU stores is way cheaper.