Does anyone ever use Live's built-in synths?

[Martin Gifford]

Make your own presets???

Mozart never wasted his time building violins, timpanis, flutes, etc. He was too busy making music!

[massenmedium]

Timpani.

[re:dream]

Hmm... for me making presets is an essential part of making music.

I do have a number of standard presets I use... but often the central voice or voices will be something I cooked up from tweaking parameters. I feel I have more control, and I also have more fun.

Horses for courses, I guess. But being limited to existing presets is very disempowering

[tedlogan]

I feel "wrong" when using presets. I have to make my own, just personal preference. It just feels that the music I create "belongs" more to me. Once in a blue moon I'd tweak an existing preset to my taste.

And about Live's presets being crap, I only mentioned this earlier because I feel it gives many people the wrong impression as to what Live's instruments are capable of. I'm definitely not one to complain about crap presets, as I don't use them.

[Samuel L. Jizzle]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Live offer instrument rack presets, with built-in effects? Now if only they could include some better algorithms with their reverb.

[camoz]

operator is for me new. i like it very much. i also use simpler too.
it would be nice if operator would have inputs or more then 2 lfos.

If you have Live 9 suite or M4L you can use the M4L LFO on pretty much anything!

i am still on live 8 and dont think that i switch. do you think m4l lfo works also in l8??

[Tarekith]

I've been using the built in synths more and more since I got Push, which is obvious since they are the easiest to access that way. I've tried a lot of times to switch to using ONLY Live's built in synths over the years, because they can definitely sound amazing when you dig in and start making your own patches.

For me the real downside of them is that I REALLY dislike how small the panels are for them, especially that black center area in things like Analog. I just find it really uninspiring working in a cramped interface like that. Personally, I think that's the reason sooo many people like Operator (other than low CPU). It's really the only built in synth that is laid out and works well for that small interface IMVHO.

Presets. Hard to disagree, the presets in Live are rather bland for me too. I was happy to see they brought on new sound designers for Live 9, and there's some definite improvements there. But they still are too pedestrian for most people I bet, and there's not nearly enough of them for the Push crowd. I'm as sick of the Maschine comparisons as anyone, but when you see and hear the quality of sounds that come with that compared to Live... well I know what I'd be using if presets were important to my workflow.

Yes there are presets for Instrument Racks that include effects, but again there are FAR too few of these IMO.

Live's GUI has always been hit or miss for me. I love how it's clean and simple, and doesn't mimic the look of hardware. And I'd agree that the key to a good GUI is how it works and not neccessarily how it looks. But I have issues with Live for that reason as well; the small plug in interfaces, the need to scroll constantly left and right to edit even a medium-sized rack, the way the volume handles in the mixer soooo small that it's hard to grab with a mouse, etc.

I'd love to see them update some of these areas while still keeping the same design aesthetic. If for no other reason than after a decade of using it, it looks the same and I like a change now and then to keep me inspired. It is music we're talking about, but in the studio visual cues are just as important to my creativity as audible ones sometimes.

[sparklepuff]

If they could make expanding windows for the synths that fill the screens like Spectrum and EQ8 I imagine that would be a huge incentive for more people to check them out and use them. They would just seem more impactful given some room to stretch out rather than just a little box on the bottom of the screen.

[pencilrocket]

Even so you can't do things like edit bass while editing drums or edit lead alongside pad. That's where I don't like native spectrum analyzer: you can't use at once.

[login]

If they could make expanding windows for the synths that fill the screens like Spectrum and EQ8 I imagine that would be a huge incentive for more people to check them out and use them. They would just seem more impactful given some room to stretch out rather than just a little box on the bottom of the screen.

that would be quite nice.

[sporkles]

If they could make expanding windows for the synths that fill the screens like Spectrum and EQ8 I imagine that would be a huge incentive for more people to check them out and use them. They would just seem more impactful given some room to stretch out rather than just a little box on the bottom of the screen.

I think it would be nice if you could resize device view like you can clip view, having the devices grow proportionally. I find it odd that Live's interface zoom is still restricted to an all-or-nought, hidden in the preferences.

The way Live is laid out, it would make perfect sense with an option to zoom the upper and lower section indenpendently.

[sparklepuff]

I just think an instrument GUI overhaul would be refreshing, they've been the same for years and with retina screens and whatnot things are starting to look a bit small down there. Not to get away from the original topic, these are just wishful thinking items at this point. The instruments still sound great.

I find the interface zoom to be too disorienting, it doesn't scale in a natural way for my eyes and gives me vertigo. It just looks kind of off. Letters are blurry and stuff, I feel like I can't focus on the screen.

[Quez]

I just wanted to say that I too feel that the presets are few and weak-ish. I also don't understand why they removed the Live 8 presets from Live 9.

That being said, I prefer to make or tweak my own sounds (if you start from a preset, then you can understand how a sound is made and what shapes what), but still a bunch of good presets (maybe as in Reason) would help show what the instruments are capable of. I suppose a lot of people don't read the manual too, but that's something that helps me a lot in understanding.

Anyhow, the few presets are not a deal breaker for me, because it's definitely possible to make interesting sounding things with any of Live' instruments. So I don't care about presets so much as I would have in the past.

[rydan]

Sampler is fantastic! Much more of a "synth" than most other samplers.
Also tend to use impulse quite a lot. Really quick for just getting a few percussion samples into a project.

[Buleriachk]

I pretty much agree with this. I want to make music, not design sounds, and Ableton's presets really do suck. Nevertheless, if you experiment with reverb, chorus, etc. you can get a few decent sounds without much effort.

However, by comparison a VST like Sylenth1 or Maschine is much, much better, and the investment is worth the money IMO. Ableton's strong point really is in its audio time stretching, and Push is extremely useful as a device for playing VST's within live using the scale matrices....

But I am very, very underwhelmed with the intrinsic sounds within the Factory patches in Live.

The synths are not the problem!
The patches are pure crap to me. I've seen people make amazing sounds with 100% Live Synths and fx on youtube and I've used a couple of 3rd party Live packs that were awesome, so I know the Synths are more than capable. Other Libraries come with about 70% great sounding presets, but for me, Ableton comes with about 5% (and that 5% is usually only good for electro).

Even Lives basic drum kits suck ass compared to Reason's Drum kits. Almost every Kong kit I load is clean and powerful, ready to go out of the box... There are maybe 3 Live drum kits that I would use, and even then it would only be because I'm being lazy. At one point I was actually sampling Reasons kits into Live (I prefer Lives workflow over all other DAWs). If Ableton used good sound designers, Lives sounds would be just as amazing as anything out there.

Write to Abes so we can get better more versatile sounds.