New Computer Music special "Insider's Guide to Ableton

jamester · Post by **jamester** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 6:13 am

Well, I've had a cursory look through it so far. Observations:

- Still lots of bitching about the lack of a scissor tool. Seriously, what's up CM's ass about this??? It's mentioned at least three times, yet they also mention Cntrl-E, so what's the big diff here? Get over it CM, a scissor tool is not nearly as important as some other missing features...

- As with every Live 6 magazine write-up I've seen (and I've seen most), still seems like everybody misses the fact you can drag the mixer channels sideways to reveal the numerical readout on the meters! All they ever mention is pulling them up to reveal the paek/overload display.

- Seems a mix of noob info (yet another explanation of EQ8 and Dynamic Tube!) and semi-advanced stuff like "hacking" into Live. Seems like a lot of stuff about Sampler, too.

I think the bottom line is: If you're a Live geek, you want it and you should have it. No other reason necessary other than it's an entire magazine devoted to Live!

D DAS · Post by **D DAS** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:06 am

jamester wrote: = still seems like everybody misses the fact you can drag the mixer channels sideways to reveal the numerical readout on the meters! All they ever mention is pulling them up to reveal the paek/overload display.

=

? huh?
it does not do that for me. whatchyou talkin bout jamester?

hoffman2k · Post by **hoffman2k** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:18 am

Not a bad word about the "head to head" section

Thats actually a worthy addition to the manual. It covers most of the features that aren't officially covered. Dummy clips, custom maps and even a cool little trick submitted by Stefan Franke.

If you know everything on this forum, the issue might not be that useful.
But for people who don't have a clue about dummy clips.... It's a 9 step tutorial now

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 12:22 pm

jamester wrote:- Still lots of bitching about the lack of a scissor tool. Seriously, what's up CM's ass about this??? It's mentioned at least three times, yet they also mention Cntrl-E, so what's the big diff here? Get over it CM, a scissor tool is not nearly as important as some other missing features...

Speak for yourself

This would seriously have saved me hours on my last track alone.

itook4lefts · Post by **itook4lefts** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 2:35 pm

it seems to me that CM produce an issue about once every six months that has enough good stuff in it to make me buy it. mostly, there's a couple of cool bits and a lot of stuff that's too superficial.

still, it was interesting to see a pic of machinate and hoffman, and that tips and tricks bit had some cool stuff you won't come across much elsewhere.

dCross · Post by **dCross** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 4:03 pm

hoffman2k wrote:If you know everything on this forum, the issue might not be that useful.

That was definitely the point of the head-to-head section. What may seem trivial to us forum junkies may actually be inspiring for those who don't spend much time here.

jamester · Post by **jamester** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 5:35 pm

Tarekith wrote:
jamester wrote:- Still lots of bitching about the lack of a scissor tool. Seriously, what's up CM's ass about this??? It's mentioned at least three times, yet they also mention Cntrl-E, so what's the big diff here? Get over it CM, a scissor tool is not nearly as important as some other missing features...
Speak for yourself This would seriously have saved me hours on my last track alone.

Really? How's it so different/faster than Cntrl-E?

jamester · Post by **jamester** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 5:38 pm

D DAS wrote:
jamester wrote: = still seems like everybody misses the fact you can drag the mixer channels sideways to reveal the numerical readout on the meters! All they ever mention is pulling them up to reveal the paek/overload display.

=

? huh?
it does not do that for me. whatchyou talkin bout jamester?

It will do it for you too! Just go to the top of the track in Session mode, to the right side until the cursor becomes a " ] ", then drag to the right, just like you would to drag a clip in Arrange mode - voila, numbers!

Seems a lot of people don't know about this....

amilo · Post by **amilo** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 6:02 pm

Tarekith wrote:
Speak for yourself This would seriously have saved me hours on my last track alone.

ctrl e , that the first command i learnt, come on Tarekith i thought you knew your stuff

Nogi · Post by **Nogi** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 12:33 am

jamester wrote:
D DAS wrote: it does not do that for me. whatchyou talkin bout jamester?
It will do it for you too! Just go to the top of the track in Session mode, to the right side until the cursor becomes a " ] ", then drag to the right, just like you would to drag a clip in Arrange mode - voila, numbers!

Seems a lot of people don't know about this....

The numbers won't show if you have the fader at the minimum height regardless of how wide the track is. Pull the gray line at the top of the cell containing the fader up at least one position from minimum.

sebovzeoueb · Post by **sebovzeoueb** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 12:39 am

Tarekith wrote:
Speak for yourself This would seriously have saved me hours on my last track alone.

Ah... the Tarekith slicing method. I can understand the usefulness of the scissor tool for you! Yeah, scissors would be handy, crtl+E is slightly more fiddly than just chopping slices with a click of the mouse... But for loop based non slicy production this is not so important.

jamester · Post by **jamester** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 6:32 am

Nogi wrote:
jamester wrote:
D DAS wrote: it does not do that for me. whatchyou talkin bout jamester?
It will do it for you too! Just go to the top of the track in Session mode, to the right side until the cursor becomes a " ] ", then drag to the right, just like you would to drag a clip in Arrange mode - voila, numbers!

Seems a lot of people don't know about this....
The numbers won't show if you have the fader at the minimum height regardless of how wide the track is. Pull the gray line at the top of the cell containing the fader up at least one position from minimum.

Ah yes, good point! The faders do need to be at a certain height.

And I can see the point about the scissors to the extent of having all your beat slices individually in the Arrange view...I actually used to make beats like this in Acid waaay back in the day, just painting them in. But for me, it doesn't make sense to do this in Live, since you can just launch your patterns from clips.

But i'm sure there's more to it that I just don't understand...

tricil · Post by **tricil** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 8:34 am

Nogi wrote:It's been out for almost a month. Hit the shelves with the FSOL issue.

I thought the previous one for Live 5 was better. Most of the content seems to be culled (at least guided) from this forum, actually. The whole issue could have been reduced to a single page with http://www.ableton.com/pages/forum in the middle.

(Plus, how could they have a Live 6 issue and not mention the unofficial but compulsory nerd/geek emailer custom splash screen?)

FSOL?

what's new with them?

Poster · Post by **Poster** » Mon Jan 08, 2007 11:40 pm

rolfski wrote:What I find particulary interesting is the official Live reaction at the end of the magazine on the most requested missing features as it will give some insight in what we can expect in Live 7.

What I found particulary strange is that 90% of these questions are DJ orientated

AlexBlanco · Post by **AlexBlanco** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 11:53 am

Hi guys. Just to let you know that the missing sample issue is because you need the full Essential Instrument Collection to open the complete track project (some of you have figured this out and we did say this in the 'What You Need' box of the Track tutorial - but admit we should have mentioned it again in the Arrangement one!).
Unfortunately we couldn't do 'collect all and save' as a: it would have violated Ableton's copyright and b: would have taken up about a gigabyte on the disc as it would automatically save the entire multi-sampled instruments (trust us, we tried it out of curiosity!)
If you follow through the Complete track tutorial you can just add you own sample/synth patches, but if you want to head straight to the Arrangement tutorial what we are going to do is Freeze and Flatten the individual loops so that anybody without the EIC can still work through the Arrangement tutorial.
Keep your eyes peeled and it should be up within a couple of days - we hope that helps!
Sorry for the frustration any of you might have had over the missing samples if you don't have the EIC, but with limited space on the disk, we had to go for a near-universal Live 6 sample collection, and also the EIC is one of the coolest new features of Live 6, and so we thought it was only fair to show it off. For those of you who don;t have it who are worried about not knowing what type of patch each sound is, don't panic - the object of the tutorial isn't really to get your track to sound exactly like ours (that's what our Sound Like features in the main mag are for!), it's to take you through the wicked stuff on offer in Live 6 and how to make the most of it in the context of a real project - so the actual sounds aren't too critical for this one. Just pick your own and you'll still get just as much from the tutorial

(ps If you DO have the EIC installed on your system and Ableton still says the files are missing, you probably need to go to the file management section and ask it to search for all missing samples. Do that and Live should track them all down on your specific system)
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As for the plug-in problem, sorry about that, but as some of you have guessed, the project was made on a Mac, but we made sure that the two plug-ins we used are freely available for Mac/PC (AU/VST). You can download them from here:

http://www.solid-state-logic.com/resour ... lugin.html

http://www.mda-vst.com/ (select the AU&VST effects button near the top middle of your browser window)

Simply install these on your machine (they're both worth having anyway

and insert them into the relevant tracks and you should be good to go. Each only has a couple of controls so don't worry too much about getting them exactly right but if you're determined to get them exactly as we had them, send us your details and we'll fire over a screengrab of the exact placements for both ASAP.

Hope all this helps guys....
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New Computer Music special "Insider's Guide to Ableton

Solutions from a CM contributor!