Ableton Forum

OK, kids, enough of the mac/PC debate.

membrain wrote:American and english companies seem to fall down when it comes to making anything.

As an english design engineer, I'd like to say, you're not making friends here.

Oh God, and now I'm using smilies. My first in all this time on the forum. I've hit a new low. This is your fault, Membrain.

Argh!

Anyway. Lots of talk about comtrollers here, would you guys say that would be an essential early purchase for a prospective producer. Would you buy one before decent monitors for example? I don't know about anyone else, but I hardly use them when writing music, usually just for playing or practising sets. Could just be the way I work, I tend to draw my automation in.

Keyboard is handy though, hmmm....

Yeah you need a decent controller before decent monitors in my opinion..
good monitors are great for mastering but you need to create something half decent before you need to master.....And a midi keyboard is alot more inspiring than a computer keyboard.
i often produce using just headphones.....but i can't master in headphones....
Then you need monitors!!

andydes wrote:OK, kids, enough of the mac/PC debate.

membrain wrote:American and english companies seem to fall down when it comes to making anything.

As an english design engineer, I'd like to say, you're not making friends here.

Oh God, and now I'm using smilies. My first in all this time on the forum. I've hit a new low. This is your fault, Membrain.

Argh!

Anyway. Lots of talk about comtrollers here, would you guys say that would be an essential early purchase for a prospective producer. Would you buy one before decent monitors for example? I don't know about anyone else, but I hardly use them when writing music, usually just for playing or practising sets. Could just be the way I work, I tend to draw my automation in.

Keyboard is handy though, hmmm....

Glad i can bring everyone down to my level
andydes - I love what you guys design, I just wait until a Japanese company works out the manufacturing and quality control.

As for the mac vs. PC debate - let's all just remember that Live is a Mac program that got ported to PC shall we? (jokes guys, just jokes!)

I started out on piano so it's a very familiar to me. Once you have that keyboard playing ability (when you learn physical things at a young age they become very intuitive) it's much easier to input your ideas using that interface. I also went through a stage of quantising everything and evening out the velocities and now I try to record my natural groove and feel and re-record if it's sloppy or clumsy.

It was interesting watching the doco on Robert Moog when he explained how they decided to put a piano like input device on the first synthesisers rather than anything else. That one decision shaped the music we make and listen to today and this discussion would be vastly different if they had gone with say the ribbon controller that was one of the other options at the time.