Is Ableton good for anything other than DJ/electronica?

[Angstrom]

Bad polka is difficult because, well, the bar is set so low that it's hard to go under,

Limbo Polka is not possible in Live??!?!?

A shame, those Jamaican Polka guys are really hot right now

[Simbosan]

I do folky stuff on Ableton, ukulele + strings/brass. It's only dance music if you're some kind of Morris dancer.

The session view is the greatest composition tool I have ever come across. My workflow is slowly settling down to this:

1) Compose in Session, basic mix should work just playing through the scenes. 80% of my time I spend here.
2) Record to arrangement and do the finalising of the... well the arrangement. Do the main mixing and fine tuning, punch in replacements for dodgy playing
3) Save as a new project called mix/master. Freeze and flatten all tracks, and do what I laughingly call mastering, channel strips and Ozone4.

S

[luddy]

1) Compose in Session, basic mix should work just playing through the scenes. 80% of my time I spend here.

I record parts in session view, and I would like to do even more in session view, but I find it to be a problem that I can't start playback mid-scene. For example, if I have a scene that's 8 bars long and there's a problem in bar 6, I don't like to waste time listening to bars 1-5 as I'm tweaking bar 6. How do you folks who work mostly in session view get around this?

-Luddy

[outershpongolia]

1) Compose in Session, basic mix should work just playing through the scenes. 80% of my time I spend here.

I record parts in session view, and I would like to do even more in session view, but I find it to be a problem that I can't start playback mid-scene. For example, if I have a scene that's 8 bars long and there's a problem in bar 6, I don't like to waste time listening to bars 1-5 as I'm tweaking bar 6. How do you folks who work mostly in session view get around this?

-Luddy

Well if you happened to STOP playback BEFORE that section you can hit SHIFT + SPACEBAR to start from where the marker left off - If I remember correctly this works in session view, but it's not exactly going to help you but it may be the start to some kind of workaround..cheers

[auto-lock]

u can make pretty pictures too

[regretfullySaid]

!!! wikkid !!!

[Mcboy]

my album "Mcboy" on iTunes, amazon,etc...was made with ableton live 7 except for the track "Slingers" done in protools...
the album is alternative rock,r n b,...its a guitar oriented album with 5 vocal tracks and 4 intrumental jams....i am in love with the workflow in Live....

[JoshR]

Holy crap autolock how much time do you have and why aren't you spending it making music?

[Simbosan]

1) Compose in Session, basic mix should work just playing through the scenes. 80% of my time I spend here.

I record parts in session view, and I would like to do even more in session view, but I find it to be a problem that I can't start playback mid-scene. For example, if I have a scene that's 8 bars long and there's a problem in bar 6, I don't like to waste time listening to bars 1-5 as I'm tweaking bar 6. How do you folks who work mostly in session view get around this?

-Luddy

Just click the bar counter at the top, and you can either type in the bar you want to jump to or you can drag with the mouse and it will scroll forwards and backwards through the clip

[regretfullySaid]

Holy crap autolock how much time do you have and why aren't you spending it making music?

Unless auto-lock is zantho he didn't do that.
http://djzantho.deviantart.com/gallery/

[otojin]

I suppose you can use any DAW to create any type of music, but Live is definitely skewed towards DJ/Electronica:

1) Heavily integrated warping/syncing (for DJs, remixers)
2) Built in sounds and instruments (all kinds now, but traditionally heavily synthetic)
3) Loops, loops, loops (what session view is best at)

Using Pro Tools, especially older audio-only versions like I had, was more of a blank slate. The interface didn't even suggest music, and the program wasn't any more or less suited to layering found sound or creating a foley track than making dance or rock. But how I ended up using PT was usually creating a loop, then layering on it. If you're going to do that kind of thing, you might as well be using Live. Session view lets you continuously play music and endlessly layer parts on top of it, something most other DAWs aren't really geared towards (if you've ever used a Yamaha Rm1x or groovebox type sequencer, it's more akin to that).

I want an easy, intuitive DAW for creating backing tracks and natural-sounding arrangements for lead guitar including ballads, funk, blues and rock.

Making backing tracks "realistic" is an interesting problem. They probably sound the most realistic if you just record complete performances to play back. Loops might sound more artificial, but with a program like Live you can interact with them in real time, creating a more dynamic live performance.

[andydes]

3 pages and no one's mentioned the obvious answer. Why is live popular with DJ's?

Because you can't DJ with Logic, Cubase or Protools.

How many Indy, Rock, Blues, Jazz, etc acts do you see with laptops on stage? The odd one maybe, but if they are there, they are usually only for a bit of backing (a DAT could often surfice).

Where as if you're a dance or electronic act and you want to get on stage, there is Live, or racks of Hardware, or Live and Racks of Hardware. OK, it's possible with other programs, but Live is the big cheese in this area now.

So a lot of electronic acts who use Live to perform, also use it to compose. Or people buy it with the intention of one day taking it on stage. At least in the early days when it was making a name for itself and was primarily a performance tool.

Of course you can write and record anything you like on it. There are things Live is very good at (eg. getting ideas down quickly, trying different parts, composing and experimenting) and things it's not so good at (eg. comping vocals, fine midi and audio editing, etc.). But I think what is important to you comes more from how you want to work than what style you write.

[Saxer]

exept the fact that you can play all music into any daw there are some points:

the session view is a good jamming tool but not good for parts longer than 4 bars. if you play a mistake in bar 4, its a pain to re-record only this bar in session view, especially if there are different chords. you can´t tell the session view to start playing all clips and record into one of them from bar 4.

annother thing: if you do heavy midi-editing (often useful for instrument mockups like orchestra or keyboard-played guitar-sounds where you have to correct note length, overlap corrections etc) live is not useful. also not for transposing whole songs or raise velocity of whole music parts.

[Silwolffe]

I don't know if anyone pointed to this thread yet, but it's over in the POST UR MUZIC section.

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=149380

Self explanatory.

[luddy]

Just click the bar counter at the top, and you can either type in the bar you want to jump to or you can drag with the mouse and it will scroll forwards and backwards through the clip

wow, thanks, I would never have thought of trying that! It scrubs around in the whole scene.

great tip.

-Luddy