Ableton Forum

Evengy wrote:live's warping and logic's flex time are both from elastic audio, isn't it? (pro tools aswell?)

yep.

two kinds of people start these topics, noobs and attention whore producers in fluff piece DAW magazines.

puzzlefactory wrote:it's all about your mixing skills.

yep. usability and comfort of use I can see as issues with which DAW is best for you.

get a bigger monitor and stretch your window all the way. the sound is probably getting crowded, and you need to give it room spread out.

theophilus wrote:get a bigger monitor and stretch your window all the way. the sound is probably getting crowded, and you need to give it room spread out.

+1

Always maximise your open windows!!!

I find it helps if I open a few instances of Firefox in the background (Fully maximised windows of course) Gives a nice full tone to the sound along with a sense of space - sort of like an old Lexicon 224 unit.

all the top Producers keep this stuff handy.

"it's all about your mixing skills"

Sorry, no. You can have a moderate mixing skill to say that Live 'may' have a 'thin' sound. I'm a professional pianist and I can perform much better on a common upright piano then someone on a decent grand piano. But it does not mean that those instruments are the same. Same about Live's sound. It's absolutely obvious and I don't know why you don't hear it, but when you start jamming in Ableton Suite using only Ableton's instruments and effects you get that 'thin' sound. And yes, I'm not a great producer at all. But I can hear the character of the sound if it is a hardware analog synth or a decent VST or a poor sounding Ableton instruments.

Ableton worry a lot about the CPU load that's why they use some scaled down DSP algorithms in their instruments, thats why you can use tons of them without overloading your system. Of course the modern music production is some kind of a compromise between price, usability comfort and sound quality and I don't say that you MUST use only hardware analog instruments, and I don't say that you can't create a great track using Suite.

For those who want to use Live and worry about that 'thin' sound my advice is stay away from built in instruments and effects as much as possible if you can afford it and if money is not a problem. Or at least use them moderately. My verdict: Live + Suite instruments only = 'thin' sound; Live + VST's = same sound as any other DAW with that VST's.

You're talking about pluggins and instruments which is a whole different ball game. I would agree that Lives built in pluggins are not as good as Logics or Pro Tools. But I was referring to the actual sound engine not the pluggins.

Ok, then yes. 'Sound' is all about Instruments and Effects sound. Live and any other DAW 'sound engine' is very primitive, it actually don't 'process' sound it just put it in the place you want, cut it, and combine (mix) it. All the differences are the DAWs interface and user interactivity (features).

If you are a Reaktor or Max user you know that digital 'mixing' is a very simple mathematics - it's just about adding a couple of digits, so there can't be miracles here, it's theoretically all the same for all DAW's in the world (just heard recently that Waves developing some new "Analog Summing" plugin, thats obviously something different).

So from that point of view different sounding DAWs seems to be a myth indeed.

There is no scientific experiments (that I know of) that backs up the notion that one DAW sounds better or worse than the other. The argument is usually based on subjective opinion and therefore it should be treated as such.

Though it's not difficult to test. Jets put two identical wav files in two tracks of different DAW's with the same levels, better 0 dB, (all fx/eq/comp off) then export the mixdown then compare the result files in the Audio Editor - I'm pretty much sure they will be bit to bit the same. If someone have some free time right now you welcome to test it, or maybe I'll do it later.

I swear it 99% of these ppl just don't know enough to turn up the velocity on their drum racks from the default of 0. whoa - drums just got phatter!

Hi jpga, the answer to Lives thinness lies in an Options.txt file, place the following option within your file

-SuperSizeMe

This may make Live run very slowly however.

nylarch wrote:I swear it 99% of these ppl just don't know enough to turn up the velocity on their drum racks from the default of 0. whoa - drums just got phatter!

*sigh*... in my many years doing this, this has become all too apparent.

...soon all this will be moot, as Bitwig has a phat sound by default, game over

LOL, gggreat song titles there ^^