Long-term user... disenchanted...
Yes. You said it all with "original concepts"sweetjesus wrote:i think if u look at the front cover of the live 6 and live 1 boxes u will notice that they are a perfect metaphor for the differences between the original concepts and where it's at now.
Live.... The concept we all fell in love with.
All I desire is a modular audio workstation. Digital goes without saying these days...
Real-time control over any aspect of the application.
Every single feature in live mapped to a custom hardware setup or networked to a screen controller or even another instance of Live.
RE: warping of recorded parts and sound quality.
One thing I do if warp is only needed for "small corrections" like you say, is to split clips and only turn warp on for the small section which needs to be tweaked. At least that way you can keep 99% of the clip playing without artifacts.
One thing I do if warp is only needed for "small corrections" like you say, is to split clips and only turn warp on for the small section which needs to be tweaked. At least that way you can keep 99% of the clip playing without artifacts.
Last edited by longjohns on Fri Feb 23, 2007 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Don't slam the original poster too bad, since his complaints were well thought out and resulted from years of using Live.
Considering how many different kinds of people use it I'm amazed it's as good as it is: it seems as many people use it to play live as use it as a DAW in their cave (as I do.) For the way I work I can much more easily work on a track in Live than in Sonar.
The comments about recognizable/overused sounds is good. Remember how easily Auto-Tune abuse was heard when it was first out... Beat Repeat is still a useful tool but I use it more surgically than up front.
I stopped upgrading Sonar at 4 and Reason at 2.5, and I am very prepared to stop upgrading Live but it seems with each major release there's one or two features I have to have--for instance, racks in Live 6, the Saturator effect (use it all the time), VSTi support, track freeze, etc in older versions.
Live 6 also still seems relatively CPU friendly on my aging 2 GHz Pentium system...
r.
Considering how many different kinds of people use it I'm amazed it's as good as it is: it seems as many people use it to play live as use it as a DAW in their cave (as I do.) For the way I work I can much more easily work on a track in Live than in Sonar.
The comments about recognizable/overused sounds is good. Remember how easily Auto-Tune abuse was heard when it was first out... Beat Repeat is still a useful tool but I use it more surgically than up front.
I stopped upgrading Sonar at 4 and Reason at 2.5, and I am very prepared to stop upgrading Live but it seems with each major release there's one or two features I have to have--for instance, racks in Live 6, the Saturator effect (use it all the time), VSTi support, track freeze, etc in older versions.
Live 6 also still seems relatively CPU friendly on my aging 2 GHz Pentium system...
r.
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dj superflat
- Posts: 1279
- Joined: Wed Nov 02, 2005 5:31 pm
- Location: leadville, CO
i like live's move into DAW-land, because i'm one of the folk who have dumped other programs (mainly logic) to work entirely in live. workflow means about everything to me, i get way more done in live than any where else. so, to the extent ableton keeps adding DAW features -- but in a streamlined, ableton way -- i'm thrilled. put another way, i want one app to do it all and, for me, live is already that app. so i don't buy this "ableton is ruining live by making it more DAW capable" line (i'm overstating it, but i don't want live to remain some sort of dedicated live instrument).
the general consensus on the forum tells me that we arrived at, or even crossed, a very important turning point..
A. yes! we are a mature daw and here are the complementing features..
B. no.. this is about as far as we'll take it..
I guess by the time of L7 we all know where Live is heading..
What will the box say?
A. yes! we are a mature daw and here are the complementing features..
B. no.. this is about as far as we'll take it..
I guess by the time of L7 we all know where Live is heading..
What will the box say?
Yeah, I appreciate that I am oversimplifying a bit, and that some of your more specific points hold water - ie. the way effects tails are going to take on a certain sound in a loop-based production etc. But these are all cases you can take as paying a small price for a huge convenience. Either way, when it's time to fix what you don't like, the options are there if you want to put the work in.I'm certainly NOT trying to fault the product (only, perhaps, some of the way it is now being repositioned/marketed...). And I do agree with you in general, although perhaps this is an over-simplification...
Whether or not it is possible in the long term to continue producing music that eschews cliches while using a loop-baswed approach is obviously debatable, and for that matter it is quite possible to use Ableton without looping any of your clips.
Then again, may of us have found that Live inspires creativity by offering specific features and workflow
I'm really new to this whole paradigm, so when I'm hacking around in Session view, I've always got it in my head that when I'm done writing/ looping/ fiddling around, I'll have to take it over to arrangement view or another DAW and track my "real" takes in a more traditional way. I haven't actually gotten far enough along with anything composed in Live to know what the workflow will be like, but I know if I go back and re-perform these parts as I would need to perform them live in front of an audience, then they can't sound anything other natural.
Thing is, some music calls for the traditional real-time DAW approach, and some doesn't. Live'll do both, and it's the best app out there for the looping/ clip-and-scene-based approach, so I can forgive its not being the best real-time recorder/ editor.
Whatever you do, just be certain to archive your Live 6 install files.But the Ableton marketing department really screwed users like me with their "complete music production solution"...
Now Ableton are pretty much obligated to make Live become a "full daw".
Every now and then I run into one of these guys who, at some point or another, found the software that worked for him, and just sorta stopped the clock. You know the type: he's still running Cakewalk 2 and Windows 3.1 on a 386, or whatever... I never got that until now. I think 2006 marks the year that technology got "good enough for me". All the Vista hype really brought it into focus: I don't really want anything to change, I just want to work with what we've got for a while.
Not saying I won't continue to press forward with new releases (I'm stupid that way) but I'll definitely keep a machine (or a disk image) handy so that I can use this technology if things start heading in a direction I don't prefer.
I originally bought live as a guitarist who was using loopers (first I used the Boomerang, then the Gibson Echoplex which I synced with Reason).
After making songs on the fly, over and over (all of which were destined to be international radio hits), I found that once I turned off my looper - those soon to platinum records were lost. Of course, I could record the audio out of the looper, but who the hell wants to do that and there's no editing capabilities later.
Live allowed me to loop and save and edit/rearrange later. That's all I wanted and that's what I got. The only issue i still have with live is that there's no real time looping (I must record to a static click track or drum beat), no audio overdub, and those real time audio loops certainly don't sync with any subsequent real time loops (like the echoplex did). The "Augustus Loop" plug in apparently does this and so I bought it last week (but haven't learned it yet).
If Live 7 has the above requested features (which shouldn't be too hard, imo, since the technology is already there), then I will be a happy camper.
Oh, and Live allowed me to become a self-taught engineer/producer in the meantime - so that's kind've cool.
Cheers,
bk
After making songs on the fly, over and over (all of which were destined to be international radio hits), I found that once I turned off my looper - those soon to platinum records were lost. Of course, I could record the audio out of the looper, but who the hell wants to do that and there's no editing capabilities later.
Live allowed me to loop and save and edit/rearrange later. That's all I wanted and that's what I got. The only issue i still have with live is that there's no real time looping (I must record to a static click track or drum beat), no audio overdub, and those real time audio loops certainly don't sync with any subsequent real time loops (like the echoplex did). The "Augustus Loop" plug in apparently does this and so I bought it last week (but haven't learned it yet).
If Live 7 has the above requested features (which shouldn't be too hard, imo, since the technology is already there), then I will be a happy camper.
Oh, and Live allowed me to become a self-taught engineer/producer in the meantime - so that's kind've cool.
Cheers,
bk
\,, / (^_^) \,,? /
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Naive Teen Idol
- Posts: 227
- Joined: Tue Feb 10, 2004 8:28 pm
Interesting thread.
I've had Live since version 3 — then, I used it in tandem w/ Reason 2.5 via ReWire. I liked it, but still found myself plunking around using Reason's sequencer way more than I wanted to. So Live's subsequent move to integrate MIDI sequencing was a welcome one for me — I actually remember folks on this forum BEGGING that the Abes not add sequencing for fear that it would ruin the "Live Concept." And frankly, I don't think it has — virtually anything you did in v.3 you can do in any subsequent version and often in a simpler, more streamlined fashion. Whether to use it that way or not is up to the artist/musician.
Which brings me to the "Live cliches" point, something I've actually been really obsessed with recently, the idea that gear often leads the artist in a certain direction. The most obvious example of this was when computers and sequencer first made looping easy — in almost no time at all, techno and dance music were everywhere.
And frankly, Live is only different in the sheer number of directions it could lead you. Indeed, from super-detailed crunchy beat mangling to microsampling along the lines of Akufen or Todd Edwards to being able to record the loop brace jumping around on an mp3, the program offers a number of features that is, to be quite honest, kind of daunting — even to the most accomplished and technologically facile electronic musicians.
As such, it seems to me that the key to getting the best out of Live is to either:
a) Have a very clear and specific idea of how to use the program and what it is (and isn't) capable of, or
b) Be extremely open to letting the program lead you in accidental directions and have enough wits about you to capture them and use them.
The latter is harder than it seems. The Abes' videos make it look like happy accidents are an artist's wet dream — as if they never interrupt the workflow.
I've had Live since version 3 — then, I used it in tandem w/ Reason 2.5 via ReWire. I liked it, but still found myself plunking around using Reason's sequencer way more than I wanted to. So Live's subsequent move to integrate MIDI sequencing was a welcome one for me — I actually remember folks on this forum BEGGING that the Abes not add sequencing for fear that it would ruin the "Live Concept." And frankly, I don't think it has — virtually anything you did in v.3 you can do in any subsequent version and often in a simpler, more streamlined fashion. Whether to use it that way or not is up to the artist/musician.
Which brings me to the "Live cliches" point, something I've actually been really obsessed with recently, the idea that gear often leads the artist in a certain direction. The most obvious example of this was when computers and sequencer first made looping easy — in almost no time at all, techno and dance music were everywhere.
And frankly, Live is only different in the sheer number of directions it could lead you. Indeed, from super-detailed crunchy beat mangling to microsampling along the lines of Akufen or Todd Edwards to being able to record the loop brace jumping around on an mp3, the program offers a number of features that is, to be quite honest, kind of daunting — even to the most accomplished and technologically facile electronic musicians.
As such, it seems to me that the key to getting the best out of Live is to either:
a) Have a very clear and specific idea of how to use the program and what it is (and isn't) capable of, or
b) Be extremely open to letting the program lead you in accidental directions and have enough wits about you to capture them and use them.
The latter is harder than it seems. The Abes' videos make it look like happy accidents are an artist's wet dream — as if they never interrupt the workflow.
MacBook 2 GHz Intel CoreDuo, 2GB RAM, Live 6.10, Reason 4.01, Reaktor 5.14, Novation Remote SL 25, GForce Oddity, TimewARP 2600, Arturia CS-80V 2, UC-33e, M-Audio FastTrack Pro, Roland Jupiter 6 w Europa mod
That's true, in a sense that Ableton have been paying a lot of attention to what's being said on this forum, and people have been screaming for more and more DAW features - essentially turning Live from a sequencing instrument to a DAW. That may be ok, but it's not why I got interested in Live in the first place. For me Live is and always will be a sequencing instrument, and that's how I use it. It's always been about the session view, I can't remember the last time I even looked at the arrange view. It's when the DAW features get in the way of performing when I get pissy.hoffman2k wrote:I bought Live for what it said on this box:
They're loosing track of that concept.
Last edited by mcconaghy on Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.