Ableton Forum

Hi, Well I dl'd the Live Demo and am considering purchasing it, but some quick questions I have are, Can you use Live 4.0 Solely for Music Production.. or are you always going to need to Reason or Logic, Like can live play those roles as well. Also, Am I going to be getting A LOT more then I get in the demo, in terms of midi instruments and audio files? Because of my budget, I want to know what would be the right direction to turn since its going to be my only program for a while, I'd like to use it to DJ and Produce.. but mainly produce.. so any help would be great.

I use ONLY Live 4.0, a simple sample editor (Audacity - it's free and awesome), and a bunch of VST plugins that I have collected over the course of my electronic music shindigs.

To me, I couldn't ask for more! Unless you want me to get all feature request on yo' ass!

I use it mainly to produce right now - all I have time for at the moment ..

I used to use Reason and Live rewired to Cubase SX2. Now, for the music I do (progressive dance and electronic) I have no need for Cubase at all.

I still rewire Reason to Live occasionally, but now I can use more VSTs that do what Reason does better - without Cubase - so its rarely (only as a sound module for certain sounds)

No matter which way you go its going to cost you. You are going to have to buy VST's (or AU / RTAS if your on mac) if you go the logic route as well ... even with all the great free ones out there

But yeah, having went both ways this is absolutely a better way to write music for me ... if you "get" the demo, just buy it

Definitely absolutely

You will get much better results than with Reason, and much quicker and more intuitive than SX.

The Midi instruments alone may not satisfy you if you're into synths but I've spent a fortune on Softsynths (like NI Komplete) only to start finding a whole multitude of free ones out there which are outstanding

out of those choices Live wins by a long way but you may want to add a few vstis - but free one will get you a long way

I do not use Cubase or Logic anymore, though Live does not have all the adavnced functions, I learned to work without them, am still more efficient with Live then the formers.
The rest depened of what will you record,, if you dont use real instruments acoustic or electronic you will need sounds, Reason is the most economical solution. Wave editor like Wavelab or Auditon would be another basic tool. There are also free alternatives which may work for you.

rikhyray wrote:I do not use Cubase or Logic anymore, though Live does not have all the adavnced functions, I learned to work without them, am still more efficient with Live then the formers.
The rest depened of what will you record,, if you dont use real instruments acoustic or electronic you will need sounds, Reason is the most economical solution. Wave editor like Wavelab or Auditon would be another basic tool. There are also free alternatives which may work for you.

ditto..

I'm converting all my sequenc projects to Live. I've found it to be a great sequencing tool. I mainly use Live 4/Reason/ and some Hardware. Life for me is great (though I'm still figuring out some things in Live...)

This is definetly my sequencer of choice.

best thing about Live is the ability to bang out a rough arrangement really quickly. you get all the loops together, save different combos that you like as new scenes, make a rough arrangement - easy.

another cool thing to mention - I started work last night on a remix I'm doing for a band where they started a basic one in Reason and I was doing what I normally do - recording the audio from reason to then colour and mangle in Live - then I remembered I could export midi files from reason and use them in live and use the sounds of my NI and other synths, and being the first time I've actually done that with Reason + L4 I was stoked to find out that you get a reasonfile.mid folder which you open in the live browser and it opens showing all the different sequencer tracks in the reason file - Job done! so I just drag the bass.mid clip onto a midi channel in live, give it whatever vsti you want and it's there - no pissing about - all the tracks in reason ready to go and give some decent sounds!

i pretty much stopped using Reason once i started exporting Reason mids to SX and replacing all the sounds, but some friends still use Reason. i love that idea - i might give Reason another go as a quick sketchpad now.

OMG why didnt i think about that !

i think im gonna be a busy mofo reworking my reason tracks with live

I used to use Logic, but have since switched over completely to Live. This was of course partly due to the Logic switch to Mac only (big mistake I feel, but another topic), but since version 4 I feel that Live has moved into a serious contention for main DAW application. I make music which is influenced by funk, soul, blues, electronic, jazz etc. using a mixture of real and vst instruments and I find that Live suits my needs perfectly. I would try it out for yourself to see if it suits you, but it, of course, has my recommendation as a main application.

Just my 2 euros.

forge wrote:another cool thing to mention - I started work last night on a remix I'm doing for a band where they started a basic one in Reason and I was doing what I normally do - recording the audio from reason to then colour and mangle in Live - then I remembered I could export midi files from reason and use them in live and use the sounds of my NI and other synths, and being the first time I've actually done that with Reason + L4 I was stoked to find out that you get a reasonfile.mid folder which you open in the live browser and it opens showing all the different sequencer tracks in the reason file - Job done! so I just drag the bass.mid clip onto a midi channel in live, give it whatever vsti you want and it's there - no pissing about - all the tracks in reason ready to go and give some decent sounds!

I found alot of midi drumfiles with google, some of those midifiles have the sound named like it does with reason instruments. you can mix various parts of midi files and record them as clips in Live. It comes in real handy with the impulse or that microtoniq thingy
Another easy way to alter the pattern is to change the SCALES or mess with anything really.

Maybe those mastering capability's in reason 3 will make it worthwhile, it's easy to throw a render from Live into a nnxt. If your still not satisfied you can do some more tweaking back in Live. Those apps should work together like one, switch to reason with alt-tab or something

Cheers

forge wrote:another cool thing to mention - I started work last night on a remix I'm doing for a band where they started a basic one in Reason and I was doing what I normally do - recording the audio from reason to then colour and mangle in Live - then I remembered I could export midi files from reason and use them in live and use the sounds of my NI and other synths, and being the first time I've actually done that with Reason + L4 I was stoked to find out that you get a reasonfile.mid folder which you open in the live browser and it opens showing all the different sequencer tracks in the reason file - Job done! so I just drag the bass.mid clip onto a midi channel in live, give it whatever vsti you want and it's there - no pissing about - all the tracks in reason ready to go and give some decent sounds!

that goes for every sequencer aslong as you save the mifi file as midi_01 or some shit!!!

hoffman2k wrote:
, switch to reason with alt-tab or something

Cheers

you can cant you?

mpc2323 wrote:

forge wrote:another cool thing to mention - I started work last night on a remix I'm doing for a band where they started a basic one in Reason and I was doing what I normally do - recording the audio from reason to then colour and mangle in Live - then I remembered I could export midi files from reason and use them in live and use the sounds of my NI and other synths, and being the first time I've actually done that with Reason + L4 I was stoked to find out that you get a reasonfile.mid folder which you open in the live browser and it opens showing all the different sequencer tracks in the reason file - Job done! so I just drag the bass.mid clip onto a midi channel in live, give it whatever vsti you want and it's there - no pissing about - all the tracks in reason ready to go and give some decent sounds!

that goes for every sequencer aslong as you save the mifi file as midi_01 or some shit!!!

yeah but try it in Live 4 for comparison - you'll soon Jetison Distractabase and FruitLogic