Ableton Forum

Im sitting here to write to ableton and all its users after having a great session with looper and marveling at its abilities to break new ground in live sound like never before…. But the reason for this post is about just how much of a missed opportunity looper is. Ableton has made real the dreams of every studio musician who wanted to play live real, it is the only real option to loop and play the instrument of your choice and effects live. IT IS a looping program and I just don’t understand why looper hasn’t been developed in so many years. Being the next logical evolution to the original concept as in, instantly created loops which turn the ‘just hit play from on the cd’ to an interactive ‘yes I made that loop in front of you’ situation which brings the performer closer to their audience.

So when I have an amazing session with looper (when it doesn’t do something weird) I am the only one who will ever hear it because all the things I layered up can’t be mixed for studio purposes because for some reason ableton decided to pancake them all together with only the ability to undo the last thing you did.

being able’to’ get to each layer individually is not only the difference between a useable take for a finished recording, it is the only way to turn traditional repetitive loop/build/and build… stop and begin again looping that we have all seen, which for me gets tiring quickly as there are no surprise changes allowed. This is changing with hardware based loopers now which I really struggle to understand why software like ableton is so far behind the curve in this.

I feel like ableton has forgotten its roots in why it created the tool, and why we love its premise, to not realise what looper is.. which is the natural evolution of what it created, to got from pre recorded loop triggering to ‘what I just recorded’ triggering while still having the ability to use pre recorded along side it all.

Ableton could be the looper to end them all if it saw the vision I have for it and transcend the ‘band’ verses Dj conversation for ever. I might be stating the obvious here but a good band has dynamics and the organic ability to ‘breathe’ in tempo and volume that only the most talented and fanatical sound programer can come close too. To bring the texture of electronic loop creation and the ‘breathing’ of a live band to an audience would bring a true revolution to music… of which (if i were the creator of ableton) would be the most fore filling contribution I could ever hope to provide humanity…

Anyway, I’ve gone on way to long, I just had this clear picture of what I want to share with people and I see how ableton is right on the edge of being the outline for that picture and if it could see it as clearly as I do then they would instantly stop all these feature updates that just take people into the tech ‘button clicking whoa doesn’t this sound great’ world and into the ‘I’m so into this music all my cares can wait until I return’ world of music….. because the more buttons your click and the more windows you scroll through, the less you are being the organic being who makes the musical moments that turn back ground music into a room full of people of jaws dropped, lost for words, minds wiped clean, heart filling them with all the emotions that they had been missing in their life for far too long moment that all musicians dream of providing…

this way to long post is just the general idea, I have more specific details on how this could be achieved if anyone cares

So ableton replied to this post and asked me how I saw this idea would work, this is what I sent them.

I sure do have a ton of ideas, but I will just focus on the big one or 2.

the easiest update to looper that will expand its ability hugely is being able to set up multiple loopers (in the bottom effects window where it is now) with an assignable midi left and right button to move to each one. Then all midi assignments transfer to the one move to eg. record only activates the selected looper and I would shift to the next looper to hit the same button to record for that one. Then with the same set of midi keys assigned people are already using (plus 2 more for left and right movement) I could control as many of them as I want.

This also would hopefully allow each loop to be its own length which opens up song creation ability eg. for the second loop to be twice as long as the first or 1/3 as long to allow unusual repetition of them.

For this to work, a view to see them all compactly would be needed(and only expand the ‘live’ one). All the compact view needs is the progress length bar (perhaps in the form of a circle like in clip view) and volume indication meter. Then you could have at least 5 loopers in view in a row with the current active one that auto expands with all options you are about to use.

Stage one would be to make the features you already have work properly. I still can’t get it to start the song with a loop and have the pre recorded ones sync with it. It also has some buffer issues where it just mangles the sound in a variety of unusable ways. Its just FAR to easy for looper to drift out of time or something go wrong.

The half/double speed octave option is awesome but a loop that sounds in time to begin with, when pitched down an octave has now turned an imperceptible 6ms of bad playing into a 12ms of unusable sound, it needs auto quantising for this awesome feature to be useful live. Also when dragging an ‘effected’ looper sample it only put in the original created one, a bit of a bummer.

Just padding the case
Other users have suggested just integrating the loopers features into the existing tracks which would have advantages but I think one of your guys wrote there are some limitations that make this difficult to implement. If it is possible it would allow midi keys already needed to navigate live, useable for looper. It makes sense to as its the same thing with just live loops so, I guess you would have done it this way if it was possible.

Sooperlooper has already done most of what I am talking about, it just doesn’t sync like Abletons looper because its not ‘inside’ ableton.

Ableton focuses on dj’s because its who uses it the most I guess but that is changing and thats why you created looper and its certainly what made me buy Ableton but, more than 2 years later nothing has been done to make it a true hardware looper replacement. No real musos I know use software based ones because they just take to much of your attention away from your performance while hardware ones are simple and reliable. They can create loops, turn them off and on, record over the first one to move the song in another direction etc. So even though a software looper has WAY more functionality, they stick to what operates more like an instrument than a computer. To be honest, If I had known that it was going to take so long for looper to be developed I would have gone hardware based myself.

I did industrial design at uni because I always thought the things I bought could have been designed so much better, for all of my criticism of Ableton I do think it is in a league of its own, its layout is intuitive, play back is 100% reliable which makes me confident to use it at gigs and I recommend it highly to others. It is a revolutionary step from a DAW to being a musical instrument, the next logical step is to turn its pre recorded abilities into live recorded ones surely? Looper is a great first step to me as I use nearly every feature you put in it….. at least until I realised that they didn’t produce reliable and reproducible results, even still I am very happy that you guys created live and look forward to seeing what you do next.

Anyway, thanks for asking me to have some input. I would be happy to expand these concepts with images to make them clearer if you guys are interested in a picture of how this would all work…




cheers

Jayme Capurso
[email protected]



On 17 Sep 2014, at 12:11 am, Ableton Support <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello Jayme,

Thank you for your passionate email and your feedback, we are glad to hear that you enjoy using Live. This is Frank helping you today.

The option to independently mix different layers created in Looper is indeed not possible. We will put your idea on our internal wishlist which is hosted by our developers, but can't tell you whether or not it might be implemented one day as this decision is taken by our developers.

However, it would be interesting to hear your ideas regarding the solution of this problem, so feel free to write us your suggestion. It's always important for us to receive feedback, ideas and even possible solution ideas from users as they can help us to develop Live as well as Push.

Best regards,

Frank
Ableton Support

When referring to this case, please use the case number: (Case
ableton1204991) from the subject line.
____________________________________________________________________

Find help online, browse our knowledge base or ask other Live users:
http://www.ableton.com/support
____________________________________________________________________

Frank Rudert
Ableton AG
Schoenhauser Allee 6-7
10119 Berlin, Germany

Vorstand: Gerhard Behles, Jan Bohl
Aufsichtsrat: Uwe Struck (Vorsitzender)
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg HRB 72838
Umsatzsteueridentifikationsnummer: DE204128565

Ableton does not authorize any publication of the content of this e-mail without the permission of the author.


-----Original Message-----
From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 16:36:43 -0000
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: [web] I just posted this and thought, as its addressing ableton as ...

Support Category: Something else.

The customer provided this problem description:

I just posted this and thought, as its addressing ableton as the creators its only right I send it directly also.

Im sitting here to write to ableton and all its users after having a great session with looper and marveling at its abilities to break new ground in live sound like never before…. But the reason for this post is about just how much of a missed opportunity looper is. Ableton has made real the dreams of every studio musician who wanted to play live real, it is the only real option to loop and play the instrument of your choice and effects live. IT IS a looping program and I just don’t understand why looper hasn’t been developed in so many years. Being the next logical evolution to the original concept as in, instantly created loops which turn the ‘just hit play from on the cd’ to an interactive ‘yes I made that loop in front of you’ situation which brings the performer closer to their audience.

So when I have an amazing session with looper (when it doesn’t do something weird) I am the only one who will ever hear it because all the things I layered up can’t be mixed for studio purposes because for some reason ableton decided to pancake them all together with only the ability to undo the last thing you did.

being able’to’ get to each layer individually is not only the difference between a useable take for a finished recording, it is the only way to turn traditional repetitive loop/build/and build… stop and begin again looping that we have all seen, which for me gets tiring quickly as there are no surprise changes allowed. This is changing with hardware based loopers now which I really struggle to understand why software like ableton is so far behind the curve in this.

I feel like ableton has forgotten its roots in why it created the tool, and why we love its premise, to not realise what looper is.. which is the natural evolution of what it created, to got from pre recorded loop triggering to ‘what I just recorded’ triggering while still having the ability to use pre recorded along side it all.

Ableton could be the looper to end them all if it saw the vision I have for it and transcend the ‘band’ verses Dj conversation for ever. I might be stating the obvious here but a good band has dynamics and the organic ability to ‘breathe’ in tempo and volume that only the most talented and fanatical sound programer can come close too. To bring the texture of electronic loop creation and the ‘breathing’ of a live band to an audience would bring a true revolution to music… of which (if i were the creator of ableton) would be the most fore filling contribution I could ever hope to provide humanity…

Anyway, I’ve gone on way to long, I just had this clear picture of what I want to share with people and I see how ableton is right on the edge of being the outline for that picture and if it could see it as clearly as I do then they would instantly stop all these feature updates that just take people into the tech ‘button clicking whoa doesn’t this sound great’ world and into the ‘I’m so into this music all my cares can wait until I return’ world of music….. because the more buttons your click and the more windows you scroll through, the less you are being the organic being who makes the musical moments that turn back ground music into a room full of people of jaws dropped, lost for words, minds wiped clean, heart filling them with all the emotions that they had been missing in their life for far too long moment that all musicians dream of providing…

this way to long post is just the general idea, I have more specific details on how this could be achieved if anyone cares

Web Request ID: 123120