Looking for Ableton, need some informations

[MoonCrystal]

Hi everyone,

First of all sorry for my english,

I play synth for my personal hobby. I bought a Launchkey mk2 49 and I'm looking at Ableton Live. I consider Ableton Live Standard, but I need some information. For now I didn't have a lot of things (vst, smaple etc...) In this case and because I can't for now buy a software + contents, I need a software with some library elements. I have seen the chart comparison but it doesn't tell me exactly how big is the library / presets in the standard edition. I don't play only electro music so I need differents things (like strings, etc...).

Could someone, tells me about the library in Ableton Live Standard ?

Thank you very much and again, sorry for my english.

[Stromkraft]

Could someone, tells me about the library in Ableton Live Standard ?

Live Suite owner here, since 4.5 years. I can only speak for myself, but I don't think any of the libraries is a reason to get Live. In Standard "Drum Essentials" (Live 10), "Guitars and Bass", "Grand Piano", "Vinyl Classics", "Chop and Swing" (Live 10), "Skitter and Step" (Live 10) and "Loopmasters Mixtape" do not constitute a wide library, even though you can of course make music with these. But they will probably not be sufficient for coming instrument needs. On the other hand it's a good thing to limit oneself.

You do get whole lot more in Live Suite, even more soon in 10, but you really got to try out the sounds yourself. I suggest you focus on one instrument at most per day and play around with only this and its presets and explore the possibilities making your own (that could be two days(sessions too). Start with the ones also in Standard.

Personally, I don't give much for the library of Suite. I did initially find it somewhat inspiring. This faded.

Depending on the music you make, it may make a lot of sense to get something like Native Instruments' Komplete on the second hand market, no matter what version of Live you get.

Remember, this is only my view on the library. Doesn't mean it can't be great for you or anyone else. It's all what you do with it.

[MoonCrystal]

Thank you. I can't afford suite, that's why I'm looking for standard. Is here a vst with "classic instruments" like string, bass, lead, brass, pad etc...like vst we can find in every Daw to make different style and not only electro ?

[Stromkraft]

Thank you. I can't afford suite, that's why I'm looking for standard. Is here a vst with "classic instruments" like string, bass, lead, brass, pad etc...like vst we can find in every Daw to make different style and not only electro ?

Well, there are quite a few free sample libraries out there, that either work with a free samplers like Sforzando or Kontakt Player or even Simpler in Live, but building a library takes time, I think. How playable these libraries and instruments are I cannot say as I'm not interested in "classic instruments" so much. Electric Piano and drums possibly.

What about the second hand market?

[MoonCrystal]

What do you mean by "second hand market" (sorry my english is...).

It seems that Ableton is made first for electro music and "live". I saw some videos about it and it's a lot of electro or something like this. May be I'm wrong but it's that I saw on Youtube.

I know that make a library takes time if we want to make all of our sounds, but I need something that makes be able to make my sound (with plugins) but also something with some stock sounds/vst/presets. I can't buy everything now, and I don't want to have a "super mega software" without the capabilities to use it because I didn't buy vst / pack etc...

I'm not a pro, just a hobbyist, who play synth "without computer" and want to play with a Daw software to have more stuffs. Lite is a bit limited regarding tracks and some things, that's why I consider Standard version. But may be Ableton is not what I'm looking for I don't know, that's why I ask a lot of questions.

[Stromkraft]

What do you mean by "second hand market" (sorry my english is...).

A "Second hand market" or "secondary market" is in this case a place where you can find sellers that want to resell their license to you, instructing the software company to transfer the license to you.

You should really only do this on web sites like ebay, where you can make use of Ebay Support and maybe only pay via Paypal so that Paypal Buyers Protection is available as well. It's possible this doesn't apply to all software sales on the secondary markets, but I've successfully bought a license, got reason to raise a complaint about the license and got all my money back (Naturally I never used the license).

It seems that Ableton is made first for electro music and "live". I saw some videos about it and it's a lot of electro or something like this. May be I'm wrong but it's that I saw on Youtube.

I'm not sure what this entails for you, but it's certainly possible to make a wide range of music genres with Live.

But, except for the sampled instruments, many of the instruments in Live Suite lean on the "electronic" side of things, emulating electronic instruments to some extent. Though I'd say that Tension and Collision also have clear acoustic qualities in their type of sound. I think that's very cool, but I don't use these even if I do have them with my Suite license.

It does sound to me, that maybe you want to recreate orchestral instruments, if not classical, but maybe traditional?

[Richie Witch]

You haven't mentioned what your budget is, but have you looked at UVI's Orchestral Suite? It's one of the best-sounding classic instrument collections I've tried, and it's very affordable compared to most orchestral libraries.

If you were to combine Live Standard and Orchestral Suite, you'd have a pretty complete package for what you're looking for. Orchestral Suite uses UVI's free UVI Workstation, and it's pretty handy for a lot of other libraries too. It won't match Kontakt for the vast span of libraries, but UVI has its own particular strengths.

[Frawnz]

The "full" Kontakt instrument from Native Instruments is on sale for $199 for the next 2 or 3 days. I has a LOT of great instrumental sounds including excellent examples of orchestral, jazz, percussion, etc. The instruments are very similar to the instruments in the Komplete packages, but with more modest user interfaces and a little harder to use. This is not the Elements package, but just the full version of Kontakt. You get a lot with it, it's the best $199 you could spend right now.

For orchestral, the Cubase symphonic orchestra is just amazing for $99! And Cubase is having a $300 sale for the VST3 instrument package, which IMHO is better than NI's Komplete Ultimate suite, unless maybe you are into heavy duty rock & roll with very heavy duty percussion. The VST3 package includes the full symphonic orchestra package. Works fine with Ableton.

[Stromkraft]

the VST3 instrument package

What are you actually referring to here??

[login]

In your position if you can deal with Live Lite limitations (I suppose you have Lite since you bought a keyboard that comes with it) and just need more sounds you could start with Komplete select.

Komplete select gets you 3 synths (Massive, prism and Monark) plus electric piano, organs and some drums. That might be enough to start. Eevery summer Native instruments has a Sale on Komplete upgrades/upates and you could go for Komplete standard or ultimate and get much much more content.

Komplete select goes for 200 USD, Komplete Standard upgreade will be 200 USD (on sale) and Ultimate upgrade goes for 500 (on sale). You will get a broader and bigger library.