Ableton Live 6

It takes just a few minutes of being in the company of Ableton’s insanely powerful Live 6 music creation and performance software for Mac and Windows to realize it offers crazy potential to tweak the living daylights out of audio you record and the audio and MIDI samples and effects Ableton bundles. Conversely, you’ll quickly realize that unless you’re really passionate about composing, producing, or performing music, and I mean really passionate, Live 6 probably isn’t your bag for a couple of reasons.

The first and most significant reason is that Live 6 carries stiff $499 download and $599 box prices, although you will definitely get your money’s worth. This alone should filter out the passers by from those truly dedicated to their musical craft. Second, if you haven’t used a sequencer or DAW-like app previously, Live 6 has a significant learning curve to overcome. Thanks to some excellent organizational work, including Ableton packing Live 6’s various elements into one logical (albeit crammed) window, and new support for multiple and dualcore CPUs, however, stably stumbling your way through Live 6 is possible. To effectively use the app, though, means investing considerable time learning and mastering Live 6’s many intricacies. I spent days, for example, just obsessively creating and tweaking various loops with Live’s virtual knobs and sliders.

Creating and manipulating loops and others compositions takes place in Live Sets, which reside in Live Projects, essentially a folder system that also houses demo Sets. Clips are chunks of audio you can use to build your music. You can create and alter your own Clips; as little as a cheap microphone or Input cable can get you started; to help shape songs, remixes, scores, etc. Altering Clips on the fly constitutes much of Live 6’s considerable charm and is a primary reason why DJs and musicians who are seeking to enhance their live performances are attracted to Live 6. You can work with Clips in either Arrangement or Session views, which you can easily toggle via the TAB key. As you might expect, the Session view is where you’ll twist and morph Clips, while the Arrangement view displays your Clips in what resembles a musical timeline.

Ableton goes to great lengths to detail these and seemingly every other facet, function, and capability of Live 6 via stellar manuals, lessons and tutorials, and instructional videos on its Web site featuring pro musicians, DJs, and Ableton’s own staff. Further, several books, clinics, and special issues of computer Music magazine have been devoted to Live 6. The program is that massive. After nearly two months of consistent use working on my own Clips; created using everything from riffs I recorded with a Fender Strat to handclaps to whistles; I managed to piece together several compositions, but I really had only begun to scratch the surface of Live 6’s abilities.

For example, I had yet to use the program’s loop-based tools in a performance setting, something you can see DJs and bands do in Ableton’s instructional videos. Ableton strongly emphasizes Live 6’s performance capabilities, and when you see how you can use the app as a unique and highly adaptable instrument that you can also acclimate to a studio setting, you’ll understand why.

Throughout my testing I continually found myself grabbing samples from the program’s new Essential Instrument Collection, which contains several gigabytes of brass, string, percussion, and other instruments from SONiVOX. Using these, I was able to create scores to accompany Live’s new support for QuickTime video. Just drag a QuickTime clip into Live’s windows, and you’re scoring on the fly. Also new in this version are instrument and effect Packs (customized collections of instruments, effects, plugins, and tweaking tools), EQ Eight (doubling the number of independent filter bands), Dynamic Tube (an excellent vacuum tube effect), Warping (a handy tempo-synching tool), and Deep Freeze (a CPU-resources saver).

Sufficiently detailing even Live 6’s most basic tools would take many pages. Suffice it to say, if you’re serious at all about working with music, you’re probably already aware of Live’s excellent reputation among musicians, producers, composers, and others within the music industry. If you have the financial means and music fuels you, it’s hard to imagine you being disappointed with Live.