UnderGround Review: Ableton Live v. 8

Ableton Live is a professional loop-based software music sequencer for Mac OS and Windows by Ableton. The latest major release of Live, Version 8, was released in April 2009. Unlike other software sequencers, Live is designed around the notion of being as much an instrument for live performances as a tool for composing and arranging. It is also often used for precision mixing of tracks by DJs. The first version of the highly popular beat making program was released in 2001 as a commercial piece of software.

Features

Much of Live's unique interface comes from being designed for use in live performance as well as for production. As such the interface is more compact than most sequencers and clearly designed for use on a single screen. There are few pop up messages or dialogs. Portions of the interface are hidden and shown based on arrows which may be clicked to show or hide a certain segment (e.g. to hide the instrument/effect list or to show or hide the help box).

Views

Ableton Live (8) is composed of two "views" – the arrangement view and the session view. The session view is primarily used to organize and trigger sets of sounds called clips. These clips may be arranged into scenes which may be triggered as a unit. For instance a drum, bass and guitar track might comprise a single scene. When moving on to another portion of the composition – a new scene – some or all of those parts might differ and could be triggered in parallel. In Live 6, there is also the addition of "racks" which allow the user to easily group instruments and effects.

The other view is the arrangement view, which is used for recording tracks from the session view and further manipulating their arrangement and effects. This view is fairly similar to a traditional software sequencer interface.
Clips may either be an audio sample or MIDI (triggering one of Live's built in instruments, third party VSTs instruments or external hardware). Live comes by default with two instruments – Impulse and Simpler.

Check out The UnderGround aNgle next week for part 2 of the Ableton Live Review, when we take a look at Instruments, Effects, Samples and special v.8 features!