UnderGround Review: Ableton Live v.8 pt.2!

As promised, The UnderGround aNgLe is proud to present the second half of the Ableton Live review. Enjoy!

Instruments

Built-In
• Impulse is a more or less traditional drum sequencing instrument which allows for defining a kit of up to eight drum sounds. There are a number of options available for preprocessing these samples such as basic equalization, attack, decay, pitch shift, etc. Once the kit is defined these samples are arranged into groups of measures using a piano-roll interface.
• Simpler is a relatively easy to use sampling instrument. It is based on working with a single sample, applying preprocessing and then arranging it in a piano roll interface. In this case, rather than the notes representing different samples as in Impulse, the samples are pitch shifted to the selected note.

Add-On

There are a number of additional instruments which may be purchased separately or as part of the Ableton Suite. [4]
• Sampler is an enhanced sampler.
• Operator is an FM synthesizer.
• Electric is an electric piano instrument.
• Tension is a string physical modelling synthesizer.
• Collision is a mallet percussion physical modelling synthesizer.
• Analog simulates an analog synthesizer.
• Drum Machines is a collection of emulators for classic drum machines.
• Session Drums is a collection of sampled drum kits.
• Latin Percussion is a collection of sampled latin percussion hits and loops.
• Essential Instruments Collection is a large collection of acoustic and electric instrument samples.
• Orchestral Instrument Collection is a collection of four different
orchestral libraries, which can be purchased individually or as a bundle. They are as follows: Orchestral Strings, Orchestral Brass, Orchestral Woodwinds and Orchestral Percussion. The Orchestral Instrument Collection is not included in Live Suite.

Effects

Most of the effects are fairly familiar effects in the digital signal processing world which have been adapted to fit Live's interface. They are however fairly obviously tailored for the target audience of Live – electronic musicians and DJs – rather than, say, post processing a guitar rig.

The audio effects shipped with Live are:
• Auto Filter
• Auto Pan
• Beat Repeat
• Chorus
• Compressor
• Corpus
• Dynamic Tube
• EQ Eight
• EQ Three
• Erosion
• Filter Delay
• Flanger
• Frequency Shifter
• Gate
• Grain Delay
• Limiter
• Looper
• Multiband Dynamics
• Overdrive
• Phaser
• Ping Pong Delay
• Redux
• Resonators
• Reverb
• Saturator
• Simple Delay
• Spectrum
• Utility
• Vinyl Distortion
• Vocoder

Additionally, there are a handful of MIDI effects:
• Arpeggiator
• Chord
• Note Length
• Pitch
• Random
• Scale
• Velocity

Live is also able to use VST and (on the Macintosh version) Audio Unit (AU) plug-ins.
Working with audio clips
In addition to the instruments mentioned above, Live can work with samples. Live attempts to do beat analysis of the samples to find their meter, number of bars and the number of beats per minute. This makes it possible for Live to shift these samples to fit into loops that are tied into the piece's global tempo.
Additionally Live's Time Warp feature can be used to either correct or adjust beat positions in the sample. By setting warp markers to a specific point in the sample, arbitrary points in the sample can be pegged to positions in the measure. For instance a drum beat that fell 250 ms after the midpoint in measure may be adjusted so that it will be played back precisely at the midpoint.
Some artists and online stores, such as The Covert Operators and Puremagnetik, now make available sample packs that are pre-adjusted, with tempo information and warp markers added. The audio files are accompanied with an "analysis file" in Live's native format.

Envelopes

Almost all of the parameters in Live are controlled by envelopes which may be drawn either on clips and will be used in every performance of that clip or into the arrangement so that they vary at different points in the playback of a composition. The most obvious examples are volume or track panning, but these are also used in Live to set things like the root note of a resonator or the delay time or feedback amount for a delay effect. Essentially these map to most of what would be a knob on an effect in a traditional audio processing rack and in fact they may be mapped to knobs on MIDI controllers.

Live 8

On January 15, 2009, Ableton announced version 8 of Live. Live 8 includes a wealth of new features, including an integrated Max/MSP platform, internet collaboration features, and many new effects and workflow enhancements, as well as a refined piracy protection system. Also announced was a dedicated hardware controller developed in collaboration with Akai, called the APC40. Live 8 was released on April 1st of 2009. Max for Live is slated for release in 2009.