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Edit Review — Ableton Live 5

Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Franklin McMahon

New features help create natural-sounding tracks for the video producer and live DJ alike.

I have used every version of Ableton's Live since 1.0, and it rocks. As an expressive artist's tool, it can't be beat for letting producers create great music out of a few basic clips and some effects. However, Live 5 may be a little different from other audio programs you may have used. Though it is a strong tool for freeform performance, it excels as a loop construction toolbox (like Sony's Acid Pro or Apple's GarageBand). If you need audio for your video productions and don't have the budget for a whole band, Live 5 will provide you with easy methods to create songs quickly.

Here is a typical workflow: you drag various looped clips over to a timeline and the program puts them all in sync; you layer different sounds, strings, guitar, drums, etc.; and it all meshes together like it was meant to be. But there is another way to work with Live as well. Think of all your loops not as running left to right in a timeline, but running up and down, top to bottom, stacked in groups. Imagine slicing these groups horizontally into scenes. You can toggle the scenes on and off in realtime, as you record. This way, you start to really develop what many loop programs lack, and that's actual song construction.

Of course, you can always work in the normal timeline way, but then you'd be missing out on a lot of the power — not to mention fun — of what Live is all about. The program is used live by DJs to create songs in realtime, but more and more it's being used by video professionals who want spontaneous scores that have a human element to them.

In addition to this unique approach to scoring, you can drag and drop audio effects onto different tracks. Live offers echoes, compressors, gate, phasers, distortion, and many more amazing digital effects. Did I mention that any of these tracks can be MIDI as well? You can easily mix MIDI and sampled files in the same song. In fact, you can plug in VST virtual instruments for millions of combinations.

Want to add a little swing and make the song sound more natural? Just dive into any sample and adjust the warp markers. These markers typically are set to the beats; however, if you drag them off slightly you'll get a more natural, human sound. Want to preview new audio loops? You can do it while your current song is playing. The software is smart enough to play it right in sync with your current production so you can hear what it will actually sound like before you add it. Another cool feature is that any loop you add effects to, alter, move warp markers on, etc., can be saved as a new loop (called a Live Clip). Just drag it over to the folder list on the left. All your settings and adjustments are saved with it.

What is new and improved in the just-released version 5? Lots. One of the coolest new features is Clip Freeze. Often you'll add effects, tweaks, and other things to a track; now you can freeze it and create a sample of the track. This not only allows you to free up the CPU from constantly running all these effects, but you can also bring the project to another computer running Live 5 — with all the effects intact.

Live 5 now brings in MP3 files and tempo-matches them to the current project. Live 5 is a hot program for doing mash-ups, megamixes of different, unrelated songs, and now it's easier than ever to keep everything rockin' together.

Ableton Live has always had a great file browser built into the interface (it's always there; you don't have to open a requestor). Now it's got a built-in search field, making it very easy to find the clips you're looking for. One unique new browser option is that effect presets are listed in the browser. Take, for example, a reverb effect. You can drag it over to apply it to a clip as always. But now you can click the arrow next to the reverb effect, and out pop all the presets. So you can drag over the “basement” reverb preset you created and apply it just like a filter.

Live 5 comes with a new library of musical sounds. You get actual loops to experiment with and use, and also a large library of Live Clips, which are audio clips with presets and effects already assigned to them.

The program comes packed with filters and effects, including some new ones such as Beat Repeat, which allows deconstructing and then reconstructing a beat into thousands of variations. Phaser and Flanger now offer classic '70s guitar riffs for your productions. Saturator wipes the digital cleanliness off your track with some warm, punchy distortion. Arpeggiator allows you to shift grooves and velocities off a bit for the realistic feel of an actual person playing an instrument. Most great audio programs for scoring contain a variation of this tool, and it's a very welcome addition to Live 5.

Live 5 has a lot going for it. I especially like the way the Help system is laid out: as a series of tutorials that you can toggle on or off and follow from inside the program. The text and screenshots are within the program, making the learning process quick.

As a matter of fact, the learning curve on the program is pretty flat. There are many deep features, that's for sure, but you could spend about 10 minutes checking out the tutorials and you would have all the knowledge needed to score songs and create compositions on the fly, including adding your own recorded voice. Live 5 makes it easy to arm any track for recording, and once the segment is recorded (in realtime as your project is playing), it syncs it up and rolls it right into the song.

Another great feature is the interface. So many programs are becoming a maze of requestor boxes and pulldown menus, and Live 5's nonstandard layout does put a lot of information right in front of you. There is a pulldown menu, but chances are you won't use it much. Live's interface keeps everything on one screen, which scales to any size monitor. Also, a handy description window gives a paragraph or two about whatever you happen to be mousing over.

My only suggestion for running Live is to make sure you have a fairly robust system and an audio card with low latency. Latency is the delay time (in milliseconds) from when you hit or click something on the interface to when you hear a sound produced. Audio creation programs like this need to be spontaneous. Thankfully, most recent audio cards are up to the task. If you want to get heavy with effects and multiple tracks and score in realtime, a speedy computer is handy. However, I have also been running Live on an older laptop, and it keeps up as long as I don't get too crazy.

Live 5 is a different kind of audio program; it's designed to allow media artists to be expressive and experimental. If you are looking for an audio editing program or a loop program that does most of the work for you, it will certainly do the job. But if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and start clicking and experimenting in realtime, no other audio program out there can bring out the hidden musician in you like Ableton's awesome Live 5.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Ableton

Website: www.ableton.com

Product: Live 5

Assets: New features like Clip Freeze and MP3 file tempo-matching, new sound library, easy-to-learn interface with built-in tutorials.

Caveats: Application requires robust system and low-latency audio card.

Demographic: Music creators from video producers to live artists and DJs.
Price: $499

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