When Ableton Live 7 came out i wrote a review about the software as soon as i got my hands on it. Ableton released Version 8 of Live on Wednesday last week during Musikmesse 2009. I was struggling and fighting with myself a few days if i should buy it or not. After balancing all the pros and cons i decided that i really need to get my hands on this brandnew toy. (Many of you may not know me, but i’m a fanatical user of Ableton Live since 2005. I use it since Version 5 came out and i still love this piece of software. It added so much stuff to my electronic music production workflow. Thanks Ableton!)

Foreword:

Please guys, if you read this and don’t know what i am talking about.
Open up the Manual and read what’s inside. It really helps a lot!
If you don’t like reading Manuals, there’s a small arrow on the bottom left inside Ableton Live. This one’s called the Info View. Press this arrow and you get a short description of everything you’re hovering with the mouse. This is perfect for beginners.

If you are a real beginner to Ableton Live go to the menubar: Help >> Help View >> Lessons.
On the right you’ll find a view quick, step-by-step tutorials which will help you get started with Live. (I really recommend these!)

Additions to the Clip View

Slice to New MIDI Track by Transients

I really was waiting for this feature to be implemented — i can tell you!
In Live 7 it was only possible to “Slice to New MIDI Track” using: Warp Markers or 1/2th, 1/4th, 1/8th notes, and so on. In Live 8 it’s possible to use Transients.

In this section i will cover the additions to the workflow which Ableton seems to be very proud of as well.

To get the best out of Live’s workflow Ableton added many shortcuts to the Audio- and MIDI-Editor. (On the bottom where you see a waveform overview of your selected sample.) In fact there is so much stuff new here it’s really hard telling with words, but i’ll try.

I think best would be to have a look at the waveform display.

Everything seems normal here. At the top you see the Bar Markers like 1., 1.1.3. and so on. Below this row you see the Loop Start point and below that one is the Clip’s Start Marker.
In Live 7 you were bound to the MIDI grid moving those three points around (Loop Start, Loop End and Start Marker) in Live 8 you can press ⌘ (or CTRL) while moving these Markers around to get rid of the MIDI grid and place them everywehere you want.

Let’s go down one row. There you’ll see all the Warp Markers you’ve created. There are already two Warp Markers. One is at the beginning of the Sample, one is at the End. In Live 8 you can squeeze the part which is played back just like you want. Just move the Markers around and the waveform will squeeze or enlarge. Playing back the Clip doesn’t change it’s length, only the content gets “warped”.

Click on the image to get a bigger view.

Now let’s add those mysterious Transient Markers. When you click inside the waveform view. This Editor gets the program’s focus and all shortcuts you’re pressing will change something inside this Editor.
For example you can create new Warp Markers or new Transient Markers.

At first it seemed quite annoying that i don’t get a slider where i can set a Threshold when something should be a Slicing Point or not. But instead of adding an (annoying) slider Ableton has choosen to do something better.
They give us total freedom where we would like to create new Transients and where not. This is, at first, a little more work for us to do, but i pays off in better results.

What’s the difference between Warp and Transient Markers?
Well actually a Transient Marker is a Warp Marker which isn’t “nailed down”. You know what nailing is from the older version. When you doubleclick in the Warp Marker row you create yellow Warp Markers. In Live 7 you could use these to Warp the Sample around. In Live 8 you don’t have to doubleclick and use these Warp Markers.
Instead you can create Transient Markers. They show up as a small grey arrow. When you right click the mouse button and then “Slice to New MIDI Track” you get the option to use those Transient Markers.

Great, but why are Transient Markers good for me?
Transient Markers can be created, moved around and so on without changing something related to playback.
Click inside the waveform view, press the left and right Buttons on your Keyboard and you step around in, let’s say, 1/16th notes. When you get near a Transient just hit ⇧+⌘+I (i won’t provide any additional Windows shortcuts from now on. If you don’t know them please refer to the Manual. Thanks.) Now this Marker sits “anywhere”, but not on the Transient where it should be.
With your Mouse pointer go above the Marker and press ⇧ while moving the Anchor and you can move it around to any place you’d like.

When done, right click on the Sample select “Slice to New MIDI Tracks”, use Transient and you’re ready to go.

MIDI Editor

As the Audio Editor gets better so does the MIDI Editor. Similar to stepping through the Sample by using your keyboard. You can use the same technique (and a few additional shortcuts) to input notes like in a Step Sequencer. Mark Mosher shows you how:

(Video by Mark Mosher found on Synthtopia. Thanks guys!)

Group Tracks

One thing that annoyed people in the past was that they couldn’t get their head around on how to group tracks together. In Ableton Live 8 this is a pretty easy task.

Just select all the tracks you want to group and press ⌘+G. After pressing that shortcut you get a new track with a small arrow you may already know from “Drum Rack”. It let’s you flip in all tracks, belonging to a group, in one track.

What else do you get? A small, striped, cliplike representation shows you if one clip is inside a scene or not and you get play Marks as well.

In my example you can see that it’s possible to have nested Groups. So you can have a Drum Rack inside a Group Track.
Sounds confusing? It isn’t when you get used to it.

(To ungroup Tracks: ⇧+⌘+G.)

New Warping Engine

This one’s really not worth mentioning. Old users, like me, get used to the new Warping features very fast.

What’s new is that, i think because of the new Groove Engine, it’s now possible to Quantize Audio Clips as they were MIDI Clips.

Beats Mode

Beats Mode now allows you to set something like “quality” which Live 8 uses to Warp the Sample. (Slider from 0 to 100)
In addition to that you can set “Transient Loop Mode” to Loop Forward, Loop Back-and-Forth and Off.

Loop Forward is the old Transient Warping Mode. You hear it when you import an audio file and set the Song tempo to the lowest value (20 BPM).
Looping Back-and-Forth uses the Transients to first play Forward until reaching the next Transient and then playing backwards to the previous one.
Off doesn’t do anything. It just trys to play the Sample at the desired speed.

Complex Pro Mode

In addition to the Complex Warping Mode we now have the Complex Pro Mode. Let’s see what the Manual has to say:

Complex Pro Mode uses a variation of the algorithm found in Complex mode, and may offer even better results (although with an increase in CPU usage.) Like Complex Mode, Complex Pro works especially well with polyphonic textures or whole songs.

It’s an even better Complex Mode, are you getting it? ;)

Additions to the Arrangement View

Fades

Fades were a feature Live struggled in many, in fact all ;), versions before. Live 8 has a new separate Automation Track in the Arrangement View.

It’s quite obvious what the three dots do. The first and the last adjusts Fade-Start- and Fade-End-Point. The Dot in the middle changes the slope of the fade.
By moving around these three dots you can create almost any fade you’d like. What’s disappointing here is that you can’t add more dots to the slope to make some more “advanced” or complex Fades. I hope that a future update will add this feature.

New Effects and Instruments

I won’t cover all of the new Instruments and Effects in this article. Some additions to this section are worth writing an extra article. But i will say a few short words here, just for completeness of this article.

• Operator is now part of the normal Ableton Live package. Plus it has been overhauled with new filter types, modulations and additive wavetable (!) synthesis with drawable (!!!) partials. #awesome
• Collision/Corpus are the new instruments and effects in Live covering mallet instruments.
• Latin Percussion is an additional Drum Library to Live 8 (Suite).
• Vocoder … we all have been waiting for that, don’t we?
• Looper … layering sounds … with a looping device … :kopfkratz: (I didn’t have any need for such a device, but i’m sure you can get some cool sounds out of it. I will try that in the future.)
• New Dynamic Effects:
  • Limiter is a Brickwall Limiter like the one you know from Waves L1, L2 or L3.
  • Multiband Dynamics: Multiband Expander or Compressor. Yay!
• Overdrive is just another distortion tool.
• Frequency Shifter: Like the name says it’s a Frequency Shifter plus some Ring Modulation.

Additions to the Program itself

Zoom Display

Inside Live’s Preferences under the “Look and Feel” Tab you can now set a “Zoom Display”.

This will zoom Live’s whole interface from 50% to 200%. I think this feature is for all those people having a small display (Netbooks and such) or people working at a college lecturing Ableton Live.

It’s kinda useless to me since i have a Full HD Display on my MacBook Pro. But i’m quite happy to know that if my screen size gets to small i can change Live’s size.

This picture is my screen at 50%. The screenshot itself is 468px by 150px it shows my example set. Nothing added, nothing deleted!

Previewing Tab

Previewing Tracks is much easier now. Under the File Browser Tab you (on the left hand side. The Folders saying “1”, “2” and “3”). get this Preview Tab:

This seems to be far better than in older versions of Live. You can scrub, turn on and off Previewing and you can activate “Raw Preview Mode” which will playback the Sample unwarped. (Unwarped means that tha Sample plays back at it’s original speed. Otherwise Live 8 tries to figure out the tempo of the Loop and adjust it to the Song Tempo.)

Groove patterns

I don’t get what’s so exciting about this “Groove Pattern” stuff. Reason 4 added this feature, now does Live 8. In my opinion this is something the Hip Hop guys need.
But why do i need Groove Patterns? Is it to get some “groove” in my music? If that is really the truth then i probably should start thinking about doing something else.

But some people might find it useful…so go ahead and use it.

Conclusion

Now i want to make a conclusion to the all new Ableton Live 8. The new version feels very snappy. Which means that the interface seems pretty “fast”. In older versions you always had to wait a little until something has happened. Live 8 seems to react much faster to user input.

No Sidechain for AU Plugins. Even Ableton tells that they have added a hundred new implementations for all the third-party Plugins the Sidechain for AU Plugins still doesn’t work. (Tested with Sonalksis’ Mix Essentials)

Vocoder is a killer! We have been waiting for that thing sooo long. It seems to fit perfectly into Ableton’s workflow. It’s sound is OK. (Which means it does what it has to: vocoding!)

For me the best newly added feature is the “Slice to New MIDI Tracks by Transients” feature. When Live 7 came out i was complaining it wasn’t possible to Slice via Transients. There’s this little workaround, you can use Warp Markers instead…but who want’s to work like this?

At first sight Live 8 seemed to be a “not so much stuff added” Update but underneath there has changed a lot. The new Plugins, Instruments and the workflow additions really pay off the price for the Update (in my case 175€ for Ableton Live 8 Suite Download Education Version).

There’s just one that really disappoints me. I would have bought Live 8 much faster, without even less thinking, when Max for Live would already be implemented in the program. But in fact it isn’t.
I can live without Max for Live another 6 months, but after that i want to get my hands on it! Green?

On Ableton’s website you can download a full functioning demo of Live 8. It’s only limitations are that you can’t save your Live Set. Everything else is working.
If you’re still not sure if you want to buy. Please take a look at the videos available at the Ableton website.

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