One can find many answers to this question on the net, even at Wikipedia, but it’s my hope to provide you with a fresh perspective. To answer this question completely would require a post of substantial length, but for the purposes of an introductory blog article such as this, I will attempt to keep the explanation succinct.

Ableton Live is an innovative software solution for the creation of music or audio material. It enables content producers to compose material with fresh and inspiring state-of-the-art methods which have not been present in “virtual studios” of the past. Initially designed as a software solution for performing electronic music “live”, this brave new program has been breaking new ground within the audio engineering community since 2001. As of this writing, the current evolution of this revolutionary application is now in version 8 and is available for Windows™ and Macintosh™ computers and is now considered to be amongst the very best comprehensive (all-in-one) audio production solutions.

Fig. 1 - One of many innovative features of Live - The Session View.

Fig. 2 - The Arrangement View.

In my personal view, one of the greatest features of Ableton Live is it’s inventive user interface. Most “digital audio workstations” (or “DAW” for short) have complex, multi-window work spaces which tend to intimidate beginners. While the ease of navigating the interface may not be immediately obvious, becoming familiar with its’ one-window, multi-view approach typically takes much less time than other DAWs on the market today.

Another ground breaking aspect to Live is the ability to “play” the individual elements (or “clips”) of a composition in an improvised fashion which allows users to explore a variety of ideas before committing to a linear arrangement of those individual elements. The “Session View” (See fig. 1 above) essentially allows the user to in a manner of speaking, “jam out” on individual audio and midi material. The results are streamed into a linear arrangement, also termed the “Arrangement View” (See fig. 2 above), which can be further edited and refined afterward.

Flexibility in generating new musical ideas is further enhanced by Live’s ability to change audio pitch and tempo independently. In the analog world of tape players and turntables if we change the speed of the playback, the pitch of the audio will change as well. Ableton Live’s “elastic” audio engine enables the user to work with audio without these constraints and in fact allows the “stretching” of audio pitch or time independently of each other. This is also a great boon to composers who wish to experiment with other tempos while keeping pitch the same. The converse is also true - one can change pitch without affecting tempo. Other traditional DAWs have similar “offline” features, but Ableton Live performs it’s elastic audio functions in real time which further empowers producers in experimenting with new musical ideas. Midi can also be manipulated in Live in the same way, however this ability is nothing new and is typical of traditional hardware and software midi sequencers of the past.

Another incredible feature of Ableton Live is the manner in which either audio or midi “clips” are triggered. In Live, “Clips” are essentially designated containers of audio or midi information which can be triggered to playback at any time or more importantly, at a synchronized musical time interval. This process in Live is known as “Global Quantization”. Continue reading What is Ableton Live?