Any Ableton users?

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Prime Mover
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Joined: Tue Jul 03, 2007 1:19 am
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Any Ableton users?

Post by Prime Mover »

I commonly hear quite a few people around here refer to Ableton as the "other" DAW they use, since it focuses on a distinctly different feature set than DP. Since I'm interested in doing more live programming, I've been giving Live a spin these past few weeks, but I'm kind of running into brick walls everywhere, and I'm kind of disappointed. DP will always be my studio DAW, but I'm considering various options for live "on the fly" live performance, which Ableton seems to be the big one out there.

Coming from a progrock background, I just can't help but throw in a few extra beats here and there, and it completely breaks Live's session view. Bummer, I was really looking forward to being able to switch up drum beats and the arrangement on the fly, but if you have a phrase that adds two dotted eighths at the end, you're looking at a nightmare. I tried just creating a single bar of, whatever, 21/8, or whatever it took, but then the entire quantization system breaks apart! Now I'm back in arrangement mode, which offers little over DP, except some interesting scripting possibilities.

Secondly, Live's editing features are extremely limited, transposition? Nope. Destructive humanization? Notta. I decided to transpose the song I was working on due to vocal constraints, but there was no way to "Select All, Transpose", I had to throw in a transposition plugin... now I'm working between having to think about it in two keys moving forward! I wanted to randomize velocities for a filtered bass line and my only option is a randomization plugin, which I have to turn on and off for different sections, very frustrating!

I'm just shocked that a program 9 iterations in doesn't have such extremely basic operations. Am I missing some major things?
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Michael Canavan
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Re: Any Ableton users?

Post by Michael Canavan »

I'm working outside, so I can't answer these
all right now, but a few.. Transpose, I'm assuming you're talking audio? select all and us the transpose knob in the submenu. Session View launch quantization is selectable all the way down to 32nd notes, if you're doing something like half measures a whole bar quantization won't work. Transposing MIDI in the piano roll can be done with the arrow keys like you can move notes forward etc in DP.
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