Ableton Live is my main daw. I use it every day, generally for hours, and for a wide variety of purposes.
The most depressing thing about ableton is made obvious in two seconds of messing with that tutorial. A complete disregard for music in the sense of pushing boundaries of time, or doing things that are not tied to any sort of grid, and the sense of music as an emotive form.
So many aspects of music are very annoying or borderline impossible to do in ableton. Yet in all these years, and with so many installations, they just never addressed those issues. Instead they vaguely pretend as if music that would require features they don't have is radically experimental. Which might become true if so many people learn music only through using their software.
Seriously, Ableton. Stop pretending making music is clicking on and off in little boxes. It's embarrassing.
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Edited to take out the "art" part and put in a couple of more specific criticisms.
Hate to be a pedant... but I'm not sure any one person gets to define what "music in the art sense" even is.
Yes, Ableton is rigid. Yes, Ableton favors certain musical styles over others. Yes, Ableton, here and in their design of Live, may just be giving lip service to anything beyond rigid song structure, tempo and dynamic changes, etc. Yes, Ableton loves their little boxes.
But, I find it hard to believe that Ableton has a "complete disregard for music in the art sense." If "art" inherently means "unquantifiability" or pure "aesthetics", then sure, session view Live might not be your best bet. Regardless, arrangement view is basically the same as Pro Tools as far as I can tell/remember from what I've used of Pro Tools.
I think either my phrasing was terrible (likely) or people aren't seriously considering what I am saying.
Try just looping a sample that is of arbitrary length, not some multiple of beats. This is something that we could do fairly easily since the 1980s, and with moderate effort before that. Ableton made this in to an unusual technique.
The entire arrangement view only superficially resembles protools, the automation, the time stretching, everything really, is completely different.
I don't understand, it's easy to get arbitrary length loops, that's the reason there is a "fixed length" button on the Push 2 which you can enable if you want.
The arrangement view is not meant to be Protools.
Ableton is actually quite nice for doing experimental and unusual music, it just is built around doing it LIVE. If you want to paint outside the lines, you can with it. "clicking boxes on and off" is simply a way of perceiving layering.
You can disable quantizing and "warp" for clips (or just some clips if you like).
I sometimes use Ableton for noise shows, you can definitely get weird and off the grid with it. Record in 2 loops, not quantized so their lengths don't match exactly, duplicate each loop a few times. Disable warp on a few copies, enable repitching on a few others. Then when you twist the tempo knob some loops rise in pitch while getting faster, some just get faster but keep constant pitch, and some stay the same length and timbre. Record that to another track, then duplicate THAT and repeat, etc.
This takes like a second. Drag a sample into an audio track (in arrangement view), copy it, paste it again where the last sample ended, repeat until it goes on as long as you need. Do you not know how to use Ableton at all?
It breaks. But now you're just adding arbitrary conditions. If you want it to loop without breaking when the tempo changes, load it into Simpler, turn off warping, and create loop points around all of the audio that you want. And then create a single MIDI note holding it on for as long as you need. Or if you need something really unusual, load a looper plugin into Ableton--there are tons. You're acting as if problems that only require a few minutes of cursory thought are impossible to solve.
I recommed Steve Reich - Music for 18 musicians :-)
Composing in the DAW is the best way to make someone else's music. Create your own creative process, then you are on the way to your own sound.
You can turn off auto-warp on audio tracks by default globally, and you can disable warp on a per clip basis as you go.
In your specific case... disable warping on your ambient track, line it up against your warped/synced "another sort of loop" in arrangement view, and then change the master tempo of the track until you find out what you want in terms of different tempos. (This is off the top of my head, and without the program in front of me. Apologies if it's vague.)
Live can definitely function as a "dumb" multitrack recorder that lets you do those things -- but, by default it has all the tempo/beat/quantize options turned on.
I saw your edited post above... I think people are reacting negatively to your criticisms because they're a bit harsh, and, I personally think it's shooting the messenger (Live). You can do the things you want to do in Live... but by default out of the box, it's not what's it designed for. Live lowers the barrier entry to making sound... the people/users cranking out 4-4 120bpm tracks likely wouldn't be making anything had there not been Live. If you don't want to call that sound art or music, that's on you. To many people, that's still music, and music they might not have created otherwise.
EDIT: Just saw your other post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14300672) with some more specific criticisms. I feel your pain. You obviously already know how to do the thing I'm mentioning above, and are referring to more complicated scenarios. Thanks for sharing.
>What if I want the sound of rustling leaves to come and go across the course of a song?
Trigger it via MIDI as a one-shot in the sampler, for example. Sampler and Simpler params can be automated. If you want some 'arbitrary' looping, again use the loop points of Sampler and set the (re)triggering appropriately.
You can do all these things if you want to, you just have to invest enough time learning the tools.
Edit: If you respond, you may mention that you have invested the time. Perhaps you have, and I'm just misunderstanding your case or needs.
I feel the need to address some of the typical HN poison floating around. I've got a very expensive music education. It doesn't make me better than an "Ableton clicker". Music is open to anybody, and is defined by what moves one, not by the mechanism of its creation. America really tends to treat it as some exclusive art club (beyond required elementary school classes), and that's really just wrong.
Right on. Anything can be an instrument from a 5 gallon bucket to a $100,000 concert piano. I never understood the snobbery, even among hacker crowds even, for people using certain tools to create music. Heck my C64 made music to the tune of Daisy and it was super cool. If someone wants to produce live music I am all for that.
PS Punk Rock and Indie Rock still is better then whatever else anyone else listens to :) Just jokes.
Please refer to my comment history and also please rebut specific things I said. I rarely say negative things and I am a user of this product all the time. I am genuinely frustrated by the lack of progress in recent years, since I use the product literally every day. This is not poison, it is legitimate criticism.
I didn't mean personal offense in my reply. "Stop pretending making music is clicking on and off in little boxes", is the specific portion I was referring to, but more generally I just aim to promote inclusiveness.
Music is made in your head, the DAW is just a tool to get it out. You can turn off grid snapping and use samples the way you like and many more creative methods to do whatever you please.
> So many aspects of music are very annoying or borderline impossible to do in ableton.
Like what? Scoring music? How about using a proper tool then? Nobody complains that they can't write hardware drivers in PHP.
My DAW is Reason and because it sucks in making mixtapes I got Ableton too because it's superior in that use case.
I really don't buy this. Ableton was created by an excellent musician (Robert Henke), and its design reflects a musician's perspective. It's intuitive and flexible. It doesn't work for every possible workflow, but no individual piece of software could.
That's arguing from authority and ignoring the meat of my point.
I know Robert Henke created Ableton Live and it was a tremendous innovation when it came out.
Over time it gradually expanded features but never dealt with a variety of things that might be development intensive but would in no way break the workflow.
For example:
Support advanced midi stuff. Like, any of it. Why is it so mind bogglingly inconvenient for me to hook up my continuum or my linnstrument to Live?
Loops of arbitrary length/non warped loops, as I mentioned in another comment, are unnecessarily hard to implement.
Why can't I midi map to certain controls, why can't I macro map to certain controls.
Why can't I easily lock stuff in the arrangement view so I am not terrified to change the master tempo.
Why can't I group things in arrangement and edit them together.
why can't I intuitively stretch a sample in arrangement view, when the whole sell of ableton is time stretching?
It's not arguing by authority, it's arguing by counterexample. Robert Henke doesn't represent all musicians, but he is a musician, so it's not possible that Ableton doesn't reflect the perspective of any musician.
All the things you mention relate to a certain workflow. It's not my workflow, it's not every musician's workflow. It'd be great if Ableton had good SysEx support, but it's not accurate to say it has a "complete disregard for music" because it doesn't fit your workflow exactly. Ableton is designed to simplify working with repetitive beats. If you don't want any of those, of course it's going to be difficult to use.
It just encourages so much grid based work that you tend to lose perspective on the fact that most of the music made throughout all of the history of ever wasn't actually on a grid.
I love ableton a ton. It just encourages a limited mind set.
It seems to me each DAW focuses on a particular problematic.
- Ableton Live: focus on painless transition between live and written electronic music, quick producing
- Reason: focus on modulating everything with a studio feel
- Orion: focus on cleanly mixing looping music, slow producing
- FLStudio: focus on composing looping music
- Reaper: focus on customization and performance
- Protools: focus on getting the most money out of the customer
- Logic: focus on getting the sound you want and making a song easily, pre-made effect chains
- Studio One: a bit similar to Logic in spirit
- Cubase: I don't know what it focuses on tbh
A major problematic is that the topdown goal of making one song may easily be dwarfed by mixing difficulties that can then capture your focus forever (aka "loopitis").
As an audio plugin developer, I get to know a bit of every
DAW out there, for testing. A popular opinion is that tools don't matter for making music, but a more realistic opinion is that they actually do matter, by warping how you think about the problem.
> Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write.
It takes serious effort at times to force a ballpoint pen to actually write. Which has the effect of turning off people to writing and ruining the quality of written material.
I find it best to always acknowledge that there may be a better tool for the task you're trying to do at any moment, and realize the point at which you should go and search for that tool.
But as Rumsfeld would say, the unknown unknowns are what you need to worry about. That is, the case where you don't know the tool you're using is limiting you, and in what ways.
Renoise: incredibly accurate timing. Yes demoscene music makers, but it's also exceptional at producing anything that's got to have incredibly tight timing. It even excels at sending MIDI data without jitter.
Also, as the heir apparent of the tracker movement (its audio can be a heck of a lot better than the early generations of trackers, and it's happy to work with multichannel DACs for outboard analog mixing) it offers a distinct way of thinking about sound-making: that old 'tracker' way of composing. Since it's based on audio samples of arbitrary fidelity, it's not restricted to 'demo-y' sounds: you can just as well use huge 24-bit high sample rate sounds, or use it as a way of layering audio tracks as one might in a DAW.
I'm not involved with Renoise as a company, BTW, but I AM completely charmed by it and own both it and Redux (the DAW plugin version).
Yes a thousand times, dude, Renoise is that good. It's my main DAW and I feel really spoiled by it, specially by its incredible stability.
Everytime I read articles or forum posts about people talking about their DAWs I hear people complaining about ableton/fl studio etc being unstable, crashing on odd occasions etc. I have never experienced a crash on Renoise, not even using multiple VSTs etc, even some buggy ones that are prone to crashing or scrambling other DAW's internal state hehehe... I have composed tracks on Renoise for over 6 hours to only them realize I hadn't saved a single time.
The most depressing thing about ableton is made obvious in two seconds of messing with that tutorial. A complete disregard for music in the sense of pushing boundaries of time, or doing things that are not tied to any sort of grid, and the sense of music as an emotive form.
So many aspects of music are very annoying or borderline impossible to do in ableton. Yet in all these years, and with so many installations, they just never addressed those issues. Instead they vaguely pretend as if music that would require features they don't have is radically experimental. Which might become true if so many people learn music only through using their software.
Seriously, Ableton. Stop pretending making music is clicking on and off in little boxes. It's embarrassing.
--
Edited to take out the "art" part and put in a couple of more specific criticisms.