Building on their intuitive basic interface, Ableton have added functions such as keyboard and MIDI triggers for audio clips as well as scene-based automation. Version 3 saw the introduction of envelopes for manipulating audio data, with the facility to copy and paste envelopes between parameters speeding up the process of creating more complex automated tasks considerably. Much of the basic functionality was present in version 1 of Live, but Ableton have extensively developed its automation, audio processing and interface facilities through releases 2 and 3. All of this can be done mixing most common file formats, sample rates and bit depths for maximum flexibility and speed. You can audition material from hard disk alongside running program sequences, drop in live overdubs that can be triggered back off disk in an instance (remember 'Frippertronics'?), change tempo while all this is going on, and a lot more.
It allows musicians to combine almost any audio, be it on their hard disk or recorded from scratch, with anything else, virtually 'on the fly'. Live is essentially a hard disk-based audio player and recorder that takes advantage of today's fast processor speeds and disk access times, and combines them with some blistering time-stretch ('warping') algorithms to deliver what can only be described as an astonishingly fast, innovative and intuitive tool to compose, arrange and play music. The way they have gone about implementing this concept in fact incorporates a lot of the methods '90s dance music has developed since the arrival of the S900 and the Atari computer. In their company profile, Ableton co-founder Gerhard Behles describes the idea of Live as software that provides musicians with a 'studio as instrument' - a concept that many of us from the era of dance music are very familiar with.
With version 4 offering a wealth of new features including MIDI sequencing, could it now replace traditional sequencers altogether? As a creative, stable and above all fun way of combining audio loops in real time, Ableton's Live has proved an ideal counterpart to Rewire-compatible applications such as Cubase.
0 kommentar(er)
