Ableton Live is one of the most popular music software packages on the market for creating and DJ-ing music. With its streamlined studio approach and live streaming features, it has quickly become a favorite of DJ’s and composers alike. Ableton Live is available for all newer versions of Windows as well as Mac OS 9.1 or OS X 10.1.5. Minimum system requirements to run the music creation software is G3/233 and 256 MB RAM on a Mac, or a Pentium II/400 and 128 MB RAM on a PC.
Arrange View in Ableton Live
This is the place within Ableton where all of the tracks get recorded individually to create a song. Tempo, time signatures and song passages loop here, and audio clips, midi devices and live performance recordings can be added. Like most music creation software, the Arrange view is formatted horizontally for music sequencing making it extremely easy to get ideas out.
Ableton Live’s Session View
The Session view looks like a mixing deck where all the sound files, VST plugins, internal effects and instruments are housed. Preview new songs to add into the song, all in real time without needing to change the tempo – a feature that comes in handy for remixing or live performances.
The Ableton Warp Feature
One of the most powerful features of Ableton Live is its time warping feature. Essentially, Warp can change the timing of a sample to fit make it perfectly in any time signature. Sounds can go from subtle changes to being completely unrecognizable in this mode. Reversing the sound is easy as well as stretching it into any possible timing. This feature alone makes Live extremely powerful and worth $399 USD price tag.
Recording With Ableton Live
Previous versions of Ableton Live only offered recording options within the Session view, although it was still an instrumental piece of the music creation software. With version 2.0, Ableton now allows users to record multiple tracks at once, use a metronome, and tailor recording preferences with precision and flexibility.
Ableton Live has a great number of positive benefits to the end user, including the new time warp feature, multi-track possibilities and straightforward file manipulation. There are some drawbacks to Ableton as well however, most notably the inability to both record and monitor sounds at the same time but this should be addressed in later versions. Still, Ableton is extremely easy to use with a small learning curve, and once mastered the sound shaping possibilities are endless.
