This week here at Sonic Academy we’re super excited to bring you an exclusive in-depth look at the all new Ableton Live 10 with multi genre Ableton guru and employee, Chymera.
Since the announcement of Live 10 last November, Ableton users have been getting excited about what new features will be included prior to it’s full release on 6th February.
Over these 13 videos Brendan takes us through some of the best, and also gives us a real world view of this awesome DAW in use by creating a ethereal ambient track from scratch.
This isn’t just an update, Ableton have really pushed the boat out in this new version and have listened to what producers want from their DAW, from speeding up workflow, to really giving you everything you will ever need in one box to create just about any sound/beat/effect you could ever want.
Ableton Live 10 is going to be a sound design and music creator’s dream!
Sound quality is great, and the wavetable pad is especially lush. The tune has a Dubspeeka vibe. Big fan of your body of work, Chymera. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Why doesn’t Ableton follow in the footsteps of Logic and once you buy the dam thing you get the upgrades for free. Take Reaper…I bought it years ago and i’m still getting free upgrades…People whould just stop buyng Ableton. Daylight robbery…and this Ableton 10 looks no different to Ableton 9. Bshit.
THANK YOU for explaining how important it is to remove processing from the master bus before mixing. A lot of my mastering clients paint themselves into a corner with multiband compression and EQ on the master. When I ask them to take it off, their mix sounds like garbage, but if they leave it on, my hands are tied.
Two questions though:
Why a separate drum rack for each drum sound, versus just putting them all one one rack? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about the notes in the clips being stacked on each other. They’d all be nice and tidy, separate, and labeled.
On the 808 samples, why not use 1-Shot mode? I noticed you tweaked the release, but the values you ended up at don’t sound much different than just playing back the whole sample.
@aidanf It’s been several years now that we’re running with Live 9 which has seen lot’s of “Updates” that obviously are free for the users. Live 10 is more like a new “version” which can be consider as a serious upgrade and I find myself that it’s been improved a lot comparing to Live 9, so I have to disagree with your comment saying that it’s the same.
Talking about pricing, it’s something to address to Ableton and not really concerning the tutorial here on SA. But just the fact that Ableton added a new instrument like the Wavetable that you could compare to a “mini” Xfer-Serum synth and new effects entitle them to charge their customers for it, if you think about the price of individual plug-ins.
Now of course, it’s just companies marketing policies and they may differ and no one have to be agree with them but also bear in mind that Ableton’s business is founded on Live & Push when Apple deals with a all range of computers and software’s to make benefits, so it’s more easy for them to make all Logic upgrades free for their customers.
@ctheory11 Well, to answer to your question 1 : it’s just to give more work to mastering engineers since they will have more tracks to work on !! Hey, budy ! Just kidding here of course…
My point of view to answer both questions is : to get more freedom and sound adjustment levels.
1- Though you can put all your individual drum’s sounds in one Drum Rack and all the Fx chains on each cells of this Drum Rack to sculpt each sound individually, you quickly end up with a not so smooth midi track to deal with when you want to make changes on the fly. That’s already a visual & workflow issue. Next to that, unless you route the audio out from each cell from your Drum Rack to individual audio tracks, you’re ending up with all your drums coming through only one stereo channel which is not giving you the same level of controls for levels, panning, phase…etc. Think real life situation where a sound engineer will record a drum set in a studio : he’s going to use multi-mics to record to have some freedom during the mixing process afterwards. Then the fact to group all those tracks give you the common sub-group / Bus option to control the level and fine tune the all drum kit before reaching the master or the mix-bus. So I think that’s good practice and that’s without talking about Live Audio & Midi workflow, the first & last fader you want to adjust is your track level’s fader, just for gain-staging. Any device, plug-in that you put on a track is acting on the sound before that one. So you sculpt the sound as much individually as you can before reaching that stage and this method is giving you plenty of freedom in that regard.
2- Same principle, more freedom and flexibility for sound sculpting. Using controls like attack, decay,sustain, release, volume…etc gives you much more flexibility on your sample playback and also more interactivity with your Midi notes events like length & velocity. You have more restrictions / Less options when using the One-Shot mode.
@chymera Best & in-depth tutorial on Live 10 new features I’ve been watching until now. The fact that you show to us a full track creation to illustrate those new features is an invaluable add-on to this course. Congrats on your subject that you know so well, I mean Ableton Live and your workflow is very impressive in both session & arrangement views, which again is showing your knowledge of this DAW and is a very good example of what this new version is capable off, so respects !! Very great course and your music is very inspiring too !!
And by the way, if “Polo & Mony” are friends of yours, they for sure are famous now !! That was a very good slip that’s also showing us that your course is the real stuff about music creation and not only tutorial business.
So THANK YOU so much for that one and thank you to SA as well.
Glad that this was helpful for you! To answer your questions:
There’s a few reasons that I prefer working like this. Firstly, it gives visible separation to the elements on both the session and arrangement view. So I can quickly see where the hi hat starts, or a kick drum drops out. This is very important in the arrangement process when I’m fine tuning the sequence. Also, if I decide to add another element to the drums, I don’t have to go and edit multiple MIDI clips, I can just add a whole new track and drag its MIDI clip out as far as I need. Thirdly, I sometimes get my tracks professionally mixed and it’s just much easier to export them all in one go when they are already separated.
I could, and I have in the past. I just find the slopes of the envelopes in the classic mode easier to work with. But sometimes if I really want to fine tune the decay of a sound exactly I’ll switch to one shot mode.
Alright you guys, I’m convinced! Just seeing the parts separated in the arrangement is huge. I’m going to do separate drum racks in a group from here on out!
That said, I couldn’t stand loading in an 808, only using one pad, and leaving the rest of the samples and corresponding chains there to rot. I’d have to think it sucks up CPU, or at the very least, makes your pack too big when it’s time to archive the project.
Hey ctheory11, usually when I’m working with multiple drum sounds I have just one sound per Drum Rack per track.
If you’re loading in a kit like the 808, you could just delete all the chains that you’re not using. Or even easier, right click on the chain you are using and select “Extract Chain”, then you can delete the rest.
A full kit doesn’t really take up much CPU if it’s not being used, but if you’re collecting and saving the project then yes, it will definitely chew up space.
I usually don’t use kits when working with Drum Racks, but rather just drag in individual hits from my own sample library.
But there’s no right or wrong way to any of this - use whatever suits your workflow the best!
Hey, budy ! Just kidding here of course… 