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Many of Ableton Live's unique features stems from being developed for easy use in live performance. The interface is more stream-lined than most other audio sequencers and clearly designed for use on a single screen. Some of the interface are hidden and shown based on easy access buttons which may be clicked to show or hide a certain segment (e.g. to hide the instrument/effect list or to show or hide the help box). Futhermore, since the performance aspect of Live's design, all of the processing is done in real-time, rather than rendering effects after record and play back as is typical in many sequencers and sample editors. No pop up messages or dialogs anywhere in Ableton Live, beside an options dialog consisting of five tabs. The freeze feature introduced in version 4 allows for some pre-rendering of effects and synths to reduce processor load and when you deep-freeze version 6 lets you manipulate the effect parameters on pre-rendered tracks and clips.
The two views which are central to Ableton Live – the session view and the arrangement view. The session is mainly used to organize and trigger portions of sounds called clips. These clips may be arranged into scenes than triggered as a complete audio unit. For example, a vocal, percussion, and piano track might comprise a single scene. When moving on to another portion of the composition – a new scene – some or all of those parts might differ and could be triggered in parallel. In Ableton Live 6, there is also the addition of "racks" which allow the user to easily group instruments and effects.
Another view is the arrangement view, which is used for recording tracks from the session view and further manipulating their arrangement and effects. Anyone familiar with traditional software sequencer interfaces will find this view basically similar to other programs.
Clips may either be an audio sample or MIDI (triggering one of Live's built in instruments, third party VSTs instruments or external hardware). Live comes standard with three instruments – Impulse, Operator and Simpler.
Impulse is a more or less traditional drum sequencing instrument which allows for defining a percussion kit of up to eight individual sounds or samples. When the drum kit is defined these samples can be arranged into groups of measures using a piano-roll interface. Many options are available for pre-processing these sounds such as basic equalization, attack, delay, pitch shift, etc.
Simpler is a basic easy to use sampling instrument. Based on working with a single sample, applying processing & effects, and then arranging it in a piano roll interface. tThe samples are pitch shifted to the selected pitch, instead of each notes representing different samples as in Impulse.
Operator is designed for synthesizing sounds via a wide range of controls; it can be bought separately in addition to Ableton Live. Operator implements FM synthesis string variation of four FM operators.
Sampler is the latest add-on product, which is really an extension of the Simpler.It features multisample support for 3rd party sound and sample libraries such as SoundFont, as well as ability to use wavetable and granular synthesis.
Envelopes
Most of the parameters in Live are controllable by envelopes which may be free-drawn either on clips or in the arrangement itself.Basically these equal what would be a knob or dial on an effect in a traditional audio mixer or processing rack and can actually be mapped for use with knobs a MIDIcontroller. These then will be used in every performance of that clip or with the arrangement so that they vary at different points in the play-back of a project. An obvious example for using this is with volume or track panning automation, but these can also be implemented in Ableton Live to adjust certain values like the root note of a resonator or the reverb time or echo amount for a delay FX.
Most of the effects are all your standard effects used in the digital signal processing universe which have been adapted to fit Live's interface. They are however fairly obviously tailored for the target audience of Live –VJs, DJs, and electronic musicians– rather than, say, post processing a guitar players set-up.
The audio effects included with Ableton Live 6 are:
Also many MIDI-only effects including arpeggiator, chord, pitch, random, scale, and velocity. In the newer versions of Live it is possible to use VST and Audio Unit (AU) effects.
Ableton Live's Time Warp feature can be used correct or adjust beat positions in each sample. For example, a drum beat that fell 370 ms after the center of a measure may be slid over so that will be played back precisely at the midpoint. These warp markers when set to a specific point in the sample, also provide arbitrary points in the sample that can be marked to positions in the measure.
Including all the instruments mentioned above, Live can also work with samples. Live has a beat analysis feature for the samples to find their meter, number of bars and the number of beats per minute. This allows Live to adjust these sounds and samples to fit into loops that are synced to the project's global tempo.
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