Creating a whoosh
Live guru Tom Cosm offers his thoughts on three ways of creating “whooshing” build-ups in Ableton Live.
Ableton Live v 8.2.1 released
Ableton has released version 8.2.1 of Live (and Suite), the music production software for Windows and Mac.
Changes in Live/Suite 8.2.1
- Improvements and feature changes
- Improvements to Amp presets including better folder organization, additional guitar and bass amp presets and various other changes.
- Improvements to sound quality in Drum Machines.
- Performance optimizations on many Rack presets.
- Many delay devices now use the “Fade” Delay Transition mode, to avoid clicks.
- All Latin Percussion sounds are additionally available as chromatically tuned Simpler presets.
- Bugfixes
- Amp is now available in the trial version of Ableton Suite.
- Removed duplicate Amp presets.
- Fixed Hot-Swap behavior for a number of Session Drums and Drum Machines presets.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the use of soundcards with only one input on OS X.
- Fixed a crash that occurred when using a ReWire slave such as Reason and manipulating devices in the slave that were referred to by clips in Live.
More information: Ableton
Side chain compression in Ableton
Here is the first in a sequence of three videos showing a tutorial on side chain compression
In this video (part 1 of 3 focusing on Sidechaining) Dubspot instructor and Ableton Live expert Steve Nalepa shows how to use the Compressor-Sidechain audio effect in Ableton Live. Put simply, Sidechain Compression allows “different elements of your songs to essentially dance together.” Professor Nalepa starts by creating a simple dubstep drum pattern (kick and snare), adds a couple of synths which overpowered the drums, basically drowning the kick and snare. To remedy this imbalance, Nalepa select the synth tracks and grouped them together, and worked on the tracks/elements individually, reducing volume and adding effects. The popular effect has been used by a number of unique electronic and dance music producers from Daft Punk and Justice to newer artists like Baths and Nosaj Thing extraordinary results.
Connection test
Another small demo on how to do efficient work when using Resolume in combination with Ableton and Arduino
Connection Test Resolume + Ableton + Arduino.
Ableton sends MIDI messages to Resolume to sequence some video loops, as well as to synchronize BPM scale of another video.
Meanwhile, Arduino (with help from Midi Yoke and S2Midi and one LDR) sent other MIDI messages through another channel to control the volume of a track in Ableton and the speed and opacity of two loops in Resolume.
How to get started with touchAble
Here are a couple of nice demos on how to use touchAble.
Learn how to use touchAble, the iPad app that allows you to control Ableton Live. In this three part video series we take you through the basics of the Touchable interface, how to control Live with Touchable and how to use it for composition.
Navigate around your live set with the touch of a finger, tweak Lives mixer, instruments and fx with full automapping and unlimited tracks & parameters.
touchAble allows live users to walk away from their computer and perform live from anywhere within Wi-Fi range while keeping latency at a minimum.
Play your favourite synths with the unique double keyboard or record your rhythms with the 16 drum pads, including 5 velocity steps & octave selectors.
Access the most important transport and clip functions without losing focus on your set and tweak the same set with two iPads with the unique Dual-User-Mode.
You need to adjust volume, launch a new clip and play a device?
Don’t worry – a smart and intuitive screen menu empowers the user to arrange and switch modules on the fly.
Nice demo fo the Tinysizer
demosong for the TINYSIZER from anywhere instruments. All sounds except the kickdrum are from the tinysizer. sequenced and recorded with ableton live.
the TINYSIZER is an analog modular synthesizer where you can patch everything
with little patch cords and the total size of the synth is like a little laptop.
Its got MIDI to CV build in, so you can sequence with MIDI or CV.
Progtronica’s 130 Twisted Beats mix
A live mix by Progtronica producer Nigel Sifantus using Ableton Live, the Novation Launchpad, and ZeRO SL mk II.
This was improvised early on Sunday morning after quite a late Saturday.
Visit nigelsifantus.com for more details.
Quicktronic live performance
A live performance of the song “Quicktronic” featuring the Be-Bot app on the iPhone. I used to play the therimin so I get a huge kick out this app and wanted to do something with it. I’m triggerig 7 tracks of Ableton Live using the Novation Launchpad while mixing in the Be-Bot. The song has a house/broken beat feel with a twist of drilling drums. Visit nigelsifantus.com for more details on Progtronica
Side chaning with gating in Ableton Live
This is a really quick easy way to get nice rhythmic cuts based on the other elements in your track. Ableton Live tutorial using the standard gate plugin.
All the new stuff in Ableton Live 8.2
More complete then ever 
Ableton has released Live 8.2, a release that addresses numerous bugs, listed below, and also includes several new features and improvements.
Here’s what’s new in Ableton Live 8 :
- Support for The Bridge, Ableton’s collaborative project with Serato. The Bridge is free for users of Live/Suite 8. Details here.
- Amp, an audio effect that models guitar amps and cabinets. Amp is free for Suite users. More here.
- Some changes were made to the Help Pages regarding how to report a crash and how to contact support. When restarting Live after a crash, Live produces a file named “Ableton Crash Report… .alp”, whereas choosing “Get Support..” in Live’s Help menu produces a file named “Ableton Status Report… .alp”.
Amp is a collaboration between Ableton and Softube. Amp is an effect that emulates the sound and character of seven classic guitar amplifiers. Amp is free with Ableton Suite 8, and comes bundled with Cabinet, a separate effect offering classic speaker cabinets and optimized microphone configurations.
See the video above for an overview.
Ableton & Serato’s The Bridge
Also include in the update is The Bridge — a “natural” link between Ableton Live and Serato Scratch Live.
Next up – DJ Eskei83 shows how The Bridge allows a DJ to tweak multiple parameters from a Serato Scratch Live mix, resulting in a perfectly refined mixtape.
Above, Ableton’s Jeff Milligan shows how The Bridge spans the gap between DJing and playing a live set, by allowing DJs to seamlessly integrate Ableton Live into a Serato Scratch Live setup.
Bugfixes
- Improved compatibility for Antares Harmony VST. Now the plugin works in Stereo mode only when inserted in a track, while previously its 5 channels were active in such a case.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent Live from deleting temporary Projects.
- Fixed a rare crash that could occur with a combination of control surface selected in the Preferences, Ableton devices moved from track to track, and then tracks moved to different positions.
- Fixed a crash that could occur after undoing the move of a track containing a clip into a group track, which occurred with a specific state of the Live Set.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when entering mapping mode while a Max for Live device was in the clipboard.
- Fixed a crash that occurred after triggering a ’stop slot’ and recording outside the punch region.
- Fixed a crash happening after pressing Del (return to default) after editing the volume of at least two Rack chains at once.
- Fixed a crash that would happen while Live is slaved, and opening a Live Set containing a MIDI clip ready to Overdub, which would try to be triggered when loading the Set, before the undo history is ready.
- Fixed a bug that would create corrupt documents if the user uses ‘Save a Copy’ but overwrites the original Live Set, then tries to restore that Set after a crash. Now, overwriting the current Set using ‘Save a Copy’ does the same thing as ‘Save’.
- Fixed a crash that occurred while remotely changing scenes while editing some clip property.
- Core Audio driver is now listening for external sample rate changes, on the Mac.
- Fixed a crash that could occur after undoing the pasting of an Instrument into an empty MIDI track. The crash could happen in other ways too, but that’s the easiest to describe.
- In some cases Live could crash when loading a document that overcomes limitation (like a Live set containing Operator on a computer where Operator is not unlocked).
- Fixed a crash caused by a rounding error, causing some memory corruption
- It was previously not possible to map a track group slot when the group track was unfolded, because the selection spreads over the whole local scene. Now the selection changes upon entering map mode, or when existing it, allowing to map the slot, and restoring the correct selection when done.
- Fixed a crash that happened when moving a Max for Live device containing a “getpath” object to another track.
- Live could hang changing clip parameters while jumping in the song while recording.
- On some systems, Live is able to create Live packs that exceed 2 Gb, but could not read them. This is fixed by upgrading our packing Libraries.
- Fixed a crash that happened in rare cases (revealed by using The Bridge, but it is not directly related to it) when trying to insert a first warp marker in an audio recording.
- Fixed a crash happening when some MIDI targets where not available anymore but called. For example, it happened when having 2 MIDI clip selected in Session view, in a track containing at least a device, and then flattening the track.
- Fixed a crash happening when rebuilding the set from the Undo history, related to 3rd devices.
- Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to open a certain kind of corrupt document
- Disabled editing the value of a VST plug-in parameter via the computer keyboard (only in the Ableton view of the plugin, not in the plugin’s own interface). The VST specification doesn’t allow Live to set the value correctly.
- Fixed a crash that happened on a Mac whenever the number of channels for the opened audio interface would change. For example, changing the sample rate for some devices would implicitly change the number of inputs and/or outputs.
- Fixed the drawing of notes while recording a MIDI clip in the Arrangement view.
- Fixed many issues that caused memory corruption when using Complex Pro. A bug that made 192Khz files sound distorted when stretched with Complex Pro has also been corrected.
- Fixed the display of looped MIDI clips in the Arrangement, which was a regression due to a fix that made MIDI notes draw correctly while recording (viewtopic.php?f=25&t=149012)
- Fixed a crash that could occur when uninstalling a Live Pack and making the Library unavailable, by unplugging the external drive it is on, for example.
- Fixed crashes that could occur when using sample files that have a sample rate greater than 192KHz and set to Complex or Complex Pro.
- Fixed a crash that happened when using “dead keys” in message boxes, like pressing “z” when the “Do you want to save this Live set” dialog box was displayed.
- Fixed a crash which was triggered by moving a fader or knob on a MIDI controller while in MIDI learn mode, and quitting Live at the same time.
- Fixed a crash happening when having an incoming MIDI mapped message that would reach Live while loading a document. This had to do with the Undo history not yet being created, while the incoming message needed to access it.
- Fixed Japanese text input. It was not possible to rename tracks with Japanese characters, for example.
DATAMASKIN
