[06.11.07]

Ableton Live 7 - sneak preview

Since its announcement last month, Ableton Live 7 has become the most hotly anticipated new piece of kit this season.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with it throughout its development, so here’s a look at just a few of the goodies in store for DJs and producers.

Fasten your seatbelts. There’s some amazing stuff under the hood of this wünder-DAW.

Slice to New MIDI Track

An eagerly anticipated feature of Ableton Live 7 is support for REX format loops.

REX files are unique in that they forego time-stretching. Instead, they slice a loop into smaller segments and play these segments via MIDI sequence information.

What’s most remarkable about Ableton’s new support for REX is that it also allows for one of Live 7’s coolest new features, called “Slice To New MIDI Track.”

With a single right-click on any loop in Live, you can automagically slice it into dozens of smaller segments — like individual kicks, snares and percussion — then import these slices into a Drum Rack, which is then played by its own unique MIDI sequence.

The sequences can then be reordered so that you can create entirely new grooves from a single drum loop.

Mark my word, this feature will become the basis for a new production sound in 2008.

Fortunately, it’s so flexible that many producers will approach this tool from their own unique perspective.

Compressor Update

While Live’s old Compressor 2 device was fine for basic tasks, many producers opted to purchase third-party compressor plug-ins for punchy drums and mastering.

Having worked with the new Compressor device for several months now, I can honestly attest that it’s an extraordinary improvement over its predecessor.

Two new vintage modes are included, in addition to all of the previous modes. These can be combined in a variety of ways to achieve a wide range of professional compression sounds.

In conjunction with Live’s eight-band stereo EQ, you can now pre-master your mixes so that they sound quite polished indeed.

New Synths

Hardcore sound designers will be drooling over Live’s three new modeled synths: Electric, Analog, and Tension. Each specializes in a different form of tone generation.

Electric is optimized to create groovy electric pianos, perfect for deep and jazzy house.

Tension is a physical modeling tool for stringed instruments, whereas Analog is a full-featured dual-oscillator subtractive synth.

All are based on technology licensed from Canada’s Applied Acoustics Systems, whose products include Lounge Lizard, String Studio, Tassman, and Ultra Analog.

In Ableton’s implementation, the underlying technology behind these plug-ins receives a facelift, in the form of intuitive and flexible new interfaces and full integration with Live.

Each can be purchased a la carte, — or you can get them all, along with Ableton’s own Operator and Sampler synths, by purchasing the new Ableton Suite package.

Drum Rack

I’ve often heard hardware snobs comment that Live’s Impulse drum machine is “nice, but it’s no Akai MPC.”

That argument is about to be silenced, as Live 7 now includes an extraordinary new device called a Drum Rack.

Now, you can take any sample - or set of samples - and drop them onto a Drum Rack.

Live 7 will then load each of the samples into its own full-featured Simpler device, which allows for enveloping, filtering, LFOs and several useful sample editing functions.

This is much more flexibility than an Akai offers.

From there, each sample is assigned to its own MPC-like pad (up to 128 pads total), which can be played from any MIDI controller, including keyboards, pads, even your computer QWERTY keyboard.

Alternately, you can assign any synth or plug-in to the pads so that you can generate your own synth drums from scratch.

This is both the most powerful and most intuitive drum machine implementation I’ve seen in years — and it comes standard with Live 7.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to the above highlights, there are a ton of other, subtler amenities included in the new upgrade. Here’s a quick rundown.

Sidechains. Live now includes the ability to sidechains on its compressor, gate, and auto filter devices. This allows the audio from a different channel to control the effect’s dynamics, perfect for that pumping effect that has become a mainstay in Trance and Progressive.

64-bit Processing. All mix points throughout the program are now 64-bit. What this means to users is cleaner sound and more headroom.

Hi-Quality. Numerous plug-ins, such as Saturator, Dynamic Tube, and EQ Eight, now include Hi-Quality modes which reduce aliasing and sound even better.

External control. Two new devices — External Audio Effect and External Instrument — allow you to route MIDI and audio to external hardware, then back into Live, in a completely transparent manner, with adjustable latency compensation.

Spectrum Analysis. Another new device, the Spectrum Analyzer (pictured below), delivers full visual display of up to 16384 bands of audio. This is great for zeroing in on problematic EQ situations or just zoning out.

Nudge Tempo. While most of the above features apply equally to both DJs and producers, a pair of tempo-nudging buttons are now available. For Ableton DJs who have to follow hardware DJs in gig settings, this will be a reason to rejoice since we can now beatmatch just like the big kids if needed.