Product Reviews

Building on the great strides made by Live 2, Ableton has come up with one star attraction and a supporting cast of admirable additions for version 3 of its audio sequencing instrument.

At the head of the list is Live's new Envelope Draw Mode. Each clip in a Live Set now has independent envelopes for pitch, volume, pan, warping, mixer and effect parameters, any one of which can be mutated independently of the others. This opens up a fantastic level of editing control over every clip. Perfect rhythm but off-key playing or singing? Retune by drawing. Marvellous.

It is a superb process that liberates creativity and grants existing samples infinite life. Taking a drum loop, altering its pitch and stereo panning behaviour, adding PSP Audioware's VST delay plug-in PSP84 and automating an unfolding filter sweep for the duration of the loop was as easy as drawing a few lines with the pencil tool.

Similarly, recording a guitar riff and subsequently creating dozens of variations simply by adjusting the tuning of the recorded notes (up or down 48 semitones) was a function which we liked a lot. The sample is processed non-destructively and in real-time, so the same sample can be used in many different ways without destroying the original.

A nice twist is that Clip Envelopes can be unlinked from their respective sample loop and region length, so you can, for instance, take a one-bar drum loop and lay an eight-bar variation over it. The Lock Envelopes Switch can adhere the envelopes to the song position independent of clip movement, while favourite envelopes can also be copied and pasted onto other clips.

Live 3 also brings improved midi capability. Clips now have a velocity amount setting and can be played either via midi or on your computer keyboard. A Legato mode offers four ways to start clips without retriggering (Trigger, Gate, Toggle and Repeat).

By defining a root key and the range in Midi Map Mode, clips can be mapped to a keyboard's range for chromatic playing. This mapping is bound to the slots, rather than the clips, meaning that template Live Sets can be easily set up with pre-allocated key ranges.

Personal effects

The Live Effects section welcomes

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four new additions: Compressor II, EQ 3, Utility and Resonators. Compressor II includes frequency selective compression, sidechain EQ, variable lookahead (0, 1 or 10ms) times and two response modes (Peak and RMS). It produces much smoother results than Compressor I, which is included, and is good for use on individual tracks or the master output.

The Resonators effect features five parallel resonators, tuned in semitones from the root pitch defined by Resonator 1, with various detuning and decay parameters. The results can vary from metallic plucked strings to vocoder effects, depending on the source, and can throw up exotic new twists on existing samples.

EQ 3 is an emulation of DJ mixer-style EQ sections, adjusting low, mid and high frequencies independently, while Utility adds a Gain control, Active/Mute and Left/Right buttons (to isolate specific channels in stereo files), a Width control and Phase invert for both channels.

On the subject of effects, multiple VST plug-in editor windows are now possible (click on the spanner icon to open the plug-in's interface); there is improved VST program and bank handling and OS X support for Mach-O plugs, although nothing for AudioUnits.

There are also plenty of minor improvements, including support for the import of Sound Designer II files (although you only record WAV or AIFF); a new Clip RAM Mode, which lets Live load audio from the computer's memory rather than reading from disk in real time; triplets are available as a quantisation option and Live now automatically handles the monitoring set-up when recording.

The new Consolidate command also warrants a mention: this creates one new sample from every selected track playing in the Arrangement View, which can then be reintroduced to the mix. Similarly, the Insert Captured Scene creates a new scene in Session View featuring all active clips and switches seamlessly to this new clip collection, allowing you to instantly snag that perfect moment when you've got your mojo working.

Slow tempo

We have a few complaints, though. Primarily performance is cripplingly slow on a 600MHz G3 iBook and it takes a G4 with a sufficiently speedy processor to enable you to really get your groove on. The program also likes to fill your Mac's screen on launch, which can be annoying.

Also, Live works best as a manipulator of existing material. As such, it is rare that it is used to record music projects entirely from scratch. There is a known issue with the Expose feature of Panther, namely that any keys assigned to Expose will not be available in Live.

However, let none of this detract from what is an excellent update of an inspiring musical tool. Live is maturing nicely into one of the major weapons available for any creative musican's arsenal.