Product Reviews

Ableton Live is an unusual piece of music software that allows you to create musical arrangements and improvise around them. As with Sony's Soundblast Acid 4, you make tracks by layering and editing short samples, but where Acid allows you to craft carefully a single edit of your masterpiece, Live helps you build a structure and then edit it as you play. This is ideal if you want to perform to an audience rather than simply create one mix for a CD.

The improvisational aspect of Live revolves around the Session view. Resembling a mixing desk, this provides you with a number of channels, each with volume, pan and effect send controls. Above each mixer channel is a bank of samples, called Scenes. By triggering a Scene you can change the sample playing in each channel. These let you build up and develop musical structures, while allowing for last-minute moments of inspiration.

A CD of samples is included, but

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the beauty of Live is the way that you can twist and warp even a few sounds into an array of different noises. It will automatically match the samples to the tempo of your track, but you can manually stretch a sample's timing in complex ways, either syncopating the rhythm or skewing it beyond recognition. You can transpose samples and edit the way they loop without changing the original sound file, and you can even make these changes as your track plays. Live also includes 17 effects ranging from the usual suspects (chorus, compressors, delays and EQs) to the more unusual, and you can also use standard VST plug-ins.

Once you've finished your track you can record it and make edits in the arrangement view. This uses a standard timeline approach, allowing you to edit volume, pan and effect envelopes until they are just right. It's generally easy to use, but zooming in and out and tweaking volume levels can be frustrating at times. Once you've finished you can export your track in WAV or AIFF format, but there's no option for compressed formats such as MP3.

Live is a slick, powerful piece of software that is a pleasure to use. It can involve tweaking a lot of onscreen controls, so an external MIDI controller is useful, and a sound card that supports ASIO is also a big advantage. It's more expensive than Screenblast Acid but it includes more samples and more effects and simply gives more room for creativity. If you want an original way to make sample-based music, it could be the perfect tool.