Ableton Live is a digital audio workstation for macOS and Windows developed by the German company Ableton.

In contrast to many other software sequencers, Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for composing, recording, arranging, mixing, and mastering audio. It is also used by DJs, as it offers a suite of controls for beatmatching, crossfading, and other different effects used by turntablists, and was one of the first music applications to automatically beatmatch songs.

Live is available directly from Ableton in three editions: Intro (with fewer features), Standard, and Suite (with the most features). The Suite edition includes "Max for Live" functionality, developed in partnership with Cycling '74.

Ableton has also made a fourth version of Live, Lite, with similar limitations to Intro, which is only available bundled with a range of music production hardware, including MIDI controllers and audio interfaces.

History

Live was created by Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf in the mid-1990s. Behles and Henke met while studying programming at Technische Universität Berlin, and wrote software in the music programming language Max to perform techno as their band Monolake. Henke and Behles identified a need in Berlin's electronic music scene for user-friendly software for live performances, and worked with local acts to develop it.

Henke said later of Live's creation, "I think the feeling we had was [that] there was enough like-minded people in our closer community who could appreciate a product like this, and that it could work commercially. That gave us confidence to believe that a small company could actually survive on the market."

Unlike Pro Tools, which focuses on multitrack recording, the first version of Live was designed for performing live with loops.

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| Live 3 || 10 October 2003

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| Live 4 || 28 July 2004

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| Live 5 || 24 July 2005

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| Live 6 || 29 September 2006

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| Live 7 || 29 November 2007

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| Live 8 || 2 April 2009

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| Live 9 || 5 March 2013

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| Live 10 || 6 February 2018

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|Live 11

|23 February 2021

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|Live 12

|5 March 2024

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Features

Views

Live's user interface is composed of two 'Views' – Session View and Arrangement View. Session View offers a grid-based representation of all of the Clips in a Live Set. These clips can be arranged into scenes which can then be triggered as a unit. For instance a drum, bass and guitar track might comprise a single scene. When moving on to the next scene, which may feature a synth bassline, the artist will trigger the scene, activating the clips for that scene. Arrangement View offers a horizontal music production timeline of Clips that is more similar to a traditional software sequencer interface. The Arrangement View is used for recording tracks from the session view and further manipulating their arrangement and effects. It is also used for manual MIDI sequencing.

Instruments

Live Intro includes four instruments (Impulse, Simpler, Instrument Rack, and Drum Rack). Live Standard additionally includes External Instrument, with users having the option to purchase additional instruments. By contrast, Live Suite includes all available instruments.

  • Analog - physically-modeled analog synthesizer.
  • Bass - a monophonic virtual analog bass synthesizer.
  • Collision - a mallet percussion physical modelling synthesizer.
  • Drift - a subtractive synthesizer enabled with MIDI Polyphonic Expression functionality.
  • Drum Rack - an instrument framework that maps individual MIDI notes to separate instrument chains, supporting up to 128 notes at a time. Any Ableton or VST instrument can be used inside a chain, such as a sampler or synthesizer, and you can set which note is sent to the instrument. Each chain is capable of having its own effects.

Dedicated hardware instruments

Akai Professional makes the APC40 mk II, a MIDI controller designed to work solely with Live and closely maps the layout of Live's Session View onto a physical control surface. A smaller version, the APC20, was released in 2010. Novation offers the Launchpad, a pad device that has been designed for use with Live.

thumb|Ableton Push controller used by [[Pussy Riot in 2022]]

Ableton has also released their own MIDI controller, the Push, which is the first pad-based controller that embraces scales and melody. In November 2015, Ableton released an updated MIDI controller, the Push 2, along with Live 9.5. Push 2 features a new color display, improved buttons and pads, and a lighter frame. In May 2023, Ableton released the Push 3 as Controller and as Standalone-Version.

On October 8th, 2024 Ableton released their second hardware product, Move, which functions as a compact standalone groovebox, or as a MIDI controller for Ableton Live.

Effects

Live features a suite of built-in audio effects that are common amongst digital audio workstations; including EQ, delay, reverb, compression, and distortion. Spectral Resonator, Spectral Delay and Spectral Time use spectral processing to make glitchy, metallic sounding delay, reverb, and vocoder-like pitch effects. Some effects are reproductions of classic hardware, such as the Glue Compressor (styled from SSL bus compression) and the Echo (simulates noise and delay-time wobble as characteristic in analogue delay). Furthermore, Live features effects that can simulate a guitar rig and other signal degradation effects, including an amp-sim, Overdrive (band-pass filtered clipping with built-in distortion), Pedal (circuit-level modelled overdrive, distortion, and fuzz from guitar pedals), Erosion (uses filtered-noise or a sine wave to modulate the time of a very short delay), Saturator (waveshaping distortion with controls to dial in a custom curve), Redux (bit-depth reduction and downsampling), Dynamic Tube (models saturation produced by vacuum tubes), and Vinyl Distortion (harmonic distortion models with a crackle generator.)

Envelopes

Almost all of the parameters in Live can be automated by envelopes which may be drawn either on clips, in which case they will be used in every performance of that clip, or on the entire arrangement. The most obvious examples are volume and track panning, but envelopes are also used in Live to control parameters of audio devices such as the root note of a resonator or a filter's cutoff frequency. Clip envelopes may also be mapped to MIDI controls, which can also control parameters in real-time using sliders, faders and such. Using the global transport record function will also record changes made to these parameters, creating an envelope for them.

User interface

Much of Live's interface comes from being designed for use in live performance, as well as for production. There are few pop up messages or dialogs. Portions of the interface are hidden and shown based on arrows 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). The user is warned when an attempted action will stop the audio playback as a preventative measure for live performers.

Live now supports latency compensation for plug-in and mixer automation.

See also

  • List of music software
  • Multitrack recording

References

  • Ableton Live how-to database
  • Free Ableton Courses for Ableton Live users.