Ableton Live Version 7

It has bee a few months since Ableton released the latest version of their sequencer, Live. I have put off buying it til the new year as I had already finished an album, so I wasn't starting the next one straight away. Plus I thought I would wait for my company to pay the annual bonuses.

Well the bonuses have been paid and I ordered my Ableton upgrade the other week. I went for the Ableton Suite, which contains a lot of extras over the standard Ableton upgrade. This basically cost me £280 to do, instead of the £700 that is costs to buy the suite from new.

The suite extras include a set of new synths, Analog, Tension and Electric, plus the new EIC instrument pack and 'Session Drums', a multi sampled drum library and 'Drum Machines' a multi sampled library of vintage drum machines.

Live itself has had a significant upgrade in version 7. The mixing engine has been upgraded to 64bits from 32bits, giving a better mix on the master bus. There is a new device called spectrum, which is a real time FFT based spectrum analyzer which you can drop onto any channel and look over your eq'ing.

There is a new and very good compressor which supports side chaining. The most fun new feature is the new Drum Racks system, which is a very fancy drum sampler. This is layed out so you have multiple pads where you can drop your drum samples, like the impulse sampler. The main difference is each drum pad acts like its own effect chain, so you can add different effects vst's to each sample.

Since getting Live 7, I have started roughing out 3 new tracks for the next Creature album, so I have a good grasp on the new features. There is one bug that is serously annoying me, but Ableton assures me there are looking at fixing it.

This is basically caused by the controller keyboard I am using, the Novation Remote 25SL. It causes Live to randomly glitch the audio and the CPU meter jumps up to around 80%. I really hope they fix this. I can live with it for the moment, but the next maintenance upgrade will hopefully resolve this. Apart from that bug, Live 7 is a great upgrade to an already great music package.

I said I wasn't going to start another Creature album until about May time, but that gone out the window as I have already started playing around with track ideas. Although I am in no rush this time. :-)