Thoughts on Ableton Live Intro

[justhansel]

Was considering purchasing Ableton Live Intro, looking to produce music but I would just be a beginner and this program seems to be cool to start with. Anyone here use or have used it before? Thoughts on how it would be for a beginner?

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It would be good as it provides many thing usefull but download the DEMO and check it out, you would maybe need a good VST Synth too since it doesnt come with any. There are some free and some comercial ones, from quite cheap to very expensive. I would recommend: u-he plug ins like DIVA or Zebra, Native Instruments Massive and reaktor, Cakewalk Zeta+, Faw Circle, DCAM Synth Squad, Fabfilter twin, Camel Audio Alchemy, and look around at kvraudio.com for freebies.

[justhansel]

Now I am a beginner, and this may be a dumb question, but is a synth just a program that allows you to create certain sounds that are included in just that synth, also do you control the sounds they make with a drum pad or a piano roll?

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Now I am a beginner, and this may be a dumb question, but is a synth just a program that allows you to create certain sounds that are included in just that synth, also do you control the sounds they make with a drum pad or a piano roll?

In a DAW there are two ways to create sounds:

Recorded samples
Synthetizers.

The first are recorded instruments of any kind you can imagine: piano, drums, guitars, other synthetizers, etc etc. There are ton of libraries out there one of the more popular is Kontakt by native instruments.

Ableton Live comes with a library of sample instruments that is good to begin with (and interesting). To be honest I dont know how much different is the Intro to "Normal" version of live library, I guess thay are quite similar.

Now, Synthetizers create sound using different methods (substractive, additive, physical modeling) and are used to create unique sounds, and manipulate it's parameters to achieve certain effects.

Ableton Live suite has 4 different synths (analog which is susbtractive, Operator which is FM, tension, collision and electric that are physical modeling).

Synthetizers are the backbone of electronic music that's why is important to learn to use them.

In Ableton live the sampled instruments and the synthetizers can be used with piano roll, or like drum pads using Drum Racks (I think live instro doesnt include drum racks that you can customize just the ones from the library).

[justhansel]

That was a great explanation, Thank You very much.

[streetspirit]

So then what's the difference between a VST synth and a synth that comes with Ableton?

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So then what's the difference between a VST synth and a synth that comes with Ableton?

There are many VST's synth's outhere in many flavours, features, prices etc. Some can have a better sound that ableton synths, some are just different, or have different features. They can be used in almost any DAW/host (ableton live, logic, cubase, fl studio, etc)


The ones that come with ableton are integrated with the program so they consume little resources, share the interface, but they can't be used outside of ableton.

By the way the synths that come with ableton were made by Applied Acoustic Systems, they offer the same ones under a different name (Analog for example is Ultra analog), except operator which was made in house and is only avaible in ableton.

[xyloft]

Was considering purchasing Ableton Live Intro, looking to produce music but I would just be a beginner and this program seems to be cool to start with. Anyone here use or have used it before? Thoughts on how it would be for a beginner?

i would seriously considering buying a controller that comes with Live. it will save your some money. I mean. Live Intro is $100, or you can get a novation launchpad with live LE for $140. or an MPK25 or APC20 for around $200. maybe an APC40 for 300?

no, you do not need the controllers to learn or use the software. but if you do decide to buy one of the above controllers later, it comes with an LE version of ableton so you end up with two copies.