The all-new chord generator (Stacks) can smartly come up with the goods based on harmonic context (Image credit: Future) It’s also one of those Live devices where you may not know what you are doing, but pretty much every control has a dramatic effect and this third update is certainly one of Live 12’s highlights. Granulator has always been one of Live’s best sound design tools as you’ll soon come up with something usable or just plain weird. You can also now record audio directly into Granulator III in real time plus there’s MPE support. Granulator III has a new UI with all of your favourite options and a new expressive control that lets you add vibrato, bend notes and generally get a little more dynamic. You can choose to have your audio split into more grains, loop a certain section, add an LFO to make it jump around all sorts of craziness. Granulator III updates one of the best ever Max for Live devices, a grain sampler where you add any audio file and it smashes it into grains, letting you do some amazing stuff along the way. Next is an update to an Ableton Live classic: Robert Henke’s Granulator II. It’s a great addition, we think, and should be the first port of call for experimentation.Ībleton Live 12's new synth, Meld (Image credit: Future) It’s also got very extensive modulation and routing, too, so its sounds can be very dynamic and evolving. WIth oscillator names in the 25 or so on offer being things like ‘Bitgrunge’ and ‘Noiseloop’, you can guess that Meld is capable of quite abrasive, digital sounds as well as more natural ambient washes. This is quite an experimental synth and almost demands that you create your own sounds with its many dual oscillator combinations, accessible from two pop-up menus. It’s an MPE instrument so you can get even more expressive with it, and its sounds are genuinely very varied, from FM organs to more evolving pads and noisier elements. This is a great-sounding ‘macro oscillator’ synth with bi-timbrality meaning that it can play two different sounds and layer them together. We’ll start with the most exciting additions – those instruments and effects. Yes, we did say it wasn’t a redesign, but Ableton have certainly given the main UI a clean up. The updates to Live 12 are broadly spread across new devices, workflow updates and a refresh of the UI. And if you are a non-user, a couple of these additions might well be the ones to tempt you to join the club. If you are an existing Ableton Live user, we think you’re really going to be thrilled with the updates and additions to the DAW. This feature was written using a Mac, but all notes apply to both, and if you’re on PC simply substitute the Command key with the Control key when using shortcuts! The Mac version of software we have been using does feel stable, though, and – with the latest beta release – pretty complete, with excellent explanations of all the new additions built in (as Ableton always articulates so well).įinally, and yes we often say this, Live is a true cross-platform Mac and PC DAW. Yes we do have to stress that because we have been using the beta, some things will perhaps look different to what you are going to see in this feature compared to the final version. And we get to a dozenĪnd so to version 12 – or very nearly. Updates then began to slow and 2021’s version 11 was the last biggie, and introduced the Hybrid Reverb and Spectral Resonator and Spectral Time among a slew of other additions. Other big additions included audio to MIDI support in v9 and v10 bringing us the Wavetable synth. Here we met the Drum Rack, many now-core effects and Sampler. It kept getting updated every year until version 7 came out in 2007. Live’s initial flurry of updates meant that version 4 landed by 2004. While there, Hans Zimmer was so impressed by the software’s real-time audio time-stretching features that he helped spread the word – and the rest is history. That foundational clip-oriented idea has been with us since 2001 when Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf took version 1 of the software to the NAMM show. 20 years of Ableton Live: a history told by the founders and developers
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