Much of Live’s unique interface comes from being designed for use in live performance as well as for production. As such the interface is more compact than most sequencers and clearly designed for use on a single screen. 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).

Ableton Live is composed of two “views” – the arrangement view and the session view. The session view is primarily used to organize and trigger sets of sounds called clips. These clips may be arranged into scenes which may be triggered as a unit. For instance a drum, bass and guitar track might comprise a single scene. When moving on to another portion of the composition – a new scene – some or all of those parts might differ and could be triggered in parallel. In Live 6, there is also the addition of “racks” which allow the user to easily group instruments and effects. These elements make for simplifying compositions.

The other view is the arrangement view, which is used for recording tracks from the session view and further manipulating their arrangement and effects allowing for unique compositions. This view is fairly similar to a traditional software sequencer interface.

Ableton Live comes with a wide range of instruments, effects and music composition tools that gives the composer a wide range of musical possibilities. There are also a number of additional instruments which may be purchased separately or as part of the Ableton Suite to make your musical compositions as unique as you’d like.

Ableton Live can also work with samples. Ableton Live attempts to do beat analysis of the samples to find their meter, number of bars and the number of beats per minute. This makes it possible for Live to shift these samples to fit into loops that are tied into the piece’s global tempo. This is great!

Additionally Live’s Time Warp feature can be used to either correct or adjust beat positions in the sample. It does this by setting warp markers to a specific point in the sample, arbitrary points in the sample can be pegged to positions in the measure. For instance a drum beat that fell 250 ms after the midpoint in measure may be adjusted so that it will be played back precisely at the midpoint. Very nice indeed!

Some composers and online stores now offer sample packs that are pre-adjusted, with tempo information and warp markers added. The audio files are accompanied with an analysis file in Live’s native format. How cool is that!

Ableton Live is a great and highly recommended piece of Music Production Software to have in your own personal Recording Studio.