At NAMM 2018, Ableton announced the new iteration of its loveable DAW. Yes folks, Live 10 is finally here, and we at B&H are pleased to enumerate its many virtues. The DAW is famous for plug-ins and synths whose timbres you can’t find anywhere else, and in keeping with this aesthetic, Ableton has loaded the software with more modules destined to be future classics.
Wavetable is the new virtual instrument, and it delivers on the ability to shape, morph, and stretch sounds sampled from analog synths and a whole lot more. No complicated knowledge of synthesis required to operate—you can get great sounds out of the gate with easily tweak-able parameters.
Have you ever thought that Live needed more ways to compress, distort, or mangle sound? No? Well soon you will, when you check out modules like Pedal, Ableton’s take on stompbox distortion units, as well as Drum Buss, a compressor, transient shaper, and frequency tweaker—all in one plug-in tailor-made for drums. You’re also sure to love Echo, which bridges the gap between classic analog and digital delay styles with filters, noise, wobble, and modulation.
Improvements have been made to the workflow, as well, with a memory function that stores your MIDI ideas even if you didn’t press Record, and exciting new editing features. Want to tinker around with more than one MIDI clip at a time? Now you can! Want to edit audio in real time, straight from the arrange window, as your masterpiece is looping or playing? Ditto! Ever dreamed about nesting a group within a group? Wake up to a world where this—and more—is possible!
There are just too many new improvements to list in a single announcement, so really, it’s better if you check out the different versions themselves. If you’re just diving your feet into Ableton’s ecosystem, check out the Intro edition, which gives you 16 audio and MIDI tracks, eight scenes, two send and return tracks, and four mono I/O channels. With Standard, you get unlimited audio, MIDI, scenes, and all the sends, returns, and mono I/O Ableton’s going to offer you. Throw in more than 1,800 sounds, five software instruments, 34 audio effects, and eight MIDI effects for an experience that’s far from standard, though it is labelled as such.
So, what do you get with the Suite then? All the I/O and unlimited tracks, plus complex editing capabilities unavailable in in the Intro edition, Max for Live, over 70GB worth of sounds, 39 audio effects, 16 MIDI effects, 13 software instruments, and a partridge in a pear tree (partridge and pear tree not included). No need to check out our SuperStore for these, folks—you can download them straight from our website!
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