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Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

roberthenke.com

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just groundbreaking, but zeitgeist shaping. Session View (aka "clip launching") represents more than just a workflow - it represents an idea of what music is . Some people might want to spend their time arguing over whether or how much or when that idea is correct. I'd prefer to note that in the 25 or so years since its debut, the idea has reshaped so much contemporary music whether it is correct or not. The idea…

And it is stable, this always shocked me when I tried out some other software for music production that it actually crashed and killed my project! You will not have that bad experience with Ableton!

Part of what drives that is that Ableton is designed to be used in-performance, so even minor instability isn't acceptable at all

Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about that is that no one in my (limited) experience uses the session view as it was intended to be used for music composition. After trying it for a bit, everyone seems to revert back to using the linear Arrangement view. Session view is still useful in some performance cases, but it makes me wonder if it would make sense to have it as an optional view, and not as the default view for all sessi…

Very interesting. When my buddies and I started playing in Ableton after years in Adobe Audition (circa 2010?), we immersed ourselves in Session view for writing and piecing everything together, building songs top-down instead of left-to-right. It completely changed our entire workflows, and that seemed like the point. I'm only ever in arrangement view when I'm finalizing the order of the sections before final mix do…

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Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about that is that no one in my (limited) experience uses the session view as it was intended to be used for music composition. After trying it for a bit, everyone seems to revert back to using the linear Arrangement view. Session view is still useful in some performance cases, but it makes me wonder if it would make sense to have it as an optional view, and not as the default view for all sessi…

Session view user here. It’s trivially easy to make arrangement view your default view. You simply hit tab to switch the view to arrangement and then overwrite your default template in the ‘File’ menu. Now you’re set.

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Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about that is that no one in my (limited) experience uses the session view as it was intended to be used for music composition. After trying it for a bit, everyone seems to revert back to using the linear Arrangement view. Session view is still useful in some performance cases, but it makes me wonder if it would make sense to have it as an optional view, and not as the default view for all sessi…

How did you get that knowledge? Everyone?

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Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it finally was available for Linux!

I wish... Live is the only reason I have a windows partition anymore. I just can't quite get it to work in wine/emulation... When I'm forced to upgrade to windows 11 I simply won't have Live anymore, because I won't be doing that, and so I haven't purchased the latest version and am starting to experiment with the alternatives. Makes me sad though, it'd be so great to have on Linux.

I use it in a VM with vfio pci pass through of a gpu. Works fine but I'll probably move to bitwig anyway, I don't respect the decision of not having Linux support (they even run Linux on their push devices).

Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#47
post #17

Ableton is an epitome of software design innovation. I think few people understand how groundbreaking the Session View vs Arrangement View design was to advance the workflow of both produced and live music. Subcomponents like Operator created design patterns that are widely adopted by most VSTs today. Kudos to the Ableton team for crafting a product that is so beloved.

If you're impressed by Ableton, wait til you see Bitwig.

Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#49
post #17

Ableton is an epitome of software design innovation. I think few people understand how groundbreaking the Session View vs Arrangement View design was to advance the workflow of both produced and live music. Subcomponents like Operator created design patterns that are widely adopted by most VSTs today. Kudos to the Ableton team for crafting a product that is so beloved.

The interesting thing about that is that no one in my (limited) experience uses the session view as it was intended to be used for music composition. After trying it for a bit, everyone seems to revert back to using the linear Arrangement view. Session view is still useful in some performance cases, but it makes me wonder if it would make sense to have it as an optional view, and not as the default view for all sessi…

I use the session view for vocal recording. Recording multiple takes to new clips in session view, then copied into the arranger, it lets me comp several takes without messing up the final arrangement, and is great for project organisation.

Re: Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

#50
post #4

Ah Operator. This synth is so deep. Not only is it a fantastic FM synth, but it does subtractive synthesis well too. Also, it really is impressive how the UI manages to fit all those parameters. I mostly use it for cool synth leads. Here's one of my favorite videos on Operator https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M by Robert Henke himself.

It's my goto VA synth too. I'll reach for it first, before Analog or other VSTs.
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