Article Preview - Ableton Live 7

The hyperactive developers at Ableton have been at it again. Live 7 gains an ingenious new way of working with drums, and an optional library packed with new instruments.

Simon Price

The Session Drums library included in the new Ableton Suite includes several multi-miked drum kits for the Drum Rack.

Software develops at such a pace nowadays that buying a music package can feel like making a down-payment on an annual subscription. The last major Live upgrade still feels warm from the oven, and another one is here. In our generally enthusiastic review of Live 6, we suggested that the most significant weak spot was its paucity of instruments and drum kits. Enter Live 7, with a whole new framework for working with drums, and the new Ableton Suite, featuring a host of new synths, plus electronic and acoustic drums.

Engine Of Change

Part of the development for this version has been dedicated to revisiting Live’s foundational technology. This is an admirable move, as the temptation is always to prioritise shiny, new, marketing-friendly features. Both the audio and MIDI ‘engines’ have been subjected to thorough testing and tweaking, partly documented in two ‘fact sheets’ published by Ableton.

Rather than being technical white papers, the fact sheets are more like ‘best practice’ guides for those seeking neutral signal paths and rock-solid MIDI timing. There are some intriguing results showing the wide difference in timing accuracy between a selection of MIDI interfaces; now we just need someone to leak out what those interfaces were!

On the audio side, the mixer now features 64-bit summing, which eliminates rounding errors when combining signals. While most processing remains at a perfectly respectable (and less CPU-intensive) 32-bit, the EQ8 equaliser now has a double-precision (64-bit) mode, increasing quality and presumably increasing internal headroom to astronomical levels. In a similar vein, the Operator, Saturator and Dynamic Tube devices have gained a Hi-Quality mode, which reduces aliasing, presumably by increasing internal sample rates.

Drum Rack

The headline feature in Live 7 is the new Drum Rack. This takes the idea of Instrument Racks and adds some really useful drum-specific twists. Before we get stuck into what it does, let’s have a look at the working process it aims to improve.

If you’re programming drum patterns by sequencing MIDI, as opposed to using an instrument with a built-in step sequencer, you can take several different approaches. The simplest is to put your drum machine or sampler plug-in on a track, then record MIDI clips on that track. But when you’re arranging, you might want separate MIDI tracks for some sounds, so you create extra MIDI tracks and route them to the drum machine. When it comes to mixing, you might prefer each sound to come up on a different audio track, so you can treat each one separately. So you route the sounds to different tracks (if the plug-in supports this).

This works, but it’s rather complicated, and you can’t save this configuration as a patch for later use. Further, you’re limited by the number of channels you can route to, and you have loads of tracks cluttering the mixer. You could use an individual sampler on each track, which also lets you use a variety of sound sources for your drums, but it’s hard to treat such an arrangement of separate tracks as a single instrument like a drum machine.

Individual channels in the new Drum Rack can be ‘unfolded’ in the main mixer.

If this scenario is familiar to you, you’re going to like Drum Racks a lot. The Drum Rack gives you a single plug-in environment with 128 trigger pads, each of which can control a single drum sound. Each sound has a separate chain (signal path), but all the chains are mixed back together at the output of the instrument. A mixer track containing a Drum Rack has an expand button to the right of its name. Clicking this slides open a new nested mixer view, showing all the chains in the Rack as separate mixer channels. From here you can quickly set levels and pans, and drop audio effects on individual sounds. Clicking the name of a nested track displays that chain on its own in the device view, so you can quickly see or edit what devices are in the chain.

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