Ableton Live 9 Explained

Want to know about Ableton Live 9 and Ableton Push?

Here’s an in-depth introduction to Ableton Live 9 and Push, featuring the people that know Live 9 better than anyone:

  • Ableton co-founder and CEO Gerhard Behles;
  • Ableton product specialist Dennis DeSantis; and a
  • Ableton’s Jesse Terry

It’s pretty long (49:09), but it’s full of deep info and some interesting facts, too. Did you know that there are 1.7 million Live users?

Check it out and let us know what you think!

16 thoughts on “Ableton Live 9 Explained

  1. I can not wait to get my hands on this controller. This looks so much better for making music than the current offerings with Live. I am really looking forward to this. Being able to browse instruments from the device is HUGE! They might just have solved the problem of using the mouse to start a track. The audio to MIDI feature will save a ton of time. Lets just hope its really stable and there are allot more tricks in the bag as far as updates go. Thanks Ableton!

  2. I have quite some mixed feelings here.

    Live 9 seems ok, if not a little underimpressive. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but it seems as if most changes are cosmetic without any specific new features. Sure; there’s the new slice to midi feature and we have rounded automation curves. But getting a few new instruments and effects would have been a very welcome surprise too…

    I think Push looks quite impressive, seems like a feature full MIDI instrument which allows for quite some creativity. But it also seems that the Live 9 release is more centered around Push than Live 9, which seems a bit odd.

    But its the rest around it which bothers me the most. The whole introduction is chaotic. First they added the new products and prices, all good. Then all of a sudden a forum post pops up stating that they had initially added the wrong prices but have now corrected that error.

    Some Live owners seem to have gotten an e-mail which provided them an upgrade discount, others haven’t. But in the overall current users cannot upgrade to Live 9 but they can upgrade their license (if applicable) which will then also entitle them to an upgrade to Live 9.

    It feels very flakey. Having Suite 8 myself I can see some pages telling me that an upgrade is becoming available, but there’s no way to get that right now. I can get extra Live 8 licenses though…. The whole thing doesn’t make much sense.

  3. As well as being underwhelmed by the new features after a three year wait from a once groundbreaking company , I’m bemused by the double irony of their new advertising showing loads of hardware . After years of promoting ITB instrument musicmaking and sample dragging/ warping and sample pack selling they’re now into hardware integration ? So where is the sysex implementation ?
    Live is the least hardware friendly DAW out there . Last I checked, even the M4L hardware editors need external sysex workarounds .

  4. For the people complaining about being underwhelmed… Did you not see the dude demonstrating polyphonic pitch recognition, convolution processing, tone row style MIDI processing with inversion, reverse, and stretching, speech to drums conversion, parallel bus compression, an EQ with state variable filters a spectrum analyser and 48db shelving, Max4Live as standard with Suite, automation in session clips, insert time as scene, super fast browser integration. Live has basically become the holy grail for electronic music production, live processing and performance and for experimental music of all kinds. Seriously I think you people are too dumb, insular and too blinded by your own small minded ideas that you literally are not able to understand the power of what has been added.

    Apologies for the rant SynthHead but man these people are dumb!

  5. I’m very impressed. This is the Ableton release aimed at traditional musicians and engineers. It looks to finally be a really sophisticated composition environment, not just an impressive performance environment for clip driven audio. And the controller seems pretty great too. I can see using it both for what it’s advertised as well as a really expressive way to play virtual instruments.

    1. I fail to see how they ripped off roger linn, the harmonic table was not his invention. In fact, there were many iPad apps that do the same thing befor mr. Linn came up with this (and I don’t know if you have been in a cave but I don’t think the “linnstrament” will ever see the light of day)

  6. THe time consolidate feature is going to be huge for me if it really lets me cut loops ACROSS multiple tracks while being able to keep them separate. I’ll believe it works when I see it. THe MAX live LFOs could be good for long overdue long filter sweeps of any sample or midi sound. THe sound-recognition is unexpected but cool.

    What I really need to know however, is….DID THEY ADD A NON-AUTOMATION-CHANGING MUTE BUTTON on each channel or at least the option to add it?

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