Ableton Live 11 Standard

Ableton Live is one of the most widely used production software, and you'll find it on almost every stage where there's also a computer. Artists love it for its unique architecture - it's easy to create a beat and a full song and manipulate it live thanks to an advanced sequencer and a range of creative tools. And of course, Live can also do everything a standard DAW can do, so you can record and mix an entire album on it. The software is available in Suite, Standard and Intro versions. Ableton Live 11 comes with many improvements and new practical features.

The new "Comping" feature will provide the ability to work with multiple audio or MIDI tracks simultaneously, for example, recording to multiple tracks and then mixing the individual parts to achieve the perfect result. Related to this is the ability to edit multiple interconnected tracks simultaneously.

Live 11 also now provides support for MIDI Polyphonic Expression, giving you full control over each individual note. The new Expression view allows you to edit the envelope, pitch and slide on a note-by-note basis, while the Wavetable, Sampler and Arpeggiator have been upgraded and equipped with MPE presets to give your sound a whole new range of possibilities.

In terms of instruments, Live 11 has been updated with a brand new Hybrid Reverb, which offers both convolution and algorithmic options, or a new type of Delay, the Spectral Resonator, for example, which works by breaking the sound into individual parts and then stretching, shifting and blurring the result by a frequency or note. The Spectral Time tool then allows you to take individual parts of a track and create a frequency delay, giving you a very interesting palette of reverbs and delays that can be transformed into extreme effects.

To develop a creative and experimental approach to music, there's also the Inspired by Nature collection - six instruments and effects, made in collaboration with Dillon Bastano, that use nature and physics as inspiration. Also available is the new PitchLoop89, created in collaboration with Robert Henke and based on the well-known Publison DHM 89 digital effects processor.

Of course, Ableton Live is not just a studio DAW. It's also used on stage, so Live 11 also adds a few features that are especially ideal for stage use. Most notable is LIVE Tempo: the feature is that Live 11 can "listen" to incoming audio and adjust its tempo accordingly, making it easy to jam and play with other artists. Marco Snapshots then allows you to save the state of each macro for later recall, or, for example, configure the racks to contain 1-16 macro parameters with random selection.

However you want to humanize your music, new features based on "randomization" are available. Note chance, for example, lets you randomly create new variations of your patterns based on a selected probability, and vary them over time. Velocity Chance, on the other hand, lets you choose a range over which the volume of each note will randomly vary - ensuring that the dynamics of your music will sound very natural.

New sounds are also available in Live 11: the Voice Box offers vocal samples, instruments and effect racks, while the Mood Reel and Drone Lab are ready to provide a wide variety of interesting effects. There are also new instruments - Upright Piano, Brass and String Quartets, all created in collaboration with the renowned Spitfire Audio.

It's also worth noting that several existing live instruments have been improved and the core library has been updated and expanded. The clip editing and CPU metering areas have also been improved. You can now track scales in the MIDI Live editor to see which notes "fit" a given key.

The Standard version includes a library of over 10 GB of audio tracks (over 1800), 36 audio effects, 6 virtual instruments or 13 MIDI effects. For a full comparison of each version, please visit the manufacturer's website.