Live is fast, fluid and flexible software for music creation and performance. It comes with all kinds of effects, instruments, sounds and creative tools – everything you need to make any kind of music.
What is Ableton Live?
Live is fast, fluid and flexible software for music creation and performance. It comes with all kinds of effects, instruments, sounds and creative tools – everything you need to make any kind of music. Create with Live With Live’s two modes of working, and a ton of creative tools and sounds with endless ways to combine them, the only limit on your music is your imagination.
Session View lets you sketch ideas fast: play, mix and match MIDI and audio loops of different lengths and tempos without ever stopping the music. The Arrangement View is where you organize music along a timeline and build sections of your song. Or record an arrangement directly from the Session View and improvise a finished composition.
Live has the tools to both capture your ideas and discover ones you never expected. Record hardware synths, software instruments, guitars, vocals or any audio from the real world. Combine the best of multiple audio or MIDI passes into your perfect take with Live’s new comping feature. Use MIDI Transformations to add variations to your patterns, or MIDI Generators to create new ideas that you can turn into your own. And find presets and sounds comparable to the ones you’re working on with Sound Similarity.
Live’s synthesizers offer a full spectrum of sound using wavetable, FM, subtractive, granular and analog- and physical-modeling architectures. A pair of sampling devices bring built-in slicing and warping, as well as multisampling and extensive sound-shaping capabilities. MIDI effects let you manipulate notes, and a rich range of clean to characterful audio effects help you tidy up your mix or make a creative mess. Live 12’s new devices include Roar, a multi-stage saturation and coloring effect, and Meld, an expressive 12-voice MPE-capable synthesizer with highly versatile twin oscillators.
Every edition of Live includes the Core Library, with vintage synths, analog drum machines, keys, multi-sampled drums, and much more. Live 12 adds Lost and Found, a collection of unique foley recordings and DIY multi-sampled instruments, Performance Pack, a collection of Max for Live devices designed for live performance, and two drum Packs from Sound Oracle that put the creative power of his authentic hip-hop and trap beats in your hands.
Perform with Live
age you can trigger, resequence and remix your music in real time. Use flexible MIDI mapping to set up almost any part of Live for hands-on tweaking with your controller. You can design your own unique combinations of instruments and effects, and use up to 16 Macro knobs to control any number of parameters. Find settings you like and save them as Macro snapshots to create builds, drops and instant variations during your performance.
Use Live to pull your show together. Control external hardware, integrate outboard effects or mixing desks. Improvise on your own, resample sounds, or process audio played by others, all in real-time. And Live can be a dynamic part of the band — with tempo following it can listen to incoming audio and adjust its tempo in real time. DJs can even use Live as a tempo-synced FX box.
Connect, extend and customize
Not only does Live come with everything you need, you can use it almost any way you want. Connect Live to any MIDI controller – even MPE-compatible hardware, which lets you add bends, slides and pressure to individual notes in a chord, make subtle expression variations and create evolving sonic textures with your hands.
Extend your setup using Ableton Link, technology built into Live that keeps multiple devices in perfect time over a network connection. It makes it easy to play alongside other music applications like Reason, Serato and an ever-growing number of iOS apps and Link-integrated hardware. And with Note, our iOS app designed for sketching musical ideas, you can start a track on the go and continue working on it in Live.
Even more imaginative ways to connect and customize are made possible through Max for Live, which brings the Max programming environment directly inside of Live. It lets you customize many of Live’s devices, build your own from scratch, and even hack how Live works. You can connect Live to lights, cameras, sensors, surround-sound setups and more. And explore a world of ready-made instruments, effects and tools produced by the Max for Live community.
