Ableton Live Instruments by Stephen Hedley
Last year Ableton released four new optional integrated software instruments to complement the existing 'Operator' FM synth. They are available for separate download or as part of the Ableton Suite, but can be tested in demo mode by any Live 7 user. Together with the new drum and instrument racks, they have been designed to provide a flexible set of sound generation tools at a considerably cheaper price than many commercially available instruments, but can they match up to these, and do they really provide any advantage over using free third party soft synths? I found out when I was upgraded to Live 7 last month...
Operator: Everyone who's used Live since version 5 has probably had a go with Operator at some point, so I'll be quick: it's very good. It was a sensible first choice for an instrument from Ableton, as it can handle subtractive synthesis as well as FM to a certain extent, and hence has a pretty varied range of sounds. It can be a little fiddly to program until you've learned your way around the GUI (though this is partly a consequence of the chinstrokey nature of FM synthesis), but it's intuitive enough to make that learning process easy - the same goes for all the other live instruments. Most of them are laid out with the synthesis sections around a shell which changes to show extra details of the section being edited... all within the usual Live editing pane. It's nice not having to deal with massive floating plugin windows or those arrays of horizontal sliders anymore!
Analog: Analog, the suite's classic two (and a half) oscillator subtractive synth seems like a bit of a white elephant given Operator's flexibility (the latter can deploy six oscillators in a subtractive patch!), but it's really a very different beast. I've just lost an MS2000 synth with a very similar architecture, so Analog was familiar ground - very intuitive and easy to program, but with enough flexibility to get unexpected sounds when they're needed. The oscillators (two standard square/sine/saw plus a noise) and the filters sound beautiful and definitely different to those on Operator - they give Analog a rawer sound than the other instruments, more redolent of hardware than software. This instrument has tremendous body, particularly if the unison control is turned up...
I would still have loved Analog even without this remarkably rich sound, though, just for being a nice simple subtractive synth. They're surprisingly difficult things to find in freeware terms, and I've come to rely on having a familiar 'classic' analogue-style synth around on which it's easy to knock up simple sounds quickly. The only real problem with Analog is that the nicer it sounds, the more CPU it devours... sometimes a complex patch will take the processor up to 40% on my 2ghz dual core machine, and even a simple patch with no unison normally requires more power than a single instance of the other Live instruments, so it's not something you'll just be layering willy-nilly in racks: but after all, that's what multitracking is for!
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Sampler: The Sampler instrument was an unexpected highlight for me - I wasn't expecting much from it beyond a multisampling version of the bundled Live Simpler, but like all the best samplers it's actually more like a synth in many ways, and has more modulation options than any of the other Live instruments, as well as more complex envelopes and a pair of very arousing morphing filters (I don't know why they aren't available for the other instruments, but they're lovely!). The factory presets were predictably impressive, but Sampler really started to come into its own when I decided to take multisamples of all the favourite patches on one of my hardware sound modules. It took no time at all, as I just had to record the notes into Live, put a warp marker in front of each one and then use the 'slice to Sampler on markers' command, followed by a bit of key note assigning within Sampler - and with the complex sound-mangling opportunities available, a rather tired set of sounds has become the basis for something much fresher. Sampler is much easier on the system than Analog (though large multisamples obviously take up a lot of RAM), and could become a mainstay synth of choice, as it really does push sampling past imitative generation into more creative areas.
Tension and Electric: The other two instruments in the suite didn't appeal to me quite so much. Tension is a string modelling synthesiser which can produce some lovely bowed, struck and plucked sounds and be pushed into more abstract territory, but when trying to achieve new sounds I quickly found my fascination turned to bafflement... the parameters are so unfamiliar, and it's hard to see how they interact, so I often ended up with settings which produced no sound at all. However, in the end I did make a few patches which would have been impossible to achieve with the other instruments. The factory presets cover orchestral strings, guitars, harps and the rest, and they sound good but I don't know how convincing they'd be in lieu of the real thing. Tension is a good instrument, but I'm not sure at whom it's aimed - experimenters with perseverence perhaps, or orchestral composers who are producing demos but don't have enough memory to run enormous multisampled string libraries?
The final instrument, Electric, is the least flexible of the suite, being a straight up electric piano simulation. There are plenty of parameters to tweak, but they're not going to take the sound very far from a fairly conventional e-piano sound: and since this isn't a sound I use very often, I haven't found very much use for Electric, and I suspect this may be the case with a lot of other Live users. But it certainly has a beautiful tone, and like all the other instruments it can very easily be squelched out of shape with effects.
In summary, then, Ableton's Suite comprises a very versatile set of tools with consistently intuitive and well-integrated interfaces. Operator, Analog and Sampler have now almost entirely replaced my bank of freeware plugins - it's simpler to work with them, and they sound better! My only real caveat is that most Live users will find some elements of the suite far less useful than others on an everyday basis - unless you work a great deal with electric piano and string sounds, Tension and Electric may gather dust... and if you do, you may be less likely to explore the 'synthier' instruments in the depth they deserve. So my advice is to give them all a good test session in demo mode, and if you can only afford to buy one, make it Sampler if you want to get your hands dirty, or Operator or Analog if you'd prefer a bit more instant gratification!
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