I recently got the live lite thing that ableton was giving away if you used soundcloud. generous offer and always wanted to mess around with it. opened it up and saw how different it is from my current DAW Logic. then I started playing with it and of course there is a learning curve and I had to look through the help section, google stuff, go on youtube, etc...

after awhile I started to wonder if there was any point to this exercise. I am really comfortable with Logic and I couldn't seem to find anything on Live that I couldn't do with Logic. Not that Live isn't good, but what would be the point in learning a whole new DAW. I don't play live, I'm not a DJ,...

i haven't trashed it as I was wondering if you guys could point out something interesting that I may not be able to do with Logic. I like to do music with live audio and manipulated samples and use a bunch of synths, drum machines etc.. kind of psych pop (if the genre means anything at all, which I kind of doubt). thanks in advance.

I have Live Lite and Logic.
I love Logic for the music making, not only because of the limitation of Live Lite...only 4midi4audio tracks, but it's simply better for music production.
Not a little better, but a lot.
I do use Live for doing sound design though, and that's because I like the levels better. I can keep my sound levels at a more stable level in Live than in Logic. If you don't do sound design, than the only other reason would be if you enjoy one or some of the included instruments, or Live Packs.
Otherwise, don't bother with it.

edit: Another reason to use Live, might be if your playing live for stage use...like that. It is better for that, from what I've heard and read.

Instrument & effect racks, session view, and clip automation

Drop some clips into session view, add some effects with midi mapping, and play with your sounds. It's a lot of fun.

I've been using Live for a few years and just recently added Logic to the mix. I love Logic for laying out sounds and detailed mixing. It's zooming beats Live big time and is critical for dealing with lots of tracks and clips. Live is definitely better for keeping a vibe going, it's all about recording music and manipulating it on the fly.

Personally now I like to do sound design in Live, export my audio and drop it into Logic. Also I do basic composition in Logic typically, bounce the audio to use in Live to really twist it up.

There are 'getting started' videos and so on, here:

http://www.ableton.com/getting-started

The APC40 and Launchpad integration seems absolutely incredible. That said, I'm right there with you and have never really gotten my head around Live. I think that people who start out with Live love its interface but for me, a long time Cubase user, it's like staring at math problems that don't make sense all.

+1
exactly because of this. In one word: modular
Just start with a clip (small piece of idea) and apply your second thoughts.
In other DAWs I always felt like you have to know what you are doing.
Here I was able to start right away.
And - you already heard about it - Live is made for playing Live.

Watch this video, one of the most impressing features are in there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8iYD0ZTV5c

But I'm not sure about the instrument & effect quality.
Don't use any internal instrument and effect yet.
Just want to do research about their quality (effects vs. 3rd party)

Just to name FabFilter Pro-Q: it has the most versatile user interface on market but I ask myself if I really need it (in the end you (should) apply it with the help of your ears!) and it doesn't fit in the ableton skin. Same thing with FF compressor, setting Ableton's built in one up is far easier an looks nicer. Or the Uhbik stuff I just tested, all nicer looking with more presets but I'm lost what I really need :p
Last edited by phazedown on Sun Apr 15, 2012 10:55 pm; edited 3 times in total

Live is a DAW it is a sound design platform, it is a musical performance instrument it is much more than a DAW

Live's standout feature for me is the session view. You need to forget the linear recording scheme you're used to and start to work with it. You'll find that it's incredibly easy to get something going, because you'll be looping away in no time. I can do relatively complex songs in three or four hours ever since getting Live.

It's the best bridge between improvisation and composition that I've encountered (check out what Bugge Wesseltoft does with Live, for example). There's a danger there of tending to rely on loops, and tying your music to the grid too much. But once you're comfortable with the workflow, you'll find that there are many creative ways in Live to subvert that.

If you don't have a problem with Logic, then don't switch.

Ableton doesn't have a magic button that makes it sound better or have different features.

The only difference between Logic and Ableton is how you access features and apply them to your music.

Logic is a fantastic program and so is Ableton. Both are used widely by professionals across the globe.

Stick with what you know in my opinion. You already know Logic, there is no learning curve to conquer, or manuals to read. You know what you're doing, so you can concentrate on being creative.

Switching DAWs means re-learning basic things, and just getting the interface down. After that you have to figure out how to do those soft touches that used to come easy to you, and a year or so later you're at the same level you were in Logic.

Stick to Logic. absolutely no reason to switch.

... which might just be what the doctor ordered. Switching things up, challenging yourself to enter some new areas, leaving your comfort zone in order to avoid getting stuck in a rut. This is precisely what happened when I switched over to Live from Cubase and FLStudio.

Spend some time with it, at least enough to get over that "huh?" phase.

Other people have mentioned the Session View, which is the main difference between Live and most other DAWs. If treating audio on the fly is your bag, then I'd check out the tutorial videos on the interweb on using session view with 'dummy clips' - by switching between scenes and clips in the session view you can, on the fly, change how the audio is being processed and how control interfaces manipulate the samples. Think of each dummy clip as a different audio-processing patch which can contain recorded MIDI automation, you can fade in an effect as it switches in. Trigger a bunch of them at once in one scene, and you can alter how a collection of audio tracks are processed.

You can, in principle, do this kind of thing in Logic but it takes a lot of hacking in the environment. It's generally much simpler in Live. Using Live in this way you can produce and record treated audio which you can either pull into finished recordings within Live or pass them as samples to Logic for mixing.

Some videos on dummy clips are here: http://vimeo.com/user375586/videos/page:3/sort:newest

I was going to put in a link to the Covert Operators site, but it now seems to have been hijacked by diet-pill scammers.

My DAWs are Live (for my main sequencer), eXT, and Audiomulch v1. I also like to use offline effects programs like CDP, Mammut, FScape (I mainly use Audiomulch as a live effects box) and I barely touch VST effects other than the basics like compression and EQ. I love using a few different things and bouncing between them as I find different workflows (and indeed workarounds) inspiring, and working in different programs with different limitations gives me loads of different ideas. I like to think the ragbag selection of stuff with no common thread in my Soundcloud is testament to this. Or maybe it's just the sound of someone who can't settle .
Most of the things I've done come from being inspired by some workflow function in one program or another.

Live is the world's most fully featured sampler. Even the lite edition has some great features. Why wouldn't you want to learn it?

Shame about the Covert Operators. They had some great stuff.

FWIW, as a 15+ year Cubase user, I was able to start writing music within 30 minutes of using Logic 8. Maschine took me a little longer than that but it's still a lot more intuitive to me than Live is.

Yeah, I can dig that and would probably take it to heart if I had more time for music.