after everything else, who likes Live 5?

[dgkenney]

How do you use it for guitar tracks, Dave? I have had no success recording guitar with L4 or L5.

Best,
Gordon

I'm not Dave, but what troubles are you having with guitar recording and Live, Gordon? I absolutely love Live for guitar recording to the point that I don't even fire up SX3 for any kind of tracking any more. On bigger projects I may wind up rewiring Live into Cubase for final mixing or mastering but Live gives me such flexiblity for composition and arranging. Like bluedad it has become one of my two go-to applications.

Clearly it is not as feature rich for midi as Cubase but my midi need are pretty modest. For audio it is incredible - comping, rearranging, warping - it's flexibility and ease of routing are the best.

Let me know if you have any particulars that I can answer for you.

Dan

[iskandar]

the interface needs to be worked on, being able to see the session faders under the arrange page would make it so much easier/or both views open at the same time..and it does tend to carry a lot of bugs, their whole M-audio bundles are a bit crap as most people have to return them due to constant crashing.

[Chuck E. Jesus]

It makes an impressive show pony, but quickly falls to bits (workflow-wise) when asked to do hard work. Of course, just my personal experience only.

now from you, who makes a strong point, i would ask: at what point does it fall apart? from looking at the way it works, it seems Live 5 is good for coming up with riffs and such, but i'm curious how it handles arranging complete "songs", is this what you are talking about? it seems so far that people are making little blurbs about Live 5, hard to understand what they mean in "real world" use....


regardless, thanks for all anwswers, it helps lots.....

[sweet_trip]

I adore Live, but to me it is not the production tool I wish it was. For live situation it is super amazing and you can get very creative with it. I agree the MIDI side of it is very simplistic, and there are many other features I wish it had. Workflow is also a bit simplistic I think; and the becoming slow after a period of time doesn't help either.

Anyway, there are many thing I dislike about it, but, to contradict myself, I believe that everyone should own Live, because it truly rocks for live work...

[sweet_trip]

Plus as a DJ tool it is awesome too. I was playing with it last night with mp3s and doing mixes and stuff and I was really impress at the possibilities... I still need to fine tune my skills in that area, but man, Live + Traktor = Digi-DJ rig from heaven!

[Chuck E. Jesus]

It's very good on the composing side. I have a combination of hard and soft synths and for prototyping ideas it's an unbeatable tool - quickly recording 16 bars of something and then being able to loop that while you arse about with other ideas .. recording maybe 4 or 5 different takes of the same thing as individual loops and then using the one(s) you like the best .. that's where it excels.

The beatmapping is very strong - for example, prior to getting it connected to midi, I recorded (audio) an arpeggio from a hardware synth that was *close* to the tempo I needed, then used Live's "warp markers" to bring it into perfect sync. You'd never know the difference, it sounds like it was recorded that way.

On the downside, I'd say it's a bit weak when it comes to managing large sections of audio. There's no real in-place audio editing (compared to, say, Sonar), but if you're building things up from lots of loops then you can do a lot of the required editing in the loops themselves.

I have a real love/hate relationship with the automation system. By far the biggest problem is that it can only 'see' the first 128 parameters of any VST, so if the parameter you want to draw an envelope for or assign a hardware knob to isn't in the first 128 parameters, you are shit out of luck. Ableton have made it clear they have no plans to address this limitation. However, if you own (or buy) EnergyXT you can use eXT as a VST shell to map the VST parameters you need into 128 parameters that Live can see. It's a kludge, but it works.

The last thing I'll say is - a few months ago I sold Live 5 because I thought I was better off using Sonar. About two weeks later, I bought another Live 5 license because I missed it so much, and that exercise served to make me appreciate just how good and powerful an application it is. I won't sell it again.

G.

great post, lots of usefull info....i didn't get that whole automatiom blurb, but i don't know much about energy XT, besides it is modular midi and such.....

[Chuck E. Jesus]

How do you use it for guitar tracks, Dave? I have had no success recording guitar with L4 or L5.

Best,
Gordon

Clearly it is not as feature rich for midi as Cubase but my midi need are pretty modest. For audio it is incredible - comping, rearranging, warping - it's flexibility and ease of routing are the best.

Let me know if you have any particulars that I can answer for you.

Dan

what does cubase have that's so great as far as midi/audio? they have one of the worst sites as far as presenting their features, but lot of people use Cubase, it's just hard to use cubase as a standard w/o knowing what it is that is so great....are they more in line with logic/performer type of working? for that matter, what is bad about Live 5 that is better with cubase (y'all call it SX*)


i gotta go watch Robot Chicken....

[machinesworking]

I use Live and Logic, I could easily switch out Logic at any given moment with another DAW, be it Digital Performer, SX3, or even Sonar, but Live has no competition.
Live is only recently more than a very advanced audio manipulating tool, and as a live performance tool, I can't see any contenders?

The main drawback is the 128 automation parameters for any given soft synth or FX..... The MIDI isn't on par with the big four either, but besides that, the audio is in some ways above them.

[soma]

Just bought it this week already made 3 songs

[Chuck E. Jesus]

The main drawback is the 128 automation parameters for any given soft synth or FX.....

what does this mean? i really don't get this...

[sweet_trip]

all automateable parameters in a plugin are available on all the major hosts like Cubase, Logic, Sonar. on the other hand Live limits this to the first 128 parameters on the list of any give plugin.
For the most part this doesn't affect most plugins, but it's annoying to me in particular because some of the plugin I use alot, DFX Geometer, Waldorf Attack, Voyager VST, have more than 128 parameters that can be tweak by automation. Not that i will be using more than 128 parameters at once, but some crucial parameters are usually on the list past the 128 numbers, so i'm not able to automate those...

[Chuck E. Jesus]

all automateable parameters in a plugin are available on all the major hosts like Cubase, Logic, Sonar. on the other hand Live limits this to the first 128 parameters on the list of any give plugin.
For the most part this doesn't affect most plugins, but it's annoying to me in particular because some of the plugin I use alot, DFX Geometer, Waldorf Attack, Voyager VST, have more than 128 parameters that can be tweak by automation. Not that i will be using more than 128 parameters at once, but some crucial parameters are usually on the list past the 128 numbers, so i'm not able to automate those...

i thought the midi parameter was locked at 128 (0-127) as possible, and as values, besides the pitch bend (using 128 squared if memory serves)....they don't have a way to split the parameters into more than one midi channel?

[sweet_trip]

well VST automation and MIDI automation are different things. the MIDI limit is 128 for sure, but in VST it is limitless, or that's how it should be anyway. VST automation is when you record the movement a knob or slider in the GUI, and you should be able to do this to every parameter that allows you to do this. If the VST has one billion knobs and record movements of everysingle one of them, then all those knobs will be automated. but if you wanted to assign MIDI CC numbers/controllers to those knobs or slider, then you only have 128 options, because that's what MIDI allows.

[sweet_trip]

i should say that the number of parameters that can be automated in a VST depends on the developer and what he/she things should be automated. a good example *was* the Glitch VST plugin v1.3.0.2 which allowed automation of most parameters but the 'mute' and 'solo' settings. the developer updated Glitch to v1.3.0.3 and it now allows automation of mute and solo

[Chuck E. Jesus]

well VST automation and MIDI automation are different things. the MIDI limit is 128 for sure, but in VST it is limitless, or that's how it should be anyway. VST automation is when you record the movement a knob or slider in the GUI, and you should be able to do this to every parameter that allows you to do this. If the VST has one billion knobs and record movements of everysingle one of them, then all those knobs will be automated. but if you wanted to assign MIDI CC numbers/controllers to those knobs or slider, then you only have 128 options, because that's what MIDI allows.

thanks, good post...do you know how midi CC's are interpolated within vsts? is it dependant on the creator of said vst, or is there a standard? i have noticed some don't even track smooth within themselves.....

EDIT: isaid something about splitting midi CC's into more than one cham\nnel, that was wrong, i meant using the midi standard to relay greater than X (how many bits is 0-127?) info, like how do midi knob controllers do their stuff?