On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Williams, Graham <gwilli...@eds.com> wrote: > The way I see it is, when you just use Abelton and a midi controller, > it's not really live. It's just pressing play and tweaking a few knobs.
That's overly arbitrary and quite unfair. There are many ways to use Ableton. As far as I know, most people use Ableton in a live situation in "Clip Mode", where each "clip" is a separate percussion loop, synth part, etc. Starting and stopping the clips is really no different than starting and stopping tracks on an MMT-8. You push a button or turn a knob on a controller instead of pushing one of the track buttons on an MMT-8 in order to "arrange" a track on-the-fly. Yes, you can just push play in Ableton and tweak a few knobs. But that's nothing new. You could load entire song sequences into an MMT-8, or any other sequencer, and push play and tweak a few knobs as well. There's really no reason to accuse Ableton of allowing some sort of cheating/simple performance that wasn't possible before. Anybody who wants to perform a canned set has been able to perform a canned set for a couple decades now. The truth is that Ableton is a great performance tool with many more possibilities than any old hardware sequencer + sampler combo. I think what you guys are criticizing is endemic to laptop performances in general and not Ableton per se. Yes laptops homogenize performances, and don't provide much in the way of appreciable performance for most audiences, what's going on back there is usually a mystery. The easy availability of Ableton, to anybody and their mom who wants to do a "liveset", perhaps makes it seem like anybody can do it. Personally I think using an MMT-8 was easier (the instructions are in the lid FFS!) and provided considerable oppurtunity to "cheat" as well, that's sequenced music for ya.
