Ableton Live 12

Scenes are basically Blocks, though. What’s missing is linked / alias / shared clips, i.e. the feature where adjusting one clip adjusts all the copies simultaneously.

I even made a video about it recently:

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Oh yes… Capture has come to life with Move’s release, everyone seems to have had a Capture realisation. I hardly use the Rec button on my Move, Push, or in Note now.

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I never use the rec button in live. Capture has been one of the biggest things in live for several years now.

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Sure, but there are some nice key features from Blocks that I miss in Ableton’s Arrangement view.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked in Reason. I used both Reason and Live from their respective v1.0’s, but switched over fully to Live at some point. So, I might not be remembering correct Reason terminology. Anyways…

I like their layered view way of working in the timeline. You can lay down Blocks and quickly paint them in, rearrange them quickly, etc. But still have an “overlay” of regular song content on top for variation, longer sections that might overlap 2-3 different Blocks, etc.

From the Reason article on Blocks:
“A nice way of working with Block Automation Clips and Song Clips is to first create a couple of Blocks in the Block View and then arrange Block Automation Clips in the Song View. When you have arranged your Block Automation Clips, you could record a couple of shorter Song Clips with variations in the Song View. Then, place these short clips at desired positions in the arrangement to create nice variations in the song, according to the example below:”

Just to say again, I love Live’s Session view. And I like Arrangement view. I’ve made many complete songs. I’m not struggling that much, but, as with anything, there’s always room for improvement in Live’s Arrangement view. I think something like Blocks - in Arrangement view - could be beneficial to completing even more songs, that’s all.

I’m gonna drop it now though. If anyone’s interested I’d suggest watching a couple vids on Reason’s Blocks features as somebody out there in YT-land explains it better than me, no doubt.

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This is exactly what I envision for “scenes in the arranger” – imagine those block labels at the top are scene names, and instead of going into block edit mode to edit them, you just edit them in Session view because they are live-linked to your regular scenes. And the clips layered over it are regular, static clips (although to @antic604’s point, they could be linked to individual Session clips from other scenes as well).

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Yeah, I’d love to see what the minds at Ableton could do with this if they picked up the Blocks idea and ran with it.

If they implemented it similar to Reason Studios (I have to edit myself from still saying Propellerheads), and it remains an extra “bonus” feature of a sequencer, if someone didn’t want to work with Blocks, they wouldn’t have to. But it’s still there in case it does click with an individual’s mind and songwriting workflow. No one would be forced into a new workflow or anything.

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So you jam in Abelton and then you export all stems for working on in Cubase, is that right?

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It depends.
Until this autumn (when I bought Push3) my main DAW was Cubase with Maschine. I used Ableton occasionally.
Sometimes I export stems, sometimes I export midi tracks. Couple of times I tried to use Blue Cat Connector.
Now I started to use more Ableton plugins, and I think I’ll use arrangement view to prepare mix ready stems for Cubase instead than clips or midi tracks.

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interesting …
I am experimenting with stem import into Cubase, but I have problems with the tempo detection in Cubase, so my stems have different lengths, which then have to be adjusted…

maybe I am doing sth wrong

Out of curiosity - what’s the benefit of moving the stems from Live to Cubase for mixing? Better plugins? Better workflow? Change of environment that encourages different “thinking”?

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I have students who are working exclusively with Cubase, so I thought it might be a good thing to get my Cubase game up.

However, I worked such a long time with Live that it’s more a drag than a help.For mixing and mastering purposes Cubase might be a little better.

But I am so used to Session view for brainstorming ideas, as a notebook and as a looping device that Cubase alone is not sufficient for me

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Thanks! :slight_smile:

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I usually know the exact tempo of my stems and have never used Cubase detector :slight_smile:

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Apart from mixing, Cubase still has better midi editing tools. Logical Editor is the thing. And drum maps, and expression maps.
It would be more difficult to write orchestral thing or metal track in Ableton. Not impossible, but not so convenient.

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Workflow.
I’m ready to use it for Control Room alone, but in addition to that Cubase mixer is just ages ahead of Live.
Ableton just added normal mixer in arrangement view, but that’s still pretty basic.

UPD: one of my projects mixer

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So how satisfied are you working with Blue Cat Connector?
Does it speed up your workflow?

I bought it to experiment with Bitwig Grid in Cubase, but didn’t touch that a lot.
And later I tried to integrate Ableton with Cubase.
It looks promising, it was stable, but since then I didn’t have use cases for this combo, so I didn’t try it in anything serious apart from a couple of experiments. Can’t say how it affects my workflow.

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I’ve feeling they’ll expand it soon(ish). I mean they’ve not gotten rid of this “-ShowDeviceSlots” options.txt hack, so there must be a reason to keep the code there, no? :pray:

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I haven’t even heard about this hack :slight_smile:

But things are simple. Cubase has been my first and most used DAW for the last decade. I like it, but it’s not very convenient for experiments and loop-based things. I tried Maschine, Bitwig and Live.
Maschine’s workflow is still the best for me, but Maschine stagnates and I don’t trust NI.
Live with Push is close to that. And Live offers much more than Maschine. So that’s my current take on that sketching workflow.
But I still will use Cubase for mixing just because I got used to it.

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I like the new(ish) CC Control device, but I’d like to have bi-directional control.

So when I move a knob on my hardware, I want the dial in the CC Control device that is set to send to the same midi cc to follow, so I can record directly into an automation lane (instead of in a clip envelope).

Anyone know how to achieve that?

The CC_map8 m4l device does something similar, but has its own issues (no renaming and the dials don’t show up on Push as controllable parameters).