A couple of months ago, I purchased Ableton Live Intro. I figured $79 was worth the risk to give Live a good try, even with its entry-level limitations. Ended up producing a couple of tracks I liked, and really enjoyed the workflow. I have been a Reason user since V1, but I had been finding the physical device and patching metaphor more and more cumbersome as time went on. I mean, Reason makes SENSE in the way that physical hardware makes a certain sense, but it’s 2024 and I’ve been having to admit to myself that fast and unified workflows are more important than cleaving to a rack-based physical device framework.
Once I committed to really making tracks with it, Live has been a breath of fresh air. I found I was getting through to completing music and mixes much more quickly, despite being a Live n00b and a Reason ninja.
Fast-forward a few weeks and I upgraded to Live Standard. I immediately started pulling in fewer and fewer third-party VSTs or instances of the Reason rack because I was finding more and more of what I needed in the Standard Live devices. Also, the additional content packs were a fantastic, well-integrated bonus.
Fast-forward another few weeks and I broke down and upgraded to Live Suite. Good GRIEF there is so much here! And it’s GOOD. Like, REALLY good. I have multi-band coloring EQ VST that I can likely leave closed now because of Roar. I can probably leave Blamsoft’s eXpanse synth closed now because of all the synth options in Live Suite. That probably goes for The Legend as well. Serum … well, that’s just kind of an industry standard that isn’t going away any time soon, but I feel like I do have many first-line-of-defense options directly in Live, even so. I could go on at length about Suite’s alternatives for many of my go-to plugins, but you get the idea.
So what do I intend to do with it? Produce music, of course. But more specifically, I’m digging hard into making some nasty bass house tracks, likely an EP or more worth of original tracks. My warmups with Ableton the past couple of months have been a mixed bag of dusty lo-fi, nu-disco, electronic pop, tech house and more to get my bearings. Now I have some harder bass house tracks in development, and I feel very productive in getting those harder hitting and bouncy, catchy vibes I’m going for.
tl;dr - I have migrated from Reason to Ableton Live Suite in order to up my production game with a focus on putting out a collection of nasty bass house tracks over the next few months.
It’s the sound of Cyborg (van Damme movie) and Robocop 2. (Got a RAM card with 1600 great sounds on it). Great filter. So clean but noisy lofi when played (I can’t believe it’s not 8 bit). Enter Bach scores with the multi part multi timbral step sequencer. Make Neo-Retro-Neo EBM (freely tunable, at least relatively, all keys in an octave, great early 90s stereo FX, great digitally sounding bases with waveform samples; sequencer also has pattern and live record functionality). Best 150 EUR ever spent on an instrument. My new first love (rewriting old memories to include it in an alternative timeline). 
:dizzy:
