Pros and Cons of Albeton.

O

OriginalPromise

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I currently use FL12, but I'm looking into Ableton.
What are things that Ableton does better than FL?
Are the in-house instruments actually usable? (FL's instruments suck arse)
If any of you guys use Ableton as your main DAW, what are your thoughts on it? I saw the Diplo and Skrillex uses Ableton.
Cheers!
 
From what I've heard, you can't go wrong with Ableton.

I'm a happy Reason user as the program is extremely powerful on its own... just the main con being issues using some external hardware. Sometimes it's a huge pain getting shit to work.
 
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If you don't like sytrus and harmor, you are in a bad spot lol because those are on par with most of everything in the edm world.

Studio one/reason user myself, tried alotta daws. Ableton was alright, fl studio has the same stuff but different design.
I switched from fl because I liked other workflows better, ableton does the pattern approach, but has a flexible sequencer that doesn't play the whole bar if you only have a 16th at the front of the bar which I love about the other daws tbh.
 
Fl Studio's instruments are fine, they've been used on many a hit record. And like someone above me said, sytrus and harmor are on par with about everything else.
If you've been using fl studio for a while and have your own little tips & tricks, I wouldn't change daws. You'll find faults in whatever daws you use and they are all capable of creating inspiring music. So if changing means losing some of your progress, I wouldn't do it.

If not, I'd switch to Reason. It seems badass lol
 
I haven't used FL for ages but from what I remember each row in the arrangement window is a part that itself can use any instrument, and each instrument is routed individually to a mixer channel. To me that's a bit crazy.

In Live every instrument is a mixer channel, but you can route differently if you want. And an instrument can be any number of instruments. live channels aren't really simple channels. Live can do infinitely complex effects routing inside any channel, you don't have to create any additional FX channels to achieve that. For example you can have a sound go into 5 individual parallel effects, then have that go into a compressor, then into another parallel pair of effects, without having to create a dozen channels. And the resulting effect can be grouped and saved as a preset and dropped into any other channel. This, in my opinion, sets Live apart. There are things you can do in Live in a couple of clicks that take ages to set up in other DAWs. If you want to manually route to individual channels, of course, you can.

For me having everything bundled with the instrument makes far more sense (given how much CPU we have now) than having archaic mixer templates. For example I'd pick the reverb for the instrument, not have a reverb return for everything.

There are things Live misses out on though:

- You can't edit multiple midi parts at once.
- it doesn't do more than stereo, despite being adapted for Live use.
- Visibility of channels would be nice. Showing/hiding.
- Live's design philosophy is simplicity. As a result I think it avoids some of those functions that are very useful very rarely.
 
I use Live and love it. I used Reason previously - it was great but it wasn't what I was looking for.
Live does exactly what I need. I use Sylenth1 and Massive plus a bunch of hardware synths. MIDI works great. I can record midi from controller in Live, send it to a synth, record all the automation from it and then edit everything.
Effects in Live are fine but there are better out there so I don't use too many, same for instruments except for EQ and Sampler.
Keyboard short-cuts are great, once you master them you can work really fast or try different things very quickly. It has great remixing capabilities. Warping is really great.
It has other tools too - for example you can convert audio into MIDI then drop an instrument of your choice into it. You can get some crazy results from experimenting with it. Or you can chop a sample into smaller chunks and they get mapped to your controller keyboard - and it's done by pressing a keyboard short-cut or menu selection. Awesome stuff.
And it's simple. I enjoy it very much.
There may be some shortcomings but it does exactly what I need so they don't bother me.
My advice - think about what you need for making music and then decide on a DAW that does everything you need. Maybe FL is perfect for you.
 
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Stick with FL Studio. It's much more intricate than ableton, there are shitloads of controls for anything you can imagine, it has a better piano roll editor, better native tools and has a more flexible interface. True, half of Image Line's plugins are fluff, and it's all easy to dismiss due to the appearance, but Sytrus and Harmor are beasts, and will never have incompatibility issues. Not to mention tools like Fruity convolver, patcher, maximus, that as I said are native, so you basically already have everything you need. Except maybe an orchestra vst.
Ableton is usually hell for FL users unless they seriously commit to it.

Diplo and Skrillex use ableton because they like how it works, not because it's better. You shouldn't make such a blind choice because of them. Leave them, try ableton for yourself. My impression of it after years of using FL is that ableton is faster, but not as in depth. There's a certain number of things I could't do. One example is pitch bend individual notes. Can't do that. You can only automate the channel pitch in ableton. Pain in the arse when working with chords and you only want to modulate one note.
 
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Yep tried it and I had no idea wtf was going on....
I think I'm going to stick with FL and look for guitar, piano, and orchestra vsts.
I'll possibly just use Kontakt but we'll see..
 
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Pitch bend is a CC channel... you can't do it per note can you?

One thing that I like about Ableton is that the UIs not all skeuomorphic nonsense like every other DAW.
 
pitchbend is a channel level message not a continuous controller (even though the values are a continuous stream)

therefore if notes are on different channels and there are pitch bend messages in each channel then it can be done
 
That's right, it's something I love about ableton too. If FL looked like ableton it would gain much more popularity.

Let's face it, guys, FL is considered a toy because it looks like a toy.

Also because many people make these other stupid associations:

-It's beginner friendly, so it must be limited. That's the excuse, but it's really about status. If the target audience is inexperienced, obviously nobody wants to be that target audience. Ableton looks so complex, so if I use it I must be a genius...

-It's full otaku shit. God knows why. Must be shit.

-It looks messy. What this really means is "It doesn't match my OSX UI"

I could go on, but instead I'll be a fanboy and repeat how awesome and elaborate FL is for EDM and hip hip production.
 
MarcDHall said:
FL can't do pitch bend per note can it? IIRC it can do 'pitch fine tune' or something per note.
Click to expand...

It uses slide notes. If a note is set to slide, it becomes basic pitch envelope information about how an overlapping regular note of the same color will bend. Length of the slide note stands for length of the bend, and interval stands for... well, interval. But the actual sustain value is given by the length of the regular note, which must start before the slide, btw.

bandcoach said:
pitchbend is a channel level message not a continuous controller (even though the values are a continuous stream)

therefore if notes are on different channels and there are pitch bend messages in each channel then it can be done
Click to expand...

I didn't say it couldn't be done, I inferred it is much less tedious in FL than it is in ableton
 
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MarcDHall said:
FL can't do pitch bend per note can it? IIRC it can do 'pitch fine tune' or something per note.
Click to expand...

no daw using midi as the basis of its internal command set should be able to pitchbend individual notes on the same midi channel - that said, I do not know the ins and outs of either ableton or fl at the depth that such a question could be easily answered
 
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