why is abelton the daw used by the best electronic musicians ?

dmajor100

dmajor100

Active member
glitch mob,daft punk and dead mau5 all use abelton and I'm just curious if abelton is the stable for electronic music and if its abilities some how cater better for them.I know that doing live shows is a certain benefit with the controllers used for abelton but in what kinda detail can abelton do to my music that logic can not? Is it because people record there effects and scenes live that make there songs more fluent in electronic music or what? I'm starting to move to dub step and glitch music and still have not found a easier way of making my music flow like the mentioned producers do so kinda looking for advice.
 
I'm just guessing here, but aren't they sponsored by Ableton? I mean, if you look at rock/heavy metal, there are tons of musicians sponsored by manufacturers.
 
dmajor100 said:
glitch mob,daft punk and dead mau5 all use abelton and I'm just curious if abelton is the stable for electronic music and if its abilities some how cater better for them.I know that doing live shows is a certain benefit with the controllers used for abelton but in what kinda detail can abelton do to my music that logic can not? Is it because people record there effects and scenes live that make there songs more fluent in electronic music or what? I'm starting to move to dub step and glitch music and still have not found a easier way of making my music flow like the mentioned producers do so kinda looking for advice.
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Silly question. What's the "best" for you might not be the "best" for someone else. So that's very subjective by itself.

Also, they use Ableton because they decided that it fitted their way of working. Just like anyone else choosing a particular DAW.

It's simple really.
 
As I've said to many others:
It's not what software on the computer that counts, but the person sitting in front of it.

There are a lot of other famous and legendary producers that use other softwares.
 
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I think that it has to do with the "racks". The drum racks, instrument effects racks and instrument racks make it easy to experiment and create especially when using Macro's. Also the stock effects and some of the stock synths/instruments that come with the Suite version are pretty beast when compared to other DAW's. The mixer routing is very straightforward and simple in Ableton... It is truly about workflow in the end. I can't decide which i prefer out of FL and Ableton so i just switch back and forth. Last month i was all about FL 11. Now with Ableton's 9.1 update, which supports dual screens, I'm using Ableton. Next week i might be back to FL. They can both do exactly the same thing, it's just the processes and workflow that differ. People say pick one and stick to it. I say pick as many as you like and learn them.
 
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The "scene" paradigm allows them to improvise in live situations. The software started out as a DJing tool (hence the name "Live"), and only expanded from there to become a full DAW.

EDM musicians are often lacking in some music theory when compared against "traditional" musicians. Detailed EDM songs are usually put together via fancy automation, effects, and tone rather than by impressive use of composition guidelines.

A good way to demonstrate this dichotomy would be to download a ".mid" file of an EDM hit and compare it against the ".mid" file of a top song in another genre. You might notice that, devoid of any special effects and automation, EDM music is extremely bland and suffers much worse from the ".mid" conversion (Play the below ".mid" of a Skrillex song!). ;)



Live is built for EDM musicians, with a workflow targeted at the things that make electronic music interesting: theme variation and automation. However, FL Studio and Reason also fall into this camp of DAWs which are targeted firmly at EDM producers.
You mentioned that DeadMau5 uses Live, but he got into making EDM through FL Studio (DeadMau5 (Joel Zimmerman) - Power Users List) and likely still uses it for production.
In the linked article, he says:

DeadMau5 said:
I just get in my little mental zone, and start blindly plotting away melodies with the 3xosc and a little effects here and there and see what I can come up with on the fly and when it starts to work melodically for me
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As I mentioned earlier, Live supports EDM producers who use this "random experimentation" workflow to come up with new song ideas. However, FL Studio has caught on with a new performance mode in recent versions which provides much of the same benefit.

Deadmau5 specifically also uses Cubase in addition to Live and FL Studio (united we fail, sometimes the most obvious solution...), so maybe there's a bit of error in your perception of the situation:

DeadMau5 said:
Then you got Cubase, which i also use… which isnt live… or anything like it… but the sonic possibilities and flexibility has always appealed to me more (along with MIDI to ext gear that actually ****ing works).
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-Ki
Salem Beats
 
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I think it has alot to do with scenes and clips. At least it does for me.

I used to use cubase a while ago. However I found that while the linear approach of what in ableton is called the arrangement view is great for arranging, and in general developing your themes over time, it falls short when playing with parts, or scenes as they're called. In ableton is just so easy to play around with a part, drop a clip, pull another one in, just see where it leads. To me the ease with which you can experiment is the main pro of ableton.

I suspect that is the case for those of the famous producers you mentioned that use live as a composing tool, and not just for live performances, it will be much the same.
 
I've just seen a bunch of demonstrations on live and it does seem suited for producers that wanna just throw down a lot of ideas and then throw them together in different ways or even record your whole session live for in the moment kinda way like djs do. i guess for me i do struggle with some arrangement and now barely getting gin to dub step and electronic music i was just curious if ableton would be best for me. having used a lot of softwares (logic express,pro tools,reason,machine,sonar) and i see that they are much more linear and kinda bring you to have to think about arrangement before hand and then setting it up which might kill the moment per say. To me personally i think pro tools is great for live band recordings and general stuff while logic is very midi friendly great for beat making so I'm now curious how can abelton push my workflow different. I am also just trying to just learn different softwares for callab reasons and who knows when it might come in handy cause usually knowledge is power and the more i know could lead to a job placement or something.
 
Live is not like anything out there.... well, it's like a giant MPC in functionality, but the way you go about doing what you do... way different. But it allows the electronic musician to mix & match so many different musical ideas.

I use to think guys like Aswell & Ellis were on the cutting edge, but these guys (madeon, conte) took that sht to another level. I don't normally listen to this kind of music, I came across it researching the launchpads. They rock & the videos should help you see the possibilities. Not just launching samples, but the melodic playing as well.

For $99 I'd get a launchpad mini, which comes with a free copy of Live 9 Intro. 16 tracks, 8 scenes.... that's some powerful stuff. You can create unlimited possibilities. if you find out you need more, the upgrade pricing isn't bad.
 
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looks like ableton has a pretty set way of glitching not saying that no other daw can but abelton looks like its a more intuitive workflow of dub step and electronic stuff. Having a very good controller is a must ill admit so just for the basic live with the launchpad looks like a killer deal. Ill admit the machine studio looks like it has a lot of similar features and the sampling looks even better than before but i think the maschine would be more for just sampled music rather than full blown electronic sessions at least for me.
 
OldBoy Sosa said:
i just got ableton live. how is it working for you now?
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barely testing the water today with the free trial i need to watch a ton of youtube to even get what this program can do and whats the best way to use it for my creativity. i could use the session page but it kinda throws me off cause I'm used to logics view and just duplicating plug ins on the go and browsing for patches. Im not completely sold on it was of yet but i gotta do my first real session to see if i can flow threw it and use its features. The A & b switching on tracks looks awesome and i know logic or any other daw has this
 
thunderkyss said:
For $99 I'd get a launchpad mini, which comes with a free copy of Live 9 Intro. 16 tracks, 8 scenes.... that's some powerful stuff. You can create unlimited possibilities. if you find out you need more, the upgrade pricing isn't bad.
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Correction. The Launchpadmini comes with Live Lite 9. Eight tracks, eight scenes.
 
so far I've seen that abelton can be far more effective for dub step editing and glitching up stuff for glitch hop and just overall sound design. The a &b slider is something that I've seen no other daw have and sure there are some cool tricks for this
 
Because Ableton is built towards Live performance... where you trigger things, loop/mangle entire songs and sections.. etc. That's just what it does man.

Not like it's impossible.. but it would be extremely extremely difficult to do what they do on a linear/traditional DAW. There's a few things Ableton does with ease that really would be impossible to do in a linear DAW, b/c it just isnt setup for that. Traditional DAWs are setup for recording and editing in the studio. Ableton is setup for performance.
 
oh okay. What if I wanted to blend dub step with hip hop? How is Ableton's drums compared to Reason/Cubase/ etc?
 
Reason has a collection of sweet drums right off the bat, but that being said ableton isn't bad and you can easily beef anything you have up. Not to mention all the free stuff you get on the ableton site right after you buy it. Now, don't get me twisted but I wouldn't say every big EDM artist uses Ableton. Deadmau5 uses FL Studio, I think Avicii is also on FL. Hey, FL even uses the launchpad now and it has tones of free sh*t if you buy the signature bundle. That's still less than a quarter of Ableton's price here in SA. The best thing though is that FL accepts both 32 and 64 bit plugins without the need to get some vst bridge. It also comes with an arsenal of effects and a mad amount of instruments like harmor and sytrus(easily comparable to fm8, I just find it more technical).
 
Because it has SOOO many features. I think Porter Robinson and Avicii are some of the best in the world and they use FL so I cant really say people use Ableton because its better. Buuuuut I do prefer it. Its so quick and easy (once you learn everything of course) no BS to it. Whatever you want done you can do super quick. Everything is organized and layed out so nice that its very user friendly when laying out and organizing all your channels. I also feel the overall sound of Ableton is better than in FL. I dont know about Reason or Logic though.
 
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