Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke on Ableton (2016)
roberthenke.com
roberthenke.com
I think the way Ableton works is responsible for a good part of Live's success: Treat people with respect, as something valuable and unique, and they will create an awesome product. There's a lot of attention to detail, a lot of dedication towards the artists that use Live every day. I mean, in the end, Live should not only enable very different people to create their own unique sound and music, but also work reliably, on stage, in real time, on a desktop OS. There isn't much talk about that, but DAWs are pretty complex, tightly coupled pieces of software, due to those requirements. There's a lot of unsung heroes.
Anyway, I'm grateful for all the lovely people I met at Ableton, for what I learnt, on a technical and social level, and the trust that was put into me, by giving me quite a free hand over a few subsystems of the software.
They also have been very good at marketing.
When I was looking for a DAW a couple of years ago, the sheer amount of helpful content and tutorials stood out, both from the company and the community they built. I also like their creator-focused events (Loop) and the one-thing series which reminds me to try something new.
I found that most DAWs seem to be aimed at music creation instead. Camelot is close, but it can't take in a drum loop.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried (or put in effort into learning) many DAWs.
I get the whole Live fanboying. It's really great for open ended production - and perfectly suites the fluidity and separation of "audio finger painting" - and "song finishing".
I have many gripes about it - which both FL and Reaper address - but i highly recommend it as a DAW for people who want to "play"/"bash stuff out".
While Live certainly isn't perfect and there are other DAWs out there that are quite feature-rich and offer a different & interesting workflow, I keep coming back to Live as my main DAW. It's just so versatile. Keep up the great work, Ableton!
I'm not one who is focused on a DAW's particular weaknesses, rather, what makes each one unique from a functionality point of view.
I love Live, but that doesn't mean I hate FL Studio, Reason, Logic, Bitwig, VCV Rack, etc... In fact, as someone who spends more time in the DAW doing crazy and experimental sound design versus actual song production (blame my ADHD for that!), I enjoy some of the unique features of all the major DAWs.
Do you have a bandcamp or similar where you post your sound design experiments?
I have close to a thousand uncompleted Live projects sitting on my current laptop and old laptop, some are just little melodic loops, some are fully built out EDM/house/techno/electronic loops, some are just whatever happened when opening Ableton after a night of substance abuse (read: completely unorganized, unmixed, heavily distorted sonic chaos).
I can't arrange for shit, even though it's easy and straightforward. This is the one part of Live I don't like - you can just noodle around in clip view if you'd like, and unlike FL, Logic, Pro Tools, you aren't arranging from the start.
What I really enjoy doing is just being unfamiliar with a new plugin or piece of equipment and just noodling around with it creating happy accidents. Presets are cool if you want to just make music and not learn the plugin.
I would love if it there was a HN thread for DAW geeks with regular meetups or Zoom chats so we could all show off what little nuggets of production we've learned. There are so many things in Live that I don't use or even know exists (or how to use) that I wish someone could just show me, or vice versa.
...and while I loved Bitwig, and while Bitwig is vastly superior on a technical and workflow level, I had this epiphany about music making: It should be about making music.
It's not about having shortcuts or having better ways of doing things. The problem is that I ended up spending more time customising Bitwig and playing around with all the cool things it could do, that it kind of took the focus away from actually making music.
Basically, I'm the kind of person that likes to tinker and that's a huge distraction for me. I think what makes Ableton Live so valuable to me, is that there is no tinker.
It's the fact that it is so bare-bones in a lot of ways, that makes it work for me and allows me to focus on making music.
I think Live is geared to "do whatever you want, quickly" as opposed to Bitwig being "make any sort of noise you can imagine" or FL "write whatever you want, quickly".
All great tools, just depends on what you'd like to do, honestly. Nothing is inherently bad.
I think the problem is that there's too many different ways to do the same thing in FL Studio, whereas Ableton Live keeps it pretty simple in terms of workflow.
There's no session mode, but you get that sequencer instead. But to be fair, I never used session mode in Ableton, only arrangement.
But at the end of the day, DAWs are so personal. Everyone has a different preference for something different.
> So from the moment you met, did you know you wanted to work together and make music?
> GB: No! We hated each other!
> RH: We came from a very different background and, actually it’s a good question because later we figured out we have a lot of things in common. But on first sight we only saw the differences.
> RH: To paint a totally cliche picture, I was at that time the kind of totally lost goth punk person. And Gerhard pretty much looked the same as he did now [...] nice white scarf and a very stable demeanor. Like the type of people I hated at school.
> RH: Right after noticing that the other was there too, we ran up the auditorium to the exit and said: “What the fuck are you doing here?” And well the next thing you do is you decide you need to have some coffee to discuss that problem.
> Ok, so that’s basically where everything stems from. You became friends through mutual hatred of each other, and how did that become music? Like were you making electronic music already?
> RH: Yes.
And then they both went on to collaborate and create one of the most popular DAWs out there :)