“If you look at jungle, D&B, 2-step, garage and dubstep over a period of 15 years there’s all these common sounds through all of them and there’s a hi-hat you could probably find that would fit across all of those styles,” Wood says. What we found is that certain sounds stick around over a long time – the genre might change, but the sounds or the elements that you actually need to build those styles usually stay quite similar.”Ībleton spent about a year and a half figuring out what the character of each curated pack was going to be, using playlists of classic and modern tracks as ‘mood boards’ to help draw links between them.
“So rather than making a kit that’s aimed at one genre – minimal tech-house – we looked at what sounds get used a lot and tried to find ways to make sure that a pack represents the kind of sounds people needed. “We actually tried to stay away from genre because what we find is more important is the sonic theme than the genre,” Dylan Wood, Ableton’s Product Owner for Sound, tells me. Ableton understands that a lot of loose, jazzy deep house shares the same musical DNA as sampled, MPC-crafted hip-hop, so it’s grouped together drum kits, Operator, Analog and Wavetable synth presets, effect racks, samples for Simpler and MIDI loops that could feasibly be used for both genres. While buying a deep house sample pack will most likely give you a set of pre-prepared sounds or loops that you’d probably only use for making deep house, these six packs act as a much looser starting point. Downloading them and adding to your library is as easy as clicking “Packs” in Live 10’s browser and downloading from the “available packs” tab. The more interesting sound packs are what Ableton calls “curated collections”: sets loosely grouped around a common music theme that capture “the musical threads that tie together evolving styles and scenes”.Ībleton has produced six in total: Chop and Swing, a collection based on old-school hip-hop sampling a dark techno collection called Punch and Tilt Drive and Glow, a collection of indie pop sounds Glitch and Wash, which is loosely inspired by IDM and ambient music a UK bass and club music collection called Skitter and Step and Build and Drop, the most overtly ‘commercial’ of the set, covering EDM and trap sounds. These are useful things to have, but fairly vanilla (three of them are also only part of the more expensive Live 10 Suite). The bread and butter of Live 10’s sound content comes in the form of four packs of samples and presets covering acoustic drums (Drum Booth), drum machines (Drum Essentials), vintage synths (Synth Essentials) and multi-sampled electric pianos and organs (Electric Keyboards). I’ve avoided sound and sample packs in the past because they usually feel too genre-specific, but Ableton’s approach in Live 10 is different: a genre-agnostic take on sound content that encourages experimentation rather than forcing users into a restrictive, pre-defined box. What I didn’t expect to be quite so useful are Live’s included sound packs. Why Ableton’s new “curated collections” are some of Live 10’s most useful tools.Ībleton Live 10 does a lot of things right: its new Wavetable synth, the brilliantly weird Echo effect and Pedal, a versatile guitar pedal-inspired sonic mangler, are all some of the best things to come out of Ableton’s Berlin HQ in years.
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