Ableton Live 11: Every New Feature Explained And Demonstrated (Comping, MPE Support, Tempo Follower)

hey everyone slink here so a few weeks ago ableton invited me to a zoom meeting and andrew huang sanjay c and myself watched with our jaws open as the ableton staff demoed all the new features for us then we were invited to join the beta program and i've been playing around with live 11 since then and trying to keep my mouth shut about it so currently i'm running the b17 build which is the newest build at the time of recording this video so let's dive in and i'll explain and demonstrate everything that's new in live 11. i mean live 11 i wasn't expecting that when i joined the zoom meeting that's for sure it was only two years ago when they released live 10 and it was five years before that when they released live nine so man they've been busy and by the way just remember that this is not the final version of live 11 so if you're watching this video from the future just remember that i recorded this video in the past so things might be different now than they used to be so let's start by checking out what's new in the preferences so under look and feel they've got a few new themes we've got the light theme the mid light that's the default mid dark and dark and then you can also go back to the live 10 themes this looks exactly like live 10 and then there's even live 9 still here i remember looking at that crazy the new option here is the gridline opacity so by default it's set to 100 i find this a little too harsh so it's nice that you have the option to go even harsher or zero percent i like to have mine at about 50 and there's also a new option here called reduce automatic colors with auto assigned track colors on when you add a new track it automatically picks a color yeah but reducing the number of automatic colors and making them kind of stand out more from one another is really going to help people with deuteronopia or color vision impairedness over in live 10 you can see that these colors are a little bit closer to one another it's nice to have that as an option and even as someone that isn't color vision impaired i like these colors better actually okay so there's nothing new on the audio tab but let's flip to the link tempo midi tab we can see there is a new option here called tempo follower and we can choose to hide or show that button shows up up here and then we can select our input channel so what does this do well basically you can tell live to listen to this input channel and then adjust the tempo in real time to match it's pretty cool let's actually try this out right now i've got a video of this street drummer so he's not listening to a click track at all but we can click this follow button and then get him to play along with something he's kind of doing a techno beat so uh let's see let's get him to play along to this acid loop so i'll just drag it in here and then we'll play the video and then we'll click follow and then play the live session and it should match up check it out [Music] [Music] now [Music] so it actually works really well you can see that he's just drumming on the street he's not going to any sort of click track and live is just adjusting based on that so this follow button is actually crazy this button is really like the epitome of the name of this program i mean it's called live so you should be able to follow along with a live instrumentalist or a live drama or something the whole idea with this button is to be able to play along with the drummer instead of having the drummer play along with you or any other instrument i could beatbox on the microphone right now and match this acid loop up with my voice so it's absolutely crazy and it works really really well anyway where were we oh yeah in the midi section there's a new lane here called mpe and also there's been a slight redesign from live 10. we've got the on off buttons here now we've got some check boxes i'll talk more about mp later but this is where you would switch it on for whatever devices you have connected in the file folder tab we're missing the save current set as default option you know remember in live 10 you have this here well now to save a new live set as a template you have to go file save live set as template and there's also an option to save live set as default set so where do they end up well there's a new folder in the browser to keep a collection of all your templates and live 11 comes with a couple of default templates but all your templates can be found in your user library under templates in this template folder you can also right click on a template and set it as your default live set and you can also delete them and rename them and stuff like that they've also added another folder called grooves and this works the same as the other folders like sounds drums clips and samples if you don't care about it you can turn it off here but it will show you every groove that's available within your libraries and user libraries when you double click on a groove it'll open the groove pull if you drag a groove onto a clip it'll open the groove pool and same as if you extract a groove it'll open the group tool and that's just a small workflow addition to make it more obvious about what's happening with the groove and where to change the settings of the groove that you've added while we're in the browser let's talk about the audio effects folder so now everything is categorized into handy little folders to make it easier to find things you know if you need some utilities they're here i need an eq all my eq options are there and if you don't like to always be opening folders you can hold down control and open more than one folder at a time now there are a few new devices that have been added and some improvements on existing ones but we'll talk about that in a minute so the shortcut key control alt b that has always been here it opens and closes the browser but what's new is when you do press that shortcut key the focus is given to the browser so you can then use your arrow keys to navigate around immediately and open a new instrument for example then go ahead and close the browser all with your keyboard so that's a small workflow improvement there okay one last thing to mention in the preferences draw mode with pitch lock and we can turn that on and off so what that means is when you have your pen out using the b key you can now draw notes like this whereas before when you have this on or by default in ableton 10 you can only draw a straight line like that now what's interesting is when you hold the alt key before you start drawing a note you can change the length of it like this but if you start drawing a note and then hold alt you can only draw them in a straight line like this with the draw mode on if you hold the alt key before starting to draw a note it's the same thing you can change the length of it like that but if you start drawing first then you hold the alt key you can draw any note so that's sort of how that works i think i'm going to be leaving mine off because it makes more sense to me to just be able to draw any note i'm really drawing a straight line of the same note so that's a nice little option okay so let's get into some of the more juicy changes that ableton live 11 has added so anytime you record over existing stuff ableton organizes the different passes into separate take lanes so let's stop the recording now and if i right click on this channel and say show take lanes we can see all the different takes this is the first one second one etc now if i push the b key and go into pen mode i can just start swipe comping and say yeah i like this bit i liked that part i didn't like it when i said that etc etc which is super cool now in this content lane which is what we're calling this top channel you can only play one thing at a time so you can't play two things at once only one thing yeah that's kind of how comping works now with all these cuts in the audio it's going to be annoying to go through and fade the side so that you don't get any clicks and pops but ableton 11 has got us covered again right click create cross fades on clip edges don't like that right click again reset fades so that is super cool i gotta say i want to listen to just this lane if i push t i can audition just that take there and audition this one up and down keys like this really really cool and of course you can always manually add your own take lane by pressing alt shift t or right clicking and saying insert take lane you can rename take lanes to you know like bad take or good take or whatever you can delete them and if you liked some content in here and you wanted to use it elsewhere just go ahead and drag it out of there and similarly you can drag whatever you want into a take lane and start comping with that this is cool man this is really really cool as someone that's used ableton for i don't know 10 years i didn't really know what i was missing out on as far as comping goes and i can see this being really useful for glitch hot production and just sound design i'm always making extra channels and using them as cutting boards and things like that so this is just going to be insane the shortcut key to open and close the take lanes is ctrl alt u so once you've figured out what you like and don't like just hide all that stuff away so it's really really clean and nice i love how they've implemented it one thing that i wish that they did is to just have some kind of indication somewhere on the channel itself to show that there are take lanes inside of this channel because right now unless you try to show the take lanes you don't know whether there's a take lane in there or not just a little visual indication would have been nice and maybe even a button to click rather than right clicking and saying show take lanes i think there should be a little button in the corner here or something like that that's just my two cents oh yeah did i mention you can comp with midi as well that's right you can comp midi also this is going to be so handy for me because i can set up a loop and record and try to play the line with my keyboard over and over again until i get it right and then comp the good pieces and comp out the bad pieces this is so useful i'm telling you guys you can also comp with video clips as well but ableton's still not the greatest with video you can't drag in like an mp4 or something if you have the right video files and stuff you can drag in multiple video files and then comp like that but there's no new features as far as video handling like you can't do any transitions or anything like that yet but who knows what the future holds check this out so i've got a multi-microphone recording of a drum kit we've got our overheads and our microphone next to the snare drum kick drum and all that [Music] and every layer has two takes so if we get our pen tool out again let's say he played the kick drum a little bit better there a little bit better there etc but now i have to go through and do the same thing all the way through these different channels unless i right click and say link tracks after selecting all the channels now when i comp the comp applies to every channel just like that so we're really saving time all of this linked track business is really handy especially for when you're doing remixes because when you have a bunch of tracks linked you can actually warp them all together at the same time so for example right now we're at 110 bpm [Music] i've already done some baseline comping here with the two different sections my plan is to remix this into a drama based song but now the drums are a little bit too fast i want everything to be slower so let's just warp everything at once just like that and we'll mute the drums we'll turn on our remix channel here and we'll turn this stuff on as well in our sidechain and boom [Music] so this is going to be so handy for remixes when you get a bunch of stems that you need to fix up and warp all together all right let's talk about some of the new devices in the audio effects folder here so modulators these aren't new but it's new to this folder and if you watch my last video about max for live devices i talk about these devices really briefly there are awesome modulators that everyone should be using and i'm glad that ableton 11 has put them right in the view of everyone because people should be using this stuff let's get a few of the smaller ones out of the way first so redux has had a little bit of a redesign some new features if you remember in live 10 we really had only a couple of options here so let's just solo these drums and we'll play with the redux settings so that you kind of hear what's new about [Music] it [Music] there's definitely a few more features here this jitter thing i guess kind of messes up the redux rate or something so you get less of a kind of tone [Music] it's almost like it's playing a note but with this jitter turned up it's a little bit more noisy you know what i'm saying so that's redux they've also redesigned the way corpus looks it functions exactly the same but now there's kind of more of a visual representation of what's actually happening here because it's kind of an abstract plugin to begin with so it's nice to have some kind of visualization obviously also they've applied the same changes to the layout on collision because collision is essentially two corpuses inside of an instrument yeah and then they've also updated the look of electric which again does a similar thing just to make things a little bit more visual and it looks way sleeker i mean look at how electric looks on ableton 10. brown it's just a mess of knobs you know what i mean same with collision it's just it's hard to look at this and be like oh yeah i know what's going on immediately now this just looks so much cleaner they've really done a good job with redesigning those plugins by the way on the instruments tab they've added the drum synth instruments into here so they're easier to grab they're not hidden in the max for live mess of stuff they're right here easier for you to grab and you can just drag them in and use them on a drum rack or whatever these are great i did a video about these the other week okay let's talk about a new device hybrid reverb let's drag one in you can find it in the time and space audio effects tab here now this is so cool it's funny because a few weeks ago i was doing a video about all the max for lab devices that are criminally underused and one of the devices i mentioned was the convolution reverb now hybrid reverb is a combination of a convolution reverb and an algorithmic reverb put together and you can mix between them you can play them in serial or parallel or choose one or the other and the algorithms you can choose from there's five different algorithms you can choose for the algorithmic side and of course there's endless amounts of well this is the beta but there'll be endless amounts of impulse responses and if that's not enough you can drag anything you want in to use as your own impulse response and these folders are really smart if you choose something from a folder you can then quickly flip between the other impulse responses in that folder i mean this whole plugin really needs its own video to explain everything about how cool this is but just to give you an idea i'm just going to play the drums we'll have a little play around [Music] i mean this is a huge improvement on ableton's default reverb which really left a lot to be desired this reverb is incredible it's incredible lately i've been getting into spectral effects and spectral sounding things and the fast fourier transform algorithm and just the other week i created a max for live device that spectrally subtracts one audio signal from another and so it's so cool that ableton has introduced a couple of new audio effects that are unlike anything i've ever seen before so let's check out spectral time to start with we'll just drag it on the drums here this is kind of like a delay or a reverb you can kind of use it like either or but it has some weird features so let's just turn the feedback up a bit and we'll play like just a little bit of this [Music] so it sounds like a delay right let's turn the tilt up a bit [Music] so cool so it's actually delaying each frequency band at a different rate i believe that's what the tilt does and then the spray sort of just blurs things a little bit as well we can turn the resolution up to ultra as well [Music] but it actually sounds good at every different resolution it depends on what you're going for [Music] that's really like more minimal [Music] that sounds so cool i prefer mid [Music] that sounds so like squelchy and watery [Music] oh my god you can sync this up so it's uh on the time that you want you know every quarter note or whatever [Music] i mean this plugin needs a full video just to explore all the cool things you can do with this and i'll get to that at some point on the channel such a cool plugin let's check out the spectral resonator now this kind of sounds similar to a vocoder depending on how you use it you can input midi information or you can just change the frequency but i'm just going to put this on the drum so you can hear what it does what [Music] i mean come on so cool okay i've got little vocals going here and some chords no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping so let's drag on a spectral resonator oh man this thing needs a whole video for itself for sure but just to show you how this works if we set this to midi and then select our lounge lizard these chords here polyphonic mode we'll turn that all the way up to 16. now instead of picking our frequency our single fundamental we're sending it a full chord no slump and get the beats popping get up and keep the body jumping no slopping get the beats popping get up and keep the body jumping no slumping get the beast bumping [Music] get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beats bumping i mean so cool so cool this might be the coolest effect that they've ever added to ableton you can quote me on that remember years ago when ableton combined simple delay and ping pong delay into one effect and just called it delay well they did the same thing with the phaser flanger so now phaser and flanger is one plugin and there's also a third option called the doubler i think they've improved the algorithms here but let's check it out body jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no smoking get the beats bumping get up banking so the amount knob actually changes how much it moves on its own but you can change the center by yourself so we could automate this so that we have like more control over how the phaser moves or we can just have it moving like on its own and we can change the spread this is pretty cool like i gotta say [Music] jump in no smoking get the beat and i mean 42 notches is pretty insane let's try like eight or something this button here will phase invert the um result of the phaser but we can change that back i think is that what that does phase invert it yeah never dodges house link so let's flip over to the flanger tab let's see how this sounds know something get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beast bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beat bumping so this almost sounds like a delay well that's kind of what a flanger is i guess i guess a phaser and a flanger are both sort of delays anyways um but it's cool how there's just way more control over what you can do now and then double uh let's check that out as well get up and keep the body jumping no something get the beast get up and keep the body jumping flanger and doubler are basically the same thing except flanger has a maximum timing of 20 milliseconds and then doubler has a minimum timing of 20 milliseconds yeah so it's interesting how this all works it's gonna take some getting used to but i think the phaser is really a big improvement i would never use the ableton phaser but now i think i will because i mean 42 notches and just being able to control the center like this is really cool and this plugin also has a warmth knob which adds some mid-range saturation [Music] obviously these are extreme settings i've got it set to but that's kind of how that works they've also updated the chorus and called it chorus ensemble because now you can use the chorus to add a third kind of lane of chorusing and it makes it sound even more chorused than before party jumping no slumping get the beast bumping get up and keep the body jumping no slump but get the beats bumping get up and keep the body jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the party jumping that's really nice and i can see myself using this as a stereo width enhancer but the coolest thing is this vibrato tab body jumping no slumping get the beats bumping get up and keep the body jumpering no sloping get her up there and keep the party jumping no swelling get the beast bump really get real keep the body jumping no slowly get the beats bumping get up and keep the body jumping and again you've got the warmth knob there and you can change the shape make it more of a triangle this is kind of like auto pan but for pitch built in high pass as well this is really cool i love what they've done with it a long time ago i made a video about vibrato and tremolo and i used a delay and an lfo to kind of hack together this vibrato anything rack you could throw it on any channel you wanted and then you'd use the mod wheel to sort of apply vibrato to anything and the purpose of that was to avoid like long-winded settings and whatnot within certain plugins serum that doesn't have any kind of vibrato settings by default and you have to sort of put it together yourself with lfos it's really annoying but now with chorus ensemble we can make a quick vibrato anything rack just like this so let's set the amount to macro 1 and we'll set the rate to macro 2 and i think a good vibrato amount is probably like 7 hertz and let's just turn the maximum to 25 on the amount we can give that a little color and we'll give the rate a different color just map this to our mod wheel on our keyboard and now so now we have vibrato on anything and we can just tidy this up we'll call this vibrato anything and we don't need all these extra mod wheels here so we'll just get rid of them nice clean rack yes that is new we'll talk about the racks now okay so i've just dragged a base patch from the core library in alvarado anything rack is still working so yes you can have up to 16 macros if you want or as little as one macro if you want to do something really minimal so along with that there's also this new random button and by clicking this button every macro knob that you have will be set to a random position but in the case of this volume knob we probably don't want to be randomizing the volume of our baseline so we'll just set that back to zero and we can right click on it and say exclude macro from randomizations so now when we randomize the knob positions the volume does not change now with all these knobs and being randomized we're going to stumble across some cool combinations that we'll want to save so we can do that in the macro variations tab and save a snapshot of the knob positions and we'll save that one let's find another good one that's cool it's kind of like more like fm jaws sort of vibes and then we can just launch these snapshots at the click of a button or if we want to we can map the buttons to launch and select different variations by a midi so if you have a midi controller and you're performing live and you want to flip between different variations on these macro knobs you can do that you can also map the randomization button so that's macro knobs and everything that's new with the racks now this doesn't just apply to instrument racks it also applies to audio effects racks and midi effects racks speaking of midi effects let's check out the midi effects tab now you can see that they've actually added a few of those maxwell live devices that i was talking about in my video just the other day the expression control which actually has a bunch of new options the envelope this thing's really cool and there's a new one here called mpe control so we should probably start talking about mpe what is mpe and why is it cool let's find out so what is mpe and i gotta admit i was asking the same question a few weeks ago mpe stands for midi polyphonic expression which means that with this new way of using midi we can effectively have multiple dimensions of expression on a per note basis so regular midi which is what we're used to using only allows us to adjust the velocity on a per note basis when we get into things like pitch bending suddenly we need to pitch bend every note at the same time it's uh time based not per note based so that's when mpe comes in suddenly we're able to pitch bend notes individually on a per note basis and it also gives us two new dimensions of expression slide and pressure which we can also individually change on a per note basis so every node can have a different slide and pressure automation every note can have a different pitch band and every note can have a different velocity so that's four dimensions of expression so mpe really represents the cutting edge of midi technology it was only a couple years ago when the specifications and standards for mpe were laid out so this is brand new stuff the association of music electronics industry and the mma they got together and decided on you know how things should work so that everyone can start working towards this new midi standard so it's impressive that ableton has already implemented it into live logic pro has already got mpe support they released that in june of this year cubase 10 added mp support a couple years ago reaper cakewalk garage band are already supporting mpe but pro tools and fl studio do not yet support mpe but we'll probably see that change in the future so in order to take advantage of all these cool mpe features you need to be using an mpe enabled vsti or instrument it's one thing to automate the slide and pressure but then if the instrument itself has nowhere to interpret those messages for example our lounge lizard plug-in here then it's not going to do anything so we need to use mp-enabled devices with mpe midi messages okay now you're probably wondering which of the ableton devices are mpe enabled well wavetable simpler and sampler are all mp enabled i did a little bit of research in some of the most common plugins serum is mp enabled you can tell because it says mp right there on the title bar if you're ever confused you can just drag it plugging in and see if it says mp either and also you can right click on the title bar and say that you want to turn off mpe mode and it will just act as a regular plugin pigments is another mpe enabled vsti it's by arturia this is a really good plugin a couple other ones like um hama is not massive is not i mean massive is pretty old is izotope iris two mp enabled i have no idea but we're about to find out it's not cool you might run into a problem where the instrument or vsti that you're using has a different per note pitch bend range by default ableton is set to negative and plus 48 semitones but you can right click and go to pitch bend range settings and match this setting with your plug-in settings and that just makes sure that when you set it to pitch bend down by 12 semitones that's what actually happens because your pitch bend range matches to the plugin that you're using so wavetable does a really good job at implementing mpe it's really clear how everything works in the core library there's a few mpe sort of patches but they'll be way more added once the full version comes out so let's take a look at how wavetable deals with mpe so there's a new tab here called mpe and then basically you've got your note pitch bend obviously it's going to pitch by plus or minus 48 you can change that and you can set this to other things as well like for example this is set to the frequency a little bit and then we've got our slide and pressure and again those correspond to this kind of action down here i've got a little bit overboard but it definitely sounds interesting so for example we have this note here sliding up to this note here and this note sliding down to that one you can slide in between notes as well or if you hold alt you can snap to a certain semitone which is cool if you want to snap left and right you can hold down alt as well and yeah i've just gone a little wild with drawing in different pressure and slide values let's hear what this sounds like [Music] um there's so much movement there it's crazy it sounds like multiple instruments it sounds like multiple layers we're affecting the unison we're affecting the filter frequency this is uh one of the default ones that i've just spent a little time goofing around and so as you can see mpe is really powerful just as a point of reference [Music] that's what the patch sounds by default and with all these notes pitching around and having different values of pressure and slide it sounds so much different [Music] check out the cpu jumping up and down all over the place while it's trying to execute this mpe stuff i think it's pretty cpu intensive but ableton 11 has added a few more cpu monitoring options here you can set the cpu meter to show the current cpu usage or the average and also if we flip over to session view we can click this little button and see a per channel amount of cpu load so let's play this again so obviously the wave table with all the mpe action is causing a lot of cpu usage but it's nice to be able to see that visually so if we are running out of cpu now we know which channel to freeze and flatten which channels aren't really causing a problem and we can kind of troubleshoot our project to make it run smoother on our computers so that's an awesome feature that they've added as well okay this midi stuff is getting really fun i just went ahead and made a bit of a drum beat to go with our weird chords or whatever sounds like this [Music] now that sounds okay but what i would love to be able to do is to randomize the velocity of all of these hats to make him sound a little bit more natural so we can do that by clicking the randomize button now that's pretty cool except it's going to always play the same random pattern i want it to be random every time it plays so if we set this back to how it was we can now turn up the velocity range and that will set a range of randomness so now every time a hat plays it's going to choose a velocity between these two extremities and these hats will sound supernatural now [Music] you would have had to have put a midi velocity plug-in in front of the hi-hats and set the random amount like this it's just a pain in the ass you know what i mean it's great to be able to visualize it right here in the midi clip which is where we want to be able to see this stuff now on top of that there's also a second tab here called probability i know it's getting interesting right what we can do is turn the probability of our hats down to like 50 percent so now every time this hat plays it'll decide whether to actually play or not based on this probability range so you can even see as well that every midi note that has a probability that isn't 100 has a little notch on the side there so it's easy to tell what's happening but let's see how this sounds now [Music] oh man that's actually really cool velocity range and probability two really awesome new features of ableton live 11. so i've just recorded a little bit of a solo over the top of our miniature track that we're writing and i've already comped together the pieces that i like let's take a listen to it okay i definitely messed up that one note there let's zoom in and fix it i'm going to select both of these clips and as you can see they've improved multi-midi clip editing so now i can edit both of these clips at the same time in one window without having to consolidate them or anything like that now where was that missed note i think it was this one i'm not really sure where that should go well i am but for demonstrated purposes let's check out the scale mode so we can turn this on and it's going to highlight every note that is within this scale now we're actually writing the song in a major i guess or a minor look at all these different options we can choose from as well i guess it's a minor it might be a little bit of both i'm using some borrowed notes or whatever but this gives us a good idea of where we can potentially throw this note let's put it there i should mention as well that we can turn this scale folding off and we can also just fold all the notes when we fold the scale the notes that are in incorrect positions that aren't part of the scale kind of show up here like these ones here are technically not part of the a major scale but we're going to leave them in because they actually sound okay they're like borrowed notes so let's see how that sounds now [Music] okay that sounds a little bit better now when i said that they improved multi-midi clip editing i really mean it we can select midi clips from different channels and then edit them in the same window in fact we can edit our whole track in one midi view look at this this is crazy [Music] you know if i want a drum to line up with part of the melody it's so easy to see everything we don't even need to look at this view anymore i'm writing songs like this from now on you know look at that that is so cool this is our that's our weird melody then these are some chords i added in [Music] and we can always click the focus button to focus in on the one clip that we have selected at the time and then unclick focus to zoom back out and see everything that we have selected wow i love the way they've improved multi midi clip editing so there's been a lot of improvements in the session view when it comes to launching clips and follow actions and that sort of thing so now when a clip has a follow action attached to it you can see that the play button is sort of stripy indicating that there is a follow action and down here in this follow action section we can turn follow actions on or off and there's a slider here which is a little bit more comprehensive than the options that we used to have so now it's very obvious that you know 72 percent of the time this action will happen whereas 28 of the time you know this action will happen and there's actually a new option in here now called jump and when we select that we can choose a different clip to jump to so if we wanted to jump from there to this clip here that's in the third position so we would set this to three now on top of that we also have a new option called linked now when linked mode is on now when linked mode is on the follow action is going to happen at the end of the clip and you can change how many times you want to play the clip before the follow action occurs so in this case i have it set to times four but if we unlink now we have this marker that we can drag around and choose exactly where we want the follow action to have and that's way more comprehensive than what we used to have which was basically just this number system which you had to sort of figure out exactly how many bars and beats you wanted it to do so now it's just so easy to be able to drag this follow marker to exactly where you want while we're in linked mode you can just grab the marker and move it as well and it automatically switches us to unlinked mode and i think most of these other settings are basically the same except for the nudge forward nudge backwards buttons those are new so while this clip is playing i can nudge this back by a global amount or forwards by a global amount in time it will also affect when the follow action happens on the scene itself you can set follow actions with all the same properties of jumping around different scenes or choosing random scenes so when you launch this scene it can launch other scenes as well and basically you can just have the song play itself which is pretty cool i'll give you a demonstration of what i've got set up here [Music] [Music] check one two yeah [Music] check one two yeah pretty fun stuff and one other thing to mention about clips and follow actions is that you can add video clips into session view and then use follow actions to trigger those video clips again the videos support for ableton is not very expensive so i can't really drag in an mp4 or anything but if you are sort of a more performance based ableton user you could set up follow actions to trigger with scenes and all sorts of things the possibilities are really opening up here with these follow actions and the ability to use video clips as well so imagine you have a massive session view project with a bunch of follow actions and clips everywhere launching scenes and launching different clips and kind of uh expanding out like a virus you're gonna want a way to turn off all of your follow actions to troubleshoot and test things out we need to pause the follow actions and that's what this button does here it pauses all follow actions or turns follow actions off or i'm not really sure about this button quite yet because we're still in the beta they're still trying to decide what this button does and how it re-enables follow actions and that sort of thing so this will be one button that will probably change in the future but that's the basic idea it's to disable follow actions so that's about all i can show you at the moment the rest of the changes to ableton are more content-based they're just adding loads of content they teamed up with spitfire and they're adding new piano strings and brass sample based instruments which are going to sound fantastic they've also teamed up with dylan bastin to make six new max for live instrument devices it's called inspired by nature there's some really weird looking instruments that unfortunately aren't included with the beta so i'm waiting just as much as you guys have to get my hands on those things also there's a new max for live device called pitch loop 89 that was created by robert hanke and it's a granular pitch shifter by the way robert hanke is one of the co-founders of ableton one of the founding fathers if you like but the pitch loop 89 is based on this 1983 device called the publishin dhm89b2 you know robert hanke was a big fan of this device and based the pitch loop 89 device on that one later on publishing actually released a newer version of the dhm 89 and they called it the infernal machine 90 which kind of looks a little bit more like a microwave than some sort of audio gear but i'm excited to try this out looking at some demos of the dhm 89 on youtube they look pretty cool i think it's gonna pair very well with some of the new devices like spectral time and spectra resonator and of course they're adding a bunch more packs you've got the voice box the mood reel the drone lab they're going all out with the content that's coming with this release as well so what do i think of ableton live 11. oh man it's pretty cool it it kind of came as a shock to me that they were working on this in the background and i didn't have any idea and so soon since um ableton 10 came out but i gotta say that i do really love these new devices they've added spectral time spectra resonator i love how they've combined phaser flanger chorus ensemble this is great stuff all that stuff that we talked about with the new effects awesome i kind of wish you could maybe change the names of these or move them around or something but i guess you've got your collections so maybe i'll start using that a little bit more because there is some stuff in here that i never use like channel eq for example so maybe i'll just go through and categorize things because so far i haven't even used these collections at all another thought i had while using ableton 11 is there's no way to show or hide these extra mpe options i mean you've got your tabs here which is cool but i want to hide this whole thing there needs to be like some buttons down here to show or hide this whole thing you know because when we're looking at it like this there's this big strip of blank space that we're not using maybe if these settings dynamically moved over here into this area when the height limit was enough to accommodate that it might be cool so that's just one thought i had and i was also mentioning you know the show take lanes thing i think there needs to be a button that you can click to show the take lanes or some kind of icon to indicate that there are take lanes on that channel also one thing that's been bothering me since ableton 10 is this option here assign track color to clips these two options are so close to each other i have to stop and think like which one am i clicking am i saving as a default audio track that would be bad or am i assigning the track to a color clip i think this line here needs to disappear so that all the color options are within the same kind of box it's such a small thing but it would probably speed up my workflow a little bit i'm always clicking this button and i'm always narrowly missing this button i'm really stoked on ableton 11. i think the mpe support is amazing comping is going to be an incredible asset i know when ableton 10 came out there was a bunch of people that were just moaning about there not being any comping still and me as an ableton user for over 10 years now i'm just like whatever like i don't know any any different you know i don't know what i'm missing out on as far as comping but now that we have comping i'm like oh man that is so useful i'm going to be using comping all the time so i'm glad that ableton has added comping that's a big feature that they probably needed to add a long time ago this follow button it does seem kind of gimmicky but i was surprised with how well it works like it actually works there's no other way to say it except that it works pretty good i mean yeah when there's like sharp changes in tempo it's it's not you know all knowing it does have some limitations but if you have a drummer who's genuinely trying to play at a certain tempo but it's just like fractions of a bpm on or off or faster or slower this follow button definitely nails it it's right on the money for that kind of thing but if you're trying to follow the tempo of someone who's intentionally speeding up from like 100 bpm to 174 bpm things are gonna be a little bit strange unless it's done in a gradual sort of way what else to mention i love this templates thing i've never bothered using templates in live from the entire time that i've been an ableton user i just find that templates were too constricting because you could only have one default set and a lot of the time i just want to open live and quickly throw something in and test an idea out or something like that i don't want to open up live and have it load a bunch of channels and a bunch of presets and stuff like that unless i want those presets and channels and stuff so i think this template section is going to be great i'm always going to have a blank startup template but i think i will make a couple of templates for different situations also let me know in the comments if you have any questions about ableton 11 i can test it out and get back to you anyways that's it for now keep an eye out in the future i'll be i'll definitely be doing some videos about these new effects and stuff i'm gonna push them to the limit all right thanks for watching guys take it easy peace

Channel: Slynk

Views: 75,368

Keywords: Ableton 11, Live 11, MPE, Comping

Id: 5OxjJRYtlxo

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thepinkpill]

much love to slynk. when exactly is 11 dropping?

[u/slynk]

Thanks for posting my video. If anyone has any questions about Ableton 11, hit me up on my discord server. https://discord.gg/7s6HNJQ

[u/illenial999]

Follow is the best thing I’ve ever seen in a daw, been wanting that for ages!

[u/[deleted]]

nice.... will it be free to upgrade to 11 if you have 10?