Ableton Vs. FL Studio: The Ridiculously Comprehensive Guide

all right hi so this video actually had a much different intended result i as you know and then ben jordan some of you may know me as the flashball i have been an fl studio power user for upwards of 17 years i've used fl studio as my primary digital audio workstation throughout most of that time and i've used it on everything from scoring films hundreds of television shows and television ads dozens of albums yadda yadda brag brag brad and fair warning if you're an ableton user you might want to take some xanax or get a belt to bite down on because this is going to get a wee bit frustrating all right so first a little bit of background i've been using fl studio on a professional level for about 15 to 17 years and by professional when i'm using that term i'm meaning the television industry the advertisement industry the game composing industry etc in the first five years i was in that industry i actually hid the fact that i was using it because most people considered it to not be a professional digital audio workstation the television and ad music industry was extremely competitive at the time and most of the agencies i worked with had multi-million dollar recording studios and they probably didn't want their clients to know that somebody was using fruity loops in a bedroom to make music for their multi-million dollar ad campaign but i worked with fl studio for a reason and it was because i found those old school pro tools workflows to be cumbersome and inefficient the reason i sound like i'm humble bragging right now is because i think that my weighted history of using this software actually adds value to this video i don't really find the need to say this very often on this channel but i'm a professional musician and youtube is still kind of a hobby of mine and it's a newer hobby of mine i've been a professional musician for a long time pretty much where i spend all of my time and everything that i've earned in my adult life is owed to my profession and a huge chunk of my profession was spent in one piece of software so i guess i take this piece of software very very seriously so before we dive in the reason i'm telling you all this is because if you heard that fl studio or ableton live are not professional grade tools or that they're something that beginners would graduate from you heard wrong in 2020 they are used in virtually every fiber of the mainstream music industry and yes there certainly are other daws or digital audio workstations out there but exploring them in one video with any degree of objective depth would be absolutely chaotic i currently have updated copies of obviously fl studio cubase reaper and bit wig and i am very familiar with all of those i haven't touched studio one logic reason or pro tools in quite a few years but i do have a pretty good idea of what their strengths and weaknesses are however the one daw that i've never really played with at all is ableton live fl studio and ableton live are in my mind at least the original anti-daw meaning that before they were commercially available if you wanted to make music on a computer you were typically using software that behaved like it was turning your computer into a digital recorder so things like midi instruments or effect automation eventually came as additional features of the software rather than the core functionality now fl studio and ableton live on the other hand early in their development they didn't really seem to have any intention of becoming digital audio workstations they were tools aimed at electronic musicians and electronic producers i feel like if we're going to make a video that is comparing fl studio and ableton live we need to dive into the history a little bit so we could understand the fundamental differences in the software ableton live was released in 2001 and it was not intended to be a digital audio workstation it was intended to be an instrument or piece of software that would be used to perform electronic music live or dj believe it or not even today most of ableton live's included synthesizer instruments were prototyped in max msp and then later coded in c plus so ableton evolved as software that had a lot of emphasis on looping audio looping midi clips and pretty much having everything in one screen making it ideal for live performances i seem to remember a lot of electronic musicians using ableton as a daw before ableton admitted that it was won but it eventually drastically increased its capabilities allowing you to write music record music and even master music i would personally say that ableton live has a slow to moderate update frequency which isn't necessarily a bad thing although they were i think the last daw to show up to the 64-bit party i don't think they introduced 64-bit software until 2014. in comparison cubase had a full 64-bit build available in 2008. 32-bit software has a 4 gigabyte ram limit now this wasn't that big of a deal to most computer users but when you're dealing with pro audio and big sample libraries the memory management limitations become a pretty big problem but this is history we're talking about ableton now runs smoothly at 64-bit and has been for five or six years in 2020 without a doubt ableton is a powerful fully featured professional music production suite that's used widely by professional musicians worldwide fl studios started out way back in 1997 as fruity loops and fruity loops was a sampler that emulated the step sequencer style that you would find on some vintage drum machines fruity loops was rapidly updated with all sorts of new features and quickly became kind of a favorite for bedroom producers in comparison to something like pro tools or cubase the interface was really intuitive and easy to work with for new users image line is the company that made fruity loops and they eventually grew it into something called fl studio which is a full-fledged daw fl studio was so successful at the time that it actually worked against them because so many people pirated the software that the company couldn't make a profit this was actually really interesting to me because it kind of laid out the foundation for how imageline does business with its customers pro tools fought piracy by requiring you to have proprietary hardware cubase fought piracy by requiring you to buy a usb dongle fl studio on the other hand fought piracy by making their software really reasonably priced and giving you free updates for life while i think that this is by far the best strategy that a software company can use to deal with piracy at the time it was a bit of a double-edged sword a decade ago fl studio had in my opinion an undeniably superior feature set in comparison to its competition in pro tools or cubase but it was still pigeonholed as software for amateurs interestingly enough this is a perfect example of what economists call elasticity in demand if product a costs 20 as much as product b then most consumers will assume that it's only 20 percent as good but image lines stuck to their principles they played the long game and it worked out very well fl studio is nearly a household name and i would say that most artists the generation below me have not even considered using cubase or pro tools or some a lot of times even logic in contrast to ableton live fl studio's update frequency has always been very fast and ambitious they went from being a simple little beat maker to a fully fledged daw within a few years and even with little subversion updates you end up with some really crazy new features that are sometimes just way out in left field if you spend an absurd amount of time learning and creating workflows fl studio virtually has everything you would ever want inside their signature suite in reality depending on your take and depending on what kind of musician you have fl studio could very easily be the most powerful digital audio workstation by a long shot or it could be a kind of confusing workflow that is the result of throwing a lot of ideas at the wall to see if they stick as somebody who has primarily used fl studio as the brains for a wide variety of professional audio work including my own that i like doing in my own spare time i actually really like finding out those new workflows and experimenting with all that power however i could easily see how it could be overwhelming for someone or how it could actually distract them from i guess making their idea into sound waves and now here we are in 2020 and ableton live nfl studio are competitors and virtually anybody who wants to get into music production eventually asks the question which is better fl studio or ableton live and unfortunately all too often that question will be met with a tribalistic or disingenuous answer if you thought that the ps4 vs xbox people were bad or the mac vs pc people were bad wait till you stick your head into this universe and my viewers are included in this i'm sure as i take on the steep learning curve of learning a new daw some ableton user will be very frustrated watching me not glorify the process so maybe before you crack your knuckles and call me a for not knowing a keyboard shortcut think about the first time you used ableton live or better yet go over to mr bill's channel and watch how frustrated he is learning fl studio learning a new daw is never ever going to go smoothly this shit's hard actually if you want to leave me a really mean comment feel free my wife reads them to me in a sarcastic voice so as i explore learn and make a song in ableton live for the first time i'm giving myself a set of rules and number one is that i'm not using any third party plugins i'm only using the tools that ableton gives me in the trial number two i am not even opening max for live i'm here to learn ableton not a node-based programming language that works with it yes max for live is a really awesome perk and i've been using max msp for over a decade however patching my way out of getting to know ableton's interface is not going to make this video very helpful number three i am not using ableton on my primary audio workstation i have thousands of plugins installed on it and a very complex routing setup that adds a lot of variables that a new user wouldn't encounter instead i'll be using my video editing machine which has a pretty fresh install of windows 10. it has an amd threadripper 3960x and 64 gigs of ram the audio interface i'll be using is just a pre-sonis 1810 usb the midi controller i'll be using is an arturia key lab 61 make two so other than the video editing specs there's nothing really extravagant or outside of the normal budget that you would encounter when diving into the world of music production number four and finally to drastically speed up my learning process the videos that you're about to see are actually either private or public streams both my viewers and mr bill were a huge help in getting me from not even knowing my way around ableton's interface to being able to create a track within three days this is probably cheating as i would have had to spend a lot of time googling this information but i wanted to learn as much as i could in the time that i had to make this video spoiler alert if you are an ableton user this might actually be a little frustrating to watch i definitely feel like my experience had a bit of a bell curve i spent an absurd amount of time inside 72 hours learning ableton live and admittedly i was discouraged and grumpy in the beginning of that and probably at points on the stream i was just looking for bugs or ui issues just to justify my own ignorance but by the third day i could see the light at the end of the tunnel and i was feeling pretty confident motivated and inspired so bear with me all right let's do this i am using the trial which apparently i can use for 90 days with all the features i'm able to save and do all that stuff have maxter live um all right let's try it out then when i say that my expectations with ableton are a loop-based non-musical daw i realize that i'm starting the reason i'm doing this video is to find out where i'm wrong in that and a lot of people get very very territorial when it comes to their daws of choice and i kind of want to avoid that like the reason i'm trying this is to prove myself wrong in a way i mean it's for a video project but the reason i'm doing it is so i could know what ableton's all about and what its pros and cons are i got until uh august 22nd to use ableton for free yeah of course i want all this stuff can't i just i guess i have to authorize it all right okay i'll authorize analog also i'm using this on a computer that doesn't have really any vst plug-ins this isn't my audio computer it's a very capable machine it's running a aco sound card and stuff like that but i didn't i i knew that if i installed it on a computer with a hundred thousand vst plugins i would end up running into some issues so i'm just using an arturia q lab make one or make two caleb yeah okay i see the midi meter ding ding ding ding midi meter midi meter [Music] that's odd i don't know what this is [Music] okay so i guess i'm just gonna load a new session and start from scratch okay this is sort of what i remember seeing this little interface here so uh these are all my instruments um piano and keys whirlwind sir [Music] sounds nice i feel like it's possible that this little werewitzer here that i'm using doesn't have it doesn't actually change with how hard i'm hitting it oh it is okay it was just that preset good that's good [Music] all right so i guess uh let me if i'm to record this i'm just basically goofing off right now and trying to figure out oh i see there's a little explanation down there that helps metronome got it yeah do we get a count in not really okay so now i know that that records and then i bet i could double click this and get a piano roll yeah nice that works so we can move the oops ctrl a select [Music] [Applause] [Music] and if i want to change this to let's say a major okay so initially one thing i don't like right off the bat is that i can't preview the sound that i'm playing when moving this note and i don't know if that's something i can actually this is also tiny man i have like 20 20 vision i mean i'm sure i can make it bigger i'm trying to make it bigger but this is like infuriatingly this keyboard on the side i do see that there is a there's going to be like some negativity obviously coming from me with this i mean i'm just basically like using my theory brain without being able to hear these previews oh can you even hear it doing this headphones button oh god okay got it oh perfect great so if i oh okay cool is there a way that i could look at this and then put a baseline below it is the next question i see i should just use this really shouldn't i aha got it this has to be so frustrating for somebody who uses like anybody who's a live user watching this has to be so incredibly frustrated also i know you guys are like telling me what to do on the side and i'm like trying to uh trying to pay attention this and that at the same time and i'm getting too distracted by this so this is just basically how to infuriate yourself for an afternoon just so you know when i make music in fl studio or something like that i typically have one pattern that has all of my instruments and automation in it and so this is obviously going to be very foreign to me because i i don't like using clips i don't like looping things i like having something different every single time [Music] whatever [Music] a new midi track oh i guess i don't really have to do that do i think i could just sort of drag one from over here a drum rack i gotta have drums somewhere i see drums it's its own thing how crazy oh this is like a totally different it looks like we have different like workflow for rhythm so fl studio it's basically like the same piano roll sounds like somebody eating a chip oh a red button on top of the arrangement oh dear god there's a spider right here hang on a second i got an emergency a massive wolf spider just on my midi controller off i'm not one of those people that's like geek about spiders but if you've ever been bit by a wolf spider ho that's not fun those things hurt a button gets rid of the spider draw mode okay so apparently i can press b and get into draw mode what why what is b equals to draw b is for this is how i remember things and like davinci resolve and stuff b is for brush makes sense as if we could make this track any more that just did somehow i didn't think it'd be possible okay hang on i'm gonna grab a guitar [Music] i i want a really long count-in i want an obnoxious accountant four-bar accountant oh what else how about it a wooden counten i want a wooden counten all right here we go all right boys let's hit this all right we're going [Music] [Music] that was clearly not in time right we can all agree with that that was clearly pretty bad i have a broken hand i get i get like one little i might get a free i get a free pass on that but what i want to try and do is i i hear that ableton's really good at uh slicing stuff up and like audio quantizing and stuff so let's try that i don't really know quantize look at that quantize what the did this just actually quantize audio that fast that's incredible holy oh jesus christ give me a break come on i'm like i actually don't have to play bass all that well do i wow i'm absolutely amazed that that was so easy does ableton have pitch correction does it have that could i like sing over this as well any sort of like pitch i know um fl studio has like vocadex and it has new tone and it has picture wow it's hard to really know if you're in tune when you're using a fretless i'm sure fretless users agree with me on that um all right i'm gonna use the tap tempo i'm just gonna record for a bit and see where it takes me [Music] god it's so slow i wonder if i could maybe i'll play better if i take my stupid cast off this is so dumb don't do this at home anybody [Music] okay [Music] so can i split it there yes got it split it got it delete this delete this beep okay am i getting this obviously my what i recorded is not exactly five bars it's just under and i plan to keep it that way so if i wanted to quantize this you know what i feel like i'm figuring this out pretty well i'm just trying to figure out where i would like put in a new slice there's some areas where it seems to just be off or missing it by a little bit but it's still phenomenally good for just an auto warp thing i'm impressed with that that was very cool to insert warp marker i think i'm going blind in my review of ableton i feel like i'm going blind hope i didn't everything up [Music] oh dear that's the whole thing oh i thought that i deleted that stuff sorry what happened here though what did it do to this it thinks it's 400 and some odd bpm oh dear what did i do cancel don't do that [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hmm yeah okay so if i want to apply grooves i could extract grooves too i don't know if i want to do i want to apply grooves i mean i think i think we have a pretty good groove here so i'm assuming that i can copy this and i could go up here and then paste it nope i'm wrong when i assume that i'm sure there's probably an easier way to do this but i don't do things the easy way i do things the kurt russell way and i don't know for some reason i just imagine kurt russell doing things the hard way oh that's weird how it kind of ghosts it not not necessarily a bad thing i'm just not used to it to any degree so if i just keep hitting paste now i can't all right i was hoping that i could just keep it and paste and it would just i guess that could be useful i kind of wish i had that in video editing to be honest i'm just gonna keep doing this until we round out to the end of an actual bar so funny how bad i am at just clicking and doing anything in this program which is again i'm not criticizing it i'm just saying that that's because i'm not used to it oh no i did all that tasting in it it only edited this one god damn it all right this is the one that sounds good from what i understand so you say if i drag it at a loop that's kind of cool let's see if see if you're lying oh yeah well i'm just going to drag it all the way let's just drag it 16. hey maybe if i paste it after i drag it it'll loop interesting i'm not sure exactly what happened there i'm just going to make sure i'm copying the right thing so i don't go through this all again okay then i am dragging it just really far man all the way to here i don't know oh okay i see so if i oh hold on i thought loop was enabled up here ctrl d oh nice okay it's okay sometimes you got to put the work in imagine learning this without 140 people watching um you guys are like um each one of these things where i've just looked at my screen and had somebody be like no idiot do this um would have been like a google search and then watching like a video and it would have just been terrible the downside to that is that this is not my finest moment learning a new daw like literally the worst thing i could do the dumbest i could possibly look i'm i'm looking right now so that's the downside save live set as uh i don't want to save it to my desktop you free code i do that desktop's just full of live sessions first song in all caps i'm going to add some sort of rhythm to it i don't want to use samples about i guess i have to use samples i don't want to use loops but i had some sort of kit some sort of downloadable kit or something like that glitch and wash what the hell is that i don't mean to be a negative nancy here but i feel like anything that has the word glitch in it is like not interesting to me session drum studio is probably the closest thing that i want normally i would i have a back there i have an electronic drum kit that i would hook up but i'm probably not gonna go through all that in my first demo of a daw why do i hate this so much there's something weird going on with the audio i don't i don't think it's actually ableton it might be like the way i'm monitoring it i don't know how many times i go through these i guess multi-rod draw is the one i'll use why do i see so many different samples here i guess i'm just looking at the sample zones they're not okay they're probably not lighting up that's probably what's happening okay i see now that's just a little confusing at first i don't really understand what was happening yeah i want to make a new pattern and i don't want to put just press record and play with my fingers and in 30 seconds i'll have an answer double click anywhere or select and control m got it double click any i don't know why i didn't try that that was kind of dumb on me sorry i remember b being draw mode okay and i remember clicking the headphones okay yeah so this is where i am utterly confused with ableton this is where my my problems come in in fl studio when i make a session i typic when i make a song when i have a session i typically have one pattern for those of you who are familiar with like how song mode and pattern works i typically have one pattern that goes the entire way it has all the notes all the automation in it i don't loop anything ever unless it's just something really minor like you know a little background symbol or something like that um and i and it it looks insane like it looks completely mo when people see it like whenever i show somebody like a screen grabber whenever somebody looks at one of my sessions they're like holy why would you do it that way that's just the way i've always done it that's how my music sounds the way it sounds i guess and so when this is like looping when there's some sort of dis difference between what's happening down here and what's happening up here i'm utterly confused right if that makes any sense like the fact that this hold on let me zoom out so i know so i'm actually like 100 confident with what i'm saying when i'm saying it um okay so see how i do this and then see how i keep going and it's not mirrored on the bottom that's my head up big time i don't like that um it just makes me lose track of what's going on and when i want to be really specific with timing because as you could see i've already recorded something at an odd time that ends on the fourth bar the fourth measure of the fourth bar and so when i want to be really specific with my hits because i'm going to end up like having to do some math in my head all that's going to get screwed up which is okay this isn't a problem with ableton as much as it's an incompatibility with my workflow which probably is very different than most people's no uh electric keyboards there we go 2.6 gigs let's do it why is there a maximum of okay why is that an issue i'm not too excited about that yeah why won't not load anything more than a gig from ram i have samples that i load that are above four gigs five gigs and i also don't have a cancel i just i guess that's cancel right it's a little bizarre yeah let me let me see if i can change that because this is if i can't change that that's actually a legitimate criticism that i'll have for this daw yeah because this machine is a video editing machine it has 64 gigs of ram i should have absolutely no issue running anything i saw the allocation thing um that's just odd to me i just don't understand why that would be whatever i mean it's not it's not the end of the world i prop realistically if i were to use this as my main daw i probably wouldn't be using this piano sound anyway i would be you know if i were to use an electric piano thing i'd either be using piano attack or i'd be using some other thing automatically loaded the suitcase piano over the drums i'm gonna figure this out i swear no hold down control nope i'm just wondering if i could put this put this note in without having to click it again to make it longer and i know i can capture like you just want me to capture everything yeah i mean i liked what i i played but i'm just i'm playing with piano roll it's like too growly it's just mean ah this one's a little better yeah i'm holding down my foot pedal right now [Music] it like intermittently doesn't work i'm having some issues with the way it's recording foot pedals to be honest there we go hold pedal yay weird yeah it doesn't record didn't record it for me mr bill's gonna disagree with me on this one but i feel like this is one where fl has like in terms of like automation drawing and stuff fl has has the advantage big time that being said i think that it's i think it's really weirdly hidden nfl i think that it's a workflow that takes a bit of time let's try this if this only ends up on the snare nope doesn't end up anywhere doesn't i get this but as somebody okay nice like having light overdrive on kicks it makes them more uh what's the word i'm looking for choppy not like that much distortion i'm gonna try as hard as i can to turn this into a track that i would be comfortable sharing and releasing which which is a pretty high bar because i probably make 30 tracks for every 10 i release after i'm done with all this i i think it's only fair that at some point i go back and show my workflow in fl studio i mean this is the first time i've ever used this so obviously i work much much faster in fl studio so i'm on day two of ableton here this is not a stream this is just me recording my session for a bit and i replaced the bass uh with a ibanez six string threaded so now rather than being on that c it is a fifth higher on an f and so it sounds like this [Music] i've obviously messed around with some of the settings here so as you can tell i've been programming and recording some other things here but uh back to that green little bass clip here so if i'm to press ctrl d and duplicate it you know sort of the way i was told and let's just play it right from here [Music] it doesn't play again it's kind of odd [Music] i'm going to start from the beginning of the song and you can see exactly how this is sort of misbehaving because this is the exact same clip right it's just being [Music] duplicated [Music] my markers are okay they're all ending on the fourth measure of the fourth bar so it should know exactly how big the clip is i just don't understand why that's happening now um if i move it to just start at the fifth bar it will [Music] do it just fine but can't start it from where i need it to start i can only start it from the fifth bar and i've been trying to find that setting for about 30 minutes and i'm kind of just losing it at this point i've changed my time signature to 15 16. i'm gonna try this and see if this actually does it yeah so even when the time signature is accurate with that clip it still kind of geeks out on it i don't know in fl studio if i'm doing something that's all in three-fourths or something like that then of course i'll change the time signature but a lot of times i'm doing a couple patterns and three fourths a couple patterns and seven eighths a couple patterns and four four and then i kind of blend it all together a lot of times i even change tempo and i'll in fl studio one thing that i'll do for example is i will create something at like a third of the tempo or a i guess 66.6 of the tempo so i'm actually programming in triplets and it just has a way more interesting result and so i like being open to do those things so i don't even really like changing the time signature perfectly for each single clip because i don't know when i'm going to use that clip differently in the future if that makes any sense and i know that this isn't probably the normal use of a daw but it's just sort of a trick that i've had up my sleeve forever so i guess i'll try just for the sake of seeing if it works making this entire project 15 16 and then i'll duplicate it again and 45 minutes later after changing the project to 15 16 that they're changing the clip to 15 16 still nothing however here's a sort of a work around i have that i'm not that happy about and the only reason it's really working for me is because i have so much echo and reverb and stuff like that on this recording okay so if i zoom in really really close i'm trying to find the difference between these two files if i zoom in really really close i've actually can't even find it now yeah okay so i'm going to zoom in really close and you can see that i've actually cut the waveform a little bit short so it's like not actually oh this is really hard to navigate to it's frustrating to say the least so if you see right there i don't think i could i'm not actually sure i could even zoom in more but if you see right there i had to cut this a little bit short and if i cut this a little bit short then it's not really noticeable again due to the amount of effects i have on it but that will get it to play over but now when i want to duplicate it uh i fear that let me see if it'll actually duplicate properly or if i'm gonna have to keep doing this over and over again yeah crap let me have to keep doing it over and over again so i guess i'm just gonna have to duplicate it and manually do this i wish there was a workaround for this and this is something that i've googled a lot i've looked at the manual i've spent a really long time trying to figure out what what i'm missing and i cannot sort it out which is unfortunate all right we're starting day three with ableton and i'm still working on this concealed track and i have a dead cat on my condenser um because i'm having like this massive air conditioning meltdown at the house and i'm just running my mini split 24 7 now just to make sure it doesn't get humid down here while the central ac is on the fritz it's also brand new not gonna get into it so first of all right now i'm having a bug another bug um we've kind of figured out that this situation up here that was going on with these yesterday was a bug i'm running into another bug right now this one's really odd i can't move knobs really i'm like clicking i can't really move them i have a left-handed mouse maybe that has something to do with it obviously if i right-click i could like show that have the right-click menu i can't move things can't drag this not sure what is going on i can type in the values on some of them but yeah so for this big massive synth here this is all you really get to work with i could expand these these are just effects though but i don't know i'm not i'm gonna have a lot of trouble getting used to that i like opening things up and and seeing the entire unique interface of i mean a lot of presets have their own unique interface depending on what kind of soft synth you're using um as for these onboard ones they're all just little nodes down here or little pods down here that you just sort of use and i thought for some reason that i was missing something and i could open it up into a much bigger window or that there would be a lot more detail and there's not it's just not there so for what it's worth i i mean i guess that's why max for live is so popular but i'm kind of kind of running into a wall with that it's it's not the most inspiring thing in the world but i guess i could see how the portability of this how you i mean i guess i could see how somebody could get used to it and it could actually work in their favor but again i guess even if you have something that's bigger then you're you're still using this i can't drag though right now that's the issue okay i could drag that could drag that but when i click here i can't drag it across so i i'm just gonna have to restart the software again and see what's going on with this clicking bug thing okay so a couple hours later we have this like pad that nope sorry all right so another little issue that i'm having that i hopefully get over is i sort of went into complex chord territory a little bit not really that much but and the reason i'm doing this is because this is kind of how i noodle in a normal session i just sort of noodle around and then i find something i like and sometimes it ends up being complex in the song sometimes it ends up not being and i end up cutting that out but so we have this [Music] okay so i was just trying like this isn't even probably something i'll keep in here definitely not after the workflow limitations that i sort of felt with this um so i haven't been able to find i don't know if this is possible it might be and i might just be missing some big thing but like when i click this base this is just my uh synth base right i can't see exactly unless i zoom in up here like there's no way to have like a ghost channel to show where the kicks are because obviously i don't just have like a you know everything's not my kicks are knob places and my snares are not places and i like lining things up like that and then also this is just something i played live and quantized it's just making it a real real big headache um and then the fact that my entire session is in 15 16. uh it just seems like nothing really wants to i don't even know i describe it okay so here's another thing right i i don't wanna i don't wanna be bitching i don't want to be i feel like i'm just i'm kind of just having a bad ableton day today i'm going to keep keep cracking at it for probably about four more hours today it's monday memorial day um this is where i'm at right now i'm in the second part of the track and now we're getting into sort of the drill and base flash bulby style stuff and i'll let you hear that really fast [Music] okay and one it just kind of goes on from there and it's obviously a slow process and to sort of give you an idea of exactly what's happening i have a drum kit that is made out of a bunch of four operator fm synths which is really nice really digging that it's really powerful but i feel like once i get the automation down it's going to be more powerful i'm still a little bit lacking on the automation i kind of wish that this little velocity window could be mapped to different things and maybe it can but uh that's gonna be my next search after i'm done programming and all the stuff but that brings us to this crazy little beat i've programmed here in the piano roll uh painfully but it would be painful in any program where you do this the labor of love however i've discovered that there's sort of i mean there's obviously a resolution to this daw but it's almost like a plank scale resolution like it's so small that you almost wouldn't even notice basically meaning that notes if i take this it doesn't really snap into anything it's just kind of loose which is really awesome because that gives me it should give me enough control to get when you can see what i'm doing here as i'm tuning it i'm tuning the glitches to my overall song [Music] right so that's pretty cool and i can keep doing that and i'll show you exactly how i'm doing that so like with that last note with the uh i swear i'll get the hang of this one day right okay so um that's just my tom right so i'm gonna take that and i'm going to zoom out zoom all the way in so it doesn't really snap to anything so i could be absolutely precise because if i'm off by so much as a so hard to i think my broken hand isn't helping this very much um if i'm off by the tiniest amount it ruins this whole effect like then it can't work anymore so we're gonna go this way and now i'm gonna stretch this to be i know that i could make two and do control j as well but i feel like this is just an easier way of showing you exactly what i'm doing okay and then i'm going to zoom in even closer here to make sure that i'm exact on that size so now this should i feel like that's not exact okay does that look exact that looks exact okay so now i have this and i'm going to move it over to the start of this beat over here which is all right okay and then i'm going to hit ctrl d and it should be an octave lower than the one previous to it so let's see yep okay that's what i'm gonna be doing for the remainder this morning is just trying to get in some more melodic glitches pretty cool all right so a mirror uh like three hours later i've recorded like a minute worth of beats and now what i'm actually doing got a little bored with it so now what i'm doing is i'm putting resonators on those beats and uh automating every single resonator in key so let's hear that really fast [Music] i make sure that's actually in [Music] this one [Music] so the f is actually an f major so this third will now be automated up to a fourth and then the uh seventh we'll go from plus 10 to a plus 11. and that will give it a proper seventh and the chord change will sound like this yay if you want to get really funky i could go 14 semitones up which would give me a ninth so we go from a seventh to a nine [Music] cool yeah so there's a whole lot of work doing this it's not it's weird i i don't think it's an as intuitive to me as fl studios automation is in this type of thing but this is pretty good at the same time um one thing that i really wish you could do and if anybody from ableton actually watches this video uh if i am to change these like so one thing that i'm running into um for example if i were to change this up a semitone here and then scroll across okay see how i lost that and it went up to 12 when i was trying to do 11. my overall point is if you ever use photoshop for example and if you hold down something like shift you may actually have this in ableton i just cannot find it but if you hold down something like shift in photoshop you'll just draw a straight line um that would be amazing if i could just draw a straight line where i want to draw a straight line because i am using a mouse and again i got a got a broken paw here so that's probably making things a little more difficult so might not be actually fair to complain about that all right back to work [Music] [Music] so [Music] i'm over here now maybe this is the best corner to be in for this session maybe i should just be smaller like a little coin down here so i have been working for three days on this project here this is my first ableton live song and uh i think i'm done and to be completely totally honest i would have probably gone a little bit further in certain places if i wasn't trying a dog for the first time but also um there are i feel like the piano roll is a little punishing a little hard to um write material that's not looping or something like that and that's i'm kind of okay with that now like i'm not okay with you know i wouldn't write like a piano album here but now that i'm actually playing with instruments that are more melodic such as pianos um i think i'm realizing that you know this might not be the best daw for that type of thing but you'd also think that fl studio isn't the best offer that type of thing especially since like cubase can be directly plugged into like a score editor but however fl studio is great for that type of thing for literally just instrumental music writing like piano or writing a well i've written orchestral pieces in fl studio anyway but we're in ableton and uh you know i'm a little limited in you know i just have like a little mastering plug in on the top of this i'm not really mastering anything however it does seem like it might be easier to master things in here than it is in fl studio just the way the mixer's set up uh but i don't master anything in fl studio i just export the stems and master it elsewhere like an adobe audition or something and i think i would do the same here but you know that's not a takeaway from ableton that's just because i'm not used to it so uh i've added as you can see some piano here uh the piano has like a random midi effect on it like i don't know i just wanted to see what that did to be honest i didn't really need it using a lot of a lot of impulse responses another thing that i want before i like leave ableton here another thing that i want to mention is that i was really nervous about the amount of resources that ableton was taking when i first started this session up when i only had three channels or something it was at times it was getting up to 30 percent and it was using like 40 gpu and i was like i'm not gonna be able to actually get anywhere with this track like i'm gonna get up to like nine tracks and then i'm gonna be done however it never really seemed to get that much worse like it probably got maybe up to 40 tops with all this going on i have a lot of waste i'm not bouncing anything i don't like bouncing stuff i have two drum kits a bunch of different samplers uh fm synthesis i have one drum kit that's running eight different operators right so this is my session and i guess rather than just like playing it in this weird obs interface i will just play the actual song with like a music visualizer behind it or something and uh make my face really big i'm not wearing a shirt if i were on twitch right now i'd be [Music] banned [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] do so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right you ready for my takeaway here are the ableton pros or the things that i really liked audio time correction and audio quantizing is something that ableton started with and it has matured wonderfully it's instant it's really powerful and it makes me want to sample my modular it makes me want to just go around my house and sample different percussive instruments ableton is generally more straightforward from the get-go than fl studio in my opinion and that's actually a hard conclusion to come to considering how comfy i am with fl studio in ableton there seems to not be nearly as much work when adding a new channel and routing it and it's not that these things are hard work in fl studio but it does require some key strokes or at least some learning on how the routing system works in fl studio to be fair as of fl studio 20.1 they added the functionality where if you open a new instrument and drag it into a track in the song window it automatically routes it to the mixer channel and to the channel strip and if you rename it in the song window it automatically renames it everywhere else so it has parody that is a huge step in the right direction for fl studio however i still had to watch a very short tutorial clip to know how it worked whereas in ableton i just sort of intuitively did it with the overall routing and mixing being a bit more straightforward in ableton i would say that if i wanted to record a live instrument and had to choose between these two daws i actually would probably pick ableton live simply because i had made some mistakes and it was very forgiving but if my sole purpose of opening the program was to record an instrument or if i was recording multiple tracks i wouldn't use either of these daws for that i would either use my allen and heath console with an ssd hooked up to it or i would use a daw like reaper where the core functionality of the program is direct to disk recording i want to say that ableton is more compatible with hardware and midi controllers but that's technically untrue fl studio is the more compatible one especially with this new midi scripting tool however compatibility and plug and play are two very different things i would say that more stuff just works in an idiot-proof way in ableton whereas with fl studio you're more likely to have to do a little bit of configuring to get something to work i didn't even get into max for live and i'm very excited to it's huge it's an absolute game changer and it is honestly something that fl studio needs to catch up on and to their credit they did try years back with synth maker and flowstone but it seems like their partners just didn't follow up on their side of the deal i guess of course in most daws you could have something like reactor running as a vst plug-in or you could even have max msp or pure data communicating with your daw via midi but that's still quite a long way from having it integrated the way max for live is integrated with ableton max for live is an outstanding idea and it is extremely ambitious and it seems to have pushed this daw to the next level so well done ableton i don't really have any other daws or i pushed myself to learn it within three days so i don't have anything to compare it to but i do think that it's a pretty big feather in ableton's cap that i was able to produce the track within three days and i'm very interested to see how mr bill did over on fl studio site this is totally personal preference but when i'm using fl studio i need more than one monitor in fact when i've used it on a laptop i have one of those little usb monitors that i could use as a second monitor here in my studio i have two 4k monitors that i use with it i have all of that space used up in ableton i used it on one monitor and i was pretty much fine the entire time the vast majority of fl studio users likely use it on one monitor that is not 4k but 1080p or something and they don't seem to have any problem with it so again this is a very personal thing however ableton made me feel like i might be a little bit more comfortable in a portable environment as i mentioned earlier when you first dive into a complex piece of software with a big learning curve you're never gonna have fun on that first day and so i'm sort of disregarding my initial complaints and this is more of a general takeaway of what i would like to see improved in ableton so here is my criticism the biggest drawback to me is easily the piano roll gloves coming off here if you are an fl studio user or somebody who's comfortable with fl studio and you're going into ableton live the piano roll is going to be an absolute nightmare there's no note slicing no no chopping no humanizing without using groove clips there's no randomizing there's no pitch bending without opening up a different envelope window and doing it there there's no perimeter locking this is a pretty big deal to me because generally piano rolls are not known for being the most fun place to hang out when you're making music but it's usually very necessary to spend a considerable amount of time in one in my sessions i would say i spend about two-thirds of them in the piano roll programming if you've seen any other reviews of fl studio being compared to another daw then you've probably already heard a lot of praise for fl studio's piano roll it's very very powerful however that does not mean that ableton doesn't need to improve on this they do in my honest opinion it's lagging behind cubase and reaper as well and it doesn't have a step sequencer function and that's sort of the crutch that i use when i hate a piano roll for example i have an fao8 music workstation and the piano role is a pile of however it does have a step sequencer and so i could just sort of step sequence everything and then if i need to make any changes later i can go back in the piano role and just use it for that when i'm making my own music i like to fill every single pocket and i also like to be extremely dynamic i don't like using loops i like everything being different and so i spend an enormous amount of time in the piano roll and for that reason this is by far my biggest criticism of ableton live and i promise it is constructive criticism and i mean it with love and i'm sure that the ableton team knows that they're lagging behind in the piano role department and i would hope and i really do hope that the next version of ableton has some improvements in that area i am very excited to see that most of us use plug-ins these days so this is going to be irrelevant to a lot of people but the included instruments that come with ableton live seem to lack a lot of depth in comparison to the included plug-ins that come with fl studio and i assume that some of this is intentional as ableton seems to prioritize screen space and simplicity whereas fl studio will just pop open a new window for example the operator instrument is so well tucked in that i'm either grumbling about what i'm missing from an fm synth or i'm squinting trying to figure out what's going on in contrast fl studio citrus has six operators each with their own pages and envelopes it has an entire mod matrix it has effects like delay reverb chorus it has independent articulators for those effects there's multiple looping envelope editors for each operator there's even a harmonic editor in case you want to make an additive synth by hand this is kind of the story for all included instruments when compared to fl studio ableton's instruments don't seem to give me enough power whereas fl studio's instruments give me too much power it's kind of overwhelming at times of course both of these things can be bad for productivity depending on what kind of user or musician you are but i guess if i had to choose one over the other i would probably choose too many options over not enough options in ableton live there are some very little things which can become a very big deal for example if i want to modulate a perimeter on a synth or a mix or something like that with an lfo i have to either make or find a max for live device to do it not that big of a deal right i modulate everything all over the place in my sessions and not being able to do that as much as i like in ableton actually made me miss that freedom a whole lot and it made me wonder that if i were an ableton user that was trying out another daw i might not even know to look for that simply because it wasn't something that was always easily available to me so it's just this little tiny thing that may actually change the character of how somebody's music sounds both fl studio and bit wig do something called sandboxing when they load a plug-in basically if you load a vst instrument or effect and it crashes it crashes the vst instrument or effect not your entire daw ableton unfortunately doesn't support this and while i'm not a professional developer it seems like it would be something hard to write in in a future update since it has to do with the core functionality of the software ableton suite doesn't seem to have anything for pitch correction it doesn't even have an auto tune effect whereas fl studio seems to have a whole buffet of options and some of them actually sound better than fully fledged pitch correction suites like melodyne this one is not that big of a deal but it is so weird to me ableton does not use true panning meaning that when you pan a track you can raise it by as much as three decibels and this made me think that i was losing my mind when mixing my track once i finally figured out that it was using circular panning i was like okay well i must have screwed up a setting somewhere that somehow there's a little button i need to tick or something but there wasn't the only way to pan without increasing the volume is with a max for live device which brings me to the next thing this isn't a con or a criticism per se it's more of a warning or something that i'm worried about whether intentional or not i do feel as if max for live is sometimes used as a crutch for ableton shortcomings for example when i was doing my stream i would ask if a certain feature or functionality exists and i would get a resounding yes you can do it in max for live i do not consider max for live to be part of the core functionality of ableton live for a few very valid reasons first being it's not very user friendly to the average person who's just trying to make a song it's also not the same language max while extremely powerful and fun to work with is a node-based programming language meaning that it's more likely to be unstable and clunky so while ableton and max are nearly becoming synonymous i do think that some ableton fans are having their cake while eating it while praising the power and versatility of max while also praising the efficiency and stability of ableton live it felt a bit like a friendly car salesman showing me a car and i said hey is there a drink holder in the back seat and he said yes there is there is a box full of legos and you can make a drink holder in the back seat well no there's not a drink holder in the back seat there's a box of legos in the back seat i would not even bother talking about this much less go on this sort of tangent about it if i wasn't told to make a max patch to pan a track again i am so excited to dive in and play with max for live but i still cannot consider it a band-aid for something that might be missing in the core functionality of a daw as with most of my videos i don't really realize how ambitious most of my explorations are until i'm already on them and i feel like i have to come to some sort of general conclusion here especially if you've been watching all this time if you're the type of artist who might make long progressive dance tracks or even work on a lot of remixes then i feel like ableton has a pretty clear advantage for you if you are a musician with a more melodic background or somebody who intends to make a lot of instrumental music or maybe somebody who intends to make music with lots of dynamic changes or somebody who will be scoring to queues or film scoring then i feel like fl studio is probably the pretty clear choice if you're an experimental musician then i guess things could get even more complicated ableton has max for live which means that with a pretty steep learning curve you could be making your own sequencers synths etc a lot of us think of node-based audio languages as infinite possibilities but that's not really true for example fl studio has harmore which is absolutely insane it's a re-synthesis engine and probably the most powerful additive synth to ever be made you can't make that with max msp you couldn't even get close in fl studio you could i don't know for example put a peak controller on a guitar track have that peak controller uh trigger an lfo that will trigger the overall bpm of your entire project you can kind of connect anything to anything and it gets really crazy really fast and if you're a musician on the experimental side of things then you also need to give bittwig a fair chance because their grid system is amazing it's a virtual modular environment that's built into the daw but whether we're talking about beat making or film scoring or writing instrumental piano tracks or being an experimental musician you can obviously do all of these things with either daw it's just a drastically different user interface to get you to your goal if i were to think of an even broader way to describe my impression of the differences between these two daws when first opening ableton it was very easy to get started however when i got more than a couple tracks it felt more and more hectic and by the time my song was over i i was having trouble finding certain things and i was just having trouble mixing it especially with that panning issue and it just felt more hectic and stressful and it kind of made me want to be done with the track quicker opposed to this fl studio actually feels a little overwhelming if i just want to make a really quick melody however if i have 40 different tracks and channels routing everywhere i actually feel way more comfortable inside fl studio and more confident of what i'm doing in comparison to fl studio ableton has a very controlled guided and somewhat minimal user interface and you could tell that a lot of thought went into it it's intentional if you're ready to really dive in and learn max msp then you'll get a very powerful and unique production experience i don't think the track i made in ableton is anything special but i do think that it is a feather in ableton's cap that i was able to make it in three days now fl studio i feel like i can confidently say at its core fl studio signature edition is currently the most powerful daw in the world but with great power comes clutter if you need an incredibly powerful additive resampling engine or if you need a massive filter bank or if you need looping envelopes that are mapped to your mixer sends all of that is available at your fingertips only one or two clicks away however if you don't need any of these things all that stuff is available at your fingertips only one or two clicks away and for somebody who didn't age with the program like myself i can understand how that might be a little overwhelming at first most importantly though in the conclusion and takeaway that i hope most of you are getting from this video is that when you listen to my track or when you listen to mr bill's track you understand that ninety percent of that came from experience ten percent came from the doll we use this is art we're talking about an art is extremely subjective there will likely no there definitely will never be an objective answer to which daw is best and if you're spending your time arguing about which daw is best then you should probably spend your time learning how to make music in general maybe the pricing will help you make a decision as for cost ableton live's full suite the one that you witnessed me using cost 749. fl studio signature bundle which includes i believe every single thing that they make costs 710 dollars however there is one important thing i need to note fl studio has free upgrades and updates for life meaning that you will never pay the money again yet you will always get new features and updates however ableton i believe their live suite nine to life suite 10 upgrade costs 300 if i have to pick one and it actually pains me to pick one because ableton really did start growing on me and i have a feeling that it's going to continue to grow on me if i started making music in ableton i'd probably be in ableton fanatic so if i have to pick one for a new musician or somebody who wants to get into music production even with ableton's user interface that might be better for somebody who's new imageline has the free updates forever and they also just have a long-standing good relationship with their customer base and i still can't pick one the good news is both of these have trials so you could try for yourself and you can make up your own mind i'm really glad i did this for a few reasons ableton will not replace fl studio as my primary daw but i'm excited to dive in and check it out from a more experimental approach that targets its strong points rather than just puts it as a competitor with what i use to make music generally i am actually really excited to look through the max for live library and see what's there uh maybe even make some of my own patches i'm really excited to record my modular into ableton and use some of the quantizing and grooves and stuff like that a lot more experimentally and creatively just as importantly doing videos on this channel requires me to understand how the plugins and hardware that i'm reviewing will be implemented and a lot of my viewers are ableton users i want to be able to participate in conversations about ableton live and at least have some idea of what i'm talking about and i intend to continue to learn ableton live if you like this video if you learned anything subscribe the channel let me know in the comments if there's anything you want me to cover in the future if you want to get super smart and support this channel at the same time i am a partner with curiositystream a massive massive library of documentaries that you could get for under twenty dollars a year uh with my referral code which is down in the description okay that's enough bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 231,383

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Id: JJWT2yk3RD8

Length: 71min 47sec (4307 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020