So….. Ableton 11. Just had my '‘early bird’' link through to the 20% discounted offer.
First impressions are somewhat underwhelming.
First, to try to be a bit positive.
-Spectral Time/Delay is pretty fucking good. It’s a very distinctive sound. However, I can see every man, woman and their dog plonking this on every channel and could quite easily date very quickly.
-Velocity and Chance on the midi clips is a good addition. And really useful for adding more control over the other probability plugins, where you can’t visualise what is happening.
-Scale on your midi clips. Useful for when you get around to composing that C# Lydian Augmented track you’ve been dying to start.
-Sounds - there are plenty more of these with things like a ‘Vintage’ category which is not bad.
-The Audio Effects are grouped into new folders. That’s nice I suppose.
The ‘meh’
-MPE. Can I use this with Push 2? There seems to be very little info on this. It’s as if Ableton are avoiding this question. There a set up toggle in the settings. But fuck knows if it’s actually doing anything when I try it.
-MPE. Why is everyone getting so excited about this? Behaving as if modular synthesis has just been invented.
-Why are they making me download most of the packs again? They are fucking huge and I already have them in 10. Is it because they are jam packed with new devices and sounds? Gigabytes of them? I suspect not.
There are probably dozen of lovely touches that I need to discover and whoop with joy to myself when I find them, that are completely oblivious to me.
It’s not the massive release as they are hailing. Fucking hell, even Native Instrument’s Maschine has larger differences between ‘minor’ releases. Their jump from Maschine 2.7 to 2.8 had me completely lost and took me ages to work out what they had done. In fact, I wish they wouldn’t do that. I digress….
