Ableton Live 8 funk jazz flavored ambient guitar improv by Okinawa based french guitarist and producer Paul Mahoux using GT10, , Bootsie’s Epicverb and Boot EQmkII for guitar, as well as Vember Audio Surge for background rhythm. Unconventional tuning, use of slide and use of pre-bridge strings.

Ableton Live is a digital-audio workstation (DAW) program that allows you to trigger pre-recorded audio with a the keyboard, mouse, or a MIDI controller. Unlike traditional DAWs, MIDI control makes Live a playable instrument as well as an audio editor and MIDI sequencer. Live 7 delivers refinements to features found in previous versions, as well as introduces new capabilities that will be welcome to musicians, DJs, and producers. Live 8 is just around the corner as well, witch enhances the Ableton vision of creative, real-time digital music with a wealth of new techniques, effects and most-wanted workflow improvements.

What makes Ableton Live 7 a unique concept?

Live offers two main views—the Session View and the Arrangement View—that interact in a powerful and unique way, allowing you to create, produce and perform your music all in a single application.

The Session View Live’s unique Session View acts as a powerful musical sketch and launch pad, allowing you to try out new ideas easily and improvise freely. Each cell in the Session View grid can hold a recording, MIDI file, or any other musical idea. These ideas can be recorded on the fly or dragged in from the Browser and played in any order and at any time you wish.

The Arrangement View offers a timeline-based approach for traditional multitrack recording, MIDI sequencing and other music production tasks. You can even improvise in the Session View, and all of your actions will be recorded into the Arrangement View, where they can be edited whenever you like.

Some Features of LIVE 7…

• Multitrack recording up to 32-bit/192kHz
• Complete nondestructive editing with unlimited undo
• Powerful and creative MIDI sequencing of software and hardware instruments
• Real-time time-stretching and warping of AIFF, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and MP3 files, for improvisation and instant remixing
• A comprehensive selection of built-in audio effects, including a host of creative delays, filters, distortions, studio compressors and EQs
• Built-in software instruments: Simpler for creative sample-based synthesis, Impulse for sampled drums
• Instrument-, Drum-, Effect Racks for creating and managing complex performance setups, drum kits and multi-effects
• VST and AU effects and instruments support; automatic plug-in delay compensation
• REX file support and native sliced audio file creation
• Video import and export for scoring to picture or warping picture to music
• Real-time control of parameters with any MIDI controller—just MIDI-map it or choose from a list of popular supported controllers for instant mapping
• Full ReWire support
• Single-screen user interface for simple, creativity-focused operation
• Multicore and multiprocessor support

For those of you who use Live regularly probably know that the program excels at letting you tweak your sounds into oblivion while leaving the original audio files intact. This is known as nondestructive editing. You can change all sorts of things about a clip, such as transposition, sample offset, volume envelopes and more, all with the reassuring fact in mind that you’re never doing irreparable harm to your source files (some recordings are one in a million- especially if you have bad backup skills!). Nondestructive editing is also efficient when it comes to hard drive utilization, since you can have multiple clips in your Set with different settings, all referencing a single source file. [ more ]

And lastly, here is a really slick video tutorial on slicing beats in Ableton Live 7…