[NickC25]

Live user here. Fantastic interview.

While Live certainly isn't perfect and there are other DAWs out there that are quite feature-rich and offer a different & interesting workflow, I keep coming back to Live as my main DAW. It's just so versatile. Keep up the great work, Ableton!

[uxcolumbo]

What's your view on Bitwig? Created by ex Ableton folks.

[dottjt]

It's funny, because I went full Bitwig after being dissatisfied with the lack of certain workflow features in Ableton Live (for example, no customisable shortcuts, crappy bounce workflow etc.)

...and while I loved Bitwig, and while Bitwig is vastly superior on a technical and workflow level, I had this epiphany about music making: It should be about making music.

It's not about having shortcuts or having better ways of doing things. The problem is that I ended up spending more time customising Bitwig and playing around with all the cool things it could do, that it kind of took the focus away from actually making music.

Basically, I'm the kind of person that likes to tinker and that's a huge distraction for me. I think what makes Ableton Live so valuable to me, is that there is no tinker.

It's the fact that it is so bare-bones in a lot of ways, that makes it work for me and allows me to focus on making music.

[NickC25]

That's one of the reasons I think FL is a great DAW, because there's no session mode, only an arrangement mode. You're forced to compose rather than loop endlessly or muck about tweaking parameters.

I think Live is geared to "do whatever you want, quickly" as opposed to Bitwig being "make any sort of noise you can imagine" or FL "write whatever you want, quickly".

All great tools, just depends on what you'd like to do, honestly. Nothing is inherently bad.

[dottjt]

I had the opposite experience with FL Studio.

I think the problem is that there's too many different ways to do the same thing in FL Studio, whereas Ableton Live keeps it pretty simple in terms of workflow.

There's no session mode, but you get that sequencer instead. But to be fair, I never used session mode in Ableton, only arrangement.

But at the end of the day, DAWs are so personal. Everyone has a different preference for something different.

[NickC25]

I've toyed around with it a few times. I like it! It's definitely a cool product, and I think with its focus on modularity it blurs the line between a traditional DAW focused on production/composition and a more experimental DAW focused on sound design, as opposed to Live's focus on blurring the line between a DAW focused on live performance and a DAW focused on composition/production.

I'm not one who is focused on a DAW's particular weaknesses, rather, what makes each one unique from a functionality point of view.

I love Live, but that doesn't mean I hate FL Studio, Reason, Logic, Bitwig, VCV Rack, etc... In fact, as someone who spends more time in the DAW doing crazy and experimental sound design versus actual song production (blame my ADHD for that!), I enjoy some of the unique features of all the major DAWs.

[uxcolumbo]

Thanks for clarifying ;)

Do you have a bandcamp or similar where you post your sound design experiments?

[NickC25]

I wish I had enough complete projects to actually put up on SC or Bandcamp or whatever.

I have close to a thousand uncompleted Live projects sitting on my current laptop and old laptop, some are just little melodic loops, some are fully built out EDM/house/techno/electronic loops, some are just whatever happened when opening Ableton after a night of substance abuse (read: completely unorganized, unmixed, heavily distorted sonic chaos).

I can't arrange for shit, even though it's easy and straightforward. This is the one part of Live I don't like - you can just noodle around in clip view if you'd like, and unlike FL, Logic, Pro Tools, you aren't arranging from the start.

What I really enjoy doing is just being unfamiliar with a new plugin or piece of equipment and just noodling around with it creating happy accidents. Presets are cool if you want to just make music and not learn the plugin.

I would love if it there was a HN thread for DAW geeks with regular meetups or Zoom chats so we could all show off what little nuggets of production we've learned. There are so many things in Live that I don't use or even know exists (or how to use) that I wish someone could just show me, or vice versa.