The Steel Guitar Forum

Hi All

Through force of circumstance, I am now (painfully) trying to get on top of Ableton Live 11. One interesting thing is that it takes you in unforeseen directions. Here are two: one poppy, one jazzy.

https://soundcloud.com/user-581188416/bar-six

https://soundcloud.com/user-581188416/second-degree

Enjoy!

Gary

That's great, Gary! I gave up on Ableton because I wanted to make live band recordings which I couldn't do without paying for the full version, so I went to Reaper.
But for what you're doing Ableton is obviously fine. Another Williams owner, I see

Thanks Ian

Yes, I have Reaper installed, and fully intended to switch over to it, but only to discover it simply won't work on my Macbook Pro. Don't ask me why. My son, who is a professional sound designer/producer spent a few hours trying to get it to work without success. As he uses Ableton Live, he suggested I gave the 30-day trial a trial...it worked instantly! The 30 days is almost up, but that will coincide (hopefully) with the annual Ableton sale, so I should get it for around £200. Now that I've stopped punching myself in the face through pure frustration, and thanks to my son running a virtual tutorial on Facebook, I'm beginning to see what I can do with it...quite amazing, and well worth the money. Like you I do a lot of live recording too, but I thought all the Ableton variations, even Ableton Lite allowed live recording. Anyway, I've heard great things about Reaper and it's certainly far superior to Ableton Lite, I just cannot understand why I can't get it to recognise my laptop.

And yes, Williams man through and through...great guitar, as you no doubt know (although I remember you play and Excel too?)

The Excel is my gig guitar - the Williams never leaves the house!

The free version of Ableton (which came with a Focusrite interface) imposes an artificial limit on how many tracks you can record simultaneously, and it wasn't enough for me. The idea is to encourage you to buy the full version, but all it encouraged me to do was try Reaper instead; I gladly paid for it when I discovered how cheap it was. Why it won't work on your Mac is very curious indeed.

I had just traded my Focusrite interface for a UAD Apollo Twin, which I much prefer, but which might be the underlying problem...I did find a couple of mentions of this on the web. Anyway, the Apollo works fine with Ableton, so I'm happy enough, just a bit poorer. Reaper looks amazing for 60 dollars mind.