My friend Francis Preve has been working on Live 7 through its development, but he’s finally gotten a break long enough to talk about what’s new in this version:
Ableton Live 7 – sneak preview [Beatportal]
Being close to the development, what Fran says has some weight. The preview runs through the features one by one, as you’ve seen before. But there’s good reason Slice to MIDI is right on top.
With a single right-click on any loop in Live, you can automagically slice it into dozens of smaller segments — like individual kicks, snares and percussion — then import these slices into a Drum Rack, which is then played by its own unique MIDI sequence.
The sequences can then be reordered so that you can create entirely new grooves from a single drum loop.
It’s a huge feature. Slicing in this fashion is nothing new, particularly on beat workstation hardware. Doing it this easily — that’s new. On the record, Francis says “Fortunately, it’s so flexible that many producers will approach this tool from their own unique perspective.” And I believe that, yes; I’ve seen other features of Live warped (excuse the pun) to extremes by experimental Live users.
I like how Fran described this feature yesterday over IM, though: “Slice to MIDI will be the drop shadow of 2008.”
Hey, someone has to record this stuff for posterity. I’m working with the Live beta now, and it’s just getting to the point where I think it’s hands-on preview time, so stay tuned. See our previous preview:
Ableton Live 7, Ableton Live Suite: Quick Look at What’s New (and 90-odd comments from you good folks!)