Live’s Instruments can be a terrific way to explore Ableton Live – rather than simply giving you black-box preset sounds, these include custom racks that can be customized, disassembled, and warped to your own applications. I’m a fan of the work of some of the folks doing the programming, too, like the talented Puremagnetik folks; rather than just generic productions, you get a lot of the sort of oddball stuff that we love.
Live users may already know this via Ableton’s mailing list, but in case it got into your “marketing from companies” filter, Ableton is offering up a huge compilation of their partner instruments as one giant, 2.9GB Live Pack (1.2GB download, compressed):
Free Live Pack: Partner Instrument Compilation
You get 58 instrument racks, 16 drum racks, 5 live sets, and 80 clips.
Add this to the ten Live sets, focused on artist-specific production and performance, made in conjunction with the Minus label, which I’ve covered previously:
Free Stuff for Ableton Live: FM Drum Machine in M4L, Minus Artists’ Live Sets
…and don’t forget the tasty monome Max for Live content we saw last week.
Updated – still more free content: PakBytes are free sampler sets from Puremagnetik’s larger collections, with samples of Casio Phase Distortion and VL-Tone and SK-1 gear, modular analog drums and Buchla samples, Atari 2600 sounds, KORG Wavestation, and more:
PakBytes
It’s a good way to spark some production ideas – if not for you, worth passing along to friends you know exploring Live. For those investing in an upgrade or new copy of Live, there’s also a deal on that bundles a free partner instrument.