Learning Synths, Ableton’s free site intended to teach synthesis basics, has added some compelling new features. You can now save and share your work and explore sounds in new ways.
You can start work and bring it into Ableton Live and record 60 seconds of audio – ideal for teaching, and for encouraging folks to begin with the browser tool but graduate to working with a finished project. (I can easily see using that with a class.)
There are also new ways of playing with sounds – an XY pad for navigating sounds, plus the ability to mess around with examples in a Playground or Live.
Full feature additions:
- Export – turns your creation into a Max for Live synth contained in a Live Set
- Record – capture up to 60 seconds of audio, so you can record the output of the synth as you manipulate its sound
- A configurable XY pad in the Playground – quickly experiment with new sound combinations
- “Open in Playground” buttons – edit the sounds on lesson pages in more depth in the Playground, and then explore them further in Live
- Dark mode support – switches on and off based on your system preferences
- Turkish, Finnish and Portuguese language support
Interestingly, that Export function Ableton says works with Live 11 Lite – sidestepping what would otherwise be an issue with reliance on Max for Live. (If you have Suite, support works back to Live 9.7+.) That’s thanks to the ability to include Max for Live in the Lite edition, though there’s no indication yet that Ableton intends to open that up to other developers.
https://learningsynths.ableton.com/