Ableton Live 8 in-depth review part 1: Groove and new warping tools

What is easily one of the most welcome and requested additions in the newest member of the Ableton Live family is the groove tools/groove pool. Prior to Live 8, the only control you had in regards to altering the groove of a project was either to adjust it globally using global groove, or to directly alter the qualtization of individual MIDI clips to fixed note or swing values (which was pretty limited and basic in functionality).

The new groove tools are pretty easy to get the hang of. In your library just open up the "grooves" folder and you'll notice that Live comes pre-loaded with dozens of presets, some of which were emulated directly from classic machines such as the Akai MPC series and the EMU SP1200 drum machine. Groove templates from these machines are more rigid and far less complex than the ones based on live instrumentation such as "rock" but surely will come in handy for veteran producers who came up on those machines. Drag a groove preset onto a clip- they work on both audio as well as MIDI clips. In order to apply the groove permanently to your clip you must select it in the clip properties window at the bottom and select "commit". The pull-down menu in that window actually consists of multiple grooves which are pulled from the groove pool, which I will describe in the next paragraph. You can also extract a groove from any audio/MIDI clip and use it in other ones, but you just have to make sure if you extract from an audio clip that you use your warp markers to define your transients in your waveform as closely as possible for the best results.

The groove pool gives you additional control over how you apply groove information to a clip, and you can audition multiple different groove presets from your library here. One thing that is important to know is that when you apply a groove to a clip and then go to apply another one, the second groove is written on top of the first one. So if you don't like the first groove you applied, you can dial in 100% in the qualtize window for that preset in the pool, then apply the second preset. The velocity and random settings in the groove pool is especially nice as they add extremely subtle fluctuations and control the volume level of your grooves respectively. There's also a global setting in the pool called "amount" which controls the random, velocity, and timing parameters of all the presets simultaneously.

Warping tools in Live 8 are fairly different from previous versions and this has been a very hot topic on various forums. There's a new transient detector that guesses based on your waveform where you might want to set your markers, which allows you to easily warp an entire song/clip by right clicking and selecting "qualtize", which gets it fairly close. Obviously you'll have to do some manual warping after the fact to get it perfect. You can also hold shift to move your transient detectors and double click to create the marker. Also, holding shift after creating the marker while hovering over it allows you to move the actual waveform around it. There's some awesome videos below courtesy of medwaystudios that go more in-depth with warping tricks.

The new beats algorithm sounds great (for drums and percussive effects) and builds nicely on previous versions. There's also an additional complex warping algorithm (complex pro) that I haven't had the chance to demo yet. I'm sure I'll cover this eventually once I get a chance to use it.