Live 2.01 Impressions, or "ableton listens, users rejoice" Options

[filarion]

Paid my 80 Euros to upgrade to Live 2.0 a couple of days ago. Awesome new features like different timestretch engines (acoustic guitar tracks actually can be used in Live now), ability to turn those engines off for individual samples, better automatization, etc.

Performance looks to be the same like 1.5 - which means that it still isn't Altivec optimized, and faster on PCs, but the Ableton guys are Mac users themselves and are promising to add this (requiring a bunch of rewrites) for the next upgrade. Anyways, especially with software like Live the performance is nowhere near as important as creativity.

[filarion]

You say you don't like Reason's interface. Do you have another synth that you prefer?
You say that Logic is the "serious" way to go, which I get.
Then you say that Live requires a "certain experience and discipline". In this regard I thought that this statement would be even more so for Logic, and thus I got a bit confused.
And with the Logic Big Box Bundle, would I still want to get Reason?

I don't like how Reason tries to "emulate" a real rack. Sure, it looks nice, but it's not very effective to work with in my opinion. I prefer clean, nice GUI's like Live and Logic use. I work with a lot of MIDI gear, so no, I don't use a lot of software synths. I like reaktor, absynth and max/msp though (all of those are pretty experimental - not for everyone).

what I meant with Live requiring discipline is - it is a relatively focussed and limited working environment. you're working with samples and only samples. arrangement, finetuning of loops are everything. plus, I could never use it as my only music production tool because of those limitations. Logic has a lot of functions you might not use for a year, but that's no problem since there's so much to learn and discover. logic platinum (the gold bundle probably too) also has a great written tutorial book that comes with it. to put it simply, you don't learn how to make music on computers (in the "classical" sense) with software like Live or Reason, but with soft like PT, Logic or Cubase.

of course, I still don't even know what kind of music you want to make - reason + live will work great for minimal techno for instance, good luck scoring a movie or tracking vocals though.

as for the Big Box Bundle, you'll be busy for a while. The EXS24 is a very musical sampler.