Attitudes Toward Ableton

ThirdMan

I sold my decks a few years back and picked up Ableton. My intention was to have a production set-up that would also do me for DJ'ing. Both are only hobbies for me, and this was the best and cheapest way for me to enjoy both.

However, this didn't get a great reaction on other forums I was a member of. "It's not real DJ'ing" was generally what was thrown at me. Anyway, I've just booted up Ableton after a long period away from it, and I'm excited about getting "into" it again, but this leaves me wondering what is the general attitude towards Ableton now? Obviously it's very popular amongst many well known DJ's. But what is the 'grass roots' perception of it?

Sorry if this question has been asked before. Im new on this forum.

eeloe

Personally, i don't really see the attraction of DJing with ableton.

I know of a few DJ's who do, and they are good with it, but it's just not for me.

I use ableton at home for production, and it's an incredibly powerful tool....i just can't really see the DJing side of it.

Traktor is nearly becoming the industry standard for DJ's playing out now, so i think you should look in to that

Chloroplast

If your a DJ, your role is to play and mix music. what medium you use to do that does not matter in the slightest. dont be put off by idiots who say "oh hes not a real dj , hes on a laptop". how do those people know you haven't been on proper decks for 10 years ? they dont.they dont know anything about your history as a dj,so dont listen to fools who know nothing.

ive been a DJ for 12 years. 10 of those years on technics.
i switched over to ableton after a few years of useage, and haven't looked back since.

before i got into ableton,on the decks i would use the role sampler on the pioneer mixer for snapping quick loops for those situations when you get a tune and the end of the record might end too quick for you to mix out of, i would snap a loop and mix, it didn't always turn out to successful as you had to snap the loop manually. with ableton all that is sorted, i can read the file and see where the breaks are, i can rearrange an entire track to suit the needs for the next track im mixing in, i can do it all there and then while the other track is playing. no to metion fx, vsts and other possibilitys. this is giving struggling artists and djs an opportunity to do something different when playing out live. gives them a chance to stand out that little bit more and make a difference.

how may gigs have you went to where you go to hear your favourite dj to play, only to find him letting tracks play for a full 7 minutes only to just cross one track over another ? ive been to loads, many producers have disappointed me like that.

give me an innovative laptop dj over an overrated vinyl dj anyday. and as regards traktor : overrated,over marketed,over Ritchie hawtined . 2cent.

copeyhagen

having used ableton to dj for around a eyar, then traktor for about 9 months i feel a lot more at home with traktor than ableton. coming from a vinyl background aswell.

yeh richie hawtin (plastikman really) is an ass biscuit but beside him traktor rocks!!

Chloroplast

ill say, that Kontrol x1 seems very attractive with traktor, ive watched a few videos of it. its nice the way they present it, i can see why people go for it, with its instant plug and play and no need for midi mapping and all that.

do you use it too or you using different controller ?

i use ableton on a sony vaio and a poineer 800 mixer as a midi controller,cant get enough of it.

copeyhagen

i was using an allen & heath xone 1d for traktor. was decent enough and built like a rock.

i know a lot of people that used traktor would still use ableton aswell for extra effects and that, its really just a personal preference between the 2.

would like to have a greater knowledge of traktors production benefits though

lardossan

I use Ableton for production and live sets, I tried it for Dj-ing but I didn't find it very stimulating. I like mixing one track, let it play and mix the next song at the right time, knowing when and how and enjoying the seat if the pants feeling of mixing vinyl, Ableton I found a bit boring given my djing style.

A lot of this innovative digital djing possibilites mentioned are normally having 16 loops playing simulanteously overlaid with 5 or 6 effects and all sounding **** and dated. Mostly I like to play records that don't need me to re-edit them on the fly but do their own thing with their producers having made a good job of it prior to releasing it.

Most bad rep I heard in clubs from promoters and club owners about digital djs is the poor quality of the sound, the fact that the software or audio interface (being that the sound card or the serato box) has always some glitch that either stops the gig or somehow creates problems during the gig.

copeyhagen

the same can be said about tone arms on vinyl hopping, or cd decks skipping, nothing is ever gonna be perfect.

but i have yet to see someones laptop setup fail live (im sure it happens quite a bit), whereas i have ehard vinyl hop / jump, tone arms jump ect in places like pod / tripod.

Chloroplast

exactly, and i have many a tune that i love, that might have an odd ending and may not have a produced ending that i want for my next track to mix into, i work around it and make it fit, with my given tools and a brain.

when a producer has a track released, its released because his track is good, not because the end of his track is dj friendly.

and while there may be some people out there having 16 loops going with 5 fx etc etc, that doesn't mean everyone is doing that.

and i too have never seen a laptop fail on stage.nor has it failed for me..

hans aus dtschl

It doesn't matter what format people use.
Ableton will make a good dj better or a bad dj worse.

Vinyl...CD...it's all the same story.

The one thing vinyl and CD have going for them these days above ableton/virtual dj/traktor are that they're relatively expensive. So the half-assed people tend to end up with the software stuff "because it's easy to be a dj" etc. But that's not really a hard fast rule either.

Sounds-wise, I think people equally dislike sh1tty samples, gomey sounding effects and boring loops as much as worn records/scratched cd's/skipping records/boring mixing anyway so it's much of a muchness.

Most critical thing for me is: are they (the dj) good at what they do.
I feel it's like asking whether a carpenter or brick-layer is better, really. It's by pure coincidence that one's easier to get started on right now.

electrogrimey

Chloroplast wrote: »

ill say, that Kontrol x1 seems very attractive with traktor, ive watched a few videos of it. its nice the way they present it, i can see why people go for it, with its instant plug and play and no need for midi mapping and all that.

do you use it too or you using different controller ?

i use ableton on a sony vaio and a poineer 800 mixer as a midi controller,cant get enough of it.

I use 2 Kontrol X1s and they're brilliant. They're only flaw, and I mean only (it's the only problem I've encountered so far) is that the native mode doesn't use MIDI, it uses a different thing called HID, so basically you can only use it with Traktor.

I use Ableton for production, and think it's unbelievable, but can't really see how people DJ with it. The browser is too gammy for me to select things quickly, and dragging from iTunes live at a gig doesn't seem great either. I can see why people do it, but it's just way less intuitive, like selecting effects etc than Traktor is for me.

The one thing vinyl and CD have going for them these days above ableton/virtual dj/traktor are that they're relatively expensive.

Definitely true, and more importantly for me, the actual music is more expensive, so vinyl DJs will put a lot more thought into the music they play, and will know it better, than a digital DJ who downloads 100 tracks for free every day.

copeyhagen

electrogrimey wrote: »

Definitely true, and more importantly for me, the actual music is more expensive, so vinyl DJs will put a lot more thought into the music they play, and will know it better, than a digital DJ who downloads 100 tracks for free every day.

100% agree with the above, when i first moved to digital i used to download a ridiculous amount of mp3s. way way way too much. and if i was downloading files such as "beatport best selling techno jan 2010" i would just download the whole thing and keep them all, whereas when paying money for vinyl you would only pick out the gems that really stood out.

at the moment on my new laptop i think i have like 1900 mp3s, of which i have never even loaded about 75% in traktor!

gonna take a day off in a week or two and just go through the entire collection and delete what i dont really like.

Stab*City

electrogrimey wrote: »

Definitely true, and more importantly for me, the actual music is more expensive, so vinyl DJs will put a lot more thought into the music they play, and will know it better, than a digital DJ who downloads 100 tracks for free every day.

Thats crap.. I was a vinyl dj now im now an ableton dj.. i put same if not more thought into my stuff now as before.. Not every digital dj downloads 100 tracks a day, and not every digital dj fileshares. And if they do they will pick the ones they like the best and learn and know them just the same as if they went into a record shop and listened to 100 records before actually leaving the shop with 5.

Its not what tools you use its what comes out the speakers that counts.. But i think if a dj finds using ableton/traktor boring they were usually that dj that mixed one record into another then stood around for 8 minutes pretending to twiddle knobs/cueing in a first beat till it was time to mix the next..

Im sitting here looking at 3000 or so records and i paid mostly 5-15 quid each for them.. and ya know what i cant even remember how half them go..

Executive Steve

lardossan wrote: »

I use Ableton for production and live sets, I tried it for Dj-ing but I didn't find it very stimulating. I like mixing one track, let it play and mix the next song at the right time, knowing when and how and enjoying the seat if the pants feeling of mixing vinyl, Ableton I found a bit boring given my djing style.

A lot of this innovative digital djing possibilites mentioned are normally having 16 loops playing simulanteously overlaid with 5 or 6 effects and all sounding **** and dated. Mostly I like to play records that don't need me to re-edit them on the fly but do their own thing with their producers having made a good job of it prior to releasing it.

This.

hans aus dtschl

Stab*City wrote: »

Thats crap.. I was a vinyl dj now im now an ableton dj.. i put same if not more thought into my stuff now as before.. Not every digital dj downloads 100 tracks a day, and not every digital dj fileshares. And if they do they will pick the ones they like the best and learn and know them just the same as if they went into a record shop and listened to 100 records before actually leaving the shop with 5.

Its not what tools you use its what comes out the speakers that counts.. But i think if a dj finds using ableton/traktor boring they were usually that dj that mixed one record into another then stood around for 8 minutes pretending to twiddle knobs/cueing in a first beat till it was time to mix the next..

Im sitting here looking at 3000 or so records and i paid mostly 5-15 quid each for them.. and ya know what i cant even remember how half them go..

The point being made by electrogrimey (and I made it myself too) was that when you're buying digitally you need to be careful not to slip back into the "acquire all" mentality. It also requires huge discipline to not revert back to the same songs while playing out.

I think you need to realise that ableton dj'ing is no longer a "new" or "technologically advanced" way of going about things. It's not a "better" way of dj'ing. It's just different. The perceived advantages you see ableton having are simply the advantages YOU find. Most of us have tried each method, and settled on a preferred one. We all have our own reasons. You might be bored by dj's who let the record play, but I can assure you that for every person bored by these dj's, there's one who's bored by dj's who don't leave the tracks alone.

There's no difference between ableton and the other methods of dj'ing.

The point about your 3000 records is arbitrary but I put it to you that if you can't remember how half of your 3000 records goes, you're in for a rough time, on the digital formats.

Stab*City

hans aus dtschl wrote: »

The point being made by electrogrimey (and I made it myself too) was that when you're buying digitally you need to be careful not to slip back into the "acquire all" mentality.

This is true.

hans aus dtschl wrote: »

I think you need to realise that ableton dj'ing is no longer a "new" or "technologically advanced" way of going about things. It's not a "better" way of dj'ing. It's just different. The perceived advantages you see ableton having are simply the advantages YOU find. Most of us have tried each method, and settled on a preferred one. We all have our own reasons.

So what is "technologically advanced"? I have all 3 1210's, cdj's and a laptop with an apc40, ive also used traktor since version1 with my bcd2000.. ableton/digital djing is the new way of doing things and by far the most "technologically advanced".. first was vinyl, then cd's, now digital.. unless you have a new method of djing that we dont know about?

hans aus dtschl wrote: »

You might be bored by dj's who let the record play, but I can assure you that for every person bored by these dj's, there's one who's bored by dj's who don't leave the tracks alone.

This of course depends on personal preference.. im not bored by dj's who let the record play just the ones who only play songs one after another and nothing else..

hans aus dtschl wrote: »

There's no difference between ableton and the other methods of dj'ing.
The point about your 3000 records is arbitrary but I put it to you that if you can't remember how half of your 3000 records goes, you're in for a rough time, on the digital formats.

The reason i cant remember half the records is because alot of them were bought in haste.. heading up to dublin from limerick via train couple times a month for years your gonna pick up alot of stuff that maybe sounds good in the shop but after a few plays out just goes to the back of the now huge pile.. Plus when it started to become possible to buy vinyl online i ended up with lots of vinyl that maybe had parts i liked but other parts i didnt..

this was another appeal of digital djing for me the smaller outlay of cash!! especially nowadays.. ive been djing via a digital format since about 2004 and i did fall into the download everything trap at first but i got over that and now i only download tracks i intend to use.. but if it turns out after a few weeks i dont really like it anymore ill just delete it.. 1 or 2 quid down the drain via beatport is better than 10-15 via abbey.. and trust me you get to know downloads quite well if your warping, beatmapping, chopping, sampling, converting, listening, transfering them..

I am lucky enough to be able to try my hand at every method as i have the equipment.. to say i prefer one over the other would be a lie.. i love vinyl/1210's.. i love playing with cdjs.. i love digital djing.. but its all in vain and a waste of money if you dont like what sounds you hear coming out my speakers.. its all about the music baby..:D