Customer Reviews

Ableton Live 7 Tips and Tricks

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
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I bought this book hoping it would kickstart my working with Live. It really hasn't. The book claims to be something different than the manual. Well, I'm not so sure. Since it wants to cover all aspects of Live it tends to be pretty shallow. Maybe I'm unfair, but to me it reads a bit like a salespersons description of the software. "Live can do this, and this and this..." but it doesn't really help you start doing those things yourself.
There's even a whole chapter devoted to midi-controllers, that also seem very much like salestalk for Behringer, M-audio etc.

What I would have like would have been regular lessons - tutorials guiding you through step after step.

I don't recommend this book. New Live-users would do a lot better at looking at all the free resources at the Ableton website. There you'll find great video tutorials as well as good lessons on pdf-files that you could print or read on screen.

(While it might not be relevant for Live, but just to show I'm not impossible to please: I bought a great book for another software - Propellerhead's Reason 4. The book "Reason 4 Ignite" by Matt Piper has a great structure that walks you through different parts of the software in well written examples.)

This is the book to learn this particular Music Program, by all means, this is not a substitute to the Ableton Manual but merely a companion to that, to get the best results out of this book, you need first to have the actual software install on your computer to follow through with the tips and trick it teaches, basically giving you a basic definition of the feature in question followed by a suggestion example to apply to your musical projects.

The illustrations shown here are quite clear throughout the book with big snapshots showing where you need to be around Ableton at all times which is very helpful, this is the area where most books fall short, drowning the user with endless text with not enough visuals to follow through.

The author (Mr. Delaney) obviously knows the subject matter very well, with the graphic ability to show not just the basic operations, but additional tricks to apply to your piece of music. Ableton Live 7 Tips and Tricks is really what it is, additional ways to use the program to your advantage beyond the Manual. I've been using Ableton Live since version 5 for Multimedia projects and even I've learn different ways of applying effects, dynamics and using hardware keyboards and controllers and better implementing Ableton Live with different Audio and Midi interfaces along with other Software's as VST or Rewire

Conclusion:
To get the best results out of this book, I suggest reading the Manual first and the built-in Tutorials that comes with Ableton Live to get real world satisfying results out of your Multimedia. Newcomers, Intermediate and Advanced User will all benefit greatly from this book.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

this book lives up to it's rep. I have been using ABELTON Live since it was version 4
and now that i'm using version 7 i wanted a quick learn guide. This is it.
Simple explinations and pics to show you the way. thank you!

There are certainly good tips in this book and it manages to avoid being just a re-hash of the Ableton Live user's manual. It's greatest problem is an almost total lack of information on certain fundamentals that make Ableton Live the product of choice for so many DJ's and producers. An example is time Warping, which barely gets a mention in the book, and has been an important part of Live for so long that it's nearly unforgivable to give it so little attention. Still, for the price, there are enough tidbits in this book that you won't find in the Ableton user's guide to make it worth the purchase.

'Ableton Live 7 Tips and Tricks' is great for learning music production on the Macintosh. Around 150 pages of content reside in this book and it's broken up over 21 chapters. Only complaint is that this book should have been published in color. The black and white pictures don't make for a great experience and this was a mistake but the people who bankrolled this book.

**** RECOMMENDED

i was hoping for more out of this... i have read the manual and then this book... and it really didn't give me much that i couldnt get off the ableton forum...