So I’ve made the jump and invested in the Ableton Live Suite. Having used NI’s Maschine exclusively for the past 6 months, this represents a major addition to my workflow, where Maschine goes from being basically my DAW, to being a plugin amongst others running within Live.

I don’t think I will stop sequencing entire songs in Maschine, especially the more percussion / beat heavy tracks wich lend themselves well to Maschine’s scene / pattern based workflow, but Live is just so much more versatile and multifaceted in its editing and workflow capabilities.

A major tool chain change like this has many consequences. For example, my output will drop since I need to spend a lot of time learning Live before I can compose / produce rapidly with it. (Having built over 20 complete songs in Maschine by now I have a pretty good, basic flow in place…) Also, this means I will need to unlearn several methods and workflows that while well suited to Maschine does not seem to translate well to Live.

I have set my first goal to produce an entire trance song in Live in order to get the basics done, and I will add it in here once it’s done.

Now given my usual luck this probably means that Live 9 will be announced within the next  week or so ;-)…