It is not necessarily a cool thing for someone producing alternative/rock music to admit that they love gear that is pigeon holed as for DJs and Techno freaks, but Ableton Live has been the most important musical thing to happen to me. For those who don't know, I produce alternative rock under the name LiQuid Metamorphosis and the more electrorock/electronic material under Umbriel Rising. I had been a veteran of Steinberg Cubase for several years from VST 3.5 to SX3.

I first got on board the Ableton train in December 2006 with the recently released Live 6 and it's interface looked very primitive and quirky coming from the glossiness of the well established behemoth of the DAW world of Cubase. It kind of looked raw and unappealing, but digging into it a little deeper led me to liberation from the linear world of Cubase and Sonar and Logic etc.

Even just lining up a few of the preset clips for the first time for a quick play opened up my eyes to the possibilities and I went on to produce my Umbriel Rising album 'Extraterrestres' in less than 6 months, something that would have taken me more than a year in Cubase. This electronic/rock hybrid using a combination of real instruments, samples and real time quirky DJ features is well documented, Live's unique Session view allowing you to build up clips and 'scenes' and being able to trigger things and then throw in loops and samples and other audio tracks on the fly is a reason why dance DJs such as Pete Tong use it as their mainline software. How would Live stand up to the recording of a more traditional, more linear album? ('Searching For Esperanto' by LiQuid Metamorphosis)

Well as it turns out, it did extraordinarily well.

Ableton recently introduced Live 7 with several improvements to workflow that immediately made it work better for my project. Sidechain compression, drum racks, slicer and then the new Suite instruments were immediately put to good use and enhanced the final product, as did the new audio and MIDI engines.

Although Cubase has some advantages over Live, and in some cases, is better suited for live tracking of a band, working alone, I was able to do much more, more quickly using Live as an arrangement tool. I was half tempted to export the audio tracks for mixdown in Cubase, as some people seem to prefer, but decided I would give Live the chance to complete what it had started and that worked out very well. I had to finish one track in Cubase as the one bugbear with Live is that it is more CPU intensive and one very complex track was threatening to send my processor into a meltdown on my ageing laptop computer, but this was a rare exception.

So whatever genre of music you make, Live is able to handle your creative needs and is almost there in terms of the extra audio and MIDI editing power of the established DAWS, I think in the next release or two it will be lacking for NOTHING.

I would recommend the Live 7 Suite to anyone. Ableton have now made Live 7 and the Suite instruments available for 14 days unlimited free trial, so why not give it a chance. You might feel as amazed as I did, it was a musical revolution for me.