I've been using Studio one for a number of years now, mainly for live instrument recording but echoes of my youth are returning and I tried my hand at electronic music production (trance, deep house, drum and bass) but I'm finding it difficult.

Most of the tutorials I have seen are based around Ableton Live, and while I can apply the concepts to Studio One I decided to download Live and give it a go. I found that I was more productive (after the initial learning curve), and I'm wondering why that is.

Why is Ableton more popular for electronic music?

 

Well i think its mostly popular because of its "live" music making capabilities. Its very easy to just get a couple of loops going on the tracks and just make a bit of real time music. Basically u can do everything u want while playing sound in realtime. And thats what electronic music is often about. Thats really what ableton does like no other. Altough u can make electronic music in Studio one just fine also. I actually think that studio one has a much better audio quality when it comes to stuff like timestretching and internal fx. Ableton can sound a bit thin at times and the timestretching just insnt very good. But still when it comes to livesets and life music making like you would with outboard gear like grooveboxes drummachines and synths with stepsequencer that you just sync to each other and then control them in realtime i think no program comes close to ableton. Thats the way i usually start a new track. I just let it loop and add more layers to the main loop playing untill i think that i have the main ingedrients for a full track and then i start programming it further on.

 

Hi @mferrr and welcome!
You remind me of how it was back in the day when Cubase was Steinberg Pro24 and Logic was Notator.
We would have a lot of external MIDI devices running, some of them having their own sequence patterns that were being triggered by whatever the main pre-audiofile sequencer was on the computer.
It was always a pain to 'back-engineer' our track so that we could either get all the parts as MIDI to the main sequencer for playback, or get other parts to tape.
Although Ableton Live makes that situation a bit simpler, it still doesn't get away from that old school workflow that I just don't need anymore!
Even Logic, which I have been using for 20 years now, has step-time ways of programming in realtime for MIDI, and now some pattern-based ways of creating in realtime, more like Live.
Not that Logic couldn't be setup to do this even since the early days! It just involved going into the Environment window and lots of messing around.
So I understand why the Ableton workflow works for people, and the way that you descibe using it is how I have used it too.

I just see my main daw as an amalgamation of all the hardware we have had over the last however many decades (I'm specifically thinking of since the dawn of MIDI i.e. drum machines, sequencers, synths and samplers) paired with multitrack audio capabilities.
And I can create and achieve pretty much the same track in any daw.

 

It is also common that people start a song with Live and then mix the song in another DAW.
Just use what woks best for you, and don't care about the rest.

 

I've not quite got the appeal of loops (yet), my workflow has always been to start with a blank canvas and build up individual instruments slowly. I might take the idea of loops and see where it gets me.

I had Pro24 on my 512 ST/FM and a Roland SC-55. I remember being in awe of the quality of those GM sounds, poor at today's standards but back then it was all a young me had

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jun 22, 2020

I'm loving Ableton, so much that I am thinking of getting Push 2 to compliment the workflow. I don't quite enjoy the NI ecosystem, otherwise I would have though about the Maschine.

 

I'm Live user, coming from FL Studio, experimenting with Reaper and Studio One.
My niche is electronic music.
Live is most fleyible DAW for people who wants something different. The way Live is doing it is by the most simple wave manipulation.
Live has its own wave editor where you can grap loop points in the sample and relocate them wherever you want. One click and the loop is double slower or faster. Sample engine is the best of everything in DAWs. Its own high quality algorithms is something you really need to work with in order to understand what I'm talking about.

 

There are 2 types of daw: mixing oriented and producing oriented. From what you say I guess you need the 2nd type

 

I've spent most of my time since writing this thread using Ableton, I even went and got the push 2. I've had so much fun experimenting, coming up with new ideas and jamming live. I wish I had done this sooner.

The other day, I grabbed my old Strat and went to jam and instinctively fired up Studio one. I'm happier with audio inside that than live.

I guess it is all about the right tool for the job