Daws – Ray J Music

So there I was with a huge bank of sounds, instruments, tracks and effects plus Max For Live and Plug-ins but where do I start. At first it was a bit overwhelming to be honest. I had craved this and suddenly I had it and had absolutely no idea what to do with it lol. I guess in a way that’s fairly natural especially if you’re just an enthusiastic amateur like me. But features like Max For Live which I knew very little about are a huge subject and facility to master on their own.

I decide in the end to YouTube myself to near death in an attempt to increase my knowledge and skills. Day after day searching for more and more info about every aspect of Ableton Live 10 Suite. Of course the only problem is that for every decent YouTube video on a subject there are probably about 20 really rubbish ones but you have to watch them or part of them to find this out.

Anyway after a period of learning a topic and applying it to a riff or sample tune my skills did start to improve, even at my age, I suddenly knew what ‘sidechaining’ was and ‘warping’ and loads of other useful features that can make track sound so much more professional and that was great. Two years on and I’m still learning, my music has changed and become a mix of live keyboard and guitar together with lots of samples, drumbeats and natural sounds which I love to use. My journey continues and every day i feel so lucky that I can sit down in my little home studio and create something totally original that belongs to me !!!!

I first started using Ableton Live Lite when I purchased my Novation Launchkey 61 a few of years ago in 2017 when it came packaged with the keyboard. I was hooked straight away. I already had a copy of FL Studio 12 (Fruity Loops) at the time which I had been dabbling with for a while. I found it quite good and enjoyed creating with it but I have to say when I started using Ableton Live it was a game changer for me. From that moment when I first started using it I knew that I would have to get the Standard edition which I did at a cost of £207 on 22 Dec 2017 !! It immediately opened up so many more options to me. For example I now had 5 instruments instead of 4, 1800+ (10GB) Sounds instead of 1500+(5GB), 34 Audio Effects instead of 21 but most importantly I went from 16 Audio and Midi tracks to UNLIMITED !!!!!! I mean you have no idea the elation I had when I loaded Standard on my computer for the first time and suddenly I could create as many tracks as I wanted. There were other differences too such as 256 audio inputs and outputs instead of 8 etc etc. 2018 was a very creative year for me and I had countless hours of fun with my DAW. Of course that wasn’t enough because by now I had heard of things live Wavetable, Sampler, Convolution Reverb, Echo and a whole host of other audio effects, software instruments and packs that Standard didn’t have. You guessed it, I had to have Ableton Live 10 Suite, it was the only way to go. Finally in January 2019 I bought Suite for £269, which is a lot of money to me, and finally I was in heaven! More in my next post when I talk about my year of discovery with Ableton Live Suite.