I bought Ableton Live and Push around October of last year and it is one of the best purchases I've ever made for music!
First, since this is Cakewalk's forum, let me me tell you I've been with Cake FOREVER and I just bought the update to Platinum. I find Ableton a chore to mix in, and there are delay compensation issues. In other words, I love them BOTH and neither will replace the other.
Now, what I love about Ableton. Bottom line: It fits my creative workflow like nothing else.
1. First, the Push. I'm a guitar player and not a keyboard player. The push operates in multiple modes.
- In one mode, the pads act like keyboard pads but you can set the scale and all of the pads are in that scale - no bad notes! You learn a few basic three finger shapes and you've got all your chords down, regardless of the scale you play in. You can go crazy with melodies and leads and never play a bad note! When you get an interesting pattern, the push makes it easy to audition other instruments in real time as the pattern plays. FUN!
- In another mode, Push works with drums in a unique way. The bottom left 16 pads map directly to individual drums in your "drum rack". The top four rows are a pattern sequencer. So, tap the pad for kick drum, touch the pads where you want it to play (as it is playing through the pattern - it's all in real time) and you get a kick pattern. Tap the hat pattern and do the same thing. Want some variety? hold the Accent button and tap a pad to make it play louder. With the Push, you can easily scroll through other drum sets in real-time as your pattern plays, and you can even scroll through single instruments. In other words, like your kit but not that ride cymbal? No problem, use the push to scroll through other ride cymbals you have while it plays your song in real-time.
- Related to instruments, not drum kits, there is a mode for step sequencing. the bottom row of pads becomes your root note and the pads going up are notes in your chosen scale. Really easy to make interesting patterns and melodies, as tapping a pad toggles the note between playing and not playing in that spot.
- Arrangement mode. Harder to explain - let me explain clips first. :)
So Ableton takes a unique approach by letting you record clips. Think of clips as snippets, or phrases of a song. How I do it is I have mapped the pedals of a Behringer FCB1010 to trigger and stop recording of clips individually across 8 audio tracks mapped to guitar (in this case, my Fractal Axe FX II coming in digitally). When I play something I find interesting, I hit the record pedal for the track I want to record it. Everything in Ableton is quantized (unless you don't want that) so even if I hit the recording button early, it waits to start recording until the next measure starts. When I tap the pedal to stop recording, it waits until the end of the measure to stop - I don't have to have perfect tap dancing skills! If I tap too early or too late, it's super easy to drag start and stop end points for a clip. Clips can be audio or midi. I love recording something with guitar, and then using a function similar to what Cake added, I can convert the audio to midi. When I do this, I get a brand new track with a midi clip that is already mapped to a default synth. I can then start scrolling with the Push to find something that is interesting. VERY fun!
So I end up with all of these clips. Some are on a drum track (for example, I might drag some patterns from EZ drummer - each pattern becomes a separate clip). Some are synths, some are audio. Any one track can have any number of clips in it, but a given track can only play one clip at a time. If you attempt to play another clip on a track that is playing a clip, Ableton waits until the end of the measure and then starts your new clip while stopping your old clip. Everything is ALWAYS in time! WOOT!
The push has an Arrangement mode where the columns of pads represent tracks, and the pads in the columns represent clips. You can tap a pad to trigger the clip. It's a ball to do this as it plays, because everything is in time and you can experiment with the order of clips, how long to let them play, etc. Think of the clips as your alphabet, and you get to figure out in real time the words and sentences of your song. Ableton can actually record what you do so you have your song (which can be edited).
so for me, I love to experiment and just make interesting clips and phrases and then put them all together later on. Each stage is just as fun. I've seen some posts where people defend Sonar as being as good as Ableton for EDM, but that's simply not the case. They are both great tools, but very different. My intent is to create in Ableton, export the steps, and mix in my beloved Sonar.
Ableton has it's challenges (creating racks for your VSTs is a HUGE chore) - but for what it does it is simply awesome.
Sorry for the long-winded post, but when I started researching Ableton I would have LOVED this info, as I had to piece it together over months. :) Let me know if you have any other questions...