Gerhard Behles & Dave Hill

Ableton Live is a program that has long been hard to define — is it a DAW, is it a DJ-centric program, is it a tweaker's toolbox or is it all (or none) of the above? A recent major update, Live 8, has brought more tweaks that bring it in line with a DAW while still retaining the features that set it apart from other digital audio software. We talked to Ableton founder and CEO Gerhard Behles and managing director Dave Hill about Live and how it fits into a 21st century production palette.

Can you give me some background on how you first decided to develop Live?

GB: For one, it's not like I wrote this. I'm part of a lot of people who developed this. I guess the original ideas evolved from how it always goes — a musician's need and that need not being fulfilled by anything that you can get a hold of. We were fortunate to be in a time and place where it was possible to attract financing and set up a business.

Did you first develop it as a performance instrument or as a sequencer? Or a little bit of both?

GB: The honest story is that it was always meant to be everything a musician should need. That was the scope of it from the beginning. It was a little megalomaniac, I guess, but we just sat down with — we're around the corner from a situation where a computer is going to be so powerful that it can run all the processing next to all the UI, next to all the control and everything that you would need to run a full-blown studio — everything a studio does today. Once we are there, what is the musician going to want to be working like? It's a whole different paradigm. In the classic studio situation legacy from the '50s, '60s, '70s and so on, the studio is the place you go to produce. You have your song done and you come to the place. It's all in your head and you've practiced and the whole band is tuned in. Then you spend the shortest time you can in the studio, because it's an expensive place to rent to get that down onto tape. Once you have a machine that you don't pay rent for — it's with you all the time — you're going to have so many different applications than just a recording of a song that's already done. You're going to want it to do something for you when you're trying to come up with an idea for a song. Plus, beyond the production, you're going to want the computer to help you with your stage performance and your playing out. We thought, "We need to conceive of an environment that makes sense through all these different steps in the process and that connects them." Also so that it's not, "We're going to have to play out tonight. That means we need to get our heads into a new tool, repurpose what we have in some way so we can deliver this to an audience." It should really be one environment that connects all these different angles of the process. I guess the performance aspect of it was what caught people initially — because that was just the most glaring [product] deficit at the time. There was just no other way you could do it at all. You needed to schlep a whole lot of gear to a venue to play. Most people said, "Now that's a fix for a very obvious problem that I have." I guess that got a lot traction in the beginning, but it turned out most people use it for creation more than performance.

I often turn to Live when I need something that I'm unable to attain using my more conventional options, such as Logic or Pro Tools.

DH: That is a good reputation to have. Live certainly can appeal to the person who likes to tweak — the artist or musician who likes to get deep inside things — but I think what is maybe even more wonderful is the fact that it can appeal to the novice and the person just getting into making music on the computer. I travel around the world and I meet Ableton users and they're all so different. It's all over the place. There are a lot of people making electronic music, but one guy is DJ'ing only and one guy is using it for film music and getting cues together. Then you meet a theater person and they're using it only in theater applications. You have folks out there who are just completely into the tweaking side of things and really getting deep into the electronica, like hardcore glitch and IDM, and then you have people who use it really simply like, "Hey, I just want to loop something."

What do you think are some of Live's strengths from a live performance standpoint?

GB: Stability would be pretty high up on the list, wouldn't it? We spend a terrible amount on testing and fixing things that we find — then obviously the playability of it. We try to make it more like an instrument and less like a tape machine. We try to think of ways a person can interact with the material. It's like the computer contains musical materials and we want to offer ways that we can interact with it more spontaneously than just as a playback. It's just simple stuff. You're playing a song and it so happens that the solo takes a little longer today because it's a good day and you would rather not want the tape to dictate for that to be over now. It's that kind of freedom that we're trying to offer.

What about its strength as a studio tool?

GB: I guess what most people will say is that they like the fact that they do less editing and more playing — that's what we want to achieve. We're trying to get people out of a left-brain, analyzing and methodological way of working. We want to put them back on a track that we find so inspiring and fun, really, which is just developing a flow of ideas and responding to what they can listen while they make it. If I look and see a timeline that is going to hit an end — that scares me. "I have a canvas in front of me and it ends at three hundred five, whatever it is, and I need to fill that and that's going to be my confines." That looks to me like it's almost the end of the story, and not the beginning of a story. All I was trying to do was noodle around and come up with some ideas for a song. That is more of where we came from in the beginning. We wanted to do away with the idea that it's going to be a "song". Now you fill the song with your materials and we wanted to make it more like, "Why don't you try to do something and we'll see how we can make sense of all that later on. Just capture your stuff and keep going."

Can you talk about the increasing power of computers and how native-based audio applications are taking advantage of this increased power?

DH: It's certainly been great. Maybe everybody has to thank the videogame industry for forcing the speed of development for the graphics cards, the CPU and how computer busses manage RAM. All around it's gotten faster and we've certainly leveraged that, and will continue to do so.

How much do you try to develop Live based on user input? I know that the Ableton forum is very active, but how much input do you get from users that is actually implemented?

GB: I would say 90% of the resources go pretty directly into what they want or what they need. That is a fine difference. There is a lot of work going on with the team that handles specification in trying to understand if a user says, "I want this and this", what it really is that they need. Oftentimes the solution that they propose is not the best one that we can think of in context. You try to understand when a user comes forward — what is the problem that they are trying to solve? Then you're trying to solve the problem. That is where 90% of the work goes and maybe 10% goes into other stuff — forward thinking things that people have not requested. That's the experimental part and that happens too because we're trying to innovate. It's very systematic. There is a guy who manages a list with a couple hundred entries — every single user wish is in there, but luckily most of what people say has been requested before.

DH: I guess I can risk to say that Ableton is one of the last independent companies making a digital audio workstation. We're making a program that people produce and record and perform music with, and most other companies such as Apple, Yamaha, Digidesign, etc., have a lot more at stake. As a result, our forum is a little wild and wooly, so the ideas and true feedback boil to the surface. It's uncensored or self-censored for the most part, and that helps our users tell us exactly what they are thinking.

What would you tell somebody who is "digital-audio averse" that would make them want to try using Ableton Live?

GB: Give it a chance as a creative helper. That's where I see its most potential. If you are a musician with some engineering aspirations, you are going to have so much fun with this type of technology. DH: If you're looking for a new way to write, compose, produce and possibly perform music, the Ableton Live work flow and the user friendliness of the program is worth checking out. The type of user that uses Live doesn't exactly fit into a nice category — it's wide open. It's a creative, impulsive tool that you can use like an instrument.

Anything else you would like to add about Live?

GB: It's always been made with a person in mind that is the sole performer, engineer, producer and everything — because that is just today's reality. You kind of have to make it simple on them because they have so many things to do.

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