
There’s nothing special about take lanes compared to the main lane of a track: they contain clips, and you can cut, copy, paste and edit Arrangement clips whether they are in take lanes or not. Selection and editing is quantised to the grid by default, as you’d expect, and take fragments are sliced into the track with short crossfades to eliminate clicks or glitches.

Although the obvious use of take lanes is to assemble the best possible track from distinct takes of the same musical phrase or section, there’s nothing to stop you creating takes from completely different material and slicing them together creatively. Once you’ve assembled a number of takes, you can start assembling your final track from them, and there are convenient keyboard shortcuts for selecting regions within takes and copying them into the track. Record over the same part of the track, and the material in the main lane of the track is overwritten, but the old take lane preserves a copy of it.Ī track can now contain multiple take lanes, from which a comp can be made. Start recording, and a new clip is laid down in the track, but a duplicate clip is also laid down in a take lane, which are created as needed. Every Arrangement track accumulates a number of ‘take lanes’. However, something else is going on behind the scenes. In Live 11, Arrangement recording is always non‑destructive, although at first glance there’s no difference in behaviour compared to Live 10: record a new section of audio, or MIDI, over an old one, and the old one is erased. Record something new, and what was in the track before was lost, at least unless you hit ‘undo’ or reverted to a saved version of the project. In Live 10, recording over material in a track was essentially destructive - just like with tape. Live’s linear Arrangement view now supports comping: multiple takes for a track can be recorded at the same point in a song, and the best parts of each take can then be assembled into the final track.

Ableton have also had the builders in to work on the instruments and effects, with some upgrades to existing devices and some intriguing new additions.

But this visual similarity hides some significant structural improvements: specifically MPE support, more versatility inside clips and device racks, and multiple take lanes in the Arrangement.
ABLETON 11 LIVE UPGRADE
Live 11 introduces new features, improves some old ones, and throws in some exciting new rack devices for good measure.Īs Ableton Live’s release version finally goes to 11 in its 20th year, what improvements, refinements and additions does it deliver? There’s no major visual overhaul as we saw in the upgrade from Live 9 to Live 10, and it’s hard to tell Live 11 visually from its predecessor unless you know where to look.
