Best Submit Onlywire!: Ableton Live ReWire Live with Logic X

Ableton Live is a great composition and performance tool, and I
absolutely can’t do without it, but there are times when it’s
lacking certain features, and that’s when I turn to Logic Pro.
That’s not a put-down of Live in any way, let’s be clear about
that, but there’s no such thing as a perfect DAW – they all have
their strengths and weaknesses, and different projects have
different needs. It’s like having more than one synth or more than one guitar;
you have a broader palette when you expand a little bit. Most Live users I know
have another DAW as well, whether it’s Pro Tools, Cubase, or Logic. Logic has
evolved over many years, going back in various incarnations as far as the early
1990s, while Live’s ground-breaking interface first appeared in 2001. (I’ve
never felt motivated to add a third DAW to my regular set-up. I suppose I
could… it would probably be Reason).
It’s timely to look at using Live and Logic together because they both had
major updates in 2013. Live 9 was released early in 2013, with some great new
features, as well as overall improvements to sound and performance. The new
features include dual monitor support, the Glue Compressor, audio to MIDI
conversion, clip envelope recording, improved browsing and rendering, and of
course, very significantly, integration with the new Push controller. When Logic
Pro X came along, it was arguably even more radical, and instead of being the
birth of ‘Garageband Pro’ as sceptics had predicted, it gave a new lease of life to
Logic, with a long-overdue interface refresh, Flex Pitch, track stacks, bass amps,
smart controls, the new Drummer tracks feature, the Retro synth, Logic Remote
app support, updated EQ interface, and – very popular with me – MIDI effects.
Pros and cons
Even with the many updates, there are differences between what Live and Logic
do. Live’s specialities are still what they’ve always been: fast audio manipulation,
the Session View, 1a clean user interface (which makes it great for education
as well), and incredibly simple, yet expansive MIDI routing options. Add Push to
this, and it’s a powerful system, most at home with live performance, remixing,
DJing, and experimentation. Logic on the other hand, feels more like a modern
take on the older style of DAW, with a bias towards deeper MIDI programming,
score-based composition, 2huge amounts of user-definable options, superior
timeline-based functionality, track comping, better handling of third party
plug-ins, better suitability for soundtrack production, MainStage compatibility
with channel strips and instrument set-ups, 3and, what I think might be the
most important feature of all – upscalability
from Garageband projects created on iOS or
OS X. Logic is super-cheap, as well; if
you’re a Mac user, and you’re willing to
spend £139 on a synth plug-in, for
example, you can look at Logic, with its
plethora of bundled synth presets, as an
alternative solution.

Friday, 6 June 2014

Ableton Live ReWire Live with Logic X

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