Ableton has jumped into the phone app music-making space with Ableton Note, a new paid-for iOS app intended to help users capture early musical ideas, before moving seamlessly to Ableton Live on a computer to continue the process.
The company said: “Note offers multiple musical starting points with a curated selection of Ableton Live’s drum kits, melodic instruments and synth sounds. Music-makers can also create their own sound palette by recording the world around them into Note’s sampler instruments.”
Features include:
- 56 Drum Sampler kits to use on the 16-pad grid, with quantise and note repeat
- 261 synth sounds and 36 Melodic Sampler instruments, which can be played polyphonically using the 25-pad grid or the piano roll, with onboard effects too
- A Drum Sampler and Melodic Sampler, for creating bespoke drum kits and sounds, which can be manipulated through cutting, filtering or repitching, and further transformed by adding effects
- A grid-based Session View layout for experimenting with different layer combinations and song structures, with easy audio exporting
- Ableton Cloud integration for sending Note sets straight to Live’s browser to further develop ideas
• Note is now available for iPhone and iPad in the App Store for €7/$6/£5.
First Thoughts
It makes sense for Ableton to offer a tool like this for capturing first ideas, such is the company’s dominance of the DAW market for electronic music producers.
We have yet to try it, but we’re particularly excited by the sample manipulation features, and the “jamming” functions, because the latter especially has always been a strength of Ableton Live on laptop, with Session View.
At this price, it’s probably going to be a no-brainer for anyone who already uses Ableton Live.
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Phil Morse
