Ableton Live
More info
- Creator
- Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke, Bernd Roggendorf
- Released
- Owner
- Ableton AG
- Type
- DAW
- Website
- ableton.com
The Berlin DAW built for playing live rather than recording, which is why it looks like a spreadsheet of loops.
Ableton was founded in 1999 by Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke — the pair behind the electronic act Monolake — together with Bernd Roggendorf. Live 1.0 shipped in 2001 and broke with the Pro Tools school on one point: Session View, a grid of clips that can be launched in any order and always land on the beat. A conventional timeline was there as well, but the grid is what sold it.
Underneath sits warping, real-time time-stretching that makes any loop follow the project tempo. Max for Live (2009) embedded Max inside the program, and in 2017 Ableton simply bought Cycling '74. The Ableton Link sync protocol and the Push controller belong to the same ecosystem.