Loop-based arrangement

It took a few years for Ableton Live’s innovative non-linear Session View clip recording and launching interface to change the world of music technology, but that it surely did, becoming the de facto standard for laptop DJing and dance music production, and putting the Berlin-based company on the map. In a nutshell, the Session View lets you rack up (and/or record) any number of audio and MIDI loops in a series of vertical Scenes, and ‘launch’ them in perfect sync with each other, literally performing your productions live with no possibility of anything going out of time. It’s even more awesome today than in the audio-only v1 days of 2001.

Just as Ableton have since had to work up Live’s Arrangement View in order to address public perception of the DAW’s emphasis on loop-wrangling, so Apple have very recently (in version 10.5) added a full-blown Session Viewstyle clip-launching interface to Logic Pro X – and very nice it is too! Having been part of the iOS version of GarageBand for over four years, it

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was expected that the Live Loops Grid would at some point end up getting ported to its professional Mac sibling, but we’re nonetheless blown away by the seamless embedding of the new system into Logic’s well-established interface. As you’d hope, it offers the same bidirectional exchange of clips between it and the main arrangement, and you can record your clip launching performances directly into the Tracks view, too. Vertical ‘scenes’ work just as they do in Live, but unlike Live, you can have both the Grid and Arrangement open together in the same window.

Before we mail the trophy to Cupertino, though, Live still has one feature that keeps it firmly at the top spot for on-the-fly loop recording and launching: Follow Actions. This seemingly innocuous little Clip View control panel gives producers and live performers the means to automate and randomise clip launching within Scenes – something no other DAW can do. So Live nabs this one.

WINNER: