1/24/2024 0 Comments Serato vs traktor vs ableton![]() Just make sure you can deliver a decent set when the promoters give you a call!ģ. You can also add effects after the fact, use panning to spice up transitions, and use Live’s built-in EQs to tweak the sound for a smoother promo mix. This means that if you fluff a transition by, say, bringing a track in one bar too early, you don’t need to worry: you can switch to the arrangement view and manually move the track forward to where it should have been. Live, however, doesn’t record the audio going out of the program, but records when you triggered the clips, at what volume they were playing at the time, and any effects you had on them, and sends that information to the ‘arrangement’ view (closer to a traditional DAW’s timeline view). If you fluffed a transition, you’d have to stop recording and start the set again. With other DJ software packages, or with a traditional decks and mixer setup, you’d record the audio coming out of the mixer and be stuck with it. Let’s say you want to make a promo mix to hand out to club owners and booking agents. With Live’s warp markers, you can snap the funk track into perfect timing before playing it, creating a silky-smooth mix between different styles. Mixing between these two tracks on CDJs or turntables would be a nightmare, as the funk drummer’s beat isn’t constant and the mix would require constant manual intervention. Say you want to mix a 70s funk track (recorded with a live drummer whose sense of timing is a little loose) with a recent electronic track with a steady, computer-generated beat. You can also use it to fix problems in the original tracks. ![]() Live’s warping engine does more than simply slow down or speed up track playback. If you’ve correctly told Live where the beats of your songs lie, each song will play back in perfect synchronicity, eliminating the need to beatmatch while performing. Instead of letting the tracks set the tempo, in Live the DJ sets a master tempo and Live plays all tracks at that tempo. Live removes this process from the equation through its warping engine. Once the second track has been blended in, it then becomes the reference tempo for the third track, and so on. Traditionally, a DJ mixes between tracks by beat matching each song with the next. ![]() Live’s biggest strength when it comes to DJing is its warping engine and the way it handles song tempo. With a few kludges – treating whole songs as sample clips and running an EQ plugin on each track at a minimum – this session view can be manipulated into functioning as a virtual DJ workstation. Ableton’s innovative session interface allows performers to trigger samples, loops, basslines, drum patterns and other sounds in real time, and manipulate them by altering their parameters or by applying effects to them. While other famous DAWs – Logic, Fruity Loops, or Pro Tools – allow musicians to compose and create songs, they don’t allow song manipulation on-the-fly. The difference is that Live is a DAW (digital audio workstation) that is geared for live performance. Live’s default ‘session’ interface, on the other hand, is positively spartan by comparison. Both Serato and Traktor attempt in different ways to recreate the workflow of a traditional DJ booth with two decks (be they CDJs or turntables) and a mixer in the middle. While Serato and Traktor both use two-deck layouts that display the waveforms of the tracks alongside a bank of DJ-specific controls (EQ, looping, effects, etc.), Live’s interface is very different. ![]() This should be pretty obvious when you compare screenshots of Live, Serato, and Traktor in action. The first thing that needs to be said about Ableton Live is that it is not designed primarily for use by DJs. Given all the negative publicity, you might well ask, ‘Why bother DJing with Ableton Live at all?’ There are some very compelling reasons to use Live, but before we get into that, it may help to look into what, exactly, Live is and isn’t. It’s pretty common to find lengthy lists of features that Live users think Ableton should integrate into the next version (DJTechTools author Zettt has a handy list here) but despite this, I still believe that Live can be a great platform for digital DJing. When it comes to DJ software, Ableton Live can sometimes look like a neglected child compared to its older, more DJ-friendly siblings Serato and Traktor.
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