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Ableton’s free Live 11.3 update includes Drift, a new MPE-compatible synth that can create sounds “from every era of modern music”.

The public beta is available now for all Live 11 users.

Ableton has announced that Live 11.3 is now in public beta, and it turns out that this update has a strong MPE flavour. There’s a new MPE-compatible synth, known as Drift, and other Live instruments now also support MIDI Polyphonic Expression.

Drift is said to be capable of generating sounds “from every era of modern music,” and has a minimalist design that Ableton believes makes it beginner-friendly. However, we’re assured that there’s also enough depth to keep experienced sound designers interested.

The new instrument is inspired by classic hardware, but also nods to more modern synths and Eurorack modules. The good news is that Drift is being included with all versions of Live 11 – even the lowly Live Lite, which is bundled with other software and hardware products.

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Ableton has announced a free Loop event taking place on March 4, 2023.  Loop Session: In the Studio with Wayne Snow is the next installment in a series of online experiences for music makers. Each event in the series focuses on one artist’s practice and ideas.

In this session, attendees will get a behind-the-scenes look at Wayne Snow’s studio practice and learn about his song-writing methods. In the studio, he deploys acting techniques to explore and recall scenarios, emotions and thoughts, and works with a producer to resurface them into creative energy for his music. This visceral approach to song-writing requires tools and workflows that allow him to capture the feelings that come up and respond to them immediately.

Wayne Snow will be joined by producer Golo Schultz in Brewery Studios, Berlin, and together they will give a walk-through of their process for writing a new track from his forthcoming album. Musician Katarina Holmberg will moderate the conversation between the two and field questions from the audience. After the 90-minute studio session, attendees can join the Loop Cafe – a group chat where music makers can discuss their learnings from the session and their own studio practice.

The March 4 Loop: Session with Wayne Snow starts at 6pm, Berlin time (UTC+1). Attendees can use the event website’s timezone selector to find out when it happens in their local time. This virtual Loop: Session event is free to attend. Registration is not required but is encouraged; sign up at the event’s website.

About Loop. Launched by Ableton in 2015, Loop helps music makers discover new ideas to inspire their creative practice. Bringing together artists, technologists, educators and creative thinkers from around the world, Loop connects a global music-making community. Through events, and a living archive of ideas and techniques, Loop is a collective exploration of what it is to make music today, and what it could be tomorrow.

Ableton’s Live DAW is now such an integral part of the fabric of the music technology universe that it’s sometimes hard to believe that the software is still little more than 20 years old. When it was launched, back in 2001, it represented a sea change in the way that music could be made on a computer, so how did it come to be?

Speaking to Sound on Sound in a recent podcast, Ableton co-founder Robert Henke was asked about the origins of Live and how he came to form the company with Gerhard Behles.

Henke had been living in Munich, but says that he “kind of ran away” from there because it was “conservative and boring”. So, he moved to Berlin to study computer science. 

It was there that Henke renewed contact with Gerhard Behles, who he’d previously known in Munich. “We became very close friends and we started making music together [as Monolake], and in order to do what we wanted to do we wrote our own little pieces of software. And later that person [Behles] decided to basically found their own company, Ableton, and he asked me to join. And that’s what I did.”

Did the pair believe that they would soon create a DAW that would change the face of music production, though? It seems not.

“At the beginning, we just thought that our concept of a more performance-focused sequencing system would be interesting for a small group of people,” Henke recalls. He thought there would be some kind of market for it, though: “We were quite confident that a very, very small company could survive based on the customers in our electronic music bubble. And then things just very quickly started to become much bigger than we anticipated.”

Discussing his role at Ableton during Live’s early years, Henke says: “I was responsible for a lot of the decisions at the beginning. I wrote a lot of the early effects, and the one thing I’m most proud of is Operator – that’s pretty much my baby. It was never intended to be a big synthesizer; it was just my take on building a small yet playful FM engine.”

Henke left Ableton around a decade ago to focus on his art, but says that he returned because he felt too mentally involved to let it go.

“I felt it was important that I stay there and shape the future of it,” he explains. “And so I’m trying to find this balance between being an artist and being a software guy.”

You can listen to the full interview on the Sound on Sound website.