That music guy called Cipher

Ableton live 10 came out last week and I was so Hyped. I waited the whole night until it came out. Unfortunately I couldn't activate it (probably due the high request). 2 days later I finished everything up and felt in love.

Live 10 is so great! Actually... The huge improvements like wavetable and recording without pressing record are cool but not the huge deal for me.... They are more like little toys which improves the flow... All those small changes makes me happy.

Let me explain what I really like and love :

First of all *the new UI* :

Graphics changes a lot and are very important. I'm on a school for media design and know how important UI and UX can be! I know a lot of people (including me) who feels uncomfortable using a bad designed tool. Mostly they are very powerful but feels unnecessarily complicated and cheap. Lives new design... No Abletons new design feels so great. Very minimalistic and focused on the important things you need in your workflow! Everything feels so clean and looks so satisfying. But enough of UI and UX... Now the important stuff

My favourite new feature *Groups within groups* :

O boi you can't imagine how I looked forward to this. I'm a group/buss hoe. I like to make a bus for one synth where all layers are inside and group them again into a synth buss where all synths are processed once more. It gives me more controller over each individual synth and all synths (or bass, FX vocals and more). Before that group within group thing it all looked very messy and needed time to navigate through... Especially on a project I didn't worked on for a while. Now everything is sorted and has a structure. Every project has the same build and it's like a documentation! Love it.

*Improved Automations* :

My second favourite update. I began my journey with FL Studio. It's great for beginners and Pro's and if live 10 wouldn't be announced when I first bought a daw I probably had have bought FL studio. FL studio has such nice automations. So much control. It feels so nice. On my change to live 9 I almost never used automations. They where to unprecise ... I didn't liked it. Now with live 10 they feel great again... And again the small things are the great things. And because of all those small things it actually deserves a own list but I'm to lazy *insert a shrug here*. Anyways. The things which improved on automations are some small changes like toggling automation mode with the a key. A grid on the X axis based on your project grid. A number which always shows the value of the automation. This increases the workflow massively ... At least for me. The only thing missing now are more options for automation curves but for now I'm happy to have those and many more improvements.

Hey there musician's!

Yesterday I spent all my time into music. I found the Ableton user manual and was pretty surprised how good it actually is. I thought I would be a usual manual where they teach you to press this to achieve that... But there is actually a whole section with detailed description and basic knowledge of their inbuild plugins and I really recommend everyone to read them (at least the most used like compressor or reverb etc.) It really helped me to understand how to use them in the right way (eventhough every compressor is a compressor you have to keep in mind that everyone build or code their compressor in a different way so there will be always something that differs and works differently so it's good to know how the compressor you're using works to achieve what you imagine)... And what I really liked about the descriptions - they wrote it like you are a beginner and that's actually good for beginners (obviously). That doesn't mean they treat you like you are stupid ... It's more like they describe also the usual working of the effect ... So you don't only learn how this compressor in particular works - you also learn how compressors works in general and I think that's a good thing!

The manual is available in almost every European language and Chinese + Japanese.

But why am I telling you this?

Because no one uses manuals anymore. They seem often useless (Yeah FL manual I talk about you). I mean manuals are good to learn how to use a software but I never saw a manual describing the workflow aswell and that's a very good thing. It actually improved my mastering. Right after I read through it I tried my new knowledge and it definitely helped! My mix sounds sooo much cleaner and louder... If I knew that earlier I wouldn't have struggled that much 😂 ! So I think it's a good thing to just read through it and learn it!

Enough of that boring learning and theory stuff.

I also explored the packs you get with suite. Due my bad WiFi I never tried downloading them but I need to make orchestral music for a school project but I'm too poor to buy kontakt libraries for that. So I looked if there is any good pack for that - and there isn't. For real they suck. They sound wrong (especially the guitar one I really looked forward to and got disappointed!). But why do I tell you THAT if it's so bad?

Because there are actually good packs! I really love the max for live packs you can download! They aren't any special BUT they are good! (And I really love the max plugin simply called "Bass"!)

I hope you can improve your music and see there is never no need to learn new stuff! Always try to improve! Even if you're the number one chart guy!

That's all for now and I think this long post is enough anyways.

Hey what's up?

I'm Dan and I'm a young musician from berlin/Germany. Music is my life and over the past 5 years I work more professionally... Unfortunately not professional enough to earn any cent with it, but that is not the point of this blog. I want to share my beloved world of music with people who are interested in music but aren't able to find the right way in the scary jungle of no understanding and "Collab bro" 's!

I will share my music, my experiences, my development and all related to music I want to talk about.

About me :

I use Ableton Live 9 suite (for not so long though) I bought the standard license on my birthday in November and one month later I was so surprised by it that I bought suite (actually mainly because of max what I'm unfortunately do not use at the moment)

Before Ableton I used to work with FL studio (totally bought like every young poor producer) I won't show you how to get any tools for free but let me give a hint - ... Facebook groups ;-)

I use serum and some Native Instruments plugins that where bundled in Kontakt 11.

I own a Launchkey 49, maschine jam, launchpad pro and novation circuit.