Ableton's 12 Meld: Do you Need Any Other Synth? 

With pleasure! It’s good to hear this 😊

With pleasure!

Thanks a lot! I put a lot of effort in editing these videos 😌 🙏🏼

@@impulsecontrol It shows. Keep going mate

The ui is sick!

Thanks!

12 is treated as a new/separate application. Backup your project files, don’t uninstall 11, and you’ll be fine.

I would recommend stay with 11 until you finish your album, I had some issues when tried to install new plugins. Also you might be so hyped about the new devices in 12 it might interfere with your signature sound in this album 🤷🏼‍♂️

Just run it alongside it,it really doesn’t get any simpler

@@palaHDI did have some issues with running both, but I think it was related to max for live devices

If you run a project that you have started in 11 and save after little or no change in 12 you’ll not be able to re-open it in 11 again because Live doesn’t support opening projects from newer versions of itself. So keep that in mind. I was finishing serious project for a streaming platforms and was so hyped buy 12 I’ve made a mistake of opening a project and making save after little change as I usually do automatically. After that I’ve noticed that GUI of a most important plugin in a chain wasn’t opened properly and it made using plugin almost impossible. So this plugin is not opening properly in 12 and only in 12 and now I can’t open project back in 11 so I had a meltdown about it and printed the stems as it is to finish a project in Logic. If you want to save yourself from a headache I really do recommend you to finish work in 11. Btw the only issue I had with 12 is that it can’t open GUI of this plugin properly. Still not fixed in 12.01 and by the plugin developer LOL.

The question was if Meld alone can produce these types of sounds, and the answer is not quite, yes operator, wavetable etc are the better choice for those sounds

Haha no way! That’s sick 😅

Which MacBook do you have, and how much RAM it has?

@@impulsecontrol I just have a runabout m1 air that I use as my daily driver but I was thinking of buying a machine dedicated to music. Maybe a M3 max MBP. The one with 10 performance cores not the 12 (the penultimate spec one not the full fat one with 40 gpu cores). I guess I'm worried all those extra gpu cores, apart from being redundant, would probably cause the fans to kick up more than the one just one level down with 30 gpu cores. But saying all that I do wonder if I could just get by with a M1 pro or M1 max if I can find one on the Apple Store still. Save a bunch of money maybe and still have enough computer to run all these Ableton synths into large track counts.

@@impulsecontrol My current notebook has 16gb of ram by the way.

@@Screaming-Trees​​⁠I have an MacBook Pro, M1 Pro and it works exceptionally well, the fan has never turned on once, and my projects are heavy

@@impulsecontrol Right. So in that case there is no need to buy new. I can save some money and live with the M1 pro. Which is great actually. How much ram do you have?

Yeah but non of them is for the standard I use.

@@impulsecontrol I'm not saying you should use one of those. I'm saying it's clearly possible to synthesize one with Meld.

@@Artek604What I was trying to say is that it’s possible but limited

@@impulsecontrol What is exactly the limitation? 99% of the kicks is a sine sweep with two envelopes describing pitch & volume decay; and a short blip - or a sample - for your transient. None of Live synth has a proper MSEG, so you'd have to use MIDI Shaper anyway. Sorry, your comment just piqued my interest because if I was to criticise meld I'd complain about the oscillators being completely separate (e.g. no sync, no FM) and filter routing being rigid (e.g. no way to use them as parallel). Frankly, the ancient Analog is way more sophisticated in this area :D

Yeah, just slightly behind

No idea, I never used Massive X 🤷🏼‍♂️

Yes, overlaps Serum as well, but native UI/UX, integrated, etc…. I’ve used/love them all, Meld feels a bit like taking the most useful parts of many modern synths and building them into 12.

Haha it’s really unique device!

Which version of Ableton you own?

@@impulsecontrol 12 standard

@@johnerodz7Meld is included only with the Suite version of Ableton

Is Arturia Pigment the ultimate synth?

I don’t think so. Because if you combine Ableton‘s synths and samplers with racks you get also a quite powerful setup. However, I like the UI of Pigments very much. And how interactive it is. Working with tiny plugin views (Ableton plugins) on a big screen can sometimes be a bit meh. Also, Meld reminds me in many ways of Arturia‘s MiniFreak and it‘s oscillator engines.

I prefer how Pigments does modulation. Wiggling the knob and then going to the mod view isn’t so fun in Meld.

@@woeye3251Perhaps Ableton should consider making their plugins with floating windows and with size adjustability 🤷🏼‍♂️

The number one biggest difference is that Pigments is great for learning and immediately being able to understand what is happening at any given moment. For as complex it can be this is quite impressive it can do such. Let's take the auto filter device in Ableton. It is 2024 and the in device LFOs still don't animate the parameter they are supposed to be controlling. This leaves you guessing how much is being modulated, etc. I was hoping Live 12 would solve that. Modulations, msegs, are where Ableton needs to focus on else unfortunately it hinders what are otherwise really cool stock devices and synths. I think we need more than one row of devices in Ableton. This can be persisent for all tracks and things like LFOs, m4L, etc can be added to that then. They could the be attached to whatever you want in any track or multiple tracks. This is similar to what Bitwig does though would be leap frogging what Bitwig offers currently.