Ableton 12 finally came out, and I dashed to grab it.

.. reluctantly.. with a large dent in my bank balance.

-=-=-

I only have the "Live Standard" edition of Ableton. And than god I do, because they still wanted a hundred quid for the UPGRADE from Ableton 11 to 12..
God only knows how much it'd have cost to upgrade the complete "Suite" edition.

The new interface is damn near identical to the last one, but for a few colour tweaks, and a teensy bit of changes here or there.
The capabilities haven't, so far, leapt out to me as being drastically different.
The little CPU meter on the top right now claims it's using about 10% on average, compared to Ableton 11's 24% average, so I guess that's good. .. Assuming the value is accurate, that is

So far I've found a couple of nice functions. There's now an easy to use "Strum" thing that lets you slide a little box left or right to add or remove the amount of strumming. It's nice!
.. Though it is a shame that it's one directional. Would be nice to have it strum back and forth instead of constantly in one direction.

The way I made my strumming back in 2022 was to throw a couple of tools into a box, add some randomness and the result was quite nice. This new internal tool is quite limited in that respect, but since it's right there in the Midi Clip, it's a bit easier to tweak it to how you need it.

Still, could do with a nice "Jay Strum" Midi Effect Rack like I made..
.. oh, it does.


..
And, boy does it look like mine!!

I mean, that's pretty much the same, right?!
Except mine's got a couple of quick-tweak knobs, space for storing presets, and an extra random-velocity parameter in the middle.

Still, it's the same!!
Hmmm..

Anyhoo....
I've been playing with it for much of yesterday, and as far as I can tell, the upgrade hasn't impacted any of my ALChoons. In fact, honestly, the upgrade has been so lacking in impact that I'm not 100% sure it was worth it.
.. It certainly wasn't worth paying £99 for an "upgrade", that's for damn sure.

I think in future, I'll probably read up on improvements before forking over my cash on such a thing.


"Cartoon @Derek tries to make music with the latest version of Ableton" by #ArtFlow.ai