I agree. A lot of the other UIs are insane. One of them boasts about its full physics package to accurately render the cables connecting one "device" to another. I thought it was so gimmicky but a lot of them do the same stuff and people buy it so what do I know. Ableton just makes sense.
But maybe because I'm not an artist. I just like learning these tools. I will say that with a few hundred bucks of equipment (a Launchpad and a Kaossilator2) I've had hours of fun just "jamming".
Also for more technical fun, there are 3rd party MIDI loopback interfaces available on Windows, so it's easy to write your own instruments. Took about an hour to hook up an Xbox360 controller so I got a few x-y inputs. Ableton makes it super easy to map them.
Wha? Ableton has great built-in effects and Sampler + Operator are fantastic instruments. Some of my favorite producers use almost exclusively built-ins. You can get really far with just a few stacked Operators + saturator + erosion + overdrive + multiband dynamics.
All I've felt the need for so far is a better limiter (you can't really push Ableton's) and a multi-band distortion plugin.
> Took about an hour to hook up an Xbox360 controller so I got a few x-y inputs. Ableton makes it super easy to map them.
Fun tip: You can do this with an Xbox 360 (probably Xbox One) Rock Band drum kit for a cheap e-kit. The drumkit just sends gamepad input and there are programs to convert that to MIDI.
The Kaossilator 1 (KO-1) is available on ebay for under $100 and they are massive fun. Never a boring train/plane journey with a KO-1 and some headphones.
It's pretty easy to get the grid idea, but when you start trying to do anything more complicated Ableton turns out to be a mess, with many limitations and arbitrary weirdnesses.
E.g. you can't send MIDI sysex out of Live (except to the Push 2 controller). That kills it for all kinds of hardware automation and advanced synth programming.
Live has no concept of a mono track, so it wastes a lot of DSP resources processing effects and mixes in stereo for no reason.
There's no simple hybrid clip arranger mode, which is something most other DAWs can do.
MIDI clip files come with an audio preview. The clips aren't associated with any drum sounds. So you hear the preview, think "I like that...", load it, and then you have to spend half an hour picking the right drum sounds for it.
And so on. I've really tried to like working with Live, but there are just too many design decisions that make no sense for it be to anything other than frustrating.
I started in that mode (since I tend to do long drones) but once I adjusted to the non-linear workflow it became super easy. It helps that the ecosystem around Ableton is so rich now.
FL Studio has a nice learning curve too, though different. FL's best features IMO are the pattern sequencer and the piano roll. So intuitive, once you get the DAWs flow you just get creative and the limits disappear.
I moved from Cubase to FL two years ago. I'm in love with the patterns in FL!
The only thing I really miss was the feature in Cubase where you could add effects to an audio pattern in a destructive way. You could create really complex and glitchy patterns and it was easy to mix them together (cross fade and such).
The other thing I would love ImageLine to do is a better workflow when you use audio samples directly in the sequencer. Things like fade in and fade out and a much bigger zoom overall in the sequencer to move samples around.
Edit : I know you can work with Edison but it isn't intuitive imo
