Hi all,
Is there a blogpost somewhere that describes the strong points of GP versus Ableton Live? I’ve tried to convince a family member to go for GP, given the type of project she wanted to undertake (mixing live instruments with a few backing tracks to a quadraphonic PA setup). But due to unfamiliarity with GP and some peer pressure she decided for Ableton. I’m not familiar enough with Ableton to say for sure that it was a mistake. Any comparative material available?
Thanks in advance
You cannot really compare Gig Performer with Ableton Live.
Ableton Live is a DAW, Gig Performer is not.
There are many reasons why, but the biggest reason I moved from live to GP was that DAWS will kill the notes you are playing moving to a different sound and GP lets it finish
A similar thread: Can you list benefits of using GP over Ableton Live if CPU resources not critical? - #3 by npudar
Very different tools.
Ableton is more geared for music creation and production. Regarding Live work it is great for playing stems. Live keyboard setups, it will work but it isnt as customizable as Gig Performer. Live comes with a great amount of effects and synths. GP dont or at least come with more utility plugins.
Gig Performer sole purpose is live setups. It goes deeper in setting up midi controller setups. You can set up custom GUIs, create setlists. i would say Gig Performer his a higher learning curve as it is more open ended but if you are doing live keys with Ableton, you can quickly start running into limitations especially if you are using two midi controllers. Gig Performer is created more for the sole intention of being able to configure controllers how you want them. Ableton is more about conforming to their workflow (which is great for creation and production or even playing stems, but not so much for live keys)
Thanks for all your insights. I get that Live is more a production tool while GP is a plugin host capable of complex routing at very low latency.
But her goal was to pre-record acoustic instruments and mixing those, adding effects etc. to make stems to be used as backing tracks, while playing over those layers live (no synths, though). At the same time any of the ‘channels’, be it one of the stems or one of the live instruments (voice, violin, cello, percussion), should be assigned to one of 4 speakers, and that panning should be dynamically controlled by a midi controller.
For me that sounded like a job for GP, but I couldn’t claim that Ableton wouldn’t be suitable. Lots of DJs and musicians use it live, and a friend who lives much closer than me had a proposal for how to set it all up in Live. Also, Ableton came for free with the sound card, so I understand why she started down that road.
I’m just wondering at what point Ableton will fall short and I should start promoting GP again 
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Ableton will at least fail when you need some way of automation.
If you have a fairly simple midi controller setup and don’t require much customization (and are willing to work with Ableton’s workflow), Ableton will probably work fine (and might even be preferrable).
Ableton has tons of native controller support. So with Ableton alot of controllers work right outside the box.
Ableton also comes with a bunch of nice synths and effects (especially if using the Suite version).
Ableton falls short in terms of customization of setups. Ableton tends to be more cumbersome when setting up “dumb” midi controllers. Gig Performer is alot more customizable and “Dumb” midi controllers in Gig Performer are powerful devices. Ableton has pretty decent midi controller customization but it is very project based and things can’t dynamically change like Gig Performer (where each Rackspace, the controller can utilize a very particular role). Ableton has some script support via Max4Live to make controllers more customizable, but in Gig Performer these basic controller mappings are more made available to the common user. Gig Performer has scripting support as well but you can often do alot in Gig Peformer without needing a script.
Probably the biggest differences is that Ableton follows a mixing console (Global project) concept. This is a fairly easy to learn concept but can be limiting in certain live setups.
In Gig Performer you have a Rackspace concept which is totally customizable by the user. Each Rackspace is kind of like an individual Ableton Project which can be totally different from song to song or even song part to song part. This is the automation piece where Ableton falls short.
That said I think if you are primarily playing stems and are only playing minimal keys, you might like Ableton better (or at least it should be able to cover your needs).
I enjoyed working live with Ableton (when only using one midi keyboard controller).
The limitation I ran into was when I decided to add midi controller #2 for my top keyboard. Ableton (still to this day) has no good way to manage multiple midi controllers for live use where you can move around to different tracks using the auto arm feature. If you do this with Ableton, the auto arming will conflict with you other board. You can probably do something similar using Instrument Racks but you will lose alot of the customization this way of Ableton, and this is an area where Gig Performer was designed specifically for where Ableton was not. Ableton’s auto arming actually works great for Studio Production and Song Production but just wasn’t designed for what I needed it for and has no elegant way of acheiving what I need, where Gig Performer is made for multiple midi keyboards in mind where you can have two, three or however many you need.