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.
I can’t say that’s the case with Ableton Live 12 chain selectors and using my Arturia Keylab 61 Mk3. I can hold down the keys and they’ll keep playing until I’ve released them, even while my other hand is playing notes of the instrument that replaced it in the same track. Dunno if this was different of Ableton in the past, but it’s no longer an issue for me
In Ableton you can use chain selectors to do both instrument swapping and set lists. However it’s not intuitively obvious that is what can be done with them.
If you want to do live looping well or post-live re-composition then you’ll need Ableton.
If you want to be able to control internals of plugins on the fly then Gig Performer is better.
If you are more of a preset person then you can use either app (Ableton clips don’t have to have content, they can be used as slots for triggering live changes too).
So yeah Ableton could have its paradigms improved but plenty of the same can be achieved.
If you’re a person who does live stuff only or have many instrument swaps then use Gig Performer at a min. Otherwise you might want Ableton, or both if you want a more explicit way of doing swaps and setlists.
Neither app is simple, they have a learning curve to get started
Interestingly, i used Ableton for a few years and can’t even remember why I started looking for alternatives which led me to GP. 
I had fairly elaborate setups, but as I’m trying to recall the experience compared to GP 4 things come to mind:
Probably it’s a different story for keyboard players though, they have lots of controls they can change while playing. So I guess GP makes much more sense in this case than Ableton.
Beyond your observations with your use case for scripting and aliases and handles, what other parts of Gig Performer do you think are not easy to use?
Sorry, but this is not true.
Even basic scenarios are extremely easier than Live.
Example: [blog] Why a graphic interface is superior to the channel strip model
I don’t think that “ For whatever reason, I would now like to feed the output of the Chorus effect of the piano into the Reverb used by the guitar.” falls into the category of basic stuff, for which I said Ableton was easier due to a more familiar paradigm.
For more complex routing and things like you describe in that article, yes, GP beats Ableton hands down.
I consider that to be absolutely basic stuff — I have often inserted a favorite consisting of, say, a piano along with its effects and EQ and then routed the output into some other effect that was already available.
This is an example I use quite often in songs - this SHOULD be basic (and in GP it is)
It’s not “my use case”.
But I think I said it in the comment above - Ableton has a familiar paradigm which makes it easier to start working with. You drag plugins to a strip and have a sound. Plus it has things like eq, reverb etc., right there. It’s much easier to add a backing track, it doesn’t exist in a separate entity. Of course it gets more difficult as you need more controls than the “rack” (or whatever the name is) in Ableton provides, or if your routing needs to be more complex like in that blog post example.
Then the concept of widgets and their role in variations and song parts needs some processing time to sink in - again an unfamiliar paradigm. I remember it took me quite a while to understand why the hell I change plugin settings and they aren’t saved. You can see users coming to the forum with the same type of problem, unsurprisingly.
Both widgets and routing is stuff you need to set up to make GP work, that’s preparation time you don’t need with more traditional software.
And very basic stuff like looper, mixer, master volume are missing out of the box, you need to set it all up (and I still don’t really know how to solve the looper problem in GP, after two years or so).
I guess that was one of the reasons why you built GP the way you did it. And that’s great, I like flexible routing.
But tell me, out of every 100 users trying to find a plugin/automation host, how many do you think will come to evaluate a software thinking “how do I route a piano chorus to a guitar reverb” vs “ok, I plugged in, added an amp/synth, where’s my sound and how do I change volume”?
I haven’t seen those.
If we’d saw those users, there would’ve been a blog article (or something else) to address that concern.
You don’t need widgets at all. Maybe one or two.
This user is an example.
Maybe this is just how your brain operates
I’m just not sure why every thread needs to be a debate
I understand that you have your own vision of how things should work. In that case, write threads in the “Feature requests” category. Debating definitely won’t help.
If that’s the simplicity you’re referring to, then that’s usually the user that doesn’t get past/doesn’t need to get past the standalone versions of the amp sim.
Looking for a live plugin host or DAW already implies you want to do something more complex than plug in your guitar and make some noise.
And it’s my fault?
I was asked a question and answered it. Don’t ask questions if you don’t want to debate.
There’s literally nothing to debate, an unfamiliar way of doing things is more difficult for people, period. The way GP does it IS BETTER but it adds complexity for new users.
I don’t have any feature requests with regard to what we’re discussing here. 
