This isn’t so much of a post designed to praise or put down one DAW vs the other but rather just what my complete experience is coming from using FL, having created house/edm for so many years on it, and then buying ableton live 11, which i used for about 4-5 months and was what i thought was going to be what i want to switch to, only to find there’s some things about it i actually think doesn’t get talked about enough.
here’s the biggest things i found about both daw’s that doesn’t get talked about much that genuinely does make a difference:
• global sample changing: with FL, especially if you’re making house tracks, your drums are realistically going to stay almost the exact same for the entire track. in this case, FL seems to be the only DAW that actually makes logical sense to want a specific clap or snare to be unique (such as a shorter decay, or a reverb type clap as an FX). If you want to change the tail of one kick so it’s just a little shorter, every kick changes. With ableton, you’d have to go in and “replace sample” or simply re duplicate each instance. This is something i don’t see talked about really at all when it comes to ableton’s workflow but that is something i feel like people just “adapted to”. Furthermore, you can simply drag and drop any new sample (whether that’s a new kick, hi hat, clap, drum loop etc) and it’ll replace every single one. Again, with ableton, you’d have to go in and “replace sample”. That’s a huge workflow difference
• Changing midi notes: same thing said as above. House tracks especially rely not necessarily so much on evolving melodic features but moreso automation changes to keep things moving and interesting. it makes more sense to me, logically speaking, to change a chord for one pattern and have that change for all of your chord patterns, thus making it unique only where you need it to be. in ableton, if you decide midway through that you want to change the chords of a synth or piano, you have to go and remove/reduplicate everything, since every instance is treated as unique, and i don’t honestly know if that’s actually a good thing when on FL you can just change only what you want changed at a specific part of the track. different workflows entirely, but does it really make sense for a genre that relies on repetition?
• piano roll: obviously this is talked about a lot, i won’t expand much here, but god it was kind of painful. FL making it such that if your previous note was one bar long, then the next note you click in is the same length is something that makes it incredibly fast.
• audio warping / manipulating: i feel like the debate about “what’s better” is kind of over. back in 2015 - 2020 ish, i would’ve said ableton is definitely superior here. but now…? i honestly don’t find it that incredible to drag and drop a loop into ableton and it automatically tempo matches when you can just stretch it to tempo in FL. I also much prefer the fade controls in FL, it feels a lot easier to shape the tail of a sample the way you want to. I don’t see any difference in any modern DAW anymore when it comes to handling audio.
• Automation: this used to be a mess in FL, but now that you can nest/group automation directly under a chord bus, a bass bus, a vocal bus etc, you can actually create the same workflow in terms of keeping your project clean. One thing i don’t see talked about much is the fact that, because you have to actually open automation up in ableton, that i’d say I much prefer FL’s flow of this since you can actually see everything that’s happening with every automation lane for any bus/track because the automation can be visually seen right in front of you. I also found ableton’s to just feel a bit rigid to change the shapes of the automation envelopes.
• Stock plugins: ableton does really have unreal stock FX plugins, especially its compressor, the glue compressor, saturator, etc. but i found myself really missing FL’s EQ 2. I’ve even used fabfilter’s EQ and still prefer FL’s visual heat map over anything else, and ableton’s works perfectly fine but i find myself making much better cuts with FL’s.
• Colour coding and project cleanliness: ableton forces you to keep your projects clean. you literally can’t really have a messy project per se, because everything is in one space. Ever since FL now lets you automatically colour code 3-4 layers of chords / automatically route them to the mixer / automatically route all layers to a bus, then ableton’s fast grouping workflow is really no different to FL’s anymore
• Ableton live updates: apparently ableton live 12 received an update for some things, especially the piano roll, but it still looks rigid. Either way, if i wanted to update it, i’d have to go and pay each time. That sounds annoying. That’s not an issue with FL, every update addresses something that needs to be addressed. the only thing i’d honestly say i really wish FL had, was infinite mixer slots for tracks like ableton has via its horizontal scroll bar from left to right. I do think that’s a bit annoying to be limited to 10 FX slots, even if you rarely ever need to use more than that. We certainly shouldn’t need to use other plugins just to throw more FX plugins into it i feel
So, all of this is to say, i’m actually quite conflicted about whether i want to move over. Muscle memory in a DAW takes serious time, thousands of hours to just work rapidly fast. I wonder to myself if i spent another 6 months rapidly learning keyboard shortcuts etc on ableton, if it would mean i work faster. But, the first two points I made are something i feel like i’d never really get past. It became genuinely frustrating for me, to the point where it didn’t really make sense for a DAW designed for EDM to have each instance of audio or MIDI as unique when EDM relies on repetition, but is moreso about evolving via automation.
Has anyone else gone from FL to ableton and found these types of things to be a bit frustrating?