Again it depends on what you’re making. For songwriters, where the emphasis is on interesting note choices and the play of one instrument’s part against another, sound design can really delay and ultimately derail the writing process. Most of the songs we carry around in our heads, whose melodies we sing in the shower, etc weren’t written by sound designers.
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Agree with the general sentiment here
personally I’ve used Ableton since around 2014 and before that started with Logic 2 years earlier or so
I can’t even remember exactly why I switched, but I think it might have been a bit of peer pressure or something, but I have stuck with it eversince and i generally like it.
I use a quite big library of VSTs/AUs and not much from the actual Ableton stock plugins, however thats not to say that they aren’t good, I’ve definitely had a lot of fun with them as well but as others have pointed out, you have to combine them/use the excellent rack feature. I’ve got a bunch of racks saved, also from other people, but In most cases there’s VSTs that just do the job better than ableton stock plugins. What I do use in almost every ableton project are the delay/echo, glue compressor, regular compressor, EQ8, convolution reverb, (although thats max for live strictly speaking i think), saturator sometimes, and playing live, the limiter cause its quick & low load.
It’s also quite perplexing to me, most of these effects are the exact same since Ableton 1 or so, with a bunch of them getting sound quality updates/upsampling, but at its core they are the exact same…if it’s not broken don’t fix it I guess, but especially the reverb I’ve always disliked, and im not the only one. And it’s still lacking so much stuff, especially considering suite’s price…like a pitchshifter, deEsser, some kind of native auto-tune, stereo processing programs beyond the Utility dial, the list could go on…Alchmey in Logic is also a great example, that is such an amazing synth, I don’t like Ableton’s synths at all, they are for sure capable and can get the job done, but I don’t really think they are particularily outstanding, inspiring or fun to use
I suppose because they got max for live, they don’t really bother to add a lot of these things cause there’s a lot out there that fills these gaps for free, but you have to dig for it
And I think the big advantage Live has is the tight max integration, which i think is one of the best moves they’ve ever made, there’s so many excellent developers making insane stuff both free and paid, that in most cases you cant even find as a VST equivalent, and in many many cases are much better than the stock ableton ones. I really love max for live and I would say that is probably the main reason why i’m personally sticking with it aside from just familiarity and liking the program overall.
So maybe related to the original question, I think I could minimize my setup for sure if I put in some work, but I think I’d still need to use a lot of Max for Live devices to open some more interesting sound design possibilities, like spectral processing, more advanced granular, additive synthesis, device control that are just not present in Ableton Suite.
I do agree that ableton stock sounds and presets especially, which for example Logic has tons of instantly usable ones of, are not good to downright bad. I’ve never really used any of them…If you’re a songwriter and just want to work with presets and quickly get stuff done, then I’d say theres much better DAWs for that. If you’re willing to dive into max for live (dont even need to code, just exploring whats already there) and got a bit more time for setting up instrument and audio racks, then I’d say Ableton is very worth it. Sometimes I find it a bit weird though how behind they are on a lot of things, like MPE only came with A11 even though that has been in most DAWs forever. They didn’t have comping either lol, an absolutely basic feature. And you gotta shell out what, 200€ for the bare-bones upgrades? Thats another topic though
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Shifter = pitch/freq shifter and ring mod that also offers interesting stereo processing ;). And there are more stereo processing stock plugins.
Hybrid reverb is very nice imho. The older stock reverb kinda sucks yes.
I think a lot of the stock plugins are a bit misunderstood or undervalued. Often they can do multiple things and can be used in rather creative ways.
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Shifter imo not particularly great sounding that one, for clean pitch shifting that is not very usable in my opinion. But true i forgot about that one, can do the trick sometimes as an effect
And yeah you can do stereo effects with a lot of those, but there’s no dedicated stereo processor. To compare with logic, not that these are masterpieces of plugins either, but they got “Stereo Spread” for example, where you can pan frequencies, they got another one that is like voxengo MSED to decode mid/side, and widen/tighten the image with crossove, another one for binaural processing. (they got auto pan as well)
Yeah true.
And logic’s stock plugins always have been on another level. Great great plugins. Only thing I really miss from that daw.
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When you see what the guys from PML can do with stock plugins, you realize that magic is not in the plugins, but in the way you use them. The PML courses just opened my eyes on Live’s plugins, though I’m a plugin addict. For example their mastering rack is dope, loud as hell and everything comes from Live.
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Also something I’m often missing is a formant shifter. I guess you could use vocoder (great stock plugin btw) for that, but then the sound is also processed by the vocoder
another one that I used to really like, but no updates in like 20 years: beat repeat. was such a cool plugin to me, but they never updated it, now Logic pro have the “Beat FX” stock plugin, which is more akin to infiltrator/shaperbox, with tons of modulation and scratching, beat repeat, glitches, reverse, gating yada yada
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for sure, the magic is never in the plugins. but I do think convenience and accesibility is definitely a factor. i think before people stumble on good mastering racks, they would have downloaded Ozone or something before.
i think Ableton should integrate a whole lot more user-made racks etc into ableton, they’ve already started a bit with this
Ableton is more like a modular. You can build a lot of those all in one plugin stuff yourself. It just takes a bit more affort to set up. But then also provides a lot of flexibility. Combine shaper with filter. Throw in an envelope filler, lfos etc etc.
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I agree wholeheartedly. I’ve been trying to make songs using only stock ableton stuff lately and it’s painful because I just can’t make myself like the stock synths. The problem is exaggerated since I’m doing it on Push 3 SA, where some of the synths are missing loads of parameters. I know the problem is me to some extent, but I have no problem coaxing sounds I love out of pigments, ST, Peak and Take5.
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I think Wavetable is my favorite out of the bunch, but even that I dont really use when there’s Serum, it’s just so much easier making an interesting sound, even without the FX
This is really interesting to hear folks. I mean, whenever I speak to people online they tend to fall into the Ableton evangelical group, where you’re seen as mad for even looking at a VST, or the “Ableton sucks without the efforts of external Max development” crew. But I do hear more and more that folks feel that considering the price of Ableton that it could deliver more, and that Live 12 needs to be a big update.
It’s interesting to hear a balanced group of opinions that the built in sounds might be seen as so-so, unless you are into deep sound design, which not everyone is, and even then VSTs can take you further. It feels like as @keygen.exe says - for songwriting, you kinda want great stock sounds and ideally things that help you mix quickly -shortening the line between idea and finished track. Obviously this is highly subjective, but I hear Logic packs in plenty of great stock sounds, and many Ableton users used to mix in Logic such is the quality of the mixing tools.
Yet to be balanced about it, Ableton always swings back with a workflow that is creative and streamlined. Which also matters when writing, and that alone potentially is enough - even if you’re not making the most of the modular approach. In my eyes the way Ableton works is almost like Photoshop for music. Whenever I tried to do something basic in Garageband (aka Mini Logic) like trying out automation, it feels more clunky to do. So on the front end of the process, Ableton is awesome and quick, which matters for creativity.
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I love ableton, like you said its awesome and quick, and I will probably keep buying for the updates…but im not sure if i would ever recommend it to a beginner at this point.
Not that I mind buying for updates, but it is a bit weird how little you’re getting out of the 200€ updates, i dont recall ever paying for a logic pro update either. granted, they got the most highly valued company in the world backing it lol, so maybe thats an unfair comparison, but uhh…they added like…comping (come on, this needs to be HOTFIX not a paid update)
a bunch of max for live devices included, mainly by dillon bastan who had previously released most of these
putting the flanger, phaser, chorus into one device and other small tweaks like that
MPE
i would say i fall in between these two camps you mentioned
Ableton generally doesn’t drop huge updates on one day. It’s more like buying into the next 3 to 4 years of updates. You can choose not to update and wait until more features are available 
It’s also a bit odd to more or less ignore max4live or disregard it as “not really stock” because it’s one of the major things that makes Ableton pretty awesome.
I agree though that some basic functions have been added late like comping. There are still a few things that are missing or annoying but myeah, can’t have everything. Each daw has downsides.
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Why do you only want to use stock devices?
I’d rather have the best core software and UI, than the best instruments and effects (and a sub-par drum rack/looper… cough…. Logic) Any day:)
Abletons modular approach is lovley, especially when combined with some external plugins.
Also, Ableton has some devices that can compete with anything out there imo, for example:
Convolition Reverb Pro
Echo
Hybrid Reverb
Amp
Drift
Wavetable
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And don’t let the minimalist looks fool you, they are way more powerful than they look.
For example hitting the input hard on Echo, engaging the distortion button, tweak the timing, character, filter, modulation, and reverb for some wonderful sounds 
And the thing even has a built in ducker, with a release setting. But somehow the UI is super small and still looks nice and clean 
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Those are really great yeah. I also love corpus and things like spectral time.
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They look pretty cool, I’ve had them on my todo for a while, thanks for the inspo, need to make some time to learn them 
Ah just a thought experiement really. I was considering Push (not standalone though) and that thought made me think if you went down that route, would you want to maybe lean more on the stock effects and instruments to make the most of that tactile thing. It’s one of those things that sounds good in theory, but wondered how others found it in practice - ie - did you move more toards stock, or would you keep hold of plenty of VSTs around for the ride etc…
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Ahh okey thanks, got it! Might have missed some stuff in the convo abobe.
If I hade a P3 I’d definitely limit myself to stock when in standalone, perhaps ITB as well for some of those projects. But I wouldn’t do it outside of that.
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