I survived Black Friday sales without buying anything physical. Nothing I planned to buy anyway was in sale. It was different story on software side. Ableton Live upgrade was from Black Friday sale. Kind of lost my sense with software sales. Probably should have taken trial version of everything I bought before buying. Would have saved some money that way. After few purchases I started to do it. I had plan to minimize my setups. Black Friday sales didn’t help with it.
Starting to think getting back to Ableton Live was correct move. Only things I miss from Cubase are Chord Track, Chord Assistant functions and ability get sections easily to full screen. Probably will miss video and Expression Maps when I need them. Cubase does some other things better but I don’t miss them. Ableton Live is just faster and better at what I want to do. Cubase needs lot of tweaking until you get everything easily available. You need templates because sometimes you need overly complicated routings to get what you want. Google Cubase and Elektron Overbridge for examples.
Roland SE-02 found its way to my setup. Max For Live controller made it usable. My setup would look different if I used Live when I selected synths for setup. Had to select ones with VST controllers because Cubase doesn’t have usable way to control external synths. You can do it but it is not usable. Wrote about device panels and how they don’t work earlier. You can find free or paid Max For Live controllers for synths and tweak them to your liking. If you don’t find one you can make one yourself. You don’t need someone else to make one and hope they upgrade controllers when synth get upgrades. If Cubase had something like this I would be still using it.
Then there is functionality you can’t get from Cubase. More about that in next post. It needs some video editing. Video is already shot and music for it is ready. I made song based on idea I couldn’t do in Cubase. But that will be in next post. You won’t have to wait it as long as this post.