Omar Uddin

With the upcoming release of Ableton Live 7, I wanted to give all my fellow Ableton-hungry producers some of the resources that I’ve found to be useful with regards to VSTs and Ableton 6′s instruments and Live Packs.

Must have Live Packs (Free or cheap!)

• Ableton Live Packs Downloads
• The Covert Operators
• Free Ableton Live Pack by Composer Dennis DeSantis
• Five Dollar Bass, Atmosphere Expansion Packs for Ableton Live
  If you’re finding massive soundware libraries to be a little overwhelming on your hard drive, your brain, and your wallet you’ll like the idea of the new expansion packs from Tone Research. The first two are 13MB downloads priced at US$4.99 each. They work with Live 5 and get bonus features from Live 6. I’m still waiting on my copies, so I can’t yet comment on sound quality yet, but I’ll report back once I’ve thrown these into some songs.
• Ableton Synthtopia
• PureMagnetik
  Great Deal.. pay a $5/monthly subscription and get a great Live Pack every month

Learning Resources

• AskVideo.com
• Ableton Live 6 101
• Ableton Live 6 102

VST / Plugins

• Native Instruments Komplete 5
  KOMPLETE 5 is the high-end collection of 11 ground-breaking synthesizers, samplers, emulations, and a virtual guitar studio. Perfect for both studio and stage – this is the industry-standard bundle for serious musicians, producers and sound designers. KOMPLETE 5′s instruments can be heard on platinum-selling records and in underground clubs alike, all over the world.
• Major Malfunction
  A sweet plugin for mangling, glitch, distortion and and much more in a easy to use interface.
• Sounds Online
  A top site for massive collection of samples from many sample studios with most of the tools available via VST or other host plugin technologies and sometimes also raw samples .
• KVR Audio
  I check this site to stay up to date on the latest trends in Audio Plugin technology.
• Dblue Glitch Freeware Plug-in: Free .wav Deconstruction

Cool Hardware

• Sonica Labs
  I recently purchased the high end HUSH-QR Quadcore after doing research on all the top tiered custom DAW vendors around the world. Sonica Labs’s price point for a QuadCore Xeon loaded with memory, disk and expansion abilities has been a great replacement for my old DAWs. Talk with ‘Guy’ at the company to find out more, I was sold even before I asked them a thousand questions which they gladly answered to satisfy my curiousities about investing in their products.
• MonoTouchLive
  A brilliant tool to allow you to control your DAW with your TabletPC’s remote touch MIDI interface application!

To be honest with you, I don’t think I have time to list every tool that I use on this post since there are so many but I’ll try to do a follow up post or possibly create a dedicated page so you can come back to it for updates. Enjoy.