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Live users are a fiercely loyal bunch. Tell them that a major chink in Ableton’s armour has long been their lack of a serious sound designer’s sampling platform - not to mention Live’s inability to import sample formats such as Kontakt or GigaStudio - and they’re likely to debate long and hard with you.

Thankfully, any such dispute has been rendered pointless with the release of Sampler, an optional add-on for Live 6. Sampler is built around the same model as the other Live plug-ins, fitting neatly into the window at the bottom of the software’s interface (though the keyzone mapping window sits above). All of its different sections are accessed via front panel tabs.

Format flexibility

Getting started is a cinch - drop a sample onto the Sample page (you can even drag ’n’ drop clips from the Session or Arrange view) and it’s automatically mapped to the root key of C3. Alternatively, you can access sample libraries in EXS, Kontakt (non-encrypted only), SoundFont, GigaStudio, S1000 and S3000 formats.

Live also now has a Find Sample CD function in the browser, so you can even access many old sample library discs that your computer wouldn’t otherwise recognise. The Sample window is as simple as you’d expect, and is where you handle pitch, looping, crossfade and other standard functions. This being Live, though, they’re uncommonly easy to set up and navigate, come with some cool tools (such as bidirectional looping) and, for the most part, are real-time controllable with modulators.

The next tab brings up the Pitch/ Oscillator section. This features not just a pitch envelope but also an oscillator section (with envelope) that can be assigned to perform either frequency or amplitude modulation duties, and which can itself be modulated further by the pitch envelope. All of which enables Sampler to dish up some pretty unique timbres. Next is the Filter/Global section, with a variety of filter types, including real-time morphable combinations of high-, low- and band-pass. On paper, there aren’t as many as in, say, E-MU’s Emulator X2, but many of those filters are preset combinations rather than distinctly different types.

Rest assured that Sampler can certainly hold its own when it comes to depth and breadth. The penultimate section deals with modulation and includes a tasty aux envelope and three LFOs. Finally, there’s the MIDI section, where you can assign a range of MIDI CCs to one or two sample parameters simultaneously. Sitting astride all of this is the zone mapping section, and this is where the real complexity and power of Sampler becomes evident. Each multisample within a zone can have any and all of the parameters we’ve mentioned set independently for it (with the exception of the Global controls), and no other sampler makes it as easy to set up key and velocity ranges to move between them all or to solo and mute individual sections for fine-tuning.