J. Anthony Allen explains the difference between Ableton Live's native instruments and third-party plugins like Serum. Native instruments, listed under the Instruments tab, are synthesizers and samplers that come with Live Suite. Third-party plugins generate sound too but appear in a separate section because they're made by other companies, not Ableton.
Working with Live's instruments. So first things first, let's talk about the difference between instruments and plugins. What Live calls instruments. This is Live terminology. Stuff is the stuff that's built into Live. So if I go to the Instruments tab here, these are our synthesizers and our samplers, okay? Those are primarily what we're going to be working with this class. Now, if you want a broad definition of what these things do, they make sound. These are things in Live that make sound on their own. These are really the only things in Live that make sound on their own. Everything else is effects or already made sound, like samples, things like that. These are our synthesizers, our samplers, anything that makes sound on its own. Now, you might be thinking, well, what about something like Serum? That's a popular plugin right now. Serum is a synthesizer. It makes sound. You play it, you know, you give it MIDI notes, and it makes sounds. It's true. So that is not going to be in Instruments, because that's not made by Ableton. Everything in our Instruments tab is just the stuff that comes with Ableton Live Suite, okay? Your list might be smaller than this if you're not on Live Suite. If you're on a different version of Live, your list is going to be smaller. But back to Serum. So Serum is going to Live in plugins, okay? Plugins are all our effects and instruments, synthesizers, things like that that are not made by Ableton. So if I just type Serum here, I open up my vst, there is Serum. Okay? And Serum is an instrument. The way that Live defines it. It's a synthesizer, but it's not made by Ableton. So it's a very separate thing. Right? But it does really kind of work in a very similar way as some of the Live instruments. In particular, Wavetable is kind of Live's answer in Serum. More on that later. So the big difference between the synthesizers that Live has and the synthesizers that you might install as a plugin are just who made it, right? If Ableton made it, it's going to be here in Instruments. If anybody else made it, it's going to be in plugins. Cool. Okay, so we're primarily going to focus on the instrument stuff.
