Ableton Suite Worth It?

I’m not sure I can help with the upgrade question fully, but if the reason is you’re bored of Serum’s WT’s, or you want more synth options, I might say…no?

Serum allows you to *create* new WT’s within the synth, and to *import* any WT’s from anywhere, so if you’ve exhausted all of that and are still bored, you will be mightily disappointed with the Ableton WT synth, which does not allow for either. Although in the upcoming 10.1 update, they are finally introducing WT import…something that they arguably should have done from the jump.

Operator & Wavetable are fine synths. There is actually a lot you can do with Operator. But is it worth $370? I have a hard time saying yes. For that much you could go get UVI Falcon and have exponentially more synthesis & sampling capabilities than what you would get back from the Live synths (flame on!). There are some pretty decent audio FX that you would get with Suite, but it sounds like you’ve already got a pretty decent hoard of those. And the other Live (or should I say A/A/S) synths, like analog, poli, collision, etc…I just don’t ever use. I have other synths that I prefer. I will admit that I do use Sampler often, as my bread and butter sampler. I’ve never liked Kontakt, mostly because of the UI, and haven’t since its inception…I was well-disappointed in NI’s decision to just regurgitate the early 2000’s design for Kontakt 6…Fucking. Horrendous.

The place where you might really get your money’s worth is in Max4Live, and the additional Midi & Audio FX it provides. Max4Live is pretty powerful, but honestly, if it were me, I would take that money and buy a new copy of Bitwig 3, which kinda kicks the shit out of what M4L tries to be, at least on the user side (as opposed to creating M4L devices…if you want that then the decision is made, although BW’s new feature, The Grid looks to even that playing field as well). M4L isn’t a terrible attempt to expand the modulation capabilities of Live, but Bitwig is leagues better in that department, with the concepts at the heart of how BW was built, as opposed to being bolted on, as M4L is. And maybe I am a little biased right now, as currently ALL of my Max devices have taken a shit and won’t work AT ALL, and haven’t for almost a month now. I’m afraid it’s going to take a full re-install to fix it, which pisses me off, and I have just been working around it. Also, BW is easy to learn…in fact if you know Live, you already know 95% of BW, and even many of the hotkeys are the same or similar.

Finally, if you are bored with Serum’s included WT’s, I am happy to share my entire WT collection for DL. You can’t possibly be bored with this many WT’s, and again, if you are, Wavetable isn’t gonna scratch that itch.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mahd9fg7pfez7hr/AACcCdO7_kcKmAZoRFm0BKJNa?dl=0

On Windows, extract these to:

C:\Users\*YOUR_USER_NAME*\Documents\Xfer\Serum Presets\Tables

On Mac side you are on your own, but it shouldn’t be hard to find.

There are literally 1,000’s of WT’s in that link, some that I have created myself.

I don’t think I’ve made your decision any easier, but these are my honest thoughts.

Good luck!

Want some new synth fun? Cheggidout:

I’d agree with Shrike saying it’s not worth the $370 (!?!?!) upgrade price unless you plan on getting into the Max side of things.
I’ve never actually used anything other than Suite, but Ableton’s list of extra features is extremely deceptive (https://www.ableton.com/en/live/compare-editions/), as it includes M4L effects and instruments as if they’re native to Suite, like Poli, Bass, Colour Limiter and Spectral Blur to name a few.
There’s a lot of free Max stuff that does integrate pretty well into Suite, it’s nice being able to automate any parameter with a Max LFO or envelope follower, but I feel like the improvements to automation in 10.1 are gonna make this a bit less appealing. From what I’ve seen of Bitwig their modulation system is a lot more seamless than Max which I’ve found pretty unreliable at times. Having written this I skimmed the rest of Shrike’s post and seen he’s written basically the same thing lol.
Another thing to consider is if you ever want to get into plugin coding then Max is a great entry point and is a lot easier to follow than C++ if you were to do VSTs, but even then there’s a free alternative called Pure Data (not integrated with live but still a great learning tool).
I know what you mean with Serum, it does have a very harsh sound which can get quite wearing (and the FM is pretty weak), Wavetable is a bit more fluid but it is extremely CPU intensive so I tend not to use it.
Having said all this, I’d recommend getting the 30 day free trial of Suite and see if you actually use the extra features on a daily basis, I’d say there’s probably other stuff you can get for that much money that’d be more useful but you might become a die-hard Operator fan like me and have to splash out!