If you are reading this book, you’ve most probably already used Ableton Live and are here to brush up on the basics and sharpen your skills or even find the most suitable workflow for yourself. Or, you might have been using a different Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and are looking to make the switch to the wonderful world of Ableton Live. Perhaps you are planning to dive into performing your music and you heard that Live is a popular choice among established live performers. Either way, you are in the right place!
The Live 11 update has definitely brought some amazing workflow improvements as well as some new devices to spike the community of users’ creativity.
In this book, we will be using the Live 11 Suite version, although there are other, more limited, versions available (Lite, Intro, and Standard). I will guide you through some best practices, tips, and tricks to show you how you can get the most out of the software to create the music you always wanted.
In this chapter, we will take a quick tour of Live 11. This should provide a refresher or an introduction to the interface so you can have a more comfortable music-making journey.
By the end of this chapter, you will know how to set up Live, have developed an understanding of Live’s linear and non-linear workflows, and understand how to save your projects, export your tracks, and work with Templates.
This will be important in order to find all the tools you need and develop a convenient and fast workflow that enables your creativity to flow.
We are going to cover the following topics in this chapter:
In order to follow along with this chapter, you will need the following:
Don’t own Live 11 Suite? You can download a fully functioning trial version from the Ableton website: https://www.ableton.com/en/trial/.
Live originally started out as a loop arranger (or loop sequencer) before it became a fully realized DAW, and became popular upon its release in 2001.
Its unique approach to music-making can be a little intimidating to those coming from a traditional DAW background, especially when you first open the software. Sometimes, you might need to change your thinking and approach to producing music in this kind of environment; however, the workflow that you are about to embrace will definitely benefit your creativity in the long run.
Live is widely used among producers and performers due to its previously mentioned unique workflow. But what makes Live so unique? Well, I guess you already met Session View when you first opened up the program. This view will enable you to compose and perform your music in a non-linear environment (without a timeline) so you can just focus on your ideas and playing, in contrast to a grid-based timeline’s linear approach.
The time will come when you will need to lay down your ideas in a traditional linear way to form your final arrangement, but that’s why there is the other view – Arrangement View.
Furthermore, there is now MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) support in Live 11, and we will also discover the amazing world of Racks (which will enable you to create complex and layered instruments, as well as providing you with track-based parallel effect processing, macro controls, and more), which can benefit both production and performance workflows.
Live also offers a bunch of tools to humanize your music (by adding further movement to sequences and fluctuation to values), generate ideas quicker, and even help you out with some areas that might not be your strongest suit, such as music theory.
You can carry out the entire production process in Live, from laying down your first initial ideas to forming your arrangement and doing your final mixdown.
Of course, you will not have to stop there. Once you are finished with your tracks, you can use Live to take them to the stage or design a set specifically for a live performance.
Let’s have a look at how to set up Live’s preferences in the best possible way to suit your workflow. To follow along in this chapter, you can use the Chapter 1 Ableton Live project. You can also access the same project from within Ableton Live itself:
Live will automatically open up the demo project.
In the preferences, you can set up how Live operates on its own or with external devices that you connect to the computer.
The first thing that we will have to set up is the audio preferences:
Figure 1.1 – Audio preferences
You should now be set to hear sounds in Live.
Let’s just briefly look at what you can set in the other tabs within Preferences; however, don’t worry too much about remembering what these do as we will keep on coming back to Preferences throughout this book:
What are Packs?
Packs are curated content libraries, which can be one-shot samples, device presets, or loops. You can find many of them to purchase on the Ableton website. Alternatively, the ones that are part of Live Suite will show up in your browser to be downloaded directly from there.
If your third-party plugins are not showing up, you should check whether their folder is set properly here and then rescan them.
Now that the preferences have been covered, we can take a look at the different elements of the interface so you will be able to navigate Live quickly.
Let’s begin to take a tour of Live!
Figure 1.2 – Session View accessible by the Tab key
We are going to go through all the crucial parts of the interface, and in the next section, we will conclude with how Session View and Arrangement View operate in this parallel workflow.
But first, let’s look at the parts of the interface that you can display regardless of whether you are working in Session View or Arrangement View.
In the browser, we can access all our samples, loops, synthesizers, samplers, audio and MIDI effects, as well as third-party plugins, grooves, Packs, templates, Max for Live devices, User Library content, project content, and custom collections of these.
Figure 1.3 – The browser
This is where you are going to start your music-making. The unfold button (triangle) shown in Figure 1.3(1) shows and hides the browser.
There are two columns in the browser: the browser sidebar on the left and the content panel. When we click on something under Categories, it will expand the content of that category and show subfolders in the content panel.
For example, if you click on the Instruments category, Live will show you all the available instrument devices you can use. Furthermore, each of these devices will have a small triangle next to them, which will further expand the instrument types and presets (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 – Bass presets of the Wavetable instrument
Let’s briefly cover the different categories:
Now that we’ve looked at the categories, let’s go through what we can find under Places:
Preview will enable you to hear the selected media in the browser before loading it into your session. You can activate it with the small headphone button on the left of the waveform display (Figure 1.3(3)). You can preview the media in real time or synced with the current tempo of the project. The preview can also be routed to a separate output, so if you are looking for a sample, loop, or instrument preset in the browser when playing live, it will not interrupt the music playing through your main output.
Collections allows us to organize any media within the browser into custom-made folders, so if you are working on a project that requires you to use the same device, preset, or sample over and over again, it’s a good idea to tag those items into a collection folder.
You can simply navigate to the item, Ctrl + click (right-click for Windows), and choose the appropriate collection folder from the drop-down menu (Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5 – Choosing a collection folder
You can also rename a collection folder by Ctrl + click (right-click for Windows) on it or selecting the folder and hitting Cmd + R/Ctrl + R (Figure 1.6):
Figure 1.6 – Renaming a collection folder
In order to speed up the browsing process, we can also use the Search field in the browser (Figure 1.3(2)).
We can type in bass
, for example, and it will show us everything in the browser with this keyword within the selected category.
If we would like to browse in all the categories at the same time, then we can select All results, or press Cmd+F (Ctrl + F for Windows) (Figure 1.7).
Figure 1.7 – Searching for bass in the browser
Now that we have gone through the browser, let’s have a look at the other areas of the interface…
Figure 1.8 – The interface
The Groove Pool (Figure 1.8(1)) allows you to add a more humanized feel (additional movement and fluctuation of values) to your clips by using grooves. Live comes with a rather large number of grooves, which you can either drop into the Groove Pool from the browser and then later add to your clips, or drop the Grooves straight onto a clip. They will appear in the Groove Pool, where you can adjust the parameters. More on this in Chapter 5, MIDI Editing and MIDI Effects.
Now, this is a quite crucial area if you are only beginning your journey in Live.
The Help View (Figure 1.8(2)) explains the functionality of each parameter in Live. You simply need to hover your mouse over the parameter and the Help View will display the appropriate information regarding the chosen parameter.
I strongly suggest displaying the Help View, as even for a seasoned Live user, it can be useful when the time comes to provide a little reminder of some functionalities.
You can hide and show the Help View by simply clicking on the small triangle button underneath the Help View box.
This area (Figure 1.8(3)) will display either the device chain on the chosen track or the Clip View, which will be either the sample editor or the MIDI editor, depending on the chosen track’s type.
You can simply double-click on the track head to display the Device View or double-click on the audio or MIDI clip to display the Clip View. Additionally, you could use the Clip View selector or Device View selector, as shown in Figure 1.9.
Figure 1.9 – Clip View Selector and Device View Selector
In the Control Bar, you can find the transport controls (Figure 1.8(4)). This area holds crucial functions, such as start playback, stop, and record, in both Session View and Arrangement View. Additionally, you can set the tempo here and switch on and off the metronome, among other functions.
Let’s quickly have a look at these:
Figure 1.10 – Control Bar and transport controls
Figure 1.11 – Control Bar
Figure 1.12 – CPU Load Meter
Figure 1.13 – Control Bar
So, now that we have had our first proper tour of Live, we can continue to have a look at Session View and Arrangement View. This is super important in order to take full advantage of the creative workflow that Live has to offer.
The time has come; we can begin to discover the magic of the non-linear Session View, the linear Arrangement View (Figure 1.14), and their relationship in Live.
Figure 1.14 – Arrangement View
Let’s quickly take a tour of Session View!
Figure 1.15 – Session View
In Figure 1.15, for example, under the Ambient Enco track, there are three clips that belong to the track and will play back Ambient Enco. These clips can be triggered by the small launch button with the play symbol on it. Each track can have one clip triggered at a time. So, for instance, if you’d like the Ambient Enco track to play two different clips at the same time, you would have to duplicate the track so the two clips are placed on two different tracks. How the clips will be launched timing-wise will be defined by the Global Quantize settings. If Global Quantize is set to 1 Bar, as in Figure 1.16, then Live will always wait for the next bar before it triggers the clip and plays it back.
This way, you can’t fall out of time and clips will stay in sync within Session View.
Figure 1.16 – Global Quantize is set to 1 Bar
Each clip slot without a clip has a small square symbol instead of the launch (play) button. These squares are small “stop” buttons, so when you press on one of them, the clip that is currently playing on that track will stop. The timing of the clip-stopping during playback will also be defined by the global quantize settings, so even this will happen “on time.”
Give this a try:
drum
into the search bar and find a drum loop.You should hear that the loop playback stopping is synced to your tempo at the next bar.
Here, you will also find another Clip Stop button, which if you press will stop the playback of the currently triggered clip of the track (Figure 1.15(2)). Now, if you’re wondering why we need multiple stop buttons, well, just imagine a simple scenario. What if there are no more empty clip slots displayed in Session View? You might still need to stop the playback on that track. So, you can use this Clip Stop button, which is always displayed and available.
The Track Status Display will show you the status of your currently triggered clip.
This is super useful as you will be able to see when the clip that you triggered is about to end so you can trigger the next clip at the right time.
This is where you can route your inputs and outputs for both MIDI and audio on the tracks (Figure 1.15(3)). This is also where you can set up input monitoring. There's more on this in Chapter 2, Recording Audio in Ableton Live 11.
You can use this section to send the signal to a return track for parallel processing. We will come back to this in later chapters of this book (Figure 1.15(4)).
Here, you will find the Track Volume Fader, the Meter, Track Pan, the Track Activator (which you might know as “mute”), the Solo button, and the Arm (record enable) button (Figure 1.15(5)).
Track Delay (Figure 1.15(6)) allows you to pre-delay or delay the track output.
With Crossfade Assign, you You could actually set up Live for Djing, mimicking two decks. You could have one track that you assign as Deck A and another track that you assign as Deck B. The crossfade setting to transition between the two “decks” can be found in the same section but on the Master track. If the track isn’t assigned to any “decks,” the crossfade has no effect.
CPU Load Meter allows you to display how much CPU an individual track is consuming. This is super useful when you start experiencing audio dropouts due to CPU overload as you can easily find which track is contributing most to the dropouts and deal with it.
You can customize what you are displaying by hiding some of the previously listed controls (Figure 1.15.(7)). You can hide and show the I/O, sends, returns, the mixer, Track Delay, crossfade, and track CPU metering.
You can have up to 16 Return Tracks in Live Suite (Figure 1.15(8)). When you create a new Return Track, the corresponding Send will be created on the tracks. This is a concept that you might come across in other DAWs, Return Tracks popularly being called as AUXes and the Sends “Buses.”
Let’s look at Figure 1.15(9). I wanted to talk about this separately so we can discuss the Cue. Again, this is something that can be extremely useful for performing. We will come back to this when we look at live performances later in this book, but since you use the Cue to control the output of the browser’s Preview function, it is important to know about it. You can route out the Master to, for example, your speakers, which are your main outputs, but you can also route out the Cue to a separate pair of outputs. Besides the Preview of the browser, you can decide whether you want to hear other tracks in the Cue too. Once you have sorted the routing, then you can click on the Cue button. This will turn the Solo buttons on the tracks into little headphone buttons, which will send the tracks into the Cue when you select them. You can then switch it back to Solo when you want to. See Figure 1.17. We will come back to Cue again in Chapter 15, Playing Live.
Figure 1.17 – Cue and Solo buttons
Let’s look at Figure 1.15(10). Scenes represent a selection of clips across all the tracks. Take a look at Figure 1.18.
Figure 1.18 – Scene
You will see that we have three different scenes. The first one was renamed Intro (you can right-click (Ctrl + click for Windows) on a Scene and choose the Rename option, or select the Scene and press (Cmd + R (Ctrl + R for Windows) and type in the name) and it only has one clip to play back on the Ambient Enco track. The next Scene, named Intro pt2, has three different clips across three different tracks to be played back, and the Verse Scene has even more. When you press the Launch button on the Scene, it will launch all the clips that are part of that Scene. This is how you will be able to progress your ideas into some sort of structure before moving to Arrangement View. Or you can structure a live performance where you will be launching clips, scenes to have a little jam session.
But how do we create these Scenes?
Well, you can use a simple copy-paste technique to insert the clips into the clip slots to form scenes, or you can do the following. If you have clips in Session View that you you have launched and you would like to form a Scene out of these triggered clips you can simply Ctrl + click (right-click for Windows) on the last engaged Scene and chose Capture and Insert Scene from the contextual menu (Figure 1.19):
Figure 1.19 – Capture and Insert Scene
This will form a brand-new Scene, including all the clips that were launched across multiple Scenes (Figure 1.20).
Figure 1.20 – Brand-new Scene formed after selecting the Capture and Insert Scene option
You can always copy and paste or duplicate previous Scenes (see from the contextual menu in Figure 1.19) in order to add a new clip from an additional track to the copied or duplicated Scene to progress your ideas/track.
We will be working in Session View quite a bit throughout this book, so you will get to understand the full potential of this workflow!
Scenes can represent a part of your track, but when you are preparing a Set for a live performance, sometimes a Scene will represent full tracks. For example, Scene 1 will hold all the elements of Track 1, and Scene 2 will hold all the elements of Track 2. The two tracks you are performing might have totally different tempos. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to spend time on stage typing in the tempo of the next Scene/track. You would essentially want the Scene to switch to the appropriate tempo for the track when you trigger it. This is exactly why there is the option to enter the tempo separately for each Scene. This works the same for time signature changes too; each Scene can have its own Scene Time Signature.
Even in production, sometimes you might want to switch things up with a cheeky tempo change, such as dropping to half-time after the breakdown and then going back to the original tempo in the next section, or having a lovely middle-8 with a time signature change. Being able to change the tempo for each Scene will enable you to do these kinds of things.
Let’s have a look at what functions we can access on Figure 1.15(11).
The Stop All Clips button will globally stop playing back all clips in Session View.
The Enable Follow Action Globally button allows you to enable Follow Action. Follow Action is a rather large topic. We will be looking at it in Chapter 13, Exploring Tempo Follower, Follow Action, Max for Live, Working with Video, and Ableton Note.
We then have the Back to Arrangement button. This is the right time to start talking about Arrangement View. A pretty standard workflow can be that you start laying down your ideas in Session View’s non-linear loop-based environment, where you can focus on playing live and quickly capturing your idea without worrying abot the timline.. But eventually, you will want to move into Arrangement View to form a full arrangement in a linear environment where you can just press play at the beginning of the track and it will play through from left to right. The Arrangement View is also where you would do your micro-edits and add additional ear candy. Once you’ve done that, move your clips to Arrangement View; the original clips you started out with will still remain in Session View too. When any clips in Session View are triggered, the Back to Arrangement button will light up to indicate that you aren’t playing back your arrangement in Arrangement View (Figure 1.21). If you press this orange button, Live will only play back whatever is supposed to be playing in Arrangement View. So, you can only play back a given track in either Arrangement View or Session View; otherwise, you would have some serious chaos.
Figure 1.21 – Back to Arrangement button
If you don’t know already, I am sure you are dying to know how to get the clips and Scenes from Session View into Arrangement View. Hold your horses; we will get to that a little later!
Let’s have a look at the preceding functions shown in Figure 1.15(12).
So, you have probably figured out by now that the Ableton logo is actually made out of the symbols of Session View and Arrangement View. Pretty amazing, eh?
If you press one of these buttons (in the top-right corner of the screen below the CPU Load Meter), it will switch between the two views. There is another, perhaps more convenient, way to toggle between the views, by simply pressing the Tab key on your computer keyboard.
So, let’s click the Arrangement View selector and take a look at Arrangement View (Figure 1.22)!
Figure 1.22 – Arrangement View
Now, I want you to look at Figure 1.22 and Figure 1.23. Hopefully, you have clocked that the tracks are the same in both views, just in a non-linear manner and a linear manner. The elements of this track were composed in Session View and then the Scenes were transferred into Arrangement View, where the idea can be further developed.
Figure 1.23 – Session View
You can get your clips and Scenes into Arrangement View from Session View by either simply copy-pasting them or actually recording them in real time into Arrangement View by pressing the Arrangement Record button in the Control Bar and launching the Scenes or clips. You are basically jamming out your arrangement and capturing it in real time (Figure 1.24)!
Figure 1.24 – Capturing an arrangement in real time
This is something that we are going to cover in depth in Chapter 10, Utilizing Arrangement and Organization Techniques in Our Ableton Live Project.
Figure 1.25 – Arrangement View
For now, we are going to quickly explore the controls in Arrangement View.
Of course, there will be times when you go straight to Arrangement View to start a project and do not use Session View. In this case, just like in Session View, you can drag and drop media from the browser to the appropriate track, but this time not to a clip slot but into the timeline.
Now, you should feel more comfortable with Live 11’s interface. In the next section, we are going to look at how we can export audio out of Live, save our work, and use templates before we can dive in and start making music.
This section is super important in order to speed up your workflow with templates, to save your project properly so you never lose any files, and, of course, to export your track so it can see the light of day.
In order to export your audio from Live’s Arrangement View, take the following steps:
Figure 1.26 – Export Audio/Video window
Live can be used to edit audio for videos, and can actually host video in the timeline. Therefore, you have options for exporting your video work from here too.
It’s always a good practice to check your exported audio by playing it back, to make sure everything is included that you want to export, because an accidental timeline selection or a muted or soloed track can mess up your exporting.
When you start working in Live, you create a Set, which is an .als
file. This file can be found inside the Project folder (Figure 1.27).
Figure 1.27 – Project folder
This will include other crucial media related to your Set (Figure 1.28) or multiple Sets in the Project folder.
Figure 1.28 – Crucial files in the Project folder
It is extremely important that when you are transferring your work to a USB stick, an external hard drive, or another computer, you move the Project folder, not the Set .als
file. If you move the Set, you will end up with loads of offline/missing files. If that happens though, don’t worry; we will cover what to do in Chapter 17, Troubleshooting and File Management. Your project folder will include, of course, the Set(s), the Samples folder (including imported, recorded, and processed files), the Backup folder, and the Ableton Project Info folder.
Figure 1.29 – Saving a Live Set
Let’s investigate the saving options (Figure 1.29):
Additionally, you can use this option to save minor changes you last made to your already existing project as long as that change didn’t include bringing in any new media into the Set.
Upon clicking Collect All and Save, the following dialog box will appear (Figure 1.30):
Figure 1.30 – Collect All and Save window
Here, you can select where exactly you’d like to collect the files from.
Saving your work might seem a very easy task but it is definitely something you should do properly to avoid lost work and disappointment. File management is a crucial part of any media work, regardless of whether you are a hobbyist or a professional.
Templates can really speed your workflow up for specific types of work!
If you are, for example, editing loads of voice-overs for videos or recording loads of vocals and you find yourself having to set up the same chain of devices on tracks for your session, that’s when it’s probably a good idea to save a template. You could have one for all your voice-over work and all your vocal recording work. When you open these templates, the saved data will automatically be loaded up, so you don’t have to set up the same track count and devices over and over again.
If you look at Figure 1.29, you can see that you also have options to save templates.
Save Live Set As Template… will save your set into your User Library (Figure 1.31).
Figure 1.31 – Saved template in User Library
Ableton also provides some of its own templates that are already made for you, which you can find in your browser, under the Templates tab (Figure 1.32).
Figure 1.32 – Premade templates in the browser
Lastly, you can also select Save Live Set As Default Set…, which means every time you open Live, this Set will load up by default.
This is something that should you also consider doing if you find yourself always using the same devices on your Master track (of course, with different settings) or if you have a specific reverb device preference for your Return Track, so each time you sit down to produce, all of these settings will be automatically loaded for you.
This brings us to the end of Chapter 1. By now, you should be comfortable with finding your way around the Live interface, have a solid idea of the Live workflow, know how Session View and Arrangement View work, and know how to finish up your work by exporting and saving it.
In the next chapter, we are going to take a look at how we can record audio in both Session View and Arrangement View.
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