Getting Started With Ableton Live Part 2
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Now lets head over to the arrangement view. You’ll notice that the lines are going in a linear fashion. That means sort of arrangement youd like music would go – in a linear fashion. The last thing I want to tell you about is these little buttons around Ableton live, or the buttons on the bottom right. You’ll see that they’re turned on. I/O: these are your inputs. When turned off, all the input settings go away. Really what these buttons do, is turn things on and off to give you more realestate in order to work inside of Ableton. Especially if you’re just working on a laptop and only have one small screen, the more realestate you have, the better.
Now let’s get into the faders, the ins and outs, panning and that kind of thing. These are your faders:
You can expand and contract these by just going to the top of the fader making it as big as it’ll go, and we can make it smaller same way. There are little triangles on the faders that move the volume up and down. This is the channel on button when it’s grayed out it is off:
Just below that is the solo button and that’s where if you have other things going on and you hit that button, that’s the only track you’ll hear. And finally the button on the very bottom is your record arm button:
Just above the volume faders are your send levels. This is where you’re going to send the signal of that particular track to whatever reverb, delay or any effect you have. This is where you send the signal from:
And lastly, your master output. Just above the master output is your monitor section. Input auto or off. That’s when you’re gonna be recording audio into Ableton. And just above that are your inputs. However you have your inputs set up inside the preferences page, will show up right here. On the right side or your master fader is the level for the metronome. Just above the volume fader for the master fader is the master output.
I’ve showed you all those things on the outside of the screen but it’s in the middle of the window where all of the magic in Ableton happens.
Ableton opens up with a default setting of too many rows and 2 audio rows and in these roads are clip slots. Your clips can have anything from a single sample and audio loop to a part you play on your midi keyboard. And you’ll notice quickly in Ableton live, once again that there’s many ways to do the same thing. For instance say you want to have another midi track or another audio track. One way to make a new audio or midi track is go under create- Insert audio track:
Another way to do the same thing is to right click hold control Click on the pad. A prompt comes up and you can insert audio track just like that.
Or when you’re dragging in a clip whether it’s a midi clip or an audio clip when you drag it right into that blank part of the screen, it’ll automatically make a new track for you.
Okay we’re almost to the point we’re gonna start making some music I know you want to get there quickly like I do. But first lets see a little bit of what’s going on in the arrangement view. What I want to show you first off is that a lot of things are the exact same in this view. Such as the edit window, your browser view, and all of those buttons on the outside of the screen. The triangle over on the top left opens up your browser just like it did the session view.
The triangle on the bottom right opens and closes your edit window just like it did in session view . And the triangle on the bottom left, your description window is still there in arrangement for you.
What you’ll notice here, is that everything is set up from left to right, and you’ll see that when you put a piece of audio and play it inside Ableton arrangement view. Next thing to check out is where the ins and outs and the volumes are inside arrangement. That takes place over on the right side of the screen. To turn the tracks on off is right here.
The solo button is just next to that and the record arm is just next to that. So the buttons do the exact same thing their just placed in a different spot because it’s an arrangement view.
Solo button, record button and so on. And finally the master fader in the to sense that you have are down here on the bottom. You can expand those as well.
All right now let’s start making some music.
Drag a loop over and you can audition anything inside your browser by double clicking on it can you hear that sound. In order to stop the audition just hit the spacebar it’ll stop whatever you’re listening to. if you want that loop to play at that exact tempo you have to make sure your project BPM is set to the same number than your sample. all right now take the loop and you drag it into the big plane area and let go of the trackpad. The loop is there.
You can put the loop in any of the slot you want. Now it’s worth noting here that if project you click and drag the bpm to slow down the tempo in the loop will slow down as well. Or speed up. Again this is an elastic DAW.
When you double click on that clip it opens up the edit window:
This is an audio loop so you’re looking at transients, if it was a midi loop, you’d see all the midi notes.
okay one more quick thing to show you while in there. Close the edit window. When you double click on the title bar:
That opens up the original edit window so you can drag and drop effects on top of whatever sound you have in the clip row. So say you want to add a flanger to this. Just go to your audio effects. and drag and drop. Now that’s gonna have a flanger effect on.
This is really easy to do as you can tell by just dragging and dropping, but if you’re a beginner to Ableton live don’t be afraid to drag drop double click on anything in the window. You can always go back and start a new song and start from the beginning.
If you want to learn Ableton quickly don’t be afraid to dive right in the deep end and get your feet wet.
Now I think the drum loop you just dragged in deserves a bass loop. Find something that fits from your clips and drag that right over just like you did with the drum loop.
Now that you have more than one clip going, if you want to play them all the same time youl have to start the scene over on the right side where it says master.
There’s play buttons 1,2,3,4 and 5. These are called scenes. This is where you can set up the different clips to play in different times and set their songs like the chorous, the bridge. And you can play them in any order you want by starting the scene. You can turn the clips on and off in any order you like in the main clip area.
At the bottom of the master scene list is the main stop button. When you hit this button anything that’s going on will stop.
Ok Thats it for now, Lets return with How to start with AbletonPart 3 soon!