Hello Ableton Live | Eka’s Notes

30/09/2020: First time trying Ableton live after the party-corgi music production discussion. Listening to other members' creations and looking at them tinkering with Ableton Live on the stream whetted my appetite to learn Ableton Live. 😺

[!info] Narrator voiceover She stopped learning Ableton Live after two days.

TIL: Arrangement and Session views

Arrangement view: sideways = time, tracks are arranged downwards (like the view I'm familiar with on old Nuendo, FL, GarageBand)
Session view: sideways = tracks
Session view is the default
tab key toggles between them

Learn more:

Thought: Ableton Live official tutorials and documentation are great and extensive... but a bit too extensive to the point of overwhelming to me. I had bookmarked their Learn Live 10 playlist but always put off watching them because I didn't have the time and energy to go through a 66-video series. Instead, I now find myself gravitating towards this type of tutorials as they look more low friction:

✅ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGUdDgKdEg8 -- Making Your FIRST Song in Ableton Live 10 (Using Default Ableton Plugins/Instruments) ← watched
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83TxBL3yOE -- Your First 15 Minutes in Ableton Live 10 for Beginners

Hopefully after finishing these shorter intro videos I'll have some basic knowledge to find the materials I need in the official documentation.

TIL: Creating a MIDI track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGUdDgKdEg8 2:01 - 5:00(ish)

Go to Arrangement view
Click & drag along how many bars I want to make on a MIDI track
Right click, "Insert MIDI clip" (Shift + Cmd + M). Piano roll should appear.
Assign instrument. Sidebar -> Categories -> Instruments -> left click and drag our chosen instrument to the MIDI track.
- On select, the bottom area is replaced with the instrument's settings. Use the bottom-right icons to switch between the piano roll and instrument settings.

Tips:

B = draw mode
To zoom, hover the top and left edges of the piano roll
To play piano roll note on click, click the headphone icon above the piano in the top left corner. It's off by default.

Impression: Piano roll behaves the way I expected it to (eg. the Drawing mode, dragging and selecting).

TIL: Looping piano roll

Go to Arrangement view
We can loop in (1) the main timeline and (2) in the piano roll (useful for checking while drawing/editing)
Create loop area...
- In main timeline: create selection by dragging the top-row triangle icons ▶▬▬◀ near the bar numbers, right click, "Loop"
- In piano roll: same as main timeline, but the option says "Loop current region". Alternatively: select the area/notes, click "Loop" from the left-side menu, indicate the position and length below the "Loop" button.
Not sure of the correct way to undo the loop. But these do work.
- In timeline, we can uncheck "Loop"
- In piano roll, unchecking "Loop current region" seems unavailable (it shows "Duplicate" option instead). Toggling the "Loop" button on the side menu works.