From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

Session view overview - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

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Session view overview

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- [Narrator] Session view is perhaps the most important of the many Ableton innovations. It gives music producers a very different way to create music and it's a crucial tool in the setup of most professionals, integrating a dot and line performance. So, let's take a closer look at the session view user interface. There's a number of similarities to arrangement view and they'll start with the control bar that goes across the top and things like our transport controls, our metronome, our tempo setting, and even our performance indicators over here on the right hand side. On the left hand side, we have our browser. Which we can open and shut using the little arrow right here. And in the bottom left hand corner we have info view. So if you need to learn about something you can just point your mouse at it and info view will display information about that thing. Now across the bottom we have the clip over view area. So if I click on a clip, I'll see in this case, the midi editor area and these little boxes that have parameters related to what's displaying here. Now also at the bottom, there's a second tab and if I click that I'll see the devices in use on that track to either create sound or process the sound that's flowing through that track. Now you can toggle between those two views by using the shortcut, shift tab. That's one that you're going to want to remember because you're going to do that a lot. Now over on the right hand side we have help view. And this is really useful because there's little lessons that you can work your way through on your own to learn more about Ableton Live. If you want to close this, you can click the little x in the left hand corner and then if you need to reopen that, you'll need to go to the view menu and choose help view. So let's talk a little bit about the session view area here. At the bottom we have the mixer controls. And if yours aren't displaying like mine, you'll want to come over and click the M button here in the show/hide buttons. But at the very bottom of each track we have the track volume indicator, we have a pan knob, and if you need to reset something back to it's default setting while it's selected, you can hit your delete key. Below the pan knob we have the track activator button which works the opposite of most mute buttons. So when it's enabled you're hear the audio coming threw a track and when it's disabled track is effectively muted. Below that we have a track solo button so if you only want to hear that track you're going to click the s button. And then below that, the track record enabled button. Now above that area I see sens. And those are used to copy signal from a track and then route that to a return track where you're going to run it through something like a reverb or a delay. Now right now, my return tracks are hidden and I can bring those back by coming over here in the show/hide button area and clicking on the R. I can see that I've actually got about six or seven return tracks. So, I'm going to hide those now that we've got just a little more room to look at our tracks. Above that you can show the track inputs and outputs which are currently hidden. So I'm going to click this top show hide button in the lower right hand corner, says IO, and that will let me see my track inputs and my track outputs. Let me hide that again, it's a little busy to look at. So the tracks are vertical here in session view. So we've got the drums track and then a bunch of bass tracks and then moving across to some symph tracks. And on each track you'll notice these little rectangles that are clips, now clips are short audio or video recordings. And they can be of any length, just depends on what you need. Let's take a look at the buttons we see here on the track. So, on this particular clip, the little play button on the left hand edge will trigger or launch this single clip. If I want to stop it I can either press my space bar or I can click one of these square buttons on the empty clips, and those are stop buttons. So anytime you click a stop button on a track it will stop any clip that's currently playing on the track from playing. So let's take a look at the differences between those two things. (upbeat music playing) You'll notice that when I click the stop button it took just a second to do that because it's looking up here at the global quantization button and it's saying, "Okay, you want me to stop, "so I'm going to wait until the beginning "of the next bar to do that." You'll also notice that the counter is still moving and the play button is still lit. If I want to stop that I need to click the stop button or press my space bar. Now don't worry about the counter in-session view, because it really doesn't have anything to do with what's happening here. Notice that there isn't a ruler here that's expressing time and we'll talk more about that as we move through this video. If I launch this clip again and this time I stop it with the space bar something different will happen, let's check that out. (upbeat music playing) The clip is stopped but you'll notice the play button on that is still lit. I refer to that as that clip having focus. Because now if I hit the space bar it will actually trigger that clip to launch. (upbeat music playing) Now, also, if I click a play button on another clip, on another track, because this clip has focus, it's going to join this clip when I fire it off. Let's check that out. (upbeat music playing) If I hit my space bar, it stops both of those clips from playing. If I want to add another one, I can come over here and I can click another clip on another track to play and all three of them will play. (upbeat music) Now, this next time I'm going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to hit my space bar to launch those three clips to play, but then while they're playing, I'm going to click the play button on another clip. Now, just like a minute ago when I clicked the stop button over here, when I click the launch button on this clip it's going to take a second before that clip actually plays because it's going to look at the global quantization which is currently set at one bar and it's not going to launch until we reach the beginning of the next bar. Let's try that. (upbeat music) So you notice that it waited a second before it started playing and then it joined the other clips, but it didn't quite sound right. And that's because the place in the core progression wasn't in sync and if i want to hear those in sync I'm going to need to launch them all at the same time. So, if I want to stop all clips from playing, I can drop down here to this button that's on the master track and click that. That's called the stop all clips button and that's really important because if I do that all those clips lose focus. And at this point I can start over again and cause other clips to launch. Now I should point out that you can only play one clip on a track at a time. So if I fire off this core strums part and then click the verse drums launch button, it's actually going to stop that one from playing and it will start playing the next one. And again it's going to do that based upon the global quantization. So it will start at the beginning of the next bar. (upbeat music playing) That happened pretty quickly because I clicked it almost simultaneously with the start of a bar. And I'll hit my stop button on that track to stop that from playing. So as you start to pull the parts of a section together, you'll want to put them on the same row here in session view. Those can all be launched using the launch button over here on the master track. And we refer to these as scenes. So each one of these rows is a scene. And I can launch scenes in the same manner that I've been launching clips. So if I launch this intro scene and then go into this verse one scene, when I click the play button for the verse one scene, it's going to wait until the beginning of the next bar before it launches. Lets give that shot. (upbeat music playing) ♪ Gather 'round, I got a story ♪ - Okay, and I stopped that using my space bar. So you'll see that all those clips still have focus. Now that we're familiar with the session view window and the basics of how clips and scenes work, we're ready to dig in. Join me in the next video where we'll take a look at how clip properties allow you to control how live sync's playback of clips of differing tempo's.

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