From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

Track controls - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

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Track controls

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- [Instructor] Working in arrangement view is similar to other DAWs, so it's a good place to start to learn how to work in Ableton Live. Let's start by taking a closer look at the track controls. If you remember from our earlier discussions, across the top of arrangement view, we see the control bar, on the left we see the browser, in the lower left hand corner we see info view, and across the bottom, we see details view. So the most important part or the really, the part that's different about arrangement view is this middle two thirds here. Now if you find yourself in session view, you can move back and forth between the two views by using these two buttons in the upper right hand corner, or you can toggle using the tab key on your computer keyboard. So on the right hand side of arrangement view, we see the track controls. Now right now, the tracks, which are stacked vertically here, are at their smallest track height, and if you want to increase that, there are several ways to do it. First, you can click the triangle next to the track name plate, and that will increase the track height, or you can move your cursor to the bottom edge of a track and when you see the double arrow cursor shape, you can click or drag up or down to change the height of the track above it. Now if you want to do that action to all tracks, you can just add the option key or the alt key on a PC, and click and drag and do the same thing. You can also unfold all tracks by option or alt clicking the unfold triangle to the left of the track name. Now one other way that you can change a track height is if your cursor is on a track like mine is on the top track there, you can hold down your option or alt key and use your mouse to scroll increase the track height. Now with that track height increased, I can see more detail over here in the mixer area of the track header. So the buttons that we have here include the track activator button, which works the opposite of the way a mute button works in most programs. So when the button is enabled, we can hear the track and when the track is disabled, the track is effectively muted. To the right of that we have the solo button, and then the track record enable button, and then on the second row, we have the track volume field, and if you click in that field and drag up or down, or type a value, like minus 4.2 is where I think I was and hit return, you can do it by typing the value. And you can do the same thing in the pan field to the right, so if you click in the field and drag up or down, you can change the track pan value. Now if you ever want to set that back to the default value, all you need to do is hit the delete key while that parameter is selected. Below the pan and volume, we see the controls for the syns. If we want to see more detail in the track header, we can do that by clicking on the show hide buttons that we see down here in the lower right hand corner. We can also show and hide that information by key command, and that would be by pressing the option and command key on a Mac or the control and alt keys on a PC, plus the first letter of the button. So to do the IO, I can go option, command, I. Return tracks, I can do option, command, R. And again that would be control, alt, R on a PC. And then last but not least, we've got the track delay here on the bottom and I'll just warn you, if you're on a Mac and you do the option, command, plus D, you're going to end up showing the doc, so you'd have to disable that command in preferences. Now I typically work with only the mixer controls showing here, and then depending upon the number of tracks that I've got, I'll also show the return tracks as well. Now one thing that's also changed in Ableton Live 10, is that we no longer see the automation controls by default, so you'll notice that below the track name plate it's blank. We can recall those or make those visible by just pressing the letter A on your computer keyboard, and that's a toggle. Now I really like that change, because in the past when you were trying to make selections and other things while the automation was showing, it could complicate things. So now all we have to do is press the letter A to hide it, and it's very easy. We're just getting started in arrangement view, so check out the next video where we'll discuss making selections and starting and stopping playback.

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