re: suggestions about audio clips

[rpl0264]

I'm a newbie to live. I am trying to write a song right now. I have the song mapped out to intro/section A/B/C. I would like to lay down the bass and guitar parts. how long should an audio clip be? What is recommended? Should I start this in the session view? Thanks in advance.

[ianf39]

don't worry about being new to it, everybody has got to start somewhere. an audio clip - or midi for that matter - can be however long you want it to be. For example it could be the whole audio file of a song or it could be an audio blip thats a couple milliseconds long, its really whatever you want it to be. If you have an idea in your head how you want the song to sound than you can kind of build it up... one track for guitar clips (for example: one clip for the intro, another for chord progression in the verses, another for the hook, bridge, outro and so on). Add another track for the bass, drums, synths or whatever and you can structure the piece a little more by making scenes for specific sections. Or you could make a number of clips on the guitar track and set up follow actions to get some more varied or spontaneous sounds. It really is totally up to your imagination and creativity, don't limit yourself by thinking of ways to do something "the way it should be done" and don't be afraid to experiment, which is in my opinion Live's best function. As far as working in Session or Arrangement view it's again totally up to you. Try both and see what works best for you. I personally really like the layout of Session view and it helps me come up with things which I wouldn't normally think of when writing a song and makes me think outside the box. I would suggest you look through the manual and some youtube videos at least to get a little understanding of the possibilities. Hope i've helped a little

[rpl0264]

Thanks ianf39 for your comments!

Do you have an good resources for arranging songs using Ableton. Can you point me to some websites or videos I can look at? For example, setting up the intro, then the verse, chorus, outtro,etc.

One other thing, I just experimented with laying a bass track playing my electric bass. It was recorded around 70bpm. When I added it to live and increased the speed to 120bpm and quantize it to the grid. It sounded terrible. I'm I doing something wrong?

[ianf39]

Glad I could help! You can start by looking here on Ableton's website for the manual and you can also link to their youtube channel were they have tons of videos and instructional stuff (their channel is called AbletonInc if you can't find it). Theres a pretty good series called Building a Track with Live Intro that you might want to check out... not sure if you have the Intro version or not but they go through basics which covers all Live versions. It covers things like drum samples, adding midi tracks and building up scenes. You can also find some good stuff by just typing into Youtube things like "recording bass in ableton live", "arrangement view ableton live 8", or "quanitization in ableton live"...Youtube and the Ableton website is where I find the most interesting stuff.

I'm not sure about the bass issue. Are you recording into Live or into some other software and then transfering it to Live? If it's the latter that could be the issue but I don't have much experience on quantizing so you might want to get some other input. Good luck with everything, let me know how it goes.