Greenberg here -- How do I make/sequence a song?

[ninja8618]

Hi,
while I'm certain this has been covered to death before, I have been unable to find an answer in the manual/on the internet. I've just been using ableton for about a week now, and this is the first time I'm doing music related anything. So let me have all the ridicule that I deserve, then answer this:

How do i plan and lay down a song using clips over a timeline? I'll elaborate in very black and white language

right now I have clips with different sounds in different tracks in the session view. I play them individually, together, that's all good. But now I want to record a proper track ... you know, for example with track 1 starting then fading into track 2 then this other sound starts playing underneath, then a big bass drops ...so on and forth.

and I want to plan this out in advance, like on a timeline before i play anything, right?

But right now, all i seem to find is kinda making a song on the fly; where I enable record on arrangement view, then I start playing the clips, then i scramble scramble to raise this, lower that and while it's very fun and spontaneous, I want to be in control. I want to arrange just how much of what comes in and out over a length of time, and then play previews, and then finally hit play/record and watch the track be born.

I looked around in the manual, but always came back more lost than before. If you have a plain and simple dumbed down exxxplanation, help me out.
I mean, it is possible, right? just point me in the right direction, get eternal gratitude. I'm using live 8.2.2, running on windows vista home basic on a dell vostro, 4gbs of ram.

[pepezabala]

use arrangement view. learn how to use automation in arrangement view. use copy, paste, cut, duplicate etc. to rearrange clips on the timeline.

from time to time listen to what you did without watching the screen.

[memes_33]

i usually do what you do (make an arrangement live) and then edit that in the arrangement view. or you can drag clips one by one by dragging them to the arrange view tab on the side.