Why Do We Newbies Suffer?

[Meffy]

Take a lood at the Propellerheads Reason forum and you will see an environment with nothing but trolls.

I agree with most of what's been said in this thread (and in your post, cmcg37)... but this simply ain't so.

Sure, jerks wander in now and then looking for trouble. There are warez luzers looking for an ID 10-T number to authorize their copies, and there's the occasional hot-head who thinks flaming is the right way to communicate. (Been dealing with one of those, a knowledgeable and sometimes helpful fellow who nonetheless can't accept that anyone else's viewpoint might fit that person's circumstances as well as his own viewpoint fits his. Oy veh!)

And of course you get people who ought to have read the manual asking "How do I get audio in?" and "Why don't my VSTis work in Reason?" That's inevitable, happens with every program of every kind.

But for the most part the Props boards have been pretty good places lately. The incredibly lame trolls of a few months back got bored when all their best chain-yanking silliness failed to trigger the knee-jerk reactions they wanted, and they wandered off. Good riddance to bad cess, says I.

What remains is: a core of experienced users, many willing to spread their knowledge around; lots of intermediate Reasoners who both give and ask for advice; and lots of mostly-sincere new users who might be confused but who often have valid concerns. For a little wicked fun, there's good old Fred. :-D

Also, don't forget that the General Forum is a free-for-all, with anyone allowed to read and post. Over in the Propellerhead User Forum, where only registered owners are allowed, it's usually -- but not invariably! -- a calmer, saner, and more productive environment.

Finally, there's been a lot of hoo-hah over bugs in the 3.0 release. Now that 3.0.3 is out, people are slowly, carefully, getting used to all the new improvements in Reason. Things get shaken up, then return to normal.

"Punctuated Equilibrium," to steal Stephen Jay Gould's term for the intermittent, contingency-driven evolutionary process.

Anyhow, it's a good forum with good people. If you use Reason, you couldn't ask for a better bunch of friends. :-)

Meffy

[dannyk]

The 'DJing with live 3' tutorial should be on the ableton home page in giant flashing neon lights. Seriously, it's a great tutorial (as are most of the rest of them), it sets out everything you need to know step by step and in non-technical language, with plenty of screenshots. Those tutorials were my first port of call, coupled with plenty of playing around and pressing buttons to see what they did.

Hows about a 'new to ableton' section on the website home page?

Plus, im pretty much a newbie here - i've had no hard time yet, its been all love. As far as i can see, you only really get a hard time if you ask something that is plainly available at the ableton website or in a tutorial. Or if the guy that answers you is drunk / broken up with his girlfriend / dropped his coffee on his lap.

[dannyk]

I have all the tolerance in the world for anyone who has searched the forum, read the manual, done the tutorials, bought and digested 'Ableton Live 4 Power!', and has a rudimentary grasp of English grammar and common human courtesy.

After that, there are no dumb questions...

agreed, but.... on an international forum based in germany i think this should be amended to 'has a rudimentary grasp of their own language'

Though i can't understand them all, im always happy to see posts in languages other than English. Huge amounts of culture exists in languages and im quite a big fan of culture, even if it is mostly low culture.

Sorry for my humourless post (definitely not having a go at you, hambone1 - i realise your post was tongue in cheek!) but i really think the use of languages other than english is to be encouraged.

[sweetjesus]

...expect that they will be banging out tracks like Moby as soon as they install the program...

that would be rather unfortunate...

but yeah, good point. don't expect miracles. this IS the most intuitive DAW ever but it's not going to do the work for you.

mOby thinks he's gods miracle to music.

[SimonPHC]

read the fucking manual noobs!!
j/k

I can get a 3000+ post count by posting these kinds of replies!

[Advent57]

Ok chaps thanks very much, i had a good laugh reading some of those posts and i really like the comment about opening Live 4 for the first time instead of starting from version 1(this is me). Once again thankyou very much.

[DJRetard]

It's easy for old hat live users from version 1 to say that Live is an easy prog to learn.

v1 was pretty shit simple.

Live, 2 was fairly simple, but Live 3 (the addition of clip envelopes) was hard for some people to get their heads around.

Midi in Live 4 was a godsend (for me anyways, some opposed it) but again, all this learning was in incremental steps for me, since I was using this prog since the day the first version hit the shelves (I had a copy pre-ordered!)

Anyways, my point is that for somebody just opening version 4 for the first time, they will have to get their head not only around the session view (until recently a uniquely live feature), but audio routing, effects, clip envelopes, envelopes in the arrange view, midi routing, etc etc.

That said; I answered a lot of very basic questions on Live versions 1-3, but I won't re-post them. For Live 4, I have put up some posts on workflow practices, since there were a lot more people on the boards by this time last year...

Your correct


I think a lot of the responses on this thread are quite disgraceful. Adam jays response to a newbie is Read The Fucking Manual. Come on adam, what kind of response is that man.

We should all try and understand that a complete newbie knows nothing. They dont know about bars, beats, quantising--------anything. So they also fidn it difficult to explain the question properly

A lot of people ion here are a bit nasty to newbies and I think its a great shame.

Abletons marketing clearly aims the software at newbies. Live has a reputation for being a really easy application to use. Its not if your a newbie and as mentioned above it just got more complex with version5

Give the newbies a break. Some are ashamed to ask questions so be gentle with them. Live isnt our very own little club, its for anyone and everyone.


But I also feel Ableton have a big responsibility to add a new category for the newbies. Or at least a sticky with basic instructions.

Ive watched all the tips on the site and they do seem to assume some knowledge. To a newbie thats of little use I think.

[MrYellow]

You guys think Live is hard

Years ago I had a copy of Corel Draw with no manual..... on an Atari ST

It had no menu bars, no tool bars, no interface as such.

EVERYTHING was Ctrl + Shift + G, Ctrl + Alt + W etc etc.... Complex multiple
key combinations to do simple tasks..... Through trial and error I managed
to decypher how to use it without a manual to tell me those combinations....

If I can do that..... anyone can learn Live in a few hours.....
It's just a matter of trying.

If you've never used a computer, sure it can be new..... but it's just like
every other program now-a-days, there is a paradigm..... You click stuff
and it does things..... I wonder what that play button could do.... It looks
just like the play button on my old cassette recorder, my DVD player....

add a new category for the newbies. Or at least a sticky with basic instructions.

If I had my server up I'd setup an FAQ site......
Need somewhere to put all the common questions....

-Ben

[Martyn]

I don't think i've ever seen an app with more help for newbies, built in tutorials, tutorials on the website, a whole forum to freely search and a manual.

I wish this had been around when I was starting out in music software, now people wamt even MORE shortcuts, they want the hard won knowlege of other users who did put the time in. And I'm sorry, I'm with Adam Jay on this one, if you can't suss Ableton Live from the provided information then you must be a complete twat! it's just laziness, that's all.

[SonnyBonnier]

Actually, this forum has a very nice tone to it. The people here generally knows what they´re doing, and they are not that hard on newbies, compared to some other forums I´ve visited.

But reading the manual is something everyone should do. Not just to spare more experienced users from stupid questions, but also (and mostly) to learn the program.

[DJRetard]

You guys think Live is hard


I

NO, I dont think Live is difficult to operate. Ive used nearly every DAW out there but your missing the point of a newbies thinking.

Ableton markets their product in a way that attracts complete novices. Reason, and storm also do. Of the three Live is the most difficult one to learn.

Lets think about a few things a complete novice might ask.

Whats automation
Whats Midi
Whats 24 bit
whats 44.1khz
Clip, whats that?
Render. Whats that?
How do I get impulse to make a noise?
Where can I get sounds from
How do I make midi audio
Follow actions?
Offsets
PDC
Quantise settings. What are they?
whats an Auxilary send
Whats a compressor
Whats a noise gate



think about a DJ who has never made any music. He knows nothing at all about recording music. So, when he reads the manual its all aliend language to him.


I forget which site, but theres a DJ forum out there with a large thread on how to use Ableton Live. None of the guys there can get a peep out of it. Their not stupid people, they have just never created music on a daw.


Live is not easy peasy nice n squezzy to use for a novice.

Its easy for us becasue we know.

Would you be able to fly an F111 by reading the manual? Thats no more complicated than Ableton Live, probably even less complicated. You would crash and burn before you got off the runway.

Like I say, give the newbies a break and stop laughing at them because they cant figure stuff out

We all had to start somewhere.

[DJRetard]

I
if you can't suss Ableton Live from the provided information then you must be a complete twat! it's just laziness, that's all.

What an ignorant statement.

Try and get the point that if a person has no musical knowledge whatsoever then all the terminology we use as musicians is completely alien to them.

This isnt a fucking guitar with six strings and a plectrum were talking about here.

Its the equivalent of a whole studio. Think about it. A WHOLE STUDIO complete with mixing console, tape machine, outboard FX and thats before you even start to learn what the session view is, the arrangement, warping, follow actions etc etc etc etc etc etc etc

When you started of and had zero knowledge could you have walked in to Abbey roads studio 1 and sat there and instantly sussed everything out and a couple of hours later walk out with a lovely sounding tune even if you had the manuals.

No fucking way man.


I have never swore on this forum until now.

[Martyn]

I
if you can't suss Ableton Live from the provided information then you must be a complete twat! it's just laziness, that's all.

What an ignorant statement.

Try and get the point that if a person has no musical knowledge whatsoever then all the terminology we use as musicians is completely alien to them.

This isnt a fucking guitar with six strings and a plectrum were talking about here.

Its the equivalent of a whole studio. Think about it. A WHOLE STUDIO complete with mixing console, tape machine, outboard FX and thats before you even start to learn what the session view is, the arrangement, warping, follow actions etc etc etc etc etc etc etc

When you started of and had zero knowledge could you have walked in to Abbey roads studio 1 and sat there and instantly sussed everything out and a couple of hours later walk out with a lovely sounding tune even if you had the manuals.

No fucking way man.


I have never swore on this forum until now.

So you're comparing the use of Ableton Live to engineering at Abbey Road?

To be fair, maybe what I said was a little harsh, though my use of the word 'twat' was meant more like 'silly sausage' than anything. If I'd wanted to REALLY offend I might have used the word 'prick' or 'cunt' in it's place, that would have been toooo rude though and would have detracted from my general gist.

The trouble is, there are now lots of new users coming into the fray who think that using audio software is going to be as easy and immediate as dropping two bits of vinyl onto two turntables and pushing a fader up.
This is not the case, if a newbie has no knowlege at all of midi and recording, then he or she has a lot of learning to do. Nobody on a forum like this is going to be able to help beyond pointing them in the direction of suitable literature, people write WHOLE BOOKS on the subject.

I think Ableton have gone to extremes in their brilliant tutorials, both included in Live and on the wesite, the manual is the clearest and best layed out I've ever seen with any app.

You have to do some work yourself if you want to learn anything that's good. It took me years and years to learn to play guitar, years to learn the ins and outs (ooh a pun) of midi via Atari, then cubase vst then Logic (all without manuals) through Reason and onto Ableton live at version 2. All hard won knowlege acheived through research, trial an error and perseverance.

There are a LOT of VERY knowlegable artists that use this forum, they all answer questions from anybody and everybody all the time. That means that they freely give their hard won knowlege so that others can grow quicker than they themselves might have.

Why does everything have to be so damn instant for some people these days? Good things take time to learn but that makes it much, much, MUCH more rewarding when that difficult thing you are trying your hardest to figure out finally clicks.

[mikemc]

in a nutshell making newbies suffer is a time-honored computer geek tradition. many of the reasons have been eluded to in previous replies:

"I remember when there wasn't a manual and you had to ...."
"You think this is hard? Well, I'll tell you, when I was using version blah..."
"Ha! You want me to answer yer question? You'd be crying like a baby if you had to adjust the jumpers on a serial i/o card...."
"Back then, we didn't have MIDI notes, we had to punch holes in little paper cards, and *you're* complaining about..."
or simply:





(edit: now, with Live, you have the opportunity to create huge gaps in your knowlege, where you might know all about adjusting for latency but nothing about quantization so you can constantly ask newbie level questions about facets not yet explored)

[Martyn]

Yeah man! One of these days we'll tell you all about Groove quantise and the wonders of 'system exclusive'.

stay tuned!