Songwriting in Ableton 9

[Chingy]

Hello all,

I used to be a Live owner a couple years ago, but moved to other DAWs due to a couple of issues. Ableton Live 9 looks nice and I wanted to see if you all had some thoughts on the issues that I ran across the first time. Much appreciated!

This has mainly to do with session view since that is unique to Live and a helpful way to write for the most part...

- I do mainly indie pop songwriting. While many things do nicely fit into 4/4 blocks, a lot of things such as vocals will start on the last beat of the previous bar for example. I never figured out a good way to use session view for sketching out these ideas because it seemed to operate better when everything was perfectly looped. Any ideas?

- Does Live have a render in place option? For example, if I'm using Melodyne on a vocal clip, I usually tune the vocal and then bounce down the tuned version to a clip that I use when mixing. I don't keep Melodyne active.

Anybody using Live for songwriting (mainly non-EDM)?

Thanks again!

[KrisM]

I do mainly indie pop songwriting. While many things do nicely fit into 4/4 blocks, a lot of things such as vocals will start on the last beat of the previous bar for example. I never figured out a good way to use session view for sketching out these ideas because it seemed to operate better when everything was perfectly looped. Any ideas?

two clips and a follow action?. ie you trigger the clip with the start of the vocals on the last beat, and then it automatically plays the next clip with the rest of your vocal line.

Does Live have a render in place option? For example, if I'm using Melodyne on a vocal clip, I usually tune the vocal and then bounce down the tuned version to a clip that I use when mixing. I don't keep Melodyne active.

Never tried to Freeze in Session View >.> If you can't, you could always bounce to audio in Arrangement and chop it up into clips for dropping into Session. I'd do it on a copy of the vocal audio and mute the original if it was me.

Anybody using Live for songwriting (mainly non-EDM)?

All the time. Probably electronic-oriented, but quite often not a four on the floor dance beat.