Experienced with production, Ableton Live Noob. Questions

[Praxisaxis]

Hey, I have recently started using Live in conjunction with an APC 40. It’s a lot of fun. I migrated to Live because of what it promises as a utility for live performance (it has capabilities here that cannot be matched by Pro Tools, which is my native DAW).

I’m planning on working towards creating tunes in Live, in conjunction with a set for live performance, and perhaps exporting stems to Pro Tools for mixing for recorded production.

But presently, I’m still in the migratory phase, and I have stems bounced from Pro Tools, imported into AL, and chopped up for launched playback using the APC 40.

I have a bunch of questions about this workflow, some of which don’t seem to be answered by the manual.

* What is the specific relationship between the Session View and Arrangement View? I have noticed that clips in the Session do not need to be present as a track in the Arrangement. Is it fair to say that you don’t need any clips in the Arrangement View in order to work in Session View? (I understand there are some benefits in the Arrangement View, but speaking strictly…) Is it fair to say that both views offer clips as markers for actual audio on the disk, and therefore arrangement and session can remain entirely independent?

* Ableton Live seems to suffer from bad latency. Or is this just me? I am using the APC 40 mainly to launch clips (using quantise), but some one off hits I wish to “play” live, i.e., unquantised, un-warped. Even so, the latency makes it difficult to play like this effectively. I have tried reducing the Output Buffer size, but even set very low, some annoying latency persists. Is this just something I have to live with?

* Even if I were to get Maschine, I imagine I would still be stuck with this latency, when using Maschine’s software inside Ableton. Is this correct? (Meaning, I’m guessing the latency is attributable to Ableton’s internal processes).
* Principally, I wish to be able to use a pad controller to do some live playing. Do you have any recommendations about this? I imagine these: 1) Use APC 40 and put up with latency 2) Use maschine and work with standalone mode in addition to AL (is that possible??) 3) get a hardware sampler to work in conjunction with software… like an MPC. Suggestions??

Workflow questions:
* How can I stop a clip/group/scene which I’ve set to launch, and is queued up, awaiting its entry pending quantise. I.e., if I accidentally queue the wrong clip and just wish to cancel it before it begins, and continue the playback without alteration? At present, if I queue up the wrong scene or clip, I can’t get out of it playing other than by stopping playback or relaunching another scene/clip. I’m having trouble locating that in the manual.

* When consolidating clips into the Session View, they are always assigned a certain gain. Sometimes it’s 0, but it is often something like -15 or -20. It doesn’t seem to matter what the clip is given as its initial gain, it plays back at the correct level in the mix (meaning if I set all consolidated clips to 0, it mucks up the mix). However, in Arrangement, all the stems I import from another DAW are set to 0, and remain mixed well. I don’t understand this aspect of the gain staging: why are the clips in session view that have been consolidated from arrangement given an altered gain?? This isn’t addressed in the manual.
Here’s an illustration of the section of the clip view I’m talking about:



I will probably come up with many other questions, but thanks in advance for any help you can offer me.
-
Tom.

[Praxisaxis]

bump?

[GUY SMILEY]

session and arrangement view can be viewed as seperate environments with capabilities to easily transfer between them.
There are numerous ways of utilising this to your advantage. For me personally when writing a tune, I start in session view, create clips and jam with them , and then hit record, which effectively transfers this 'clip jam' into the arrangement view for final arrangement and mixdown. Then for live work 're-import' back into session view and use something like your APC (for example)
The new 'consolidate time to new scene' function make this last step a fuck sight easier than it used to be.

Latency is the same as with any DAW, and is therefore dictated by your Audio Interface. My Metric Halo runs at about 8ms. There's an excellent built in 'lesson' (accessed via help menu) so you can work out optimum latency setting for your chosen interface. Ableton defaults to 512ms, but usually you'll be able to get to at least half of this no matter how shitty your interface.

Suggesting a suitable pad controller virtually warrants its own forum thanks to the number of options now available. MPD series from akai, the maschine etc etc.. they all work, and usually someone's done some clever bit of additional programming of some description to make them work even better. Launchpad95 etc etc

To stop a clip pressed inadvertantly clicking an empty clip slot in the same track will stop it, or just another clip on the same track.

Hope that helps. The manual at 600 pages is big.. but it's also really well written. I still use mine once in a while, and i've been using ableton for over ten years.

Given your username this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUL_gcHv0EA may also help.

[bicarbone]

1. Correct. Think of session view as a jam pad, whereas arrangement view is the traditionnal linear timeline approach common to almost every DAWS. They can be totally independant, or combined (i.e. you can trigger clips in session view to try out ideas/combinations of sound while tracks in arrangement view are playing. This woukd be like jamming over a mix in PT).

2. Latency. Do you mean quantization? If so you can set quantization for each clip, in the clip view: set to "none" will trigger the clip independantly from the tempo immediately when you hit a pad on the APC or a any control on any controller assigned to that clip. By default, clips launch quantisation is set to one bar if I'm not mistaken.

3. Don't own maschine, can't answer that.

4. Supported controllers can be fun to use with ableton, APC or novation launchpad for example.

5. tough one, maybe someone else can chime in as I can't think of a better way than what you have mentionned.

6. The process of consolidating a clip comes with normalising, that's why you get those odd gain adjustements. Nothing to worry about as long as you stay within live's environment and don't reimport the audio file from directly the HD.

Hope that helps

[bicarbone]

GUY SMILEY beats me to it! Sorry for my bad english and my slow typing.

[GUY SMILEY]

GUY SMILEY beats me to it! Sorry for my bad english and my slow typing.

heh ! close race though
Your point about quantisation of clip triggering is a good one which I missed. Can feel like latency.

[bicarbone]

GUY SMILEY beats me to it! Sorry for my bad english and my slow typing.

heh ! close race though
Your point about quantisation of clip triggering is a good one which I missed. Can feel like latency.

yup