Ableton Forum

i was a guitarist and bassist about 12 years ago and put my instruments down until a few months back. i went to an art school when i was young, studied audio production (what a joke) back when avid was it's own company and you had to assign pno's when burning cd's. i interned in an audio post house and later was given a position. i didn't do much engineering as my tenure was fairly short there. anyway i have been trying to control a burning desire inside to let something creative out and this turns out to be the thing.

so i waded through a thread a few pages back with a ton of videos and wow, so much information. i'm soaking it all up. it seems that ableton is THE choice for dj's and electronic music.

i was wondering if anyone would be able to provide some links to tutorial style videos that involve music other than house/trance/tech etc...

i've watched quite a few and learned tons from them but i don't make that style of looped repetitive music. i'm a songwriter and a rock guy. i'll post stupid questions from time to time when i think of them and maybe one day in the near future my questions wont be quite so stupid.

i guess i'm having trouble wrapping my head around using session view as a songwriting tool. ive been exclusively using arrangment view and it works great but i figured there might be something i'm missing that would open up new ways of thinking.

are there any instrument only guys lurking here? folk, rock, metal, alt, anyone?

there's a few bits on youtube if you search.

I do a lot of work in arrangement view, mainly compositing or dubbing parts using scratch/draft arrangements as a guide. But session view is a useful tool if you can take a modular approach to your work. You can have several drum part variations, guitar, banjo... whatever, and then switch between them, have them come in and out, using clips in session view. You can record that to arrangement and then edit in arrangement like you already do. You can "play" clips and try arrangement variations on the fly in a way that you really can't do in arrangement. Once you get something you like you can treat it as a guide mix and record new parts in arrangement, keeping some or none of the parts from session.