Ableton Forum

I know it can be "challenging" to answer questions from people who don't have experience with robust software. To better help the folks here who will hopefully help me, I'll start with my main goals.

1-Use Live to compose and record songs (draft version), then take the results to pro musicians and persuade them to make a "real" recording of what I had cobbled together.

2-I'm not very good with bass, guitar, keyboards or vocals, but I've learned how to record myself (in Audacity) and remove the sour notes etc. Presumably do the same in Live. I can't play drums at all, but I bought a library of sampled drum sounds that I can use to assemble the percussion. (Don't like drum machines or MIDI.)

3-I started with the only slightly-helpful 500+ page manual, then found some YouTube vids that were much easier to follow. (Monkey see, monkey do.)

So my first baby step here will be to start a Live project and record, say, the guitar part. Still learning the jargon, I believe that what I call a track, Live calls a session?

How am I doing so far? Maybe there are some noob videos I haven't found yet that you can point out to me?

The "record arm" button is probably the best start. Learn how to use it in both arrangement and session views. In arrangement view you probably want to hit the global record button. Things should start recording then

You're doing great, keep it up!

Oh man, you should definitely check out the built-in Live tutorials (under Help -> Help View). They're mostly quick and pretty fun. I think there's one that covers exactly what you're asking about.

To sort of answer your question, recording in Live is pretty similar to most other recording programs: start in Arrangement view (horizontal tracks), make an audio track, set the input to whatever you're recording, press the track's record arm button to arm the track for recording. Now when you press the global record button up at the top, and then play, that track will record whatever is coming into it.

There's also a Session View which is where you have the grid of clips on the tracks. Recording works here the same way, except that in addition, you also need to trigger one of those clips to start recording into it.

Thank you all so much. I've got my starting point. This is going to be fun.

I lost two weeks of my life to the demo of Live 6. It's definitely fun.