Ableton Live 8 - I'm in need of HELP on a few things.

  • Thread starter MetronomeAUDiLE
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MetronomeAUDiLE

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Hello Future Producer's,

I'm in need of some help on a few topics regarding Ableton Live 8, I'm fairly new to the DAW but I know my way around most of it and the basics. I just need to hear from someone who know's Ableton better than I do what the best way to accomplish these are:

For one, in a midi track, it seems you can only have one set playing at a time within that track? So basically if I wanted to have two instances of the same instrument w/ the same effect I would have to duplicate the whole track to have them both playing at the same time? That's kinda funny to deal with coming from a different DAW.

Second, I've seen videos showing automation and what not and I was wondering where do you locate automation for anything and how does that work once you have it up w/ the pink line?

Third, it seems to me a lot in Ableton has been placed in some weird directories, especially when it comes to the beat sequencer interface that comes up once you double click a set inside of a track. How do I extend the length of one set? Even if I did, I noticed that if you do for one set, it stay's default for the rest of them inside of that track which is kind of annoying to do.

I feel as if working w/ Ableton is going to have me creating multiple tracks that I don't need, just to get a simple beat going then I'll have to hassle with adding effect's to each instrument when half of them will be for the same instrument. I guess this is where bussing comes in.

Thanks in advance, and my previous DAW was Reason 5, I'm DEFINITELY still sticking with Reason but the fact that it's not to friendly with importing audio or anything like that really bottlenecks the software as a whole and I'm too cheap to get Reason 6 even though it looks godly beyond belief. If there was a way for me to get Reason 6 or have Reason 5 handle audio as good, I wouldn't have gotten Ableton to be honest. I could do everything here way more efficiently in Reason and I'm proficient in it.
 
If the VST supports it you can send midi from other channels to it. If the VST doesn't support it there's not a huge advantage to having multiple midi channels feed into one synth. It doesn't save any CPU. It's also bad practice to have midi going into a synth from multiple sources, makes everything unpredictable and a nightmare to follow, and makes the arrange view taller than it needs to be. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if theres a Max for Live tool that can side-chain midi.

Not sure what you mean about automation. It appears in the arrangement view. When you expand a channel you get 1 automation track that automatically switches to show the automation for the last automatable thing you touched in that channel. If you right click on any parameter you can click "show in new lane" and itll be given its own lane in the arrangement view. You can also use the drop down to select automation lanes. Ones that are automated have a red thing on them.

You're using words i don't know the meaning of. I think you mean you double click on a cell/slot on the session view and it creates a 1 bar clip. You can extend the length of the clip with the Length controls in the bottom left. It's pretty straight forward. If you want to duplicate stuff use shift-D.

I feel as if working w/ Ableton is going to have me creating multiple tracks that I don't need

If you want to get a simple beat going you need 1 channel with a drum rack in it. You have dozens of slots that each can have any number of sound samples assigned to them. And you can have as many or as few FX in there as you like. You can give each drum sample it's own FX (as many as you like). Drum racks even have (unlimited) built in send and returns. You're only limited by the power of your CPU. And thats without use any of the projects FX or bussing or sends... thats all in 1 drum rack that you can drag and drop into any project. I'm not sure where you think the limitation lies.
 
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You're acting like duplicating a track is hard to do. All you do is hit apple+d when the track you want duplicated is highlighted. If you're worried about memory just freeze it or export that track as and bring it back in as an audio sample.

For automation just type ableton 8 live automation in youtube and watch a video to find out where it is located. It's pretty obvious.
 
Thanks Marc, I was kinda confused there but is your last name Hall or is that just a choice of alias?
 
It's just my name. My middle name is Daniel, I put the D in there as MarcHall is always taken.

---------- Post added at 10:53 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:43 AM ----------

All you do is hit apple+d when the track you want duplicated is highlighted. If you're worried about memory just freeze it or export that track as and bring it back in as an audio sample.

You have to be careful here. If you duplicate a VST synth or something you would incur a small increase in RAM usage if the VST is a pure sound generator. If the thing is some sort of sampler or rompler, then you would probably increase RAM usage.

Freezing a track will significantly increase RAM usage if the thing you freeze is purely a sound generator. But in some case (if you are using a sample that accesses a gigantic sample set) freezing the track might save ram.

That said, Live (and most DAWs) has pretty good caching technology that means they don't keep everything in RAM so if you freeze a track you effectively allow Live to decide which parts of the waveform to load at different times. This actually has an impact on performance when quickly change the playback position. I think this is why looping is a very limited feature, you get 1 loop region and thats it. This is because leeping to different parts of the project messes with caching logic.

The question of whether freezing a track saves CPU power is a bit complicated too. Generally it probably does if the sound generator is doing something fairly complex. I would leave freezing to times when your CPU usage starts to hit 100%, then I'd go through and find the track using the most CPU and freeze it. In this case it's often very effective.
 
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It's just my name. My middle name is Daniel, I put the D in there as MarcHall is always taken.

Oh, alright because Hall is my last name as well. Also thanks for the information, it's greatly appreciated.
 
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