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Saving and Submitting Your Sessions

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Introduction to Ableton Live

Berklee College of Music

4.8 (831 ratings) | 54K Students Enrolled

Course 2 of 4 in the Electronic Music Production Specialization

In the past, Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) were programs used only by audio engineers with a highly specific knowledge base, on machines inaccessible to most people. But over the past 10-15 years, DAWs and the act of recording music have evolved from being a luxury of the few to being available to the masses. Ableton Live is one such application. Used by an extremely broad range of music creators, Ableton Live not only facilitates the work of engineers, producers, and writers in professional, home, and mobile studio settings, but it is also a powerful platform for musicians on stage, in the DJ booth, and elsewhere. In this course, you will explore some of Live’s most powerful and useful functionality: MIDI programming, audio recording, warping and processing, looping editing, mixing, performing, file management, and troubleshooting. Meant to be a springboard for those who are new to Ableton Live and/or DAWs in general, this three-week course will provide you with a strong knowledge base for using Live to take your musical ideas from conception to final recording. The course breaks down the many barriers of entry into music technology and encourages all those who wish, to create fearlessly. Note: If you do not own Ableton Live 9, you can download the free, fully featured Ableton Live Trial. The trial version will allow you to save and export your work for 30 days. If you use the trial version, do not download it until the course is scheduled to begin.

Skills You'll Learn

Audio Recording, File Management, Music mixing, Abelton Live, MIDI programming

Reviews

4.8 (831 ratings)

5 stars
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4 stars
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BO

Jun 30, 2018

Great first introduction into Ableton. Very clear and structured unlike a lot of the free tutorials out there. I would love to see a part 2 of this course that goes into more advanced topics.

GD

Jun 15, 2016

An excellent introduction to an extremely powerful Digital Audio Workstation - one which I had used for a few months but still learned a great deal from the course.\n\nHighly recommended. :)

From the lesson

Getting Our Hands Dirty

In this lesson I'm going to demonstrate how to get set up in Live, whether you have an audio interface or just your computer. We'll also look at saving and submitting your sessions, devices, MIDI drums, and MIDI synths.

MIDI and Audio3:31

The Audio Interface, from Introduction to Music Production5:27

Saving and Submitting Your Sessions4:27

MIDI Synths7:27

Global Quantization6:45

Creating an Arrangement7:23

Taught By

Erin Barra
Associate Professor

Transcript

In order to submit your projects, you're going to need to set up a profile on

Blend and sign up for your free Dropbox account if you don't already have one.

So you're going to need to click on the link underneath this video,

which is going to provide you detailed instructions on how to post and

publish your project on Blend in order to share it with your peers.

While moving through this process,

there's a few key commands which are going to make your life infinitely easier.

And I want to reference a few of them now.

So since Ableton works on both Mac and PC platforms, there's a little

slight differentiation between the way key commands work on each platform.

So if I'm going to say Cmd+Z, that would apply to the Mac platform.

And if I said Ctrl+Z, that would apply to the PC platform.

So the only difference is when I say command or control.

Cmd is for Mac, ctrl is for PCs.

So before we even begin we're going to save our session by going up to file, and

selecting, Save live set As, from the drop down menu that appears.

So we're going to get this pop-up window and

we're going to give our project a title.

So I'm going to call this, Assignment 1.

And for the purpose of this course, and until it's time to upload your

projects to Blend for peer review, I want you to save them to the desktop.

So, I'm going to press Save here, I'm going to minimize Live and, you can see,

I've got assignment 1's project folder here on the desktop.

And here is the assignment 1 version of the liveset that I created.

So, going back into Live.

Any time I do something now, if I adjust a fader or

unselect a track I have the option of saving the live set or

saving it as, which would make a new version of this.

So I'm, pretty much always just going to want to continue saving as I do more work.

But just to give you an example, I'll turn some, change a few things here.

Going back up to File, Saving the Live Set, as assignment 1.2.

Making sure that it's being saved into the proper folder where the other

session lives.

And so now, when I go back to the finder,

we're going to see Assignment1.ALS and assignment1.2.ALS.

So the tag here at the end of these files .ALS stands for word Ableton life session.

So you can see see we got two versions but they are living inside the same project so

we aren't really duplicating we are just kind of giving two different maps for

how the session could go.

I only suggest doing a save as if you like to keep a specific version of

your session that you might want to go back to later on.

For instance if you've decided you want to take your composition into this new

creative direction but you're not really totally sure how it's going to turn out,

you can perform a save as, and always be able to go back there whenever you

wanted and before you explored that new creative territory.

But if you're a new user and for

the purpose of this course you probably just want to keep things really simple by

saving one version of your session and continuing to build upon it.

So Cmd+Z will undo any of the actions until the last time you saved,

so I'm going to move a fader here.

I'm going to move a fader here, I'm going to select and unselect these tracks.

So I've made four moves.

And I'm going to use the key command, Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z to undo.

So we'll see the track being re-selected, track three being unselected,

the fader on audio three moving and then the fader on audio four moving.

Cmd+C or Ctrl+C will copy and Cmd+V or Ctrl+V will paste.

So here I'm just going to double click on a cell and

create a clip, and then I'm going to use the key command, Cmd+C or Ctrl+C to copy.

I'm going to select the next cell I want to paste it into and

use the key command, Cmd+V or

Ctrl+V to paste an identical version of that clip into that cell.

So again, at this point I'm going to just use the key command,Cmd+S, or

Ctrl+S to save.

And you'll see file light up here,

indicating that we have indeed actually saved the session.

So many of these key commands may already be really familiar to you.

And if you're not familiar with them,

they have the same functionality in lots of other applications like Gmail and Word.

So they're going to be useful to you across multiple platforms.

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