Ableton Live is the latest and greatest piece of music production software, giving producers from all ranges of knowledge the ability to write the music they hear in their heads. A simple interface combined with extremely powerful effects and instruments result in a really brilliant music production package, dispensing with the complex trappings of more traditional digital audio workstations.
The thing that draws many producers to this piece of software is the session view, a pretty radically new concept in music production. This view allows the composer to envision each track of information on a vertical plane, similar to how oldschool trackers worked. However, Ableton Live differs from trackers in that you don’t enter notes in hex while the screen scrolls from top to bottom. Instead, the session view plays host to “clips,” individual arrangements of notes which trigger the instruments contained on the audio and MIDI tracks in the program. On the horizontal plane you have a number of “scenes” which consist of combinations of clips from the individual tracks. Using this simple two dimensional grid, you can formulate your own combinations of clips, easily capturing any of the musical ideas you come up with as new custom scenes or as data in the Arrange view. The arrange view is the traditional left to right sequencer that producers are used to from other programs like Pro Tools or Logic.
There are also a number of Ableton Live tutorials available on the internet. One of the most popular supplies of these tutorials is Nickstutorials.com, an independent video tutorial producer. Nickstutorials focuses primarily on the sound design angle, showing producers how to use the Ableton instruments to their fullest potential, going well beyond simple preset modification. Other resources include Tom Cosm and Musicsoftwaretraining.com, so be sure to check out these materials for more specific information on the aspects of Ableton Live that interest you the most.
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