How To Make A Track In Ableton Live 11 Lite: Intro | Music Radar
Presented by: Ski Oakenfull - Ableton Certified Trainer
Transcript
00:00 Hi, my name is Ski Oakenfult and I'm a musician, producer and Ableton certified trainer.
00:06 I'd like to welcome you to this short series of videos where I'll show you how to create a track from start to finish in Ableton Live Lite,
00:12 helping you familiarise yourselves with the layout and the functions of the software so you can start producing your own tracks as quickly as possible.
00:19 I've been using Live for over 16 years now and I'm a massive fan, so I'm sure you're going to love it too.
00:25 In this first video, I'm going to take you through the registration and installation process and then give you a quick walkthrough of the different areas in Live so you can get ready to make some music.
00:34 Try to follow along with all the videos if you can, but don't worry if you get lost, you can always watch them back.
00:39 So, let's get started.
00:42 OK, so the first thing to do is to go to the Ableton.com website and then click on Login or Register.
00:51 And then on this page, you'll need to type in your email address.
01:00 Then choose a password. Make sure it's a memorable one.
01:06 And then your first name.
01:10 And your last name.
01:14 Make sure you're in the right country. And sign up to the newsletter. And then click on Create Account.
01:21 So now let's register your serial number. Now that you're logged in, click on Account and then Register a Product.
01:32 And this is where you need to type in your serial number. This is mine, so it can't be used again.
01:37 And click on Submit.
01:41 And this is where you'll see your available licenses. Choose either Mac or Windows.
01:48 And then click on Download. And you'll see it downloading here.
01:53 I've just sped this up. Unfortunately, I haven't got such a fast internet connection.
02:00 Then you need to go to your Downloads folder and click on the disk image.
02:07 Click Agree to the license and it will open up the disk image.
02:15 Then you'll need to drag the Live Lite application to the Applications folder on your computer and it will install.
02:25 And then finally, navigate to your Applications folder.
02:30 And double click the application to launch Live Lite.
02:35 And it will start loading.
02:39 And we're in.
02:41 So if you've already downloaded and installed Live, there's another really easy way to authorise it online.
02:47 As you've seen, I've actually already authorised my copy, but I can still show you the process anyway.
02:53 So once you've launched Live, go up to the menu item here and select Preferences.
02:57 Then make sure you have the Licenses Maintenance tab open.
03:02 Click on the Authorise@Ableton.com button and it will open the Ableton site in your browser,
03:08 where you'll then need to log in with your account details.
03:14 Once you've logged in, you may get a pop-up message like this.
03:17 So just click Open Ableton Live Lite and it will take you back to the Live application and you'll get a success message.
03:25 Now in some cases, you may need to authorise your copy of Live Lite if you are offline, i.e. you're not connected to the internet.
03:32 If you have that situation, you can go to Preferences here and then go to the Licenses Maintenance tab.
03:37 Now I've actually already authorised this, but you'll need to click on the Authorise Offline button.
03:42 And then this will give you some instructions.
03:45 Now the main thing you'll need to note down is your hardware code, which is here.
03:49 And you can actually save this to your computer.
03:52 Let's just put it onto the desktop.
03:55 There we go.
03:56 And it will create a text file so you can actually copy and paste your hardware code.
04:00 Now there's a good web page which takes you through the process.
04:05 And essentially, you'll need to log in on another computer that is connected to the internet.
04:10 And you'll need to actually type in your hardware code here.
04:15 And it will save an authorisation file. It's a .auz file, which you can then transfer to the computer that is offline.
04:23 You can double-click on that, and then it will authorise your version of Live Lite.
04:29 And finally, a quick note to say that if you're registering on a Windows computer, there's a walkthrough link in the description of this video.
04:37 So when you first launch Ableton Live, it will show you the demo set.
04:41 In Ableton, set means your project or your song.
04:46 So let's have a listen to what it sounds like.
04:48 [Music]
05:13 So I'll let you check out the whole track.
05:17 You might have seen that I was flicking between these two different views, and we'll talk about those a little bit later.
05:24 You'll also see on the right-hand side here, something called the Help view.
05:28 And you can turn this on and off here.
05:34 Now this is a really good starting point as it contains some useful reference information.
05:38 For example, what's in the latest version of Live 11, how you can record audio, creating beats,
05:45 the packs you've installed, how to set up your audio input and output and your MIDI controllers.
05:51 And there's also some built-in lessons which I thoroughly recommend checking out.
05:55 Anyway, what we're going to do now is we're going to start from scratch.
05:58 So in order to do that, we're going to go over to the Menu option here and click on New Live Set.
06:08 There we go. And I'm going to close this Help view here.
06:13 So the first thing we're going to do is just set up our preferences.
06:16 So if we go over to the Live menu here and click on Preferences,
06:20 you can see various tabs here to set up how you want Live to work for you.
06:26 So the first thing we can do is we can change the zoom display.
06:29 I've got this 135. If you want to make it bigger or smaller, you can just adjust that there.
06:36 Let's keep it at 135.
06:40 The next thing that's really important is to set up your audio input and output.
06:45 Now, I've got a Universal Audio Apollo.
06:47 If you can click down here, we could just set it to the built-in output of your computer,
06:53 whatever you want it to. So I'm going to keep that there.
06:56 I'm also going to set the input as my Universal Audio Apollo as well.
07:03 The next thing is to set up your MIDI interface.
07:06 So if you have a MIDI keyboard or controller that you want to use with Ableton Live, you can set it up here.
07:12 I've got a Native Instruments Complete Control, so I'm just going to set that up there.
07:16 And you can refer to the manual of your controller for the exact settings here.
07:22 Now, before we have a look at the various areas of Live, I would recommend heading over to this web page here,
07:27 which has got some great information and some videos as well about all the different areas of Live.
07:33 But I'm going to take you through a few of these now.
07:36 So first of all, on the left-hand side here, this is called the browser section.
07:42 And you can hide it or show it by clicking this small triangle.
07:46 Now, this is where you're going to access all your sounds, your samples, your grooves, and your plugins.
07:53 And you'll see that we'll be visiting this section a lot in this series of videos.
07:57 Now, there are two views in Ableton Live, and you may have seen me switching between those in the demo set.
08:02 We have this view that we're looking at the moment, which is called Session View.
08:06 And this is where the tracks are displayed vertically.
08:08 It's great for building loops and ideas when you're starting your tracks.
08:13 And then if we click on here, we go over to the Arrange view.
08:17 And this is where the tracks are displayed horizontally, and it has a linear timeline.
08:21 So we use this when we're arranging the final structure of our track.
08:25 Or you could start with this section as well. It's up to you.
08:28 And a really great keyboard shortcut is Tab. We can just flick between the two by pressing the Tab key.
08:35 So the main central area here contains the tracks.
08:39 And these tracks can either be MIDI tracks or audio tracks.
08:43 So a MIDI signal is normally generated by a keyboard or a controller, and it contains information about the notes that you play.
08:49 So this is where you record that information.
08:52 An audio signal will be recorded onto an audio track of Ableton Live.
08:56 And this could be a vocal, guitar, or a synth. We'll be recording something later.
09:00 On the right-hand side, we have our return tracks.
09:03 And this is where we can set up effects, and we can send the output of both MIDI and audio tracks to these channels.
09:09 On the far right, we have our master track.
09:11 And this is where all the tracks are summed together into one output.
09:15 Now, one really useful view here is the Information view.
09:19 And if you hover over pretty much any feature of Ableton Live, it will show you what it does.
09:23 For example, this is the track activator.
09:26 But we can turn this on and off with this triangle here.
09:29 Over on the right-hand side, we have the routing and mixing section.
09:33 And this will let you choose what you want to display.
09:35 The input and the output, the sends and the returns, and the mixer as well.
09:40 We can actually change the size of some of the sections.
09:43 So for example, if you want to show a little bit more of the mixer section,
09:47 you can just drag it up and down there to create more space.
09:53 So whether you're in Session view or Arrangement view, the top section of the screen stays the same and has global and transport controls.
10:00 So this is where you can change things like the tempo, the time signature, turning the metronome on and off,
10:07 whether you're playing or overdubbing or recording, and there's also some looping controls here as well.
10:14 But yeah, we'll see all of these functions and areas of Live used in the following videos.
10:20 Okay, so now we're up and running with Ableton Live Lite.
10:23 In the next video, I'm going to show you how to program a beat.