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.
00:13 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.
00:20 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.
00:41 Okay 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.
00:55 Then choose a password. Make sure it's a memorable one.
01:04 And then your first name.
01:09 And your last name.
01:12 Make sure you're in the right country.
01:16 And sign up to the newsletter.
01:18 And then click on 'create account'.
01:21 So now let's register your serial number.
01:23 Now that you're logged in click on 'account' and then 'register a product'.
01:28 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'.
01:39 And this is where you'll see your available licences.
01:43 Choose either Mac or Windows.
01:48 And then click on 'download'.
01:50 And you'll see it downloading here.
01:52 I've just sped this up. Unfortunately I haven't got such a fast internet connection.
01:57 Then you need to go to your 'downloads' folder and click on the disk image.
02:05 Click 'agree to the licence' 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.
02:21 And then finally navigate to your 'applications' folder.
02:28 And double click the application to launch Live Lite.
02:33 It will start loading.
02:36 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.
02:46 As you've seen, I've actually already authorised my copy but I can still show you the process anyway.
02:52 So once you've launched Live, go up to the menu item here and select 'preferences'.
02:57 Then make sure you have the 'licences/maintenance' tab open.
03:01 Click on the 'authorise@ableton.com' button and it will open the Ableton site in your browser,
03:07 where you'll then need to log in with your account details.
03:11 Once you've logged in, you may get a pop-up message like this.
03:14 So just click 'open Ableton Live Lite' and it will take you back to the Live application and you'll get a success message.
03:21 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.
03:29 If you have that situation, you can go to 'preferences' here and then go to the 'licences/maintenance' tab.
03:34 Now I've actually already authorised this but you'll need to go back to the 'preferences' tab
03:39 but you'll need to click on the 'authorise offline' button 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.
03:54 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,
04:20 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.
04:28 And finally, a quick note to say that if you're registering on a Windows computer,
04:33 there's a walkthrough link in the description of this video.
04:36 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.
04:45 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
05:20 and we'll talk about those a little bit later.
05:22 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.
05:32 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,
05:41 how you can record audio, creating beats,
05:44 the packs you've installed, how to set up your audio input and output and your MIDI controllers.
05:50 And there's also some built-in lessons which I thoroughly recommend checking out.
05:54 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'.
06:03 There we go.
06:08 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.
06:30 I've got this 135. If you want to make it bigger or smaller, you can just adjust that there.
06:35 Let's keep it at 135.
06:40 The next thing that's really important is to set up your audio input and output.
06:44 Now I've got a Universal Audio Apollo,
06:47 but if you can click down here, we could just set it to the built-in output of your computer,
06:53 or whatever you want it to.
06:54 So I'm going to keep that there. I'm also going to set the input as my Universal Audio Apollo as well.
07:01 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 Komplete Kontrol, 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.
07:21 Now before we have a look at the various areas of Live,
07:25 I'd 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.
07:41 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.
07:56 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.
08:12 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.
08:31 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,
08:47 and it contains information about the notes that you play.
08:50 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,
09:05 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.
09:14 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.
09:52 So whether you're in session view or arrangement view,
09:56 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,
10:05 turning the metronome on and off, whether you're playing or overdubbing or recording.
10:10 And there's also some looping controls here as well.
10:13 But yeah, we'll see all of these functions and areas of Live used in the following videos.
10:19 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.
10:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]