Learning Ableton Live

[Gary James Peters]

Hi All

As my longstanding DAW (Adobe Audition) is pretty much defunct in every department, I've been forced to learn a new manner of producing music. So over the last few weeks I've been trying valiantly to come to terms with Ableton Live 11...it's quite a task, but worth it. Anyway, here's a track that is just a bit of fun but is really trying to use some of the resources available in Ableton. It's just a start, but I quite like the poppy direction it took me, without me realising it.

[Jif]

Sounds good Gary, got a bit of a Steely Dan jazzy feel about it. Liked it. Presume you are using loops in Ableton for the backing track.

I used to use Ableton in an iteration of one of my sons band when performing live. Ableton provided the drum tracks and some additions such as some sax I recorded into it. I set up each song into verses, choruses, bridges etc and stepped through them using a midi foot controller I made from an old set of Hammond bass pedals. It worked really well as long as I remembered to hit the "next" foot pedal at the right time. Fortunately this worked as long as I hit the pedal in the proceeding bar before the next part, so timing wasn't super critical, which is just as well as I was also playing bass and upright bass.

Ableton is a really powerful program, very versatile, as with all things versatile there are many options and it takes time to get your head around them. Worth it though.

I've used Cubase for recording etc since the early Atari ST days in the 90's, expensive but it really does the biz. Currently on Cubase 12 Pro, however Steinberg, (Yamaha), have just released version 13, so will probably upgrade to that once it's been released long enough for any bugs to be ironed out. Cubase is all about workflow and making it easy to do things without it interrupting your creative flow. Everyday I learn something new which improves my mixes or makes it easier to do stuff, a constant learning curve. Thank god for YouTube tutorials!

Anyway, nice track, good luck with Ableton.

[Gary James Peters]

Thanks Geoff..interesting insights and great to hear from people (you) still totally embroiled in the creative process. Yes, definitely a whiff of Steely Dan emerged from somewhere!! Not necessarily a bad thing in my old book!

Youtube tutorials and my son Francis are my two life lines!

G