Taking a Quick Tour of Ableton Live 11

If you are reading this book, you’ve most probably already used Ableton Live and are here to brush up on the basics and sharpen your skills or even find the most suitable workflow for yourself. Or, you might have been using a different Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and are looking to make the switch to the wonderful world of Ableton Live. Perhaps you are planning to dive into performing your music and you heard that Live is a popular choice among established live performers. Either way, you are in the right place!

The Live 11 update has definitely brought some amazing workflow improvements as well as some new devices to spike the community of users’ creativity.

In this book, we will be using the Live 11 Suite version, although there are other, more limited, versions available (Lite, Intro, and Standard). I will guide you through some best practices, tips, and tricks to show you how you can get the most out of the software to create the music you always wanted.

In this chapter, we will take a quick tour of Live 11. This should provide a refresher or an introduction to the interface so you can have a more comfortable music-making journey.

By the end of this chapter, you will know how to set up Live, have developed an understanding of Live’s linear and non-linear workflows, and understand how to save your projects, export your tracks, and work with Templates.

This will be important in order to find all the tools you need and develop a convenient and fast workflow that enables your creativity to flow.

We are going to cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Introduction to Live concepts
• The preferences
• A tour of the interface
• Session View versus Arrangement View
• Exporting audio, saving a project, and templates