I wouldn’t get my hopes up for seeing what you want in Arrangment View.
Live is a workflow centered around sketching in Session View, and then recording the performance from Session View, into Arrangment View where it can be finished (arranged), mixed and mastered without leaving Live’s environment.
Session View is exactly where it’s extremely easy to swap sections, or different parts of sections to create/rearrange and build out a track. There’s even the shortcut for “Capture & Insert Scene” (Shift+CMD+I) to do exactly this without need to drag/click or copy & paste. This is essentially where Live set itself apart from other hosts way-back-when.
With that said… The Locators in Arrangement View are unchanged for well longer than a decade. You can add them and a jump to the location to play, but it’s clunky and offers none of the rearranging you would want. I do think there’s room for improvement, but I doubt it would happen only because of how Live is structured as a workflow (Session View -> Arrangment View).
Something like Logic’s versions would also be great. It lets you save the current version and come back to it, and because it uses all the same resources it doesn’t take up any extra space. It lets you go wild and experiment with alternative arrangements.
Are you talking about “alternatives”?
Live’s take on that is a set.
You can have as many sets in a single project as you want, and they all will use the same resources from the project folder.
A Live Project is a folder containing Live-related files that belong together. Consider, for example, work on a piece of music: You start out with an empty Live Set; you record audio and thereby create new sample files; you drag in samples from collections; you save different versions of the Live Set along the way so that you can go back and compare. Perhaps you also save Live Clips or device presets that “belong“ to this particular musical piece. The project folder for this Live Project will maintain all the files related to this piece of music — and Live’s File Manager will provide the tools you need to manage them.
Sets work even better. You can access any content of a set without even opening the set just from a browser. And move it to the current set, of course.
One of the best Live features, IMHO.
I do this part all the time. I love grabbing a single track from another set for example. I also save loops (midi and audio) as Clips, which is another amazing Ableton feature.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Clips let you drag a single loop/clip from session view into the Clips folder in the sidebar browser, and Live generates an audio preview. And when you drag it back into another set later, it brings along the instrument and FX. So good.
I was surprised when I opened “guitar loops” in the new browser and Live showed my own recordings from one of the projects. And I didn’t tag any recordings manually, and I didn’t take any recordings from projects to any kind of samples folder.
I don’t remember how it was before, but it seems now you don’t even need to open a project to discover samples from it. Perhaps it works not only with samples, but I haven’t tried it yet.
“Recording the performance from Session view into Arrangement view” is how I had conceived of the way Live works for finishing a song, and I gotta say, I don’t like the idea. that’s not how my brain works. So, when it was suggested that you could just drag clips from session view over to Arrangement view, I was stoked. Which leads me to a probably dumb (very basic) question here, but when I tried this, the clips in arrangement view are all greyed out. When I hit play, it plays the clips from session view, not arrangement view. What do I need to do to “test” my arrangement and play the clips as I’ve arranged them there?
for each track it’s either session or arrangement view that is active. Have a look at the orange button above track 1. This one is called back to arrangement. You can also click the play mark of only one track to make only this track active in arrangement.
Got it. Thanks! So many little buttons to learn what they do. I need to spend more time, obviously learning the basics. I do plan to go through the course I bought from Push Patterns. I’d used Logic for so many years (all the way back to when you had to learn how to use the dreaded “Environment” to tweak what you wanted it to do for you) and just started (sort of) using Live when I bought a Push 3 earlier this year, but have been mostly focused on learning the Push from the Push 3 bible course. Probably should have focused on Live first.
Live’s manual is outdated a little, but that’s still a very good source of information about all these small buttons. It’s well structured and comprehensive.
I don’t like it either but you can do some interesting things with follow actions, creating variations between clips or use it for generating loops, pretty cool. but for doing anything else I don’t like it too, honestly now that we have mixer in the arrangement view I wish there was a way to turn it off completely…
Sorry if this is already obvious, but just adding for points of common ground…
Recording from Session View and copying from Session View, then pasting into Arrangement View has the same result because you’re not resampling.
The record option can be faster and serve as a tool for reviewing, and real time changes to record, such as repeating a single clip, or by removing the stop clip button button below an active clip, to allow for changing multiple Scene of clips without interrupting the one active clip.
Additionally there’s clip playback options that can be incredibly useful for repurposing content (think of the times creating then hating what you just did) vs just reimagining something by adding random legato playback set to short durations.
Some will heavily use playback options while others might not ever touch them, but it’s good to know how to use them for simply having more options if ever needed.
Then, as mentioning before… Session view is the easiest place to swap sections when building up a track.
With that said, much of the hate for Session View comes from people (not accusing anyone here… just years of hearing this) who get stuck making loops. Many people do get lost creating looped sections, endlessly building out a section by adding instruments but then never adding a B section or adding really anything beyond their first idea. Those are the ones I would also heavily encourage to discover the Arrangement view.
not for me, what I dislike the session view for is it’s too rigid to make adjustments like clip editing, and maybe it’s a personal thing but I never got used to vertical layout of things, I never can remember which clip is what and proper labeling/organization is not my thing, on the arrangement view I can see into the clips, I can cut them quickly, etc.
