I am giving Live more attention, lately. Got it since version 6 I think, but only used Arrangement View for recording and automations. So I have a lot to learn, even if I know maybe 30% of it.
I’d like this thread to be a place where people share their workflow, with or without Push (but let’s stay focused on Live), in studio while recording or on stage while performing, so that we may see the interest of unused features (thinking about basic features like Comping, or more advanced like smart use of grouping, routing, tricks for Mixing, etc.)
And also basic questions/answers (please make it tight).
Is there some kind of Song Mode in Session View: like “play row 1 8 times, then shift to the second one and hold it till I manually shift to the third one”?
I love comping. I use it not in the traditional sense but to splice loops together, usually drums or bass, to come up with gestalt loops in a fun and satisfying way. Great for vocal chops as well. Anything choppy and rhythmic.
I do my automation usually in Arrangement view, but automating effects parameters in Session view is brilliant because it means the automation copies over to Arrangement view when you put your track on the timeline. And it means you get dynamic stuff going on in Session view.
I recently discovered the joys of the legato clip action. Say you have a 16-bar pad which plays across several Scenes in Session view. You don’t the pad in that clip to restart every time you trigger a new scene because it’s jarring, right? Well, set the pad clip to legato and suddenly that pad will continue playing exactly where the last scene left off, meaning your song performance is seamless!!!
You’re looking for “follow actions” in clip view. It should do exactly what you’re looking for with randomisation options etc.
It’s pretty powerful.
Works on clips rather than scenes though.
(EDIT: Works on scenes too.)
One thing I often do before getting into details in Arragement View, is to bump the volume so that it’s more or less normalized and I can see the waveform. I would love to have such functionality automated. I know Consolidate (Cmd+J) does this more or less, but it duplicates all the stems, and it’s a long process.
Do you have a trick to do this automatically?
you can also edit several midi tracks at the same time/seperatly…just select several midi clips and all the notes appear in their respective track color and you can edit them in the same window…
I stand corrected!
I used to use follow actions all the time in Live 9, but haven’t really used them since I upgraded to 11.
I guess the scene functionality must have been added somewhere in that 5 years or so I wasn’t paying attention.
I’ll need to have a play with them.
I’ve been starting to get back into Live a bit more recently.
It doesn’t indeed, but during the process the sound is normalized and turned down to original volume: if you double click on the sound volume fader, it gets to level=0 then is normalized.
Does anyone have any tips for getting a better recording level in Live? I’m routing audio through my Big 6 and the levels look good (keeping it in the yellow) on my desk, but the recorded audio on Live looks way lower than expected.
How does it sound? When I record from Overbridge (which results in really low levels) I add a Utility gain plugin. It doesn’t change the recorded audio, just boosts it for listening/resampling.
Audio quality sounds fine, sometimes I adjust the gain control as a temporary measure to compensate but I assume that poses negative artefacts. Is it better to use the utility gain plugin?
Thinking I should set up a default template with utility gain set to plus 6DB on all my audio tracks. I’d like to know why there’s such a difference between the levels on my desk compared to Live
Same here. Even when I can see the red lights on my mixer, the volume of the recorded sound is very low in Live. Difference of headroom I suppose.
Maybe I should give it some more attention.
Another Live tip involving clips - get some perfectly looped breaks, pop them into an audio track in Session View, turn on Follow actions (set to ‘other’) and Legato for all of them. Then press play.
Instant, endless joy.
Slap on your favourite effects processors (Trash 2/Motions/Turnado/Triad/Byome/SpecOps…) and get mangling.
Set up another audio track and resample the results. Chop that up. Make some noise.
