Switching to Session View in Ableton for composition

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

I’ve been using Ableton for about a decade, and as my background is in recording rock music, I’ve always used the Arrangement View. I treated Ableton the same way you’d treat any DAW—a linear canvas for recording and arranging individual tracks. The only time I’d switch to Session View is to adjust the volume on the mixer.

For the last year or so I’ve transitioned into making electronic music and it’s struck me that I’ve never once used the Session View for composition. It’s a little alien to me, and I’m wondering if anyone here has any suggestions—or if you compose using Session View, explaining a bit what your workflow is like. Do you use a MIDI controller? Or all mouse and keyboard?

#2

I’ve been using Live for a long time and at first I just used it for playing live and then used Reaper or Cakewalk Sonar to record. I now use Live to record and write and it is really fast and fun. You can think of the scenes in the session view as different parts of the song and you then jam out an arrangement and record it to the arrangement view. This is easy to do with a mouse but I also have the Launchpad Pro to get away from the mouse and keyboard.

#3

Have always used session view, only ever go into arrangement view at the very end when I want to bounce out the finished thing. I find its great to get an idea of what bits go with what, as obvs you can easily move everything around without having to commit to a particular structure/progression- and I like playing with follow actions of different lengths/different conditions as a great way to mix up the clip combinations and keep things interesting and get a quasi-algorithmic structure on the go. And you can record all of this activity to the arrangement so there’s not even any requirement to copy and paste anything from one view to the other.

#4

There’s no right or wrong way to use it so I’d say if you’re getting results with arrangement view stick at it.

I know I get more done in arrangement view as opposed to playing around more in Session view, but it is fun and I find playing live more suited to it although arrangement view is perfectly capable with the use of track markers etc.

Check out what you can do with dummy clips/follow actions if you haven’t already