Table Of Contents. Quick Links Download this manual. Table of Contents. Ableton Reference Manual Version 8. Previous Page. Next Page. Related Manuals for Ableton Live No related manuals. Page 2 The content of this manual is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Ableton.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this manual is accurate. Page 3 Chapter 1 Welcome to Live 1. A great deal of effort has been put into making Live easy and fun to use, yet at the same time capable of helping you create music with unlimited depth and sophistication. Page 5 MIDI display. Page 7: First Steps Chapter 2 First Steps When you install Live and run it for the rst time, you will be presented with an authorization dialog. Please see the chapter on authorizing Live should you have questions or concerns during the authorization process.
If you do not yet own Live, you can still try out all of Live's features, but you will not be able to save or export your work. For certain items, you can create your own text and it will appear in this window. This screen consists of a number of views, and each view manages a speci c aspect of your Live Set, which is the type of document that you create and work on in Live.
Page 12 If you nd this procedure to be an inconvenience, please understand that the copy protection secures your investment: It allows Ableton to provide you with support and to continue developing Live.
Page 13 The standard Live license allows you to use Live on only one computer at a time. However, the Ableton server will provide you with two authorizations in good faith that you will use Live on only one machine at a time.
Page 14 To use Live on more than one computer at a time, you may require a secondary license or a site license. Ableton offers these licenses at special rates. Even if Live is not authorized, you can still load and perform a Live Set with no time limitation. We advise you to read this chapter early in your Live career, as a solid understanding of the program's basic principles will help you fully exploit Live's potential for your music-making.
You can also nd Live Sets made by others at the Ableton website, as well as upload your own. This makes it easy to collaborate with other Live users. The Arrangement View and the Session View interact in ableton suite 8 manual free download ways. One can, for instance, improvise with Session clips and record a log of the improvisation into the Arrangement for further re nement. The exclusivity of clips in a track also implies that, at any one time, a track will either play a Session clip or an Arrangement clip, but never both.
So, who wins? When a Session clip is launched, the respective track stops whatever it is doing to play that clip. Some instruments, such as Live's Simpler, are for chromatic playing of one sound via the keyboard. Live offers many options for playing samples in exciting new ways, allowing you to create an abundance of new sounds without actually ableton suite 8 manual free download the original sample all the changes are computed in real time, while the sample is played.
Double- clicking a track's title bar brings up the Track View, which shows the track's device chain. You can also use plug-in devices in Live. Note that the signal connections between audio devices are always stereo, but the software's inputs and outputs can be con gured to be mono in the Audio Preferences. When the signal has passed through the device chain, it ends up ableton suite 8 manual free download Live's mixer. The MIDI signal from the clip is fed into the track's device chain.
There, it is rst processed by any number of MIDI effects. One example is the Scale effect, which maps the incoming notes onto a user-de ned musical scale. This feature allows for the creation of powerful multi-device creations and effectively adds all the capabilities of Live's MIDI and audio effects to the built-in instruments.
Where do these signals go? Recording is enabled on a track by pressing its Arm button. With multiple tracks selected, pressing any of their Arm buttons will arm all of them. The movement of a control across the Arrangement timeline is called automation; a control whose value changes in the course of this timeline is automated.
An audio clip can, however, lose the reference to its corresponding sample if it is moved or deleted from disk. The links between samples and their clips can be preserved with a special command, Collect and Save, which makes a ableton suite 8 manual free download Page Ableton suite 8 manual free download Library After installation the Library will already contain a few sound ideas, courtesy of Ableton.
We encourage you to experiment with this material to get a ableton suite 8 manual free download of what the program can do, but we do not recommend removing or changing the contents of the factory Library. This chapter will explain everything you need to know about working with each of these le types in Live.
However, we should rst take ableton suite 8 manual free download look at Live's File Browsers, through which most les arrive in the program.
Each Browser can point to a different disk location, which Live will remember across sessions. The Browser root can easily be changed: The topmost Browser item, called Parent Folder, will move the Browser root up one step up in the disk hierarchy when double-clicked. Clicking in the Browser's title bar will open the Bookmark menu. The Bookmark Menu. After entering your search terms, begin the search by clicking the Go button or pressing on your computer keyboard. Live will search the entire Browser root for your search terms.
The results will include les that match all search terms, as opposed to any. Rescanning happens in the background, and you can keep making music while Live does its work, but you can also abort the search with this button if the disk traf c is ableton suite 8 manual free download you. Hint: You can preview les even when the Preview switch is not activated by pressing Return Click on a sample le or use to select it. Click in the Tab's scrub area to make playback jump to that point.
Cancel renaming with the key. Instead of using the keys, we can also click on the le's Hot- Swap icon to load it. The analysis le contains data gathered by Live to help optimize the stretching quality, speed up the waveform display and automatically detect the tempo of long Live puts this analysis le in the ableton suite 8 manual free download folder as the sample. Samples that have an. Samples without an. The Rendered Track Chooser.
If you are monitoring the Master output, you can be sure that the rendered le will contain exactly what you hear. This should allow any sound from external devices to fade out, but if you need more time for example, if you're waiting for a long reverb tailyou can increase the wait time by typing a new number in the number box.
Because they only contain references to samples on disk rather than the audio data itselfLive Clips are very small, which makes it easy to develop and maintain your own collection.
Uploaded Sets can then be shared with other Live users. Of the three tracks contained in the Set shown in the following gure, two contain Session View clips. The template Live Set, Template.
The easiest way to locate this folder is to search your disk for Template. Clicking the Edit button will open the referenced sample in the external application. The sample will remain of ine as long as the Edit switch is engaged.
Usually, Live takes care of this automatically. When you save a Live Set under a new name or in a new folder location, Live will create a new project folder and store the Live Set there unless you are saving the Live Set into an And now for something completely different: We choose the File menu's New command and record a samba tune. So, we Save As At times however, it may make more sense to save a preset with the current Project. Page 63 Library by default but you can also save them with a Project.
Ableton delivers Library content that can serve as a starting point for creative ableton suite 8 manual free download. Content is shipped in ableton suite 8 manual free download form of Factory Live Packs. You should not use or modify this folder or its contents. In the Preferences' Library tab, you will nd the Library Location chooser, which contains a list of Library locations that you've used in the past: The Library Location Chooser.
Live will then offer to install any default packages to the new location. Note that Live will not care if the sample you offer is really the sample that was missing. To select the folder, click the associated Set Folder button. Page Live will then request that you choose a location for the new Project. As long as you're working in a Project meaning that you've saved your current Live Setevery device in the Device Browser will show a Current Project sub-folder.
You can organize your les any way you want within a Project, but you'll need to use the File Manager to relink the les that you've moved around: 1 In Live's Browser or via your operating system, reorganize the les and folders within your Ableton suite 8 manual free download folder. Page 75 Chapter 6 Arrangement View The Arrangement View displays the Arrangement, which contains music laid out along a song timeline, like a multitrack tape. A Piece of Music in the Arrangement View.
The Arrangement View is a powerful editing tool that easily lets you combine and arrange MIDI, loops, sound effects, video and complete pieces of music. To smoothly change the zoom level, click and drag vertically in the beat-time ruler at the top of the Arrangement View you can also drag horizontally to scroll the display. Note that you can also drag horizontally to scroll the display.
