Book Image

The Music Producer's Creative Guide to Ableton Live 11

By : Anna Lakatos
Book Image

The Music Producer's Creative Guide to Ableton Live 11

By: Anna Lakatos

Overview of this book

The Music Producer's Guide to Ableton Live will help you sharpen your production skills and gain a deeper understanding of the Live workflow. If you are a music maker working with other digital audios workstations (DAWs) or experienced in Ableton Live, perhaps earlier versions, you’ll be able to put your newfound knowledge to use right away with this book. You’ll start with some basic features and workflows that are more suitable for producers from another DAW looking to transfer their skills to Ableton Live 11.2. As you explore the Live concept, you’ll learn to create expressive music using Groove and MIDI effects and demystify Live 11’s new workflow improvements, such as Note Chance and Velocity Randomization. The book then introduces the Scale Mode, MIDI Transform tools, and other key features that can make composition and coming up with melodic elements easier than ever before. It will also guide you in implementing Live 11's new and updated effects into your current workflow. By the end of this Ableton Live book, you’ll be able to implement advanced production and workflow techniques and amplify live performance capabilities with what the Live 11 workflow has to offer.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Live Concept and Workflow
7
Part 2: Creative Music Production Techniques with Ableton Live 11
15
Part 3: Deep Dive into Ableton Live

Drawing and editing automation

As usual, recording something in real time can give a more human feel, which isn’t any different for automation. However, some parameters require very precise values and movements to be mimicked; therefore, drawing the automation manually with the mouse might be a better option in this case.

Of course, you can also just record the automation and then edit it later.

Let’s find out how to do all these things!

As we already briefly discussed, there are two locations where automation can live:

  • The clip envelope
  • The track-based automation envelope

Drawing and editing automation works the same in both locations/views (the Session and Arrangement Views); besides some of the features that relate to the timeline, they only apply in the Arrangement View, such as the Lock Envelope feature, which relates to the timeline.

Drawing automation

We already looked at how to manually create breakpoints at the beginning of this...