An Overview of Live

Hierarchy: Clips, Tracks, and Scenes

Regardless of which of Live’s two views, Session or Arrangement, are active, there is an important hierarchy that must be understood. Each view includes tracks — tracks which hold clips. Combinations of clips can be triggered together as units which are called scenes. Got it? Let’s examine clips.

Clips

These are the atomic elements that play in Live. They are typically short, looping bits of audio or MIDI, but they can be of nearly any length. Clips play through…

Tracks

Every clip is contained within a track. On any given track, all the ‘member’ clips share their parent track’s settings. These include things like the track’s overall level (volume), its panning (position in the stereo field), and can contain a dazzling array of effect plug-ins which are used to alter the sound of any clip that plays through it. All MIDI clips on any given track will also play through the MIDI instrument loaded onto that tracks. A track can hold many, many clips — MIDI or audio — but a track is only capable of playing a single clip at any given time. Don’t worry. There are some workarounds to deal with this, but in practice it isn’t really an issue. This is due, in part, to the fact that Live can simultaneously play back as many tracks as your machine can handle.

Scenes

Scenes are unique to Live and unique to Live’s Session View. Perhaps it is best to think of scenes as being like a spreadsheet. When in session view, clips are placed on tracks in a grid-framework. Since each vertical column (i.e. track) can play only one clip at a time, it might make sense to populate each track with a set of related clips that are intended alternate. This could be parts of a song, variations of a drum loop, etc. Let’s consider the following example: a Live Set containing three instrument tracks. Each of these instruments holds a few clips which are variations of what that instrument plays for an intro section, a verse section, and a chorus section:

Organizing clips and tracks in this way allows us to experiment easily with various combinations of musical elements. But this is just the beginning of the power and flexibility afforded us by Live. Using scenes, we can trigger the ‘intro’ scene which plays the “intro” parts for bass, drums, and synth all together. In the above example, you may have noticed that the synth wouldn’t play anything because it is empty. If you did, go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. In any case, triggering the “intro” for all three instruments at once (the entire horizontal row) is accomplished by playing a scene!

Simply put, a scene allows you to trigger an entire row of clips en-masse. It is triggered from the Master Track which resides on the right-most column of all tracks.

In the following chapters you will learn how to get sounds into Live, play them back, manipulate and mold them to your liking, and hopefully create your next masterpiece. It’s so exciting! Let’s begin.