What's your workflow like with Live's session view?

Electronic Music Production // Dark Arts
disparate
I forgot.... So baked.
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Joined: Mon May 14, 2012 12:48 pm
Re: What's your workflow like with Live's session view?

Post by disparate »

Lost to the Void wrote:plot out a rough structure with clips, jam it out.
record.
Go in and add smaller edits and record additional layers of automation via controllers.
Pretty much this. My clips are often bits recorded off hardware but could be software midi/audio tracks too.

I might re-record some entire tracks once I'm pretty sure I'm happy with the structure - e.g. if I've got a hardware synth part throughout I'll have originally just recorded a "placeholder" clip of say 8 bars but then when I'm ready I'll replace that with a full-length recording with knob tweaking done live or through CCs or whatever.

There's definitely a (psychological?) change in state when I record from Session into Arrange view, i.e. the structure gets a lot more rigid and more of a pain to make major changes to, even though I realise it's equally possible. So it can vary as to how complete the structure is before I do that, but generally I try to make sure I'm pretty happy with how everything flows before hitting record.
Lost to the Void wrote: Conversely caffeine is really bad, tightens muscles, makes hearing wonky in the high end (similar to cocain).
Interesting, I didn't know that. I often have a coffee to help me along especially in the later more fiddly stages of making a track (finalising structure, mixdown), bad news?

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buonacc
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Re: What's your workflow like with Live's session view?

Post by buonacc »

[recently posted this on another forum, but thought it would apply here as well...]

as for working in Session view, what i'd like to do is to force myself to start doing something like this:

coming from an all hardware setup for years, and without a multitrack recorder for most of the time, i was always trying to do everything at once in one take. that can be cool, but somewhere along the line i realized that i only have two hands and would be better of focusing on recording each instrument in a separate pass. there are times when it could be useful to work more than one element at a time, but overall i think it'd better to take it one at a time.

(not sure if i'd always plan on making the beat first, or a synth "riff", or what; but i'll use one particular order for this example...)

1. make a beat to serve as the "base" or backbone of the track (probably with Maschine, using a number of patterns).
2. come up with a synth "riff", hook, or bass line to go along with it.
3. with the synth going i'll jam out on the beat for a bit (recording this to a stereo track or maybe even with certain elements recorded to their own tracks) - switching up patterns/clips, muting parts in and out, using "dub style" delay and reverb techniques at certain parts, quick in/out fades using the APC sliders, etc... not with any real focus on arrangement, but just recording a 5-10 minute live drum workout. let the bass/synth play in the background, and just focus on the being creative with the drums.
4. loop 8-16 bars of that beat (making sure there's a "turnaround" at the end before it loops) and do the same thing as above with the synth part. same with any other synth or bass parts that i might have come up with by this point. 5-10 minutes of "live jam" variations for each.
5. go through and chop the best bits out of each recording and move to Ableton's Arrangement view, then start laying them out on a linear timeline to form a rough arrangement.
6. maybe loop different parts of this arrangement and play in some unique drum or synth parts over the top of each. maybe automate certain fx or parameters at this point as well (either using knobs in real-time or drawing them in by hand).
7. keep this up until i can call it "finished".

something like that... been meaning to start doing this for years. i listen to music all the time (well, sometimes i'll go days without listening to anything), and am almost always picturing in my head how i can do a million things like this as i'm listening to other people's tunes. for a number of reasons, i never actually get around to doing any of this.

not sure if that helps with your question/topic, but it's something that i've been thinking about. i guess it relates... i'd like to just get an idea/sound going and record it, then move on to the next, etc. if i have smaller MIDI or audio parts looping it's easy for me to get stuck with forever reprogramming the sound, switching different fx inand out, or whatever other sort of thing that either completely distracts me and/or eventually leads me to just losing interest in what i'm doing. this is something that i've struggled with my whole life, even when i used to draw as a kid/teen.


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