Ableton live 8 user manual download

Also for: Live 8. Live comes with a selection of custom-designed, built-in audio effects. We do not support Ableton Live 9 Lite.

For how to Contents. Notations in this manual Microsoft, Windows, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are either registered. You can adjust Frequency and Resonance by clicking and dragging in the X-Y controller or via the knobs. Limiter is ideal for use in the Master track, to prevent clipping. Delay 2 can switch among three different modes. The qualities of Tube B lie somewhere between these two extremes.

It includes manaul link to a Control Surface made by a user that will help you use the foot controller in exactly the way you want. The Block chooser selects the ableton live lite 8 manual of samples that will be analyzed in each measurement. Attack and Release are envelope characteristics that define how quickly the envelope reacts to volume changes in the input signal. Normally, the signal being filtered and the input source that triggers the envelope follower are the same signal.

You life either use a clip that contains a prerecorded voice clip or, to process a live vocal signal, connect a microphone to a channel on your audio hardware and choose this as the input source see Lute using the Blues, Heavy and Bass models, high Volume levels can also add considerable distortion.

Drag this ableton live lite 8 manual on top of your track name — this will assign it to the track. Ableton live lite 8 manual acts as a post-distortion EQ control. Higher values move the activation point closer to the edge. Phasing To create lush phasing effects, try using extremely small amounts of shift no more than about 2 Hz. These include a new groove engine, revamped warping techniques, live looping, five new effects including the Ableton Vocoder , crossfades in the Arrangement View, group tracks and a reworked MIDI editor.

Ableton Suite 8 includes all that plus a massive, inspired sound library and all the instruments a musician could hope for, including a wide range of synths, a sampler, electric and acoustic drums new: Latin percussion , mallets new: Collision , numerous sampled instruments and a new, even mightier Operator. Ableton develops modern software technology to inspire creative people. Since the company started in , Ableton has attracted an extensive and highly committed community of musicians, composers, and DJs worldwide.

Currently, Ableton counts about ninety employees in its Berlin and New York offices. Session clips can be mapped to a MIDI key or even a keyboard range for chromatic playing. Session clips, switches, buttons and radio buttons can be mapped to computer keyboard keys as well.

Live offers, in addition to this general purpose mapping technique, dedicated support for the Akai APC40 , Akai APC20 and Novation Launchpad , which allows for mouse-free operation of the program.

Saving a Live Set saves everything it contains, including all clips, their positions and settings, and settings for devices and controls. 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 copy of each sample and stores it in a project folder along with the Live Set.

A separate Save button in the Clip View saves a set of default clip settings along with the sample, so that each time the sample is dragged into the program, it will automatically appear with these settings. This is especially useful if you have made warp settings for a clip and want to use it in multiple Live Sets.

Exporting audio from Live can be done from both the Session and Arrangement Views. Exporting and saving material for later use in Live can be done very conveniently with the Live Clip format.

Live Clips are a very powerful way of storing ideas, as they save not only the clip's Clip View settings, but also the corresponding track's instruments and effects chain. Live Clips in the Browser can be previewed and added to any open Live Set just like sample les.

In the Live Set, they restore the original clip's creative options. MIDI sequences with matching instruments and effects, e.

Different regions or loops referencing the same source le;. Variations of a sample loop created by applying Warp Markers , clip envelopes and effects ;. The Live Library acts as a repository of sounds that are available to all projects. In Live's File Browsers, the Library is accessible through a bookmark. Bookmarks can be selected by clicking the Browser's title bar to open the Bookmark menu:. The rst time you run Live, it will automatically install its Library to your standard user folder.

You can, of course, move it to a new location. 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 sense of what the program can do, but we do not recommend removing or changing the contents of the factory Library.

If you do, however, you can always repair your Library. Owners of a boxed version of Live can. This chapter will explain everything you need to know about working with each of these le types in Live.

However, we should rst take a look at Live's File Browsers, through which most les arrive in the program. Live offers three File Browsers which can be accessed via their selector buttons. Each Browser can point to a different disk location, which Live will remember across sessions. Columns can be reordered by drag and drop. To resize the columns, drag their divider lines horizontally. Each of the three File Browsers has its own root directory, shown at the top of the Browser, the contents of which are available for browsing below.

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. Mac context menu, by double-clicking the folder, or by selecting it and pressing.

Moving through the les in Live's Browser can be done with either the mouse or the computer keyboard:. Close and open folders with and. Jump to the parent folder of any closed folder using. Hint: If executed on a top-level folder, this is an alternative to selecting the Parent Folder item, and will move the Browser root up one level. Double-clicking a. Using bookmarks, you can quickly save and recall frequently used folder locations in the Browser.

Clicking in the Browser's title bar will open the Bookmark menu. The Bookmark menu lists a number of preset bookmarks such as Desktop and Library. Selecting the latter will bring you to the Live Library.

To bookmark the current Browser root, choose the Bookmark menu's topmost item, the Bookmark Current Folder command. Note that if the current Browser root is already bookmarked, the topmost option in the Bookmark menu will remove the bookmark. All File Browsers share the same set of bookmarks; a bookmark stored in one Browser can be accessed from another. Live's File Browsers are equipped with a search function for nding les.

Clicking the. Search button in the upper right corner of the Browser or using the Ctrl. 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. For example, if you search for acoustic bass, the search will yield all acoustic bass sounds not all acoustic sounds and all bass sounds.

The search function matches the entered criteria not only to any part of a le's name and suf x e. This means that a search for bass, for example, will yield not only les with names containing the word bass but also those located in folders with names containing the word bass.

Compressed sample metadata tags are also included in the search, making it possible to search for songs from a speci c album or artist, for example. Live maintains an index of the hard disk so that it can deliver search results instantly.

The index is kept up to date as you create, install, delete, rename and move les within Liveit has no way of knowing, however, what you are doing outside of Live. If you have subsequently moved les using programs other than Live, the initial results of a search might be incomplete. The Go button's label will change to Rescan. If you can't nd a le in the search results, or need to be sure that the results are comprehensive, click the Rescan button or once more , and Live will rebuild its index for the current Browser root.

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 bothering you. You can go back to the Browser's folder view at any time by closing the search eld.

If you select a le from the search results and then close the search eld, Live makes sure that le remains selected in the folder view, opening folders as required:. If a search is in progress, closing the eld immediately stops the search, although navigating to other Browsers does not.

In fact, while you're waiting for a search to nish in one Browser, you can initiate separate searches in the others. A Browser that is in an active search will indicate this via a small rotating ring on the Browser button.

Live allows you to preview samples and clips in the File Browser before they are imported into the program. To enable previewing, activate the Preview switch next to the Preview Tab at the bottom of the Browser.

Hint: You can preview les even when the Preview switch is not activated by pressing. Retu rn or. Click on a sample le or use and to select it. Click in the Tab's scrub area to make playback jump to that point. Note that it is not possible to scrub clips that have been saved with Warp turned off. You can also select Live Clips in the Browser to load them into the Preview Tab, but they will not play automatically. You can click on the tab or press to preview them. With the Raw button enabled, les will preview at their original tempo and will not loop.

With Raw disabled, Live will try to preview les in sync with the current Set, so that you can better judge which samples will work for you. Please note that scrubbing is not possible when Raw is enabled. If your audio hardware offers multiple audio outs, you can privately audition, or cue, les via headphones connected to a separate pair of outs while the music continues to play.

To learn how to set up Live for cueing, please refer to the relevant section of the Mixing chapter. Files can be dragged and dropped from the File Browsers into tracks in the Session or Arrangement View. Dragging and dropping material from the Browser into the space to the right of Session View tracks or below Arrangement View tracks will create a new track and place the new clip s there.

In the Session View, double-clicking or pressing Retu rn on a le in the Browser will automatically create a new track to the right of the other tracks and load it with the clip. You can use Live's File Browsers for all of the le maintenance activities that you are familiar with on your operating system. Copying, cutting and pasting can be done with either Edit menu commands or keyboard shortcuts. A le can be moved from one File Browser to another by dragging it over the target Browser's button.

Rename les and folders using the Edit menu's Rename command or the Ctrl R. Deleting items within Live moves them to the system trash; if. In addition to the drag-and-drop method of loading les from the Browser, Live offers a Hot-Swap Mode to save you mouse travel. Hot-Swap Mode establishes a temporary link between the Browser and, for example, a virtual instrument.

While in Hot-Swap Mode, you can step through samples or presets to audition them in place, that is, within the instrument. Hot-swapping for presets is covered in the Live Device Presets section. Let's go through an example of hot-swapping samples:.

Live's built-in Impulse instrument features eight sample-player slots that can be lled by dropping samples into them. Alternatively, we can click the Hot-Swap button that appears as we move the mouse over a slot. While in Hot-Swap Mode, pressing the key loads that le into the Impulse slot presumably while Impulse is playing incoming MIDI notes ; pressing , then loads the next sample, and so on. Instead of using the keys, we can also click on the le's HotSwap icon to load it.

The link between the Browser and the instrument will be broken if a different view is selected, or if the Hot-Swap button is pressed again. Hot-swapping can also be cancelled with a press of the Esc key or by pressing the close button in the Hot-Swap bar at the top of the Browser. When Hot-Swap Mode is re-entered, the Hot-Swap Browser will try to reconstruct what you saw when you loaded the current le into the Impulse slot. If, for instance, the currentle was found by searching for gretsch kick, the Hot-Swap Browser will come up with that search string in the search eld.

A sample is a le that contains audio data. It can be downloaded from the Apple website 1. As Live plays the samples directly from disk, you can work with a large number of large samples without running into RAM memory limitations.

Hard drive rotation speed can also affect disk performance. Refer to the section on managing the disk load for more information. Live can combine uncompressed mono or stereo samples of any length, sample rate or bit depth without prior conversion. To play a compressed sample, Live decodes the sample and writes the result to a temporary, uncompressed sample le.

This usually happens quickly enough that you will be able to play the sample right away, without waiting for the decoding process to nish. Note: When adding a long sample to a project, Live might tell you that it cannot play the sample before it has been analyzed.

Please see the section on analysis for an explanation. To save computational resources, Live keeps the decoded sample les of compressed samples in the cache. Maintenance of the cache is normally not required, as Live automatically deletes older les to make room for those that are new.

The cache will not grow larger than the Maximum Cache Size setting, and it will always leave the Minimum Free Space on the hard disk. Pressing the nearby Cleanup button will delete allles not being used by the current Live Set. An analysis le is a little le that Live creates when a sample le is brought into the program for the rst time. 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 samples.

When adding a long sample to a project, Live might tell you that it cannot play the sample before it has been analyzed. This will not happen if the sample has already been analyzed i. To prevent waiting for analysis of longer samples, you can pre-analyze them via the Browser, as we will see in a moment. An analysis le can also store default clip settings for the sample:. Clicking the Clip View's Save button will store the current clip's settings with the sample's analysis le.

The next time the sample is dragged into Live, it will appear with all its clip settings intact. This is particularly useful for retaining Warp Marker settings with the sample. Storing default clip settings with the analysis le is different from saving the clip as a Live Clip. While analysis les are a handy way to store default information about a particular sample's settings, keep in mind that you can use different settings for each clip within a Live Set even if those clips refer to the same sample on disk.

But if you drag a new version of the sample into a Live Set, Live will use the settings stored in the analysis le for the newly created clip. The analysis le's name is the same as that of the associated sample, with an added. Live puts this analysis le in the same folder as the sample. Samples that have an. Samples without an.

Note that you can suppress the creation of. All data except for the default clip settings can be recreated by Live if the. To avoid waiting for longer samples to be analyzed the rst time they are imported into Live, you may want to pre-analyze them.

This process can also be cancelled via the context menu. The resulting les can be used to burn an audio CD for listening purposes or a data CD, which could serve as a backup of your work or be used with other digital audio applications. The Export dialog's Rendered Track chooser offers several options for which audio signal to render:. Master the post-fader signal at Live's Master output. If you are monitoring the Master output, you can be sure that the rendered le will contain exactly what you hear.

All tracks the post-fader signal at the output of each individual track, including return tracks and MIDI tracks with instruments. Live will create a separate sample for each track. All samples will have the same length, making it easy to align them in other multitrack programs. Individual tracks the post-fader signal at the output of the selected track. Live will capture audio starting at the current play start position for whichever duration you have speci ed.

Thus, the rendered audio is what you would hear if you pressed the space bar. Remember a rendered audio le contains only what you heard prior to rendering. So, for example, if you're playing back some combination of Session View clips and Arrangement material, then that is what will be captured in your rendered le regardless of which view is active when you render.