Ableton Live – Session and Arrangement View
Many artists when considering Ableton Live may be confused by the different views especially session view. This is a brief and quick overview of the different views in Ableton Live and what makes them unique.
Ableton Live is a popular digital audio workstation (DAW) used in electronic music production, for mixing and spinning sets, and for jamming out live. In Ableton Live there are two main views Session view and Arrangement view. Session view provides artists with the ability to jam different ideas or clips together in scenes and can be thought of as a vertical view whereas Arrangement view is for arranging sections of music or clips into a track or song and can be thought of as a horizontal view. A DJ may opt to spend most of their time in Session view mixing sounds, tracks, loops on scenes whereas a producer may divide their time 50/50 creating musical ideas that go together in Session view then bringing those ideas into Arrangement view to build out their composition and song however as a producer you could skip the jam session and head straight into arrangement view to drop samples and MIDI to build out your track. Session view definitely creates value offering a creative area for producers and opens Ableton Live to many different artists with different needs including those that do live performances. Session view truly gives meaning to the “Live” in Ableton Live.
In Session view the columns represent the tracks (swim lanes of clips) and offer a series of clips where sounds can be loaded. Tracks can either be MIDI or Audio depending on their content and can have instruments (MIDI track) and audio effects (Both) loaded into them to play or manipulate sounds. In Session view we have the concept of scenes and a scene is simply a vertical cut across your tracks that will play the respective clips or pieces of music (MIDI or Audio). We can map the scenes to our keyboard or use external hardware to jam out and come up with ideas. We can copy down clips in a track and perhaps slightly change patterns to see what works better with other track clips. Session view empowers producers to get creative and develop the soul of their track. Remember from a producers mindset you’re looking for a musical idea and inspiration you can build into a song.
In Arrangement view the tracks are represented vertically and each will contain an arrangement of clips for that track whether representing bass, drums, piano or plucks. In Arrangement view we can apply fading, automation and give a dynamic element to our sounds. Arrangement view is where musical ideas can be developed into a full song with different sections (intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, etc.). We are thinking in 4, 8, 16, etc. bars, where we want instruments to play and end, where FX’s should be used to highlight sections, where to put drops, fills, use automation to give dynamics to the sound, etc.
Session and Arrangement view provide artists with two distinct but essential and important views in Ableton Live making this DAW a great option for many artists with different needs. There is more information on these two distinct views in the exceptional documentation on Ableton Live. I know many producers that prefer other DAW’s such as Logic Pro X and to each their own so use the DAW that you’re most comfortable with and produce you’re epic tracks. Make your musical ideas come to life.
