Understanding the Building Blocks of Ableton

Now let's look at understanding what the building blocks of Ableton is.

Just knowing what those windows are is not going to help you; however, it will create a common language so we can describe where things are and what pages we're looking at.

The Parts That Make Ableton Work

Now we really need to understand the parts that make Ableton work. What are the things that play the music and musical ideas?

The Clips

The basic music building blocks of Live are called clips.

A clip is a piece of musical material: a melody, a drum pattern, a bass line, or even a complete song.

Live allows you to record and alter clips and to create larger musical structures from them, such as:

• Songs
• Scores
• Remixes
• DJ sets
• Whole stage shows

In this image, we have tracks, which represent clips. We're going to look deeper into that.

Clips as Containers

Clips are a container. It's really important to realize that this is kind of like a wrapper around a piece of audio. It doesn't actually mean it's the audio.

This leads us to what is called non-destructive editing, which allows for multiple versions of the same sample.

Example of Non-Destructive Editing

Let me show you that.

Here we have this "wheel of time" thing that I've created. Now, if I take this, I can hold Control and move it down to duplicate it.

As an example, I can come in here and transpose this one down quite a bit. Notice how this one's transposed while this one is as is.

I can also do other things, such as:

• Shrink this one to that section
• Change its color for the sake of understanding

Let's put this one up. See how this is all the same sample and I've changed it in some ways, but the original sample is totally fine. I have not changed that in any way.

I'm just saying with this container, the orange, blue, and so on, that the clip is saying, "Well, I want to play this one differently."

Understanding the Sample

If I click here, this is just going to show me what that sample is. Here's the original sample, which has not been changed in any way. There are not multiple versions of the sample; it's the same thing.

But the clip is indicating that we are playing it back differently.

I can also drag in any sample; I can drag in this beat, and so on. Anything I can just drag over can be added to my live set.