Alright, welcome back in this video I'm going to give you a brief tour around Ableton and show you the main functions we're going to be using. And as well as some terminology, we're also going to get Ableton Live preferences setup so we don't have to keep going back and fix things that should have been set up from the beginning. And also hopefully you've done your homework and have Ableton at this point. Let's open it up, initiate goose cam. Alright, so it's loading Here we go. Alright, so you probably see something like this when you open Ableton, it probably looks like an air traffic control station.

Don't worry, it's gonna be alright, if there's open windows on the sides here, you can just click these corners to get rid of those and there's still all these buttons open. So I'm going to click this i o which is input and output just to close that for now. And then you can play around with s that's cents and then this Rs returns which we don't need right now. And m we are going to keep So the first thing you'll want to do if you haven't done this already is authorized Ableton in preferences. This is just Ableton, making sure you didn't steal your copy and things might stop working. If you don't do this it's just a little risky because if it gets an auto update and you're still not authorized to do it's just it's rough waters.

So let's go to preferences which is up and live and then Preferences. In the very bottom tab, you'll see licenses maintenance, authorize this computer online, authorize Ableton comm I believe you just type in your login information. It's really easy and simple. I keep automatic updates on that's just my opinion. So I stay updated with the world. So you can close that for now.

So to give just a brief rundown of Ableton there's this amazing feature Ableton put in in the bottom left corner right here, this info view. So if you Click this bottom left corner, little arrow, this box pops up. And this thing literally tells you everything wherever you put your mouse over, it tells you what it is clip stop button, clip slot, we have a track title bar. So if you forget anything, this has got all of this. So I would go through all these things, but for the sake of time, this bottom left bar use that if you have a question and it's got in depth, detailed descriptions of literally everything, it's so helpful in learning Ableton, I don't know why every single dog doesn't have this. So the view we're looking at right now, it looks a little different than every other da like Pro Tools, logic, GarageBand, whatever.

And it's okay if this is your first time in one, so maybe it looks normal to you. But if we press tab, it brings us to this is called Arrangement View. And this is our view if we are producing and some people actually do run click and tracks from here, but for our purposes, we're mainly going to be operating In this view, and I just press tab again to get back here, which is Session View Session View is literally so unique to Ableton it's Ableton niche. No other dot has a view like this. And it's super unique. I'm just going to close this bottom.

There we go. It's so unique in its functionality. And Ableton has become the the standard for running live tracks because of this. So let's just go over some brief terminology and functionality of this set. So three terms that I will be using all the time that it would be great for you to know, I'm going to open this bottom tab is scenes. So these scenes are essentially rows in Session View.

And you see in the bottom left, when I hover over these it says scene. And then so just know that these rows are scenes. columns in Session View are tracks as you see in the bottom left that says track title bar. And then these little slots in here are clips slots. So I'm going to close this bottom thing again. And as you see there's a bunch of stuff squares here.

And it's pretty standard that a square means stop. So any of these you can remove these stop buttons or you can add them back and to select multiple, you can click in one spot, hold Shift, and then click on another and it selects all of them at the same time remove stop button, and I'm gonna do the same thing to add them back. So when we launch a scene, here's just kind of the niche functionality of Ableton. If I've launched this row by this play button, look at all these squares light up in the whole row. So when I launch scene number one right here, it's engaging every single one of these so that's going to come in hand. When we're going to put click in a track put cues in a track, we'll put track in a track and we all we have to do is hit a scene and it'll launch every single one of those Ableton functionality with Session View is freaking awesome.

So we'll go over a lot of this in the next video where we actually start building the template. But for now, let's set up our Ableton preferences so we can be all set good to go from the start. So you can press Command comma is the shortcut for preferences like this, or you can go up and live preferences. And let's just go through the main things here. I'll, I'll give a brief explanation. rundown of these and also give my personal recommendations and you'll see kind of what my preferences look like you can always refer back to this first we have language, it's pretty self explanatory.

I'm just gonna point out the main important things zoom display. This has been important to me because when I play live, I want my computer to be readable and easy to see. So I always put mine to 123 when I'm playing live, and it looks really funny on the computer I'm using right now. But when I'm not using an external display, it looks great and just blows everything up. A little bigger. So you can play with that if you need or you can make things smaller so you can view more.

But let's put that back to 100. We also have colors, brightness, Ableton is pretty dim, I think. Yeah, wow. Normally at 100%, this is normal. So probably what you're seeing I keep mine at 180 because I just like raging and then you can mess with the colors and whatever plug in Windows, we're not going to worry about that. That's for external plugins which if you don't know what they are, you don't need to worry about them.

Let's go to the audio tab driver type this should defaults for your computer audio input device and output device will use quite often. So input device. If you wanted to record something into your computer, you'd have to use this via your interface or your computer speakers. So your computer speakers are called built in input. And as you see it's two inputs. And that's for a left and a right in our output device is currently built in output.

For me, that's just my computer speakers from the last video, you heard me talk about an audio interface. I'm actually plugged into my PreSonus firebox right now. So if I hit that now, I'm going to go to the input output tab. This is just kind of a foreshadowing of what's to come audio to, if I do x out, Oh, gosh. So I should see one through six here, but I'm not. So this brings up the next thing in preferences, output config, if I want those to be available.

Oh, looks like my interface has eight outputs. That's rad. So now they'll show up. If you know you should have more outputs and they're not showing up. You just go to this configure right here. So it's fortunately right there.

And then here's how you would separate out your different outputs, you go to X t out and then choose your output from there. I'm going to configure that back to normal to where it was. There we go. And let's go back to built in output in and out sample rate. I would keep this at 44 one or 48 nine Big deal, I would just put out 40 414. Now you really only use that in depth.

If you're producing buffer size. This is different for every computer. So I found that mine is great at 128. And this is under the latency tab. And if you don't know what latency is, it's essentially just lateness how late things are going to be. So if you are triggering something in Ableton, if you want it to go instantly right when you hit it, or if you want it to be like late, so it's really hard to to function and to like play an instrument, especially when things are late.

So I found that around 12 milliseconds is where I start noticing things are late. So if I move this down to 256, there We're at 11. So that's still passable, kinda as soon as I go to 512 it's not quite possible. So I keep mine at 128 and that's been great for my computer, your computer might be weaker, might be stronger, so you can kind of play with that if you go too far. 32 my latency is going to be super low. But it makes my CPU which this percentage up here shows us how hard our computer's working, it makes my CPU work a lot harder and you risk having some clicks or pops or like skips or glitches in your playback of audio so it's it's a little more risky that way ever test tone that's just for testing making sure signal is working.

Let's go to link MIDI. So here you will probably see nothing if you don't have an interface or any other audio device plugged in. So we don't need to worry about that for now back when we come to MIDI mapping, we'll talk about the remote feature let's keep moving file folder at the end of creating your template will potentially use this if you want to where you can save your current set as like the default set when you open Ableton so I do this for my template because when I'm learning and preparing songs, I don't want to have to like open a bunch of different sessions. I just want to open Ableton and it's already there ready to go. I can type in the stuff I need done, create analysis file is on by default. This creates a bunch of little files called a SD.

For any piece of audio you drag into a session, it's basically helps the audio load faster. But the result of it is if you have this on Ableton is going to clutter your whole desktop with tons of these little audio files, so I recommend turning it off. And if you have problems with audio loading fast enough for something, turn it back on sample editor doesn't apply here. We don't need that. So let's look in rescan plugins. So we're not using any external plugins or run tracks or anything, we are fine here.

Let's go to library show downloadable packs. That's just referring into here. We have packs up here and it'll show your available packs. And it's really nice because all you have to do is hit download if you want to download those great feature able to I'm going to hit command comma location, a user library, I would just double check that these are where that you want them to be. I believe Ableton makes these folders for you When you download Ableton record warp launch, I have some recommendations here. I think by default it's on AI FF I recommend.

And while I recommend putting it on wave, it's just a much more standard file type as well as bit depth. 24 is a little higher quality, you just can't go wrong, it will be a little bigger file count in none, you can always add that if you need it. Exclusive armor solo, this comes in hand if you want to solo a track, I find it very useful to solo multiple tracks at the same time occasionally, so I would turn exclusive off for both of these, like if you want to hear just two tracks out of your 16 tracks. If exclusive is on it's only going to let you ever solo one at a time. So I would just turn that off these I would just keep how they are loop warp short samples. This has screwed over so many people and caused me a ton of trouble.

I recommend putting it on unwarped one shot this will save you a ton of time. It's basically when you drag in a long piece of audio. It'll Pre warp it and guess and you just don't want to warp it unless you choose to warp it, it will save you time later we'll get there. So turn off auto warp long samples I recommend as well default warp mode beats. Here's that complex mode I was talking about before in the last video we will get there I recommend keeping on beats because it takes the least amount of CPU for now phase and clip edges, I recommend that these things start recording on scene launch. That's when we hit a play button on one of these scenes, it's only going to start recording if you have an armed track so we don't have to worry about that start playback with tap tempo.

Let's keep that off. I'm like peeking around my camera to see this default launch. Yep, I would keep these things here. I just want to fly through here and then we got licensed maintenances boom, preferences are set roughly we can always go back and change them run through my preferences again, remember it's command comma to get back to them. Here's mine. Feel free to copy them.

Boom Boom. Boom Boom you are set up to start your template in the next video. I will see you there.