How To Get Started In Ableton Live As A Guitar Player 

Glad you liked the video! My first suggestion would be to make sure that you have installed the focusrite drivers and rebooted your computer. At that point you should see it as an option in ableton. Select asio in the first drop down for drivers, then the bottom drop down should show the focusrite.

I am using Native, and I use it as a VST plug in inside of Ableton. Typically what I'll do is when I'm recording guitars with Helix I'll also record the dry guitar onto a separate track. I use Helix as the audio interface when I'm doing this so that it's easy to accomplish this. The dry signal is on USB7 from Helix. So that way after the fact I can go in and add Helix Native to it and tweak the tones if I need to. Also I've used it on other instruments if I want to put certain effects on those as well.

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I'm absolutely loving this new set up. Ableton has made it all possible to bring everything together. BTW....halion 7 has really made it easy to get started making music in Ableton without being an expert musician! Just dive in and get creative.

Glad you liked the video! Yes you can drag and drop files into Ableton. I know you used to need .wave files, but I think you can do .wav or .mp3 at this point if I'm not mistaken.

Thanks

If you want to hear the plug ins while you're playing make sure to turn on monitoring on the channel you're playing your guitar through. Depending on your audio interface and the processing power of your computer will determine if you can get the latency low enough to play without a noticeable delay. If you can get your latency down to 10 milliseconds or below it should be pretty unnoticeable.

Thanks! I'm just using the camera on my Samsung Galaxy s10.

@@ChadHuskey the quality is fantastic. Thanks for letting know 😎

Thanks! In the view menu click on Second Window. This will add the second window so you can have one on each screen.

Glad you're enjoying the video! There are a couple of ways to achieve what you are wanting to do. If you want to export the sections to wav files use the loop bracket to mark the beginning and end of the section you want to export. You can also click and drag to select the section you want to export then right click and choose "loop selection" to mark it. Then go to file>export and that should do the trick. Note if you do the loop selection option it will turn on the loop function, which will be highlighted in yellow at the top to the right of the play/stop/record buttons. You will need to click that to turn the looping off. Another option is that if you want to drag the clips into the session view to have them as clips that can be triggered from there simply follow the same procedure, but after the clip is selected instead of exporting click and drag the audio and while holding down the mouse button hit the tab key to switch over to the session view. Then you can drop the audio into any of the clip spots and it will be available there to play on its own. This would be handy if you had a riff that was a verse section and a riff that was a chorus section. You could drag them over as clips into the session view then trigger them on the fly if you wanted to experiment with them that way. Let me know if this helps. Cheers

It depends on what your setup is. A lot of audio interfaces have a knob that blends the signal going in and the DAW signal coming out. If yours has this make sure that you have it turned to daw output. Otherwise you won't hear what the software plays back. Hope this helps!

Glad you liked the video! The guitar is a line 6 Variax jtv69. I swapped the stock neck for a warmoth neck with stainless steel frets.

Glad the video was helpful. For acoustic guitars it's a similar process only you need to use a microphone on the guitar instead of plugging it in. Just plug the mic into your audio interface and in ableton select that input as your source on the track you're recording to.

Basically you would just need to run a microphone into your audio interface and do it that way. Just select the input from your audio interface for the Ableton track and you're good to go.

You absolutely can. Just go to the view menu and click on second window. I'm not sitting in front of ableton at the moment, but I belive it's in the view menu. Then you can drag the second window to your other monitor.

I usually record in the arrangement view if I'm going to record in the more traditional method. For example if I know the song structure I'll usually just record on the timeline in arrangement view. I record in session view if it's going to be more things that are loop-based and chopped up. But most of the time I'm in arrangement view. In version 12 that's coming out this year you can put the mixer and arrangement view together. Once that happens I'll use session view less. I tend to use ableton as more of a traditional daw these days. But it's still really cool for being able to experiment and do fun stuff with. Which is what got me into ableton nearly 20 years ago. Just typing that out makes me feel old 😂

Very cool that you're getting into recording :) If I'm reading this right you want to bring backing tracks into Ableton then record your bass parts over them. You'll need to get the file(s) into .wav format. There should be free online converters that can change the mpeg file to .wave. You'll just need to google and find one to use. From there you can just drag and drop the file into a track on Ableton and you should be good to go.

@@ChadHuskeyThanks so much! After I formatted the mpeg into wave would I have to use a midi or audio track to drop it in? It's not a virtual instrument like in midi but also not really a recording in audio. You are talking to a complete hi tech idiot here LOL.

Essentially a wav file is a piece of audio, so you'll drop it into an audio track. The more you work with recording the more you'll get comfortable with these things 🙂

@@ChadHuskey wow thx for the ultrafast response. That really helps. Now I have to go practice bass to get a good recording down.