So You’ve just installed Ableton and you’ve opened it for the first time, How is it layed out and how do you get around it with speech? Fear not, I’ll give you a guided tour of its main parts, and here, you’ll get a few tips for setting it up with your screen reader.
Below is an audio recording of this tutorial
Like any other Daw, the key to being fluent with Ableton is learning as many shortcut keys as possible. All the shortcuts discussed in this tutorial live in the Navigate menu. To get there, just go to the menu bar and drop the navigate menu and you’ll find them all.
Now the first thing you will need to do is to change Live so that you can move around it with the Tab key. To do this, drop the Navigate menu and select the “USe Tab Key to Move Focus” option.
If you’re using a Mac, you may find that things work a little better if you turn cursor routing off by pressing Shift VO f3.
General Navigation
Ableton Live essentially operates in one main window which has various parts which you can hide and show. Most of the time you’ll get to the part you want with a shortcut key and then use tab and shift tab to get to the item in that area you want to work with.
If you’re using a Mac, then you also have other ways of finding things like using the Item Chooser, but, I want to concentrate on navigation which will apply to both Windows and Mac in these tutorials.
In order to save space, the shortcut keys you’ll find here will be given as Mac shortcuts. If you’re using windows, then use the control key instead of the command key and use the Alt key instead of the Option key. For example, the Mac shortcut Option 0, can be performed on Windows by using Alt 0.
The Control Bar
At the top of the main window in Live, you’ll find the Control Bar, this is a tool bar enabling you to set tempo and time signature etc. The shortcut key to get to the Control Bar is Option 0. after pressing option 0, use the Tab key to find tempo metronome settings and more.
The Main Views: Session View and Arrangement View
Ableton Live is distinguished by its dual view system: the Session View and the Arrangement View. These two views are integral to the software’s functionality and cater to different aspects of music production and performance.
Session View allows you to build your song by recording loops and then stringing them together.
Arrangement View, is much more like a regular daw where you start at bar 1 on a time line and finish at the last bar of your song.
When you open Live with its defaults, you’re in Session View. You can always get here by pressing option 1. You can get to the Arrangement View by pressing Option 2 and we’ll discover how these views work in practice in future tutorials.
Tracks and Clips
Tracks in Live are the building blocks of your project. There are three main types of tracks:
- Audio Tracks: These tracks are used for recording and playing back audio signals. You can import audio files, record directly from an input device, or process audio using various effects.
- MIDI Tracks: These tracks handle MIDI data, which can be used to trigger virtual instruments or external MIDI hardware.
- Return Tracks: These are used for applying send effects to multiple tracks. For example, you might use a return track to add reverb to several tracks simultaneously.
You essentially move through tracks using the left and right arrow keys in Session View and the up and down arrow keys in Arrangement View, Confused? This will all be covered in detail later on.
Every time that you record on an audio or MIDI track, you’ll get what’s called a Clip on that track. These are often referred to as Items or Regions in other daws.
Pressing Option 3 lets you get in to the details of the Clip your on via the Clip View And, If you’ve added any effects or virtual instruments to your track, Option 4 takes you to the Device View enabling you to change your effects chain.
The Browser
The Browser is your central hub for accessing all the materials you need for your project. It’s where you’ll find all the instruments and effects that you’ll be adding to your tracks. You get to the Browser by pressing Option 5. It’s essentially a tree view of categories so up and down arrows take you through the categories and right and left arrows expand and collapse the category you’re on. You can also search for the particular sound you want but again, we’ll cover how to do this later.
Ableton has other areas that we’ve not yet talked about such as the mixer and the MIDI editor, but you should explore the areas covered so far by trying out the shortcut keys and using the tab and shift tab keys. There’s an audio recording of this tutorial at the top of this article, and, for more information about navigating accessibly, if you’ve not already read it, you can check out the Ableton accessibility information.