Hello everyone, & welcome to the Session Building & Optimization course. My name is Dan Alber, I’m the owner & founder of Ableton Is Confusing Sometimes, & first I just want to say thank you so much for purchasing this course, and I’m certain you’re going to find it very helpful. Today I’m going to walk you through exactly how I build an Ableton session from start to finish..

Before we dive in to building the session, let’s navigate to the preference window and the audio tab. Typically I am building sessions at 48/24 or 44.1/24, depending on the artists needs, so let’s go ahead and confirm that our sample rate is correct, in this case 48k. This will be important..

Ok, before we begin importing songs into our session, we want to confirm that all of our stems are at the same sample rate & bit depth that our session is at. I've heard it said before that Ableton is called Ableton because it’s ‘able to handle a ton of sample rates’, but in my experience this hasn’t been true, and when I’m struggling with crashes..

Ok we are finally ready to begin building our playback session. Today I am working from the AICS playback template, which is available on the site. The very first thing we will do is resave our template session as our working session..

Now that you youve saved the template as a new session, you should see your project folder appear. Before we begin importing into Ableton, We’re going to create a folder with the project folder named STEMS, and duplicate our 48/24 stems..

Now we get to jump into some fun stuff, and I’m going to show you how I quickly make click & guides, as well as a couple of patterns that I always stick to keep my guides uniform across all songs. It may not be a huge deal, but..

Now that we have our click & guides built, let’s do a bit of labeling. I have this midi track labeled song, which just has midi clips on it with no midi information in them. This lets me really clearly see the title, tempo, and..

Now that I’ve got my stems separated and routed correctly, I’ll go ahead and put all of stems in a sub group under my parent ‘stems’ group, and label them at the song name. This keeps the stems hidden, keeping my session organized..

Let’s talk about editing the arrangement. I've gone ahead and placed my markers for the full song, even though I know that for this particular performance, we will be playing a shortened version that goes straight from chorus 1 to the bridge. I find that having markers in place..

Let’s dive into IAC control! You may remember earlier in this course we set up the routing for that - but just to reiterate, I like to think of your IAC driver as a virtual cable that runs from Ableton to your computer, and back into Ableton, allowing you to draw in midi notes..

Let’s jump into timecode! If you aren’t familiar with what timecode is, it’s a sequence of numeric codes generated at regular intervals by a time synchronization system. This can be used to communicate with other production elements, such as lighting, video content, lyrics, or even cryo & confetti..

We’re moving along nicely now! We have all of our stems imported and placed correctly in the timeline, and we’ve built all of our utility tracks. Now it’s time to use a meter to make sure that all of our songs are similar in volume. Any meter will do, I like to use this one called..

Let’s move to key mapping. There are a handful of different ways to do this, and depending on what your preference is or what midi controller you’re using, you may find a way that works better for you. With controllers, I’m pickier about the..

As we’re reaching the end of this course, let’s go ahead and prepare to save our final session. Now, there are a few different ways to do this, each with their own pros and cons. This might not be a popular opinion, but if you’re working in a session that requires a lot of editing day to day..

The last thing I want to mention is if you’re using the same session across multiple laptops, or campuses, or even don’t have access to the playback laptops at all times, I would recommend working from a cloud sharing software, such as Dropbox, to host the session. In my case, I build and save my sessions within the Dropbox application, and then make the folder available..

Hey everyone, congratulations on completing the Session Building & Optimization course. I hope you find it helpful, and I’m looking forward to hearing about your successful gigs running playback..

As we’re wrapping up this course on session building, I want to drop in a  quick tip that I have found endlessly useful. I’m sure if you’ve run playback for any amount of time, you’ve likely run into a scenario where you needed to fire an intro track before the band walks on stage. Of course the easiest way to solve..