J. Anthony AllenComposer, Producer, Music Educator, Entrepreneur

Free Ableton Live 12 Music Production Class! Delivered Daily.

Name: Free Ableton Live 12 Music Production Class! Delivered Daily.
Uploaded: 2024-05-03T22:45:45+00:00
Duration: 2 min 19 s
Channel: J. Anthony Allen
Description: In this tutorial segment, J. Anthony Allen walks viewers through the two timeline displays in Ableton Live. He first explains the lower timeline, which…

3 May 2024 · 2 min

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2:19

In this tutorial segment, J. Anthony Allen walks viewers through the two timeline displays in Ableton Live. He first explains the lower timeline, which shows minutes and seconds and, when zoomed in tightly, displays milliseconds (e.g., 1 ms, 1.5 ms). He then shifts focus to the upper timeline, which uses a musical notation of bar.beat.16th (e.g., 37.1.2 meaning bar 37, beat 1, second 16th note). Allen demonstrates how zooming changes the granularity of the numbers, clarifies that omitted beat or 16th values default to “1” (the first beat or first 16th), and shows how to interpret these values while navigating a project. The segment’s purpose is to make the timeline readable for precise editing and arrangement.

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Okay, it's time to take a closer look at our timeline at the top and at the bottom. Okay, so the one at the bottom is relatively easy to read. This is minutes and seconds. If we zoom way, way, way, way, way in, we get some more info. And I think here we're looking at milliseconds. Okay, so 1 millisecond, 1.5 milliseconds, 2 milliseconds. So fractions of a second if you go way in. But let's look up top. This is a little bit trickier to read and also a little bit more useful a lot of the time. Okay, so we have this looks like an arbitrary number. 37. 37.2, 37.3, 37.4. Okay, if you zoom in farther, you're going to get a three part number. So let's get there. Okay, here we have 37, 1.2. Now that number corresponds to up here 37. 1.1, which is where my cursor actually is right now. Okay, what when you see those three numbers, number, dot, number, dot, number. What you're seeing always in live is bar beat, 16th note. Okay, so what bar number we're on in this case, 37. What beat it is. So in this case the first beat and in this case the second 16th note. Okay, so let's zoom back out to here. Now if we don't see a number, it's going to be the last number and it means we're going to be at one. So here we have 35.2. Let's look at that. So that's bar 35. Beat two is what this is. This is bar 35. If it doesn't say anything after it, you can assume it's a one beat one, first 16th note. Okay, let's zoom in a little bit closer to where we can get.