Ableton/Live/UG/06 Arrangement View
- The timeline view for arranging a song: layout, zooming, transport, locators, time signature changes, the loop, and editing clips and time.
- Live 11 notes: Ableton/Manual/06
- Garden pages for the view and its controls: Ableton/Live/UI/Arrangement View.
- Upper area:
- Tracks and lower area:
- Clips sit in each track's main lane (Ableton/Arrangement View/Track/Display Area); comping moves clips there from take lanes.
- Arrangement Track Controls hold volume, pan, I/O and more; choose them under View → Arrangement Track Controls.
- Tracks stack vertically and reorder by dragging. Dropping an instrument or MIDI effect into the Mixer Drop Area below the tracks creates a MIDI track; an audio effect creates an audio track.
- Ableton/Arrangement View/Optimize/Height and Ableton/Arrangement View/Optimize/Width, or
H and W, fit every track to the view. - Ableton/Live/UI/Arrangement View/Slider/Waveform Vertical Zoom Level enlarges waveforms in all audio tracks without changing clip gain.
- Ableton/Live/UI/Arrangement View/Time Ruler shows minutes-seconds-milliseconds; drag it to scroll.
- Open the mixer from View → Mixer or the Mixer View toggle at the bottom right.
- Live 11 notes with flashcards: Ableton/Manual/06/01 Arrangement View Navigation.
+ and -, or Cmd-scroll (Mac) / Ctrl-scroll (Win), zoom progressively around the selection (Ableton/Menu/View/Zoom/In or Out). Cmd+Option-drag (Mac) / Ctrl+Alt-drag (Win) pans.Z zooms fully to the selection (Ableton/Menu/View/Zoom/Arrangement Time Selection/To); X steps back, once per Z (Ableton/Menu/View/Zoom/Arrangement Time Selection/Back).- Selecting time in an Arrangement clip also zooms the Clip View editor to it.
Option-scroll (Mac) / Alt-scroll (Win) in a main lane zooms the track vertically, or every track with selected content.- Ableton/Live/UI/Control Bar/Switch/Follow, or Options → Follow (Ableton/Menu/Options/Follow), scrolls with the song position. It pauses when you edit, scroll sideways or click the beat-time ruler, and resumes on stop, restart, or a click in a scrub area.
- Ableton/Live/UI/Control Bar/Button/Play and Ableton/Live/UI/Control Bar/Button/Stop, or the space bar, start and stop playback. Keys and MIDI can be mapped to the transport.
- Playback starts from the flashing blue Ableton/Live/UI/Arrangement View/Marker/Insert Marker, at the Arrangement start by default. Click in a track to move it; double-click Stop, or press
Home (Win) / Fn+Left (Mac), to send it back to the start. Shift+Space continues from where playback last stopped instead.- Ableton/Live/UI/Control Bar/Field/Arrangement Position shows the play position in bars-beats-sixteenths; drag, type and
Enter, or use the arrow keys to change it, which also moves the insert marker. - With Permanent Scrub Areas on (the default, in Display & Input Settings), click anywhere in the Ableton/Live/UI/Arrangement View/Scrub Area to play from there; jumps follow Ableton/Live/UI/Control Bar/Menu/Quantization, and holding the button repeats that portion. With it off,
Shift-click the scrub area or beat-time ruler. - The Clip View editor has its own scrub area.
- Chase MIDI Notes, on by default in the Options menu, plays notes that began before the play position.
- Ableton/Live/UI/Arrangement View/Marker/Time Signature Markers change the meter anywhere. Insert one at the insert marker with Create → Insert Time Signature Change or the scrub area's context menu.
- Numerators of one or two digits over 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 work, separated by a slash, comma, period or spaces.
- Typing in the Control Bar's Ableton/Live/UI/Control Bar/Field/Time Signature fields changes the meter at the play position, stopped or playing. An LED in the fields' corner means the Arrangement has meter changes.
- Markers sit just below the beat-time ruler, in an area hidden until the Set has a change. Move them by mouse or arrow keys, edit with Edit Time Signature or
Cmd+R (Mac) / Ctrl+R (Win), delete with Delete. - Markers aren't quantized, only constrained by the grid, so one placed before a bar ends leaves a crosshatched fragmentary bar. Its context menu offers Delete Fragmentary Bar Time, which removes the extra time, or Complete Fragmentary Bar, which inserts time to finish the bar. Both change the length of every track.
- Importing a MIDI file into the Arrangement can bring its time signature changes as markers.
- Drag a clip by its bar to move it to another time or track; drag its left or right edge to resize it. The waveform or MIDI display isn't a drag handle.
- Clips snap to the grid and to other clip edges, locators and time signature changes.
Shift+Option-drag (Mac) / Ctrl+Shift-drag (Win) on the display slides a warped audio clip's or MIDI clip's contents within its edges; add Cmd (Mac) / Alt (Win) to bypass the grid.- Related: Ableton/Arrangement View/Clip/How To/Play in a loop.
- Audio clips have fades at their start and end; neighbouring clips on a track can crossfade.
- Hover over a clip, in a tall enough track, to see the fade handles as small squares at its edges. In Automation Mode, hold
F over an automation lane to show them. - Fade In Start and Fade Out End handles change a fade's length without moving its peak; the Fade Curve handle shapes it.
- Selecting time that includes a clip's start or end and choosing Create → Create Fade In/Out,
Cmd+Option+F (Mac) / Ctrl+Alt+F (Win), sets the fade to that length. - Crossfade by dragging a fade handle over the neighbouring clip's edge, or select across the boundary and choose Create Crossfade. The slope handle shapes it.
Delete removes a selected fade, unless Create Fades on Clip Edges is on in Record, Warp & Launch Settings; then it resets to 4 ms, and adjacent clips get automatic 4 ms crossfades to prevent clicks.- Fades can't cross a clip's loop boundaries, and a clip's two fades can't overlap. A dotted line shows a selected handle's limit.
- Fades belong to clips, not tracks, and are separate from automation.
- Editing works by selecting, then running a command such as Cut, Copy, Paste or Duplicate. See Ableton/Arrangement View/Time Selection and Ableton/Selection.
- Click a clip to select it. Click the background to place the insert marker, then move it with the arrow keys;
Option (Mac) / Ctrl (Win) with left or right snaps it to locators and clip edges. Drag to select a timespan. - To select time inside a clip, unfold its track with the button by its name or
U; Option+U (Mac) / Alt+U (Win) unfolds all. Resize by dragging the split line, with Option +/- (Mac) / Alt +/- (Win), or Option with a pinch; holding Option (Mac) / Alt (Win) while resizing one track resizes all. - Drag in a clip's waveform or MIDI display to select time in it. Clicking the loop brace runs Select Loop.
Shift-click extends a selection within or across tracks; Shift with arrows grows or shrinks it.0 deactivates the selected material, or the selected track. R or Reverse Clip(s) reverses a selection of audio, across clips; MIDI can't be reversed this way.- Left and right arrows nudge the selection.
- Related: Ableton/Arrangement View/Clip/How To/Select in a not quantized way.
- The cursor snaps to grid lines for the meter's subdivisions, in zoom-adaptive or fixed mode. Set the width from the context menu of a main lane or the MIDI Note Editor.
- Shortcuts, also in the Options menu,
Cmd on Mac / Ctrl on Windows:Cmd+1 narrows the grid (eighths to sixteenths); Cmd+2 widens it.Cmd+3 toggles triplets; Cmd+4 turns snapping off and on; Cmd+5 switches fixed and adaptive.
- The current spacing shows at the lower right, above the time ruler.
- Hold
Cmd (Mac) / Alt (Win) while acting to bypass the grid, or to enable it temporarily when it's off.
- Cut, Copy and Paste act on the selection; their "… Time" versions insert or delete time across every track, time signature markers included.
- Cut Time and Delete Time remove the selected time and close the gap, shortening the Arrangement.
- Paste Time and Duplicate Time insert time, lengthening it.
- Insert Silence adds a chosen amount of empty time at the insert marker.
- Split,
Cmd+E (Mac) / Ctrl+E (Win) or the context menu, divides a clip where you clicked in its display. With a range selected, it cuts that range out into its own clip. The parts are ordinary clips.
- Consolidate,
Cmd+J (Mac) / Ctrl+J (Win), the Edit menu or the main lane's context menu, joins selected adjacent clips into one, per track, across several tracks if selected. Useful for turning a looped passage into a single loop clip. - For audio it writes a new sample per track, recorded from the warping engine before the track's effects and mixer: it includes clip gain, warping, pitch and clip envelopes but no effects. Use Export Audio/Video for a post-effects file.
- Samples go to the Project's Samples/Processed/Consolidate folder, or the Temporary Folder for an unsaved Set.
- Linked-track editing applies comping and other phase-locked edits to several tracks together, for example the microphones on a drum kit. See Ableton/Linked-Track Editing and Ableton/YouTube/21/04/Learn Live Linked-Track Editing.
- Link selected tracks with Link Tracks in a track header's context menu, or link a Group Track's tracks from the group header. Linked tracks show an indicator button in their headers.
- A Set can have several linked groups, but a track belongs to only one. Hover the indicator to highlight a group's tracks; click it to select them.
- To add tracks to a group, select them and
Cmd-click (Mac) / Ctrl-click (Win) Link Tracks in a linked track's header. Any mix of linked and unlinked tracks can be linked into a new group. - Unlink Track(s) in the header's context menu removes tracks from their group.
- These apply to every track in the group at once:
- Moving and resizing clips; selecting clips and time; the "… Time" commands; splitting and consolidating.
- Clip fades, for fades that start at the same position.
- Arming and disarming.
- Renaming, inserting and deleting take lanes, and Audition Mode, even where take lanes are hidden.
- Arrangement View has two sets of mixer controls: the mixer, and the Arrangement track controls beside each track. They share values.
- Open the mixer with View → Mixer,
Cmd+Option+M (Mac) / Ctrl+Alt+M (Win), or the mixer view control at the bottom right. View → Mixer Controls and the Arrangement track controls submenu choose what shows. - Performance Impact meters, track delays and the crossfader exist only in the mixer.