Okay, so you’ve got a guitar idea and you want to track something just to see if it’s going anywhere. If you’re anything like me you want a way to capture your ideas that’s pretty much as simple as pressing record on an old four-track player. What I like about Live is how simple it is to get started, and how quickly you can be laying down tracks for the ideas you have. Here’s how I go about it.

First things first. The nio acts as your recording input so that needs to be plugged in, with nioFxRack running. The first thing to do in Live is hit the ‘Preferences’ menu and pick the nio 2/4 for both input and output device. What this means is that Live will look for sound coming in through the nio when in record and also all sound coming from Live will be routed out through the nio’s headphone socket. With the monitor settings on the nio, you can adjust the levels of what you’re playing and listening to as you go, but I’ll come on to that in part two.

Next stop for me is to get a simple MIDI beat up and running to play along to. I prefer to start with something very simple for the purposes of getting a basic idea into Live, as you can always make it more sophisticated as you go along. I’m going to assume you know the difference between an audio track and MIDI track, but if you don’t, just think of MIDI as a kind of Lego for sounds that you can build very simply without necessarily playing anything. It’ll make more sense when you start tinkering.

Start with Live in ‘Arrangement view’ ie. showing all the tracks you have available to record into. Pick one of the MIDI tracks. Now, select your tempo at top left - the metronome is right next to it if you want to hear how fast it should be. Don’t forget that if the nio is your output you won’t hear anything until you plug it either into headphones or other monitors. With any kind of track, the thing to remember is you won’t get anything to appear as a workable, listenable piece of music in the arrangement area until you’ve ‘armed’ that particular track for recording (the red button at far right of each track) and hit the master record at the top. Even with MIDI it won’t start to appear as music unless you’re recording.

Okay, there’s a million different MIDI drum-track sounds you can pursue but the easiest thing is to pick one of Live’s built-in sounds from the ‘Impulse’ drum machine folder (a navigator for Live sounds and effects is found on the left of the screen). I’ve picked ‘Backbeat’ for a no-frills sound and simply dragged the icon into the track, thereby letting the track know what sound to make when in record. At this point if you hit the middle row of keys on your keyboard - A to L - you’ll hear the varying sounds of the kit you’ve chosen. This way you can ‘play’ the MIDI kit as you record. This is fine for me, because however badly I play I can always go back and fix it manually. The other way, which is to build the beat on a grid - much less sloppy - means flicking into ‘Session view’ by hitting tab. This is a vertical view of the tracks you have, showing not the music clips for each track but pretty much anything else that might affect what’s happening, like the volume and whether it is panned left or right. If you double click on the very top box of the MIDI track in session view, it will create a new bar long clip which you can build into the beat of your choice. In draw mode (the pencil at the top of the screen) you can literally draw on the grid where you want kicks, snare and so on to appear in the beat. By hitting the little play button on the same box in session view you can listen to what you’re writing, but again it won’t appear as a piece of music in your arrangement until you hit the master record. Done? Now flick back to the arrangement view and your beat should appear. If it’s still not quite right you can just double click on the clip itself and fix it. When I’m happy I simply just copy and paste the whole thing along the timeline, giving me a steady beat as a basis for the track.

Now you’re ready to record audio with the nio. The principle for recording audio into Live is just as easy as recording MIDI, in fact kind of easier in a way, although not quite so easy to fix if played badly! Assuming you’ve got the nio set-up as per my last entry, then as soon as you have a guitar, mic, or whatever plugged into it, and nioFxRack running, you’ll have sound coming into Live. It might take a little while to balance what you hear (more about this in my next entry) but as soon as you have a sound that you like, it’s as simple as arming your audio track (very important for getting the audio to appear in the right place) and hitting record. As long as the MIDI track you’ve already recorded is ‘active’ (the big yellow numbered button on each track denotes this) you’ll hear your beat as you record and yes, you’ve worked out how simple it is to build multiple tracks of music in Live.

In Part Two: so many knobs, how do I get the right balance? The finer points of recording audio into Live.