CHAPTER 4. LIVE CONCEPTS
16
A Scene in the Session
View.
The exclusivity of clips in a track also implies that, at any one time, a track will either play
a Session clip or an Arrangement clip, but never both. So, who wins? When a Session clip
is launched, the respective track stops whatever it is doing to play that clip. In particular, if
the track was playing an Arrangement clip, it will stop it in favor of the Session clip
even
as the other tracks continue to play what is in the Arrangement. The track will not resume
Arrangement playback until explicitly told to do so.
The Back to
Arrangement Button.
This is what the
Back to Arrangement
button, found in the
Control Bar
at the top of the
Live screen, is for. This button lights up to indicate that one or more tracks are currently
not
playing the Arrangement, but are playing a clip from the Session instead.
We can click this button to make all tracks go back to the Arrangement. Or, if we like what
we hear, we can capture the current state into the Arrangement by activating the
Record
button. Disengaging Record Mode or stopping Live using the
Stop
button leaves us with
an altered Arrangement.
4.4
Audio and MIDI
Clips represent recorded signals. Live deals with two types of signals: audio and MIDI. In the
digital world, an audio signal is a series of numbers that approximates a continuous signal
as generated by a microphone or delivered to a loudspeaker. A MIDI signal is a sequence
of commands, such as now play a C4 at mezzo piano. MIDI is a symbolic representation
of musical material, one that is closer to a written score than to an audio recording. MIDI
