User Guide

4.4. AUDIO AND MIDI 28

Arrangement playback until explicitly told to do so.

The Play, Stop, Record

and Back to

Arrangement Buttons.

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

signals are generated by input devices such as MIDI or USB keyboards

It takes an instrument to convert MIDI signals into audio signals that can actually be heard.

Some instruments, such as Live's Simpler, are for chromatic playing of one sound via the

keyboard. Other instruments, such as Live's Impulse, have a different percussion sound

assigned to each keyboard key.

Audio signals are recorded and played back using audio tracks, and MIDI signals are

For an introduction to digital audio and MIDI, please see http://img.uoregon.edu/emi/emi.php and

http://www.midi.org/