ABSTRACT
By now you have spent a lot of time launching and recording various Session clips and rows of clips with Scenes. This has, no doubt, been a fun and inspiring time, but not without limitations. Although there are an unlimited number of ways to use Scenes, the one thing you can’t do with Scenes is launch only a selection of clips (multiple tracks) within the same Scene all at once when they are part of a larger row of clips. The only way to launch clips in a Scene is either one at a time or the whole Scene. Now, you could come up with a few workarounds to launch some clips and not others, but that’s not an efficient way to spend your creative energy. That’s what Group Tracks can do. With Group Tracks, it becomes possible to launch multiple clips within a Scene separately from within the Scene. Therefore, you can treat a multi-track instrument—the drum kit analogy or stacked vocal recordings—as a single track with a single Launch button. Groups may not be revolutionary themselves considering the concept of groups is a common everyday feature in other music production software, but Live’s Group Tracks are a quite unique and really make non-linear music production viable and successful because they are tracks, not just groups. To that end, Live’s Group Tracks have some convenient features. Whereas groups usually serve as an organizational tool and a method for global mixing and editing, in Live they also function as pseudo audio tracks or track containers, meaning that they come complete with mixer controls and the ability to host audio effects. This makes them great for submixing and for control over groups of tracks. Does this sound a bit like an Aux track to you? Just a bit! There are definitely some similarities, but more like a mutant super hero aux track! In a more practical sense, Group Tracks are great for organizing your workflow environment. They will come in handy for hiding all of those tracks that can get in your way when working with a large Live Set.
