BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Bill Holland. I'm here with Danny Livewire, "The Livewire".

DANNY LIVEWIRE: How do you do internet world? I am "The Livewire" as he said.

BILL HOLLAND: And we're going to talk about real quick how to lay down some tracks on a basic level in the studio using Ableton Live and Novation X-Station.

DANNY LIVEWIRE: We have the Novation X-Station. It's a great piece of gear because it incorporates not only a keyboard that's a smaller keyboard but it gets the job done. It has an FM synthesizer built in and it's also a sound card which performs marvels via USB. So, what we're going to do is we're going to lay down some tracks in Ableton Live and we're going to start by loading up a drum beat and playing some synth sounds around it, recording the synth sounds and figuring out what we like and what we don't like.

BILL HOLLAND: Alright, let's do it.

DANNY LIVEWIRE: Alright, we’re going to run through right now with Ableton Live and the Novation X-Station. We're going to run through how to record into Ableton Live. It's very straightforward, very simple, so check it out while I do it.

Right now, I just loaded up a loop into there [PLAYS LOOP], and what you really want to do is you want to make sure you have everything set correctly. So I have -- in the audio section, I have my external ins set up and I got them set up for 1 and 2 on the Novation X-Station. The Novation is not only a sound card but also a synthesizer, and whatever I play through here you can see it when it gets armed, hit record to arm the channel, and I have the monitor set to off right now because if I didn't you would get a delay effect [PLAYS SYNTH], and the delay effect simply sounds like this [PLAYS SYNTH WITH DELAY EFFECT], and it's really confusing to have a delay effect and record at the same time so we don't want that.

Starting over, I'm going to load up the first break, hit play, and then play a riff. [RECORDS RIFFS AND PLAYS BACK TRACKS] I kind of got some kind of magic within all of that garbage and so I'm going to go through it right now and find the magic. So, we flip over to the multitracking part of Ableton Live, and I think there was something good around the third verse that I played, so let's play it and find out [PLAYS TRACKS].

It sounds like it's kind of off right now so I'm going to adjust it, figure out what went wrong there. I moved it over slightly and then I'm going to restart and see how it sounds [PLAYS TRACKS].

I think right around here we have the best part, so I'm going to loop it and find out [PLAYS LOOPS]. Just set the loop...[PLAYS TRACKS AGAIN].