Lots of people play violins. If you pick up a violin for the first time – whether it was an expensive instrument or not – it’ll sound really awful. So, given that music played on laptops is still music, it seems reasonable to assume that it’ll take practice, and that not everyone will do things the same way. There are technicalities to learn, of course – just as with a violin. But there’s also a combination of repetitive effort with originality. Your computer software may not be nearly as elegant a design as a centuries-old acoustic instrument, but some of this surely still applies.

Go out to clubs or concert halls now, and you’ll find musicians and DJs from a broad variety of genres playing live with software. Often, they’ll use Ableton Live, the one product that suggests live performance right in its name. Live is a good place to start, because its Session View is a kind of meta-view of music itself, with patterns, scenes, and interaction. Those clip slots can be played like a “sampling instrument,” and additional instruments can be added to channels. Playing the software requires a combination of performance and composition, even for DJs.

But the one elusive thing about Live is just how to deal with that Session View. There’s plenty of talk in the manual about how everything works, but not what that means musically. You can store clips in channels, but you can only play one clip per channel at once. How do you keep the number of resulting channels manageable? How do you control different musical changes? How do you avoid touching the mouse or squinting at the screen? And, at the simplest level, how do you manage the complexity of clips and channels so that you can perform a set from beginning to end and have a good time?