This Ableton tutorial walks through the foundational concepts of Session View, starting with what a clip actually is: audio or MIDI, as short as a single drum hit or as long as a full song, and playable either as a one-shot or a looping region. Importing a clip is as simple as dragging it from the browser, and Live automatically creates a new track for it.
Triggering multiple clips in sequence reveals one of Session View's most practical features: Global Quantization. Rather than starting immediately on press, each clip waits for the next quantization boundary, keeping everything locked in time without any manual effort.
The Track Status display at the bottom of each track gives you a live readout of where you are in a clip, how many times it has looped, and how many beats long it is. Switching a clip from loop to one-shot mode changes that display to a countdown in seconds, which is a useful way to see exactly when a clip will stop playing.