The Bridge: Perform your Beats

The Bridge gives you turntable-style control of your own multitrack productions. Simply drag an Ableton Live Set to a deck in Scratch Live and use your turntables or CDJ to control the transport. Scratch Live enhances your productions with deck control, mixing, nudging and DJ style looping, while you can remix, mute/solo tracks, use virtual instruments, change drum patterns, manipulate audio, tweak effects and launch loops on the fly in Ableton Live.

A window into Live

Activating the 'Ableton view' in Scratch Live opens a window into Live's Session View, where you can launch clips and scenes, control instruments and devices, mix, mute and solo from Scratch Live.

The Ableton view displays critical information from your Ableton Live Set, including:

  • Clips, including clip name, color and play buttons
  • Track levels
  • Level meters
  • Sends A and B
  • Device control for effects
  • Track solo and mute

Integrate Ableton Live Sets into your Serato mix
When both programs are open, an Ableton Live Transport Track appears in your Serato library. Drag this onto a deck in Scratch Live, then use the deck to control Ableton Live's tempo and playback.

Control Live's tempo with Scratch Live
Change the tempo of your Live Set, nudge the transport position and loop Live's transport, all from the comfort of your Serato Scratch Live interface.

See your bars and beats
Serato's Main Waveform Display gives you a visual indicator of bars and beats, so you can correctly line up the downbeat of your Live Set to a track playing on Scratch Live's virtual deck.

Locked to the groove
Free up a deck in Scratch Live by syncing your Live Set to one of the decks. This now controls playback of your Ableton Live Set, which is automatically locked to the groove and timing of the track on that deck. This is a great way to drop in spot samples, vocal drops, one-shots and additional instrumentation over your DJ set.

Intelligent audio routing
When you control an Ableton Live set with a deck in Serato Scratch Live, an audio tunnel is created from Live's master output to the Scratch Live hardware. Ableton Live's audio is intelligently routed to match the deck you are using to control transport. No secondary audio interface is needed.

Play hard(ware)
Apart from your Serato hardware, using an additional dedicated controller such as the Akai Professional APC40, APC20 or Novation Launchpad opens up your game for more mixing, effects handling and for triggering clips.

Tight communication
Behind the scenes, Ableton and Serato have implemented a two-way communication link to connect the programs. The timing is tight and it doesn't matter which program you open first.