Write your songs on a guitar, piano or with a band and practice the songs until you have mastered them. The most important part of recording albums is the performance. Although bad production can ruin a good performance, even the production power of Ableton Live cannot salvage a bad performance.
Record your basic performance one instrument at a time in Ableton Live using a digital I/O. A digital I/O, or digital in-and-out, is an interface that works with Ableton Live to record high-quality performances. Using your computer's microphone or line-in jack will result in poor-quality audio. To record audio in Ableton Live, enter the "Mix" screen by selecting the circle with the horizontal lines in the upper-left corner. Then set the audio track's input sources to your digital I/O. Arm the track to record by selecting the red "Record" icon and then select "Record" and "Play" in the transport window.
Mix your recordings by applying equalization, reverb and other effects to each individual track of your recording. Ableton Live comes packaged with a wide variety of effects and tools for mixing; these tools are listed under the plug icon on the left-side tool bar. Expand the mixing tools and then switch to the "Mix" screen by selecting the icon of the horizontal lines on the right side of the screen. Drag-and-drop the mixing effects you wish to employ onto each individual track and tweak until you obtain a suitable sound.
Master your tracks by using the mastering tools such as limiters and EQ included with Ableton Live. Expand the "Mastering" tools folder located under the icon of the plug on the left side of the screen and drag-and-drop the desired tools onto the recording's master track. With mastering, less is more, so apply a small amount of compression and tweak the overall EQ of the track to taste. Render the song as a WAV file with File > Render. Repeat Steps 1 through 4 for each individual track on your album.
Normalize all the tracks of your album in Ableton Live's multtrack view. Enter Ableton Live's track view by selecting the icon with the horizontal lines on the far right. Navigate to the individual tracks of your album by using the "Explorer" window on the far left of the screen. Drag-and-drop each track of your album to its own unique audio track and arrange the songs in the order you prefer on the time line. Adjust the volume of each track so that each track has the same peak in the master volume control.
Render the entire album as a single WAV file with File > Render. Select 16-bit, 44,000 Hz CD-quality from the drop-down menu of the "Render" screen. Albums are copied from single WAV forms and the track breaks are inserted by CD-authoring software.