Transcripts
1. Introduction: we've made for you. Here is the most comprehensive, able to live program we could imagine. It's designed to take you from novice to pro. It'll have project files, instrument downloads, special guests in a lot more. I've divided this class into six different sections so that you can focus on what you want to learn right away. However, to really take full advantage of the program, start at the beginning and go to the end. Or at least make sure you take all the sections. At some point, this is class to recording in warping. In this class will be looking at how you can record in live everything from a single microphone to a full band. We'll talk about what hardware you need, including microphones, audio interfaces, things like that and things you should be considering for the instruments your recording, like Mike Placement and Mike stop. We'll also start to explore the effects built into able to live. After that, we'll look at our Mideast set up. We'll make sure that we're set up to allow for a MIDI controller or a keyboard into able to live, and then we'll work on how to record overdub and arrange with a Midi keyboard or any instrument. Then we'll move on. The warping warping is the powerful audio engine underneath live. But let's just manipulate time so that everything stays in sync. There's some tricks to learning that just right, and we're going to spend a lot of time on that in this class as well. This loop is at 1 40 DPM Okay, it's significantly faster. I know that cause it's written into the filing, so let's add that in might be most tempted to get one of these. So this is called a snowball microphone, and it's made by the company Blue, which makes great microphones. However, this is a USB microphone. It goes out of control surfaces that I've had connected to my version of life. I have had a push a push to and this thing called remote SL Classic to make sure that doesn't hit the top. I want a little bit of room at the top, Yet I can also look right here on the one, even though a super time, waiting to hear in order to tell it that we're paying attention to session, you know. So here's what we have
2. What We Will Cover: All right, everyone, let's talk first about what we're going to cover in this class and how we're gonna go about covering it. Now, I've divided this big topic of recording in live into three topics. So we're going to start by talking about audio recording, and then we're gonna move on to Midi recording, and then we'll talk about warping. So audio recording is what most people think about when they think about recorded, right. Especially when you're sitting in a studio in front of live and or any audio software and you think about recording. You're thinking about audio recording. And that means like, my microphone is recording my voice right now. For example, uh, any acoustic sound in the world that we can capture and put into the software is audio recording. So in order to do that, um, there's a good bit of hardware that we need to talk about as well that lives outside of lives. So we need to talk about in audio interface microphones. Where to put your microphones and things like that primarily we're gonna be talking about how to do what that sound. In live, however, we are gonna work. Um spend some time going over all of that hardware stuff is, Well, then we're gonna move on and talk about MIDI. Recording a MIDI recording works a lot different than audio recording. That's like playing an instrument Amidi instrument, like a keyboard that you might have available. Or like a push controller. If you've worked with those before, uh, and recording that data into love, Um, in some respects it's a lot easier. And in two du Midi recording, and in some respects it's a lot more finicky. So it's a whole different kind of animal, but it is recording. It does also require a little bit of hardware, but not much, not as much as audio recording. Um, and then the third kind of big topic we're gonna work with is warping. A warping is the way that a Bolton live keeps everything in sync. So what that means is that if we have an audio file, if we have to audio files of let's say drumbeats, for example, and there at different tempo, how does live? No, to play them perfectly in sync with each other, right? An audio file is going to be hard to get to just play at the same speed. Right? Um, in the old days, we would do this with we'd have two turntables and we'd slow one record down and get it to beat match with the other record, right? We have a slightly better ways of doing, actually kind of wildly better ways of doing that in life, right? Ah, the computer can do a lot of not for us do that beat matching for us. But knowing how it works will let us kind of craft it to help the computer to sound better . And also, we can kind of manipulate those settings to do some cool sound design tricks. Uh, so it's very, very important Element of live is warping. So we're gonna spend the kind of last third of this class on warping. Okay, So without further ado, let's dive into ah audio recording
3. Intro To Audio Recording Fundamentals: All right, here we go into audio recording. Um, in this section was start by getting us a new set. Let's start from scratch. How we We don't need say that, um, in the section, uh, we're gonna talk about a couple different things. We're going to talk about the hardware. We need, um, to do audio recording. Well, and the includes microphones. We're gonna talk about microphone placement and how all that works. How you should have lives set up to do recording. Well, uh, multi tracking and we'll be talking about recording and session view and arrangement. View the two different sides of it doing multi tracking, overdubbing all that stuff in this section. Now, one quick thing I want to point out before we go any farther is kind of mile of philosophy on recording. It was true that for much of history, if you wanted to do professional audio recording, you had to spend time renting a big recording studio. And you've all seen these pictures of, you know, the classic big works courting studio set up. But, um, you can do that same recording that seem quality of recording at home in your bedroom with a laptop now, Um, tools like live made it very possible to do that. The only big difference is that it's harder to record. Um, big ensembles. And what I mean is like a four piece band all at once. It's harder. It's hard to do that without one of those big studios, but it's not impossible. But any means. It's just a matter of space and acoustics, really. But if you're recording one instrument at a time, and definitely if you're producing electronic music and want to add, you know two or three elements that are acoustic and you want to record them, you can get totally professional recording sound in just by working in your bedroom in life . Ah, and in order to do that, you need to know the things that I must tell you. So let's talk in, Shall we? Um, let's go into Ah, our hardware needs So something. Some things we need to know about the hardware of recording
4. Hardware Needs: Okay, let's talk about the hardware. You need to do some recording. Um, Now, what you probably know is two things that you're going to need to do. Recording. You're gonna need a computer. Running some kind of recording software live is pretty great. Bet, uh, and you're gonna need a microphone, right? Those are two things that you definitely need. However, there's 1/3 thing that you need in there somewhere. Also, uh, and let me explain what that is and why you need it. Let's first talk about microphones a little bit. Then we'll talk about more more about microphones in a minute. Um, I have a couple different microphones here, so these are three different kinds of microphones. Um, you might be most tempted to get one of these. So this is called a snowball microphone, and it's made by the company Blue, which makes great microphones. However, this is a USB microphone. It goes out USB into a computer. So when I talk about this kind of microphone, I'm talking about USB microphones. Okay, Um, not specifically this one, but all USB microphones. Um, that's an option. And, uh, usually not a great option. I've recently gone back on this a little bit because I did get one of the actually, one of the blue microphones. Ah, not this model, but a newer model. That was actually pretty great. Um, it was called the Yeti. The Blue Yeti. It was a ah USB microphone, and it sounded pretty fantastic, actually. But typically, USB microphones don't sound that great. Um, so And let me explain why the reason is that a fairly complicated process has toe happen in order for a microphone to get into your computer. What it is is it's an analog to digital conversion. So to convert an analog signal like me talking an acoustic signal which is like wave forms in the air, to convert that to a digital signal is a fairly complicated thing. And when you have a USB microphone, the little computer that needs to do that conversion is in this microphone. Little tiny, not very powerful computer. That's not doing a super great job of that conversion. Right? Um, so typically, these USB microphones aren't awesome. However, there are some that are pretty good. So let's put that aside for now. More common is to use a microphone that looks more like this or like this. And, um, what I'm talking about here is that it has a three pin connector on the other end of it. So that means you're going to use a cable like this. It's going to have these three pin connectors on either side. Now, this presents a problem. These are professional microphones. They're not USB. They use this. This is called an Excel, our cable. Now, our problem is, if I plug this cable into this microphone, where do I plug this three pin connector search all around on your computer? You're not gonna find a slot that lets you plug this into your computer because, um, the computer doesn't want to do that conversion that I was just talking about for you. You need something else that can do that conversion. So, um, what we're going to use is a what we call an audio interface. Here's one. What this does is it has some places I comply gin microphones, and it has something that can plug into the computer. In this case, it's a FireWire interface. This is a bit old. Ah, this particular one. It's one that was just sitting on my shelf. Um, that I don't use anymore. Um, it's actually kind of a crappy one. I'll talk more about that in a second, but, uh, this will let me plug in the microphone. This box will do that conversion for us and then send it to the computer as a digital signal. So? So an audio interface is a digital converter. Get now, the quality of the digital converter of the audio interface does matter. You can get cheap ones that, uh, don't sound great. And you can get really expensive ones That do sound great when you go to a professional recording studio and you see a big rack of blinky lights. Ah, good chunk of that rack is probably their audio converters. Right. So Ah, this one, this is the M audio Pro Fire 6 10 Um, it's OK. It's not great. Um, not so much in the audio quality. The audio quality was okay. I didn't notice anything terrible about it, but, uh, it was just really unreliable and buggy. I didn't like it a lot. This software that it needed to drive it was not great. Um, I typically like stuff made by a company called Motew Motu. They make a bunch of good stuff. Um, but I recently switched to a company called Apple G. A P O G. E said that's what I'm using right now. So this microphone is plugged into this apple G unit, which is then plug, which is right over there off camera, which is then plugged into my computer. So? So the next question you're probably thinking is Do I really need one of these boxes? These range from this one, I think, is probably about 250 bucks, maybe 300 bucks. Um, the one I'm using over here is about 1000 bucks. Ah, and they range in that range. They could go a lot higher than that. They could go lower than that, but I wouldn't buy anything lower than that. Um, do you really need one? The answer is, if you're going to use professional microphones than like this, then yeah, you do. Um, you do need a box in audio interface. If you want to use USB microphones and risk it on those, you don't need one of these. Um, now there's one other element that thes do not only do I plug in my speakers for my microphones here, but I'm gonna plug my speakers into the back. So this is going to take in analog sound and converted to digital that goes to my computer . It's also gonna take digital sound from my computer and convert it back to analog signal that I can send to my speakers. So it's got outputs here that go to my speakers. Okay, That's why when I go into the live preferences and look at my audio output device, I haven't set to quartet. That's the unit that I'm using. Apple G is the company. Quartet is the model, so that is my input. And my output device is this quartet. Okay, so you need one of these hardware interfaces. If you're going to use professional microphones, anything that has an XLR cable, you need to be able to plug it in to one of these boxes. Um, if you're gonna be doing professional recording one of these boxes would be better. Um, this also limits how many things we can record at once. This has to mic inputs means I can record two different microphones at once. It also has a few line inputs actually has eight line inputs in the back. A line input is like instrument. Like a guitar or something like that. My microphone inputs are here. Line inputs are here. There's a slight difference between those. We'll go over that at a later date. Um, so I could record up to eight things at once with this, But that's a lot of processing power that I don't think this box has. So I don't know if I trusted to do that. This quartet that I'm using is more expensive, but I can actually only record four things at once with that, um, but it's gonna be recorded at a higher quality. Okay, so that's the box. Um, so one more time. The hardware stuff. You need a computer. Some microphones are just one microphone will do. And an audio interface if you're going to use exile, our microphones, um, one other trivial, inexpensive thing you might want to get is something called a pop filter. This is something I always forget to mention. So I'm like, pointing it out right now. Pot filter is this little squishy thing right here. I could demonstrate what it does. Um, this basically catches all of your, uh, hard air. Sounds like when you use words like that, start with a P. You know, your mouth spits out like a bunch of air to make a p sound. It's put your hand in front of it. Every time you hear you feel air hit your hand. That's air you don't want going directly into your microphone, right, cause it's gonna sound like this, right? You don't let that sound. So we use one of these just to catch that area, just like a piece of foam that goes over your microphone. If you're in a pinch, you can use a, uh, old sock or two. We want one that doesn't, uh, inhibit the sound. You know, we want We want all our frequencies to come through the microphone, but not all that air. So that's what the's do. They catch the air. So if I was to say, Peter Piper picked pickles sounds pretty. Okay, I take this off. Peter Piper picked pickles. You might be getting a little bit of that popping. I'm looking at my meter That says my volume, and it doesn't look like it clipped. Peter Piper picked pickles. It's getting pretty close, though, so Ah, pop filter is always a good thing to use. Especially when you're recording vocals. Um, and even more. So I've learned recently when you're recording rappers, you kind of need a pot filter for a good rapper recording. Okay, so I think that pretty much brings us up to speed on the hardware needs that we have. I should point out, I have in the past taught a two semester college class on essentially what we just covered . Well, what we're gonna cover in the next maybe five videos. Um, so this is a big, big topic. Um, and there are a lot of nuances toe how to do this. I still do teach that to semester long college class on it. So, um, keep that in mind that this is, um there's a lot to learn here, and we're going to kind of quickly scraped the surface on the main things that you need and how to get set up and working quickly. That being said, let's jump over and talk about how we set everything up to get the best recording
5. Hardware Setup: Okay, let's talk about what we need to do in this software for this all to work together. Um, let's start by going to our preferences in live. Okay? So we're gonna go to audio and an audio input device. Now, if you have an audio interface, you're going to see it here. So input is quartet. I could also actually use my webcam as an input because it has a little microphone built into it. Now, that's USB. Uh, and it's farther away, so it's gonna be a cheap microphone that's going through a cheap converter. Um, so I wouldn't want to do that unless I'm just trying to record some sound quick, you know, and I don't care about the quality of it. This is gonna be the higher equality. So let's leave that eso What I've got for that toe work is I can go to this input config. So this tells me all my possible inputs. Okay. Now, anything that's yellow I've turned on. So I have channels one and two turned on. So that means that these are my first and second channels on the quartet my Apple G unit and they're both turned on okay. And Aiken Kind, I think I can name I'm here. Yeah, but I need to. I also have them turned on again. The same two inputs as a stereo. Input on what that means is that I can record individually channels one and two separately , or I can record them at the same time as a single stereo track. We're gonna talk more about that in just a minute. Um, well, actually, let's talk about that now. So if I'm recording something like just my voice, I would want to record that as a single microphone on a mono track, because it's just one thing. But if I was recording like a, um I don't know a drum set, for example. And I wanted to do it without I wanted to do it as quickly as possible. I might just put two mikes overhead of the drum set to record the entire sound of the drum set. It's not a great way to record a drum set, but it'll do in a pinch. In that case, I would record those as one stereo, track both microphones so I can turn on mawr inputs because I have up to 12 inputs on this , But what I basically have is four microphone inputs and then eight line inputs. Okay, so I don't want to turn all those on because I don't need him right now. I don't think there's any harm in turning them all on. The difference would be that it makes this list here a little more cumbersome. Right now, all I see is my two mic inputs and my one stereo input. If I turned a bunch more stuff on there, then I would have a bunch more stuff in that list that I don't need because really, all I'm recording right now in my home studio is stuff where I need one or two microphones . So I'm gonna leave those other ones off for now. So my microphone, and right now, the microphone I'm using is this one that I had the pop felt Iran on my desk. This is a good vocal microphone. Um, this is a shure, sm 58. If you want to look that up, it's kind of the standard vocal microphone that you use for everything. Uh, not everything, but it's been around forever. It's a super reliable. It's if you were to, like, ask a kid to draw a picture of a microphone. This is the microphone. They drop picture of its, you know, kind of the most standard one. Um, so this microphone is going through an XLR cable into my apogee quartet, which is my audio interface, and that is plugged in through Ah, I think it's a USB cable, but it's a USB three cable, so it's very fast, uh, into my computer. So that's why it's showing up here. And then my speakers are also plugged into my quartet, which is why it says Audio Output Device Quartet. You might have it set to built in output. Um, this gives me some other stuff. I have three displays hooked to my computer, which have a little speaker built in I don't want to use. It's not very high quality. I also have this pro tools thing in here that has thinks it has a speaker built in, but it doesn't really, um, during about that quartet is what I want, right, because that's where my speakers air plugged in. Okay, now let's talk about some of this other stuff are sampling right, so the sampling rate is how many little tiny pictures of the sound per second are we going to capture? Okay, this is a fairly complicated, uh, concept. So you might think you want that as high as possible to get the highest quality. 192,000. Um, not necessarily. 44,100 samples per second is the standard what we call CD audio. So if you got ah, compact disc, you bought something on a CD? That's the sampling rate. All of that sound is running at It's pretty good. Um, we can record higher or lower. Um, my audio interface isn't gonna let me record lower than that. 48. What standard on a DVD these days, and we could go all the way out. We could double it. Go to 88 to 96,000. Um, here's where you're gonna have. Well, you're gonna have diminishing returns anywhere above 48,000. You're going to start recording really big audio files, and they're not gonna sound noticeably better than 44 1 You know, they might sound a little bit better. However, the opposite side of that argument is that recording something at a higher sampling rate and then reducing the sampling rate to something lower can be done quite easily. Recording something at a lower sampling rate and making it converting it to a higher sampling right after it's recorded is no bueno. We don't want to do that because, um were then asking the computer to guess and guess guessing for a computer is not good. It means that there will be glitches and bad things that occur so we can't go higher, but we can't go lower. So that says, you should record at a higher sampling rate because you can always record it down. Um, I like sitting at 48,000 for what I do. Uh, if I was recording like a lot of string instruments like an orchestra, I might go 88 to I don't think I've ever recorded at 96 or above. So I'm gonna set mind. 48,000 kept, so that should be good for now. So it's closed that Now let's check that we're getting a signal in from our microphone, so I'm gonna go to an audio track. I'm going to set external in because my microphone is an external thing, right? It's coming from outside of the software that I'm going to set what microphone we're looking for and we can see here what's coming in. We can see that there's nothing coming in on Channel two because I don't have a microphone plugged into it. Channel One, there is something coming in and the stereo pair something is coming in on Channel one, but not two. So I don't want to use stereo. I want to use mono. Okay, so I can armless to record and see what's happening. You can see my signal coming in here and it's grayed out. That's because the monitor mode is set off. So I think I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here. What this tells me right now is that signal is coming into this channel. I can see it here, and I can see it here because I've armed it to record by hitting this button. This is the arm to record were not recording, Just means were ready to record. And when we do record, we're gonna record on this track. That's what that red button means. So we need to talk about monitor modes. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about microphones, so let's put a little pause on monitor modes and let's talk about microphones for a minute .
6. Microphones: okay. There are two main kinds of microphones that we use for audio recording that there's a bunch of other kinds of microphones as well. But the two main ones that we use for studio recording are called dynamic microphones and condenser microphones. The other kinds there are kind that arm or some that are more designed for theater. There are some designed for atmospheric stuff. There are some that our does are designed for. I don't know what, but we use them in the studio sometimes, but they're more rare, so I don't want to go into them in a ton of detail. There's some that are designed to work underwater. I spent a lot of time working with those this summer. Um, but the two standard kinds that you'll encounter most often are dynamic microphones and condenser microphones. So here are the differences. This one that you're hearing right now is a dynamic microphone. This one is a condenser microphone. So a dynamic microphone, the one you're hearing now, uh, these typically these are more rugged. Um, they can take a beating, their less fragile. Um, they're a bit cheaper in general, and they are more or less less sensitive. Now all three of those things that I just said are kind of generalizations. There are 100 probably 1000 different actual microphones made that are dynamic microphones , right, so this is one called Shure SM 58. It's one of the most common microphone you'll find, but there are a bunch of other type. Are companies that make dynamic microphones. It's not unique to this microphone by any means. So dynamic microphones. They're less sensitive. That can take a beating. Ah, and they're less expensive. This microphone, I think. I think right now they're going for about 100 bucks, 100 and 20 bucks, something that for a new one, um, they've been around forever. Um, now you might think, Why would I want to like That's less sensitive. The reason is, if you're recording something like drums, this is a good microphone to throw in front of a kick drum where it's just gonna be like pounding, pounding, pounding. Uh, you can kind of set these and forget it some of the time. A lot of the time, Um, you don't have to worry about getting hit with too much air and cracking the diaphragm of the microphone or anything like that. These are also good for live. We like these as live mikes because they can really take a beating. You can spill beer on him, and more or less they'll usually be okay. Um, you can throw him around. These are great live vocal Mike's. They're also just in general. I like him for studio recording. Mike's. Sometimes we record with more, um, sensitive microphones in the studio, but for vocals. I like these, um, in the studio, especially for rappers. Like I was saying before, um, you get a good vocal tone out of them pretty well, uh, so to contrast that condenser microphones like this one in a couple different things. They're basically opposite of the three things I just said about this one. Typically, they're a bit more expensive. Typically, they're a bit more sensitive. Um, and typically, they're a bit more fragile. So these Ah, you wouldn't want to put in front of a bass drum and just pound pound pound because you could it could break. You wouldn't want to use this live because you could ah, break it. Um, you could You wouldn't want to spill beer on it and throw it around at a live show. Ah, it's more fragile. However, there are some condenser microphones that are, um, more rugged that can be used live. They are also much more sensitive. So, um, for right now the reason I'm using a dynamic microphone and not a condenser microphone is because I don't want you to hear my dog chewing on her bone in the next room over my proximity to the airport, which hopefully you haven't noticed in watching these videos. Ah, and you know, when my heater kicks on in my house, Hopefully, all these sounds you're not hearing because I'm using on a less sensitive microphone. If I use these, you probably would be able to hear all those things. In fact, I suppose I should just prove that talking to pause the video, switch microphones and come back. Okay, here is the other microphones set to the same volume as my previous one. So it looks like that's pretty hot, so I'm gonna turn it down a little bit. Check 12 Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check, Check. Okay, that looks a little bit better. Um still looks like it's peaking. Okay, that looks a little bit better, so you can probably hear more nuance to my voice. Um, you can hear probably more upper frequencies. More just general, maybe the fan of my computer humming a little bit. There's not just missed a plane flying over when I was switching microphones. Um, in fact, I was still recording, and, uh, as I was saying, you might hear a plane fly over a plane flew over and you put it in here. But if one flew over right now, you probably hear it. And I'm talking like, significantly quieter right now because I can see on my meters that I'm coming close to hitting the top. Ah, and you don't want to do that by hitting the top. I mean, clipping the microphone, getting too loud. We'll talk more about that in a minute. My dog is being very quiet at the moment, and, um, my heater's not on. So it's super quiet in this room right now. Um, but hopefully you can hear quite a significant difference in all the different sounds coming out from this microphone that you didn't hear in the other microphone. right. Okay, um, suddenly switched back. Microphones. All right, we're back to the other microphone now. Um, one thing I didn't mention is that these kind of microphones have one other little wrinkle to them, and that is that they require power. Uh, you have to send these power through the cable, which sounds weird, but it's not that weird if you're using an audio interface, which I guess you kind of have to be. If you're using one of these kind of microphones, you'll see a button on there somewhere called either phantom power or it might be called plus 48 V um, or something like that. You need to turn that on If you're using a condenser microphone because it needs to get power. These you don't need that on. These are powered by pretty much my magnets. Um, they don't require separate power, but these do And what that phantom power is is it's your audio interface sending power back up the cable to give them mike some juice. Um, but you don't want it on if you're using a dynamic mic. And people always ask me if I'm using a dynamic. Mike and I sent it Phantom power. Is it gonna hurt it? Probably not. But, um, it's kind of a waste of power, so don't do that. Um, OK, so, uh, that's what you need to know about microphones now. We could talk for days and months and years about types of microphones, but that will get you in the ballpark. I should mention this one. Isn't microphone that I really do love. Um, this is an audio Technica 80 2020 is a newer mike that came out just last year, I think, and it's it's really sensitive. It's really good for recording some things, Um, and it's really inexpensive for what it is. It's a high quality microphone, uh, at really at around 128 130 bucks. So it's not all that much more expensive than, uh, this dynamic microphone. I'm using the same 58. Uh, so it's quite a good mic, especially for the expense of it. It's relatively cheap for what it is, so it's quite good. I like it, but I don't like it for recording dialogue in these classes. Okay, let's move on and talk a little bit about Mike placement
7. Mic Placement: Okay, let's talk a little bit about Mike placement. This is another thing that is a huge, huge topic and could go on for weeks and months and years. But, um, I'm going to simplify the entire mic placement process by saying what you need to do when you're putting Mike's on an acoustic instrument. Let's say this is my instrument. Is it my microphone? What you need to dio is experiment. So set the microphone up how you think it might work and then record a little bit of that instrument. Listen back, move the microphone. Try it again and you really have to use your ear to find the sweet spot. Okay, now there are a bunch of tricks that you can do that will get you in the ballpark pretty fast. But it's always about finding the sweet spot and using the right microphone. So let me talk about a couple of those tricks quick and in passing. First of all, um no, the pick up pattern of your microphone. You can look this up for any microphone. What the pick up pattern means is that these are engineered to listen in certain ways, kind of like think about your ear, right? Your ear is designed to listen like this, right? Let me face you like that. Okay? That's how your ear is designed to here. So it picks up sound from all over you. If you only have imagine, you only had one year and you're gonna hear sound all around you. But primarily your ears gonna hear louder. What's over here right in this kind of fanning outweigh so microphones air the same way. But some are designed to pick up in all directions around them. Those air called Omni microphones. Some are designed to pick up just what's in front of them, and some are designed Teoh pick up in, like a really narrow field right in front of them. Ah, but going a long way, that would be like a shotgun microphone. It's like Imagine the trajectory of bullet comes out of a shotgun. It's, like, very narrow, um, focused, right? This one has a screen all the way around it. So it would appear you would guess that it's an omni microphone is picking up sound all the way around it. That's not actually true. Um, this is what's called a cardio oId microphone, I believe. Yeah, this is a cardio and microphone, which means it picks up in a pattern in front of it going out and kind of shaped like a heart. Okay, so that's why it cardio aid, like cardiac cardio, it get it shaped like a heart. Um, so if you look close at this microphone, it does say right here it says back. So that's important to know on this particular microphone, it does have a front in the back. So if we want to pick up the best with this microphone, we're gonna put something in the space in front of it. We're gonna make sure that Mike is facing front. Um, and that's how we're going to set up our instrument, right? If it was an omni microphone and be picking up in all directions evenly. But this is not some microphones have a switch on them that will let you switch between cardio oId omni. Um, hyper cardio. There's a couple different ones. Uh, so I know what the pick up pattern is. And make sure that you're in there with it. Also know how sound resonates from whatever you're recording. If you're recording a voice sound resonates this way, right? That's pretty easy. But if you're recording, for example, a saxophone, I know that look up. Howe sound comes out of a saxophone. You might be surprised. Saxophones look like they have a bell right on. All the sound comes out of the end of that bell. That's not exactly true on a saxophone. A lot of sound comes out of that bell, but also a lot of sound comes out of the key holes. So miking it half way up. It's not a bad place to see if you're getting a good sound. Um, a flute. You don't put a microphone at the end of a flute all the time. Sometimes you can, Um, but you might just get a bunch of air out of that. Putting it over the keys might be better, but you also might get a whole bunch of noise of the keys clicking. So you have to experiment and see, uh, what the sweet spot is. Okay, so, again, this is another thing that we could go off on and talk about for a year. But as a general rule, just be sure your using your ear and listening to what you're recording and experimenting and trying to find the sweet spot of what you're listening to.
8. Monitor Modes: okay, up next. Let's talk. Let's get back to talking about monitor modes and monitoring. What we're talking about here is when you're recording what the software is playing back, so we want live to be recording and maybe depending on our set up playing back what we're recording. You have a couple different options here, right? We could have it be playing back through the speakers. What? We're recording live, you know, Like it directly playing it back. We could tell it to do that. We could tell it to playback everything except what we're hearing, or we could tell it to playback. Nothing. Um, and this is an important concept because, uh, doing this wrong leads to feedback. And feedback is dangerous and bad. It's bad for your equipment. It's dangerous for your ears. Let's do it. So if I have this microphone plugged in right here, um and I'm armed to record. These three buttons are our monitor modes. Right now, monitoring is off. That means that this microphone all sound coming into this channel is not going to automatically go back out my speakers, right? If it did, then I would generate feedback or come very close to it. So what feedback means is there's sound coming out of the speakers. That sound is then going into the microphone, which is then coming out of the speakers, which is then going into the microphone, out in, out, in, out, in, out, in. And it gets a little louder every cycle until it just goes, move and it gets super loud and it feedbacks, Um, and it's really loud. So if I turn this to in, that's what's gonna happen. Um, let's try it. Jack Jack. Nicely done. OK, so it didn't feedback because my speakers are pointed this way and my microphone is pointed this way. If I would have turned my microphone a little bit to pick up the speaker better or I would have been using a more sensitive microphone. It would have started this cycle, but I could feel it right on the danger zone of starting, so it's very delicate and you don't want to do that. So if you're recording something and there's sound coming out of your speakers of what you're recording, you are in danger of creating significant feedback. So that's why we have monitor modes. We have three we have off off means it is not going to play the sound that's coming into this channel. That's the best place to be. Right, Um, all these other channels are still gonna play, and that's gonna be fine. Auto means that it is going to play through when we're recording, but it's not going to when we're not recording. So I'm armed to record here. So auto right now is going to sound through check. Check? Yes, it is coming through. So, um, auto is gonna play through. But if I take arm to record off, it's not going to come through. Whereas it still does if I go to in but on auto, it's not playing through right now because I turned off arm to record. But once I'm armed is coming through, um, and means it's always coming through. Okay, so here's the rule. Leave it on off. If sound is coming out of your speakers, put it on Auto. If you're wearing headphones, it's totally okay. If you're wearing headphones, you're not gonna create feedback from your headphones to your microphone unless you have your headphones cranked up stupid, loud. And if you dio, you're damaging your ears anyway. So feedback isn't gonna hurt you all that much. It's terrible thing to say, but, um, I guess it's come true. Ah, put it on in. Um, I don't know. There's not a good time to put it on in. Um, I would stay away from just leaving it out in all the time. Maybe when you're checking your microphones, that might be in okay, Put time to put it on, but in general, leaving on off. Okay, so those are monitor modes, they protect our ears, and they protect it from feeding back. You really don't want feedback to happen in your session. Okay, let's get on to actually recording, and, ah, making some sound here.
9. Tracking In Arrangement View: Okay, let's lay down some stuff. So, um, in order to demonstrate this the obvious thing to do, we record my voice. But my terrible singer. So, uh, I'm gonna play some violent. I'm also ironically Ah, terrible violinist. I'm actually kind of a worst violinist, and I am a singer. But for some social reason, it's less embarrassing to play the violin poorly than it is this thing. Poorly. Um, that's interesting. So much. Write a book on that. Anyway, so I have a little drum loops set up here. Get. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna record one note on violin on. Then we're gonna later. When we were gonna build on this track throughout the rest of the class. So we're gonna add a bunch of effects to it and try to get it. Um, basically sound like a synthesizer. So here we go. My monitoring is off arm to record my audio track. Remember, you have to be on an audio track here, and once I turn on this, I should check my levels. I'm gonna record through my talking mike here, which isn't ideal, but it will be okay. Ah, so that level Looks OK. I'm looking right here to make sure that doesn't hit the top. I want a little bit of room at the top yet. I can also look right here on the one, even though a super tiny if it turns red. Then I know I went to loud. Okay, You don't want to turn red. So I'm just gonna record, uh, this little thing, and then we'll see what happens. So I'm gonna hit record, and off we go. Now, one problem we're gonna have is that my speakers are gonna play this drum loop, right? And we're gonna hear that through my microphone. Let me show you. - Okay , so let's listen to what we just recorded. So I'm gonna turn off recording so we can hear that, and I'm gonna hit solo, so we're only hearing what I just recorded. Okay, so we hear that drum loop in the background, right? That's not great. So what I should do is put on headphones. So let's pretend I just put on headphones. What I'm actually going to do is just mute the drum loop, because for what I'm playing, I'm just playing a single note. I don't need to hear it. Um, so here we go again. - Okay . All right. So let's see how we did. It's Turner Drum Loop back on. Okay, that sounds pretty fine. Let's look at what I did at the end, okay? All right. Maybe I don't want that in there. Let's zoom in a little bit. Remember how we zoom? We just get up here and we click and hold down. It's gonna highlight about to their press delete, or that I'm also gonna get rid of this stuff back here, and then I'm going to use our cool new live 10 trick to just fade this in kind of a lot. I'll faded out here, Aziz. Well, I actually want that in a little bit more. Okay. To the end. Okay. Cool. I got so ah, fairly decent wave form here. We could be a little bit louder. Um, I could boost it a little bit, but, um, it's it's a fine volume. We don't want to get too close to the top. We want to leave a lot of room at the top, Not a ton of room, but away form like that is pretty healthy. Pretty strong way for him. Okay, so up next, let's talk about multi tracking an arrangement view
10. Multitracking In Arrangement View: Okay, So if I was going to multi track in this what that means is record multiple instruments at once. You might want to do this. Um, So let's add another audio track that was command T. So I have two audio tracks. I can record these separately through my separate inputs if I wanted to. So I can set this one to record to Mike too. Okay. And then the trick here is that by default, able tonight only wants you to arm one of these to record at a time. When ever I click one, the other one shuts up. Right? If you want a multi track command click. Okay, Arm to at once to record. Now, we're listening to our input one and are input to I don't know, anything plugged into input to. So I can't really demonstrate this exactly. But what's gonna happen when I hit record here is we're gonna record on both tracks. One and two. Actually, I could do it way. Okay. So what are we hearing here? Here. We can see a signal. Right. We're seeing the signal of the drums coming through my microphone right here. Right. And here we're seeing nothing because there's no microphone plugged into that channel. So that's how we can record multiple things at once. You can record as many things as you have channels for if I do this with, I have four tracks armed to record, but I only have two inputs set up right now. Remember, I could go back into my hardware settings and turn on more inputs, which my audio interface has, Um, and that could be okay, but I don't want to do that, Um, because I don't have four things, a record. But if you do have four things, that record or more, Ah, lot of audio interfaces are eight ends, you know, That's kind of the common thing to find, so you could have eight inputs and record eight things at a time. You could go higher than that, too. There's ways to connect multiple interfaces together so you could record 16 32 things that wants. That's what a lot of bigger recording studios have. Um, okay, so that's a multi tracking. Let's go over to, um, session view and talk about tracking there
11. Tracking And MultiTracking In Session View: Okay, so over in session view nothing wildly different Hair just looks different, but everything behaves the same. So I still have my session over here. So, uh, when I hit play, we're gonna hear Turn that violin down. Quite a bit swill. Nauseous. But let's record, uh, let's just record some talking, I guess on audio four here. Okay, The main difference here is that we can record into separate clips very quickly and efficiently. So remember all of these little circles are record buttons because I am armed to record. If I turn that off their stop buns because I have armed to record, I'm gonna mute my drums and violin because I'm just gonna record my microphone here. But I can hit one of these. It's a bloody, bloody, bloody bloody block. Now I could hit the next clip. Bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody blond. I can hit the next clip. It's gonna wait for the downbeat, and then I can go Bloody, bloody blah. Next downbeat, blah de blah de blah, blah, blah and the next downbeat. So it always is waiting for the next downbeat tow launch the next recording of a clip, which is cool if you're trying to make live loops, right, Um, so we can have these automatically loop like I just did, and we could even set it to automatically loop to, like, one bar like that. Cool. If you're trying to make it look cool if you're trying to make a cool, uh, about cool, uh, if you're trying to make it look cool, uh, if you're trying to make it look cool, uh, if you're trying to make it look cool, right. So, um, it's fun for that. You can chop up loops. Each one of these clips can be as long as you want. Um, so you don't have to chop it up into separate loops that are separate clips that way. But you can. And that makes recording in session view rather fun, especially for when you're doing live stuff. We've got like, ah, guitar player who's playing with you on a laptop and you want to record a rift. They dio you can grab it in a clip on and then just start looping it and maybe grab another one and start looping that Ah, and there's really cool things happening with that. Ah, lot of bands doing stuff like that. It's really fun. There's another way to do live looping. That's a little bit more efficient that we'll talk about later when we get into effects and things. Um, but for now, uh, everything else works the same. Pretty much, uh, for recording in session view.
12. Overdubbing: Okay. One more thing with basic recording punching in and out. You may have seen this in other software. Um, what this is is in the old days when we would have to do recording with either tape or digital tape or something like that. Ah, what you had to do was, if you wanted to fix a mistake, you would record. Ah, and you play along with the recording you already made, and then you would punch in. You had basically hit record and then overwrite something you did and then hit it again to stop recording. What that would mean is like, let's say I wanted to fix of this little spot right here, so I would play my note, and then it would I would punch in right here and then punch out right there so that it just recorded over that one little blip. Right? There is much more efficient ways to do that here. So let's fix that little blip. This is what I'm talking about. Let's turn that up a little bit. Okay? Let's see if I can smooth that over. I don't know if it's gonna work very well, but it will be a good example. What I'm gonna do is up here is my punch in and punch out setting. Okay. And when these are on, my Lou brace becomes the punch in and out point. Okay, so I've turned punch in on. So that means that if I start recording right here, it's going to not record anything on this track. That's arm that one to record. Okay, so we're armed on this track. So if I hit record, I'm not gonna before until it hits that point, and then it's going to start recording, okay? I mean, undo that. If I turned the punch out point on also, it's gonna stop recording right there. So what? That means Aiken dio get my violin. Oh, it's broken hair. My bow summer. Um, Okay, now I'm gonna hit record, and I want to start playing. I'm gonna play along with this. It's gonna overdub that I'm gonna try to line it up so that I don't get a reversal of my bow right there. Okay, here we go. We find my spot, all right. Punching it. All right. It worked, but I was significantly quieter, so I'm gonna do it again. I'm gonna get right up on my mic. It worked, but I lost my pitch a little bit. There kind of drifted down, but let's hear it. Let's hear what happened. Pitch went more. Um, that wasn't very good. Let's do it one more time. Like just longer than a bow stroke. But let's hear what we've got. That was terrible. I'm gonna go back to the one I have before through a new Okay, that's the one where the pitch dips a little bit. So I just undid that last recording to go back to the previous one, which was the best of those three takes. I could probably do that all day and still end up with, like, not an amazing thing, because if we jump back to what I said earlier terrible violinist, am I But ah, that'll work. Okay, so that's overdubbing or punching in and punching out. Same thing in this case, we just overdubbed on that line a little bit. Okay with that, let's put a little bit of effects on this. Ah, and see if we can make this line a little bit more interesting.
13. Effects: Okay, so we have a whole big section dedicated to effects later, but I just want to introduce a couple things here. Um, so let's go. Audio effects. And let's do a couple things that I think will sound good on this. Mostly reverb. Let's throw a big, huge reverb on here to go to special you stadiums. I was gonna drop that on there. Now, there's other ways to do reverb. That might be a little bit better, but just for the sake of keeping it simple, let's do that. Ah, I'm gonna add kind of a crazy amount of reverb to it. So I'm gonna put another reverb on here, So let's just hear what we've got. Okay? Very far back and mysterious. That's cool. Um, I think what I'm gonna do is make this a little bit shorter, so I'm gonna get rid of all of this and faded out there. Now, what I'm gonna do is pull it back to here, increase the volume, and I watch this. I'm gonna duplicate this track in the control. Click on it. Duplicate. So now I've got it. Get here twice. Okay. Same effects, same content, same clips, same everything. Everything duplicates. But I'm gonna go into this audio. I'm gonna transpose this to give me Let's do a minor third. That's gonna be four half steps is what that looks like. Let's hear that now and hope I have this one soloed, right? We don't want that was gonna meet my drums so we can hear this. Okay, that's pretty cool. Let's take both of these. I'm gonna option click and drag and put them out. Maybe right here. And let's change the pitch again, shall we? Let's change this to, um Ah, four and this to an eight. It's basically gonna swap. These two will be the same, and then this will be another third above it, okay? And then let's go back down to this one. So I'm gonna option click and drag again. Okay, so now we've created interesting little composition, starting sort of internees up a little bit, cause that river makes him really quiet. Let's see what we've got so far. - Okay . Pretty interesting. My violins sound super creepy, and my drum loop sounds super happy. So I should do something about that drum loop and a great way to do that would be to record in a new drum loop. Ah, using MIDI. So let's move on and talk about MIDI recording in life.
14. MIDI Recording Overview: Okay, let's move on and talk about MIDI recording. So, um, a little recap sort of midi stands from musical instrument digital interface, And what that means is that it's kind of like a protocol is what it is. That's the way to think of it. Think of it like a little language in which Ah, we have a MIDI device. So something like a midi keyboard, let's say, um, and what that many keyboard does is it sends information to able to him that says what note was pressed and how hard it was pressed. And some other things, too. But that's the main stuff. And what live then does with it is, it says Okay, I will now make this sound based on that information, more or less so. The key to remember here is that there is no audio information coming from the MIDI keyboard. The Midi keyboard does not make sound at all. All it does is send information to live. That says what sounds it should make. Okay, so that's why we learned in the first class that you have to put an instrument on a midi track because that's where all the sounds are made is in the instrument. So what we're gonna be doing in this section is talking about how many recording works, how to record stuff from your many devices. We're gonna be looking at a few different many devices. Um, some of the set up that you need to do some of the hardware, set up the software, set up how it works. Ah, and then doing some actual arranging, so let's dive in.
15. Hardware Needs For MIDI: okay. Hardware needs for midi what you need in order to do many recording. Um, the short answer is you could need nothing. You could just do it in the software. You don't need a physical thing. A physical MIDI device to put in hardware notes are to put in midi notes. We could just do this. Let's make a new MIDI track. That's a shift command shift. T. I can double click to make a new MIDI clip. That's, ah, live 10 thing, and then I can look into that and put in many notes. That's the exact same thing that we're gonna be doing here. We're gonna be putting in midi notes just like this, except we can play them on an actual instrument to get them in rather than clicking around . So you don't need an instrument to get MIDI into live right? But we're gonna talk about how to do that on a MIDI instrument right now. So you do need a mini instrument. There are tons and tons and tons of different many instruments. The most common is a midi keyboard. Midi keyboards can range from 100 bucks to something stupid, like a couple 1000 bucks. Um, here's my advice. If you're looking to buy a midi keyboard, um, buy cheap one because there's no rial difference in quality unless you're talking about something that does something kind of weird. But if you're looking at like the M audio keyboards or the um, or any of the other kinds of basic Midi keyboards should be about 100 bucks. Um, and you don't need to get anything fancy there basically a piece of plastic that looks like a little piano keyboard. So don't break the bank on one of these. Now the one thing to look for is make sure it has a USB output. This is the opposite of what I just said about microphones. Old school Midi will have this funny cable that has five pins on it, kind of like the XLR cables that we just looked at for audio have three pins. Midi cables have five pins. However, you probably don't need those anymore. Ah, lot of many devices, most almost all many devices that are have been made in the last seven or eight years. Ah, plug into our computer directly with USB and don't use this five pin connector. You might have a five pin connector coming out of your USB keyboard arvier midi keyboard. But you also should have a USB output. You don't even and if you don't have the five pin connector, that's okay, because you really don't need it anymore. You might need it if you're doing like, a ton of midi stuff, but more or less, you probably don't need it. Um, so we want something that is USB MIDI. That just means it's got a USB cable coming out of the MIDI keyboard. Um, and then you just gonna plug that right into your computer, and then you really kind of should be good to go in terms of hardware. You don't need much else, but there are non keyboard MIDI devices that you could get and play with. For example, there are many guitars. I mentioned those before. Um, there are many drum pads like the push controller or the A. P C 40 is another popular one that's not designed exactly to be a drum pad, but it can work as one. Um, there are. There are there is a midi instrument for just about everything you can imagine. There's many sacks, phones, many clarinets. I've seen many bagpipes. Um, these all get pretty silly, but if you're comfortable playing some instrument, you might as well try to get a MIDI version of it so that you can input notes using that instrument. And what's also cool about that is that you can assign a sound to your MIDI instrument that is totally different than your instrument. If you're playing a midi guitar and you want Teoh, make it sound like an orchestra, just plug it into a live. Put an orchestra instrument on it. And now it's on your playing an orchestra with your guitar, right? It's really kind of fun experience tohave. If you're a guitar player, um, so you can really get any MIDI instrument as long as you can get it to a USB cable, plug it into your computer, and that's all you really need to be able to do this. Um, however, there are some hardware set up things or some software set up things that we need to dio in order for everything to work correctly. So let's get into live and talk about the software in the next video
16. Hardware Setup For MIDI: Okay, So in order for our MIDI devices to get set up correctly, we need to take a visit to our preferences window again. And we're gonna click on this link Midi. Ah, button link is something else that we'll talk about in the future. Link is like how ah, we can get two versions of able tend to talk together or anything else that supports link to talk together for a live performance and recording. It's actually really cool, but that's not what Midi is at. Separate. Um, So here's my MIDI window. We have kind of two windows here. So what this 1st 1 shows me is these are all the control surfaces that I've had connected to my version of live have had a push a push to, and this thing called remote S l classic. Those are not necessarily keyboards. We call him control surfaces because they've got some other parameters that will let me control live in other ways. Some dials, um, some sliders, some things like that. Ah, input. This is showing me which one of them, which ones of them are on. Basically, um, and they're all great out because neither of these three things are connected to my computer right now. Okay, so they're gone. Um, and the output is empty because neither of these except an input. So output doing to them from live is not on. So these are great out cause they're not connected. And that's okay. So those are my control services. These are my MIDI devices. Okay, so here I'm showing three things turned on the bottom one is my quartet. Now, remember, that's my audio interface. My audio interface also is acting as a MIDI interface, which means if I have one of those five pin cables, I can plug it into my audio interface, and it will convert it to a USB signal for me if I don't. If I have an older MIDI device that doesn't ah, have a USB option in it. So this is showing up as being able to handle Amidi. I'm not using it at the moment. Eso I could turn it off, but I'll leave it on for now. The other things I'm seeing here is a I see driver and a I see driver. Now, you should see your device here. If you have something plugged in, you should see it. Mine is working a little differently. My mini keyboard is wireless and it's not connected at the moment. So I'm going to turn it on and you'll see it pop up. Okay, and there it is. It's called Rise 49 you'd see it's connected by Bluetooth. Now it's important here is that we see that there on. Okay. And the track is on. That means it can control midi stuff, sync and remote. We don't need on at the moment. These are other layers of things that it could control. So make sure that your device shows up there and it shows up as track is on. So that's all we need to do for our many set up. Now, another thing you can do is if you just If you're not sure if your many devices on or connected correctly Ah, quick way to tell is move something on your MIDI device. You should see a little dot blink up here. Ah, the top right corner in a yellow box like this. Okay, so you see that little doubt there that's coming up when I move anything on my MIDI device . So I'm on my keyboard just smashing my hands around on stuff and we can see that yellow dot happening. That means that media is getting into live just fine. Okay, so with that Ah, let's move on and kind of look at our data flow of midi. So we understand how it works just a little bit.
17. MIDI Signal Flow: So we did a little bit of this in the first class, but I want to kind of reinforce it, cause it's super important. Um, we're gonna look at what happens when Mini comes into the track and how data flows through . So just to keep things simple, I'm gonna move this audio track up here and then this one up here as well. So now I've got these midi tracks down here. Okay, so let's record something onto this midi track, so I'm gonna press record. So now I've armed this mini track to record, and it's listening to my MIDI device. So now I'm gonna record. Okay, I recorded some notes. Okay, Let's hear them back. Let's solo this. Listen back. Now. What do you think we're going to hear? Nothing, right? We're not going to hear anything because we don't have an instrument on here yet. So if I look down here, I see my midi notes that I made That's all fine. But if I go to down here to this tab where I should see my instruments, I see nothing there. So I need to put an instrument on the track essentially converting the flow of information from data to audio. Here's what we mean. See right here. This shows us data. Okay, so we need that to be audio. Let's go into our instruments and let's just look at a preset for something. Let's go into I don't know analog. And let's find a good like pads on some dark and creepy. Oh, let's use that. I like that bussiness So I can either just double click on this or I can drag it right on the track. I know we have it. So now my track is still armed to record, so if I play my keyboard, I'm gonna hear it because it's playing through this instrument. You can see here. Data coming in, audio coming out. Right? So now if we play our midi track, we will hear it played through that instrument. Cool. Right now, a couple other things to keep track of one of the things that MIDI does. It keeps track of one. A note starts and when a note ends, but not much in between. So typically, if you're in a program and if I was put the cursor right here and hit play, we wouldn't hear that let me do it up here, okay? We wouldn't hear this in any other program. And I'm sorry. This is gonna sound like a little bit of a sales pitch for live right now because it's actually just one of the cool new features of live 10 that I want to point out. We wouldn't hear this because the on has already happened, so we wouldn't hear anything until the next note on. But life has his cool new thing in live 10 ah called Midi trace. And that means that it figures it out. It figures out that problem for us. So even though the note has already started, it knows how to figure out Ah, that a note is going and to continue playing it. So it's not anything you have to worry about anymore. But it is something that I always would have to point out because people would start like, right here and then say, like, Why don't I hear any sound? It's because you had to get the start of the note in when you to your playback in order for it to trigger. But as long as you have this many trace setting on which it is by default, then it won't matter. So let's hear the whole track so far. Okay? That told me something very interesting. These notes that I played here are the same notes happening here. Certainly didn't sound like I did it. That means that my violin was quite a bit out of tune, so I can fix this. The easiest way would be to fix the audio files so I can try to tune these by using this sense tune and see if I can figure out exactly where it is. So is going to take a little bit of experimenting. So I'm gonna pause the video and see if I can tune that audio file. Mm. So, um, what I did is I just kind of went back and forth. Ah, and adjusted the sense of this. So a sense is very fine tuning. There are 100 cents per semi tone, which is what we change here. So I found that this one was 36 cents flat about, um, and again I found that just by, like, listening back and forth and adjusting it until it sounded right. So once I found out this one was 36 cents flat. These are all duplicates of it. Even though these ones are transposed by four steps, there's still 36 cents flat. So I just boosted everything by 36 cents. And now it sounds a little bit better. Okay, cool. So So what I really want to put out here was kind of our MIDI flow right? And how the instrument fits into the equation. With that, let's do a little bit more recording and maybe let's approach this drum loop.
18. Recording MIDI in Arrangement View: Okay, up next. Let's just talk about some drums here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to a drum rack and let's actually just pick one of the drawbacks. Let's do something a little look Crunchy. That's kind of cool. I want something a little industrial sounding to fit with this really dark thing that I've got going on here. So I'm gonna throw this onto a mini track, Okay? Now I have my push plugged in, so I'm gonna use my push. But I could use my MIDI instrument, right? I just have to fund where my notes are. They are, so I need to go down inactive. So I'm playing notes on my MIDI keyboard. No, there's no kick. Okay, so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna play in a beat now. I don't want to hear this. Well, in doing it now, the reason I don't want to hear it just because I just don't want to distract me, So I'm gonna mute it. What? The plow. The problem of bleed that we had when we were audio recording and bleed would be I didn't want the drum track playing while I recorded the violin because it would come through the microphone. That's called Bleed. That problem won't happen with Midi, right? That there's no analog recording here. So I can have everything playing full blast while I'm recording Midi. That doesn't matter, but I don't want that to distract me. But I do want to hear the tempo, right? Someone turn on the Metrodome here. So when I record, you're gonna hear the Metrodome, right? It sounds like that we can change the sound of the Metrodome. Between these three things. This is a classic one click in. Would I like the wood one? Okay, so I'm gonna play in a really simple drumbeat. Okay? I think I know what I'm gonna do. So here we go. Let's give myself a one bar. Count off. What that's going to do is it's gonna play one bar and then start recording. - Okay ? So that snare sample was a little unruly. My velocities were kind of all over the place. Let's fix some of that. So the velocity is down here and what you'll notice is that when I played my kick quietly, it sounds like this like a normal little thump But when I played it loud, it's got a lot of grit to it. So my velocity and the velocity is how loud we played it. And it's measured down here so I can turn them up to make all my kicks That really meaty sound. I'm just gonna turn everything up all the way. So now my snare drum is also gonna be really aggressive. Look, OK, but now there are even next thing I want to do is I'm gonna tighten up this my performance here. You can see how if I zoom in, you know this one? I'm sure I meant to play here and there just a little bit off. So I'm gonna command a to select all the notes here and then command you to quantities That Okay, that moved everything over onto the grid a little bit, but I need to do it a little bit better, So I'm gonna go to quantities settings that was a control click to get to here quantities settings. I'm gonna change it from current grid 2/8 notes You say OK now, Everything got right on the eighth note. So now everything will be really tight. Okay, Now let's get a little deeper. Let's keep going deeper. So first thing is, I don't like that snare drum. So let's go over to my drum rack. Let's find that snare. Here it is. I can cook play right here just to listen to it. Okay? It's got all this extra stuff that I don't really want. And I want kind of a darker sound. Do I have I don't want any of these things. I might want this kick. Now that kicks. Okay, eso Let's change the snare drum out. Let me just search my samples for a snare drum. It's gonna search for snow. I'm going to the scroll through here until I find one that I want. This one's kind of cool. It's quiet, but that's okay. Two years I'm gonna dio I'm gonna click this, drag it and throw it right on that snare. Okay, Now all my sneers are that snare. Okay? It's awfully windy, though. That one doesn't compare to my kick. Let's use this one. Okay, That's a little bit better. I'll roll with that for now. Now I want to add in some of this high hat. Where was the high hat. I can audition by clicking on this so that I hear these. This is the closest to a high hat I have. So I'm gonna make this just really wet. And you this See if that's what I want. Okay. That's all right. I'm just gonna duplicate that. Slide it over. Duplicated, duplicated, duplicated, duplicated. This goes over the loop. But that's OK. You can just leave it hanging like that. Now, let's make this a little less gross and throw some audio effects on it. I can through a reverb on it because I can throw an audio effect on it because it is now audio. Right. So you got here. Okay, let's adjust my setting. Okay, that's kind of cool. It's like in another world, but that's OK. We'll roll with it. So I played in this drumbeat, and then I modified it, right, because it's midi notes, so I can really adjust the parameters of it quite a bit. Um, I tekken it up with quanta izing. Um, I added some notes. I changed a sample. This is the freedom that you have when you're working with midi. Um I could even if I wanted Teoh use all the sounds from this drum loop with it. I could just coffee this up here and now we're going to use the sounds from this loop, But with this rhythm, let's mute the other one and just see how that sounds. Oh, and I could turn our Metrodome off. That might help together. Oops. I kind of like that. I kind of like him both on. So I'm gonna do it. Let's hear what we've got. Okay, so now I suppose I should add this next chord. So let's duplicate this trim off the beginning a little bit so I can get this right where I want It is just about There may be about there. And now I need to take all of this and make it a line with the next chord was there. So I just transposed at the same amount that I transposed the audio files before, and then this one is the same as this one because these two were the same. Aziz to this is just a quick thing I'm throwing together. Let's hear this first chunk of the loop of the track. Uh, what we've got so far. - Okay , Not bad. I think it needs maybe some kind of baseline. Yeah, eso. Let's just to ah explore recording in session view. Let's bump over and record that in session view.
19. Recording MIDI in Session View: Okay, so now I'm over in session view. I'm gonna add a new mini track, So command shift T. It's a new mini track. And let's find a cool base sound. Let's go to instrument rack. Maybe base presets. That's cool. I want something kind of simple for just what I'm thinking of the kind of idea I have right now. So here's what I'm gonna dio. Um, we're gonna play on my midi keyboard. Uh, and I'm just gonna hold down the note for almost the whole loop, and then I'll bring it back in. All right? And then I'll add a note to the very end. Okay, so here's what I record it. It's not extremely interesting, but I'm going to change it to be eight notes. So I'm gonna shorten this note, extremely shortened it more and then just duplicated out. Then let's put this note right there. Let's hear that. That's not quite what I wanted, so let's undo that. I wanted it slower. That's what I wanted. Okay. And that's gonna be the same thing through the whole pattern, so I can actually just do this is a one bar loop. I'm gonna highlight it. command l just to make that a one bar loop that repeats throughout the whole track. Basically, it is getting dark. I'm not in love with that sound, so let's find something a little grittier. Oh, that might be perfect, actually. Let's throw that on the track. Volume down. All right. Pretty good. So recording mini works essentially the same? Um, it's just that we can record clips. Um, quicker. We can separate them into clips, but the recording process between session arrangement view is largely the same.
20. Basslines And Vocals: Okay, let's take our MIDI baseline that we just made and pull it back over to arrangement. You something that click and hold down. And while I'm holding Hit tab, I'm going to drop it back into that same track. Now I have to put it into the same track or else it's gonna get assigned to a different instrument, right? Eso and let's pull it out a little bit and it's great out. So I need to hit here in order to tell it that we're paying attention to session view now. So here's what we have. Oops, we're all the way up here. Let's go back to the beginning. Okay, this is pretty cool. But what if I wanted to add some kind of creepy vocal to it? Let's play around with a vocal track. Found this vocal sample free sound dot org's free sound is, ah, great website for finding samples if you are. If you're into that kind of thing, which you probably are for your life, check out free sound dot org's. There's, um, royalty free sample that you can download of just hundreds of thousands of things. So this is a vocal sample that I grabbed. Um, and I haven't tried this out yet. Let's just see if it works. Um, let's just drop it. I don't know. Maybe right in here, Okay? I kind of like, harmonically what it's doing. That means the pitches. Um, I thought I was gonna want to transpose this to fit the key, but I'm kind of OK with it. It's dissonant, but it's a dissonant, dark and creepy piece. It helps, right? But we could do some stuff with the rhythm to make it line up a little bit better, right? So for that, we need to talk about warping. Warping is what's gonna allow us to do basically this with the vocal track with any audio track, actually, So let's go to a new segment and figure out warping
21. Intro To Warping: okay up next, we're gonna be talking about warping. Now, let's talk a little bit about kind of where this comes from first. So, like I said before at the beginning of this class, in the old days, we had two ways. Are we had one way to make two sounds match in tempo. The way was, you put your finger on the record and that's slowed one of them down, and then you could match him in tempo. Now we have these digital ways of doing it, and the technology to do this has been around for probably 15 or 20 years. But the technology to be able to do it in real time, uh, is more recent, uh, the last, I don't know, five or six years And the it that I'm talking about is to separate speed from pitch. That's the big thing that we're doing here. In other words, when I slow that record down so that it matches, what I'm doing is the tempo is going to go down. But also, the pitch is gonna lower, right? When you slow something down, the pitch goes down. What we can now do is separate the pitch in the speed so I can slow something down and have the pitch stay the same. Or I can change the pitch without altering the tempo. Those their separate elements now. And there's some really hard core math that goes into that working, Um, but, uh, the way live deals with it is it's called warping, and it's been a very a key element of live for quite a long time. Lives had a warping engine. They call it built into it. Since I don't know how long it goes back, I don't think it goes back to version one, but, uh, pretty early. It's been a crucial component of live. Is the ability to warp you confined warping in other software. Now, to pro Tools has its thing. I think calls it calls an elastic audio. Um, logic has its version of it that it calls something else. So the other programs they have warping in them, but live has been doing it the longest. And I think it's the most refined in live. So let's take a look at how it works. Um, now, when we're talking about warping, we're talking about audio. Ah, there's no need to warp Amidi clip right, because we can play a MIDI clip at different speeds and it doesn't affect the pitch at all . Um, because all we're sending hear our message on when to play. What things? This can slow down and speed up all we want. And the pitch is not gonna be affected because it's already just data audio. On the other hand, we have to be a little delicate about how we put things together if we want to change the way it works. So let's go into, um, this file and let's let's just get down to it.
22. What Is Warping: Okay, So before we deal with this vocal sample, let's do something that's a little more transparent. Little easier to understand. And that would be a beat. Okay, so I'm gonna add a drum loop in here. Now, keep in mind, we are playing at 101 BPM. That's our tempo of our whole session. I'm gonna add this Lupin. Now, this loop is at 1 40 bpm. Okay? It's significantly faster. I know that cause it's written into the file name. So let's add that in now. Look what happened. It automatically arranged itself to be four bars long, actually. Two bars long it arrange itself to be two bars long. Exactly. Now, what are the odds that 101 divides into 1 40 perfectly. Ah, zero. So what happened was live adjusted. The tempo of this file. Ah, kind of radically. So remember it sounded like this, but now in our session, it sounds like this all solo it. Okay, so it went super fast. That was lives. Guess was to go super fast. We could tell to go the other way and go super slow. So now we're slowing it down two. So that it fits into our structure a little bit better. So what all that means is that it's gonna blend with our other beats perfectly. Let's hear everything together, right? It's totally in time because it's worked live, figured out what was going on and adjusted it correctly. So let's look at some of the settings here. If we look at this segment BPM that says 1 40 That means Live thinks that this clip is 140 bpm. Okay, that it's analyzed it, and it's figured that out that it's 1 40 bpm and it happens to be right because we know what it's tempo is is it's 1 40 bpm. What that means is that if this is 1 40 then it has to live. Has to do some math to get this to play at this 101 And it knows the calculation. It has to dio to get this in the right speed to do, to play at 101 and it's always going to do it. That's one of the big advantages of live is that it's going to say okay, you've drug a clip in here that is 1 40 BPM. But you're telling me that you want me to play it at 101 b p. M. Cool. I will figure that out for you. And that's what cool. And it makes kind of a cool groove right there, Actually, kind of dig it. Let's pull that out and loop it a little bit more. So if we wanted to tell live, don't do that. Just leave it. Exactly how it is played at 1 40 Weaken, turn hoops weaken. Turn warping off with this button here. Okay, now warping is turned off and it's gonna play this at exactly 1 40 Its original unaltered tempo in our session. Right? And it's a total mess, so we don't want to do that. So let's turn warping back on. And now everything locks right into the beat. Okay, so in this case, what happened was live did an analysis of this file, and it figured out what the bpm waas and it adjusted it correctly. Now let's say that analysis doesn't go perfect in this case, it got it right, but it doesn't always go right. So sometimes you have to help live figure it out. So let's go to a new video and talk about how you would just the warp settings for when able to doesn't get it right.
23. Anchors And Commands: Okay, So looking back at our vocal track, what we have here is live is guessing. This clip is at 2 19.89 bpm. Okay, that's maybe not right. Live is good at guessing the tempo when it's a beat, and it has repeated patterns that it confined in something like a vocal track like this, it's near impossible. There's no way to really know what the beat is for this because there's just nothing here to latch onto. You couldn't even figure out what the beat is to this, right? It's just ah, melody. So we need to do a little bit to help it out. What I want to do with this is try to get it toe lineup so that some of the notes that happened in here fall right on the beat. Let's hear what it's doing. Now let me turn it up a little bit. So it's these notes right in here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set an anchor on each one of those notes, and anchor is one of these yellow things. I can double click on one to get rid of it. Okay. I'm gonna get rid of those two anchors. And now I'm gonna try to find where those notes change and put an anchor on them, I think. Right there. There. Right there. Okay. Now, I didn't change anything. All I did was making anchor, which just kind of locks things down. Also gives me something to grab onto. So let's shift these to be right on the grid. We can see our grid up here. So all we have to do is in this case, I'm gonna put this one over on beat too. This one on the offbeat of two and this one on beat three. Okay, so now those air gonna happen right on the beat. Now, that was a subtle change, so you might not hear it, but let's try it out anyway. That actually sounds quite a bit better because it's really locking in, Especially this one hits right on the snare. Let's move this one over to be on the Okay, let's move this big moment right here, Over to there on this point right there. Kind of a big one. Okay, great. So what we have here is we have made anchors and you'll notice that for each anchor. Once I move that anchor, that's where it stays, right? If I move this one around, it's gonna just things before it. Right. But nothing before the previous anchor or after the previous anger, right? Those anchors don't let anything move even like this one. I could move stuff with in between these two anchors, but nothing after so that gets this vocal sample pretty well off. But let's look at something a little harder. Let's look at like a whole track, which tends to be one of the hardest things to warp. Sometimes let's go to a new video and talk about that.
24. Warping Tracks: Okay, so I drug a track in here. That's not gonna make much sense at all with the song we have, but let's see if we can make it work. So here's what I added, Theo. Okay, so the first thing we want to do is warp this so that live knows it's correct. Tempo. Okay, Don't worry about it. Fitting in with the track, we just need to get the tempo correct here, So I'm gonna turn on warp. Okay, then I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here. Not that much. And first thing I'm going to do is just try to find the beats, the or the significant points. Okay, so let's find first that that snare hit right there. So I'm gonna make a marker there. There is the next one. Okay, so just with those two points, let's see where that gets us. We need to put those two points on the grid and the right spot. So what are these three? So that's beat three. So that goes right there. Three. And this is also beat three. Okay, I'm gonna let everything in front of it shift because the more war markers you put in the more lives starts, Teoh, try to figure it out. So let's see if we're close now. The way we test as we turn on the Metrodome. Okay, We felt pretty good here, but we got off ahead of it. What we can try is a few things. Now we can control. Click here on this warm marker and say, Walk from here. Walk from here at our current tempo work from here straight. Ah, Warp one on one From here. I'm just going to try work from here. And basically, what I'm doing is telling it, given this information, trying to figure out the rest of the tune. Let's see how that did. Okay, it's pretty far. It's pretty well on. Actually. Think about what you here as the downbeat. Make sure every time you hear a downbeat, it's on a whole number either. 4567 etcetera. It should more or less be. I agree. 34 Okay, Okay, so it's pretty much lining up. If it wasn't, we can go through and give it a little nudge Either way. Where seven. I thought was seven. I was close on seven. I felt like it hit but it was just a hair off. So I'm gonna put a marker there just to help us out a little bit. Okay, so now we're pretty on, and we should be good for the rest of the track. If we go way out here, we still should Here that, uh, we're still on beat. Oops. Let's start way up here. Good. Let's drag our loop out all the way to the end. Try that one more time from here. Okay, Pretty good. So, um, now that we have this at the correct tempo so that it's lined up eso that live knows what it's tempo is it will fit into the rhythm of our track. That doesn't mean that it's going to fit stylistically or harmonically into our track. It might still sound dumb, but it will be in time. Let's try it. Okay, so that is just a huge mess. So you wouldn't want to actually do this, but it was the quickest thing I could think of to show us warping a whole track, right? Ah, Okay. Now you might have noticed one interesting thing happening and go back to soloing this around here, right there. Do you hear it kind of stuttering a little bit. What's happening? There is, uh, the the algorithm that's driving the warping stuff. Remember how I said There's huge amounts of math going on here? Ah, the math is having a hard time figuring out how to stretch those out to be just right. But, hey, there's a solution for that. Let's go to a new video. Let's talk about Worf modes.
25. Warp Modes: all right, so let's look right here, Stewart says. Beats this little window is what's called our warp mode. The warp mode is kind of like Imagine that this huge amount of math that needs to happen for this all to work, right? Uh, there's, like, five different ways that live can, or five different algorithms that live can use for any piece of sound. Okay. And the default is beats. So when you give it a new piece of music, it's gonna say, OK, I'm going to use my beats algorithm and figure this out, even though beats might not be the best way for it to look at it so you can tell it. Hey, there are better ways to look at this piece of music here. What? Basically what each one is going to do is the beats algorithm is going to try its hardest to preserve the rhythm. Okay, that's where all its energy is gonna go. The tones one is going to try its hardest to preserve the pitch so that well, we're doing all these fancy math things. The pitch doesn't get all wobbly. It's gonna try to preserve the pitch a zoo best it can. So that might be the one we want to use on our vocal sample. When we come back to that texture is going to be something like a pad or, um or ambient sound. Re pitch is basically turning this all off and just treating it like the spinning record that we talked about before, right? S O R pitch is gonna go all over the place, and it's good. It's going to sound really funny. Let's try it. So that puts back together the speed and pitch thing that I said. We've worked so hard to take apart the re pitch setting on the warp mode puts it back together, which is kind of funny, um, complex and complex pro is what I would use for something like a full track. What these do is they're gonna you. The downside to using them is that they're going to use the most processing power. So you can't have like, you don't want to have, like, 100 tracks in a session all being warped with complex pro. You're gonna crash your computer eventually, but for just this track, it's going to try to preserve everything as much as it can. So that should get rid of that little wobbliness that we had in here. Let's try it. Okay? It sounds pretty good, right? It sounds like nothing's really happening to that piece of audio other than it's a bit slower, right? Eso the warp mode. You really just kind of want to tell it what you're doing. Uh, if you hear those artifacts. Ah, and that will help it sound better. Okay. Now, with that being said, let's go back to our vocal sample and see if we can get that to work in this track.
26. Granulation Techniques: Okay. The first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna mute this track. We just put in because it's a little silly. Let's go back to what we have. You know, I'm gonna pull this percussion stuff all the way through. I need to go back and turn on loop with it, and let's keep that going. Going to turn it down a little bit. Okay, Let's listen one more time. That would come back to focusing on our boat. Let's hear from the top. - Okay , So what I want to do next is see if I can use some warping techniques. Teoh make this a little more interesting for us. It's actually pretty darn interesting to me as it is. But one thing I'm gonna try to do here is extend this last note out a little bit. Okay, So listen here. That's pretty short. That last note. Can I make it longer? Well, let's try. So we're looping it right now. What? I just did extended the loop, so I don't want to do that, But I do want Teoh open this a little bit more, which I don't think it's gonna let me dio I could try to do this. So I'm going to select the clip plus some empty space and then command J to consolidate it with that empty space just to extend the loop out a little bit or the clip out a little bit more. Okay, now, I'm gonna go in here. Now. You'll notice that when I consolidate it did it got rid of all my anchors, right? I had a couple anchors in here because from the warping I was doing but consolidating it just kind of wrote those into the clip, so I don't need them anymore. I can add more if I want, though, and then go. So I'm gonna put an anchor right here, and it's kind of it. Well, an anchor right here and now I'm gonna pull this out. This is why I wanted the extra space pull his way out. Now, this that is a lot of stretching. Okay, I've really stretched that one pitch out, so it's probably gonna have some artifacts in it. Artifacts are like little glitchy sounds that the computer, uh, puts in when it's trying to figure out something crazy. Like what we just did. But let's hear it way that we can hear it a little bit better. Okay, so what we're hearing there is granule ation. This is kind of one of the ways that warping works is through these little things that the computer called grains. We don't need to go into that quite yet. We will talk about that when we get into synthesizers, because that can be a really cool technique for creating sounds for sound design and things like that. So that each one of those little rhythms you heard in there was kind of, ah, grain thing, which I kind of like. Oh, it's kind of a cool sound, actually. But if I want to tame it a little bit, I can try it with my warp modes. Let's go to complex pro and see if that smooth it out a little bit, Theo. Okay, so that definitely smoothed it out. But also added this higher buzzy sound. And that higher buzzy sound is another's that artifact. I could calm it down a little bit by not making it so extreme. It's trying like that. It was a little bit better. The closer I get, the better it's gonna be, But I'm gonna leave it way out because I kind of like that robot synthesis sound that it's doing. Let's hear it in context. Cool. So let's hear this whole thing that we've got so far Pretty cool, super dark. When I sat down to make this class, I did not plan on making something so dark and morbid, but, uh, so it goes. You never know what's gonna happen here, so that's cool. Okay, so, um great. So in this video, what I was really wanting to point out, and I think I did is we don't always have to warp Perfect, right? Weaken. Do some of this really extreme work for added a fax for sound design. Um, just to make cool sounds. And that's totally okay. Warping can be used as a creative tool. And don't forget it
27. What Next?: All right, everyone. We have reached the end. Almost the end. Not quite Of ultimate able to live. 10. Part two, recording warping. Uh, what comes next? Just quick. Little preview. The next class is called editing and producing. This is Ah, The next one is the one that is the most popular of all my live classes. Eso You're definitely gonna want to get signed up for that one if you're not already editing and producing is all about making stuff from scratch. We're gonna be talking about all the editing tricks that we need in live. We're gonna be talking about making beats, specifically making beats. Ah, working with since working with effects automation, all that stuff will be doing in that next class. So I hope you decide to keep on truck and keep going with me and ah, learning able to in live 10
28. Wrap Up: All right, now we have reached the official end. Ah, I just want to say really quick. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for taking this class. Ah, I hope you had a good time. I hope you learned a little bit about able to live, Actually. Kind of hope you learned a lot about it. Um, and I hope you decided to stick with us and continue through the rest of this class. Ah, there's a bunch more sections to come. We're going to start digging through some different sessions. There's gonna be some guests that show up soon. Ah, and we'll be getting really deep into how live works as we continue through all the rest of these classes. So please stick around. Um, next in this class is gonna be one more little blurb after this one, and that's gonna be my little like, Hey, here's some discount links for my other classes. So if you haven't signed up for the next able to live 10 class, uh, grab that discount link that's in the next little blurb. Depending on which platform you're on, you will see that some of the platforms you won't see that. It's weird how this all works. Ah, but yeah. Please grab that sign up for the mailing list. Um and, ah, take more classes. Thanks for being part of my classes and my online student community, and I will see you in the next class.
29. SkillshareFinalLectureV2 (2): Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.
Jason Allen, PhD, Ableton Certified Trainer
