Ableton Live 12 Complete: From A to Z

1. Part 4: Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Ableton Live 12 Part five. Audio media effects. In this class in this part of the giant sequence of classes, we're really going to focus on media effects. Now, I am going to walk you through every single audio and MIDI effect that we have in Live 12. But I'm also going to talk a lot about effect theory, how to use effects, the different types of effects, and what order they should go in and how to do some other techniques with them like side chaining and busing and things like that. So I highly recommend watching this class from beginning to end to get a feel for all of the effects. But after that, keep this class in your account and use it as kind of an encyclopedia. Pull it up whenever you want to know how to use some effect. You can always come back to it and rewatch any segment as you're working on tracks. So near the end of this class, we're going to talk about effect racks, audio effect racks, especially. And those are one of the most powerful things in all of life. If you haven't explored audio effect racks yet, you're in for a world of amazement. So, let's get started. Let's dive in. Off we go. All right. So there's all the frequencies of our sound. Now, here's what we're seeing. So on the left, we have low sounds, everything all at once. We can go up to this triangle here and click on. Now don't freak out. It looks like we have 1 million more settings here, but we don't quiet it down, and then we boost everything by the amount that we quieted it down. Okay, so we're going to smoosh it, compress it, and then boost everything. Now, this is my favorite. This is my kind of go to for most effects is to Alright, so let's hear the three now. 2. Workflow: Working with Live’s Instruments: Okay. So let's dive in to Lives instruments. So the goal of this class is to get comfy with all of these devices. Okay? It's a lot. There's a lot here. But actually, we have one more goal, too, and our bigger goal is to learn about sound design, kind of a big picture view of how sound design works so that we can apply it to all instruments. I have a way I've been teaching sound design for years, where we're going to first talk about what goes into a synthesizer, what makes a synthesizer what it is. And then we'll use that concept to learn all of these different synthesizers. It'll make it ten times easier, and you'll be able to apply it to any synthesizer, physical, virtual, whatever that you run into. So first things first, what we're looking at here is instruments. This is different than plugins. In plug ins, there are some instruments. There are a whole bunch of instruments here that you can use to generate sound and do synthesis with. However, all of these are outside of live. They are kind of their own little programs. So we're just going to focus on the instruments built in to live. So not plug ins. Although at the end, we will look at some max for live things. We'll come back to that. Just hold on to that for a minute. Another thing just to point out before we get started, is that your list might not look like mine. If it is if you don't have the things that I have here, then it might very well be because you don't have the full version of Live. This is one of those places where the full version really matters. So I have Live suite, and that's what I'm working on. So Live Suite has all of these instruments. If you have Live Standard or the smaller versions of Live intro or live light, then you will have less things here. So I'm going to be working off the sweet version. If you don't have sweet, if you have a lesser version, you can still follow along with everything we do here just fine. There's just going to be some instruments I have that you don't have. But the ones that you do have will work the same way that I'm going to talk through. So you'll be just fine. Okay, so we're going to dive into the sound design stuff in just a second. First, I want to just do a little bit of a refresher on how MITI works just so that we're on the same page about how to make content for these things. And we all kind of know what we're doing. So let's go into that first. 3. A Quick MIDI Refresher: Okay, so when it comes to our quick MIDI refresher, there are two things that I just want to put into your head as a reminder. First, number one, do this with me. Go up to Options and go down to Chase MIDI notes and be sure that is turned on. If it has a little checkbox, it's on. That's what you want. If it doesn't have a checkbox, click it, it'll get a checkbox. We want that on because it corrects kind of a innate problem with MIDI in that um sometimes we miss the note on message. It's complicated and weird. Don't worry about it. Just leave that setting on, and it'll make your life a lot easier. Okay, second thing. We can make midi notes all we want, but we will not hear them until we put a midi instrument on those notes. So I'm just going to make some notes here. Okay? That's cool. And if I hit Play, we will hear nothing. These dots right here means that Live is playing mini notes, but it has no instrument to play them through. If I hit Shift tab, you will see this is where my instrument should be, and it is not there. So I need to put either an instrument or one of these presets for the instrument onto that track and now we're gonna hear those moves. See, instantly, the little dots turned into audio. So I can't tell you how often I get a message from people saying, I'm making notes. Everything is cool, but I can't hear my notes. Why? And it's because you need to put an instrument on that track. Also, if we want to hear this track, we want to play on a keyboard and we want to hear this. This has to be armed to record. So if you're hitting notes on a keyboard like I am right now. But you're not hearing anything, make sure you have an instrument, and you have that instrument armed to record or that track armed to record, actually. So those are two important things to just keep in mind whenever you're dealing with MIDI. Okay, now let's talk a little bit about how MIDI clips work. 4. MIDI Clips: Okay, if you've been following along with my other classes, you know, by this point your way around Session View and Arrangement View. And you probably know your way around clips. So let's do a little tiny review on MiiClips. So we are here in Session View. I made a Mini clip right here. I'm going to take it over to Arrangement View by clicking and Hold down. I'm just holding it while I hit tab, and now I'm going to drop it into the same track. Okay? This track is grayed out because it is currently over in Session View. So Live is going to play Session View until I tell it, No, I want you to play Arrangement View by clicking that button. Okay, so now here we are. I Arrangement view. If I double click on it, I get access to loop and all kinds of fun stuff. We'll come back and talk about our key aware stuff in just a minute. But I can change the length of it down here. I can open it up to get the full thing. You can see it looping here. We can move notes around the Mi grid with arrow keys or by clicking and dragging. Can make more notes by double clicking. We can drag them out this way by grabbing the edge of them. And don't forget my favorite key command of the Mi grid, and that is shift up or down. We'll shift you by an octave. That can be really important. And then just general midi clip behavior. This is true of audio clips as well. We can copy with Command C, put our cursor somewhere and Command V to paste. We can paste into different MIDI tracks. Watch out for audio tracks. If we paste into an audio track, it's going to convert it to a MIDI track unless there's something already on that midi track or that audio track, in which case, it's just going to say no. But then here in our timeline, we can move things around and do what we need to. Okay, I think that's about everything about mini clips. Let's talk about this key aware stuff because this is new and Live 12, and it's gonna be really important as we get into building mini tracks and midi clips. 5. Key Aware Settings: Okay, let's talk about the key aware business, okay? So first of all, the main control for it lives up here, okay? So here we can set our key. And by default, it's always going to set to C major. That's like a weird, like, music theory thing. By default, everything is C major. It's really kind of strange. But anyway, so let's say we want the key of our tune to be G minor. Sure. Okay? Now, if we turn this little purple button off, it's just going to not pay attention to this anymore. So this is all new, so I'm still getting used to it, but I haven't found a good reason to just turn this off because you can always go outside of the key. So just leave this on all the time. But now if we go to a clip, we can see that this clip turned us back to C major, and we're in C major up here. Okay? So I think we need to redo this G minor and say, now we're in G minor. Okay? Each clip, because I made these clips before I changed the key, these might all go back to C major. Yeah, they are. So if I select them all, and then switch this to G minor. They should now all be in G minor. Yes, they are. Okay? So I selected all of them and then switched this to G minor. Any new ones that I make are going to be in G minor as they follow the key aware setting. So what does it mean to be key aware? Well, if I make a new clip here, first thing is that it shows the key of G minor, with these purple things. Any of these purple notes are going to be in the key of G minor, okay? So if I stay on those purple notes, I'll be pretty safe. Things will sound pretty good. But I can also go outside of the key by playing some of these not purple notes, these gray notes. These are going to be outside of the key, so they're going to probably be dissonant. As I've said, many, many times, when it comes to keys and scales and all this stuff. And if you don't know my other work outside of Ableton, um, I've done a lot of content. I wrote a book about this. This is kind of my jam is music theory for electronic music producers. That's actually the name of my book. And here's the you don't have to buy my book. I'm going to summarize the whole thing for you right now. It is that if you stay in the key all the time, if we only do notes that are in the key, you are going to make a whole bunch of music that sounds perfectly fine. Okay? If you sense my sarcasm there, you're correct. It's the music will sound fine. I'll sound great. You know, it's cool. But you're not going to find any brilliant, awesome moments without exploring the notes outside of the key. So we could do something like this scale button here, where we hide all of the notes that are not in the key, okay? You can do that. Now we can only use notes that are in the key. We've hidden the ones that don't fit in the key. But again, you're going to make a whole bunch of kind of boring but fine music that way. So I would encourage you to stay in this mode, not this scale feature. This is called fold to scale, but keep it like this so that you can see the notes that you're not using, and, you know, you might hear this melody and think, Oh, what if I go there, right? Go outside the key a little bit. Experiment, see if you like it. Now, this is not going to be a music theory class. I have plenty of those. So if you want to learn more about what makes the notes sound good and what notes you can experiment with outside of key that are likely to sound good, I have a whole bunch of content on that. Check that out. But for now, I'll leave it at that just knowing how this key aware setting works and how to use it. If you want to just stay in the key, you can hit this fold descale button and then not worry about anything. But let yourself experiment outside of the key. You'll find some great moments there. Okay, let's move on. 6. What is Sound Design?: So what is sound design. Sound design is a weird term, and it gets kind of a weird rap. People have used that term to mean a lot of different things over the years. It can just mean synthesis. So that is primarily what it means. It means being able to dial in a synthesizer just right so that you can make the sounds that you want it to make. But it can also mean layering sounds, putting together a non musical sound track for something. There are elements of sound design in all kinds of things. There's an industry called Industrial Sound Design. That would be it like the beep that your microwave makes when it goes off. That's industrial sound design. I've been hired before to make little beeps and things for different apps like like Zoom style apps when you join a call, it goes ding de ding. I didn't make those sounds, but I've made similar sounds for other apps. There's a lot of sound design that goes into video games. I would actually define sound design broadly as creating unique sounds, whether it's for musical purposes or non musical purposes. So what we're going to focus on here is talking primarily about synthesis, kind of the synthesis element of sound design. However, I do have a sound design project here that it's really short, and I thought it would be fun to walk you through. So maybe we'll do that, and I think I can give you this session. Since it's all my material, normally, when you're doing sound design, especially for sound design for a film, you can't really share those sessions because you don't own the film. But in this case, I do, even though this is for sort of a film thing. I'll explain it in a minute. So let's do that now. Let's walk through this session, and I'll talk to you a little bit about how I think about sound design, and then we'll go into talking about the elements of sound design. 7. A Film Session: Okay, this is kind of a funny project because you've seen it. You've already seen it if you're in this class. This is actually like the intro for the for this class. So, here's how this came about. So I commissioned this artist to make this thing for me, this intro bit that you saw at the very beginning of this class. And what he gave me was this video, and it was great. I liked it. But it was totally silent, which I also preferred because I wanted to do the sound design myself. So I uh, did the sound design here in live. So a couple of things. First of all, in order to do this, you can drag a video file into live, and that's what I did here. It shows up like this. This will be the file's audio, which was blank when I got it. Then it pops open a new window that you can move around that shows the video. I'll just leave that video right there. And then I'll just play through this once so you can see what I did. Let's do that. Okay. Now this is actually all quite simple. First, I put in this kind of boom swoosh sound. Okay. That's really it. It's very dry. But I doubled it with this sound. And that's a sound that I had from another project where I added that low descending thing. Mom. That's a very kind of fashionable, almost cinematic sound at this point. Then with this swoosh, I used the same sound again, but with some effects on it to get the kind of back part of the explosion. It's the same as this. It's just got a chorus on it. So nothing fancy. This is some ship noise. This is an audio file I took a long time ago when I was on a ship and just walking around the ship. So it's just kind of random sounds, and there's a bunch of reverb on. Right? And then there's also this big boom on that first one, but it's not on any of the others. That's there, but it's quick and quiet. So you don't hear that And then it doesn't come back. That makes the second one a little bit different. These are different pads like synthesis that I've laid down onto these tracks. And then here's our only actual mitti and it's just this long bass note that happens right here. So just a big bass sound that gets added into everything else right there. This this kind of big opening thing is just this sound, but backwards. So this sound again, but backwards, sounds like this. If I turn all the effects off. Sounds like this. But with a compressor, a big delay, and a whole bunch of reverb, it sounds like this. So, pretty simple, actually. Mostly audio, just one video or just one mini clip here. But this is, you know, how a sound design session works for a film. So in order to make all of these sounds, you really need to know your way around synthesis. Even the audio file one, like these pads are just miti and then I rendered them as audio. And even these booms and swooshes and things, to really understand what we're doing here, it starts with synthesis. So, let's get into that. I'm going to give you this session. You can play around with it, I suppose. It'll come with this video. So yeah, have fun with it. 8. The 3 Elements of Good Sound Design: When you are designing sounds, there are three things to keep in mind. There are basically three elements that you can adjust on a sound that you can craft to make that sound unique and compelling. Those three things are tamber, shape, and motion. Okay? So remember those tamber shape and motion. Let's define them. The trickiest of those three things is tamber. So tambor is a weird word. We use tamber in music all the time. Timber literally translates as color. It means the color of the sound, which is even more useless term. Here's what it really means. Imagine in your head a flute playing a note. Okay? Now imagine a piano playing that same note. Same exact note. Now, what makes the flute sound different than the piano? They're playing the same note. The biggest thing that makes them sound different is the timbre. It is the quality of the sound. My voice sounds different than your voice. Why? Because of the timbre of my voice. There's a lot of things that go into the timbre of something. When it comes to my voice, the things that go into it are the shape of my throat, the vocal cords, the shape of my mouth, the cold that I am still getting over, stuffing up my nose. All of these things contribute to the tamber that is my voice. And tamber the actual like, technical things that change the sound when it comes to tamber are called overtones or harmonics. Okay? We're going to talk more about those in the next video, so hold on to that for just a second. But the tamber is the color of the sound, the thing that makes a sound unique Okay, now, the other two are relatively simple shape and motion. Shape has to do with is the sound fast? Like, let's think about this sound. Okay? That has a very sharp attack. It's just on. It doesn't fade in. It's just on. And it has a pretty quick decay. It ends when the sound ends. It doesn't sustain for a while. Now let's think about I don't know. Let's think about this sound. Okay? It's on when I play the note. Stop It's off, right? It's kind of like the clap in that it has a similar shape. But a shape can slowly enter. It can move around while it's sustaining, and then it can fade out. There's a lot of different things that the shape of a sound can do. The third thing is motion. That just has to do with while a sound is happening, what is it doing? Is it just still O is there some motion in it? Let's listen to this sound again. Now, there is motion here. You can hear it's going, there's something happening. It's not a lot. Other sounds we encounter will have a lot of motion to them, and they'll be moving around and doing all kinds of different things. So those are really the main three elements that we're always going to be working with timbre, shape, and motion. Okay? Now, let's move on and talk a little bit about overtones and harmonics. 9. Overtones and Harmonics: Okay, let's talk about overtones. Get ready to have your mind blown. So every sound is made up of a ton of other sounds, like an infinite number of other sounds. It's kind of crazy. If you think about color, like, the color purple is made up of red and yellow, is that right? No, blue and red, right? God, I don't know anything about colors. Blue and red make purple. So you could say, like, purple is the color, and then there's blue and red that those together make purple. Overtones are kind of like the blue and red here to the purple. For every sound, there's this there are these frequencies all above it and maybe even below it that contribute to the timbre of the sound. I know it's crazy. I'm going to show you. But they're predictable. So let's look at this chart. If you don't know how to read music, that's okay. Here's what you just need to understand. If I play this note, this is a very low note. It's like. Inside that note, that's a low C. Inside that note, there is a C, an octave higher C, and then a G, and then another C, and then an E, then a G, then a B flat, that's a little out of tune, then a C, then a D, then E, then an F sharp, that's also out of tune, then a G then an A, then a B flat, out of tune, B natural C and then it just kind of goes chromatic up from there. There's a lot of notes inside every note. And each of these notes can have a certain volume. And how loud each of these overtones are determines the timbre, okay? It's weird. Here's another way to look at it. Here is my voice. This is just me talking. This is actually also from the intro to this video. It's hugely valuable. Okay. The blue is the waveform. That's just the waveform that you're used to seeing. But the orange are all the frequencies that make up the timbre of my voice. You can see him moving around quite a bit, but the bigger brighter ones are the more dominant ones. And as they go higher, they get kind of darker and darker. They disappear because we're showing volume in terms of brightness or orangeness here. So you can see the kind of main tones that I'm speaking in, and then all these other orange bits are frequencies that are in my voice, okay? So what we need to do when we do sound design is we're really sculpting those overtones, all those notes above the note that we're actually trying to play. So there's the sound, and then there's all of these notes above it that contribute to that sound. So as we do sound design, we're sculpting the original sound, but also all of those overtones above it, okay? If you keep that in mind, it will help as you learn how to do synthesis and sound design. Now, one last thing I'll say about overtones is that there are if you're into, like, mysticism and weird things, there's all kinds of lore and mythology about overtones. I would recommend to you this book Harmonies of Heaven and Earth I found this to be a really fascinating book. This is not a science book. This is very, very speculative stuff. But they have all kinds of things in this, like, kind of almost Pythagorean examples of, uh, overtones being used in different ways, like that. It's a symbol we see a lot. You know, overtone structures being used to, like, build the pyramids and, like, weird stuff. So it can get really almost spiritual if you're into that. Um so I found that to be a really fun book that really kind of talks about the mysticism of music, and especially, there's a lot of talk about overtones, kind of these theoretical undertones. It's a whole thing. So, you don't need to read that for this class, but if that interests you, that's a recommended book. 10. Synthesis Types: Okay, so let's get our head back on Earth for a minute here and get back to the practical, how do we do this? So let's start by talking about the different types of synthesis. And then we're going to go into the different elements of all synthesizers. But there's a whole bunch of different types of synthesis, maybe like ten, if you get into some of the weirder ones. But there's only five or so that we regularly deal with in live. So let me just kind of explain the different ways that synthesis can work. So when we talk about different types of synthesis, what we're talking about is different ways of combining sounds to make new sounds. So first, we might have something called additive synthesis. So additive synthesis is quite simple. We take a sound, we take another sound, maybe a third sound, we add them together, and that makes a sound we like. In some of the other classes in this series, I was doing things like layering different sounds, different synthesis. That's basically additive synthesis. It's very simple relatively. Now, additive synthesis isn't something that we use a whole bunch. It's not a very popular kind of synthesis, maybe because it's simple, maybe because it doesn't result in usually really compelling stuff. But subtractive synthesis is probably the most common type of synthesis that we use on an everyday basis, debatably. Subtractive synthesis means that you're going to start with a very complex waveform, which when I say complex waveform, all that really means is that we've got something with a lot of overtones. It's very bright and buzzy. That means it's got a lot of crazy overtones. So we're going to start with something like that. And then we're going to use something called filters to chip away at it and take away the sounds that we don't want, and then we're left with the sounds that we do want. That's called subtractive synthesis. There's another kind of synthesis called FM synthesis. This is like this has, like, a kind of a distinctive sound, but FM is a different way of doing things, and one way I like to describe FM, which is a vast oversimplification, but a simplified way of looking at it is instead of taking two sounds and adding them together, like we do with additive synthesis, it's more like taking two sounds and multiplying them together and getting a new sound. So we end up with one sound, but it's based on several sounds. Multiplying or modulating is a more accurate term to make something. Physical modeling is another kind of synthesis, and that's kind of a whole different animal. And physical modeling, what we have is this big, long, crazy math algorithm. That tries to replicate the physical world, and we can get in on that and change different parameters. So you might have an algorithm that says, Here's a physical model of a violin, and there's ways to control the pressure you're putting on the string, the pressure on the bow, how many hairs are on the bow, what the humidity is outside, everything that's going to affect the sound of that. Physical models can be really complex, but when we use them in something like Live, we have fairly simple tools that deal with all that math for us. It's not like we get this huge algorithm and we have to plug in numbers. It's not like that at all. We get a slick interface that lets us adjust things. Last one I'll talk about just as an introduction is wave table synthesis. This is probably the most complex sounding. And what we basically have here is a whole bunch of different sounds. And then when we play one, the software kind of scrubs through all these different sounds so that it makes a new sound by scrubbing through a whole bunch of other sounds. If you imagine like those big gnarly bass sounds that you get in dubstep and things like that, they're like, that stuff. That's very wave table. If you've used a very popular synthesizer called serum, that's wave table. Live does have a built in wave table synthesizer. It's called wave table, and we will be looking at how to use that shortly. So just a quick overview of a couple of different kinds of synthesis that we have access to. Now, let's go in and talk about the different elements of all synthesizers. 11. The Oscillator Section: So here's what I have here. I have a new track, a new mini track. And on that track, I put an analog instrument. Now, I just drug the analog instrument onto here, which means we have the default patch. I didn't load any preset. This is just the default analog patch. It sounds like this. Okay. And we're just going to work with that for a minute. So I like talking about these different elements of the synthesizer with analog because it just kind of lays them out really easy. So I'm going to use this as an example. But remember, the point here is that after I point these out, we should be able to find these on any kind of synthesizer, okay? So we're not just going to learn analog. We're going to learn how to learn synthesis, if that makes sense. Okay. All right. So first, the oscilator section. Every synthesizer has an oscillator section. They might not call it the oscillator section, but they have an oscillator section. Now in analog, it's this. And we actually have two of them. You can see Osk one and Osk two. Okay? There are these two things, okay? So what is an oscillator section? Oscillators are the only part of a synthesizer that actually make sound. Everything else is about sculpting that sound. So the oscillators are units that actually, like, oscillate, and they make sound. So we can say, make a waveform that is a sine wave, and it's going to oscilate and make a sine wave like this because that's what sine waves do. Or you can say, make a triangle wave and it's going to go That's what triangle waves do, sort of. We can tell it what kind of wave to make, and then it's going to just start going and generating that wave. So right now, we have Oscillator one is set up to make this shape of a wave that's called a sawtooth wave. And Oscillator two is set up to make a sawtooth wave. Okay? They're both making a sawtooth wave. Now, also in the oscillator section, in addition to the wave type, and I'll talk more about wave types in a second. We have tuning. Okay? So we can set the tuning to do different stuff. Octave, semi, and detune. Now, these won't look the same in all synthesizers, but you'll usually have some kind of tuning parameters. So octave means like big jumps away from each other, okay? So note here's one octave up. Let me turn off Oscillator two. Okay justos Octive up. So you can think about an octave as, like, the register that we're in, low or high, and a couple in between. Semi is semitone. That's every note on a piano, if you look at it, white notes and black notes. There are 12 of these for one octave, okay? So if you go up 12, let's do it. 12. And then I go down to zero, but up 12 here. And something. Okay? So 12 semitones per octave. Detune is sense. This is, like, very, very, very fine amount of space. There are 100 of these per one of these, okay? So with these, you're not even gonna hear it at first. Okay. So the numbers here are a little confusing. So I think what we're seeing is one would be one semitone. So we're going up by percentages of a semitone. We can go all the way up to three. Okay, so that's our tuning. Now, let's talk a little bit more about oscillator shapes. And 12. Waveforms: Okay, because the oscillator is the only sound making thing, it's important to understand the different shapes that we have available. Now, not all instruments have the same shapes. There are four really standard ones that almost all instruments will have. And then some instruments have different and wacky ones. But let's look at those four first. So I'm going to switch over to a program called audacity. Maybe you've heard of audacity. This is a free program that you can find online if you just search for it. I like audacity because it shows us we can zoom way way, way in and see individual waveforms. So what I did in audacity is I asked it to generate a sine wave for me, 30 seconds of a sine wave. Sounds like this. Okay? That's a sine wave. A sine wave is the most pure sound we can make. It has very few overtones, okay? It has the fundamental pitch that we ask it to make. And then above it, the overtones are almost none. And that's what makes it so just pure. Okay. If we zoom in and look at it, Zoom in in. We're looking at fractions of milliseconds now. Okay? We see a sine wave. A sine wave is just a perfect flowing thing, okay? It's the most simple sound we can create. However, it is super useful. We'll be using sine waves all the time. All right. Let's go to Let's Select All and delete this. And I'm going to tell it to generate a square wave. This is another one of the most common wave forms. Okay? Now, a square wave has a lot of overtones. So it's going to sound more buzzy. The more buzzy something sounds, the more overtones it has. This is what a square wave sounds like. Okay? Doesn't sound all that useful, but it is, trust me. No. No way. If we zoom way, way, way in and look at a square wave, we can see that it's like a square. It goes up, flat, down, flat, up, flat, down, flat. It's just a square. It makes these squares all over the place. Now, the general rule is that the more right angles or the more sharp edges a sound has, the more overtones that it's going to create. It's just kind of a weird thing. I don't know the math or physics behind why that happens, but it happens. So, in this case, this has these flat sides to it all over the place, which makes it very buzzy, which means it's going to have a lot of overtones. So just contrasting those two, one is really smooth and simple with no overtones or very close to it. The other is buzzy and a lot of overtones. Just with those two, can generate we can make a lot of sounds by just combining them and then using some other tools that we have in synthesis to shape them. But let's learn about a couple more. Let's go select all and delete and go to generate tone and Sautooth. Okay. A sawtooth. I think we just saw a sawtooth. Sawtooth looks like this. Zoom. It looks like the teeth of a saw, right? So it goes up and then straight down almost, and then up straight down. Now, you can see this has some sharp angles in it, and that means it's going to be a bit buzzy. But it's differently, buzzy, right? You hear the difference between that and the square wave. That's timbre. That's that buzziness. That's the overtones. They sound different. These have all been playing the same pitch, okay? Sine waves, square waves, sawtooth waves. The thing that makes them sound different is the overtones generated above them, and the overtones are generated because of the shape of the waveform. Okay? Now, there's one more that for some reason just isn't built into audacity easily, and that is the triangle wave. Triangle wave is a lot like a sawtooth wave, except instead of a flat side it has inside that comes down similarly. So if we go here, here are, this one doesn't have a triangle wave either. Interesting. The different shapes in analog, I have sine wave. I have sawtooth. I have square. And I have this one, which is noise. We'll talk more about noise later. So this one doesn't have triangle and audacity doesn't have triangle, but triangle wave is one of the kind of what I consider to be the foremost standard wave forms. But not everything has all of them. Every synthesizer is unique in that way, but they're always going to let you dial up something. Triangle wave has a similar sound to a sawtooth wave. Okay, so no matter what synthesizer you are working on, you will be able to find an oscillator section, and you will be able to select some sort of waveform. You're probably going to see sine wave, sawtooth wave, square wave, maybe triangle wave, and then maybe a handful of other unique things. So whenever you encounter a new synthesizer, just walk up to it and your first question would be, where's the oscillator section? 13. The Filter Section: Okay, this second big section of any synthesizer is going to be the filters. Okay? So find the filter section. In our analog instrument here, it is this right here, okay? So this says filter one. There's also a filter two down here that's currently off. So filter one, okay? We're always going to have two controls. Well, not always. Not all synthesizers have two controls, but most of the time we should have two controls on our filter, and one kind of drop down menu with a few options. Okay? So let's talk about these options first. So what does a filter do? A filter is the main tool we have to carve away sound. It's going to filter out certain sounds. Okay? So we have to tell it what kinds of behavior we want it to have so that it can filter out the sounds that we don't want. And here we can see in this list several different kinds of filters that can be used. Low pass, bandpass, notch, high pass, informant, okay? So let's start with low pass. Now, in order to show you what this filter does, I'm going to pull up something different. I'm going to pull up an audio effect that I can pull that I can show a filter in in a much easier to understand way. So here's EQ eight. Okay, I'm going to make this nice and big for us. We'll talk about these filters later. I'm going to turn these off. So we're just looking at one of them. Okay? And let's set up a low pass filter. Okay. So here's what a low pass filter does. In order to read this grid, here's what you need to know. Low sounds are on this side and high sounds are on this side, so low frequencies and high frequencies. Okay? Low stuff, high stuff. And then in the middle, we have a zero, and then we have six, 12, and then under that negative six and negative 12. So this blue line, when it's on zero, that means we are doing nothing to the volume. But when I go up, now we are boosting the volume, and when I go under that zero, we are cutting that volume. Okay? So if I do this, what it means is that we're not going to do anything to the volume on this low stuff. But once we get up to right around here, we're going to start decreasing the volume of the higher stuff. Here's one K. So from a little before one K, all the way to a little bit after one K. All right? So we're going to reduce the volume of those frequencies as they get louder, and then anything above this point, we're just going to mute out. We're not going to listen to. Okay? So this is called a low pass filter because it lets the low frequencies pass through it, not the high frequencies. If we want a high pass filter, we want this. It's going to let the high frequencies pass through it and get rid of the low frequencies. Okay. So going back to our filter in analog, we have a few different choices here. So low pass 12 and low pass 24. Okay? So let's go back to a low pass. Low pass 12 is going to look something like this. Oops, that's not a low pass. Here we go. Low pass 12 is going to look something like this. The number has to do with how steep this line is, okay? So if that's 12, 24, oops, 24 is going to look something like this. It's going to be steeper, okay? The number, technically is decibels per octave, but you can just think of it as how steep this line is. Okay? So that's low pass and high pass. Band pass would be something like this where we have just a single area that we're letting pass through. And the notch would be something like this where we're kind of notching out some area. So in this case, we're not going to hear these frequencies in here, and these ones are going to be awfully quiet. Okay? So let's go back to analog. So if I say low pass 12, and you have to kind of imagine this filter shape in analog analog doesn't show you what that filter is actually looking like. So that's why I'm using this EQ out here so that you can kind of help you visualize what this is doing. We don't need to use this for sound purposes. I'm just using it to show you what it looks like. Okay, and then frequency, okay? Frequency is going to be also known as the cutoff frequency. That means where does this start to slope down, okay? So we can adjust that. And then resonance resonance means give it a little kick at the top, is the way I think about it. So resonance is going to be something like this. Okay? This means it's going to boost a little bit right at the top, right before it starts to cut away, it's going to boost it. It makes, like, kind of like a laser gun effect. I'll show you in a second. Okay, so let's get rid of this EQ, and then let's just hear this. Okay? So move around my remember, we have a low pass here. So as I move the frequency around, we're letting different amounts of high frequencies come through or get cut out. Alright, so now the high frequencies down, we're left just with the low stuff. If I take resonance all the way down, letting more high come through. Okay. Now let's give it some more resin. Here what rehyhy do that same thing without resonance. Okay? So resonance can be fun, it can be a sound. It's effect that you may or may not use. Okay, then the only other thing here in our filter section right now is this two filter two. This is unique to analog. It's going to let us send the signal after this filter down to our second filter so we can do a little bit of routing. We'll talk through that shortly. That's not something you always see in a filter section. Okay? So we have the oscillator section, we have the filter section. Now, up next is the envelopes, and this one works a little bit different. 14. The Envelopes: So remember a little while ago, I said the three main elements that we need to focus on to create sounds are tamber, shape, and motion, right? So, with tamber, we're primarily talking about the oscillator section. Okay? That's what's really going to control our tamber. The filter section, as well, is going to contribute to our tamber a lot. The envelopes are what really controls the shape amongst other things. So envelopes are not necessarily a section, but they are scattered throughout most synthesizers in various ways. So you can see one right here. This is what they look like, okay? If I click on the oscillator section, this is one, as well. This is a little bit different looking one, but this is still an envelope. Filter, this is an envelope, amplifier, this is an envelope. Okay? They are all over the place. This little graphic is the envelope. We can get access to its parameters over here. But you'll get really used to seeing this little graphic. In fact, Ableton likes to do it a little bit different. If you're looking at any other synth, you might see it looking more like this. This is the more traditional thing. Like, if you told me if you drew this little picture and said, What is that? Most experienced sound designers or producers are immediately going to say Envelope. The other thing they might say is ADSR, which I'll talk about in just a second. So what does an envelope do? Well, let's play it with this one, for example. So this is in our amplifier. So this is going to be a volume envelope. We can apply envelopes to do a whole bunch of different stuff. What they do is give us certain points that we can apply to different parameters. With the volume envelope, we can say, how fast does this sound start? Does it start right away, in which case this point is this line is going to be straight up and down. That starts right away. Do I not want it to start right away? Do I want it to fade in? Then we do that. Now. So now we're already just giving this a lot of shape just by doing that one thing. Okay? How do we want this sound to end? Do we want it to fade out? In which case, it is. So I'll show you when I'm lifting up my figure, right? Now, right? It's got a quick fade to it. Let's make that fade longer. Here now stop. Very slow, fade out. Come on. Okay. Long fade out. What if I wanted to just stop? The second I pull my finger up just stop. Okay. Just stops. And there's some other points here, and I'll talk about those in just a second. So with this, I can make a pad kind of sound if I do a slow attack and a slow release. Now I've got like a right? Like, more of a pad sound. Or if I do it with a quick attack and quick release, I have more of a lead sound. Ignore the weird glissing. That's my weird roly keyboard keyboard. It's kind of strange sometimes. But let's go here. We can have a filter envelope, right? So with this envelope, we could say, I want my filter frequency to open over time. And close over time, right? Now, listen. You hear that go Who? That filter opens up over a minute. Over, well, half a second or so. In fact, 835 milliseconds. That's the actual amount. Okay, I can make that go slower. So now we're giving our sound even more shape. The two most common are amplitude, which is, like, the volume, which really gives it shape and filter, which contributes to motion in the sound. Okay. So now let's talk about this graph a little bit more and talk specifically about this ADSR thing. 15. ADSR: Okay, this little graph is called an ADSR envelope. Okay? An ADSR, those four letters match to the four points. This line is our A. This line is our D. This line is our S and this line is R R. Okay? Here's what they stand for. Attack. Okay? The attack line. If that's straight up and down, then we have an instant attack. If it's on an angle, then we're going to have a slower attack, right? And so that can be straight up and down or varying degrees. Okay? We can also control the attack right here. We can say, you know, we want a very slow attack, you know, 15 second long attack. That's insane, or a very near instant attack. Okay? So the first parameter is the attack. Now the second parameter is the D, ADSR. The D stands for decay. How fast does that initial sound decay? Now, in order to visualize this, think about, like, hitting a symbol, like a crash symbol, going on a crash symbol. So you're going to hit that thing with a stick. So the attack is going to be instant. As soon as you hit it, it's just bang. Loud, okay? The actual hitting of the symbol with the stick is very loud. But once you once you're done with the actual contact of the wood to the symbol, then that symbol is going to ring at a sound at a volume that is lower than it was when you actually were hitting it, right? So that's what this decay is. This is the amount of time and the amount of distance it takes to get down to that sustain level, okay? Let me show you a couple examples of this. If I do this, what's going to happen is we're going to get a sudden sound because of that attack. And then very quickly, actually make that less quick. The sound is going to decay to almost nothing. And then it's going to sit here on the sustain part. Okay? So you're going to hear the sound go up and down and then sit to where it's at its sustained moment. Okay, let's do that a little bit faster. Actually, let's do the decay a little slower. Oops. We're still on filter envelope. So we can hear the filter going open and closed kind of fast. Okay. Let's go back to our volume envelope, where it's a little easier to hear. Let's just open up our filter envelope and go to a volume. Okay, so now here, we're going to hear that sound go up and then down quickly. Okay? That was blip. That blip you heard was this. Let's make that blip a little bit longer. Okay, let's make our sustain a little bit louder. Okay? So now you can hear the volume go up and then come down and then get to a sustained point. And now we're at the sustained point. That's our third thing, the S of ADSR, sustain. Okay? The sustained one works a little bit different because it's not a matter of time where these other ones are about time. Attack is about how fast that sound gets in. Decay is about how fast that sound goes down to its sustain point. The S, the sustain is about a level. Okay? So this is about a level. Like, how loud is it going to be while we're just sitting on the note, okay? It's just going to be there forever. So if I go like this, then we're going to have an initial decay, and then we're going to sit on a volume that's almost the same as where it was. In fact, we can get rid of the decay completely by just doing this. That's not very interesting sound, although it does have its uses. So where this line is, this is going to be a loud sustain and no sustain, quiet, sustain, medium sustain. So the S is the volume at which it's just going to sustain at forever. But the end of the sustain is this point right here. This point is created when I lift my finger off the note. Okay? So this is letting go of the note is that point right there. We can't control that point here because that point is controlled by when I lift up my finger or when I tell the midi note to stop playing. But as soon as I do that, this happens, and this is the R which stands for release. So when I release the note, does it immediately stop or does it fade out slowly? Does it fade out really slowly, okay? So now we can craft a sound with some shape to it in a way that we want. All right. Can I let go, and that's what happens. So that's how envelopes work. You'll see this ADSR stuff all over the place. Sometimes you'll just see four knobs and they'll just say AD, S and R, and you'll just kind have to know how those work. We can adjust them here A, D, S and R. We have this sustained time which doesn't really apply to us right now. ADSR envelopes are crucial part of synthesis. So get used to seeing them and understanding the four different points that they're dealing with. 16. The Amplifier: Okay, last but not least, the fourth main like element of any synthesizer is the amplifier, okay? Amplifier is the simplest one. We will have an envelope in the amplifier to control the volume. We'll also have our main level because we got to give it some juice, and probably panning is in there as well. Panning is your left and right balance. So all the way left all the way If that sounded the same to you, then this video might have had its panning removed, which happens on some platforms. It's weird. I don't know why they do that, but whatever. So that's the amplifier section. Now, any synthesizer is going to have those four sections somewhere in it, and then probably some bells and whistles, things like LFOs, Unison, glide. That's kind of it for this one. So we'll talk about those as they come up, but those are the four sections. As we go on and start learning the different live instruments, I'm going to do it by saying, Okay, let's look at a new instrument and say, Okay, where is our oscillator section? We're going to find it, and we're going to learn how it works. And then we're going to say, Where's our filters? Here they are. Where is our amplifier? Here it is. And if you understand those four sections, learning any synthesizer is going to be 1,000 times easier. Trust me. 17. Overview of the Ableton Live Instruments: Okay. So for the next big chunk of this class, actually, the majority of the rest of it, we're going to go through each instrument. We're going to go through everything in this list. Not exactly in order, though. Here, they're just kind of an alphabetical order, and I kind of want to do it a little bit more systematically. So we are going to start with analog, which we've already been looking at, so it'll be familiar, but we're going to go into a little bit more detail. And then we're going to move into operator because it's similar to analog but kind of souped up. And then we'll move through all of these eventually. Now, the way we're going to do this is I'm going to I may not explain every single button and knob. If there's a button and knob that you're dying to know what it does and I haven't talked about it, just remember to turn on that IfoviewT get that little box down here. You can even just hit this little button, and it's going to show you those things. So even if there's a parameter I don't talk about, it's there in that info view for you. However, I'm going to talk about most parameters. We're going to walk through looking for our four different areas that's the oscillaators, filters, envelopes, and amplifier. And then we'll also kind of dissect and look at some presets, design some sounds of our own. I'll share some files with you and show you how you can, um, save your custom made patches and share them with people. Okay, there's also a few Max for Live devices hidden in here. You can kind of tell by the icons. All these DS instruments are Max for Live devices. We will be looking at those in this section. I just want to point out that these are Max for Live devices, but we'll talk about them. There's actually a few more Max for Live devices that are not in this list that are worth talking about as instruments, one in particular, called the granulator. So we'll talk about that near the end of this class too. Okay, and then just last thing I'll say on this topic before we dive in is just remember the common things that all instruments do. If you want an instrument on a track, you load it in or load in a preset. You can put in audio effects after it. You can put midi effects before it, okay? So with that in mind, let's dive in a little bit deeper into analog. 18. Live’s Analog Synth: Okay, so let's start with a fresh analog. I'm just going to pull the default device over here onto this track, and then let's take a look. Okay, so we know our way around a little bit, right? We already kind of know our oscillator section, our filter section, and our amplifier section. But there's more here. Things we don't know are things like the LFOs. We'll talk about those. Also, how the different oscillators interact with each other, right? So we have two oscillators, kind of three, actually. And I don't know if I mentioned this, but the number of oscillators instrument has or any Synth has is one of the things that makes different synths unique to each other. Some synthesizers just have one oscillator in their oscillator section. Some have two like this one. Even though this sort of has three, I'll talk about that in a minute. Some have four like operator that we're going to look at soon. Some have 100, right? Most of them have 2-4, but there are some that have just like insane numbers of oscillators. So one other thing that is common in a lot of the Ableton instruments is that as you click on a section, you're going to get more controls down here. This whole black box is unique to whatever you just clicked on, right? So if I click on Oscillator section, this is all related to that oscillator section. If I go to filter section. This stuff is all related to that filter, amplifier LFO even, right? See, it's all graded out here because that LFO is off. Okay, so let's walk through our signal flow of analog because it's a little complicated. And then we'll focus on these LFOs for a little bit, and then we'll make some stuff. 19. Signal Flow: Okay, let's take a look at the signal flow within this synthesizer. Okay? This will help you really understand how to use it by kind of analyzing the signal flow. Now, most synthesizers give you some kind of clue as to what the signal flow is. So a lot of the time, it's in the design, especially when you get into analog synthesizers, um, some of the design elements will kind of point you into how the signal is flowing. Like in this Syth over here, it's got all these like design elements that are actually, once you kind of stare at it for a while, seeing that they're like arrows that are showing you like this goes that way and this goes that way. But this one doesn't have that, although things generally flow from left to right. However, they can take some turns along the way. Okay? So we turn everything off on the bottom row. What we have here is just Oscillator one is going to go to filter one, which is going to go to amplifier and then out. Okay? However, it's a little more complicated than that. There's a couple points where things can kind of diverge. The first one is right here, filter one, filter two. So here we're saying, We do we want this oscillators sound to go? Right now, it's set to filter one, which is here. Easy enough. But I could change this to say like 50 50. Now, it's going to filter one and filter two. So half the signals going here and half the signals going there. Why would I want to do that? I could set two different filters that way. I could say this filter has a whole bunch of resonance and a pretty high cutoff frequency Was this filter has a lower cutoff frequency and maybe less resonance. Maybe this is a different shape of filter. There's a lot of different things I can do with that. So here we're just kind of splitting the signal and sending it to two different places. Now, if I do that, though, I need to turn on AMP two because otherwise, the percentage, half the signal that's down here into filter two is just dying when it gets to here. It's not going anywhere. So I got to turn this on if I want to hear that. Okay? So filter one, filter two. I can do it on this oscillator two. So I could say this one is going to go all to filter one or all to filter two. And you might be thinking, could I just make this one filter one and this one filter two so that they roll right across from left to right. You totally can do that, and that's a perfectly good way to use this instrument. But if I did this, now, both oscillator one and two are going to filter one and then to filter two, half of their signal each. So you're going to get a slightly different sound that way. So let's keep it simple. Let's go filter one and filter two down here. Now there's another point where things kind of can diverge if we want them to, and that's right here. This says to filter two. What percentage do we want to go to filter two? That means that if I take this signal, this is all going to filter one, so it's all going here. After it goes to filter one, it's all 100% being sent down to filter two anyway, but that's different, right? That's different than the signal going from here, half to filter 1.5 to filter two. This says all of this signal is going to go to filter one, and it's going to be filtered by filter one. All of these settings are going to apply to it. And then the result is going to go out and down to filter two. Makes sense? Okay. And then filter two is going to send it over to Amp two, and then we'll hear it. We can't send filter two up to filter one. So that's our signal flow. We've got these kind of one, two, three points where we can kind of interrupt the signal flow and send it around the synthesizer in different ways. All of that's going to change the sound. We'll look at some examples of that soon when we look at a few presets or maybe design something of our own. After we get to the amplifier, we're going to go right out. We're going to hit this volume knob for one more kind of main volume adjustment and then send out, which out obviously means back to the track. It's going to hit this meter and then our main meter. And that's our signal flow. 20. LFO: Okay, let's talk about this LFO. LFO, I always debate whether or not I should include this in my like four sections of the synthesizer, because just about every synthesizer I've ever seen has an LFO in it. But I usually leave it off just to keep things simple. But it is a very, very, very common thing that you're going to find. So let's learn how to use it. Okay, our LFO is right here. First of all, what does that stand for? LFO is low frequency oscillator. Okay, so let's analyze that. It is an oscillator, right? There's an O in it that stands for oscillator. So these are oscillators. There are only sound generating things. So how can that be that these oscillators are sound generating things, but these ones aren't? Well, these ones are low frequency oscillators. They are too low for us to hear. They're very low. Like under 20 hertz. Like, we can hear down to 20 hertz ish. These are usually between zero and maybe ten hertz. You can see the typical rates here they go up to 17 hertz, I guess, is the fastest that it goes. So it's too low for you to hear. You're not going to hear them. So what's the point? We're not even gonna route these to an audio output. We're not even gonna try to hear them. There's no point in hearing. So what can they do? Well, remember what oscillators do. They oscilate, right? They go back and forth. Or if you're like a sine wave, they go like this. And they just do that forever. They're just like a fish swimming forever. It's never going to stop. It's just going to do this forever. So our idea here is, wouldn't it be cool if we could take this and, like, assign it to something? Like, what if we wanted our volume Our main volume, let's say, No, our oscillator volume Like, what if we just wanted, our oscillator volume right here just to constantly be going up and down up and down and up and down to create motion. Motion is one of the main things we can control in a sound. So if we could just have this go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down forever, that might give us some cool motion. So we can use one of these low frequency oscillators and take that sine wave that's on it, or it can be any kind of wave. And say, Okay, you that are just doing this forever, I'm just going to connect you to my volume, and then you're going to go up and down like this forever. Make sense? Let's try it. Basic sound. I'm going to turn on this LFO. Okay? Now, in my so this LFO is on, we'll play with these settings in a minute. But let's go back over here. So I'm going to go over to the amplifier and control this volume instead of this one. So this one, I'm going to go here. I'm going to go to level modulation is what Mod stands for here, LFO one. Let's crank that up. Okay. Now when I play that note. There it is. There's our sine wave of going. We're going a little faster than I can go. But that's what it's doing. If I turn that down, Okay. You can think of this amount that I'm dialing in right here as, like, if I'm telling the volume to go zero to 100, right? Do, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, that would be this all the way up. It's going Where, It's actually going, But if I say, like 50, it's actually not going to go zero to 100. It's more going to go like 25 to 75. It's a little narrower window, ok? So Alright. It's not going all the way down or all the way up. It's just kind of sitting more in the middle. And as I pull that number down, it's going to move less and less and less. It does not have anything to do with the speed. If I want to adjust the speed, that is the rate out here. Okay. So in my LFO settings, I have these two little buttons here, Hertz and then what looks like a little note. That is common. You'll see that in a lot of different settings. So Hertz means, I can dial this in based on the frequency. So 1.2 hertz. That is a certain speed of LFO. That's cool. If I don't want to deal with Hertz, I can deal with this, which is actually just division of the beat. Okay? This is usually more useful, at least in the way that I work. So here, I can say now it's at a quarter note. Okay, so let's crank this back up. So now the pulsing that I'm getting is a quarter note because it says quarter there. You can switch it to an eighth note it's an eighth note. So we can control things that way. Now, this Normenclature here, quarter is quarter note. Eighth is eighth note. When you see a T or a D after these, D means dotted eighth note. That's going to be a little slower than an eighth note, and T means eighth note triplet or whatever you're looking at. Here's eighth note triplet. That's going to be a little faster than an eighth note. So you might be thinking, Oh, this sounds like a way to get those big web web sounds by just going like, doing a low sound like that. It is kind of one way to get those big web web sounds. There's other ways that we'll look at later. But, yeah, this is one way that they get those. It's with an LFO. Okay? So in order to use an LFO, we have to turn on the LFO. We adjust the rate, which is the speed of it, and then we assign it to something. So far, we've assigned it to an amplifier, but there's tons of other things we can assign it to. We can assign it to panning. Okay? Now it's volume and panning. Let's turn off volume. Okay? Now it's panning. I could go into my oscillator and say pitch. Okay, now the pitch is going to go up and down like crazy. And what's interesting is that you still hear a frequency, right? Happening underneath that, a quiet frequency that's just saying steady. You hear that? That's this other oscillator. So I've only turned on the LFO for one oscillator. Okay? This is really annoying, so let's turn that off. I can do filter stuff. I can say frequency modulation with the filter. Crank that up. Now my filter's going all up and down like crazy. So let's do that not so crazy. Okay? Now we can hear the panning and the filter are both being affected by the LFO, okay? Now, if I want to make a more complex one, let's turn on a second LFO. Let's set it to dotted 16th note and put that one down here on pitchma just a little bit, just to give us a little vibrato feel. We'll also put it on this filter kind of a lot. Now we're gonna have a pretty complex sound. Okay? We've got a ton of motion happening in this sound now, right? So we've really achieved that motion that I like in sounds. Not all sounds need to have motion, but it's a nice it's a nice thing to add sometimes. So that is what the LFO does, okay? We can turn them back off like this. And now we're just back to where we were. Cool. 21. Programming Analog: Alright. Let's make a patch an analog. So typically, when we put something together, we call it a patch. I don't know why. It kind of has to do with probably, like, analog where you're like, actually moving patch cables around, but we still like to call it a patch, even though we're just dialing something in. So, let's go back to our default patch, okay? So I'm just going to load an analog back up onto the same track. You can drag it right on top of your existing analog, okay? That's going to take us back to our default patch. Now, maybe I should point out here that you can change the default patch if you want. I wouldn't really recommend doing this, but if you really want to, if you dial in a patch and you're like, that's me. That's what I want my default patch to be going forward, all you have to do is save that patch with this little save button and then kind of control click on the header of your analog and say, save as default preset. But we're not going to do that right now. I will talk about saving and sharing patches in just a minute. But, okay, so we have a default patch. Sounds like this. Okay. What do we want? What do we want to make? Let's make a pad sound, okay? So pad sounds are those, like, slowly evolving sounds. They've got a lot of motion in them, usually, but they're very delicate. They're not real bright. They can be bright. But slow attack, slow release, all that stuff. So let's start there, actually. So let's go to our amplitude amplifier and just say, we want slow attack and a slow release. Let's hear that. Give me a little slower on the attack. It's pretty good. I kind of like, you know, like in full honesty. You know, like, a big kind of confession is that I really like the default analog sound, especially, like in a fifth like that. I just like that sound. I think it's just really nice. But let's change it. So let's go to our oscillator section, okay? If we want a calmer sound. We could switch over to a sine wave. We could leave this one sawtooth. Feel like it's changing everything a whole bunch. Let's do both sine waves. It's not bad, but it's a little too clean. Let's try let's go back to this. I kind of like that. Okay, let's set our filter up. Well, actually, before we set up our filter, there is one thing we can do that'll make this sound a lot thicker. It already sounds pretty thick because of that sawtooth wave, but let's go to two sine waves. So right now, I have two sine waves doing the same thing. Okay? They can go to different filters, but the tuning is the same on them. One thing I could do here is maybe I'll take this one and tune it down by an octave. Now listen. So now we have a whole different kind of sound, right? It's almost like an organ. I can even do a little bit more. If I changed the tuning of it, if you pull one oscillator out of tune just a little bit, you'll get this density to the sound. It makes it really thick. Now, it's not so obvious when we separate it by octaves. So let's go up to the same octave. So now we have that, but watch this. Right? I almost I kind of creates its own little LFO, just from the notes being, like, a little out of tune. They're kind of doing this. So that can be a good sound, but I don't think I need it here because I liked the octave difference better. Okay, let's leave that out of tune the hair. Okay. Okay, so now, what are we doing with our filters? This one's going over to filter one. This one's going over to filter one, okay? And then we're going all to filter two afterwards. So let's tighten up our filter, a little bit of resonance. That's cool. Up an octave here. There's that resonance. Okay, let's turn on this filter. Add a little bit more resonance in a different spot. That's nice. I'm gonna play with those filters with an envelope in just a second. Okay, let's go to amplifier two out and just leave our level just like that. Okay, so I'm getting a weird click there. I think it's from this other filter. We'll deal with that in a minute. Okay, let's add an LFO and just create a little bit of motion on this. So let's do it with our filter. Let's add some frequency modulation. This one, two, a little bit from both of them on. I don't really care about the beat division of the beat right now. I just want kind of a slow ambience here. Okay. Okay, here's where that click is coming from. I didn't set an envelope, an amplitude envelope for my second amplifier. It certainly down a little bit. Okay, now let's add a little envelope to my filter. Okay, let's trim it down a little bit. Alright. So it's actually not a bad pad sound, no. Let's in. Let's make a little nitty clip so that we just have a Okay, I don't really love that LFO, but without it. Y yo yo. We have a pretty good sound. It's quite simple and nice. 22. Saving And Loading Patches: Okay, throughout this course, I want to be able to give you these patches that we make. So let me just show you how you save and share a patch. So this works the same, I believe, for all instruments. What you need to find is this little disc icon. Right there. So I'm going to hit Save. And as soon as I click that little disc icon, it jumps me and my browser over to user library and then is prompting me to give this a name. So let's call this sign pad. Okay? And it's going to automatically attach ADV Ableton device to. Okay. So now this is my patch. Forever, I can load this up as a patch that I made. Neat. Sometimes people do stuff like, like, abbreviated with their name. So I can click Command R to rename this, and I could say, like, J sign pad if I wanted to just to know, like, this is what I made. But I don't actually really care about that. So I'm going to get rid of that. Okay, great. Now, if I want to find where this is on my computer because this is an actual file now, this little sign pad, ADV, if I want to find this and send it to you, I can control click and say, Show and Finder. And here it is. This appears to be another one I've made, massive Base synth. Maybe we'll load that one up in a minute. So I will post this in the class and you can download it. And once you get it on your computer, if you just drag it over into your finder, it should take it. You can kind of see where it's willing to put it, any of my collections, and then my user library. My if it's in my user library, it will show up in Synth presets, or at least it should. Okay, so I'll post that here, and then let's come back and do a little preset deconstruction. 23. Preset Deconstruction: Let's do a preset deconstruction. This is a great way to learn any synthesizer. I love doing this, and literally this is how I learned all this stuff is by doing this over and over. So let's go to instruments analog, open this up so we see all our presets. And all I'm looking for is, I don't want to look at a rack, so you can see by the icon, this is an analog preset because it's got this icon and we're in the analog folder. This one is a rack, an instrument rack. We'll talk about instrument racks shortly, but I don't want to go there quite yet. So I just want one that doesn't have this line in the middle, so like this. And I'm just going to find, like, a random one. Okay, let's check that one out. So I'm going to drag this one over around here and let's take a look. Okay, so here's what it sounds like. Interesting. Okay, so oscillators, we have two square waves, and they're both on We have everything's going to filter one completely. The volume is different. It's interesting that they took Oscillator two's volume down. It's quieter than Oscillator one. That's interesting. Um, we have no LFOs on, so I'm not seeing any LFOs down here. That's just fine. Now, pitch wise, nothing adjusted here, but down here, we're up $0.07. Now, that's really prevalent 'cause we can hear that we're playing like a harmony. The seven semitones is a fifth, right? So that means, like, we're hearing the interval of a fifth in every single note, which is great to know because if I go down here and say, like, I don't want that sound. Like, I want this sound, but I don't want to hear that harmony. Just take this back down to zero, and now we don't have it. Or I could change it to a fourth. Or, you know, something else. Let's go back to where it was. Okay, cool. And then let's see what its filter is doing. It's filter has just kind of a wide open envelope, pretty low, no resonance. So not doing a lot in the filter, pretty simple amplifier. See, this is really interesting. The envelope they've used here, very fast attack, but not instant. It's like ramping up but really quick. Just But instantly off. Like, no release at all, shutting off as soon as we stop. No LFO. A little bit of glide. That's interesting. That means that if I play a note and then another note before releasing that first note and the notes overlap, it's going to glide up to that note a little bit. So there's just a little bit of glide there. That's cool. That's a cool trick. So a really quite simple patch, but a cool sound. So the thing that I like about these preset deconstructions, I like to call them, is that I could look at, you know, something like this semitone thing. And if I didn't know what that was, I can just play some notes and then turn that dial, right? And listen and see if you can figure out what it's doing. So this is just a great way to explore any synth, load up some of its presets, and then pick a dial, listen to it, and start turning that dial and see how it changes it. That'll tell you a lot about what it's doing. Okay, I did kind of skip over this noise thing. So let's go back to this noise and just talk about that real quick and then we're going to move on to another instrument. 24. Noise: Okay, I said a few times that in the analog synth, we have two oscillators, kind of a third. You could actually make an argument for kind of four or maybe even kind of five. And here's what that means. We have these two oscillators. These are two that we can hear. Here's our kind of three, and it's noise. We can hear that. We will hear it. The kind of four and kind of five would be our LFO. Or oscillators, we can't hear them though. So, not really. But let's go back to noise. Why would we have noise? Noise is exactly what it sounds like it is. If I turn off the oscillators and just turn on noise, But noise run through a filter you can actually do a lot of stuff with. You can add noise to a synth. Like, if we take this sound and add noise to it. It changes the sound of it quite a bit, right? So there's a lot of reasons that we might use noise on something. Another good one would be just for percussive elements. I take this off, this off, take this. Take this, and I go like that Okay. Now I've got, like, a percussive element. If I put that into my sound, right? Now, it helps with that percussiveness. So noise can be really useful. We actually also have noise here in this shape. I just kind of a cool sound. So it's a useful thing, and you will see it in a lot of synthesizers to have noise as an option, either as a separate oscillator or as a wave shape in the oscillator section or both, as is the case here. So it can be fun to add noise, especially for percussionive elements, but sometimes just for tamber making a unique sound. We can change the color. This is basically a filter let's let's go back to here. All right, so this is basically a low pass filter, but, um, it does help change the sound a lot. Alright, let's move on to operator, where we are definitely going to see the option to use noise. 25. Live’s Operator Synth Interface: Okay, so I think I'm going to make I'm going to try to make us a track using all of the synths. So I have here, going back to that square sync lead preset that we made, I just put one note in here. I'm just going to let that drone through that whole section. So I'm going to rename this track Command R, call it analog. Okay, now let's go to Track two and make an operator. So if we go to instruments, close up Analog, and let's go down to operator. Now, operator is probably my favorite synth in live. If I'm working on a track and I'm just exploring don't really have a clear idea of what I'm going to do yet. I'm just kind of playing around with sounds. Usually, I'll throw an operator on something. It's a great tool for just exploring. It's just a great tool all around. So let's throw an operator up here. Okay, this one looks a little different. But what do we need to do? Let's find our four sections. Okay? What comes first? If you said oscillators, I'm going to assume you said oscillator. You said oscillator. Okay. Whenever you're looking for the oscillator section, a clue can often be the tuning controls. So if you see, like, coarse and fine, those are tuning controls. Okay? So here is an oscillator. Okay? If I click on it, our contextual menu here, menu, the stuff that changes as we click on different areas. That's this black box again. This is going to show us some more controls, including our waveform. Okay? So we have a lot of options for waveforms. We'll come back to that. Okay, so that means we have one, two, three, four different oscillators available to us. Great. Okay. What's our second section that we're looking for? Filters, right? Do you see a filter section on the screen? It's right here, easily found by the word filter, in this case. But if you don't see the word filter, you can usually find it by looking for frequency and resonance, right there. And hey, look at that. We have an envelope in it. Okay, if we want to look around for more envelopes, we can find them all over the place. If we go to our oscillators, you see Osciator and envelope. Click on that. There's an envelope, right? Familiar thing. Um, so we've found oscillaators, filters, envelopes and amplifier probably just right here. There's a big volume knob, last tone control, which is another type of filter. We've also got pitch envelope, spread transpose, some extra stuff, and an LFO, right? We know how to use LFOs, and there they are. So general layout of the operator, let's talk about signal flow. 26. Signal Flow in Operator: Okay, let's talk about signal flow in operator. Now, this is a little bit different. We don't have the same kind of routing that we have in analog. But there's a whole different kind of routing scheme here. So let's start with our first oscillator. So note that our oscillators are labeled A, B, C, and D. You can also take note of those colors. Okay? That's kind of important. Okay, so oscillator A, we look at it. We look at our settings here. So after our oscillator makes sound, it's basically going to flow into our filter. And in this case, all four oscillators are going to go into that filter, okay? And then that filter, assuming we don't do anything else to it, is going to go out to our amplifier. So in a way, simple, right? We don't have to deal with routing and things like we did in analog. Because everything just all the oscillators go to the filter, and then the filter goes to the output. Simple, right? Nothing fancy. But wait. Look at this right here. This is a little curious, isn't it? Let's click on this. Okay, see all these dots up here. Analog had a simple version of this, but this is a much more complicated version. Okay? Let's go over here. What we're seeing here is not only routing of our four oscillators, but actually different kinds of synthesis. Okay? So this one has all four osciators heading to the output. So when there's a little line coming down off that box, that means heading to the filter and then to the output. So in this case, we're going to hear all four oscillators, A, B, C, and D are all going out and going to the filter. This is basically additive synthesis. We could say it's subtractive synthesis because we're still going to a filter, and we're going to chip away at those sounds a little bit. But we're basically just piling on sounds from oscillators. So it's adding them all together. And so that's great. You can get some really cool sounds that way. But what happens in a case like this, right? Here, what we have is there's only one oscillator, the yellow one, A, that's going to the output. The rest are going into each other. Okay? That's interesting, right? So we have oscillator D at the top. D is going into C, which is going into B, which is going into A. So what does going into mean? That means that they are modulating each other. In other words, Oscillator D is going to control Oscillator C, and Oscillator C is going to control oscillator B, and oscillator B is going to control Oscillator A. This is FM synthesis, okay? So now, in terms of routing our sound, what you need to know is that no matter which selection we have up here, in the end, all our osciators come out, go to our filter, and then go to our amplifier. So it's still relatively simple. But I want to spend a little bit more time on this routing because this is complicated and important. Okay? So let's take a minute and talk about what FM is and how we're using it here and also what all these other ones are. Let's do that now. Yes 27. FM Synthesis: Okay, let's go back to talking about our LFO for a minute. Our LFO, if you remember, does this goofy thing, right? Like, it just keeps moving. It's a oscillator that is too low for us to hear, and we can assign it to do something for us, like control our volume, right? Now, Imagine that we take the pitch of that oscillator up. So typically, an LFO is, you know, under 20 hertz, so we can't hear it. But what if we took it up to where we could hear it and then assigned it to do something to our oscillator, okay? If we did that, then that LFO would be modulating the other oscillator, right? Modulating just means controlling it. So the LFO is now not an LFO. It's an audio rate thing that we're going to use to control another oscillator. That's FM synthesis, okay? It's an LFO that's up in the audio range. We're not going to hear that LFO. We're not going to hear that oscillator, but we're going to use it to modulate the frequency of another oscillator, okay? So F stands for frequency modulation, and that's what we're doing. We're using one oscillator to modulate another oscillator. So when we have a setup like this, we have D, let me go back to that. We have D, modulating C, which is modulating B, which is modulating A. And if we look at any of these other routing patterns, they are similar. Like, let's look at this one. In this one, we have A and B are just coming out by themselves, but C is being modulated by D. So we're going to hear three oscillators and C is going to be a modulated oscillator because D is modulating it. Let's go here. We're going to have B, C, and D all modulating A. So we're only going to hear one oscillator, but it's going to be modulated by three other oscillators. Let's go to this one. We're going to have D modulating C, and then C is going to be modulating B and A. Okay? So all of these are going to sound a little different. Here's our default patch. Let me just turn up these. Okay. Now I have volume on all of them. They're all just doing a sine wave, okay? Let's go to our modulation here. So now we're hearing four oscillators doing the exact same thing. Okay? Nothing fancy. Let's switch that over to FM. Right? Very different. Now we're hearing all these oscillators modulate each other. Okay, let's go to this one. Slightly different. Very different. And some Okay. So the modulation pattern or the routing matters quite a bit. So that's what FM is. It's this or actually really any of these are combinations of FM and additive or maybe subtractive. This is pure FM, where we've got a whole bunch of things modulating another one. All right. Cool. All right. Now let's try to make something with our operator. A. 28. Operator Programming: Okay, let's make something with operator. So, let's go back to our default patch. I'm just going to drag operator right back on there and make sure I'm back to my default settings. Okay, so we have this. Okay? So let's take this sound. Let's make something a little more lead like, something that'll give us a little bit of a a little bit of a bite to it. So First of all, that tells me, I don't want to sine wave. So here we have all of these different waveforms, but you can see they're quite similar. We have three different signs. We have a bunch of different saws, a bunch of different squares, triangle, noise looped, noise white, and user. So if I go to one of these saws, they're basically going to show you different amounts of overtones. These are This graph here is kind of showing you partials. And what's fun about operator is that you can just kind of draw the partials you want, and it's going to change the sound. So you're sort of drawing a waveform here. You're drawing the partials, but you can see down here what the resulting waveform is. So it's kind of fun. But let's go to one of these squares. So square with three partials is what that's telling you. The overtones, is not very buzzy. Square with 64 is going to be a lot more buzzy. Let's stick with that, actually. I kind of like it. Now, one thing I'll point out while we're here is noise and looped noise. So white noise is pure noise. It has no pitch to it. So if I select noise, no matter what note I play, No matter what note I play, it's the same. Right? What noise doesn't matter what key you play because noise doesn't have pitch. It's all pitches. But if you want noise to have pitch, you can do looped noise. And what this is is it's basically a little sound file of noise that can be looped and that can have pitch. You can hear looping here. So that's the differences between that. But let's go back to square 64. Okay. All right. Now let's go to our routing, and let's do an FM something. So in this case, we're going to do let's let's do this one. Okay? So B is modulating A and C is modulating D. Okay? So let's add some sound to B. Okay. Okay, we want to do something with those envelopes in it, but we'll leave them how they are for now. And then let's take C and go to a square wave also. Okay, so I want to adjust my envelope for this one because it's just giving me a little sound. So I turn the other two off. And I'm gonna walk away with this. Okay, I'm going to taking this just a little bit. And then we're gonna bring back in A and B. Okay, kind of cool. I don't think I need an LFO. My filter is pretty good. There's a little kind of frantic motion in there that I think is coming from this tuning. Okay, let's set our amplitude envelopes to be a little shorter. Or longer, actually, is what I'm trying to say. So that we don't get that dog sound. We get a tiny little faded. Pretty good. I'm still getting a little of that. Let's take that down. Oh, that's what it was, I think. Okay. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's add that to our clip here. So I think what I'll do here is maybe some of our peggios, right? Let's do I think that was a C that I put over there. So let's do C E flat going out of the key. G. Well, let's do a little bit more, actually. C A flat. Okay, that should make kind of a spooky sound. Let's stretch those out to be, I don't know, long. Let's make that like a few bars. And then maybe we'll change it to maybe some kind of F F A flat C. Take that one down to F. Maybe we'll take that back up to C. F E flat. Let's take that to D. Sure. It's kind of weird. Let's see that E flat. Okay, now let's go to our midi effects, put a little arpeggiator on it just for fun. We'll solo that. Okay, not bad. Now, just to jazz it up a little bit. No jazz it up, but let's add audio effects. Let's add an echo. I always like echos on arpeggiated stuff. It just feels rather nice. Okay. I'm gonna combine these two clips together with Command J, and then just duplicate them over and over and over. Alright, let's see what we have all together now. Cool. Next, I think we need some kind of pad, but we'll get to that when we get to that. Let's keep playing around with operator a little bit more, and let's do a preset deconstruction. 29. Preset Deconstruction: Okay, so let's go to our operator here. And let's look at some presets. So operator L let's see here. How about distorted keys? Distoead. How about that one? I'm just gonna plop that right there. Oh, this is a rack, and I don't want to do racks. I see that. That's kind of close to what we had made. In terms of a lead like sound. Okay, let's look at what they have. Oh, this is interesting, right away. Okay, so our first oscillator is up. It's a little out of tune, and they have this course setting set to seven. Now, this works a little bit different than we saw in analog. The course setting, this is, in a way, a tuning like thing, but really what this is telling us is not octaves. This is telling us which partial. So you can kind of hear like if I turn these off, we chose this echo off. And this arpeggiator. So we're stepping through overtones. Um so we're stepping through overtones there or different partials, rather than octaves. So you can make some interesting effects that way. Alright, let's certainly back on and walk through them. Okay, so our envelope is all the way open, and we have a sine wave. Pretty simple. Our second oscillator, our B oscillator, this one's really interesting. It has this fixed mode set. Fixed mode means it's going to ignore what node I play on the keyboard. It's always going to play whatever the frequency says here. So as soon as you turn something to fixed mode, the course dial turns into just frequency. This is always going to be 693 hertz, this one. So that's fixed. Now, what's interesting here is look at our routing. So that frequency is always going to be modulating the A oscillator. But even though this is at a single frequency and it's always going to play that frequency, it's not always going to play that frequency because this frequency is being modulated by both C and D, right? We can see that here. So C is quieter than the others. The level here really has to do with how much modulation is going to happen. The more you push this volume, the more it's going to modulate the next thing. See, listen. No. O Right. So that has to do with the modulation. We're up to the seventh partial. Also here, we have a unique waveform here with just four partials. Same thing here, we have a unique waveform that they just kind of drew in with some partials course and then pulled it out of tune quite a ways, about half a step. And then all of those are feeding into each other. I've got an LFO is on, let's see where we're using that LFO. LFO would come in Okay, so the LFO here, we can go here and see destination. It's just going to A, and it's up pretty high, 100%. But the amount here is pretty low, so it's not doing a ton. It would be if we cranked it up. Just giving it a little bit of motion. And then this filter envelope is kind of cutting down, so it's closing up a filter as it goes. Don't go to warm like that. And then its volume is kind of low. So, interesting. Let's try that on our little track here. I'm gonna turn back Echo and our pagiator back on. I think I like it. Let's keep that. Okay, so cool things we can do with operator. Okay, um, just for consistency's sake, I'll give you this session again, and then we'll go on to drift. 30. The Drift Interface: Alright, let's move on to drift. I'm going to make a new mini track here with Command Shift T. Maybe I'll get rid of these two audio tracks while we're here 'cause we're not gonna need those. And let's put drift on it. Now, drift is new to Live. It's not new and Live 12. I think it actually kind of snuck into a late version of Live 11, like 11.5 or so. This is an instrument that it's a lot like analog in that we can use it just like similarly to how we use analog. It's got a couple more features to it. But it's also got capability to do some FM stuff, so it's kind of like operator two, in a way. Okay, so let's go through the basic layout. Okay? So first, the oscillator section. Pretty simple here. We have oscillators down here. We have two oscillators and then noise. So a lot like analog. We have different wave form. Let's see. We have sine, triangle. This is actually I've heard people referring to this as a shark tooth wave. That's kind of a new term to me, but it's there. Not sure what we call this one. Sawtooth. This is a pulse wave and a square wave. So let's go whoops. Solo wrong trek. Okay, so here's what we have right now. We can do some cool kind of wave shaping with this. Like, let's turn off two. So here's just Oscillator one. We can kind of shape. You can see what it's doing them. This kind of shows you. So we're basically taking this wave form and kind of mangling it a little bit. Let's go to that cool shark tooth thing. It's a cool sound. We can do some modulation right here, so we could say, LFO. See what the LFO is doing. So if I go all the way out here and change the LFO, I can do it. But right here, we have some modulation ability. And then this is activating our oscillator, and this is a little confusing, but this button right here is sending it to the filter, okay? If we turn it off, it's going to bypass the filter and go directly to, I believe the envelopes and then to the output. So if we want to go to the filter, we're going to go there. So we turn on our second oscillator. Let's do that. This one, we can detune a little bit. Does that kind of bigger sound? Just the volume of it? Cool. And then we can do more modulation right down here. We can say, Let's modulate Envelope two, which we haven't even set up yet, silly. Give us just a touch. Kind of like that, slob. Yeah, we could add in some noise if we wanted. Well, right? Our filter cutoff frequency. We're familiar with that. We get a nice cool graph here. Resonance, we're familiar with that. This type is we have two different types of filters. You can kind of see the shape. This just has to do with the algorithm in the background. You might like Type one and you might like Type two. Type two, as I understand it, type two is the more traditional Ableton filter and Type one is kind of a new thing. Um, key tracking. We haven't talked about key tracking at all yet. Maybe let's Let's circle back to that. I'm going to talk about key tracking in the next video. Residents, this high pass here, HP high pass, this is we see this in a lot of different places, sometimes, it basically is just a way to knock out any real low frequencies. Sometimes you see this on since where you might just not want anything low. So there's just like a high pass just kind of sitting there, ready to get rid of any low rumbly stuff. You don't have to use it. More modulation. We can choose what we want to use to modulate. And then what we wanted to modulate. So more LFO stuff, more envelope stuff, lots of opportunities to modulate. And we get to envelopes right here. We have traditional ADSR. Nothing fancy there. Okay. Here we go. I'm gonna sharpen this a little bit more. Cool. Our second envelope has a cool little feature to it. So we can add a second envelope and there's this button which is gonna cycle that envelope, okay? So what does that mean? An envelope that's crafting the shape of our sound, but is cycling over and over and over and over quite fast. That's basically an LFO. So this kind of turns this envelope into an LFO. And if we turn that on, we get some controls over the shape of it. Maybe we dial it in here Envelope two cycling. So this is where if we really set this to modulate our frequency, we get into some kind of FM territory with this. It's more LFO setting, so this basically is another LFO, if we consider that one. The amount, what we wanted to modulate, and then mode. You see this in a lot of synthesizers. I think we saw this in some of the other ones, but poly means polyphonic. It can play a lot of different notes. Mano means monophonic. It can only play one note at a time. Stereo means it's going to have two notes that it can play at a time or two different signals. And unison means it can only play one note at a time, but it's usually going to be doubled by some effect, making a stereo effect. Now, this drift, I believe what this drift is doing is adding more harmonics and letting us kind of move around with harmonics. It gets more interesting if you go into, like, stereo mode. Okay, let's chill out that o. You can kind of hear the modulation is just getting more intense as you turn up that drift setting. We have more modulation here. You can basically choose what's doing the modulating and what is it modulating and how much select three more things up here. And that's kind of it. So pretty similar to analog but with some cool new features. 31. Preset Study: Okay, let's look at a little preset. How about morning Chorus pad? That sounds great. Alright. That's a very nice sound. Let's look at what they've got here. So they've got this kind of shark tooth wave, and then a sawtooth wave. Envelope two is modulating just a little bit, this first one. So Envelope two is down here, this one. We've got the shape parameter is up, and it's making kind of a goofy shape. That envelope, this envelope is kind of changing the shape of it. And remember, I can tell it's not an LFO that's changing the shape of it because it's just happening once and then stopping. Two, no noise. Filter, type two, key tracking. I promise we'll get to key tracking in just second filter resonance. Pretty low filter. Is that modulated? Like the filters being modulated right now. Little bit of frequency modulation, that's FM, so a little bit of FM happening. ADSR, kind of a slow attack. Slow attack on the second one as well. That kind of looping envelope to turn it into sort of an LFO is not on. LFO is very subtle. I don't think I pointed out here that you can change the shape of the LFO with these. They've got a couple new ones here like this wander, which is kind of a more subtle sine wave, in a way. So a little bit of LFO, kind of subtle. The amount is high heading to Envelope two. Stereo, good bit of drift on it. Yeah. Kel Sam. 32. Key Tracking: Okay, key tracking. I promised, and now we're back. So key tracking is this little job right here. So, here's the purpose of key tracking. The reason is let's say we've got a filter, and it's, you know, it's right here, okay? So our resonance is right there. That's right in the middle range, okay? Let's say that's on this. Now, that's where our resonance is. Okay? So that note's gonna have a little spike right on top of it. Um, let's give it more resonance. Okay, cool. Now, the problem is that note's gonna stick out because it's gonna have an extra amount of resonance. If I keep going up my notes are going to start to sound different. They're gonna get quieter as the filter as they go past the filter, right? So what we actually want is for all the notes on my keyboard to be similar, right? They kind of kind of flat in terms of their volume. But these notes right in the middle are going to be louder than the other notes because they're right under that resonance hump. They're gonna get boosted, okay? So that's not good. That's going to make a funny sounding synth. So we use something called key tracking to avoid that very specific problem. What key tracking does is it's going to adjust your filter. In this case. It's usually used with a filter, but you can see a few other places as well. It's going to adjust your filter a little bit, you know, 30%, based on what key you play. So it's tracking the key that you play and adjusting from there. So if I play a high note, it's basically going to move my filter up to where I am, right? Um, it's not gonna update and show us that. Maybe if I crank it up really high. No, we can't see it, but it's working. Promise. So that's what key tracking does. We often also see velocity tracking, which does the same thing. When I play a note really hard, things can adjust if I set that up versus if I play a note really quiet, right? So you can see velocity tracking shows up usually really close to key tracking when key tracking is around. So that's what key tracking is. Generally, it can kind of just smooth out your sound if you find that you're playing and there's a weird volume bump somewhere because of the way your filter is set up. Turn on key tracking, and that can help resolve that. 33. Drift Programming: Alright, let's add to our cool sound design experiment here. Um, so let's make a sound. Let's go back to our default drift. Okay, so let's go to that kind of shark tooth thing or yeah, and maybe that other weird one. Active shape. Okay, I want something kind of bright here, so you tune this one just a little bit. There we go. I like that. For now. Leave that alone. No noise, frequency. Pull it down, give meself a little resonance. I'm going to use that a little bit because I'm gonna do like a pad kind of thing. I don't want any frequency modulation. I do want that to be a little slower. Here we go. We'll do this. Wely need the second one. Let's take our rate up, and let's go to that wander subtitud division of the beat. And eighth node is probably okay, but let's go with quarter note. No, let's set this to modulate. Envelope one a little bit, then we'll go back over here and turn up our LFO down here. Just a little bit. There. Kind of Alright, let's go with that. Okay, then for my track here, I think what I'll do is I'll just use these cords, but without any arpegiator. So let's do this, then just duplicate those out. And let's hear that. Cool. Let's hear all my sense right now. I got to label this one. This one is going to be operator operator, and drift. Alright. Pretty cool. Let's move on to talk about the actual newest one called Meld. Okay. 34. The Meld Interface: Alright, let's talk about meld. So this is brand new one to Live 12. Let's make a new midi track, and let's load in Meld. So first thing we need to do with Meld is open this little dial right here, okay? Click on that. Now we see all of this, okay? There's a lot of stuff here. Okay. So basically what we're seeing here is, this is the instrument. This is what we're going to call a modulation matrix, okay? Hold on to that for a minute. We'll get there. Okay, so first things first, our oscillator section. So we're starting to drift away from drift ha ha. Our like, traditional synthesis, and we're getting into some stuff that's a little different now. But it still has most of the same stuff. So our oscillator section looks a little different. What they have here is almost like a almost a wave table thing, but it's not really. So this is obviously the oscillator section, but it calls it engines. And what we have here is a bunch of different shapes that are kind of combinations of oscillators. They're more complex than your typical oscillators. Okay? We're not going to find just a normal um square wave in here. Some of these are designed to take advantage of the key aware settings. When you see this little parentheses at the end there, that means they're going to be able to take advantage of key aware and conform to the key that you're in. And then when you see that little symbol, I'm hearing people in the Ableton community call that a B hash tag symbol. No, don't call it a B hash tag symbol. I do not approve of that. We're going to call it a sharp symbol or the key aware symbol. But the two symbols that are there are that one's called a flat and the second one's called a sharp. So let's call it flat sharps. Okay, anyway, so let's pick one that is key aware. Okay, so this one is called Swarm saw. Make sure we're on this one. I add some lotion. Soundting? So this just became a huge sound instantly. We can add a second oscillator here if we want. We already have one. Okay. Not bad. Okay, so so far, we're just doing subtractive synthesis, and that's more or less what we're going to get out of Meld is subtractive synthesis, but with an insane amount of modulation parameters. So it probably borders on FM. But okay, so let's go to our envelope section here. So we have A and B, okay? So I believe these are lined up with engine A and engine B. So for A, we have amplitude envelope and modulation envelope. And here we have our typical ADSR settings. You're still hearing the other one go because you're hearing B. Let's go to B and do the same thing. Cool. Envelopes, we have LFOs over here that we can dial up. We can do more complicated LFOs now by, you know, changing the rate, number of steps in it, pulses. This makes some really interesting material. Once we use it, we have another LFO over here. Let's go back to envelopes. A couple other parameters, settings, key tracking. Turn that on over there. Okay, we go to our filters. We've got a whole bunch of filter settings. These are just different kinds of filters. Okay, and a little mixer here. One thing that's cool about meld is that we have a kind of built in limiter just to kind of keep it from getting out of control. A limiter kind of just stops it from getting too loud. It'll just kind of say, This is your limit. You cannot go higher than that, louder than that. Okay, now let's take a quick look at our modulation matrix. Okay, this can hurt your brain a little bit. Um, so we have sources across the top and targets across the side. So let's say I want to modulate my oh, I don't know. Um, this tone knob, okay? Now, as soon as I click on it, we jumped to tone filter. Did you see that? It just kind of jump to it. If I click on this one, it's going to jump to over here, that light gray one. So let's go back to where we were. Okay? So it jumps there. That's great. So now I can modulate that with any of these things just by turning something up. So let's say that tone filter is going to be modulated by my LFO. Okay, here's LFO one. So now I'm just going to click and drag to turn that up, okay? Okay, let's turn this up. Okay. And you can kind of see what's moving around and at what speed just by looking up here. Right? Maybe I'll try ELFO two on this also. I like that. So we set F two, and then we can modulate stuff. Once we look at a preset here, you're going to see some of these things get gnarly with just how much modulation they're doing. So actually, let's do that we've kind of we're kind of done exploring this. So yeah, let's look at a preset. 35. Preset Study: Okay, let's try this preset. So I'm just gonna drag it on here. Here's what we got. There's a lot going on here. Look at all the modulation happening. There's all this stuff happening down here. So dense. Okay, let's see what else we have. So of course, we do have just a normal square wave here, even though I said, you're not going to find a normal square wave, but there we have it. So yeah, okay, there's a square. But it's square fifth, so I think there's probably a second frequency in there. Swarmsaw for our second engine, so to speak. O. Filters, pretty aggressive up there. But I bet those are being modulated Let's look. Right here. Yeah, it's being modulated by LFO, and this one is also being modulated by LFO. So it's almost like hard to trust what you see on the screen because there's so much modulation happening. These envelopes, I bet they're being modulated by something. Let's see. Filter frequency. Yes, it's actually being modulated by two things. So just so much modulation. This tone is not being modulated. That's cool. But so many other things being even, like, spacing. Macro two is what they call spacing here, I guess. So just an insane amount of modulation. But it makes for these really dynamic sounds, right? Ten different sounds. Sounds like something that, Ben Frost, we put into the track. Look up Ben Frost. Okay, let's make something of our own and then see if we can add something to our funny little Synth track here. 36. Meld Programming: Alright, let's go back to our default meld patch. Okay? Now, I don't want something super complicated, because I'm going to try to make something that's kind of a lead for this. So let's just scroll through here. Sounds like an orchestra warming up. All the overtone just adding. Okay. I do have tuning section down here, so I can tune this. What I really want is just this second one a little quieter. So that's gonna be over here. Thicken that up just to touch. And maybe with this spacing, I'll give it just a little bit with LFO one. I want to slow that down a little bit. So we need to find LFO one and turn the rate down. Maybe you go back to that wonder I turn the rate back up. Okay. It's not bad. Envelopes are pretty good how they are. Filters. I want all that bright stuff in there so I don't want to very much. I wonder if I can modulate the drive with something. Um, I cannot, apparently. That's cool. Okay, now let's see if we can find something that goes onto this. So what I'm thinking is some kind of melodic idea. Maybe we go C. And then, I don't know, just do this. I think we're in, like, a C minor or something. Maybe we stretch it out. Let's do a really slow scale down. I should have dialed in the right scale. That would have made this a lot easier, but that's okay. Flat A flat G F E flat. Well, duplicate that. See what that sounds. I don't mind this, but I need a little more modulation in that sound, 'cause it's just a little flat. So let's see. Let's see. Let's modulate our filter with LFO two and also this filter with LFO two. That's better. W modulate the volume a little bit. Volume is being modulated by velocity because that's what you would do, but let's also say LFO one. Let's do it down here, too. Volume LFO one. Like right? Cool. I like it. Okay. Um, This is probably going to be my go to for, like, bright Bazinas sinth now. Okay, let me give you this session again. If you like it, you're welcome to toy around with it. And then let's move on to collision. 37. Live’s Collision Synth: Alright, up next is collision. This is one of the older ones that's been around for a little while, and this will be our first physical model. So remember, I explained what physical models are. They are this big crazy algorithm that is attempts to recreate the physical parameters of an instrument. Now, remember I said, Don't worry, you're not going to have to do all this math. That's true. So this is what the interface looks like. So basically what we have here is a percussion physical model, but specifically like mallets, so xylophones, vibes, things like that. You can also get it to do some other kind of weirder things. But you can see here, like, there's this graphic of, like, a beam, basically. And we can kind of say where we're going to be hitting it. How big it is. And then, like, what we're going to be hitting it with. So let's just walk through this. So in a physical model, we don't really have an oscillator section. Instead, we have a mallet and a resonator section. And those are both kind of the oscillator because they're both contributing to actually making the sound. Past that, we can have a filter, although we don't in this one But we do have things like LFOs, a little bit of routing that we can do and some envelopes all over the place. Okay, so let's start off here in the mallet. So the mallet is the thing we're going to use to hit something else. So if you've ever played percussion or, like, hit a xylophone or whatever, you know that the mallet contributes a lot to the sound. It can be a soft mallet, it can be a hard mallet. All of these things will matter. So we can say the volume is basically going to be how hard we hit the thing. Then we've got stiffness of the mallet, how much noise is in it, color of the mallet, could be the material could be a few different things. Let's hear what we've got. Okay. Let's make it stiffer. That's like a brass mallet. And then this is gonna be, like, a very soft yarn mallet. Okay. Noise. La keep that down, actually, 'cause I kind of like this. Sound. What's color do here? Not a lot for us right now. Okay? We can add noise. This is going to work kind of like a noise oscillator that we've seen. We see that this noise generator does have a filter built in. Here's our cutoff frequency and resonance, and it even has an ADSR envelope built in. This is one that I was kind of talking about earlier where we don't get the graphic that shows us the ADSR. We just kind of have to know what we're doing here. And we have an envelope amount on our noise. So here's turn it off. It's not doing very much right now. Okay, now, resonator. So this is what are we hitting, right? So, right now, we're hitting some kind of beam medium sized, okay? We could hit a marimba, a string, a membrane, that would be like a drum head, a plate, a pipe or a tube. Let's say tube, okay? Right? That sounds like you would expect a tube to be. If I hit it right on the edge, more resonant. If I hit it over here by the probably what's being held onto, it doesn't resonate as much. Some things we can make big and little tubes we can't hit a string. If I hit it kind of off to the side. With strings, we can do low, medium, and high. So it's much brighter that way. Let's go back to um Well, let's try a membrane real quick. I almost sounds like kind of like chimes maybe, or kind of a timpani maybe, something in there. Okay, anyway, let's go back to let's go back to beam. I like that. Okay, so we've got some harmonics we can add. Nharmonics are generally out of tune harmonics, so they're gonna be noisier. Here's none. Not noisier is the wrong term. They're going to be not they're going to add notes up above the fundamental, so those harmonics, but they're going to be not consonant harmonics or they're going to be kind of out of key harmonics. Okay, we can add another resonator if we want. That kind of takes things out of control quick. We've got an LFO section we can add in. So we can say LFO one. Let's put that on like the stiffness of the mallet. Okay, that's cool. I like this kind of a thing because it means that it's going to be constantly changing a little bit, which is how a mallet would actually act in the real world. So all of these here are that key mapping and velocity mapping that we talked about. So we can say mallet volume depends on the key. If I put that at 100%, that means that as I go up, it's going to get louder. Right? So the low notes are quieter than the higher notes. Okay, so that's our basic layout of collision. Let's play with it. 38. Programming Collision: Okay, so let's make something quickly in collision. So actually, I'm kind of into the thing that we started off with here. There's our mallet. I'm gonna turn off noise. Let's keep this right there, but let's add a second resonator that is a string. I kind of like that sound. This is way louder than the other one. So I changed the structure. I'm not positive what this structure does, but it's prioritizing the two resonators. So if I go to one, two, they're more even. Let's turn R and harmonics down. Brightness down. I want a really short sound. Maybe I'll go to high strings. I like that. Okay, so I've got this kind of short, plunky sound. Let's add it to our track up here. My idea was to take this. Copy, put it down there. But I'm going to do something a little weirder. I'm going to join all these mini clips together with Command J. Now I'm going to go to this Mi clip and use our Transform and arpegiate styles here and just make, like, kind of a longer shape to it. Oh, look at that. Let's solo this. Oh, I kind of like that. That's weird. Okay, kind of separate from the Synth settings, but we might as well do this while we're here. So I really like this sound that we're getting and how it's kind of coming in waves, but it's adding a weird, low some low notes that I don't want. So there's two ways I could deal with those. I could just go in here and delete them probably around there. Okay, now, to get that wave sound that we had back, I'm gonna go to velocity. And let's go. Let's make, like, a ramp here. And then ramp here. And then I'm just gonna do this to make just sort of a wave effect. This has nothing to do with sound design, but I think it's maybe a neat lesson. I'll go in and delete those ones that I missed in a second. Okay. Let's just delete those notes. We're not really gonna matter. Okay, there we go. Let's hear this. Okay, my velocity actually isn't doing anything. Let's go here and make sure that velocity is affecting volume, 100% noise volume. We're not using noise, but resonant LFO, that should do it. There we go. The whole thing is a little hot. Cool. I like it. Let's hear it in context of our whole crazy synth sound. That's a lot going on. But if we mix this a little bit, I think we'd have a nice sound. Maybe we'll mix it at the end. Let's move on. Why don't I give you this collision patch, but I'll wait on giving you this whole session again until we've added a little bit more to it. Okay? So here's this patch. Let's call it percussion wave. How about percussion wave? Sure. But 39. Live’s Tension Synth: Okay, I want to do tension next because it is another physical model. So, let's throw tension on a track. Okay? So, what we have here in tension is a String physical model, okay? So think about tension as, like, a string pulled tight with, like, tension, sort of. I guess that's why they called it that. They come up with such clever names over at Ableton headquarters. Okay, so this is a string physical model. So our oscillator filter section is going to be a little different. And it's going to be different than the collision that we just looked at. Physical models are not as uniform as regular synthesis, I guess, for lack of a better term, is. So it's not that we're going to have the same kind of parameters that we had back here where we had mallet and resonator. For this string physical model, we have excitter and damper, um also termination and body. So, I mean, the parameters of a string instrument are different than the parameters of a percussion instrument. So that's why the physical model attributes are different. So you can kind of look at this one in four chunks, right? You've got the exciter here, the terminator here, the damper up here and the body down here. Okay? So this is a string. So the exciter, there's a couple of different things we could hit a string with, right? We could hit it with a pick or plectrum. We could bow it, or we could hit it with a hammer, which is always fun, or a bouncing hammer, which is kind of the coolest sound. This is like, if you're a guitar player, taking a pencil and bouncing it on the string, like we've all done as guitar players, um, if we bow it. That's not a particularly nice sound right now. We might need to dial that one in a little bit more. But let's just hit it with a pick. So the sound we've got now is kind of a nylon string guitar. So let's look at our settings for the pick. Protrusion that's like, I have a pick right here. So protrusion is going to be, you know, like how much it comes out, and, like, that's going to contribute to how hard you're hitting it and how stiff the pick is. Here is just stiffness in general of the pick. Velocity, how hard we're going to hit it, position, where we're going to hit the string, and damping if we're going to do any right hand damping with it to kind of mute the string a little bit. This would be like palm muting if you're a guitar player. All of these can have velocity and key control, meaning the harder we press a note for velocity, we can change the stiffness of the pick if we want. Let's crank that up. So if I play really soft. If I play really hard, it's a little stiffer. So I'm going to turn that back down. Okay, let's go on to the termination. You could think of this as, like, a pedal on a piano, finger mass, finger stiffness and fret stiffness. So these are like, basically things that are going to stop the sound from happening a little bit. Okay. And those can be velocity and key controlled also. Damper. Now, this is like the pedal on a piano. That's what I meant to say. So the damper, you know, mass stiffness. This is just going to stop the sound. Body. This is fun to play with you can do some kind of inhuman things. Is that a piano body, a guitar body, a violin body, or a generic body? Let's say it's piano, extra small. So instead of saying a guitar, let's say an extra small piano. That makes different sounds. We can set some parameters in terms of that. Now, we've got a couple other things that are hidden in here, like our pickup position. Is it forward? Is it back? Where do we want it? And we can also set some parameters about our string and any vibrato that we might want to put on it. Let's switch to bouncing hammer. I kind of like that sound, actually. It's just a little tick, and it's kind of neat. Pick we got stiffness on Maximum. Turn off that damper. Now we've got, like, a do dial in dialed in. If you're familiar with a koto instrument. They're really cool, and they sound just like that. Cool. I'm rather happy with this sound. Let's play with it. 40. Tension Preset Deconstruction: Alright, I'm going to save this as pluck codo. I think do is KYOTO maybe because I like it. And then let's do a little preset exploration here. So let's go to instruments, tension and see what we can do. Upright far base, wood base, WOW Pad, tuned noise. Let's try string quartet. Now, this is going to be interesting. We'll load up the string quartet patch, but I want to point out one thing about physical models. They can sound very realistic, but they're never going to sound as good as, like, a sampler that is actually using the instruments. So when it comes to making a very realistic sound, samplers are still, like, the gold standard and way to go. We'll talk about samplers shortly. So this isn't going to sound like a perfect string quartet. Let's see what we got. Yeah, weird. I mean, it's cool, but it's not it's not making, like, a real sound. There are some fun things we could do with it, probably, though. But let's see how they did it. So first, they're using a bow as an exciter. They have a lot of velocity controls set up a little bit of key control. Terminator is on. So a normal kind of finger. No pickup, damper is on, was pretty stiff. Body is a small piano. Now, that's interesting because they could have said violin, but they said small piano instead. Let's hear the difference. Huh. Alright, so if we're going to add to our big Synth composition here, I kind of want to go back to the sound that we made just a minute ago. So let's do that. 41. Tension Programming: Okay, so I'm going back into my user library and pulling back out my pluck Kyoto sound here. And let's see what we can do with it. I kind of want to take I kind of want to do the similar approach that we did with this one, but not with the Cord thing. So let's go here. Let's open this up, join these together Command J, go to this clip, select A. And let's go to our peggiate and not chord trigger this time. Let's solo this. That's kind of nice. Let's try that. Let's see what that sounds like mixed in. That's really intense. Now I have an idea, just a compositional idea that maybe this our old analog note, I kind of want to take it, and Oops. Don't need that open. Change it. So what if we did this analog note for, you know, like 4 bars or so? And then another note for 4 bars, but let's make this one, boom. B flat. That'll make kind of a big moment. That's cool. This is just, like, synthesis, frenzy. It's almost like stranger things gone mad, if you're familiar with that show. Okay, let's move on. 42. Live’s Electric Synth: Okay, let's move on to electric. I believe this is our last physical model. And Electric's kind of a weird physical model because it's a physical model of a sort of half electronic instrument. I guess, kind of, like, an electric guitar would be, but this is an electric piano physical model. Or if you want to think of it differently, you can think about an electric piano being like a Rhodes organ, a Wrlizer organ. Things like that. It's very specific. It's so specific, in fact, you can see, like, there's only, like, you know, maybe 20 presets here versus some of these other ones that have, you know, 50 or 60 presets. But let's take a look at it. So like other physical models, it has a couple of different sections related to its sound making thing. We have a hammer. We have a fork, we have a damper and a pickup. Now, we also have this graphic here. So this is showing us kind of how something like a Rhodes organ works. You've got a hammer that hits a fork, and you can kind of imagine this is like a hammer hitting a tuning fork. It's kind of like that. That's what we mean by fork. Two parts to that fork. There's a part called a tine and a part called a tone, and we can get access to those there. And then we have the pickup. Like, where is the pickup? Is it forward? Is it back? There's also a damper that we can get here, too. Okay, so let's hear it. Okay, so if you know a Rod's organ, that's what it sounds like. Um So stiffness of that hammer. You know, it's going to get you more of a metallic tone if you go stiffer. The fork, you have the tine and the toe. Gets much brighter up there. That's where you get some of that, uh over driven sound up there. The damper, you know, the pickup, we can kind of say where it is. It gets a lot brighter as you go back. It's kind of like playing up or down on the neck of a guitar, where, if you go up, it's more mellow you're farther away from the pickup or the bridge. I'm not sure what the symmetry does exactly. But it definitely gets more mellow as you go up there. So, you know, there's not a ton of control we have here. It's quite simple. So let's load up a preset and make something with it. Okay. 43. Preset Deconstruction: Worltzer soft piano. A vibes soft? Let's go back to Worltzer soft. Okay. Okay, now I got an idea. Well, let's look at what they're doing here first. Stiffness, no noise on the hammer. Fork is pretty much straight up, T and tone. Symmetry is way up high, that's going to make that kind of mellower sound and volume. That's kind of all there is to it. Okay, so flat. Let's go down here. I think I'm going to make a new mini clip for something fun. I'm going to do something that matches our analog up there. A little shorter than that. Okay. So let's see. Let's go. I think we have a C minor chord up there. Et's do eighth notes. Let's add a little bit more to this chord, though. C EG, C, E flat, and let's do a G down at the bottom. Okay. Let's zoom out so I can see all those notes at once. I'm gonna duplicate it. But I want it right there. So I'm just gonna go bum, bum. Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. Maybe one here, two, but not that one. Okay. So I got a little rhythm going here, pretty simple rhythm. But now here where the base changes, I want to switch to, like, a B flat chord. But let's go B B flat. D flat. Let's go up and we'll do the same thing. All right. I think that's right on bar five. Yeah, that's right. So I just need a little bit more here. Okay. Okay, let's just hear that. Okay. And then let's maybe jazz it up with a little echo. Alright, let's hear that in context. I don't think this is gonna cut through because we need to pull we need to, like, take a moment and do a mix on this crazy thing, but let's hear it. Cool. Almost psychotic. Let's keep going. 44. Live’s Impulse Synth: Alright, up next is impulse. Impulse is kind of a weird one. I don't use it very often. It's kind of a sampler. And that, you know, we can load different samples into these boxes and play them. You might think this looks an awful lot like a drum machine because it kind of is a drum machine. What's interesting, though, is that we also have a drum rack that we'll talk about soon. And in a drum rack, we can do the same thing that we can do in impulse, but, like, with a lot more control. So you can think of this as a simple drum rack. So let's look at one of the presets just right away and kind of walk through it. Let's go to this impulse eight oh eight, actually. Okay? So this is like an eight oh eight drum machine. You can click here to play these. Cool. Each sample, we have some control over the transposition stretch, the start time, decay of it, so kind of how it fades out at the end, panning of it and volume. And you'll notice that these controls are all dependent on which of these that you click on. So if I turn the stretch way up, and then I go here, stretch goes back down because that's where it was. So you don't have to put drums into this. You can put whatever you want into it. You can put cat sounds or anything. I mean, just drag a sound file right over onto it. So if I go to samples and say, sure, I can put that right there. Great. There it is. I just need to adjust my length to hear the whole thing. I'm going to undo that. So, to make a midi clip with this, you know, we open our midi clip, and then, you know, we only have these notes. So it's really quite easy to do. So let's maybe see if we can make something that fits in with our chaotic thing here. 45. Programming Impulse: Okay, I'm going to do something a little different with this one. Rather than clicking in all the notes to make some kind of pattern, I'm just going to try to record something in and add a bunch of layers and then quantize it. Okay, that's enough of that. Let's add another layer. So I'm going to put on my midi overdub here and record and just record a whole bunch of stuff. Okay. Now, let's take that. Let's go whoops to Command A, and then let's go to quantize, Command U. And I don't know, let's hear what we got here. Okay. Not bad. It's frantic, but I think we'll find a use for this later. So let's take this. Let's do it all the way through and see if we can make sense of it later. It almost has like an ambient vibe to it, even though it's drums. It's very strange. Anyway, um, okay. Let's move on to wave table. 46. What is a Wavetable Synth?: Alright. Next up, wave table. You might even call this the main event. I don't know. Wave table is pretty cool, though. So let's throw a wave table down here. So, what is wave table? I think I mentioned this earlier when I was talking about different kinds of synthesis, but wave table uses a wave table synthesis. Okay? This is a type of synthesis. The idea here is that the oscillator section is made up of a whole bunch of oscillators, and the sound we're going to create is using by scrubbing through them, okay? Check it out. Here's a sound. So you can see the sound I'm actually making is in yellow, okay? But if I scrub through these waveforms, turn in each one of them. Okay, so this is my wave table. I have a sine wave, a triangle wave, a sawtooth wave, and a square wave. Right? But we can get more complicated ones. Let's do, like that. And it starts to get interesting. What if we did like this. And it starts to get really interesting. Okay, so we have Oscillator one that is this string of this table of waves. We have Oscillator two. We can turn on and add similar things. We check that one out. Okay. We have a filter, frequency in resonance. We have a second filter that we can turn on here. Okay? We have modulation. Now we have modulation all over the place here. And modulation is really kind of important in wave table, especially because we want this to be moving as we play. So we'll look at that in just a second. But we can modulate based on an amplitude envelope, like this. Here's another envelope that we can assign to do different things, a third envelope, an LFO, and an LFO two. So how do we assign those things to do stuff? Well, just like we've seen before, we have a little modulation matrix. Okay? So let's say I want my amplitude envelope to modulate my wave table position. Okay? Amplitude envelope is here. Whoops, is here, and Oscillator one position is there. Now when I play this note, the amplitude envelope will be triggered, and that is going to move around my modulation source. Oops. So you can kind of see it moving there. Let's go slower. Okay, so you can see that this line is now controlling my position in the wave table. Okay? That's important. Now, you're thinking we haven't heard anything brilliant yet. Let's look at some of these presets, and then you'll see, like how crazy this can get. 47. Preset Deconstruction: Okay, so if we look at some of these presets, there's, like, a lot of them here, like, a lot because there's just so much cool stuff you can do with this. Okay, so here we go. To look at the waste It's just so cool and so dynamic. We get all the elements of good sound design in one patch. You know, we get shape, motion, timber. It's all there. How about wobble base? Let's go down on octave. There it is. So this is where your web webs live if you're into that. No Okay, cool. So let's use that, you know, I'm just gonna take this our other baseline and just double it down here. Maybe we'll shift around octaves in a minute. But here's what that sounds like altogether. Super cool. Play around with wave table. There's so much fun stuff here. 48. MPE and Wavetable: One more thing about wave table before we move on. We looked at this modulation matrix, and, you know, when wave table first came out, this was a little intimidating, all of the things that you can modulate with and by. But with, you know, the modulation matrix in drift, this looks really small, so it's actually not that bad. But keep in mind that it is one of the most powerful things in wave table. But also, check out the MPE tab. So remember, MPE is like that higher resolution MTI. This is a good example for you to be able to see what it's doing. There are some parameters that a lot of keyboards just don't have, but an MPE of enabled keyboard does have. And the way wavetable uses that is if you're working on a keyboard that has these extra capabilities, you can use them as modulation sources. So for example, slide. This is an interesting one. So on my keyboard, this has, um, MPE. And what I'm getting at is, I wonder if I can get this so you can see it. There we go. I'll use this pitch. Okay, so slide is going to be This keyboard has it. So Okay. And then the last one, press. I believe that's pressure or after touch, sometimes it's called. So basically, if I touch the note and then this very delicate pressure sre. But Um, I can control things that way. Now, we also have note pitch bend. Pitch Bend, a lot of keyboards have pitchbnd. You have a little dial usually on the left side, where you can adjust the pitch, but that's going to apply to all notes. Note pitch Band is for an individual note. Which I can get a few different ways on my MPE keyboard here. And this keyboard, by the way, is a roly keyboard. So there's a bunch of extra parameters that having an MPE keyboard can get you that you can use as modulation sources to make a more dynamic sound. This patch is taking advantage of those, which is really cool. So you don't need to go out and buy an MPE keyboard, but if you have one, it can be pretty fun to use for some of these wave table patches. 49. What are these?: Okay, y, next, let's go through these DS things. Now, if you don't see these, it could be that you are in a not sweet version that sounded really kind of funny. But the less than sweet, I guess, of live, I believe these only show up in sweet. You may also have them in a folder on your system to But for me, they're right here all out in the open, DS, Klang clap, symbol, FM, high hat, kick, sampler, snare, and Tom. Now, these are Max for Live devices. You'll see that Live is really or Ableton, I should say, actually, is really kind of keen on peppering Max for Live devices all over. A lot of the time, someone will build a Max for Live device, and then they decide to include it in the release. I don't think that's what these are. But you'll see if you go to Max for Live, that there are some devices in going to do a whole class on Max for Live in Live 12, so keep a lookout for that. And we'll talk about actually how to program stuff. But for now, we're just talking about using stuff. We don't have to know how to program to use Max for Live devices. We can tell they're Max for Live devices because they have this little different symbol here. But basically, these are just really quick and simple drum sounds. Okay? So drum synths. They're not samplers except for this one. They're just classic drum sounds. They're kind of like your eight oh 87 oh seven, those types of classic drum machine type sounds. So what I want to do in the next ten videos or so is just rip through all of these. I'm not going to make something with all of them, because if you look inside the presets, this is a drum rack that's using all of the drum sins, and this is the same drum rack, and this is the same drum rack, and this is the same drum rack. You get it. So let's go through and look at all of these individually, kind of quick, and then we'll come back and make something with the actual drum rack. Okay? Here we go. 50. DS: Clang: Okay, DS Klang. So I'm gonna throw that on a new track. Here it is quite simple. It makes this sound. You've heard that sound before, if you've ever played around with a classic drum machine. We've got some controls over it that'll get it away from that traditional kind of drum machine clang sound. We can change the pitch. Remember that if you ever change a parameter in live, I want to go back to its default, click that parameter and press delete. That'll get us back to where it was. Decay, you know, just what you think stretches it out. Volume. And then some kind of tambor things. We can add this kind of clave sound and a percentage of it filters and noise. This is a high pass filter, apparently. Add some noise to it. Manton A B. You're just playing with tone, probably another type of filter. So really simple. Like all Max for Live devices, if you really want to crack this open and, like, reprogram it to do exactly what you want, you can hit this button right here, and that'll open like the code editor type thing. We'll do that when we get deep into Max for Live near the end of this whole sequence. But for now, there's no reason to do that. You can just play with it and have fun with it. So if you want this sound in your track, throw one of these on something and add some rhythms to. 51. DS: Clap: Have you ever been working on a track and said, Man, I wish I just had a clap. Like, I just need a clap sample. Well, here's one better. So here's DS clap. That's what it sounds like. Now, what's cool about this is that it does have some randomization built in so that if I click it 1,000 times, you'll hear that it's changing slightly every time. Right? There's a little bit of variation happening, which is good because that's what would happen if we actually clapped. So we've got this sloppy really tight tail. So like a reverb tail. Spread. Tone a little brighter. Tunings gonna turn it into noise, and then volume. It's a clap. Sweet. Okay 52. DS: Cymbal: Alright, let's look at symbol next. Okay? Kind of a noisy little symbol, which is really kind of that kind of 8087 oh seven sound. Yeah, we just adjust little things pitch decay volume. A little bit on the tone, probably emulating kind of the makeup and size of the symbol. But it's a symbol. 53. DS: FM: Okay, onto this FM one. This one's slightly different. Okay? We have a little tone, right? What's interesting about this, and I think this is true about all of these is that when I play a mini note on my keyboard, they're not responding to notes. So I get the same thing no matter what note I play. So it's really just clicking in a note. But here, we can kind of say what note we want by dialing up the pitch. That's kind of fun. Get old. You know, decay This might be cool for base stuff. Maybe, possibly. But it's just a simple FM tone. 54. DS: HH: Alright, let's go to the next one. HH is Hi Hat. So Cool. So we have a couple options here. We have white and pink. That has to do with the kind of noise. We have white noise, and we have pink noise and a couple other kinds of noises. But most of these percussion sounds are based on noise. That's just kind of how they work. The noise in a filter is going to get you basically this type of sound. So the type of noise you use will change the sound of it quite a bit. I can change tone, slope attack. I wonder if that has to do with whether you're hitting it hitting the top of the stick or the edge of the stick. Oh, it's just literally the attack. Ramping up the attack. Pitch decay in volume. Nothing fancy. I'm surprised they don't give us an open hat here, but that's kind of what the symbol one was. So here we just get a closed high hat. 55. Kick: Okay, onto what might be the most useful one to me, that is this kick. Sometimes you just need a clean synth kick. And I don't want to dig through a bunch of samples. So that's what I like this one for, right? It's just perfect. That's a clean synth kick. I can change the pitch to get it out of the way of something else. If I need to, I can overdrive it a little bit, adjust the attack of it a little bit, decay en volume. To be honest, when I use this, I don't adjust anything. I just use it just as it is and just lay it into a track. We'll do that in just a minute, but this one's really useful to me. 56. DS: Sampler: Alright, sampler. This one is pretty simple and a little handy. So we can throw that on there. We can drag any sample into it. So let's drag that to it. Okay? I can click on it and get it. I can play it, and it actually is responding to midi notes. I can adjust the start point, adjust the length, which is effectively adjusting the endpoint. Tune it, loop it, decay, add some decay to it, the shaper adding a little more shape to it or an envelope. So just a really simple sampler. Throw anything in there and just cue it a whole bunch of times. Neat. 57. DS: Snare: Alright, two more. Snare. Again, just what you need. Now, this is a very specific snare. This is that, like, you know, old classic drum machine snare sound. You know, we can adjust the color a little bit. High pass. There's a low pass we can put on it. So make it a lot darker. Banass Kitchen a little bit. Add some decay. And then, you know, classic drum snare. Nothing fancy. 58. DS: Tom: Alright, last but not least the Tm. Sounds like a floor tom. I can change the pitch. Sounds like a rototm Color, tone. Band. Decay in volume. Pretty simple. Honestly, I don't think I've ever used this one, but it's there if you want it. There's a Tm. 59. Drum Synth Programming: Alright, now that we've gone through all those, let's throw one of these DS drum racks onto this track. So this is a drum rack. We've seen this before, and it has all these sounds on it. Now, for each of these, we can go through and adjust anything we want. We've got pitch control for this one. This one we've got tone control and anything in here. So we can still adjust anything we want just by clicking on it. So what I think I might do is go to Mini Clips. See if I can find a cool, like drumbeat. It's kind of cool. So let's drag that onto there. Okay? And then we'll just loop that out, open it up. Okay, so now I got a cool drum pattern using these sounds. Let's solo it. That uro is funny. I don't know what that is. Okay, well, let's hear this in context of our big giant crazy thing. It's going somewhere. Could be something. Alright. Now that we got through all that, let me give you this session one more time in case you want to play with any of these clips and we'll go from there. 60. Drum Rack Refresher: All right. Up next. Let's go through drum Rack. Now, we've already looked at drum rack a little bit in the previous, I think, class, I think, class three in this series when we looked at slice the New Midi track, right? So we took a drum beat and control clicked on it, and the menu that came down, we said, slice the New Midi track. That took that beat and put each individual transient into a drum rack. So let's look at a drum rack from kind of a different angle this time. So if we go up here and select a drum rack and we just make an empty one on a new midi track. Let's open it up. This is what it looks like a whole lot of nothing. If I play it, if I make some midi notes for it, I get nothing. This is really just a container. It's just a container for things you want to hit, right? We can put anything we want into these spots. Okay? So if we want to take an audio file, let's go to samples and say, Sure. Let's say this whole loop, I can put right there, if I want, if I want to put This tone right there. I can do that. If I want to put this finger clap right there for some reason, there's a clap. Okay? So I can put these wherever I want. Okay. That's cool. Each one of these, every time I put something in here, I get a simpler device, and we're going to go through the simpler shortly. But that gets created in each spot when I pull an audio file on there. But I don't need to just pull audio files. Let's say I have this analog synth patch that I really like. That one? Sure. I can put a whole analog device onto a drum rack pad. Okay? So now you're thinking, Well, when I hit that, how do I control what note it plays? Well, we go over here. We open this up. And then we open this up, and now we can kind of see what's going on. So for this one, it's right here. It says, receive B one. So when I play B one on my keyboard, it's going to trigger this sound, and it's going to play a C three. So I can change that and say, actually play a C sharp four. No. Right? So I can decide what note it plays, but it's going to ignore what note I play on the midi keyboard in terms of that synth, but I can control that right here. So you can drag anything you want onto a drum rack, any synth, any sample. You can't just drag midi files that really wouldn't do anything. But virtually anything else can go onto a pad here. Okay, so just a quick little kind of reminder of what's going on with drum rack, two things I want to talk about that we haven't addressed yet is some of the internal routing that we can create in drum Rack and also this kind of strange choke setting here. It's kind of an important one if you're interested in making very real sounding drum racks. So let's go into those two things now. 61. MIDI Control of Drum Rack: Okay, before we go into the routing and choke settings, I did want to talk just for a second about different ways you can control the drum rack because it has some cool options. So you can play it just like any midi keyboard. And remember that over here, we see kind of where we are. So if I play this note, see that yellow blinking dot. That tells me kind of in the range of all possible notes where I am. And it's saying, Yeah, you're too high. There's no note there. I got to get down to one of these light gray boxes. There's that analog option. But also this kind of four by four grid of notes is all over live. It's kind of like that two by four grid that I talked about earlier for controls. This four by two grid is like a drum pad grid. So you might be able to see that, like, it's kind of up here. You can't see that, but it shows up on my push all the time. And if you have a MIDI device that is designed for drum triggers, any kind of pads or anything like that, it's going to probably auto map to hitting these. I have this special kind of, like, drum synth thing that, you know, it's like it's a sort of set of rubber pads that you can play like a drum. And it's really fun to connect it to a drum rack. You just plug it in and it automatically knows what to do. So let's load up. Let's go to a drum rack. And let's just do, like, one of these preset ones. That's cool. Let's load that one. Okay, here's my drum rack. So let me show you what I'm doing over here. So this is my little drum sent. This is an Alyssa's strike pad. It's got a couple rims. So it's cool. I can just, like, play drums on it, like with sticks like you were playing a drum. It feels like a drum practice pad. So it's kind of fun. So those pads automatically map to these. So I've got a kick and wood block, block, it says, a snare. So I could just hit record and then play However, I wanted to. It's actually kind of tricky to play. But it's handy. I could do basically the same thing on the push except I don't want to use sticks on the push because it's not designed for that. Although I would feel pretty good to do, but the pads are so small, I'm not a good enough drummer to hit them just right. So I just wanted to point out that you can get these kind of drum sinths that are designed really for drum racks and any kind of drum synth, and you can just play stuff. It's really fun. 62. Drum Rack Routing: Okay, drum rack routing. So let's go to a fresh one here because we have kind of a complicated something. Let's go to Sure. Okay, so, when you're working with a drum rack, pay attention to these buttons on the sides here, okay? So the main sections that we have here are simpler instrument, our pads, and then our macros, which are these dials. If you don't see the macros, believe they're right here, this dial. Okay? Those macros give us control of different things within the simpler over here. So for example, if I wanted to map the resonance to something, I can control click on it and say, map to macro nine, and then I can add a ninth macro here by doing this plus button, and there's nine and ten it likes to keep symmetrical. And so I can map that to this, and then I just have access to it more easily than going inside the instrument. That's what macros do. But I can also get access to a couple more things here. So here are my different chains. In this case, each sound is going to be on its own chain. Now, we're going to look at instrument racks shortly, and this whole idea of chains will become much more important, I should say. Okay, so now let's go to our IO section down here. So this is what we just looked at where we see notes coming in and out. And then down here, we have send and return. Okay? So this is where we can do some internal routing. So let's say we want this clap to have a delay on it, but just the clap, not the whole drum kit. That's why we have this internal routing. If we want to delay on this drum kit, we just throw a delay on it. That's fine. But if you want delay on just one element of the drum kit, then you have to do some funny stuff, and that's what this is designed to do. So we already have a delay loaded up here. But we could easily add any other effects here. If we just go to audio effects and say, Let's create this echo. Let's just drag that down there. Now we've got a nice big echo. There's all our settings for it. So now let's go to this clap and say, send C is right here, so I'm just going to crank that up a whole bunch. Now when I hit that clap, it gets a big delay on it, but nothing else does. Just that clap. So that's the internal routing. So you just have to go to this send and receive section. Put an effect on the bottom part. See, there's a bottom part here and a top part here. So put it on the bottom part, and then you'll have send A, send B, and send C. Here's send C, and we just crank that up on send C right there. Okay? And that's how you can route effects within a drum rack. Okay, now let's go look at the choke setting. 63. Drum Rack "Choke": Okay, I'm going to hide this send and receive I just want to see the IO settings. Here's choke. Okay, so imagine this. You're a drummer, right? You're playing drums, and you have the best example that illustrates what this does is the hi hat. So you have the hi hat can do two things. The hi hat can be open, and it goes and it can be closed, or it goes right? So two different sounds from the same thing. So if you were going to make a drum rack that was accurate, that sounded correct, you would make it so those two sounds can't happen at the same time, right? Because that's not possible in an acoustic drum kit. Like, if you had an open high hat and and it was ringing and then you hit a closed high hat while it was ringing, those two sounds can't happen at the same time, right? Because you'd have to re hit it, and it's the same drum. Now, in an electronic setting, we can hit them both at the same time because they're just samples that we're triggering in this case. But if you want your drum kit to be accurate, then we need to make sure that those can't happen at the same time. So let's go to a more traditional drum kit. Like an acoustic kit. Okay. So let's see. Do we have a high hat, open high hat? And do we have a closed high hat? There it is. Okay, open high, closed high hat. Great. So what I need to do is say, go to my IO settings. Oh, and it's already done for me. So if I said this open high hat This is set to one on the choke setting. And this closed tie hat is also set to one. Okay? So by setting those to the same thing, that means only one of those two things can happen at a time. So if I hit my open high hat and it's still ringing, and then I hit the closed tie hat, see if I can do it with my mouse. No. There, did it. It's going to stop the open high HAP from ringing because that's what would happen in the real world. So you can kind of think of these numbers as groups. We're just going to sign one, one. We could even do weirder stuff. Like, if we wanted this clap to not be able to happen at the same time as the hi HP for some reason, we just set this to one also. Now, only one of those three things can happen at a time. But if we wanted the clap and the snare, to not be able to happen. We could set them both to two, and now we've kind of linked them together so that they can't happen at the same time. That's going to make things more realistic. It's kind of subtle, but if you're setting up like a mini drum machine and you give it to, like, a drummer and say, play this, they'll be happy that it actually behaves correctly. So that's what that choke setting does. Okay, so maybe just for completeness, we shouldn't make our own drum kit. We should make our own drum rack from scratch. Let's make one and then see if we can add something to our kit here. 64. Building a Drum Rack: Alright, let's start fresh with an empty drum rack. And let's make something. So let's go to I'm just going to use samples for most of this. Let's do kick. And I think I kind of want to know, I think I know what I kind of want to do here. So Actually, you know what we should use for our kick? Let's use our drum synth kick. Let's put one of those right there. Okay? That is just a great little kind of techno kick. Now let's go to samples, and let's find a clap. Let's do this eight oh eight clap. And yeah, I could use the drum synth clap. That would be fine, too. Actually, let's use a few claps. Okay? I got three claps here now. That's kind of all I want to use. Okay? I don't need any, um, Routing, in this case, although I could get to it down here if I needed to sends and receives, IOs. I don't really need to mess with any of this stuff. I could set up some macros if I wanted, but I actually don't need to. But if I wanted to, I could say, like, volume of this clap. Let's set the volume of all of our claps to the same knob. Now, all three clap volumes are here. Okay. That's cool. That'll be handy. Okay, now let's go here and make something. The reason I did just claps is because I just want to add claps. I don't want to add a whole bunch more percussion here because I already have an insane amount of percussion happening in this little track. So what I was thinking I would do is just a really big clap. So all three of those right there let's zoom in a little bit, see where I am. So copy, Pacelle put that on two and four. Loop that out. It's awfully loud, we'll take it down. Okay. And now we'll go to our master Okay. Pretty good. So now I made a drum rack where I just have three claps. I thought maybe I'd use this kick, but I have enough kicks going and this other stuff. So maybe we'll come back to it. But I think I'm pretty happy with all these claps. Cool. All right. Let's move on. 65. The Simpler and the Sampler: Okay, so up next, we're going to talk about the samplers in live. Now, remember, let's go way back to the beginning of this part of this class. We talked about our four main things, right? Oscillators, filters, envelopes, amplifier, okay? Now, here's the cool thing about samplers. All that's the same. It's totally the same. Except the only thing that's different is that our oscillator section can hold an actual audio file. Rather than just giving us waveforms, it's going to give us an audio file, but the rest is the same. Filters, envelopes, amplifiers, all that stuff. Is the same. So we have two main samplers in live. We have what's called the sampler and we have what's called the simpler, okay? Now, if you said to yourself, well, it sounds like the simpler is a simple version of the sampler. You would get a gold star for the day. Because that is correct. We're using simplers all over, and we've seen simplers all over. All of these in drum racks, these are all simpler instruments. Okay? So we'll go into how all this works in a second. Let's actually just load a simpler onto a new track right now. Okay. Here we go. So here is an empty simpler. Our oscillator section is going to be this big sample area here. But then, as you will be familiar with seeing, we have filter. Here's frequency in resonance, filter shapes, and even a filter button to turn it on and off. We have an LFO. You know what that is. And we have these four buttons right here, which are probably familiar to you by now, attack decay, sustain release. That's our ADSR envelope. Okay. And then we have a big old volume knob here. Now we have some other controls that we can get at more filters, a bigger LFO, and some more controls for our envelope. But all of that stuff should be pretty familiar to you by now. So, let's dive into the simpler. I want to talk about simpler kind of runs in three different modes. So let's talk about that in the next few videos, and then we'll go into Sampler. 66. Using Simpler (Classic Mode): Okay, so I have a simpler here. Let's load a sample into it. We can load a sample into it from all over the place. If we have a sample that we like in our session, we can just click and drag it down there, or we can go to our samples here. That's kind of cool. Let's drag that down there. We're just going to plop it right on this dark area. All right. And there we have it. Okay, so the three different modes of simpler classic mode means that we now have a sample, and we can trigger that sample. And it's going to by default, not loop this sample, but we can loop it. This is quite a long sample. We can build a loop in this. We've got some warp controls here. We can fade this out So that's a little smoother and see how it loops. That's cool. Okay. So if we play a note and just keep our finger down on the note, it's going to loop back. We can turn that off here. The note is also going to the note that we play on our mini keyboard is going to transpose this sound. So the default is always middle C. If I play middle C, which is not that then it's going to go back to its original pitch. We can't easily change what that original pitch is. In simpler, you just kind of have to remember that whatever pitch I put into that sample is not going to be the pitch that comes out when I play it on a keyboard. Okay? It's not really designed for that. With sampler, we can do that, but with simpler, we don't really do that. So I can so I'm playing a C here. I don't know what pitch this is. Actually, I do. It is also a C. But Live doesn't know what pitch it is. So if I play up a whole step, it's just going to transpose it up a whole step, regardless of what the actual pitch is. Okay, so quite simple. If I want to adjust my frequency resonance, I can do that there, my envelope, I can make the attack less forceful and have it kind of fade in with that and adjust the volume. Pretty simple, right? It is pretty simple. It's going to play our file. That's really kind of all it's going to do. Okay, let's go to one shot mode. 67. Simpler in 1-shot mode: Okay, when we switch over to one shot mode, we have a little bit fewer settings actually here. The main two we have is trigger and gait, okay? So if I'm on trigger, that means when I say play that note, it's going to play that note, and it's not going to loop. Okay? I'm still holding my finger down. It just stops. That's cool. I could still use my ADSR, although it works a little bit differently. It's giving me, like, a fade in and a fade out kind of point. I've got a transposition here that I can use how much the velocity that I play is converted to volume. I'd say a lot. That means that play if I play my keyboard quietly, it's going to play the note quietly. If I play it hard, it's gonna play it really hard. But you might not want that. You might just want it so that it always plays the same volume every time. Okay? It is still going to transpose, based on what note I play. But back to this triggering gait. Git means it's going to play the note as long as I'm holding the note down, it's going to play that sample. But as soon as I let go, it's going to stop playing that sample. So in trigger, I'm going to hit a note, and that's just basically going to say play that sample, like fire. Play that sample, no matter what. In gait, it's going to say when I'm holding my finger down, the gate is open to play, but when I lift my finger up, the gate stops. Okay. Relatively simple. Same filter settings, nothing nothing too crazy. Okay, let's go to the more fun one slice. 68. Simpler in Slice Mode: Okay, so in slice mode, it's gonna let us chop up this sample a little bit. Now, this isn't a great one for this. Let's find, like, a It's actually used as Banjo loop. Okay, so in slice mode, you see that it automatically has grabbed all these different transients, okay? And when I play midi notes, it's going to assign one midi note per slice, okay? Now, this is kind of like slice to new midi track, except it's keeping everything in one simpler rather than divving it out to a whole bunch of simplers. Okay? So This is really fun for just finding new sounds. There's all kinds of fun stuff here. So we're ignoring the pitch that I play. It's not transposing this anymore. It's just using this to trigger all of these different points. So you can set how it slices it. You can say slice by transient, beat region or manual. But even if you set it to transient, which is usually the best way, you can adjust these transients. Move them where you want them. We have warp setting still, and we have warp modes that we can activate here. Fade in, fade out. I believe this will apply to each one. Filter frequency and resonance. So basically, this is most useful on, like, a beat. Like, if we take a beat, now I can find like this kick. There's a snare. Alright, so now I can just kind of take the beat and play it really simply. Okay, so that's what slice will let you do. It's just gonna let you chop things up and trigger things by transient rather than the whole sample. 69. Using Sampler: Okay, let's switch over to the sampler and look at how it's different. So instruments sampler. Okay, so sampler is a bit more complicated and for really for one reason, I mean, it gives you more control over the samples, but it also lets you load multiple samples in. So we'll look at how and why you would do that in just a minute. But first let's just look at the main interface. Let's take one of our presets here. Okay. So here's what this sounds like. Terrifying. Okay, so we have this whole sample here, but we're looping just this section. We can do what's called a sustained mode here. So this one means it's going to just play and then stop. This one means it's going to basically loop. This one is called a boomerang loop where it's going to play forward and then backwards and forwards and then backwards and forwards and backwards. That sometimes makes a more seamless loop. So we do have more tuning controls of our sample here. So we can see like a list of the samples available to us here. We can reverse it. We can set here what the root note of this sample is. Now, that's important because that's something big that we can't do in simpler. So once we set the root note correctly, that means that everything will line up on your keyboard correctly. So if I load in a sample that is a sound that's in a D sharp, sure. Then when I play a C on my keyboard, going to play it as a D sharp. That's going to be all weird. But if I change the root note here to say D sharp, then Live knows how to transpose the thing correctly to play the right note at the right time. So if you're dealing with pitched samples and building harmonies and things, then having the root note correct is important. Okay, look just here at cross fade and loop end. What we're seeing here is, like, number of samples, right? Like, this is very, very specific that we can do here. The cross fade settings, the loop length. And all of these are unique per sample that we're looking at, right? They're going to reset for the different samples. We can detune it. All of these things are pretty familiar to us. If we go over here, we've got some ADSR controls over here. We've got a pitch envelope over here with another ADSR. We've got filters. These are global, so these are going to affect everything, not just they're going to affect all the samples, not just the one we're using it. Some modulation settings if we want to do some LFOs. We've got three of them available to us, and then we can do some more complicated midi mapping if we really want to. But the star of the show is this Zones tab right here. So let's go to a new video and dive into what Zones means in a sampler. 70. Samples and Zones: Okay, so maybe you've seen before sample libraries that you can buy online. There's tons of them. You maybe you've seen, like an orchestra library. Like, you want a good sounding orchestra that you can queue up and use. That's great. You've probably seen orchestra libraries that cost 100 bucks, and you've seen orchestra libraries, maybe that cost hundred bucks. And maybe you've seen an orchestra library that cost $10. Why? What is the difference? There are a few things. There's the quality of the recordings. There's how the samples have been edited and put together. But one of the main things that separates those is how many samples there are, right? Because if I record a violin playing a note, a single note. And I put that into a sampler, and then I transpose it down four octaves. That's not going to sound like a bass, right? It's not. It's going to sound funny and weird. You've done this before. Take your voice, transpose it down an octave, and it doesn't sound like someone with a deeper voice than you. It sounds funny. Take your voice and go up an octave. Does it sound like you up an octave? No, it sounds like Mickey Mouse. Right? So the way we avoid that is we have a sample at let's use the voice thing. Let's keep going with that. We have a sample of my voice where it is, and then another sample of my voice of me talking up in octave. And then the computer knows when to switch. So each one is only transposed a little bit, and then it switches to the other sample. So it might transpose up a couple steps, my voice, my original voice, but then it reaches a threshold where instead of transposing it more, it goes to the higher one and transposes that down because it can do less steps of transposition. So the more samples that are in it, the better. You can also have volume. You could say that if I whisper, if I whisper really quiet, then it's a certain tamber, right? And if I take that sound and just turn the volume way up on it, you're not going to get the tambor of me yelling, right? You should have two separate sounds that know two separate files that and the sampler that knows when to use the right one based on the velocity of the node I press. That's what all this has to do with, okay? So if we go into zones, what we see in this particular instrument is five samples, and you can see the are different octaves, F one, F two, F three, F four, and F five. Okay? Now, this matrix type thing over here tells us when to use each sample. So if I play a note that is C two and under, it's going to use this sample. I play a note between C two and C three, it's going to use this one, C three and C four, C four and C five, and then C five and up, it's going to use this one. Each of these only have to transpose about an octave. We also have velocity controls here where we can set the same thing. Now, this one hasn't set it. This one has not set velocity controls, so all of the notes are going to be on the same velocity. But only one sample can play at a time. Okay, so if I play a note, it's right on the edge, huh? Okay, let's go there. So this is playing that sample. You can see with red which note I'm playing. But if I go down, still the same sample, now we've switched to a different file. Okay? So a good sample library is put together in this way with tons of files. The more files, the bigger the sampler is. And generally speaking, the better and more realistic it sounds if it's an acoustic instrument. So each of these is called a zone. There are different zones for each sample and you can set them up to trigger in different ways. We're going to see this very similar thing when we talk about instrument racks in just a minute. But before we do that, let's open an orchestra library, and let me show you what a big orchestra library looks like. 71. Sampler Orchestra Library Example: Okay, so I'm going to close all of this by going to the Zones tab again. And now let's look at the Ableton orchestra. So the quickest way to get to that is to go to PAX and you have to have this one installed for it to work, but orchestra strings let's go to String Ensemble. To. This is a pretty nice sounding orchestra. Now, the real big orchestra libraries will not transpose your files at all. They will have a single file for every note and probably five or six different velocities of that note, different volumes of that note. This one does transpose somewhat, and it is in multi sample mode. So this is a little bit of a weird live trick. But basically, when you see this multi sample mode, if you want to get into it and really work with it, control click on the header part up here and go down to simpler to sampler. And it's basically going to take it out of multi sample mode and switch it back over into a sampler. I'm not really sure why some things come up that way, but it basically turns it back into a sampler, which is what it needs to be. Okay, so let's go on zones. You can see there's 300 samples in this instrument. So if we go up to zones, we see all these files. Okay, actually, yeah, this one has single files. So if we go to right in the middle, let's say this one. So this file plays for note let's see, what is that? C Sharp five only. Okay? So this file is just doesn't transpose at all. If I play C five, it triggers this file. Okay? So now, you'll also see that it actually triggers it four times. Why would that be? I'll explain that to you. So if I play C Sharp five, these four notes are going to get triggered. However, the velocity setting is going to stop them. So here's that same note. If I play a low velocity, it's going to play this one. If I play a little bit higher velocity, it's going to play that one, a little higher and a little higher. So for every single note in the range of the orchestra, we have an audiophile of that note. Four times at four different volumes, from quiet to loud. So this setup is going to be able to tell live that when I play this note at a certain volume, which note to trigger. So you can build these. You can build these very easily by just dragging sounds into a sampler and building up a whole library this way. Um, and, you know, you can buy some of these samplers. If you have something like contact, that's a sample player that does the same thing. It's able to handle a ton of different samples, and you can push them you can set up a system where it decides which one to play, and that's where you get big sample libraries. Contact is free, but the libraries that you will buy for it are decidedly not sometimes. Okay, so that's how Zones works in a big orchestra library. And this one sounds pretty good. It's a pretty decent sounding library. 72. Adding Samplers to our Track: Alright, let's add a sampler to our crazy track here. What I want is something kind of keyboard like to help reinforce this sound. So let's go to sampler and look at some of the presets. With kind of tack. That's kind of interesting. It might now work for us, though. No, there's whole chords in there, so I don't want that. It's kind of fun. Let's try that. So we'll take all of this and put it down here to double it. Let's hear what that sounds like. I don't really love it. You try that? Too big. I kind of like it. Okay, cool. Whatever. This things kind of ridiculous. But I'll give you this session again. I think we've added a few layers since we've last given it to you. So if it's fun for you, you can download it and play around with it if you like. And then let's move on to Rack. 73. Overview to Instrument Racks: Alright, let's talk about racks. I think I said this once before in one of the earlier classes, but I'm going to say it again because it's important. When I was in the certified trainer exam kind of thing, one of the Ableton folks, one of the people from Ableton Company, described racks like this. He said, If there were four things that make up live, like the four most important things in live, they would be warping Session View, Arrangement View, and Racks. That I think that might have been before Max for Live exists, so I would add a five Max for Live. But racks are the fourth one. We've already seen drum racks, but there are other kinds of racks, two in particular. There are instrument racks and effect racks. We're gonna talk about instrument racks now and we'll talk about effect racks in the next class. So what you can do with an instrument rack is basically you can make super instruments. You can combine instruments together. You could also think about in the past, up till now, I've said several times that you can only put one instrument on a track. And every time I said that, I, like, kind of choked it back a little bit, and I think I probably said, in most cases, you can only put one instrument on a track, or most of the time, you can only put one instrument on a track. This is the exception. If you use a rack, an instrument rack, you can, in a way, put more instrument than one on a track. So let's take a look. They are similar to drum racks, in a way. So let's go instrument rack, and let's throw an Empty one down here. Okay? There it is. Nothing to it, right? There's really nothing there. But now let's say I want this collision patch. Now, this collision patch is a rack. Remember? But I just put a rack within a rack, which you can totally do. Now, let's say I want this wave table. Sure. So I'm gonna open this thing called chains, which I'll explain in a second, and just go like that. And now let's see. How about a mold? Sure. Put that there. Maybe another mold. Sure. Okay? Now I've built a super sound. That's pretty crazy. Um, but that's what you can do with racks. So, let's dive in a little bit more and talk about how racks work and what you can do with them. We'll start with this bit about chains. 74. Chains and Selectors: Okay, so you can have one instrument per chain, okay? So let's start fresh. Let's get rid of that. Let's go back up to instrument rack. Put it down here. Okay? Now, let's pick a sound. Sure. We'll drag that down there. Okay? Now, as soon as I do that, I need to open chains over here, okay? If I want another chain, I can do two things. I can control click somewhere in this area and say, create chain. Now I have an empty chain, which can be useful, actually. But we'll get rid of that for now. Another thing you can do is just drag an instrument or preset down to that area and make another chain. Okay? Every chain so far, every chain is going to get triggered at once. So when I play some midi notes, those midi notes are going to come in here and get sent to all four chains and then sent out. I can adjust the volume of each chain here. So if I want to kind of blend these in a way, I can do some panning. I can turn one off or one on, I can solo them, swap them out, do a few different things. But then here's where the real power comes in. I have these things up here. These four buttons. Hide is not really one of them. Key velocity and chain. This is going to let me choose which chain I'm hearing when. Right now, I'm going to hear all chains all the time. But what if we had an instrument that was set up by key? Okay, so watch this. I'm going to control click on here in this area of the chains and say, distribute ranges equally. Fun little time saving hack. Okay, now what we have here is when I play a low note on my keyboard. There we go. I'm gonna play. It's going to play this instrument. When I play a little bit higher note, now we switch to this instrument. If I go higher, still that instrument. Okay now switch over to the other one. Let's go to the next one. Oh, it's too high for that one to handle it. That one's too high. That's okay. Um, so you can see that now we've decided which instruments happen in which range, okay? We can move them around. We can say this one happens there. They can overlap. So now, right here, I'm going to hear both of those instruments. We could say, we're always gonna hear this instrument, but then we're also gonna hear some other instruments along the way. It's a cool effect. But my favorite thing to do is watch this. Okay, so we can decide what instruments play when by using this kind of big green bar. But do you see that smaller green bar above that? That smaller green bar is like a cross fade. So check this out. Now they're overlapping a little bit, but watch this. I'm going to grab that smaller bar. Call like this and like this. Whoops. Sometimes it's kind of hard to grab it 'cause it's small. But what do you think is happening now? We are cross fading instruments. So as I go up in this range, I'm going to get a little bit of this instrument and a little bit of this instrument until eventually this instrument kind of takes over, and then it's gonna fade between these two, right? So I'm going to get some of both and create this crazy It's kind of crazy. Um, so that's with the key selector. I can do the same thing with velocity. Now you're seeing how this is familiar from the sampler, right? I can say when we're on well, let's distribute the ranges. So I can say when we're on this one, we're when we play quiet notes, use this synth, we play loud notes, use this synth, louder notes, use this synth, and very loud notes, use that synth. Now, I've created a little bit of a problem here and it's something to watch out for. And that's that we have two different kinds of selections going. So that means if I play a low note really quiet, I'm going to hear this synth and this synth. So just this top synth. But if I play a high note, really quiet, it's not going to play anything because the quiet range is down here, but the high note range is up here. So you should try to get in the habit of using one or the other of these. It's not great to use both because you can end up triggering nothing. I'm going to reopen all of these, and then there's one more thing to look at. Okay, I'm going to reopen these, and then we'll look at the chain selector and the next video. 75. The Chain Selector: Okay, so I've reset my velocity chain selector and my key selector. Now let's go to this chain selector here. Okay, so Let's imagine another situation. Let's say you are in a band, and you are the keyboard player for that band. And you are going on tour with that band, playing keyboards, and you want to bring a little you want to bring a mini keyboard. You don't want to bring your whole arsenal of 50 different keyboards. So you're going to bring a midi keyboard and a laptop, okay? You're gonna walk out on stage. You're gonna plug in your keyboard to your laptop, and you're gonna load up one Ableton patch. And it's going to have an instrument rack on it, okay? You're going to set the instruments you need for every track. So this is Track one, Track two, track three, track four. So maybe this is an organ, maybe this is Rhodes piano. Maybe this is a normal piano. Maybe this is some kind of pad. For every song that you have in your set, you have a different chain, okay? Then what you're going to do is you're going to go to this chain selector, and you're going to go this going to move that 1/1. That 1/2. This 1/3. Okay? You're going to map this to some dial on your keyboard. Okay? So by doing that, you can set a dial that controls this. You do that with midi mapping. We'll talk about Mi mapping in the next class. So, actually, I'll just show you how to do it really quick. Command M, click in this purple area, and then wiggle some parameter on a MIictroller, and you will then have control of it. Once you have control of it, then you're all set to play this show and never having to touch your laptop. You've got your keyboard here. You say, Cool. Next song, all you have to do is turn that dial like that over one notch. Now you're on your second synth. Next song, turn that dial one notch. Now you're on your third synth. Now you're on your fourth synth. The chain selector. And then, like, they want an encore, so you go back to your first synth. No problem. You just turn that dial. Okay? That is what this chain selector is really good at. It's just saying, I want to be on one of these synths, and I'm just going to turn a dial, and it's going to be this kind of teal line. That's what I'm turning. And I can just select whatever I want to do. You can also do the same kind of stuff where you make, like, a long area and maybe, you know, a fade in. And then the opposite. So, you know, you could still use it to just dial as an effect to, like, cross between different sins and maybe have one that's always on like that. Now it's you got to bring crazy sound. So that's what the chain selector does. It basically lets you just select for it. 76. Macros: Okay, next thing, let's go back to this little macro button that we saw earlier. We saw that we could assign some things to different macros, right? Let's explore that a little bit more because there's kind of a lot of wild things we can do with this. The idea behind macros is that let's go back to that example. You're in a band. You're on stage, and you're just dialing through all of these different stands for different songs in your set. But let's say that in this second song, you need access to your filter frequency, okay? The last thing you want to do is being open up your computer, dig around to try to find this dial in the middle of everything else going on on stage. You're going to hit the wrong button, and something strange is likely to happen. We want to keep you from having to dig around inside of an instrument when that happens. So what we're going to do is we're just going to say frequency control click, map to Macro one. So now that's out here, okay? So when I move this, it moves that. Cool. That's it, right? Nothing fancy. It's just mapping some parameter so that we can get to keep us from having to go deep inside of our instrument and find it, just give us access to some stuff really quick. However, while that is something important we can do, the macros are kind of their own little synthesis engine by themselves kind of accidentally, because watch this. Let's say I wanted to do that filter, but I also want to do some crazy effect where my LFO rate is going to go down as my filter goes up. I could totally do that. Control click, Map this also to Macro one. Okay? Now, they're both going up at the same time. Then I'm going to go back over here, right click on that again and hit Edit Macro Map. Now I have some controls over those things. So my LFO rate is going 0-127. If I wanted to go opposite, crank that up, crank that down. Now, when I move this macro, one goes up and one goes down. Okay, let's turn mapping off so we can see that a little easier. Okay? Let's do something else. What if at the same time that that happened, I wanted my oscillator two level to go up and down. Okay? Now I'm creating this crazy effect. And it doesn't need to be in this chain only. What if this chain is also happening, and I go into this device and say, I want the pitch envelope to also move around for this completely other instrument. Now I've got this one dial that does this insane thing. I can change the color of it, rename it, super dial. Sure. That's how macros work. You can do an insane amount of stuff with macros. We'll see this even more once we get into effect racks, where we can start to build these really complex and customized effects. But that should give you a basic idea of what they're capable of. You can map as many things as you want to a macro. You can hit this map button to get control over minimum and maximum values, which can let you customize it even more. So there's a huge amount of potential just in macros. Okay, let's look at a few quick presets. 77. Some Rack Presets: Um Okay. Okay, I'm gonna get rid of this crazy one that we made. And let's go to Instrument rack. And let's look at these presets. Now, there's a lot of presets here. So, let's uh That's wild. Let's look at that. Okay, so we open it up. We have just macros. A lot of the time, that's what you want. Remember, the macros are designed to keep you from having to dig around in all of the instruments. So this has been built so that it's just has the things that we most need. Neat. Let's look inside it. So if I click on this button, I'm going to see the chains. There are two. Okay? If I double click here, I can expand that. So there's a sampler in multi sample mode. There's a ring modulator, which is just another sampler in multi sample mode. So we just have two samplers here. Let's look at Let's look at this drum kit. Okay, so what do we have here? This is kind of complicated because we have a drum rack here, but it's contained within an instrument rack. This is something you'll find. You can have racks within racks within racks. It's kind of crazy. So they have just four macros for us. If we look at our chains, there's just one chain, which is totally okay. And they've put some effects on this, too, on this chain, also, which you can do, by the way, put some effects at the end of the chain after the instrument. Sounds pretty simple. Let's look at one more. Let's try that one. Okay. Just some macros. One chain, operator, and then a ton of effects after it. And you can see already, like, all these green dots here are mapped to macros. So there are parameters, in particular, the on off of this effect is mapped to a macro. Let's see if we can turn one on. See this amp here, it's gonna be controlled by this bright. So at some point it hits a value that turns it on. It's just anything greater than zero, turns it on with that. So you can set that up in this mapping tab here. So there's so many possibilities of Just crazy things you can do with instrument x. It's like, just literally endless. Okay. We're almost done. We're almost done. Um, there's just a couple little odds and ends that I want to go over, and then we're gonna wrap up this part of the class. So let's do that. 78. External Instrument: Okay, let's talk about this external instrument one. This one is a little weird, so we're kind of in the odds and ends section now. The purpose of this external instrument is this. Let's say I have that MIDI synthesizer over there, right there. Let's say I want to play that through live. I want to do some MIDI sequencing and send that MIDI data over to that instrument and then get an audio signal back. Okay? That's what external instrument is. Technically, I could do all that without the external instrument. I could just do it with routing by making a new Mi track, and then say, this MIDI output goes to an external device over there and then set up a new audio track that's going to record in the audio from that track. I could do that. It would take two tracks and a bunch of cabling and weirdness to do. This makes it a little bit easier. So with this external instrument, all I have to say is Mi two, and then I can just select that. It's not plugged in at the moment. But I could select what I'm sending that MDI to. And then I would say audio from that. I got a little gain, some latency controls. And then, basically, on this same track, it's going to send MIDI out to it and bring audio back in. And at some point, I can just record that audio in and have it. But it's a utility thing. It's just going to send Midi out, like, out of your computer to another thing, and then bring audio back in. That's all. It's actually relatively simple. You would only really need this if you have some external midi gear that you want the sounds from, okay? That's the only real reason to use this at the moment. That's all I have to say about it. 79. Granulator III: Now, I've talked about Max for Live here and there. We'll do a ton of Max for Live in the last part of this class. But there are some Max for Live instruments kind of hiding around on your computer. One super powerful one. And in fact, I might even argue that this is one of the most powerful instruments that we have in live, and it's kind of hidden away. It's granulator three. We had granulator. We had granulator two, and now new in Live 12 is granulator three. This thing is crazy, and it's a Max for Live device, supposedly made by Robert Hinke, the kind of boss dude. So in order to use it, I have to open up this folder and then get to the granulator three track, and then I can load it. So remember, Max for Live device just means that you can kind of open it up and tweak it if you really want to. But this thing is like a crazy drone machine. Let me show you. Let's go Uh, B, sure. Let's just drag a sound file in there. And now, if you play it. So it does, like, tiny little looping things. Let's look at some of these presets. It's just like crazy. Um So you can drag any audiophile into this, um, and it's gonna do crazy things to it. Maybe not a high hat. Let's maybe good. Sure. Okay. And I haven't even, like, touched any of the controls yet. So we have envelopes, we have filters. But effectively, our oscillator is this sample. But it really just like picks apart the sample and does like crazy things to it. Granulator is the name granulator is a riff on the term granular, which is a type of synthesis, granular synthesis, where you take a sound and chop it up into tiny, tiny little pieces called grains, and then sprinkle them around and do fun things with them. So check out this instrument. It's kind of powerful. I believe it's free with sweet and maybe with other versions. If you have it, it's going to show up in packs. So granulator three PAC. If you don't have it, look on the Ableton site, go to PACS and then go to free and see if it shows up for you as something that you have available. You could also probably just get it right from this window. I might show up right here for you. But play around with it. It's really fun. 80. Other M4L Devices: And of course, don't forget if you go to the Max for Live tab here, you should have several things here that are other instruments. Not all of these are instruments, and you won't have all of these. A lot of these are just things that I've made or things I've played around with, but you can download things instruments, go tomforive.com. If you're looking for these. There's tons of free things to play around with. Buffer shuffler is great for doing glitchy stuff. ARP is cool. Um there's a lot of stuff that comes with live, and there's a lot of stuff that you can just download on your own. So don't forget about those if you're looking for more instrument ideas or effect ideas. 81. What Comes Next?: Okay, we have reached the end of P four, Part four of this sequence on sound design and instruments. Up next, P five is on audio and midi effects. So in that section, we're going to live here. We're going to go through all of these effects. We'll talk about more sound design stuff, effect theory, composition, how to use these. And we'll get into a little bit of mixing and mastering as we get comfortable using some of these plug in. We'll also learn kind of what some of these are, not only how to use them, but like compressors, different kind of filters, shifters, phasers, flangers, vocoders, all that good stuff. So please join me for that other class. It's probably out now, and we'll continue on our journey to master every element of Ableton Life. We'll see you there. 82. Part 5: Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Ableton Live 12 Part five. Audio media effects. In this class in this part of the giant sequence of classes, we're really going to focus on media effects. Now, I am going to walk you through every single audio and MIDI effect that we have in Live 12. But I'm also going to talk a lot about effect theory, how to use effects, the different types of effects, and what order they should go in and how to do some other techniques with them like side chaining and busing and things like that. So I highly recommend watching this class from beginning to end to get a feel for all of the effects. But after that, keep this class in your account and use it as kind of an encyclopedia. Pull it up whenever you want to know how to use some effect. You can always come back to it and rewatch any segment as you're working on tracks. So near the end of this class, we're going to talk about effect racks, audio effect racks, especially. And those are one of the most powerful things in all of life. If you haven't explored audio effect racks yet, you're in for a world of amazement. So, let's get started. Let's dive in. Off we go. All right. So there's all the frequencies of our sound. Now, here's what we're seeing. So on the left, we have low sounds, everything all at once. We can go up to this triangle here and click on. Now don't freak out. It looks like we have 1 million more settings here, but we don't quiet it down, and then we boost everything by the amount that we quieted it down. Okay, so we're going to smoosh it, compress it, and then boost everything. Now, this is my favorite. This is my kind of go to for most effects is to Alright, so let's hear the three now. 83. The 4 Areas of This class: Alright. Let's dive in. So in this class, we're really going to focus on audio and Midi effects. However, in live in Live 12, that's going to put us in four different areas here in our browser. Okay? We're going to look at audio effects, right? We'll go through all of these effects and look at how they all work. We're also going to look at media effects. We'll look at all these media effects and how they work. We're also going to look at modulators. These are effects that focus on modulating things. If you've been following the rest of my Live 12 series of classes, you kind of know what modulation is already, but we'll get much deeper into it with these things. And then lastly, Max for Live. So we're not going to go real deep into Max for Live, but we will discover a few Max for Live effects because they are sprinkled all over the place. You'll see here even in audio effects, there are a few Max for Live effects that pop up like this LFO, this align delay. You can tell by the icon that they're Max for Live. They have these little lines popping out of Let's see if there's any others, yeah, Shaper. MIDI effects, there's probably a few envelope, MTI, expression control, shaper MIDI these are all Max for Live. Modulators are all Max for Live effects. So we're not going to go into building effects with Max for Live, because if you're not familiar with Max for Live, basically, it's like its own programming language that lives within live and will let us build things. Sometimes things get built that are so cool that Ableton says, we're going to put this into the main release. And that's what you see here when you see Max for Live effects all over the program. So you can build your own effects with Max for Live, and we will do that in, I think, P seven of this monster everything there is to know about Ableton Live class. We're going to devote that just to MAX and learning how the basics of programming in MAX works. But in this class, no programming, we're just going to use some of the Max for Live effects that have been programmed by other people. So those are our four areas that we're going to be working in audio effects, media effects, modulators, and Max for Live. We won't go into plug ins too much. Plug ins might be effects. Plugins can be effects. They can be instruments, and they could be a few other things, too. But the plug ins are unique to everybody's system. You will have some plug ins that other people won't have. These are things made not by Ableton, by anyone else. So we're not going to focus on plugins in this class. We're just going to focus on the Ableton made stuff. Audio effects, media effects, modulators, and then some Max for Live stuff. Okay. Cool. So let's get good at all those things. And let's start at media effects. O 84. What are Midi Effects?: Midi effects. Let's start with midi effects. So midi effects are generally speaking, more simple than audio effects because remember that MIDI is just numbers, right? It's like note number 60, turn it on, turn it off. Like at a volume of 100. It's just a bunch of numbers. So MDieffects basically are doing math in a bunch of different ways. Don't worry. We don't have to do math. That's handled for us by the effect. But they're not as complicated as something that's like adding frequencies and overtones and partials and all of these other things. Like, audio effects are. So let's go through our MIDI effects and just learn what each one does. Remember that in any midi effect, we need a few things for it to work. First, we need an instrument on a track. We're not going to hear anything if we don't make an instrument. So let's just use the default analog patch. There it is. Then we'll go to our MIDI effects and add something. The other thing we need is some MIDI info, either a clip or a keyboard like I have plugged in. So I have a keyboard, so when you see me, do this, it means I'm reaching for the keyboard and playing some notes. We might even just put in some clips. We'll see how it goes. Now, when we get down to our effect area, we're always going to have our instrument and a MIDI effect before it, and audio effects would come after it if we want to. So remember, these little dots here are telling us that we're dealing with MIDI, and these lines are telling us that we're dealing with audio. So MIDI effects need to deal with MIDI. So you'll see those dots here and here. So dots coming in, Dots coming out, meaning MIDI data is coming in, Midiatas coming out. Instruments are magical things where MIDI data comes in and audio comes out. So any MIDI effects need to come before the instrument. If I click and drag this over here, it's just going to say, no, you can't do that. All right, so make sure you have those things. If you're not savvy on setting up a MIDI keyboard, you don't really need a mini keyboard. You can just make clips but if you need help on setting up a MIDI keyboard, you can go back to, I think, part one of the Ableton series that we're currently in Part five of that I walked through all of your setup procedures, even, like, what keyboards you should buy if you want to buy a keyboard. Alright, so off we go. Let's just go down this list. I think just alphabetically will be fine. I always like to start with our peggiator which is convenient because it's alphabetically first. So let's do it. 85. Arpeggiator: Okay, let's talk about the arpeggiator. So if you're not familiar with the concept of arpeggiation, what this means is, you can think of it as a harp. And I think RP the origin of the word arp comes from the word harp. I read that somewhere. Um, but basically, if you imagine a harp, you play it like this, see if I can get a good angle for you. You can play chords by going Bing and playing a bunch of notes on the harp. However, when we think about a harp, often we associate it with arpeggiation, which means going and playing that chord, maybe, but one note at a time quickly. So what we're doing with an arpeggiator is we're going to give it a chord, and it's going to play the notes one at a time, okay, in some kind of pattern. So let me for this, maybe I'll demonstrate it by putting a clip here. So let's make just like a C. Well, let's do this. I was just going to type in a C major chord. However, let's take advantage of our new key aware setting. So I'm just going to switch this to a minor chord or minor key. Okay? So now I'm going to put in a C minor chord. Okay, very simple C minor chord. Maybe I'll put one more note at the top too, another C. Okay, so I have four notes in this chord. Okay? Now, I'm going to hit Shift Tab so I can go back over and see my arpeggiator. Okay? So if I start this going, the style is set to up. So that means it's going to play the lowest note and then go up. Okay? Here we go. One, two, three, four, right? I can change the pattern by this list or by just using these arrow keys. Got into this one at the moment. Okay, so you can see that sometimes it has to do a repeat part of the pattern in order to fill out the sequence, but this will tell us what it's doing. So we've got a whole bunch of other options here. Let's go through some of them. First, the rate, this is the speed at which we're going. We can set it to milliseconds or division of the beat. It is currently set to division of the beat and an eighth note. So if this is our beat, it's going to play twice that. Bum bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So two for every one click. We can speed it up by going to 16th note. Neat. Oh, I should also point out we have random things here that I really like using a lot. We have random, random other and random once. I believe the difference is that random is truly random. Random other means it can't choose the same note two notes in a row. And random once, I'm not sure how that one's different. But if I choose random, I don't want any repeats. It's kind of fun. Let's leave it there. Okay, so here's my speed. I can slow it down or speed it up. Distance. This one's interesting, and this goes hand in hand with steps. So what's happening here is we're gonna let it go away from just the four notes that I gave it, okay? Right now, we're saying don't go away from those four notes I gave it because steps is set to zero. So if we say one, okay? Now, distance turns on. So what we're saying here is, can cycle through the pattern once and then transpose it one time. That's what steps means here. And what is that transposition? What notes are you going to choose? We're saying distance 12, which is an octave. So now it's going to play our notes and an octave higher. Okay. If we wanted to go two octaves, we can go here. So now we're going to say, Okay, do your pattern, but then you can also do two octaves, higher, and it'll set to octaves. Okay. It doesn't have to be octives. We could say do two steps. This is gonna get weird. But we could also turn on our key aware settings here. And now it's gonna kind of know what kee we're in and behave a little bit better. Okay, so now it's just taking those four notes, but it's playing four times two. So it's playing eight notes. Actually, it's playing 16 notes because we're letting it go twice. And it's transposing differently. So I'm gonna go back to an octave that's always a good sound. Gait means how long the notes are. If we shorten the gate, it's gonna go **** If we make it longer, it's gonna go dit, it's gonna go Titi dit ti tit. It's gonna make them long like longer. Let me show you rather than use my voice. Short, long. I'm going to keep it down to write in our octave. So that's the gate. Okay, then we've got two more sections over here. We've got the re trigger section and the velocity section. Oh, before we get to that, let me show you this hold thing because this is kind of fun. Hold basically means I can play some notes. Like, if I just, like, press two notes, I can press as many as I want. But if I just press two notes, it's going to start going, Do do do do do do do do do do do with those two notes. I can let go and walk away. It's gonna keep going doo do do do do do do. It's going to hold in that pattern. I plus two other notes. It's going to switch to that pattern and I can walk away. Like. Hold. Go. Press two more notes? Los rather nice tion. Alright. One note. To notes. Four notes. So you can just, like, it notes. Hit chords. Walk away. It's kind of fun. I'm gonna turn that off. Re trigger is, how often does the pattern start over? We can tell the pattern to start over a few different ways. In this way, we don't really have a pattern, so it's not going to do much, but let's go back to converge. We could say the pattern is going to start over off, meaning like when it's done. So there's four notes in this pattern, so it's going to start over every four notes. But we could also say, every time I give it a new note, restart the pattern, make sure it's starting that pattern at the beginning, or every new beat restart it at the beginning. So if the pattern starts over and we don't jump into the middle of a pattern the interval would be like a multiplier. So if I say every beat, then I can say every two beats, if I want. I almost always leave that off. And then I can tell to repeat the pattern however many times I need. Down here, we have this key aware stuff that is currently off because we're using the key aware up here. If we turn this off, we could set our own key down here if we wanted. But I like that on. Velocity is going to add some variation to our velocity. We can say decay, target, and re trigger, just to vary up our velocity. But, you can kind of hear it fade and then grow and fade. It can add some variation to your arpeggiator. Okay, so that's how the arpeggiator works. Let's move on to CC control. 86. CC Control: Okay, I made another MIDI track here and put a default collision on it. Now it's like a CC control. This is kind of almost a utility thing where basically what we can do here is we can send out CC messages. Now, CC messages means one of two things depending on what school of thought you have. I learned it as continuous control. That is, any kind of MIDI device that's not a button, like a key like a fader or a dial, where it's got more than just an on or off. It's got some amount of value to it. Those are called continuous controllers. It also the more modern definition is control change, meaning that it's a controller that changes, I guess. It's not sending control change messages. That's kind of a different thing, but it is a control change message. So what we can do here basically is emulate having a mod wheel, having a pitch bend, having pressure sensitivity if we don't have it on our keyboard. We can set custom things where we can say, Here's, you know, custom B. We say, This is outputting. Here's all possible, uh, CC messages that are available to us. So we could say, send out sustenuto. That's a good one. Send out a sustenuto message. Sustenuto is, if you have like a proper acoustic grand piano, the middle petal. There are three petals under them. The left one makes things quieter. The middle one is called sustanuto and the right one is a sustained petal. Sustanuto basically sustains certain notes that you tell it. So it can be actually really fun to use. So here's the cestenuto pedal. No mini keyboard I've ever seen has had a cestenudo pedal, so we can kind of emulate it if that's what we want to do and send it out to the instrument. We can also map to these or automate these if we make a clip and go to our automation envelopes here We can set all these continuous controllers that we get from that device. So here's all our custom ones and the built in ones. And we can map those as envelopes or if we were in arrangement view, we could just create automation lanes with those in them. So basically, to sum up, if you want to send pitch bend information, for example, to this instrument, but don't have pitch bend on your keyboard, you can do it this way and then automate it. That's how it works. Doesn't make any sound on its own, or send any other note data, it sends CC data, which is a type of control message. 87. Chord: Okay, I'm gonna stick with collision and do something with it. So I got rid of our CC Control midi effect, and I'm going to put cord on it. Now, this one is really cool. This used to be I'm gonna be totally honest with you and not let's just not tell anyone I said this. This cord midi effect used to be really pretty useless. I didn't I could never find a good use for it. And even when I was doing these videos in previous versions, and I had to demo it, I'd be like, Uh because it wasn't very useful. But now it's great. Watch this. So, what we could do is basically we can add notes with this. So if I play a note, I can say, Okay, add to that note six steps. Let's say an octave. Okay? Now I have an octave. So every note I play now is going to have an octave added. That's cool. But I could also say add a fifth, which is seven steps. That's cool. However, we start getting into a problem here because if you're in a key and you add a fifth to everything, you're going to start going out of the key once you get to the top of a scale. But let's make it even uglier. Let's add a major third, which is four steps. So now every note I play, I have a major chord, right? But that's totally wonky because those chords are going to go out of key all over the place. But with our new key aware settings, I can say, Cool. Let's do that again. Let's say 12 and a fifth and a third. A major third. And now we're going to stay in key because this isn't going to let any notes happen that are not in the key. So now it's gonna alternate between major and minor chords as I go up. Cool, right? So you can add up to six notes here. Now, there's another new feature that's really cool here, too. Let's reset these. Remember that if you ever want to reset a dial in live, just hit click on it and then hit the delete key. But I can hit this learn. And now I'm just going to play a chord, okay? And now it said, cool. So I just played four notes, and it's going to add three notes. So what it's saying is for the notes, so the lowest one it's going to call the fundamental, and then it's going to say minus seven steps, minus three steps, plus four steps. So it actually picked one in the middle as the root, and it's going to add these all around it. I'm not sure how it picked the one to be the root, but it doesn't really matter. So now Oops. I lost it because I didn't turn learn off. Okay, now, that is going to stay the same throughout. I can add strum to that, which does exactly what it sounds like. It's like you're strumming a guitar. Get a little Debussy in there. And, you know, if I do crescendo, it's gonna get louder as I go. Tension, I believe, makes our strum kind of uneven if we go up. So, this can be kind of fun if you want to add a bunch of notes to individual notes. Don't put this on chords. Put this on, like you want a melody to be harmonized. You can play around with this and see if you could find something that works. So it can be fun. 88. Envelope MIDI: Okay, so I made another Mi track, and I threw the default drift onto it. And now let's add envelope MTI. This is kind of a cool effect. So what we have here is really quite simple. We have an ADSR envelope, right? If you watch the last class where we went through all the instruments and talked about synthesis a whole bunch, you know these. Attack, decay, sustain, release. We also have an amount and a little graphic that's gonna let us control the same parameters of the ADSR. Okay? Now, you might remember from the synthesis stuff, what does the ADSR envelope do? It needs to be assigned to something. So what we have here is kind of a free floating envelope that we can assign to anything we want on an instrument, okay? So all we have to do. So, okay, so let me just show you what I made here. I made a mini clip. That's just this, this one note over and over. Okay. So it sounds, you know, fine, boring. But let's say I wanted to put an envelope on any parameter here that even one that I can't get at with the envelopes in that are built into this instrument, maybe, like, okay, so let's say something like octave, right? Like, what if I wanted to put an envelope on the octave to make it go up and down in an ADSR kind of shape? All I have to do is click on Map. Now it's blinking and it's saying the next thing you click on, I'm going to lock to that. So now I'm going to go click on Octave, okay? And now I have an envelope on the octave setting. Okay. Cool. I can get rid of that by clicking here. Then I can say, Let's put an envelope on this filter amount. Sure. Ooh. This frequency knob. So it's interesting because there's so much modulation we can do within this instrument. But if there is a parameter that we can't modulate, we can do it with this envelope midi. Like, here's a good example. Let's map the attack. Okay? So now I have an envelope here, and let's set that to control the shape of our sound. But then we're going to control the shape of the envelope with another envelope using this effect. Okay, so it's kind of wild. You can basically put an ADSR envelope on anything with this media effect. It's pretty cool. 89. Expression Control: Okay, I've loaded up an electric here. Neat. And let's add our next Mdia effect, which is expression control. This is really similar to the envelope that we just looked at. What we have here is some of our cool new MPE controls that we can map to anything else. So let's take something like velocity. See, we can see here what my velocity is. Actually, let's take slide. Okay, so I have slide on my MD keyboard where I'm sliding my finger up and down. You saw me do that in part four of this series. So we can see where my finger is, and I can scale it if I want so that it's not so extreme. And then I can hit this map button and we have the same map parameter. So let's map the stiffness of the hammer to that slide parameter. Okay? So now I have control of this slide parameter on my keyboard. I can give it a little more finas if I want to and do something like that. Okay? So now, Where I play and how I play is really going to impact this instrument. It's basically bringing those MPE controls to instruments that don't yet support it. So let's make something here really quick. Let's make I'm just I'm just kind of goofing around in the key here. Okay, cool. So let's solo that. And now I can it randomization I have here. Map that to the t. Increment. So it's just going to go up in a series. Is that on the diaper? So these last two random and increment are just increment is just going to step through something and random is going to randomly move around in it. And we can assign those as well. That's actually pretty great. So let's so I've been kind of quietly building a little track here. Let's hear all of it right now. It might be just pure chaos. I kind of like it. 90. MIDI Effect Rack: Okay, so up next is Midi effect Rack. Now, if you watched Part four of this series of classes, then you're familiar with instrument racks, and you know that ARAC means that we can put a bunch of effects in them and create kind of a super effect. We don't need IRAC to put more than one effect. Even with MDi effects, yeah. I can put other midi effects on a single track. But effect racks, let us do some kind of special things where they get combined together. So let's look at some of the presets in the media effect rack. So chord echo variations. Let's put this on this new track I made here. Okay? So what we have here is a midi effect where we can kind of launch different settings. Okay? That's what these are. So let's put an instrument on here. What have I not done yet? Impulse isn't great for this. Let's do meld the default meld. Okay. Wow. Alright, I just pressed one note. This is one note. That's kind of crazy. So now we can go to a different set of settings. D. Lots going on here. So we can see what's in it if we hit this button to show all the devices. A Cord effect, what is this? If I double click on it, it's going to open up. This is a delay, and this is a note echo. This is a midi delay, I suppose. And then chord. So we can see, we've got different settings for these on each of these, these macro variations. So you can build kind of complicated and interesting media effects through the medi effect rack. So check out. Let's do one more here. Let's get rid of this. So here's another one. And this one we don't have macro variations saved. We just have some dials. But let's look at what's in it. A random object, a scale object, and I think that's a shaper object. But now we can create a set of macros, which are these little dials that'll let us control a bunch of different things. So here, I'll play one note again. Okay, I'll play a chord. So it's playing different notes. I'm going to play the same chord over and over. So this is kind of choosing different notes to play within this scale. Cool. So check out the Midi effect Rack. There's some cool stuff in there. There's some cool stuff you can do if you want to build something like that. 91. 10 MIDIMonitor: Okay, let's go down to Midi Monitor. This is kind of exactly what it sounds like here. But what we can see here is basically what's happening. So I can play some notes, and it's going to say, This is an F major chord. You see my velocity, my root. I can look at all my MIDI data coming in. I can look at any MPE data that's here and kind of what's happening. It's kind of wild. So, this particular effect doesn't really do anything. It just shows you what's going on. The most useful thing for this to me, anyway, is this cord function. This is great because you can play some random notes, and I'll say, Oh, that's a B diminished chord. D minor seventh. Like, it can't get too crazy and some really, really weird chords, but I can figure out what you're doing pretty well. So it's really handy for that. Also, if you're wondering what's going on with MPE, you can always pull this up and just see what it's doing. So it doesn't do a whole lot, but it just shows you what's happening. It's a great tool when you need it. 92. MPE Control: Okay, yep, next, MPE control. This gives us another kind of access to some of our MPE values. So what we can do here is get access to some of them and then kind of control them a little bit. So this isn't going to generate any MPE data. It's just going to let us kind of smooth it out. So if I go to slide, you know, I can see where I am as I slide my finger around on this MPE enabled keyboard, and I can kind of scale it. Which is actually really handy. Like, if I go to pressure, this one, to me, is, like, really sensitive. So I could do this. And now I can kind of get into the low end a little bit easier. There we go. So it's very, very sensitive on this keyboard, so this will help me scale it a little bit. Cool. So again, almost a utility and not something that's gonna actually generate sound, but let us control our midi information a little bit. 93. Note Echo: Okay, I'm going to get rid of these two utility things here and add note echo next. Okay, so what this is going to do is add an echo of a note. However, remember that this is not an audio echo. This is not like we have a device called echo that will echo audio. This is a note echo. So that means that if I play a note, it's going to generate that note again, maybe at a lesser velocity, and then send both those notes to the instrument. That is going to have sometimes a different effect than a different effect than an audio delay. So Actually, let's compare these just for fun. I'm going to throw an audio echo on this track also. Okay? Now I'll turn off the note echo. Okay? So here we go. I'm gonna play a note. Play note a bunch of times. Let's turn this up a little bit. Okay, now let's turn off this echo and turn on note echo. Well, it's a lot longer. It's a lot crisper. The note echo is feeding back a little bit. It's just kind of a different sound. It's not dramatic, so what we have here is the delay time. These are in 16th notes. So, four, five, six, eight, and 16. Sync is going to let you use these delay times as 16th notes. If you turn off sync, it's just going to give you milliseconds. You can do a little transposition on it. You we can this mute, I believe will mute your original note. Yeah, and just play the delay. So it's basically like getting rid of the dry. And then we have the delay amount, feedback, and then some MPE controls that it'll use also. So it's basically going to function like a delay. Now, your next question might be, in a normal world, am I going to reach for this or the audio delay? 100% of the time, audio delay. I don't know why. There's not a great reason for that. It's just what I would do. So just being honest. Let's move on. 94. Note Length: Okay, up next is note length. So I've made a new mini track here, and I put an operator on it. I also made a little midi clip with just some short notes on it. So let's just hear what I've made here. Okay. So with note length, it's pretty obvious what it's going to do. We're going to be able to basically lengthen or shorten notes. We could do effectively the same thing by just doing this. But if you have a whole nitty sequence and you suddenly want it to be like staccato, like really short notes, then this is a handy way to do. So we can say, what are we basically going to use the note on or the note off? If we use the note off, we can control what the velocity does with that note off command. But if we stated to note on, which is probably 90% of the time what you want to do, then we basically have these two controls to deal with. Gait and length. Gait is going to elongate or shorten your notes by up to 200%. Um, Like that. Length, though, is what's really gonna make them a lot longer or shorter. So now everything is very, very short, and we can make everything very, very long. Like 60 seconds long. That's insane. We can also switch to divisions of the beat, which is very handy. Now, this at control is going to use the sustain pedal and other midi notes or basically, it's going to sustain all the way until it gets new midi information. So it's just going to kind of fill out the empty space. So when I use this, it is in that case, where I have something a whole ton of mini notes, and I want to do something where they're all staccato suddenly. This is a good way to do it. Can just save you time from going in and editing the whole MIDI sequence. 95. Pitch: Alright, pitch. Now I'm going to add pitch to the same operator patch here. So if I go to pitch, throw that down there. So I already have note length that's set to be real short. Like that. Now, pitch real simple. It's going to change your pitch. But we have some magic that it can do. So zero semitones. So if you're not familiar with music theory, a semitone is the smallest possible amount you can move on a keyboard. So that's one, okay? Um, sometimes we talk about steps and half steps. A half step is the same as a semitone. Okay? If you're in Europe or somewhere else, you might say tone and semitone. So one tone is going to be two spots on the midi grid, and a semitone is going to be one. Also, one step is two spots on the midi grid, and one half step is one spot on the midi grid. Yeah, it's weird. It's just how we do it. Okay, so one step or zero semitones, one semitone. We can also go negative with this. So if I hit play, We can go up. So we can add a bunch of stuff. This looks like it's going to increment This is going to increment us by 12. So 12 is an octave. That means that basically, if you add an octave to something, you're doing the same notes just in a higher range. So if you have something that sounds good, if you add an octave, it's still going to sound good in terms of, like, notes clashing and dissonance and all that stuff. Okay, now, we also have these controls down here. What these do is set a range. So we can say, what is our lowest note and highest note. So remember that what pitch does is it's going to add semitones to all notes in that clip. Okay? So we can define a range here and say, don't go out of this range. So this mode tells us what happens when a note does go out of the range. So let's say this range is 90 and we tell it with this to go above that. Well, one of three things can happen. Block means it's just going to block those notes. It's not gonna let them through. Fold means it's going to kind of wrap them around and kind of start moving them back down so you will hear them. And limit, I believe, means that it's just not going to create those notes. So it'll just kind of hit upper wall. We can also turn on this key aware setting, which will make us stay in key. So we're still in C minor here. So with this going, I can just kind of go crazy with this and know that I'm never going to transpose out of key. I'm never going to move my notes out of key because they're there. So here we have semitone. But when I turn this on SD, we get scale degree. Okay, so it's going to sound more or less the same since because we don't have a harmony going, but Let's leave it there, just for fun. Um, let's hear what that does to our whole wacky track. Oops. Turn off solo. I kind of like it best right there at zero, so we're not gonna really use that, but that's okay. Now we know what it does. Let's move on. 96. Random: Okay, up next is random, one of my favorite ones. This one, let's add this one still to our operator track here. So what we can do with random is basically say, pick a random pitch. So what it's going to do is it's going to take notes coming in, and we can say, with chance, we can say, How random do we want it to get? Choices, we can say, how many possible notes could you choose, 12. And then interval, we can say, How big? How far away from our original note are you going to go? Okay? So if I leave everything else the same, so I'm at 0% for chance now. So it's just sounding the same. You can see here what it's doing. So zero means it's playing the notes that we've given it. Plus means it's going up and minus means it's going down. So let's say higher. So mostly zero, every now and then, it's giving us a new note. Let's say 100%. So now we're going to get no zeros, maybe once every once in a while, I think. Okay? Now, we're only going up. It's adding random notes above the notes we've given it. That's because we've said add. So what it's doing is it's going to add these notes together. We can say subtract, and it's only going to go down, or we can say both. Now it's going to go up and down. If we want to get really wacky, we increase this interval. Now, it's just going all over the place. Let's go back. So one thing to keep in mind here is that these notes are truly random. They are not in the key. If we want them to stay in the key, we have to hit the little key aware button. Okay? Now, those random notes are going to stay in that key. Okay? So what I'm going to do to make this sound good, I'm going to say just go up, so add. I don't want it to go so high. See, now we've got nice little melodic ideas popping out. It's kind of cool. Now I kind of wish this whole thing was an octave hire, so let's go back to pitch and, uh, set this to 12, push everything up in octave. Neat little melodies kind of pops out. Cool. Let's move on. 97. Scale: Okay, let's make a new mini track. Let's go to Sampler. I don't know. That's kind of cool. All right. Let's put a note there up octave and just long. About that long. Okay. Now, let's go back to our media effects and go to scale. Okay? Now, scale is a weird one because Scale used to be really important, because what you would do is you could say, Here's what key I'm in and then put that on the scale, and then put the scale effect on it, and it would conform all your notes to be in that scale. But now in Live 12, we have this key aware business, right? So scale has become a lot less important, but there is one important use for it that I'll show you right now. Okay? Watch this. Um so first, let's say what key we're in. We're in C minor. Now, this list of possible keys is the same as the list up here. Okay? So these are just different keys. We can add an extra transposition to it. And we can set a range so that it doesn't go out of it. Now, this is going to conform to the scale. If we want to do something really weird, you know, we could kind of draw our own scale if you wanted to. And what this means is that notes that come in, we're kind of looking at a piano keyboard this way. So here are notes coming in and then how are they going to be remapped? So when this note comes in, it's going to get pushed down to here or up to here, we can kind of make it quantize in a way to a scale. But we can also turn on key aware, and then that just says, Well, you're in C minor, and this is C minor. And now, all we can really do with this is add a transposition and a range if we wanted to. But one thing you can do with scale that you can't do with the key aware setting is automate it. So this is going to get a little complicated, but trust me, it'll be worth it. Okay? So here's what I'm going to. I'm going to go maybe I should go to a new video for this just because if you want to know how to use scale, that's kind of it. And then this is going to be more of an advanced technique. So let's go to a new video, and I'll walk you through how I'm going to use this. 98. Automating Scales: Okay, so I'm going to go back over to my first track here. I'm going to copy this clip and put it here. Okay, now I'm going to put a scale object on it. Now, that scale object is on both clips, and that's fine. So we're going to say C minor. Now for this clip, I'm going to go into the midi clip. I'm going to go into my envelopes, and I'm going to say the scale object. I'm going to say base. Okay? So we're on a C minor. But for this clip, this second clip, we're going to switch that to F. Okay? So now we're going to be F minor when I launch this clip. Okay? So this clip is going to switch the scale object to F minor. Okay? Now, in order for that to make sense, I need to do it on all of these, which is handy because you're going to want to see me do that again. So this is going to change all the notes to F minor, but it's not necessarily gonna just change my whole chord, right, because the notes are only going to conform to F minor. They're not going to transpose up or down all the way to F minor. Okay, so let's put scale on this one. Okay. And then go into this clip, go to envelopes, go to this scale object, go to base, move it up to F for this clip. Now, before I go on, I should point out that this one, I should lock this one in at C so that when I launch this first one again, it goes back to C. So I'm just going to make a point here so that there is automation here saying that this one is in C. Okay, same deal with this clip. Let's put a scale on it. Well, let's go into this clip. Oops, did I set? This one to be minor. C minor. Go into this clip. Envelopes, scale base F. And then this one C. All right. This one scale. This one doesn't want scale for some reason. Why? There we go. C minor. Envelope. Oops. Don't need that. Almost done. Now, this seems tedious, but the reason this is handy is because now I can do this more than once. I can just, like, keep moving the base around or the scale around if I wanted to. And it creates a cool effect that I like to use a lot. All right. So envelopes, scale base. We on the first one, so we want that on a C. Second one, we want that on an F. Last one, we already have a scale on this. So let's just set it to minor. And then with this one, this clip, we want to set that to scale base, C, and then scale base F. Okay. So now when I launch this top row, I'm going to hear basically the same as what we had before. And then when I launch the second scene, everything's going to transpose to the key of F. Okay. Now, you might say, Well, that wasn't nearly as dramatic as I was expecting. But the key of C minor and the key of F minor is only different is only different by one note. So it's really just one note that got changed. What I'd really want to do is add a base note to reinforce that we've switched keys. Or I could switch to a more dramatically different key. But really only one note was changing when we did that. So let's add a base note with our next midi effect, and it'll be even it'll have a much cooler sound. Trust me. I 99. Shaper MIDI: Okay, what's my next instrument here? We just did sampler. Let's do simpler. We want some kind of bass. So let's go. Um That's kind of cool. I mean, this thing is already like super 80 synth, so let's do a super 80 synth. Okay, so I'm just going to put one big note here that is a C. And then I'm not going to use the scale object on this, and I'm just going to make one big note here that is an F. Okay. Now, let's learn another MIDI effect, which will be shaper MIDI. Okay, so shape or MTI will be really familiar to us from the envelope MIDI where we have basically an envelope that we can map to a parameter. And then we can kind of see what's happening down here. So let's take let's click the Map button, and let's see what we have here. Let's try this low pass frequency. Right now we can see what's doing here. We can change some shapes. Please. So predefined shapes. But we can also just move points around the grid. We can command click for a little more resolution. And we can shift click to get rid of something. We can also command option to add, you know, an arc to it. But let's just do this. Do you love that? So let's remap it. So here's our mapping button. Click on that. Wow. Unstable. Dramatic. Let's try pass. All right. Let's kill that and just find something. Let's try this resonance. Let's increased the length of that. Okay, now I can map this to multiple things. If I hit this button over here, I have a whole bunch of mapping options. So I could make a much more complicated, instrument by doing this kind of thing. Now let's go back. Now, let's just hit random on this a few times. Random. Yeah, that's cool. Let's try that one. Butchie bag. Alright, let's just go with that for now. Alright, now, one more thing I want to do here is go back in here and take this down in octave and this one down in octave. And now let's try our little chord change again. So here's our first scene. Oops. Let's turn off solo, first scene. Second scene. Let's turn something kind of cool. 100. Velocity: Okay, last midi effect is velocity. Let's add that to. Let's go back to one of these. Let's do this one. This collision. So let's put velocity on that. Here it is. Basically, this is going to give us just a little more control over our velocity, and we can scale it in different ways. So we can push it We can kind of set a limit, low and high limit. Add effectively some compression here. This is kind of like fake compression, but it's going to sound like compression. Anti randomization to the velocity. This is super handy for making something sound a little more human, a little more realistic. However, we can do the same thing in the midi clip now and don't need this effect, but sometimes it's better to have this effect. So relatively simple. Great. So there's one thing I wanted to add here. I wanted to change this note. I know you're like, Jay, you're getting a little too obsessed with this vibe you're making. So check it out now. Ooh. Let's go out of solo. Let's do something. Let's add one more dramatic thing to this, and then I'm going to give you this session. 101. More Chord Changes: Okay, I'm going to duplicate this scene. So I'm just control clicking, duplicate. Now I'm going to go through here, go back to that envelope. Make sure we're on scale base. And let's do something a little more dramatic. Let's go to, like, um G will be slightly dramatic. A will be a little bit dramatic. So from C minor to A minor. Yeah, that'll be kind of dramatic. Okay, so let's do that on all of these. Scale base, up to a scale base, up to A. I'm actually going to not do it on the last two. Up to A. Okay, now, this one, I'm just going to change this note up to an A. But then I should also change that envelope just to make sure that cause I'm gonna block out that A. So let's make sure there. This one, all I need to do is change the note to A. All right. Alright, so let's hear the three now. That's pretty dramatic. That's so weird because the jump to A is out of A is not in the key of C minor. So it's a weird jump. We could do A flat, and then it would be in key, but let's not play hairs. I wanted to do something dramatic, and that's how we did it. Okay, so that was fun. I'm going to give you this session. You're welcome to play around with it and go crazy. And then let's move on to modulators. 102. What are Modulators?: Alright, Modulators. So modulators are a new tab that have just showed up in Live 11 or Live 12. And you probably already know what some of these are. If you were with us for part four of this class where we talked about synthesis, then you're already familiar with a lot of modulators. Modulators are anything that applies control of something else. It modulates that, right? We saw it in synthesis all over the place. We have an LFO. An LFO is an oscillator that latches onto another oscillator and controls it. Therefore, it is a modulator. It modulates that. An envelope, the ADSR thing, that's a modulator. In synthesis, we have FM, where we have one or more oscillators that are carriers, and then one or more that are modulators. They are controlling some or all elements of another one. So modulators are just things that affect something else. We could make an argument that any kind of automation is a type of modulation. So these modulators are going to be things that control other things. Now we can see just from the icons that these are all Max for Live devices, right? Again, that doesn't really mean very much other than that we can pop them open and rewrite them or make them do different things just for fun. But otherwise, they're just normal effects. Now, these are not audio effects or MIDI effects. These are kind of sum of both. We're going to see some of both in here. Also in here, there are some redundancies, like Envelope MIDI, we already saw in MIDI effects, Envelope MIDI. So we'll deal with those as they come up. So let's dive in. 103. Envelop Follower: Okay, follower. This is really cool. This is a really, really cool utility. So, let's make a new track, but I'm gonna make an audio track. And let's put let's find some long sample to put on it. Just I'm trying to find, like, a very obvious thing we can do with this. Now, standing in the rain, feather down. Alright, let's use that one. Okay, so here's a long vocal sample. Okay, now let's find one of our other sounds and see what we can do with it. Okay, let's maybe not that Okay, let's use this one. This will be a little weird. Okay, so here's I'm going to do. I'm going to take my envelope follower and put it on this mini track, okay? Now, look where it. Put it. First of all, that's going to tell us that this is an audio effect because it put it after the instrument, which is fine. So what this is going to do is it's going to look at the audio and kind of extrapolate an envelope that that is doing. Okay? There it is. It says, There's a little envelope. Let's boost it. Okay? We can shape it a little bit. Oh with some of these controls here. Okay, so now I can map that envelope to anything I want, any other parameter. So I'm going to click on Map. Then I'm going to go over to the volume of this other track, my vocal sample. Okay? Now that envelope is going to control the volume of the vocal sample. Cool. Right? So I can do the same thing. I go to this list and say, I also want that map to control our baseline. Cool. Let's get out of that. So basically, what we've done is we've taken the volume envelope from a track, from a sound, and applied it to anything else. Let's hear the whole thing. Okay. I like that on the vocal. I don't love it on that bassline. I'm going to go here and just kill that one. Okay, now. So you can make that envelope, do anything you want. 104. Envelope MIDI: Okay, Envelope MTI. Now, we've already seen envelopTi. This is a redundant one. We put it here on our drift track. So with envelope Midi, we can do a very similar thing except kind of backwards in a way. We can draw an envelope and then apply that to any MIDI parameter. Okay? So, this one is a MIDI effect. It's going to come before the instrument and let us control any element of the instrument. But it's essentially the same as the envelope follower, but just kind of backwards. So, you know, we've got the amount here. We can customize it a little bit, our envelope, and then use this tool to grab any parameter in our instrument here. I can do the same thing. You can grab multiple parameters and control multiple things. I don't think with this one, we can go outside of this track. I was wrong. We supercan. So now this envelope is controlling the panning on our electric. I love that. So, the envelope Midi can control any parameter just with a ADSR envelope. 105. Expression Control: Alright, expression control. Another one we've seen before. We used it on our electric here. This is the one where we've got some parameters, but also random an increment that we can use to control our midi instrument. So this one, like envelope MIDI is both a modulator and a MIDI effect. So it is designed to control parameters of something else, which makes it a modulator. So that's why they've listed it twice. But, you know, it's worth thinking about these as modulators as something that can modulate something else, as you're thinking about using them to create music. So just pointing that out again, let's move on to our next one, LFO which is new. 106. LFO: All right, let's look at this LFO modulator. Now, this one is very similar to envelope follower except that instead of grabbing the envelope from something else, it's just going to generate an LFO. Now, if you remember from synthesis, an LFO stands for low frequency oscillator. It's an oscillator that's just kind of going and we can latch onto that pattern and apply it to another parameter, using it as a modulator, modulate something else. This effect is wild because it's basically put an LFO on anything, kind of a thing. So let's put it down here. This effect this sound is that kind of long sustained thing. Let's turn this off. The sound. Okay. Let's add a little more shape to that, a little more motion to it with this LFO. Okay? So here's our LFO. Note that it's an audio rate device, so it's over on the right side of our instrument. So we can use it for anything. So we can shape our LFO in all kinds of ways. We can say, you know, a triangle, have it go up and down, stray kind of a meandering one. I kind of like that. Let's go with that. Let's set it to divisions of the beat, depth, offset phase. And then let's map it to something. So we could go back to our MIDI device and map it to this filter. See what it's doing there. Let's hear it. That's interesting. Let's map it also to the high pass. But let's do it opposite. So we'll go 100 here and negative, 100 here, so they're moving in opposite directions. That's kind of fun. Gives a little bit more motion. Let's map it to drive, but less. It's cool. We could also map it to Any other parameter. I mean, let's go to Meld and say the shape. See, I just grabbed the shape of that mold. So you can map it to tons of stuff. It doesn't need to all be the same device. It can be all over your session. It's a lot to keep track of as you're working on it, but it's giving us some cool sound. See, it's just becoming much more alive, you know? It's like all these modulation elements are really just giving us like, it's like putting electricity into Frankenstein, you know, or not Frankenstein, the monster. That is Frankenstein. Everyone makes that mistake. Anyway, breathing life into it. Let's move on. 107. Shaper: Alright, I'm feeling like we need some kind of groove here. So I threw in this drum loop. And let's see if we can make it work with our next modulator, which is shaper. Oh, and we've seen shaper before? Or have we? We've seen a midi shaper, but this is audio. So this is different. There's shaper midi and there's shaper audio. You can see that we are going to see Shaper midi again. It's the next one. But this is an audio version of the same effect. So all that really means is that we can map this to something different. So what if I put this on this drum loop? I don't think this is going to sound particularly interesting, but maybe if I did some kind of pattern, let's put it here. Yeah, see it's going a little too fast. Okay, so accessory Yeah, that's not really working for me. So let's try a different mapping. Maybe do a little bit of mapping on the panning, maybe. Well, let's make it kind of random. There we go. Now we're going around a little bit bit. Son go bad. So the shaper thing, we can basically map to anything. It works the same as Midi except we can do some audio things with it. Um, Good. 108. Shaper MIDI: Okay, now we're back to our shaper midi, which we have down here. And this one, you know, like, it looks exactly the same. It can do the same stuff except it goes on our track before on a midi track. So it's a little bit easier to keep track of what's going on because we can see our midi parameters very quickly. But otherwise, it's basically the same device. 109. Presets: Okay, before we wrap up this section, I do want to point out one thing that I kind of skipped over, and that is that we do have some interesting presets here for all of these, not all of them. Most of them. So explore those. So Shaper Midi doesn't, but Shaper does, and this can get you some cool effects. So explore those presets. Now, let me give you this session again if you want to see how we did this mapping. You're welcome to play around with it, rip it apart, have some fun. And then we'll move on to Audio Effects. 110. Three Types: Dynamic, Time, Frequency: Alright. Up next, we're going to deal with audio effects. Now, we have a big old list here. So let's think of a way to divvy these up into categories. Now, in Live 11, they put all of these in categories. So if you're looking at Live 11 or you're familiar with Live 11, you'll see that I think there was five or six different folders where all of these effects were categorized into those folders were a bit controversial because people argued about what goes in what folder and what type of thing is what I don't want to have anything to do with it. But now those folders are gone, there may be a way to put things back into folders by the time the full version is released because getting rid of the folders also controversial. Um, so I am going to divide them up into three categories that I like to think about. So we think about audio effects in terms of dynamic effects, time effects, and frequency effects, okay? So dynamic effects are effects that deal with volume in some way. Time effects are things that deal with time in some way, like delays and things like that. Frequency effects are effects that deal with, uh, adding or removing frequencies, some kind of pitch type material. Now, there's a lot of effects that fit into more than one of these categories. So don't take them too literally. I'm going to work through all of these effects, based on those categories and then some kind of subcategories. So we're going to start on frequency effects and move on from. Now, I think what I want to do here is something different than what we did with Midi effects. I think because we really want to understand what the effect is doing, I really want to take one audio clip and put all of these effects on the one single clip so that we can really hear how it changes for each effect, okay? So I generally don't like doing that kind of a thing because it can get boring, listening to the same clip over and over and over and over. I think in this case, it's the best way to really hear what the effect is doing, which is the most important part. So that's how we'll explore these effects. Last thing I'll say on this topic is that just like the modulators section, we had some modulator effects that were listed in the modulator category and also in media effects. We have the same thing in audio effects, where there are a few effects that are listed in modulators and audio effects. In particular, envelope follower, LFO, and the shaper. So I'm not going to go over those again in the audio effects section here because we just have too many to go through. But we are going to go through every single one of them other than those three because we've already gone through those. Cool. Alright. Let's dive in with some frequency based effects. 111. Amp: Okay, so I lied a little bit. Instead of one audio sample, I put together four short samples that kind of all have different characteristics and will kind of show off the effect. So we'll put the effects on different on all of them, 'cause we're all on the same track, we'll kind of focus in on a few different. So here's my four quick little clips that we'll listen to. This is No effects. Totally dry. Boo Boo Okay. Cool. I just changed the warp setting on this to make it a little cleaner. Cool. Okay, so Cello, little beat, trombone, and another little beat. So let's start with Amp. Okay? So here's Amp. Now, this is so all in this first category are going to be frequency effects, and particularly these are going to be kind of drive effects, which basically is a fancy way to say distortion. So this amp effect is really an emulator, meaning that it's kind of designed to mimic something in physical world and software, and this one is designed to emulate amps. So really simple here, actually. So we've got a couple different kinds of amps here these will be familiar based on the graphics. Like, they don't say the name of what these are, but, like, this is, I think it's a fender looking thing. This is, like, your big rock cabinet, like a 51 50 kind of thing. I think this is a Mesa boogie or something like that. Heavy base. Where's mine? So several different things. Now, in addition to this, we can boost the volume. Gain is always going to be just a volume boost. We've got a little EQ here. So base, mid and trouble. So if we want to hear more base, we're going to turn that up. If we want to hear more mids, the middle frequencies, we're going to turn that up. More trouble, we're going to add more frequencies. Okay. Presence is another sort of EQ that kind of zooms in on mid high frequencies. It's a more important thing in distortion type effects because so much of what we're adding frequency wise is upper frequencies. So real quick, let me just explain why a distortion effect is a frequency effect. When we add distortion to something, we are adding a bunch of frequencies, particularly higher ones, that drive sound, distortion is adding a bunch of frequencies in the high upper range. Let's hear it on our Cello. So let's go to Rock. And let's just use the default settings here. Right? That gnarliness, that grittiness. Those are really just high frequencies. Or, I should say it's mostly high frequencies. So a couple other things that we'll point out here that we're going to see in all of our effects, basically. We have a volume here and again here, okay? So you'll see this in a lot of effects. Gain is basically going to boost the input and then run it through the effect. Volume is going to boost the output, okay? There are some situations where you could turn up the gain or the volume, and it's not really going to matter. It's going to make things louder. But there are other situations where if you want something louder, it will change the sound of it quite a lot, whether or not you boost it when it's coming in or boost it when it's coming out. Let's try it. So let's go Okay. Say that again. Okay, now let's boost the gain a lot and pull the volume down so it's roughly about the same volume. Okay? It's crunchier. It's a lot crunchier there. So that's the difference between those two. Dry wet amount. You'll see this on nearly all effects. This is really simply just a balance knob between the effect and the not effect. So the not effect is dry. So if I turn this all the way dry, we're turning the effect off. Mmm. Okay? As I turn this up, we're gonna get more and more and more of the effect. The wet is the affected sound. Okay? If you go all the way wet, you want maximum effect, okay? Sometimes, if you want if you want the effect, but you want to tone down the effect, but not change the character of it, it's really just the dry wet that you want. So here, I'm getting half the original and half the wet effect. Tear it on our drums. Not bad. More. Okay, see, that's too much. Pull it back. Man, I got a nice, tasty amount of distortion. Okay, so there we go. Now this output, mono and stereo, basically, if we turn this on, we're going to process each signal separately, which will be handy will have some effect in this drum beat because it is a stereo file, but will have no effect in this one. Okay? So there's no need to turn that on here. But if you have a lot of panning and stuff in the file, you're probably going to want to turn that on. Okay, let's move on to cabinet, which complements Amp really well. In fact, they're designed to kind of work together. 112. Cabinet: Okay, cabinet is another drive effect, frequency effect. I might even just call it a coloring effect because it's going to add color. When we are adding color to a sound, we are adding frequencies and overtones, which are frequencies. So cabinet is another emulator kind of thing, and it's designed to emulate a cabinet. In fact, if you're not familiar with these terms, amp and cabinet, let me take you on a little field trip real quick. This over here is a cabinet. It's got speakers. This one has 44 small speakers in it. The amp is in the back and then the cabinet. So any kind of, like, guitar amp has the amp and then the cabinet. Most of the processing, all of the processing happens in the amp. But the cabinet, the arrangement of speakers does matter. And when you're recording it, where you put a microphone also matters. A lot of people don't realize that in a recording studio, when we record guitar, sometimes most of the time, especially if it's distorted, we record it by sticking microphone in front of the amp. That's how it works. Because we want to get the sound and color of that amp. So we have the amp, and then we also have the cabinet. That's the arrangement of speakers. Okay? So what we can say with this is, what is the arrangement of speakers? One by 12 means we have 112 inch speaker. Has a slightly different sound than two by 12, two big speakers, four by 12, four speakers, usually in a grid of two by two, four tens, that's what I have back there, 410 inch speakers or 410 inch bass speakers. Okay, so let's set it to 410, my amp. And then where are we putting the microphone? Okay, so let's say this box of guitar strings is our speaker, and this microphone is our microphone because it is a microphone. Okay, so how are we going to mic it? Near on access. Okay? So if this is our speaker, let's see. Like that. I'm going to go vertical. And we're near on access. That basically means we're going to put a microphone close to it right in front of the speaker. Cool. If we're going to go near off axis, we're going to go like this, okay? So it's not going to be like just right in front of it. It's going to be kind of off center just a little bit. And then far means we're going to be like, you know, farther away. Near and off center doesn't really matter when you're farther away. So, I always prefer to mic my amp off center and near Lee always when I'm recording mics, I always start with off access. I can say what kind of microphone I'm using, condenser and dynamic. Most of the time I'm using a dynamic. Do I want a mono or stereo output, and then I have a dry wet mix. So the cabinet is going to add a certain coloration, but it's much, much, much more subtle than the amp. So let's hear. Okay, let's go back to all the way wet on our amp. And let me just turn off the cabinet for a second. So here's our Cello through the rock amp without a cabinet. Okay. Now, here it is with the cabinet. Okay. It's much darker, actually. Let's try it with a condenser, Mike. So, in this case, the cabinet is coloring the sound quite a bit. It's actually, like, taking away a lot of that distortion. It's filtering it out. So you can use the amp or the cabinet independently, but they really go great together. 113. Drum Bus: Okay, up next is drum Bs. Now, I didn't point this out before, and I probably should have. The effects that I'm going through, the list of effects, these are all the effects in sweet. If you're not using sweet, you probably don't have a lot of these effects. And that's okay. You can skip over them. But I'm going to go through all of them. Anyway, because I am a completionist. So I've taken all our effects off our sound. So we're back to clean. Let's put a drum bus on it. So so the drum bus really goes well on a group or a bus. So that's why it's called drum bus. So why? And what does that mean? This is really designed to help kind of glue drum sounds together. In fact, we have another tool with that specific purpose called the glue compressor that we'll deal with soon. But the idea here is that we've got an analog style processor that's going to add some color and brightness to our drums and help them gel together. So if you've got like five tracks, and you've got kicks here, snares here, high hats here, and other effects or ox percussion or something here, then you can put those in a group and then put this drum bus on them, and it'll help kind of blend them together in a way that feels like a kit. That's the kind of main purpose here. So it's not going to do that for what we have here, but we can still get a lot of color out of it. So let's listen to it on these drums. Okay, so we can already hear that there's, like, some real drive happening. Can really push it. I'm gonna pull our output down 'cause that's screaming loud. Okay, let's push that drive. It's kind of like a classic analog kind of sound. Crunch. That crunch is really going to push the high end, boom, go to push the low end. Whoa. That's a little intense. We can adjust the frequencies of those two things. Remember, transients are attacks. And that's really when we get into, like, a gluing kind of situation, like trying to make things work together has a lot to do with the transients. So this is how much crunch we're going to apply to our transients. So we've got three different types of distortion here, soft, medium, and hard. So soft is like a wave shaping distortion. It's like a fancy term for it's going to kind of make the waveform a little more rigid and that'll produce some upper overtones that we'll hear as distortion. Medium is a limiting distortion, and that's going to basically kind of set up a ceiling and just let us push up against it, and that creates a certain amount of distortion. And hard is a clipping distortion, which basically is going to emulate that we're clipping our signal, which is going over a threshold. So they have slightly different sounds, and they're more aggressive as you get higher. Obviously, soft is soft and hard is a more aggressive sound. This trim is pushing our input amount, so we can scale it back if we want to get less aggressive with it. And then we can add a little bit of compression to it, also, which is going to color it in a different way, actually. Okay. The last thing here is this go button is a little strange. It basically is going to set your low end. So this boom is a low end enhancer. And when you click this go button, it's going to set your low end to the nearest midi note. So it's basically going to quantize you to an actual note. Versus just having your frequencies in the low end all down there. So it can help clean up a mix a little bit. Then we have a dry wet mix over here. So, that's your drum bus. Use it on drums. 114. Dynamic Tube: Okay, up next is dynamic tube. So, if you've ever heard people talk about tube amplifiers, that means an amp with actual, they're called vacuum tubes. They look like a little thing that you might find in Frankenstein's lab. They're cool, and they have a certain sound to them. You find them in some more expensive amps, some older amps. You don't find them in most modern amps because they're a little delicate sometimes. But they do sound cool. So this effect is emulating that tube sound. Tube amps have particular color to them and a certain kind of distortion. And that's what we're going to get out of this. So we have our output, our drive, that's just our amount of distortion. Tone is our is the kind of color of our distortion. We have three different types of distortion here. You can kind of see what they're doing sort of Okay, so the way that a tube gets its distortion and its real tubiness. Is that a word? I think so. Is to push it beyond its capacity. So if we're just using the tube how it's supposed to be used, we get a nice sound. But if we push it too hard, that's where you get that cool tube sound. So the way we're going to push it too hard is this bias knob. So this is kind of where the magic lives. So let's go to A, and let's hear it on our Cello, No it's gonna loop that cello sound 'cause that is working really great for all of this. Okay, not much. Let's push that bias. Wow. Okay. There's that bias, but we don't have any drive on it. So let's give it a little drive to a lot of drive. Yeah, let's try the bee flavor. A little more stable. Okay. I can boost the output. Really crank up that bias. It's a different kind of distortion. So now we can also drive it with this envelope, which is controlling this bias knob. So if we push this harder, the envelope is going to follow our signal and push it more as our signal needs it. We can also go negative with that to kind of have it invert. And then the attack and release are gonna help shape how that envelope is applied. So a different kind of distortion. More of a tube distortion. Let's hear it on this drum loop here. I like using tube effect on drum loops because they give it that really kind of, like, 90s hip hop kind of vd, which I kind of like. 115. Erosion: Okay, let's look at erosion. Another flavor of distortion or drive. What we have here is, this is going to add distortion by modulation. So it's going to modulate into the signal, another signal, either noise, wide noise or a sine wave. So it's a kind of synthesis, actually, that's happening here. So let's go back to our Cello. And let's see. So noise, then we can kind of point the noise where we want it to be As we go up, we get more of that noise. Let's wide noise. A little messier. And the sign takes away the width parameter. So you can move this little ball around this grid to really kind of dial it in where you want. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that this erosion distortion is not my favorite distortion fact. I don't actually use it very often. I find it to be just a little too digitally digitalis. Digital sounding. It's just not my favorite sound. If you like this sound, that is awesome. You should use this sound all the time. But, um, I don't know. It's not the one I reach for. I prefer the tube and some of the more the tube effects and the overdrive effects, like the overdrive plug in, like the overdrive effect that we're actually going to go onto right now. So let's do that. 116. Overdrive: Okay. Oops, let's get rid of erosion and pull up overdrive onto our Cello. Okay, this one is relatively simple, but I like the sound of it. We have kind of a few stages here. First, we have a little bandpass filter. That's we're going to apply that to the sound, and then we're going to put distortion on it. What that does is it lets us kind of hone in what we want to distort. So do we want to focus our distortion on the low end, mid range, kind of almost everything if we push it way up, high end. Let's kind of put it this is kind of a low sound, let's put it right there. Okay. Drive and tone, tone is just going to be a little filter on our high end stuff just to kind of shape it a little bit. This dynamics is going to apply a little bit of compression, which basically means we'll go into compression a whole bunch in a little bit. But basically, what that means is that the distance from the loud stuff to the quiet stuff or quiet stuff to the loud stuff can get smooshed a little bit. That can make it so the distortion is applied a little bit more evenly. It. Okay, let's push that drive a little harder. Let's push our dry wet all the way up. Make it a little brighter. So, there you go. A pretty simple overdrive, but I mean, this overdrive is really emulating, like, a classic, like, like, boss distortion petal, you know, like if you're a guitar player, you know what that is. Guitar effect petals, basically. 117. Pedal: Okay, up next is pedal. Now, if you like to overdrive, pedal is similar. Pedal is literally emulating like guitar pedals. This is listed by Ableton as a guitar effect. That means nothing. That does not mean you can only use it on guitars. Means you can use it on anything you want. I know a lot of people that like to use this on vocals. I know people that use this on drums. You can use it on anything. But it really is emulating a guitar pedal. That's why it's called pedal. Let's check it out. Gain, we can just really boost our gain, which will push more distortion, squeeze more distortion onto it, and we can cut our output or boost our output if we like. We have three different flavors of distortion. We have OD, short for overdrive. We have distort, which is distortion. And we have fuzz. You can think of these as, like, overdrive is like pushing an amp a little hard, and it's going to give you kind of a warm distortion. Distort is going to be a little bit brighter. And more aggressive. And then fuzz kind of is like your amp is partially broken. That's like the fuzz sounds like this broken amp kind of sound. So with this little switch, we can basically decide what we want to boost. So if we want to boost the mids, we turn this up and put this in the middle. If we want to boost trouble, we put this over here, okay? Um, let's leave it as is for now. We have dry wet mix, and then sub. Sub is going to add a boost to the very low end of your sound. If you have a sound that has a lot of low end, you can turn this on, and it'll, actually, like, bring it out a little bit more. And a lot of the time with these guitar pedals, you don't want too much going on in the low end. So this is kind of set up as an option. Alright, so let's hear it. Let's do overdrive first. With that a little bit. Gain is super good. Alright, you know, like distortion. Let's go to distortion. Last brighter, fuzzier. And fuzz. You hear, like, in between the notes with fuzz? It just feels like it's like, like, falling apart for a minute. Let's try overdrive with our sub on. It's not so obvious here. We don't have a lot of low end. Let's hear it on these drums. You can really hear that sub on these drum sounds. Let's actually go to this one, a little bit longer. But it doesn't have very much bass. Alright, let me give you this one to hear a little bit more. Sub on. Oh. So it's really kind of bringing out that kick a little bit. So I like the sub on for distortion on drums. Not so much for guitar and more troubly kind of things. In 118. Redux: Okay, on to redux. Now, maybe you've heard of a bit crusher before. You know, a lot of people actually think that the erosion plug in that we looked at a few videos ago is a bit crusher, and it's not. It kind of sounds like a good name for a bit crusher, and I think that's where the confusion comes from. But it's not a bit crusher. Redux, however, is a bit crusher. So what does a bit crusher do? We generally, if you remember, or if you were here back in part two, I think, when we talked about recording, we run systems at 44,001 samples per second and 16 bits. Okay? That's like standard audio. You don't need to know what that means. Let me just tell you that that is standard audio rate. That is good quality audio. If we want bad quality audio, we can use an effect like this to lower that or to simulate lowering that bit rate or sample rate and that will create a certain kind of distortion effect. The effect generally has an old video game sound like old like atari video game. So let's go back to our Cello. That'll probably work pretty well on it. Okay, so we have rate here. That's that sampling rate. Here we have bits. We can add a little jitter, which is going to kind of adjust our sampling rate a little bit, kind of shake it up, move it around, add some shape to the bit rate. Let's just hear it first, okay? So here it is all the way up. So we're not doing anything this is all the way up. Let's start with sampling rate because the less dramatic one, I pull it down, you can instantly hear A Let's row up jitter on it. Okay, cool. Let's put this all the way up and then go to our bit rate. So once you get down to one, nothing. Combined. We get that real video gaming sound. Alright. We can add a little filter to this if we want to adjust some frequencies, dry wet them out. This DC shift is going to what we can do with what this does here is when we're our bit crusher is down really low, like where we are now, if it's just getting too out of control, you could turn on this DC shift, and it kind of softens it a little bit. Let's put this back up. Love. Right? Like, it's really kind of making more chaos in between notes. Which is kind of wild. But the notes themselves are a little softer and more controlled, but the notes in between are just kind of crazy. So, if you want that old video game sound, that bit crusher sound, this is the tool for you. Oh, before we move on, I love bit crushers on drums. There we go. 119. Saturator: Alright, up next is saturator. So we've seen that word pop up a few different times. Here's how I like to think about saturation. Here's my weird, colorful analogy for it. So let's say you have a bag of water. No, let's use this cup. Empty coffee cup, full of water, okay? And you put a bunch of glitter in this cup. In the water in this cup, okay? Then you, kind of shake it up. And now you've got this water filled with glitter, right? And that's cool. It's got a lot of glitter in it. Now, let's say, you take the same amount of glitter, but less water and a smaller cup, okay? So we're going to go down to a smaller cup that's only like this big. And you're going to use the same amount of glitter. You're going to have a much more glittery, water, right? Your water's gonna have will be much more vibrant with glitter, right? Because it is more saturated into the water, right? There is more glitter in the water. Kind of how I think about saturation. We're basically saying, like, take the distortion and smoosh it into the same take more distortion and smoosh it into the same amount of signal, saturate it with the glitter, in a way. Okay. Enough colorful analogies. Let's go back to our Cello sample and dig through this effect. So our main drive control here. Let's pull our output back a little bit and just drive our drive as hard as we can. Okay, let's pull that back just a little bit. So what we're going to do here is basically use wave shaping, okay? So wave shaping means we're going to take the waves and modulate them with another wave form to kind of alter them to create more overtones. So here are our options. Okay, so we have analog clip, soft sign, medium curve, hard curve, snoidFold, digital clip and waveshaper. So let's look at sanoidFold. Let's kind of crank this up and just listen to the differences of sounds. Mm hmm. Okay, so a little bit of variety to them. A couple of things we haven't seen before this soft clip, you'll see soft clip on a few different things. This is just, like, a very light distortion. It's just kind of pushing it a little too hard. Pushing the signal just a little too hard and giving us a little bit of distortion that actually, a lot of the time comes off as, like, warmth to the sound. So, like if I do nothing on this, so, like, everything is off. Okay? Except this soft clip. Let me put our output back up. Okay, that's a good tone. So, you know, it's very subtle, but on a lot of effects, newer effect, you're going to see this soft clip button kind of hidden there, and it can add a nice little bit of warmth. Okay, so let's go back to color. Now, there's a weird little secret hiding in the saturator. That is that if we go down to waveshaper, this is going to be the most extreme one, and it's really going to let us define the wave that we use to shape the other wave the incoming signal, okay? So you're like, How do I create my own wave here? Because waveshaper means that I can create my own wave that we're going to apply. Well, there's some controls that are hidden, and they're right here. Okay? So these six controls only apply to waveshaper. If I go to a different, um, wave with this open, they all get grade out. Only waveshaper can use these. So with this, we can really kind of define some wacky stuff and make some real lovely distortion. And You know, one thing I'll say about this is that back in the day, there was a wave shaping tool, a very early wave shaping tool in a dedicated program called turbosynth. Turbosynth I believe, is long gone. I haven't seen anything in turbosynth for a long time, but I used to love that program because of its wave shaping function. And I used to actually keep an old MAC around that was like really old like OS eight or something like that, for the purpose of running turbosynth. That waveshaper tool that it had, I was always told that that is what Trent Resner ran his guitars through because it was just so, like, it was just so gnarly. This sound this tool, waveshaper on the saturator is as close as I can get to that. So it really if you run guitars through this, you can really get that early nine inch nails sound where it's just like a wall of distortion. So consider that. 120. 41 RoarBasics: Alright, up next, we have ROR. This is kind of the mother of all distortion effects. It's kind of let's call it a super effect because it has, like, ten different effects built into it. It's got a compressor in it. It's got three stages of distortion. It's got EQs in it. It's got routing in it. It's kind of giant. So we're going to go through it. We might break this one up into a few different videos, though. Okay, so let's start over here. So first, we have our drive where we can push the signal or pull back the signal before it hits all of our processing. Tone is like before, just a little filter. If we push it up, we're going to get more higher frequency stuff. If we pull it down, we're going to get lower frequency stuff. And we can kind of set the threshold on that with this dial right here. Okay, next, we have this routine thing. So we've never seen this before. This is very new. I would call this routing, but Ableton wants to call it routine. It's a little different routing. It is kind of a routine. So if you look at this little icon here, what we have is it's saying single, meaning stage one, all of these settings is basically our distortion sort of setting. So we're going to run our signal into stage one and then out of stage one, and that's the end of it. Easy enough, right? We could go series, in which case, we're going to have two stages of saturation. We're going to go into our first stage and then into our second stage, and then we have a loop creating feedback in our second stage if we want it. We have parallel where we're going to run through both stages at the same time and then put them back together. We have multi band where we get a third stage, and they're separated low, mid and high. And we can kind of set the thresholds of each one down here. We have a mid side, which is a type of EQ or a type of processing where we're doing different things depending on our stereo field, and we're doing things like in the middle and the sides. And then we have just a feedback chain where we're going into our first stage and then feedback, so we can see here, it's direct and feedback, and we can kind of blend where that occurs. So you can see how things are hitting the different stages here, right? So we've got a little input to show us where our signal is going as we adjust the three different stages. Okay, let's go into cereal, and let's look at stage one here. So first, we have an amount that we're going to send to the shaper, and we have a whole bunch of options for our shaper. This is kind of like what we've already seen in terms of different types of saturation and distortion. A digital clip, a bit crusher, we know what that is now a tube preamp, diode clipper we haven't seen yet. So some of these we've seen and some of them we haven't. But they're basically different shapes that we're going to apply to our incoming signal. And within this wave shaper, this is actually a good example, a good visual of what the bias does here. It's basically showing us where we're going to hit that wave shaper. So if we move this bias around, you can see So we can kind of find a sweet spot for our particular sound with that bias tool. Then also next we go through a filter. If we want it, we can turn it off. We have a bunch of filter settings, resonance amount, and our cut off frequency. And we can be pre or post, meaning we can kind of hit pre, and I believe we go if we're on pre, the filter applies before the shaper. For not on pre, it applies after the shaper, kind of like what it looks like here. Okay, next, we have this feedback section where we can select a mode, an amount of time and then an amount that we're going to use it. So if we let it feed back on itself, which is what we're doing here, eventually, you get this kind of comb filter sound, which is that, which can be cool sometimes. One cool thing about this feedback mode is you can actually set it to note and then kind of center your feedback on a particular pitch. Which can be really cool for your mixes sometimes. Okay, and then next we have this compressor at the end of it. Now, we're going to talk more about compressors, like I said, but basically compression is a dynamic thing that kind of smooths out the volume of your sound. Now, this can be important in a thing like this where you're adding so much and doing so much and you've got this feedback. You might have some elements of your sound that are super loud and some that are super quiet. So this compression can kind of smooth things out. So if you have, like, a really kind of wild sound, crank up your compression. We don't need it so much here in what we're doing, but it can help. This SCHPF is side chain high pass filter. Basically, if you turn this on, it's going to bring out some of the low end. If you turn it off, it's not going to do that. So can be kind of like a mid range, low range boost. Not really boost, but more of a Hey, let's see boost. Okay, so that's, like, the basics of RR, but there's, like, a ton of things we haven't looked at yet in RR. So, let's go to a new video and focus on this modulation section. 121. Roar (Modulation): Okay, so let's go into the modulation settings here. Okay? So we have two tabs here, mod source and matrix. This matrix, probably getting a little familiar. We've seen that a few times in the synthesis section. So let's go to mood sources. Basically, here we're going to set up things that can modulate stuff, okay? These are our stuff, and these are our things that can be used to modulate those things. Then here is where we're going to connect them. Okay, so first, we have LFO one. We can say we can give it a shape. We can give it a rate, some different settings, another LFO, an envelope, and just noise generator that has different characteristics. We've seen this wander thing around a little bit. We can have it synced to the beat here. Then we can go over here. Now, it looks like we can just modulate one thing, but that is super not accurate. This target is going to change based on what we click down. So everything we can click on here is modulatable. Okay? So let's say I want to modulate saturation amount in stage one. Okay, I just click on it and it comes up here. And let's modulate it with LFO one. Okay, we can see in these little tiny lines what these modulators are doing. Okay, there's shaper one. Amount. Okay, let's maybe go to our frequency here. So you can see that the shaper is working. It's just very subtle. This is the opposite of that. So let's pull that down. Get a little less subtle. What else do we want? Our feedback mode. Let's put that on our noise, as well. Et's maybe go to stage two and say, our second LFO on this amount here. Pull that back a little bit. Let's make it more complicated by also putting an envelope on that. Let's do something weird with the noise here, maybe a comb filter, a good amount of resonance. All right. So now we're starting to get, like, a very lively living sound. Okay, so one of the things that's going on here is that we can see the parameters that we've modulated in this little window. We can see stage two here and stage one, but we can't see everything all at once. If we want to see everything all at once, we can go up to this triangle here and click on it. Now, don't freak out. It looks like we have 1 million more settings here, but we don't is just stage one broken out, so we can see it at the same time as stage two and stage three, which we are currently not using down here we have our mod sources and our modulation matrix here. So we've just kind of set it up so we can see a bunch more stuff, right? And if we open this up even more by pulling this up, we can see more. We can see our modulation sources at the bottom. So now we have this nice big thing. We can also see in our modulation matrix everything that's possible, okay? So let's see what's got some action, and let's do some more modulation. I like this noise setting, so I'm just gonna put a bunch of stuff on noise. Let's do our feedback frequency. That's probably gonna get kind of annoying kind of fast. There we go. It's like, kind of marching around up there. So, this modulation in this thing is just insane. I didn't mention before this envelope follower that we can see is kind of following our waveform, and we can use that as a modulation source up here, which can be a really fun way to modulate stuff. Let's move this over to our Cello because there's so much modulation possible here that people are actually using this as a synthesizer. So what if I modulator our modulation with some of the LFO Okay, so now I've made just something kind of crazy here. Let's go to this beat. Yeah, that's super rad. This is a giant effect. I could spend all day on this. So check it out, play with it. Especially, check out some of the presets in RR. There's a lot of really wild and cool ones that'll get you to really cool places really fast. So check out some of those. Let's move on. 122. Vinyl Distortion: Alright, now for something completely different. Let's go to vinyl distortion. This is a very simple effect that basically is going to give the feeling of the old crackle from vinyl record. Let's go to our cello you comes the crackle. Got density to it. You can kind of dial this in to get it more realistic. But really, this is a very simple effect. It's really just layering this vinyl noise over top. Like, I've stopped it and you can still hear it going. It's cool. You can do this. It's a cool effect. It is adding some frequencies, so I'm including it in the frequency effect. But it's actually very simple. Added if you like stuff. It's neat. Okay. Moving on. Up next, we have IQs and filters. Let's head to it. 123. EQ Eight: Okay, up next we're going to do four different effects, and these are all EQs and filters. These are still frequency effects, because what all of these do is mess with the frequencies of our signal or our sound. So we're going to start with kind of the most complicated, but it has the best visual way to understand what's going on. And after this, the other three will be relatively simple. So we're going to go to EQ eight, right? I'm going to throw that onto this track. So in the synthesis part of this series of classes, we talked about how an EQ works, but I'm going to do it again just because it's really important that you understand how EQs work. Now, one of the best things about EQ eight is that we can hit this button here and get a much bigger version of what's on the screen here. So let's do that. Alright, now we have this nice big thing, and we can see our sound in it as well. Alright. So there's all the frequencies of our sound. Now, here's what we're seeing. So on the left, we have low sounds, and on the right, we have high sounds, right? Pretty simple. Low stuff, high stuff. Okay? Now, on the kind of vertical axis, what we have here is there's a zero underneath that little teal line, and then six, 12, negative six, and negative 12. Okay? So when this little line is at zero, we are doing nothing, okay? Zero means nothing. Above zero means boosting and below zero means cutting. And those numbers six and 12 are decibels. So right now, I am boosting the very low frequencies of this sound by 6 decibels. Okay? And then by maybe 5 decibels, four, three, two, one, and then back to 0 decibels for the rest of it. Okay? Now I'm cutting volume from the kind of low mid range. Still boosting stuff up here, right around here. We're not doing anything. And then down here, we're reducing the sound by about 4 decibels right here around 200 K. All right. So low stuff, high stuff, boost, cut. Cool. So now, this particular EQ is called EQ eight. And what it means, the eight means we have eight different bands of EQ. We see four here. Okay? So we can set up each one of these four to do what we want. If we go down here, we see here are first four, we can turn on four more if we want them and have up to eight. Okay? I'm going to go down to just one for a second. Alright, here is one, one band EQ. So here's what's in a band. First, we have a frequency. Like, where do we want to target this thing? And then, let's say, we want to put it right about there. And then what do we want to do to it? Do we want to boost or do we want to cut? Okay? And then the third thing is the shape. Okay? We have a lot of different shapes here. We have High pass. That means let the high frequencies pass through it, but cut off the low frequencies. We have low pass, that's the opposite. Let the low frequencies pass through, but cut off the high frequencies. Then we have a few different kinds of band pass band reject, and things like that. So let's do a high pass filter. And I can adjust the frequency with this dial or just by clicking on the one and moving it around. Okay? So now, in this high pass, it means we're going to cut all the low stuff out below this point. This is called the cutoff frequency. So it's going to roll it off. Okay. But things above it are unaffected. We can give it what's called resonance by doing this kind of a thing. Resonance gives it a little lip up right at the cut off frequency. And then we've got something called Q, which kind of is like the width of it. It looks like resonance here, but it has to do with how wide this bump is. You can see that more obvious in things like band reject, like this where we're just going to go to a specific kind of area and say, we want to cut out those sounds. The cue is going to be like the width of that, right? So it's really how specific do you want it to be? I believe c stands for quality. Okay, so that's it. We can do that eight times with the EQ eight. If I turn on more of these, every time you add another band, things get a little more complicated and start to kind of pile up. So you can make some interesting EQs this way. But let's go back to our single band so we can just kind of hear it. Okay. High pass. Here is Ancelolo. So we're basically just gonna cut out all the low frequencies of it. O right? If we want to do the opposite, cut out all the high frequencies, we can do this. Go open this up. Okay, so that is your basic EQ. And EQ eight is really the go to for me. Like, I always am just grabbing EQ eight so that I can really see what I'm doing. I have a lot of room to work, and I can add more bands to it as we go. Okay. So now let's look at kind of the mini version of this, which is called EQ three. 124. EQ Three: Alright, let's get rid of Q eight and go to EQ. EQ is very small version of it. Wow, that was bad words usage. Good luck to the translators working on this one. Let me try that again. This is a smaller version of it. So here, all we have is a low knob, a mid knob, and a high knob. And what we can do is we can say what defines low in this case? That's with this dial. So we say, 1,000 hertz or, you know, 600 hertz, whatever we want it to be. We say, What defines high? And we set where we want that to be. And then what's leftover is the mids. What's cool about this one? This EQ is kind of a really good kind of DJ tool. Cause watch this. Let's go over to, like, this B. Okay. Now it's going to sound normal. Fine. But we can basically turn off the low mids and highs with just these LMH buttons. So I can be like, Cool. We're going to the break of the song. Let's take this. Cool. Let's pull back in the mids. Add the lows, add the highs, play around with them, do this kind of thing. Maybe down here. Add that back in, play around. Whatever. So you can set up cool ways of just turning on, like, all the low stuff or all the high stuff and just using that for little party things. You can map these LMH buttons to your quirdy keyboard or a keyboard or a knob or a fader or whatever. So you can just hit them, kill all the lows, do something, and then drop them back in when you want them. It's really handy for that. Okay, let's move on to autoflter. 125. Auto Filter: Go. Okay, autoflter is kind of a single band filter with modulators built in. So we can say, Here's our filter. We can dial that in to be however we want. We've got different shapes here. We've got a couple different what we call circuits here, and they'll sound slightly different. And then we've got this LFO that we can set up to basically modulate this, almost like a wall pedal. You hear that kind of wah pedal sound? We can adjust it a little bit. A few different shapes for our LFO, this gets us to, like, a sample and hold is what this SNH stands for. This is kind of a sample and hold sound. This is kind of like on off toggle almost. We can try on this quantize which will make it so that the modulation mochin is attached to a beat. I can get kind of a cool sound. Yeah, it's cool little filter. We can also side chain with this. We talked about side chaining in the last class, but when we think about side chaining, normally, we think about compressors, but we can do side chaining with EQs also and a few other effects, too. So if you want to side chain with it, you would hit this right here. Okay, let's move on to the channel EQ. 126. Channel EQ: Okay, last in this category is the channel EQ. This one, actually, to be totally honest with you, I think where this comes from is that logic different Da introduced a feature a while back where there was just an EQ on every track or every channel of the mixer, kind of same thing, just by default. And this was kind of Ableton's answer to that, I think, where they said, Let's just make a nice simple EQ that you would put on every track. They didn't put it on every track for you, but they made it easy to add to any track. Don't do that. I don't put it on every track. But some people do probably. It's a simple EQ. We can dial in. We have three bands. So we've got low. We can boost or cut mid and high. We can boost our output with it. Our mid, we have a mid frequency selector here. So if we give it a little boost here in the mid, we can kind of dial in where that is. We can also cut with it if we want. And then we've got just kind of a low end cut button right here. I would say this channel EQ is great. It's a utility. It's designed, I think, for more subtle EQ work. So if you have that need, throw it on a track, and, you know, you just want a quick, like, base cut, throw it on a track. This works really really well and easy. 127. Auto Pan: Okay, next, let's go to some pitch and modulation effects. These are effects that have some kind of modulation built in that are still frequency based effects. So let's start with auto Pan. Here we go. So this is relatively simple one. So panning, right, is our left to right balance. We have access to panning on any given track right here, left and right. So what this is going to do basically is we can set up an LFO inside this effect that will start moving our sound around left and right. So, um, you can start with some amount. Okay? We can see our left signal and our right signal. We can speed it up. We can adjust the phase. So here, they're going to move at the same time and here completely opposite. And we can kind of round out the shape of that if we want it to feel like it's moving just jumping back and forth, or if it's more gliding back and forth. Feel it? It might be more obvious on something like this Cello sound. You know, I feel like going back and forth, kind of wacky. Let's slow it down a little bit. Okay. That's cool. We can also switch it to division of the beat. So right now it's on a 16th note. Let's slow it down to, like, an eighth note, maybe. There we go. Mm. So now it's moving on an eighth note. That'll be more interesting for a drum beat. We can go back and forth between an inverted version, which if we let's slow it. Well, let's speed it up so we can see. Okay. So basically, this is what it's calling normal. An inverted version is basically going to kind of flip it, so you can see we're toggling. Left becomes right, right becomes left if we invert it. That's all. We can offset it a little bit. Maybe we want it to to start the pattern on a unison. A couple of different shapes we can play with kind of randomized one. It's kind of wacky. So, pretty simple. It's gonna move our panning around. 128. Chorus-Ensemble: Up next is Chorus ensemble. Let's grab that and throw that on there. Now, this one looks actually kind of similar because it does have some, you know, motion modulation built in. So if you're not familiar with chorus, it's an effect that we usually use to kind of thicken a sound a little bit. If you think about, like, a choir, the thing that makes a choir sound big is the slight imperfections between everybody singing a similar part. So you can think of the same thing in, like, a string orchestra. Like, if you have 20 violins playing exactly the same. All it's really going to sound like is one violin really loud. But if you have 20 violins playing the way humans normally play, which is with very slight variations, it sounds like a big ensemble. So that's like a chorus effect. What we're going to do is we're going to use two or sometimes three, in this case, very short delay lines to kind of peel them apart. And then we might even pull those signals out of tune just as pinch. That's going to make it sound big and thick. So let's check it out. So here's our classic. We can do a quick little low cut here if we want with this big rate, it's going to be our speed. Let's put this on our cello. That'll be the most obvious. So you can already feel that that weird thing. That weird thing is called phasing. You can speed it up. We generally don't want to do that. More amount, more feedback. Gives us that. Laser gun sound. Okay, let's go to Ensemble mode, where we have a third delay line. It just makes it feel a little bigger. Let's try it on other our trombone thing here. It's so obvious. Go back to Ochelo. Vibrato effect is gonna go down to one delay line, and it's gonna move around quite a bit more. Mm. That's an awful lot. For vibrato, you want this to be quite a bit shorter. So, chorus ensemble, these kind of thickening effects, they can really help in your mix or in synthesis and sound design just to make a sound or a part of a sound even a little fuller. 129. Corpus: Corpus. Corpus is up next. So you ever do that thing where, like, you you sing into, like, the body of a guitar, and you hear how the guitar body resonates, or you sing into, like, a fan and you hear how the fan chops up your voice. That's kind of what corpus is. So Corpus is a physical model. So we talked about physical models when we talked about synthesis. What a physical model is is it's basically this giant algorithm that tries to emulate the physical world. So what we can do with corpus we can run a sound through an object. Like if you were, like, running a sound through the body of a guitar and letting the guitar body resonate it. It's kind of that same thing. So let's take a look. So here's the thing we're going to run our sound through. Let's do like a pipe, okay? That's kind of obvious. We can change where we're listening to the pipe. Change the size of the pipe. Adjust the radius, decay. Is the pipe open on both ends? How big is that opening? And we get access to more parameters, depending on which one we're doing, which material we're using. We have tuning here, which is really going to kind of dial in that, um, sound, the frequencies that are resonating out of this. So, the Cello is playing something in G sharpish. So setting this to resonate G sharp sounds rather nice. Fine tuning. Can add an LFO just to kind of spruce it up. Oh, that sounds ghostly. Throw a little filter on it. This bleed is kind of like a dry wet mix. It's gonna take some of the original and filter it back through. So it's somewhere between a dry wet mix and a feedback. And let's go all the way wet. That's a pretty extreme effect. You can do some really fun stuff in Corpus. Let's switch it to a string. What if we ran our Cello through a string? It's like making me a little seasick. It's a really fun effect. Play with some of the presets on this one, especially, and you'll find some cool tools. 130. Shifter: Okay, up next is shifter. Um, let's put this on our track. Now, this is a pitch shifter. So, again, a frequency effect. Now, a lot of people have asked, Does Ableton have a good Autotune plug in? And no, it doesn't is probably one of the biggest complaints that they have. And when asked directly about it in a recent meeting, they kind of the person I was talking to kind of said, No, which makes me think they're working on one. But this isn't an autotune effect. This is an effect that's going to shift the whole pitch of your thing. So we can say transpose it higher, you know, transpose it lower. Just move the whole thing up or down. That's different than autotune. However, there are some kind of hidden little gems in here that make this a really fun effect, especially for making big ambient sounds. Okay. So first, we can run our sound through this. And then we can just adjust the pitch. Here I'm in steps or semitones. Right or I can go down, whatever. It's fine. I can do fine tuning where I'm moving in sense. I can also switch to, like, a frequency mode where I'm just dialing in frequencies of the transposition or a ring modulator, which is kind of like multiplying frequencies. It's a bit like FM synthesis. But let's go back to pitch. And let's move it up like almost. Okay, now, if we're all the way wet here, we're just hearing the transposed one, which is usually what you want when you do this. But if I put it down to half wet and half dry, we're going to hear the untransposed and the transposed. Okay, weird. But we also have this little feedback loop built into this, which gets really fun. Okay? Watch this. Turn on the feedback loop, set it to a quarter note, and just turn it up quite a bit. We have an LFO we can add in. Okay. Let's make this a little less sickly and set our transposition to an octave. Try an octave down. Don't like that. So with the feedback loop, you can do some kind of wild stuff where you can make some things that just kind of keep moving and going and going. I would maybe put, like, a bunch of reverb on this and then maybe use that envelope follower to kind of shape all of that feedback that's coming out of it. And that would kind of turn it into kind of a pad sound almost. So it's simple, but you can do some fun stuff with it. 131. Phaser-Flanger: I up next is our phaser flanger. So this is kind of similar to the chorus ensemble, where we have actually kind of three effects in one here. So, a phaser is like when we take the waveforms of something and just kind of let them move in and out of phase, we say, it creates it creates a very specific kind of effect that we call a phaser. Let's hear that. You can kind of hear it. That thing you're hearing is called phasing. You can make it go faster. Gonna add some feedback to it. That is phasing. And all phasing is really doing is just making another copy of our waveform and just moving it in and out, lining it up with the other one sometimes and letting it kind of move around. A flanger is very similar. It's a very, very, very short delay, and with phasing issues that it causes, makes this very specific sound. Marrow roaring. Roaring. A flanger always kind of has like a.roaring. Then a doubler is just going to kind of thicken things up, kind of like our chorus and ensemble, but this does it a little bit differently, and it's kind of a strange sound. Take our feedback down and our amount down. There we go. See, this just sounds like two cellos trying to play together that are just really out of tune from each other. But you can make some cool effects with it, play around with it. You can adjust the timing on this, to make it a little more tasteful, but pretty simple effects. 132. Resonators: Alright, next, we have resonator. We've seen effects very similar to this, where we kind of added frequency content by superimposing a resonator, basically. But what we have here something much more kind of pitch centric. So first, we have a filter. Now, don't sleep on this filter because using this on your entire sound, I find to be not super useful. But if we say, Okay, I want this just to affect the high stuff. Let's go all the way. Okay. So this is just going to apply to the high stuff now. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna set this up, then we're going to take our dry wet back, and it's going to add all kinds of shimmery resonance to this allo sound. So, first kind of line of stuff, we have some main settings. The mode is kind of just like a different algorithm behind the scenes. Um the A mode is kind of the default mode to get a realistic ish sound. The B mode is better for more extreme effects, especially when you're doing low stuff. So we're filtering out the low end here, so the B mode isn't the best way to go, so let's go with A. This const button, which is short for constant holds the decay time of the pitch for longer regardless of the pitch. Okay, so now we see these Roman numerals, one through five, this is where we get into the real resonance. So the first one is different than the other four. And the first one, we're going to say what a pitch is. So I believe we discovered that this Cello if was kind of G sharp ish. So let's dial in a G sharp. It's gonna use arrow keys to get G sharp here, okay? Now, these other ones are relative to this first one. So we're going to say, you know, seven semitones, 12 semitones. I'm just thinking of some kind of harmonic idea here. And then maybe let's do a ninth, which will be 14 semitones. Well, I have one more. Two. Okay, so you can set those to however you want. So we're basically adding a bunch of semitones above this first one. We can detune it with these. These are going to give us some sense control, so they're going to detune it in less than a semitone. And then gain so we have control over how much of these extra frequencies are popping in. So let's hear it now. Swing this back up. You can hear those extra overtones that are coming in. And they're kind of piling up because we're hitting that fundamental with that G sharp, and that's resonating it, and that's what's giving us that clip. But let's pull down our dry wet. And now we've just added kind of a weird shimmer to our Cello sound. Let's try that on, like, this trombone. So here's just the resonance. You hear that kind of It feels like it's like hitting a lead pipe. So it can be a cool effect to add some kind of brute force, add upper partials to some of your sounds. 133. Spectral Resonator: Okay, our next two effects are both spectral effects. What are spectral effects? So, in most tools that we have in live, we have access to two parameters. They are the amplitude of the sound. And time. If we look at a waveform, we see time going this way and volume going this way. That's mostly what we have access to in your average waveform. But in spectral effects, they do a little fancy math behind the scenes usually something called an FFT, and they give us access to the pitch content. So now we have access to three parameters, the pitch content, the time, and the amplitude. So we tend to see things displayed in a spectrogram, something like this. Where we're seeing the pitch content horizontally, the time vertically, and the amplitude in color. So with that, since we have access to the pitch content, we can do some wackier stuff. So we already know what a resonator is. We're going to add or bring out some upper partials or frequencies from the sound. But with a spectral resonator, we can really kind of amp that up. So first, we have two modes, internal, meaning we can just listen to the sound that's coming in and kind of dial in what what frequencies we want to bring out or MIDI. If we select MIDI, what we're going to do is we're going to select a MIDI track, which I don't have any with anything going on, and then it'll look at that MIDI track and get the note data there and use that to drive the pitches that we want to bring out. But let's use internal for now. Okay? So here's where we set our frequency. I set it to G Sharp already. So you can hear, it's basically just it's keeping the timber and throwing out the pitch of our cello. Remember, this is what it sounds like with spectral resonator off. And here it is with it on. So it's keeping the rhythm, but just having it play that G sharp over and over. We've got some filtering here that we can do. And then some added effects that really kind of bring this to life. So, watch this. Modulation rate. Let's stick to this last drum beat for a minute. Let's take this unison instead it to something big, like eight. Maybe go up a bit with our pitch. Now we're an octave hire. Now, we're in a wet cave. So what I did with this unison here, by the way, is it was default to one, meaning it's just going to use our signal. If we set that to a higher number, it's going to duplicate our signal, and I set it to eight. So there was eight versions of our signal there. That creates phasing sounds and just a thicker sound. Let's go back to our Cello, since we're all intimately familiar with that now. Let's go to eight. Combine it with the dry. So now we're like, adding these upper notes. Let's do it with a midi track. So what did we say, G sharp? So, let's see. Let's add some notes to it. Let's go G sharp, C sharp, F sharp, G sharp. Sure. That'll be fine. And we'll just stretch those out for this whole clip. I'm not even going to put an instrument on this because I don't think I need one. Alright, now let's go back to our spectral resonator, select MIDI and MIDI from two MIDI. Okay? So now it's using these MIDI notes to decide on what we want to come out of our resonator. Let's go all the way wet. We can add a transposition to this. So I can go up octave or down octave. Alright, so it's really just using one note. It's not using the whole chord that I put in there, but it's still a cool sound. So spectral resonator super fun. Let's move on to spectral time. 134. Spectral Time: So when I'm starting a new track, and I don't really know what I'm going to do, but maybe I've got a sample that I like, and I just want to start monkeying around with it and seeing what I can get out of it and what feels good, the first tool I reach for is spectral time. Here's why. I feel like I can put this on a track or on a sample, actually, and find the harmonic essence of that sample. That's not a real term. It's just something I say sometimes. Basically, I can pile all the frequencies together and just sustain them forever and just start playing on it. You know, I might just start improvising on top of it and feeling it. Let me show you what Okay, so we have kind of two big sections here, the freezer and the delay, okay? So what we can do with the freezer is exactly what it sounds like. We can just say freeze, and it's going to do just that. So let's play this sound and I'm going to hit the freeze button somewhere in the middle of it. Okay. It doesn't work when we're looping. So let's go like this. Let's take these, put these over here, turn off looping and go like this. Okay. There it is. So we have our spectral stuff here. So I can do that all the time. I can also set re trigger and tell it to actually hit this freeze button for me. Like every quarter note, let's say, quarter note, okay? Now it's gonna take a new freeze every quarter note. Okay, that's kind of cool. Let's go back to looping it. Okay. It's actually too fast. I need a longer sound for this to really work the way I like it to work. But we'll make it happen. So once I have something that I'm kind of playing with, I can go to this delay and do a spectral delay to it. So I've got time, feedback, do some pitch shifting. Increase the stereo field, mix, tilt. You'll see that in a second. Spray and mask. So let me get something in there. Okay, here's tilt. Oops, I got to stated to manual. So now with this, I can do a fade in and a fade out. And if I put these all the way up, I have, like, instant ambient music. Let's play through this drum loop. Let's go all the way wet. A even that, like I really love. All the way wet, let's go back to our Cello sample. There we go. So this is what I'm talking about. You can get this kind of thing and just start playing with it and start feeling what's happening and what we can do with it. I love this kind of sound. So play with this effect. It is one of the most fun effects we have. It's It can be complicated, but you can set up these just really drifty patterns. Check out some of the presets here. Freeze fading, I think, is probably one of my favorites. 135. Vocoder: Okay, last one in this category is Vocoder. Now, Vocoder is not Autotune. Vocoder is a different kind of effect where we're basically going to take different bands of this signal. So not unlike an EQ band. So different section of the frequencies, kind of rebuild it with a different carrier signal, okay? So, right out of the box, it's going to be set to noise. So we're going to take our Cello sound. Basically, we're gonna peel it apart and rebuild it with this noise sample. Okay? Yeah, not so interesting. We can change that. So it's not noise, but it's something external, a different sound. So maybe let's take this trombone line it up, and then we'll say audio from what is that? The trombone, three trombone. So now we'll use the same thing, but we're gonna use this trombone sound for it. Oh. Okay, so that's not a great option here. We can also do a modulator. Let's get rid of that sound for now. And pitch tracking where it's trying to do it with various waveforms. We can also draw in kind of the limits our of the different bands. If we want the high stuff to come out, I can do it this way. Now we're getting a little more buzziness. This can be cool if you want to pull back in some of the dry. You can go all the way wet. We have a whole new sound. So that's interesting. Now, we did talk about how this is not Autotune and how the shifter plug in we looked at is an autotune and how there's basically not an autotune in live, but there kind of is. There are various Max for Live devices that are great little autotune plug in. So we'll get to those when we talk about Max for Live in detail. But for now, let's move on to dynamics and talk about compressors. 136. How Compression Works: Okay, let's move on and talk about dynamic effects. So with dynamic effects, we're primarily talking about volume. Okay? So you might think, like, how many effects can there be with volume, right? Like, you turn it up, you turn it down. Not really. Actually, quite a few, because there's a whole bunch of different ways we can turn things up and turn things down. And we can do it very, very fast. So let's start with compression. Compression is the main most common dynamic effect that there is. It's also a wildly misunderstood effect and a really important effect, because if you want your music to sound loud and big and like it's on the radio, this is what you need to master is using compression. Okay, so let's take a look. Before we use compression, let's take a quick look at what's in this waveform, okay? This is our little Cello sample. So let's hear it one more time. Okay, neat. Now, here's what we see here. We see our signal is going up and down, right? That's just kind of how this works. Weigh in, we'll see that it's going up and down and up and down, and it kind of swerves around this line right here. We're not going to worry about details of that at the moment. What we are going to worry about is this top. The top of this up here is the loudest we can go. Now, we usually measure volume in terms of a negative number. So so this top, the loudest point is zero, okay? Everything under that is negative number. So if we want something to be as loud as possible, we want to get it as close to that zero as we can. So we could turn up the volume on this whole thing until the loudest point, which is probably this point hits zero, okay? And then we'd scale everything up so that the loudest point hits zero, and then everything else is relative to it. That would be called normalizing. So it's just boosting everything up till the loudest point hits zero, normalizing. But that's not compression. Compression is actually going to change the dynamic range. That means the distance from a loud thing to a quiet thing. See, it's this far, okay? In compression, what we can do is we can say, Let's take this loud thing down and this quiet thing up and, like, balance them out so that they're the same volume, okay? Now, technically, the way we do that is we take the loud stuff, we quiet it down, and then we boost everything by the amount that we quieted it down. Okay? So we're gonna smoosh it, compress it, and then boost everything appropriately. If we use a ton of compression, a ton of compression, we can flatten this thing out so that everything is the same volume, okay? All notes are the same volume. If we use a little bit of compression, it might look similar to this. Okay, so let's do it. Let's go to Compressor. I'm going to put it on this track. Okay, so here's what we have here. We have the ratio attack release, and the threshold, which is these lines, this line here, okay? We can get it right there, too. The threshold is kind of our meat and potatoes here. Now, one thing I like about the Ableton compressor is that we have these buttons down here, and what these are showing us is really just three different ways of looking at what's happening. Okay? These are all working so we can really just kind of visualize this three different ways, which is great because it can be a little tricky to visualize. So let's start with this one. So if we take our sand coming in Okay? And my threshold down. So over it. Okay. The blue line is the threshold, and it's above our signal, right? So it's fine. Not the top. The compressor is doing nothing. But if I was down. Okay. So what's happening now is the yellow line is now kind of adjusting. That yellow line is our volume change, right? So what you can see here is that if there was a volume fader, Right here, it's not doing anything. And here, it's starting to push it down. And then when the signal gets really loud, it's pushing it down a lot, right? It's almost mirroring the arc of the waveform, right? Because as the waveform goes up, this line is saying, push the volume down so that it's staying about the same volume. And if we pull this threshold way down, now we have basically completely flattened that volume. I can prove it by just exporting this clip We call it smooshed. And then importing it so we can see it. And now you'll see it is smooshed. Everything is the same volume here, okay? And it happens to be very quiet. So we flattened it so that the quiet stuff and the loud stuff is the same volume, but it's really, really quiet. So how do we make it louder? There's a setting called up. What makeup is going to do is the amount that we push the loud stuff down. If we turn on makeup, it is then going to boost everything up by that amount. So our loud stuff will be as loud as it was, and our quiet stuff will come up, okay? So I turn this on. Now we can really hear it. But if you listen closely, you'll hear that quiet stuff and loud stuff is all the same. Let's do our export thing again so you can hear so you can see what we're doing. S, smooshed to Okay. And let's pull in Smush two, and you will see that it is now more or less the same volume and still very quiet. Probably because I turned this way down so I could talk over it. But very similar volume. Okay? So let's look at kind of the fine points of how compression actually works now that we understand what it's really doing. 137. Using The Compressor: Okay, so I just told you that this compressor showed what the compressor is doing in three different ways. Let's go to a different view here. I'm going to turn our threshold up a little bit here. Okay, now what we're seeing here is this ball here is our threshold, okay? And the little ball is where our signal currently is in terms of volume. It's above the threshold. It's below the threshold. It's going above and below. So this blue line here is what we're going to do to the signal when the volume is at what point on it. So let's do this. Okay? Now we're doing nothing to the signal, okay? The volume is unaffected when we're in a perfect diagonal like this. So volume goes up and comes down. Okay. Nothing fancy. What if I hit this. Okay. What this means is that the volume is mostly unaffected until it hits the threshold, and then you can see it kind of flattens out. So we're still letting it get a little louder once it goes after the threshold because this is on an angle. It's just not as steep as this, but we're not going to let it go very much higher, Okay? We're going to kind of slow down its rate of ascent. We really want to flatten it, we do this. So now, once the volume goes above the threshold here, we're saying, like, no, you can't go any higher than that. So we're going to push the volume down so that it stays right there. But underneath the threshold, we're not going to mess with it. We're gonna let it do what it does. Okay? So let's see what these 3 meters are telling us. This one is showing us our threshold and where our. This one is the most interesting right now. GR is gain reduction, how much we are smooshing that sound, how much we are pushing it down. So as you see an amount here, it's going to be kind of upside down. You're going to see it come from the top, and it's going to show us how much we're pulling the volume down at any given moment. Okay. Here we just have our output, the result, and we can give it a quick boost here if we want, as well. If we want more gain reduction, that means we want to compress it more. We're going to lower that threshold. Okay? If I go all the way down to here, this little bit still will fluctuate but above it, totally flat. Say, feels. Feels compressed. That's that feeling. Okay, let's look at our third way of looking at it. Here we just have threshold, gain reduction, and output. So if you want to do a little bit of compression, you want to put your threshold where it's just kind of given a haircut to that signal right at the top of it on there. That's a little bit of compression. Maybe a little bit more. If you want to give it a lot, pull that way down. Now, everything is flat. Now, we have a couple of other controls here, too. Ratio, we can see best here. Ratio is the angle of this line. Right? So we can make it more extreme or less extreme. The attack and release. Now, this is speed, how fast this thing kicks on. For different situations, you might want different things to happen. You might want to slowly kick on so that the signal goes up and then you pull it back a little bit, and then maybe you slowly let go. So it goes all the way down before you let go, the compression turns off, right? For mastering, you tend to want really fast acting things. So you can mess with that. Usually, I just set them all to be quite fast. That's usually what I need. The knee is this angle. You can think of it as, like, a knee on your leg. So it's the sharpness of that angle, that point. And then we've got a dry wet mix. Now, there's kind of interesting history behind this. There's a lot of different types of compression. Maybe you've seen the phrase New York compression. There's a bunch of different compression types that are named after a city like New York, San Francisco compression, I think is one, LA compression, stuff like that. A lot of them have to do with mixing a certain amount of the uncompressed signal with the compressed signal. So if you want New York compression, I believe that's like 50 50. So by mixing some of the dry, we get what's called New York compression. It's a subtly different sound in this case. But if you want to expand if you want to play with that, you can do that. So that's how compression works. Now, there's something else we can do with compression, and that is side chaining. We've already talked about side chaining, I think in the previous class. So maybe we'll go over again how to do it just because it's a question I get asked 1 million times a day. So let's talk about side chain compression. But 138. Side-Chaining With the Compressor: Okay. Sidechain compression. So the only thing that makes this different is that we're going to use we're going to compress a clip, but we're going to control the compressor with a different clip, okay? That's side chain compression. That's all it is. So, let's take something like this. What if I did this and put an instrument on it, something with some just resonance Okay. Let's maybe take that down an octave so that it doesn't drive us insane. That's cool. Now, I'm going to take my compressor off this track because in order to do what I want to do here, I need the compressor on this track. So let's put our compressor here. Okay. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna tell this compressor to compress this track, this synth, but do it by listening to something else. So we're gonna hit this little arrow right here and we're gonna click on side chain, and we're gonna say Listen to and we're gonna do that cello thing. Okay? So now I can kind of see there's the cello. All my threshold down. A Okay, so now you could almost imagine the Cello playing, but we're basically creating a volume envelope with it and applying it here. So that's kind of cool. Let's try it on this drumbeat. It's already set up for that it's listening to that track. Let's go there. Whoops. So now let's try it. So now it's the drums controlling the volume. The compressor. Right. So most of the time you've heard side chain compression. It's just with a kick going, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's creating this wa, wa, wa, wa type thing. Um let me show you that. Let's just find a kick sample. Sample, one shot. Sure. We'll go like this. One, two, three, four, turn that into one clip and put this against that. Okay. And then we'll loop it. Okay. This is what you're used to hearing citing compression, right? So it's ducking down every time the kick hits. So the kick hits, and then the volume for the sinth scoops out under it and then comes up. So if we listen to both, This is that sound. You've heard this sound 1 million times. Some people think this is kind of nauseating. And I kind of agree. But it's a very kind of normal sound, but it's just using side chain compression in kind of an extreme way. There are some really cool things you can do with side chaining, that aren't that, even, like, taking this and just toning it down. See, even that is a nice sound, too. So you can do a lot of things with side chain compression. It can be really handy once we get into mixing. It's great for composition to come up with effects. I even like it for, like, weird effects, like putting a rhythm onto this sound by using this. You know? This will apply this drum rhythm to this sound. You know, it's not the traditional way that we think about using side chaining. But it's a great effect. So that is side chain. Okay. 139. Gate: Okay, up next is gait. Now, when we're when I was talking earlier about, like, how many different kinds of ways can we turn the volume up and down? Well, we saw compressor. That's one. Git is another. Git often gets used for noise reduction, but it's actually not that great for it, but it's good for other things. Basically, what we have in gate is a threshold. Okay? So with this threshold, we're going to say, do not play any sound until we exceed the threshold. What that means is that we could turn this really low and we could say, make it so that when I'm not talking, it just goes down to zero, right? Like, small amounts of volume just get zeroed out. So let's look at it. Okay? So now our threshold is underneath the majority of our signal. Let's push it up, get it in there just a little bit. Mm? So now you can kind of see what it's doing. We hear nothing unless we go over the threshold, okay? So that means think of this, like what it's named after a gate. If we exceed that line, the gate opens and we can hear that sound. If we come under, the gate closes and we can't hear that sound. Now to make things a little more complicated, we have this return amount. This means that the signal can go up above the threshold and we'll start to hear it. On its way back down, it has to get past the return before it shuts off, okay? That can make this a little smoother. Mm. Mm hmm. Mm hm. So, you know, you can play with that to make it so that it's mostly on. When I said noise reduction, a lot of time we use this if we're like, if we have a recording and there's ambient noise in the background, this will chop that out, meaning that whenever like, if we were running my microphone through this right now, whenever I'm not talking, it would go down to zero, right? But the problem is, the reason this isn't great for noise reduction is that while I am talking, that noise would still be there, right? So you're still going to have a noisy mic. It's just gonna be silent in between. So it's not all that great for, um, For noise reduction, but it can be a cool effect for, like, let's put it on these drums. So now we can kind of, like, just get the tops of those. So I've thinned out these drums by just listening to the things the loudest notes. Now, we also have this floor setting. This is going to make it so that in between, we don't go all the way down to zero. We actually let a little bit of the background sound in. It can make it a little more elegant. So if this is all the way up, the effect is off, really. So we're basically turning down the stuff under the threshold here. Okay? And then we have attack and release time. That'll just be how quickly the thing latches onto the sound, and then hold will be how long it can stay there before it starts to move around. Under the return. So, pretty simple. You can also actually flip it, which is kind of fun. So now we're chopping out those quiet sounds. That can be a fun little trick. And you can side chain with this. This isn't something we would normally think about side chaining with, but it can be really interesting. So, experiment with that. But that's cat. 140. Glue Compressor: Okay, up next is the glue compressor. Now, we're back into compressor land here. So this is, on one hand, another compressor, right? It works the same as the other compressor that we already looked at. However, this one has a little bit of extra sauce to it, and the majority of that is kind of behind the scenes. This is called a glue compressor because it's really designed for you to take several different tracks, put this on them, and it's supposed to help them blend together nicely. It's going to compress them all and help them blend. So we would typically do that with a group. So we would say, select two things, Command G, put them in a group, and then put glue compressor on that group. Okay? That's kind of its best use if you want that glue sound, but you can also just use it as a compressor. So let's check it out on these drums. So this should be pretty familiar to you by now, we have our threshold, and then we have the makeup gain. We can kind of manually push this makeup gain a little bit, which is different than we saw on the other one. Okay? So right now, it's not doing anything. We're gonna pull our threshold down until we see that needle start to move. Okay, now we're just pulling our threshold down. Okay, now it's moving a lot. So we're applying a lot of compression now. Let's kick up our makeup gain. And there we are. There's our compressed signal. So it really brings out the little icky things in between, some of these things. Again, we have our attack, our release, the ratio. This soft clip we've seen before. We saw this on something recently. This is going to just push the signal a little bit and give it that kind of warm small amount of distortion. Let's kind of compare the two. So, here it is off. On. We also have this range button here that we can use to kind of pull back the possibility of compression. So if we pull this down now, let's try the soft clip now that we're really hitting this clip. Yeah, it is a little softer. So it's when it's already clipping and we hit this soft clip, it kind of softens it down a little bit. But I know a lot of people who are using this effect right now for nothing. They're just leaving that all the way up, that all the way down, that all the way up. So now it's not doing anything. No compression. The only thing it's doing is the soft clip. So I've seen people using it a lot for that. So something to consider. A lot of people are really liking that soft clip circuit here. But try this on groups, especially drum groups. This works especially good on no 141. Limiter: Is limiter. A limiter, in a way, is like an upside down gate, kind of. What we have in limiter is relatively simple effect where we're going to say the signal can go to some amount, and once it gets to that amount, it shall go no higher. It shall not pass. So we set what's called a ceiling and we say, that's the top. You cannot go anymore past that. Okay? So take a look at this. Here's our ceiling, pull it down. Okay. Now, you can see we're hitting that ceiling. If we listen, we're really softening those. Like, I'm really slamming it up against that ceiling now. So what's happening here is that we're basically clipping it by artificially lowering the top of the loudest sound that is possible, right? Because it's zero is the loudest sound that we can deal with. So we're lowering that with this ceiling. So we're kind of artificially clipping it by telling it to smash up against that ceiling. Normally, you don't want to smash that hard up against it. But this is a tool that we use a lot in mastering. We use a lot in mixing, where you can just put this at the end of a chain of effects just to make sure nothing goes crazy, right? You can say, no matter what happens, this is the top, don't go past it. And you might want to set that to be negative eight for mastering or something like that. That'll keep anything from just getting out of control on you. So it's often used as basically a safety net at the end of a bunch of complex processing. 142. Multiband Dynamics: Okay. Multiband dynamics. So, the music content I'm going to be using here to demonstrate this can be a little different than the videos around this because I made this video, and then I literally just woke up in the middle of the night last night being like, I didn't explain that very well. Let's do it again. So, multiband dynamics. And what we have here is two things, three times. We have an EQ and a compressor, okay? So EQ, compressor, and then we have that three times another EQ, another compressor, another EQ, and another compressor. So we have three bands of EQ and a compressor for each one. So we have a triple compressor here. So first, let's dial in our EQ. So if I play this little clip, I've got ears drum and bass. Here's our highs, here's our mids, and here's our lows. Okay? Now, what I've always been taught to do with this is listen for the snare drum. Okay? So if I go to my lows, I want to get just a hint of that snare drum in there. There it is. Okay. Now, the same thing in the his. I'm going to raise my cut off a little bit here cause I want just a tiny bit of that syndrome. I'll do. Okay, you can set that up however you want. We'll talk more about this particular device when we get into mastering. But for now, that's just a good, just general basic rule of thumb. Now, the compressor part of it. This is a different interface for the compressor than any other compressor interface I've ever used ever. This is different. It's a little tricky to wrap your head around. So here's what you need to know. Let's look at our heights. Okay? So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to move this block down so that I get my signal in the range of my compressor, okay? This is basically your threshold, right? We're just going to get that up into our threshold. Now, we're not doing any compression yet. We haven't done anything to it. We're just getting it in there. Now, the thing you need to remember is that each of these vertical lines here is ten dB of volume, okay? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click and drag inside this box. I'm going to pull down. Okay. Now, each of the lines inside this box is still ten dB of volume. Okay? So now you can see it's just got to go farther to get ten dB volume. So that's compression. This is kind of like if you're a Sci Fi nerd like me, you might know, like, this is like an FTL drive in, like, a lot of Sci Fi shows where they basically, warp space time in order to, like, move fast. We're kind of like warping math in order to get through it faster. That's the way I think about this. So we've got a lot of compression here now. Let's look at our mid Let's get in there and then hold that down a little bit, compress it and our base. Okay? We can compress it this way. Now, there's something else you can do with this that you might not have noticed. We can go up. Okay. Now, that doesn't sound very good in this case, but what that's going to do is it's going to make each of those ten DB lines farther apart. This is called backwards compression, and it basically means we're going to uncompress it a little bit. So if you're working with a sample that has already been compressed a whole bunch and you want to get more dynamic range back into it, this is a way to do it backwards compression. Sometimes we do that in mastering a little bit, just to give us a little bit more dynamic range if in the mixing process something has been really compressed a lot. But there we go. So in addition to that, each one of our compressors has our settings, our threshold in ratio, attack and release times, output. We can boost that volume up if we want. And that's pretty much it. Okay. So a different way to look at compression, but it's really useful if you get used to it. Again, we'll come back to this one in mastering because that's where this one is really powerful. 143. Using Time Effects (Bussing): Okay, we are up to time effects. So there's a bunch of effects that do various things with time. Delays echo. Even reverb is a time effect because it's very short amount of delay is kind of what makes a reverb sound. So in order to use time effects, we need to talk about busing a little bit. So it is common, and it is good practice to use time effects on a bus. Here's what that means. We talked about this, I think earlier, but so in live, we have these two buses by default. What this means is that we can very easily route sound down to these tracks, okay? And they are right here. So this is going to send signal from this track down to this track. This is the first one, this is the second one. This is A, this is B. So that first one sends the signal down to A. So if I hit Play right now, you're going to see it show up in A. There's my signal. Okay? Nothing is showing up in B because I didn't send anything to B, I can also send it to B, though by doing that. Okay. Now, there are a few different reasons for busing. But the one we're concerned about right now is effects and in particular, time based effects. You can do this with any effect. But there is kind of a common acceptance, I guess, that a lot of time effects are better going on a bus. So if I wanted to put a big delay on this, I might send it I might not put a delay directly on this track, but instead put it on a bus and then route the signal down to that bus. Now, the reason for that is that it can make the sound a little cleaner to do it that way. What you would do, let's do it. So here we have B, and this has a big delay on it, right? So when we do this, we always set this all the way wet. So if this is all the way wet, what that means is that this volume knob is basically your delay amount, A? So if I don't want any delay, Oops. I'm on the wrong track. This one. If I don't want any delay, I just turn this all the way down. If I want delay, I turn this up. Let's loop this. Okay. So I can turn this up, and now my delay amount is this volume of ****. So the idea here is that if we separate those two, if we have a volume knob that is just delay and a knob that is just dry, which would be this one, then we can layer the delay on top, right, and it can be a cleaner sound. But if we put that delay right on the track, then it can muddy up the dry signal a little bit. Let's actually try it. So I'm going to take this exact same delay and put it on this track. Okay? And let's get rid of this multiband dynamics. Okay, so here is the same delay going right through this track. Okay. Let's turn it down to half dry, half k. Okay? Okay, now, keep that in your head, and I'm going to turn off this delay and turn on the bus delay. Oops. That looks right. Yeah. Okay, so it is a little bit different sound. Um, so something to consider. Now, let me also say that if you look around online, you will find people who say, you absolutely must put delays, maybe even reverbs on a bus in order to use them. Anyone who puts a delay directly on the track is wrong, wrong, wrong. That's what you'll find people saying, and I could not disagree more. Sometimes you just throw a delay on that track and nobody gets hurt. It's fine. I do it all the time. So you don't have to route things with the bus for your time effects. You do not have to do that. You can do it. The reason to do it is that it generally results in a little bit cleaner sound. But if you've got a super distorted sound that you're adding a bunch of delay to and don't care about it being clean, then, you know, you don't have to do it. It's fine. So keep that in mind. You don't have to do it, but it can sound pretty good. For these going through, just for the purposes of our example, I'm probably not going to do it. I'm just going to put them right on the track so that we can go back and forth to hearing them on and off. But keep that in mind. I think I might talk about this a little bit more at the end when I talk about kind of how to build effect chains. So more on this shortly, okay? So off we go. 144. Putting Effects on Sends: Okay, let me talk just really quick that if you do want to use the sends for things like delays, this is how you do it. So we talked about using these to send. Down here, we have what Ableton, by default, gives you two sends, and one is called reverb and one is called delay, and they have a reverb and a delay on them. They don't have to be called that. You can delete this reverb and get rid of it and rename this with Command R, whatever you want. Um, Delays. Sure. You can add more by going up to create insert Return Track, and you'll get a third one. And whenever you do create another send, you get another send up here. So another place we can send it with. You can create as many sends as you want. You'll get tons of them down here. Then all you do is go to your send and then put whatever effects on it you want. So here's an echo gate phaser. Sure. Now I've got this kind of complicated effect here, and if we want to use it, we just send signal up to it. Make sure that when you do things this way, you always set it all the way wet. This doesn't have a dry wet. This one kind of doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Whatever. So set them to all the way wet so that you can balance all the effects with this. So you can do this for any kinds of effects. And like I said, there are other good reasons to do it. One reason that I really like for doing it this way is for something like a delay, I might say, or even this big crazy effect. I might say I want this crazy effect to happen to a bunch of stuff, and keeping track of all of these settings is kind of hard. So I might just put it down here on a bus, and then anything I want sent to that, I can just do it with that so that I don't have to copy all those settings to a bunch of different tracks and worry about getting one wrong. I can actually just think of another really good example. I was working on this podcast where I was writing the music for the podcast, but they also wanted some treatment of the voices. So the voices to sound like they're in a certain place or with certain things. And there's like ten tracks of voices. But there's only, like, three characters. So there's a bunch of different tracks a bunch of different tracks of the various people. So I could just set up the effects in a bus for where I wanted them to sound like, and then just route them to the right bus for each track. And then I was sure that all the right characters had the right effects and no one would get mixed up. And I put one person's effects on the other person's voice or something like that. So very handy for things like that. Anyway, so that's how we set it up. You can put whatever you want on these tracks. These bus tracks are kind of funky because it looks like we can do some cool stuff with them here, but you can't can't put any clips on these. Like, it won't let me drag this down there. That's kind of wasted space for now. Um, they just kind of hold effects and things. That's why we usually keep them nice and small 'cause there's no real need to see all this stuff. Okay. Let's move on and talk about delay. 145. Delay: Okay, let's talk about delay. This is our kind of general all purpose delay. So the way we have these numbers here can be a little confusing at first. So let's start there. Okay, first of all, sync or not sync. If sync means that it's going to lack our delay to divisions of the beat, if we turn that off, we just get a millisecond amount. So if you want to do beat based things, keep that synced. If you're doing more ambient things and there's no pulse or anything, you can use the unsinkedPbably just fine. Um, this is going to unify the left and right channels so that they stay the same, which can be good sometimes and sometimes you want them to be different to make a little kind of hocke sound. So this little percentage down here can be used to kind of push our delay amount forward or backwards in very slight amounts. So if we say like three 16th notes, and we just push it up a little bit, you can get like maybe a swung feel or just a different kind of feel. So you can play around with that. I don't use it very often, but it's pretty great for really dialing in, like, exact groove amounts into your Delays. Feedback is feedback how many times this delay is going to come back. This infinity symbol on the feedback sounds awfully dangerous. It sounds like you're going to feed back something forever, and then we're all going to die. That's not what it is. It's kind of like a freeze button that we saw in spectral shaper where basically it's just going to stop taking in new stuff and just feed back what it already has in its buffer forever until you tell it to stop. Okay. Oh, so these numbers. Okay, wait. So let's go back to these numbers. So these numbers are numbers of 16th notes, okay? So one, two, three, four. This is going to be one 16th note, two 16th notes, also an eighth note, three 16th notes, four 16th notes or a beat, five 16th notes. Six, there's no seven button here. Eight is going to be two beats, 16 is going to be four beats. So you can dial them in a little more specifically using this if you want one of those odd ones, but, like, seven is strange. Like, you wouldn't normally do that. Um, usually, this is what we want is one of these options. Okay, then we have a filter. This filter does nothing until we turn it on. So there it is, turned on. And basically, what we can do is we can use this filter to carve out what's gonna get delayed. So let's say, like, right here, I have this little beat. Okay, and let's say, I don't want to delay those kicks. Okay? That's something that we often do with a delay is try to not delay our kicks or low basi type sounds. It makes it really hard on our mix. So let's just take this and say, Okay, I'm going to carve out the low end, and we're just going to apply a delay to the high end. So what we're going to hear now, because my wet is at 100%, we're just going to hear the delayed high stuff. But if we want to hear the low stuff, let's pull back our dry wet. And now our kicks are not delayed. Cool. Lastly, this mode, this has to do with what happens when you change the delay amount while it's running, okay? So in most cases, you don't need to worry about this. But let's say this is going. Let's just make it big and wide. And I change the delay amount. It makes a little like, glitch type thing that happens because well, because you've got a buffer and you're asking it to do something different, it's complicated. But basically, when you switch the amount of delay while it's running, it's saying, Do you want me to do this weird re pitch thing? That's just kind of a Algorithmic thing, do you want me to fade between the two amounts or do you want me to just jump right to the new amount? So you can kind of specify how it's working here. Ping Pong is going to add some panning into your delay. It's going to move things back and forth, which is kind of fun and then dry wet. We've also got a little modulation we can put on our filter if we want that to move around a little bit while we're playing with it. Okay? But this is pretty much kind of like out of the box normal delay. We'll look at some more complicated ones soon, in fact, next. So, yeah, let's go on and look at a little more complicated one the echo. 146. Echo: Okay, up next is echo. Now, echo is like delay, but a lot more complicated. So let's start over here. So here we have our delay amount, same thing. We can link them together so that they're the same or not. So here we have 16th note, and we can basically just crank up a division of the beat, but we have some more options. We can turn sync off just to get us back to a millisecond. But if we don't want to do that, we can say dotted triplet 16th So these are going to add different rhythms to it. So we could say, and we would combine these. So if I said eighth note, triplet, so our delay amount is going to be an eighth note, triplet rather than just an eighth note. If you're not familiar with these terms, a triplet is a little bit faster than an eighth note. And it's going to make it trickier. It's going to make it not line up kind of perfectly. Same thing with dotted. It's going to be a little bit longer than an Ace note, if it's a dotted As note. And that's going to make a much more complex echo happening. We've got our offset here so we can nudge it a little bit. We can attenuate our input a little bit as it comes in with this and our amount of feedback. Okay, next, we have this really cool graphic. Ableton calls this the tunnel. You know, it'd be hilarious, if I put a whole bunch of echo on that when I said it, like the echo I had to entertain myself somehow while I'm doing all this. Anyway, so here's what we see here. We see the left and the right signal. So if I separate the two signals, you can see they're different, left and the right. The white dots here are showing us a constant eighth note, okay? So that's what a constant eighth note would be. And so the white dots are just kind of for reference. Yellow lines are our feedback. So they're where we're going to see it as we move down towards the center. So we're going to go boom, boom, boom, boom, bum, bum, bum, bum, right? If I pull back the feedback, we're gonna get less of that, right? At zero, we're just going to hear boom, boom. That's it. Let me fix that there. Okay, so it's just kind of a visual representation of what we're going to hear. It's kind of neat. And actually if you have a push controller, it's really kind of gorgeous on a push, to be honest. We do have a filter here. It's kind of hidden away, but there is a filter, just like we saw in delay. If we want to focus this in, we can use it. I'm going to turn it off. Then we have reverb that we can add to it just for, you know, reverb, as we'll talk about in a minute, is basically a super, super short delay. So it's kind of adding another layer of delay, and we can decide if that goes before the other delay or after the other delay or combines with the feedback of that delay. Decay of that reverb, whether this is a stereo delay, ping pong, meaning it goes back and forth. You can see what that's going to do there or mid side, meaning that we have our two basic things that we're playing with are the middle and the sides. More on that when we talk about mixing. Okay? Now, we also have some extra goodies here. We have modulation where we can really kind of play around with the stereo balance by adding in some modulation. Basically, we have something like an LFO going here to control it. And then some character elements. We can add a gate. We can do some ducking, which is basically saying side chaining, but just kind of manual here. We can say, here's the threshold, turn it down. Add a little bit of noise, add some wobble to it, just fun. And here's that re pitch thing that we saw earlier. So if we mess around with some parameters while it's running, you're going to get this re pitch effect. It's going to sound like the pitch you can turn that off there. And that's it. Echo is weirdly complicated, and check out some of these presets, 'cause there's a lot of really handy stuff in here. But that's basically how it works. 147. Filter Delay: Alright, up next. Filter delay. So here's what it looks like. This might look a little familiar, yeah? This is kind of a bit like the multiband dynamics, where we have three filters set up, and then we can do delay things separately. So we saw in both delay and echo that they had a filter built in so that we could focus our delay on where we want it. This is that just kind of amped up. So if we want to say, here's my low, here's my mid and here's my high, we can do that. So we say, I want this to delay like this. I want this to delay differently, this one, maybe we don't want this one to delay at all. That's fine. We can turn it off, or we can set it to something different. Now, we can also do some interesting panning things here. So if we want, we can say, This is one is left, this one is right, and this is left and right. That is kind of by default, what is set up. You can see the panning right here, but we don't have to use it that way. We can say that, you know, these are all centered or they're however we want them to go. So in other words, we can set this up so that the filters are pointing to specific frequencies or we can set it up so that these are going to treat our left and right channels differently, or we can actually do kind of both. So here's where we set our delay time, again, in 16th notes. Our feedback amount, the panning amount, and then the volume for each one, our dry wet amount, and we're often running. I like this on drums, kind of, where I might say, nothing on the low end, maybe three in the mids and fours on the highs. No, the other way around. Be odd numbers are going to get you a more complex sound. They're going to interfere with everything. And generally speaking, broad terms, odd numbers and your delay, odd numbers of 16th notes are going to get a more kind of bouncy thing. Even numbers are going to get things that line up easier. So this will make our high ends a little washy and our mids more or less line up. So there's that kind of syncopated feel to the hives. I kind of jig what's going on in the mids. Let's turn off the hives. It's kind of a solid groove. Maybe we'll have to come back to that and play with it some more. But for now, let's move on to grain delay. 148. Grain Delay: Okay, let's talk about grain delay. Now, do you remember when we were talking about the spectral effects from before, Spectral resonator, spectral spectral time? That idea of spectral is very similar to the idea of grains or granular. We talked about granular synthesis, I think, back when we were talking about synthesis. So whenever you see that word grain or granular, what that means is that we're using a technique a lot like this spectral technique. But in this case, what we're doing is we're taking the sound and chopping it up into little little bits, like small amounts of sound that are maybe ten to 15 milliseconds each, okay? Now, once we chop up the sound into those small little bits, we can rearrange them however we want, and that can make some really interesting sounds. Think of them as little droplets of rain, right? Like, there's all these little droplets of rain falling all over the place, and we can scoop them up and put them together however we want. So granular effects give us some control over some kind of neat things. So this is kind of a confusing effect the way it is. Basically, we have this big grid that we can play around with. So we can set these things here. We can say spray. Now, this is kind of like when those little droplets of rain hit the ground, how far are they just chaotically gonna go? So we can say, yeah, a lot. So we can set frequency where there's going to be a certain amount of frequencies generated. Pitch, I believe is more of a transposition than adding new things. Random pitch, we can say, make random stuff, how much feedback we want and how much dry versus wet. So this is all the way wet right now. And then we can give it a delay amount here. Now, you have these settings. And then the same settings down here. And the reason is we can set them to values here, but we can also pick two of them to place in this grid. So we can say, I want spray on my vertical axis and pitch on my horizontal axis. Okay? That makes this little dot a really fun thing to map to, like, if you have a pad or some kind of controller that you can move around, do this, you can make some really crazy effects by modulating this. You can even automate it, but it's more fun to play it live. See, like, watch this. Let's go all the way wet. It's pretty cool. It's pretty fun. Please. 149. Reverb: Alright, onto reverb. So we don't often think about reverb as a type of delay or a time effect, but it is actually a very short delay kind of bouncing around, and that's what gives us the effect a reverb. So how does reverb work? Reverb actually is kind of three elements, okay? In the most kind of classic situation, we have the direct signal, the early reflections, and the reverb tale, okay? So, in our reverb here, this input filter, this is going to deal with the direct signal, the input signal. Okay? So we can shape what we want. We can do a low cut, a high cut, both, and just kind of shape where we want to put our reverb. Okay? So let's just kind of leave that off for the moment. So early reflections are the first bounce back of the signal. For example, in the room I'm in now, there's a wall about seven feet behind me. But there's a screen about 1 ft in front of me. When I talk, the first thing that's going to happen is my voice is going to hit that screen and then bounce back, and I'm going to get it right away. That's going to tell my brain a lot of information about what's happening. And it's going to be like less than ten milliseconds. Those are the earlier reflections. After that, the sound is going to bounce back behind me, hit that wall, and then come back. This is the actual bigger reverb. So with our early reflections, we can do this spin thing where we move them around a bit, adjust the shape. And this is all in this kind of automation of these or modulation, I should say, of these. The diffusion network is kind of what happens when it hits that back wall and then spurs out. I have these big black things right here. These kind of suck up sound and don't let them bounce around a whole bunch, but they are specifically for this purpose to stop diffusion. So we can kind of create a little filter to kind of shape how these sounds are coming back. So if we want a brighter reverb, we're going to do this kind of thing, if we want a darker reverb, this kind of thing. Okay. Then down here, this pre delay, kind of, like, sticking to the analogy of where I am, this pre delay is going to kind of push my screen back a little bit if I want it to, so I can give the sense that the room is a little bit bigger than it is. And then size is the size of our room. This smoothing, I believe, this smoothing has to do with what we were talking about before. If we change the values while it's running, how does it deal with that? Fast and slow means it's going to catch up quickly or slowly, or it's just going to do none. I always had that said to fast. And then decay, this has to do with the length of our actual reverb tail. So I notice this is in seconds. Everything else is in milliseconds. This is in seconds. So, you know, 2.5 seconds is big reverb tail. We can freeze it so that it just really goes nuts for a long time. Density is going to kind of divide our signal up into multiple signals and put them back together, kind of like a chorus effect, which we also have here. Okay. And then dry wet diffusion amount and reflection amount. So all of that gets us reverb. Reverb is actually a weirdly complicated effect. Check out your presets to kind of get you in the ballpark and then go from there. 150. Hybrid Reverb: So there are kind of two different ways to do reverb. There's actually a few different ways to do reverb, but there's two more common ones. There's kind of reverb by algorithm, which is kind of what we just talked about in the reverb tool effect. Then there's also something called convolution reverb. And what you do in convolution reverb is you take what's called an impulse response and you analyze it and you create a reverb based on that. So let's say you want a reverb that sounds like um, a grain silo, right? If you don't know what a grain silo is, Google it. It's a big concrete building. So one thing you can do is you could go into a grain silo with a gun, like a real gun. Don't use a real gun. But like a starter pistol, something that shoots blanks. And you could set up a bunch of microphones, shoot your gun, and then listen or record the reverb tale, how long that reverb goes and all the frequencies of it. Then you could put that analysis into something called a convolution reverb, and it would basically extract the reverb elements from that sound and give you a reverb that sounds like that grain silo. Convolution reverb. It's pretty cool. So in a hybrid reverb, what we have here is both. We have the kind of algorithmic way of doing it blended with the convolution reverb. Okay? So that can produce some kind of wacky reverb sounds. So we have some similar things here. We have pre delay. We can set that to be a division of the beat if we want feedback amount. Here we have our convolution setting. So convolution impulse response IR. So what do we want? Do we want early reflections kind of stuff or big things? Let's say, like, textures. And then we have these ones. Jet wash blanket. Sure. So that's what the impulse response looks like. So that's like it's gonna grow really big for a couple of seconds, and then it's gonna tail off. This gonna sound crazy. Let's try it on our Cello sound here. That's a long reverb. Okay. So we can set how these things process. Do we want them to process in parallel, two different kinds of reverb and then parallel like this and then come together at the end. Serial, or do we want to just do algorithmic reverb or just do convolution reverb. Okay? So that's how we can combine them together. For the algorithm side, we have a couple of different templates here. We can do the freeze thing, delay, decay, size, damping shape. Kind of normal settings. This vintage effect can be kind of cool where it's basically every time it feeds back, it's going to degrade it a little bit more so that it kind of sounds like it's falling apart as it moves away from you. We also have an EQ in here if we want to tailor if we want to tailor the output of it. So pretty cool effect. Go to this if you're looking for a little bit of a weirder reverb sound. There's a lot of crazy presets here that'll get you some really cool effects. Awesome. 151. Repeat: Alright, two more time effects. And these two kind of fall into a big category that we just generally call performance, meaning that these are great tools for using a live performance. However, at least the first one, I've used a whole bunch just on a track, not for live performance. So both of them, I mean, they can be used however you want. You know, you're the boss. You do what you want. Um, okay, so beat repeat. This is great for, like, glitchy effects. So here's what this one does. Imagine you've got a glass of water, okay? And you pour water. Well, you've got an empty glass, and you pour water into it. Then from anywhere in the glass, the computer decides to poke a hole in that glass and let the water out in different ways. That's kind of what Beat repeat is doing. We're going to take in a signal, some music that we play into it, and then it's going to kind of store it and then start kind of shooting it out in different ways, creating kind of glitchy effects. We can add some randomization to it if we want, or we can make it very predictable. So basically what we have here is we have this grid where we see four beats, okay? And we're looking at 1 bar. So here's the first beat, the second beat, the third beat, and the fourth beat. We can make it longer if we want with this interval, but 1 bar is the default. Okay, so while we're listening in, we're going to grab something in this first 2.5 beats is the way we're set up now. We can say we want it to pick up more than the 2.5 beats by going to this gate and opening it up more So now we're saying we can listen to the whole bar or anything else. Let's take it back. Let's take it to, like, two beats. We can move forward where those two beats are. Oops. We can move forward which two beats it's targeting with that. We can chop this up more. With this grid, we can say, I want you to focus on 16th notes or 32nd notes. Let's set it to 16th notes. We can crank up this variation. They'll add some randomization. Same thing with chance. We could pull chance down, and that would say, we're going to get one of these repeats, kind of like grains, actually, only 50% of the time that we expect it. We can add some pitch changes to the to the repetitions of it, and we can even set a delay a decay on the pitch that it ramps down or up. And then this is what I find most interesting about this. So what we can do with these three controls is we can say, I want to hear both the glitchy stuff and the original stuff. It's almost like a dry wet mix. Or you can say, I want to hear just the glitchy stuff. With this gate, or I want to hear just the input signal with this in. And then, of course, we've got a little filter on here so we can help target it. So let's look at some of these defaults. Brain dance. Let's put it on. Let's go to this clip here, and let's just hear it. Let's turn off this one. Okay, so here's that brain dance preset. You hear that? That's the pitch decay. If we go to gate, we're going to hear just the glitchy stuff that it's adding. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Let's, um deconstruct one. Let's listen to a mix. It's just crazy. This air pusher one is very I mean, obviously, this is designed to kind of emulate, I think, square pusher, his music. Let's go to gate. So, fun, glitchy stuff with this one. 152. Looper: Okay, last thing in our time effects is the looper. So if you've ever seen someone like a singer songwriter or something using a looper pedal or any kind of performer using a looper pedal, where they have a pedal that will maybe it'll cycle back their voice again, maybe their guitar again so they can build big harmonies and things like that. Someone who does it really well, I love watching these performances. It can be just fascinating. So a lot of the time when people are doing that, they're using something that looks like a guitar pedal goes on the floor and they run their equipment through it, but they could be doing it with a laptop. And if they are doing it in Ableton, this is how they're doing it. This is designed to emulate those looper pedals perfectly. So you can record in a thing and then add layers to it. So you can keep recording on top of it, and then or you can let it play while you do something else. I'm not very good at using these. But basically, what we have is this big red button, well, it'll turn red. Basically, what we have here is this big button, and this is kind of our action button. So we say, when I click this, do this, record X bars, which we can change however we want. And then the plus means, I believe plus is continue adding more layers on or we can change that to just play the layer that I just added. So if I do this, I'm going to play this drum loop into it, which is kind of weird. Let's move it out here. I don't need this loop on, but I could have it. Let's arm this to record so that it's got my voice coming through. And let's try it. So here we go. Check, check, check. Now I'm going to add some looper to it and check, check, check. Okay? Now it should start playing that. And check, check, check. Now I'm off and running. Looper to it and check check check. Okay? I'm going to add some looper to it. So I could let me turn that cord up. Okay. So now I could do some weird things like change the speed of it, reverse it, add some feedback to it. Um, and one of the coolest things is if I really like what I made, I can go to this drag me and actually just take it as a clip and throw it onto a track and just keep it. So that's a cool kind of feature of it. But the ideal thing that you would do is map this Whoops. Check. Map this button to a pedal or a key or something so that you can use it as a performance tool. So using these loopers is not my jam. I think it's awesome when people are really good at it, but I've never really practiced it and got into using looper pedals. But if you want to do it in live, this is the way. Star Wars. 153. Audio Effect Rack: Alright, up next is Audio Effects Racks. Now, we've looked at instrument racks. We've looked at drum racks. I think we looked at Midi effect Racks. What we need to look at here is audio effects Racks. Now, this is my favorite. This is my kind of go to for most effects is to do something with an effect rack, because it's just so powerful and so versatile and there's just so much stuff you can do with. So if you remember instrument racks, this will be really similar. What we're going to do here is we're going to build super effects. We're going to combine a whole bunch of effects into one thing. Okay? So let's go to this track. We'll look at this drum thing. Now, let's say I want to do something to this where I'm going to give it some compression. Let's put a compressor on there, maybe a little delay, and Spectral time, do something weird. Okay. And maybe a reverb in there, too, okay? So now I have this chain of effects. I have a compressor, then a reverb, then an echo, then spectral time. Okay? I can put all those effects on a track. That's fine. And they're going to run in series. They're going to run from this one to this one to this one to this one. It's going to sound like this. I was like popcorn going off all over the place. Now, I could dial these in and get this to sound cool. That's all great. But I could also turn these into an effect rack, okay? So if I go up here to Audio Effect Rack, okay, let's throw that on this channel, okay? So what I'm going to here's my audio effect rack, okay? So it's empty. Now, there's nothing in it. Let's take the spectral time and put it and just drag it into that effect rack. Now my effect rack has this spectral time effect. Let's open up our chains here, which is this knob. You remember this from instrument racks? And let's put echo on a different chain just by dragging it down here. Okay, now I have two chains. Let's put reverb down here. And let's put compressor down here, too. Okay? So now I have three different chains in my effects. So the way that this is different, so before, everything was running serially. So it went from one effect to the next effect to the next effect to the next effect to the output. Okay? That was before. Now that it's in Iraq, what this is going to do before I mess with anything, this is going to do is it's going to process these all at the same time. So signal comes in, splits into fours, gets processed by each of these effects, and then comes back together into one on the other side. This is called parallel processing. These are all processing at the same time and then getting put together. So in our case, right now, it's not going to sound wildly different than it did when they were just in a row. Let's hear it. Actually, it does sound kind of quite a bit different, actually. But that's not the greatest thing about this. We can do a few things. Before we get into, like, the really cool stuff, there's some stuff right on the front we could do. We could say that, you know, this echo is a little quieter than the reverb, if we want. We can kind of blend these effects nicely, just like that. We can adjust the panning of the effect. We can solo it, we can mute it. We can do all kinds of stuff. Now, there's two super special things we can do with an effect Rack. And let's deal with those in separate videos. So first, let's talk about the chain selector, and then second, we'll talk about macros. 154. Chain Selector: Okay, if you remember from instrument racks, we could build kind of a super instrument by going into the chain selector and kind of deciding what effect was being used when. We can do that same thing with an effects Rack. So we click on this chain here, right? Okay? Now we have basically, we're going to build a cross fader for our effects so that one effect morphs into the other effect, okay? So let's say spectral time, we want to happen, I don't know, half the time. Echo, we want to happen half the time, and reverb we want to have happen half the time. And this compressor, maybe we want going all the time. Okay? So let's say on the low end, we want to go reverb and then echo and then spectral time. This is basically making a longer and longer reverb or delay, actually. So we start off with reverb, teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny delay. We get to echo where we have big delay, and we get to spectral time where we basically obliterate time. Okay? And then we're going to have this compressor that's just always on and moving. Okay? So we adjusted the range of these. Now we're going to adjust the little tiny bar. You got to get right in there, and we can do this and that. And then that and oops. It's hard to grab that little bar sometimes. Okay. So now, as I move this chain selector up, we're going to move through these effects. The compressor is always going to be applied and then we're going to end up on this spectral time, okay? So now, you'll remember that when we did this with instrument racks, we had a key selector where it could decide which Synth to use based on what key we played, and it had a velocity selector. So it could decide what synth we use based on velocity. This doesn't have either of those because this is not a mini track, right? This is audio. So those won't always apply. Sometimes they will if we put this onto an audio Well, sometimes they will. So what we have here is just the chain selector. So we can take a knob and like crank it up, but we can also automate the chain selector. Okay? So we can kind of draw a line on how this is going to move. So for now, I'm just going to click and drag it, and this is what it sounds like. So now we're in the reverb. Moving into the echo. Moving into spectral time. Cool. Let's set up our spectral time settings a little bit here. Okay, I'm going to mute our compressor just to make this really dramatic. And I'm going to turn up all the way wet on all of these effects. Okay, now let's check it out. Okay, so here's our Are weaver moving up into our delay? And then into the infinite void, where we get here. Okay? So now we've got this super effect. So, how can we control this dial a little bit more elegantly? Let's talk about Macros next. 155. Macros: Macros. So we click this little button here, and we get macros. Again, we saw this with instruments, right? So one thing we know we can do with macros is assign a whole bunch of parameters to a single effect. So the idea behind macros is that we don't want to dig through all of these chains and all of the effects settings just to find the effect we want. So anything that we want access to quickly, we can put on one of these macros so that we see it right out front. So the first thing I want access to is the chain selector. So I'm going to control click on it map to Macro one. Okay? So now that's here. There's my chain selector. Now, if I want to do other stuff, I could say the dry wet mix. Let's put that on Macro two. But then let's go to Spectral time and put the dry wet mix also on Macro two reverb. I already did echo I don't think I did. Put the echo on Macro two and the compressor, maybe if I want. Sure. Okay? So now Macro two is the dry wet mix of all four effects, okay? So I can control them without even clicking inside of these parameters, I can control them where they are. So anything else I might want, I can map to a macro. We can make more macros or less macros right here with this plus and minus. And then with this chain selector, I can easily just go into automation mode and say, you know, click on the chain selector to make sure you've got it and then say, I want this to go like this. Now, this effect Rack is the ultimate live performance tool, right? You move that chain selector and you've got this crazy amount of effects. I'll show you a trick for this once we get into, like, the DJ setting, where basically this is, like, your transition for everything. Is just use one of these. But for now, even for not live performance, but just for production, these chain selectors are awesome. So if I get out of here, well, I can leave that on, and we listen to this. Let's pull the dry wet down of everything. Yeah, that's kind of cool. So that's what we can do with macros. We can control really kind of every element of it with the macros. So again, there are so many audio effect racks here. It is ridiculous, okay? There are tons of them. There are some like mastering setups. This is where it's kind of unfortunate that they're out of the folders that they were in. But you can see here master master big boom, over driven tape master, media analog master, full chain master. You know, these are going to get you in the ballpark of a good master. Take this master, put it on your main track. And now you've got some good setup for a mastered track. It's not fully mastered. You need to dial this in, but in a pinch, it's a good place to start. So, play around with these audio effect racks. They'll blow your mind once you really get into them. They're amazing. 156. Align Delay: Okay, we just have five more effects left, and then we will have covered everything in this giant list. These last five are things that we're kind of lumping into the category of utilities. These are things that are handy. So let's start by looking at align delay. Okay? So Align delay is a Max for live device. We can tell. Not that that matters to us too much, but this is something new, and my best guess for how I would use this is in a live setting if I'm running a PA or running playback or something like that. What this is going to let us do basically is set a very small delay for each speaker. And we can use that for timing purposes. So for example, let's say I'm in a club or something, and my I'm I have two feet of cable between me and the left speaker, but like 80 feet of cable between me and the right speaker, okay? So in that case, I might want to slow down the left speaker by just a smidge, a couple of milliseconds so that the signal arrives at the left and right speaker at the same time. This is the kind of, like, configuration things that you can do with this particular tool. You can set it to be in milliseconds or samples, delay a certain number of samples, or what's really fun. In distance. So meters or feet. So I can say, you know, delay this by, you know, 19 feet, which is translating as 17 milliseconds because sound travels through a wire at a certain speed, and obviously this has figured it out. You can even set the temperature as you do this because the temperature will affect the speed of sound. So a handy utility. I'm never gonna use this for any production purpose. This is really just for the purpose of, like, speaker alignment and things like that. 157. External Audio Effect: Okay, external audio effect. You may remember external midi effect. Remember what external midi effect did was it let us send a midi signal out to some kind of synth in the physical world and bring back an audio signal. External audio effect is similar except it's just audio. So the best purpose of this is, let's say you have, like, some cool outboard effects unit or guitar pedals or something like that, something like this. So here I have a reverb pedal. Is my handy trusted reverb pedal. I've used it for years. And let's say that I want let's just say that I'm in love with this reverb and I want to use this reverb on my track. Not any internal reverb. I like this one. So what I could do is like go to my interface, go to one of my outputs and plug in a cable, and then I'm going to say where that output is here. So I'm going to say output one. Okay? I can give it a little extra gain if I want. So that's going to send this track, the signal output one on my interface. Now I'm going to take that cable and I'm going to plug it into my effect, and then I'm going to plug out of my effect and go back in to wherever I say here. Let's say two. I can give it a little gain. I can do a little dry wet. And now I can do it live. Like that signal is going to be running through this effect now, and I can adjust my signal and listen to it and dial it in. And it's just like any effect in live at this point. So that is the only real probably not the only, but that is the real purpose of this effect, external audio effect. Let you send out an audio signal to a physical thing and get back an audio signal. So to do some processing outside of live. 158. Spectrum: Alright, next is spectrum. So spectrum is really cool. I'm going to put spectrum on this track. Now, Spectrum doesn't do any signal processing that we can hear, okay? Spectrum is for us to see what's going on in our audio signal. So, if I load that here, I have this grid, and you've seen this grid before. This was something very similar to this. I was in our EQ eight. But if I play this signal, we can look at it, okay? And that's useful. But what's even more useful is we've got this little arrow here, and we can make it nice and big. So now we can kind of see a spectrum analysis of what's happening in our signal. One thing that's handy is that we can put our mouse over different spots, and then see in that lower left corner, we can kind of see where we are. We're at 99.5 Hertz, which is approximately the pitch G one. And the mouse is at negative 66.4 decibels, okay? So one thing that I get asked a lot is why is it that we play a signal, and then when we stop playing a signal, it looks like the signal goes up, right? So here's our signal. When I hit Stop, it's like, drifting away. The reason is, we're actually looking at an averaging graph. So it's averaging the signals out to see it. And once we stop, it keeps averaging it against zero, and it just goes away. So that's just how these work. Um can change what we're looking at here. Blocks are basically the fidelity of what we're seeing. You can look at the left and right channel, the refresh rate, averaging, how it's graphing stuff. But if you ever want to dig in deep and see what's going on in a signal, this is a good way to do it. Throw spectrum on there and take a look. 159. Tuner: Up next is tuner. Very handy. We tune because we care. This is just a tuner. It's an old school tuner. So, um, I throw this whenever I'm recording my guitar, I throw this on a track. This one, just like spectrum, doesn't do any processing, but you can put this in a chain of effects, and it's going to do you no harm. So even if I have other effects on here, like this pedal effect, the tuner the signal is going to go right in and right out of the tuner. It's not going to affect our signal at all. So we can put it there and it doesn't matter. It's still going to pass right through it and go to pedal or whatever's next in our chain or to our output. So with this, if I let's just turn on my signal here, and now you can kind of see it doing what it's doing. Uh I was getting kind of close. So when it turns green, it's in tune. Let's do this. Let's switch to input two, which is my guitar. And now let's look. Is my guitar in tune. This is potentially embarrassing. Ooh, so flat. Turn it up. There we go. Come on. Come on. Tiny bit sharp. I like these to be my a string to be a tiny bit sharp, but that's too much. It's like, negative 1,000 in Minnesota right now, and I have a space heater right next to this guitar, which is why it's out of tune. But that's how it works. Very simple. It's a tuner, just like any kind of other tuner. You can put anything into it. You can sing into it. You can play guitar into it. You can play your kazoo into it. I'll tell you if you're in tune or not. 160. Utility: Alright, last but not least, the appropriately named utility. If we put utility, this is a little Swiss Army knife of goofy things you might need to do at different points for a given clip. I've needed to use all of them. So if you just need, like, a crazy gain boost, you can do that. If you just need to do some hard panning, you can do that. Um, this is going to invert your phase, if you need to do phase inversion, if you need to swap channels, so the left and right channel, you want to swap. I be like that. You could say this is just a right channel, just a left channel. You could say this is a mono track. Or you could say the base of this is mono. This mono track business is what I use this for the most because of cases exactly like this. See what's happened here? This is that thing we did with the looper, and it recorded a stereo file with a single microphone, meaning all our signal is in one channel. So when I play this, it's going to play it back all on the right side. Or the left side. Check, check, check. And I could pan it. But if I pan it all the way right, it's just gone. So I pan it all the way left, it's there. So right is just going to play this. So when you have a situation like this where you've got a signal on one side, but it's a stereo track, it's just ugly to deal with. So what you can do is put this utility on it and say, Yo, this is mono. Now you can deal with it just like a mono track. You can pan it left and right, and it's going to be just fine. So that is the number one reason I use it. This utility effect. And I use it kind of a lot when I get these weird audio files. It's really handy for that. Okay, enough of that. Let's move on to a couple more things. 161. Order of Operations: Alright, real quick. I get asked a lot about what order should I put effects in. So we have something called the signal chain or the effect chain. That's if we put a whole bunch of effects on something, what order should those effects go in? So here's my answer to that. Here's my, like, weird artsy cop out answer, and that is the effects should always go in the order that they sound awesome to you. There's no hard rule about this. Some people say there's a hard rule, there's not. What is a hard rule is that the order of the effects will matter, okay? In most cases, they will change the sound. So it does matter that they go in one order will sound different than another order, okay? There is no like this goes before that and this goes before that. If you like the way it sounds, and that's the right order. Now, if you need a place to start, the common way to think about this is to put dynamic effects first in your chain. Any kind of pitch affects second and time affects third. Okay? Again, there's more exceptions to that rule than there is the rule, if that makes any sense. But it can be a good place to start. But remember, always listen to it. If you're hearing something and it's close, think through it, maybe try switching the order of the effects, and it might change it and get it to something that you really like. When in doubt, go Dynamics pitch time. 162. The Effect Chain: When it comes to the effect chain, the chain of effects you use on a track, if you hear something you really like, like if you hear a sound in a track, they're like, Man, how did they get that sound? Search online for the name of that track and then effect chain. You might find it. Some people publish that information. This is especially true with vocal effects. As you work with vocals, you'll find that the effect chain can't be really important for getting a very specific vocal sound and for getting your vocals to blend. So if there's a performer or a producer you really like, search for their effect chain, especially like a vocal effect chain. Like, if you want to know how they're processing Taylor Swift's vocal, look for Taylor Swift vocal effect chain. You can probably either find it or find some people who have rebuilt something that they think sounds pretty close. Those things are out there online, so don't be afraid to look them up and see what people did. That's how we all learned how to do things. So something to keep in mind. 163. What comes next?: N. All right. We've got to the end of this giant effects one. That was a lot. Um, so take a deep breath, maybe take a day off from learning live, but then come back because we've got a lot more to do in the next class, Part six. We're going to learn mixing, mastering, DJing. Okay? So we're going to spend some time talking about how people do all this stuff on stage, live. And when you see deejays on stage live with a laptop and they're turning dials, what actually are they doing? We're going to cover that in the next one. We're also going to talk about mixing and mastering. So you know we'll be pulling out a lot of those audio effect racks, especially in the mastering section. There's a couple other tricks that we have yet to talk about like working with controllers, mapping, follow actions. I'll show you my live performance setup. And we'll talk a little bit about using the push for production, too. All of that in the next class. So that'll be Part six. It's probably out now. Go check it out. Okay, one more thing for you before we go. 164. Part 6: Introduction: Everyone, welcome to Ableton Live 12 Part six. In this class, we're going to focus on mixing, mastering and Djang. So we're going to start. We're gonna talk about controllers, everything we need to know about controllers, how to hook up a whole bunch of controllers that I have laying around here and use them with live, both for production and for live performance. Then we'll talk a whole bunch about this push controller, how it works if you need to buy one, if you should buy one. What are the pros and cons of having one? We'll go into some other performance setup things like follow action, some performance racks, how to convert a arrangement view session to a session view session so that it's teed up for you to do a DJ set with it. Then in the second half of this class, we're going to go into mixing and then mastering. In that process, I've got a track that we're going to mix, then we're going to master it. I'll show you how I do everything in live and how you can to. So stick around for that. It's going to be really fun. We're going to do a whole bunch of really useful tricks in this class. So let's type. Okay. Here's A. Here's B, right? Right? So you can do some cool things with that. And this is going to help. Now, we don't want to just flatten out all of our dynamics, right? That's going to make a very boring mix. But we do want to taper it down a little bit and kind of control it. So up here at the top. This is where I get my clip slot grid. Here I can see individual samples. And at this point, you know, I'm basically hear a song on the radio. Let's say you're driving down the road and you're listening to the radio and you hear a song. Then you hear another song after that, okay? If the next song is just quieter, like, you didn't do anything to your stereo, it just is quieter than the previous song. So you reach for the knob. 165. What we are Covering Here: Okay, so here we are. Part six. If you followed along all the way from part one, you're probably getting a little sick of me, and I'm sorry, but we have two big parts left. I'll try to be as entertaining as I can. As always, I'm always trying to be entertaining, anyway, back to business. So here's what we're going to cover in this class. It's kind of a whole smattering of stuff. The first chunk of stuff is all going to be kind of around dejing, but there's a couple tools we need to learn in order to kind of really take advantage of some of the DJ and performance abilities of live. So we're going to start by talking about controllers. We've talked about controllers a little bit way back, I think in the first class. We're going to get a little bit more into that, specifically with performance controllers. Not so much with keyboards and mini guitars and stuff, like we talked about early on. Although I am going to show you how to use an instrument as a controller. More on that in a minute. We'll talk about push the push controller, the push three. That's this thing that you kind of can't see. But I'll pull it out. We'll talk about follow actions, performance setup. Then we'll get into mixing. So kind of a whole different shift, paradigm shift. But we'll get into mixing. I'll walk you through how I mix some mixed techniques that I've picked up over the years. And then finally mastering. So those are our big things for this class. After this, really, there's nothing left, really, but Max for Live. I think we've covered just about everything in this whole program over the last 30 some hours of class content that you've watched, which is awesome. So let's dive in to controllers. 166. The World of Controllers: Okay, so let's define controllers a little bit. So we're not talking about instruments here, although controllers are often kind of hidden as instruments, and it's not terribly uncommon for us to have both, something that is both a controller and an instrument. The easy way to think about the two is that instruments play notes, Controllers trigger things, move stuff. Typically, not notes. There are ways to turn an instrument into a controller, and I'll show you that in a few minutes. But for now, let's just talk about controllers. So let's go to my controller graveyard, shall we? Let's take a walk. Okay, so this drum pad is kind is mostly just an instrument, not really a controller. Another computer, however, can be a controller, if you want to set it up that way. Here I have a bunch of microphones, but underneath it, this is an APC 40. This is kind of the go to DJ controller for many years. I'll pull that one out in a minute. This controller, I loved. So no notes on this, just dials, triggers, and faders. This was a great live controller for a bunch of years. I really liked it. This novation keyboard is a keyboard, but it has some controller stuff on it, so it can be used as a controller. This here's the push two, I think. So not my current push, not the push three, but the push two. That's an audio interface. An iPad can be a controller. There are a bunch of apps that will let you use an iPad as a controller. This is my old foot controller. This was my go to foot controller for many, many years. This thing was great. I don't often get behind Baringer stuff, the company Baringer, but this one super reliable for me. So it's got two continuous controllers and then a bunch of buttons that you can see I've labeled for my specific setup. And then we have the new push three controller, newish now, I suppose. So there's a lot of controllers in here. So when we're using controllers, we're talking about launching clips, controlling the volume, controlling the panning, controlling effects, a lot of stuff that we can do live. Now, you can use controllers for more than just, like, performing and DJing and stuff. They're great just to have on your desktop to get your hands on the mix. There's a lot we can do with them. So first, let's talk about connecting controllers and mapping controllers, and then we'll go into some things we can do with them. 167. Connecting Controllers: Alright, let's connect some controllers. So I pulled out this one, this novation launch, remote Zero SL. I haven't used this thing in a long time, and I've never used it with this version of Live, so we're going to connect it for the first time together. So in order to do this, well, first let me talk about what kind of connection you should use. You can see, hopefully in the back of this that it has old school midi ports, and it also has a USB port and a power port. Now, the way most devices work is if they have both MIDI ports and a USB port, use the USB port. Save yourself a ton of work. Use a USB port. If it doesn't have a USB port and it just has MIDI ports, meaning that it's an old device, you're going to need to get a MIDI interface of some sort. If you're using USB, you probably don't need to use power. So the power input is probably just for if we're using MIDI stuff, right? So USB has power built into it a little bit of power. Sometimes you need both power and USB. But in this case, I think I just need USB, and I'll be fine. So I'm going to plug in USB and not those MIDI ports. Before I do that, I'm gonna go to Live, and I'm going to go to my settings, and I'm going to go to Link tempo and MIDI. Okay? So here we've seen this before. We have all our instruments down here. See my keyboard, a USB MDI interface. This Fishman is my MIDI guitar, push three. Up here, we have control surface. Now, control surface basically a fancier name for controller. That's the kind of controller that we're talking about here. So you see my push two was set up as a control surface. This launch key mini, which is a little keyboard I have over there. That was set up as a control surface, but neither of them are plugged in right now. You can see they're all grade out. So let's plug this one in. Alright, so now it's plugged in with USB. And let's turn it on to the USB setting. Okay? And it's lighting up. And there it is. It's popped right up. Remote SL classic. That is what this thing is. So we have inputs and outputs. Now, we need inputs. So this input means that this thing is going to send numbers and values to live, and Live is going to accept them input. So make sure that it's set up to listen to your inputs. Outputs you may or may not need. That's live sending stuff back to this. Now, this has a display on it, and it can say some stuff. So that's what Live is sending back out to it is just updating and telling us what it's doing. I also can give us the tempo which you've seen in this little light blinking. Hopefully, you can see that. See it a little light? Yeah. So it can get the tempo. So we can get stuff back. Your device may not need to get stuff back. So that's really all it has to do. Let's talk really quick about this takeover mode while we're here. Takeover mode means this. Let's say I have this fader. Hmm. Let's say I have where to go. This fader mapped to the volume of channel one, okay? So on the screen, I click the volume and I move it all the way to the top. But this fader is sitting at the bottom. So what happens when I grab this fader and move it, right? Because the software thinks it's up here and this is down here. And when I move this to take it over, so to speak, what happens? That's what this takeover mode does. So if we say none, it's just going to jerk right up to where it is. It's going to make a pretty rough sound. Pick up means this fader is going to do nothing until I hit where it is in the track in the software, and then it's going to latch onto it, and then I'm going to control it. So I'm going to have to go up and pick it up, so to speak, and then I've got it and I can move it around. And then value scaling means that it's basically going to do some fancy math and go kind of up a little bit very slowly until I latch onto it, and then it'll be perfectly. So it's going to kind of mimic the shape and do some fancy stuff, and then come back and grab it. That's usually where I like it. Value scaling that is handy for me. But that's it. That's all it takes to set this up. Then we're good to go. 168. What Can I do with Controllers?: Okay, so what can you do? What can you do with controllers once you have them set up? And why do we care? Let's say that I'm working on this track that's on the screen. I can use this controller to help with my mix, or maybe I get it to a state where I'm ready to perform it. Let's look at both of those situations. So let me pull up my mixer here. This controller uses something called auto mapping, and a lot of controllers do this. What that means is that as soon as I plug it in, Live knows this brand of controller. It knows what it is, and it recognized it when it saw it. We could tell it knew what the name of it was. So because of that, can auto map to it, meaning that a bunch of things are automatically going to be connected to it. So what we have here is so we have, like, all of these faders, right? So I'm just going to move this one and see what's happening on the screen. It already knows to use these for my open session, right? So this is fun when you're mixing because what it means is you can really just kind of get your hands on the mix. Feels a little more real that way sometimes. Like Right? So that can be really fun. Now, if you get to performing and maybe you're doing a session view thing, we can use some of the pads on these devices to launch clips. We can also still continue to mix from Arrangement View, so from session view so that if we're performing something, we can control the mix. I can maybe control some of the panning and sends. So we're using something called autompping here, but I can overwrite the auto mapping, and I can make my own mapping. So like, I have a dial here and maybe I want this dial to control the panning of my first track. I can set it up to do that really easily. So let's do that now. 169. MIDI Mapping: Okay, this thing is called MIDI mapping, okay? Here's what we're going to do. We're gonna go up to this MI button all the way up here. You can also just press Command M whenever you want. But they're gonna turn your screen into this mess of purple or whatever your live looks like. Anything that's purple, I can map to a MIDI device, okay? So a controller of some kind, even an instrument, which I'll show you in a minute. So let's say I want this panning knob to be on one of my dials on my remote zero SL. All I have to do this is super easy. All I have to do is click that once, okay? I'm going to click the thing I want to map to. Okay? It's clicked. Now, on my device, I'm going to move this knob. I'm just going to wiggle it. Okay? That's it. It's done. You can see this thing popped up up here. This is a list of all of our mappings. And it's not going to work right now. It's not going to look like it worked because I got to get out of Mi Mapping mode. So I can click this button again or press Command M. Now I'm out of it. But now, whenever I move this dial, I suddenly have control of my panning in that now. I still have control of my volume over here in my faders, even on this one. But now panning is on this dial. So I can do this all day long. What if I wanted This controller has some pads right here. What if I wanted this pad to mute this track really easy, okay? All I got to do is go back into Mi Mapping, Command M, hit this track activator, and now hit this button. Alright. And it showed up here, and so we're done. Let's get out of Mi Mapping. Now when I hit that button, we mute or unmute. Okay? So I can do this all day long. I can map anything to any parameter as long as it's one of those things that shows up in purple, which is almost everything, really. I mean, there's tons of stuff you can do here. So, like launching clips, right? Like, if I wanted to launch a clip, I would just click on the box, hit a pad and then get out of this. And then whenever I hit that pad, we're gonna launch that clip. Right? Super cool. So midi mapping is a really important thing you can do. Now, there's another version of it called key mapping that I don't think we've talked about yet. So it's not entirely relevant to controllers, but I do want you to know about key mapping. So let's go on to a new video and talk about that. 170. Key Mapping: Okay, you may have noticed we have MIDI up here, but we also have this word key just hanging out up there. Let's click on that. Now we have a whole bunch of stuff that turned orange. The difference between MIDI mapping and key mapping is that key mapping wants you to map to this thing, your Quirti keyboard. Anything on this you can map to anything that's orange on the screen right now. Okay? So let's say I want to launch this clip by pressing F. Okay? I just click on it once, and then I click on the letter F. Maybe I want to launch this one with G and this one with Okay? Let's get out of Mi Mapping mode. And now I have those three things under F, G and Right? Cool. What if I want to well, Command K is going to take us back into midi mapping mode. So things with, like, volume fades are tough. Like, what if I want I can map that to, like, my arrow key so that I can kind of increment up and down. But those are kind of hard to do with Corti. It lets you do it, but it's not super useful. So try to do things that are just buttons like launching a clip. Launching a scene, muting, soloing, things like that. Like, if I wanted to solo this track by pressing the number four. Cool. I can do that. So now it's soloed. I can toggle solo by pressing the number four on my keyboard. Now, you might This might be giving you problems. If you're thinking, Jay, none of this is working. These keys aren't working, and this little thing is blinking at me right now. That's very possible. Here's why. This little thing is our computer mini keyboard. That says that tells AB to treat this like a piano keyboard, right? And that's cool for entering notes. But if you're trying to map notes or map things to this, that little thing is blinking saying, I'm already being used. That thing is blinking and screaming at you saying, I can't do both. So it can't can't do both. There's no way around that. You got to turn this off if you want to do key mappings. Like, if I turn this on and then do, like, four, it's still going to work for four, but not these other things, see? If I do this F mapping that I did, it's saying, No, that's a mini note and a key. So you got to turn that. Okay? Key mapping is super cool. If you have any really repetitive tasks, map it to a key and then just, like, shoot it out. It's great for performance, but it's also great for production. Okay, let's get back to our MIDI controllers, and let me show you how you can use an instrument as a controller. 171. MIDI Keyboards as Controllers: Okay, so I can using midi mapping, I can map notes to control things if I really want to. So let me go over here. First of all, let me go back to Mimpping and show you how to unmap some stuff. So if I want to unmap these things, I just go back into Mi mapping. I can do two things. One, I can click the line up here, that is the thing I want to unmap just press Delete. Or I can go to the thing that's mapped like this panning and click it there, and then just press Delete, and it goes away. Okay, so I'm going to delete all of these. I'm also going to delete these key ones because they're just going to trip me up later. Okay. Alright, so now I'm over in Mi mapping, and I've added three new audio tracks and they each have a sample. I have a snare, a kick, and a high hat. So I could go here and map these to the pad on my controller, but I could also map them just to, like, a note and trigger them with a note. So if you're using, like, a piano keyboard, you can map notes to do things, to trigger things, do things that are not just notes. Okay, I put these three new clips in, and I'm going to map them to just some notes on my keyboard. So I'm just playing mini notes. Let's play a C a D and an E. Okay? It's kind of a mess to do it that way, but you can. You can map notes if you really want to. It would be easier to map things like the pads in this controller, which are kind of notes. Let me delete these and try that. See, these are coming in as notes also, but they're a little bit easier to deal with. Now I can play it with my fingers. If you look around online, people doing, like, finger drumming stuff. It's amazing. I'm not that. But people can do amazing finger drumming stuff. Anyway, let's move on. Um Yeah. 172. What is the Push?: Okay, let's talk about the Ableton push for a minute. Now, this is kind of like a super controller. You may have seen these around. This is a controller that is made by Ableton. This is the only controller that they make, at least for now. This is designed to completely incorporate everything Live can do. The theory here is that you don't even need to look at your screen. You can do everything from right within push. So if you're saying, like, what is push, push is a controller. It is a controller. It is a control surface. It is also an instrument. These keys are set up to let us play things. That's what they're doing right now. And it gives us full control over everything we're looking at. If I, you know, look at something different, we're going to see different things depending on what I'm focused on. Here's some clips, different tracks. So it's a very versatile thing. Now, the push three, which is what we're looking at here, this exists in two different flavors. One, you have to be plugged into a computer that's running live. If you don't want to, you never have to look at Live. The idea is that you could pull this out on stage or use this while you're producing and never have to look at Live. You can do absolutely everything from within the push three controller. But there's a second version of it that actually has a computer in it, and then you don't need to be connected to live at all. You can just sit on a plane and use your push. It is completely not dependent on a computer. So this is the one that needs to be tethered. It needs to be plugged in. It's not a standalone version. So if you look on their website, there is a standalone version and I think what we call a tethered version, meaning it needs to be plugged in. It is. Now, the push three, this is different than the push one and push two, but the push three is also an audio interface. You can plug in. It's got a couple. Inputs and mic pres. So you can plug into it and use it that way. So it's really versatile. It's really cool. I would say you should get one if money is no object. They are not cheap, though. So we've got play controls, record, capture, automate quantize, everything that's on the screen you can get access to here and push. So let's talk real quick about setting it up and then showing you some of the stuff you can do with push. A 173. Setting Up the Push 3: Alright, I'm not intentionally hiding my face right now. It's just that I only have one good camera. And I want to focus on the push for this section. If you miss my face, don't worry. I'll come back. Okay, let's talk about setting up the push three. So this is just the same as everything else. It's actually quite even a bit easier. So this has a USB cable coming out of it. So we plug that into our computer, and then if you are using Live 12, you're pretty much good to go. It should see it automatically. But if we're not sure, we can go here and see it as inputs and outputs. So here's my push three, and I have most things turned on. I could turn it on for this if I wanted. Outputs. Use report. Sure. Why not? It's not going to hurt anything to turn more things on. Now, if you want to use it as an audio interface, you're going to go here to Audio and say audio input from push three right there. I don't want to do that, but you can do it. It's got, I think, two inputs. And now Ableton totally sees it. So everything I'm doing in live is updating on the push instantly. It's also generating this orange box here. This orange box is showing us what we're seeing on push in terms of the clip slot grid. Now, the push isn't set up as a clip slot grid. It looks like one, and I can go into a mode where it is just showing me the clip slot grid, and I can launch stuff. But right now it's actually set up as a keyboard. Mm. I'll lay on it. So if I was showing the clip slot grid, this is what I would be seeing. Let me show. Okay, now it's showing me the clip slot grid, and it's showing me just these four because I have just those four clips. So I could launch those clips here if I wanted. There's really nothing on them. If I wanted to launch these drums over here, I've got to slide this orange box over. And the way I'm going to do that is with this page button here, that's gonna let me kind of scroll over. And now I have those three drum hits. Cool. So I can go page back with this button right here and get back to where we were. And if I go up here, if I go up here, I can actually see my clip slot grid up here and what it's doing. Let's go page over. You can see my clip slot grid showing up just like it does on screen. And I can scroll around also using this giant wheel up here. So anyway, that's how you set up the Push three. Now let's go into a separate video, and we'll talk about navigating around down Push a little bit. Good 174. Navigating Push: Hmm. Okay, let's do a little bit of navigating around on the push, just to kind of see how it's oriented to be a lot like the Ableton screen. Now, I don't want to spend too much time on this because not everybody has a push and this isn't a class about the push. I have been asked 100 or 1,000 times to make a class just on the push, and I will probably do that soon. So if you want to know more about the push, I will be making a separate class on it. But for now, just a quick overview of knowing your way around to see what this thing can do. So if you go up here at the top, this is where I get my clip slot grid. Here, I can see individual samples And at this point, you know, I'm basically looking at a simpler here. I can scroll through the different ones and I can adjust parameters up here. So if I want to go to, for example, my Zoom settings, my crop settings, I can do that with this. Right, so I can kind of nudge it forward a little bit if I want. I can go to some warp settings and do all kinds of crazy stuff that are going to create some craziness. You know, I can almost edit this whole thing right on the screen. Anyway, if I go here, I'm going to get my mixer. So with this, I can control my mix quite a bit. I can also kind of see what's going on. If we play some music, we'll see it in its full glory here. Okay. So we can use this to mix. Paved over track. That's pretty cool. I can stop that with this play button down here. And then here I can go into my device settings. So on this particular track, I don't have any devices, but here we have all our macros for these different devices on each of these tracks. So you can see all my tracks listed here, and I can get access to anything I want up here. I can move around with these arrows here where it kind of changes what I'm seeing. If I go back to Session View, I can basically move our big orange box around more delicately this way than just using the page over stuff. But both of them will do it. Let me go back to the midi keyboard. You can really kind of see what I'm doing here. Okay, so I hit this button and we go to the My keyboard. Let me go to a less crazy instrument here. And Okay, well, that'll do. So what we have basically here is orange notes. In this case, it's gonna depend on the color of your track. But orange notes are the root, and all the white notes are other notes in that scale. So this is set up right now to be looking at an individual scale. So we're going to play all the notes in the key. So you can see how notes repeat. Like this note is also here. So notes repeat all the time. If we go this way, we're gonna go up a scale, go this way, we're gonna go up fifths, I think. Um, so it lends to some cool patterns. But this is basically a major chord. If we want to just go totally to chromatic mode, we can press the scale button here, and then in key or chromatic, we go to chromatic. Now what it's showing us, it's still showing us our scale, but it's showing us the notes in between, also. So now we're totally chromatic. Right. So that's kind of how it works. It's very different than, like, a keyboard, but I kind of like it. I've gotten used to it pretty fast. I go back to scale. Go back to inky. Yeah, a very different format, but I like it. It's fun. 175. Should you Buy a Push?: Okay, so should you go out and buy a push? Maybe. Um, if you like tech and gadgets and have unlimited money, yes, you should go out and buy a push. Um, do you need one to make awesome music? Nope. You super don't. Um, I have one. Sitting here. This is my third one. I've had to push one and push two, and I push three. And they're awesome. Do I use it on every track I make? No. Do I use it on most tracks? No. I really don't. The thing I use it for, to be totally honest with you, more than anything else, is I like to reach over without looking and just play some stuff. With that layout of keys, I'm so familiar with my computer with the traditional piano keyboard that sometimes I feel like I get stuck in a rut and reaching over and using this format is so different that sometimes it helps me come up with a new idea when I'm in a pitch. So I love it for that. But honestly, I don't use it a ton. I know people that do, though. I know people that use it for everything. So it's great. It's a really well designed thing, and it's awesome. You don't need one, but they're pretty cool. 176. What are Follow Actions?: Okay, up next, I want to look at something that is often used in live performance. I've also used it in production in kind of a weird way. It's mostly a performance tool. But it's something that if you set it up right, it can actually just write music for you. So what I thought we would do in this section is I've been explained how to do this, and in the process of doing it, I'm going to make an kind of like an ambient music generator, okay, where we hit play and just starts generating random music, ambient music. Random ambient music. Okay? So the thing that we're talking about here is follow actions. So I'm just going to grab an audio clip and put it here, and then just for the sake of cleanup, I'm going to turn off these mini tracks. You can do this with Mi tracks and audio tracks. Okay? This is a session view thing. I don't think there's really anything in arrangement view that's related to this, so this really only works in session we. So I'm going to put a clip in here. Now, if I go down here to my clip window, and I go to this launch setting, Okay? Here we see follow actions, and then a bunch of stuff. This is what we're focused on here. Now, what follow action means is. I can play I can click this button, this little play button to launch this clip. Okay? That's easy. We all know about that. But what follow actions do is they say, What would you like me to do when this clip is done playing, okay? So what I can do is I can say, Well, after this clip plays, play it again or play the previous clip. Play the next clip, play the first clip on this track, play the last clip on this track, play any clip. Play any clip other than the one you're just on, or jump to some other clip. So basically, I can say, randomly choose another clip and start playing. Now, there's some Now, there's a lot of uses for this, and one of them is to do, what we're going to do here, like, just to say start something playing and say, randomly go to other stuff and keep going forever. But there's also some much more practical things. Like, imagine you have a bunch of high hats, and they are slightly different and you want to kind of have it randomly pick which high hat it uses. So it's going to that fast. It can do that. It can do that just fine. And you'd set that up the same way that we're going to set this up. Okay? So in order to do this, first, we're going to need a bunch of clips. So let's find some just kind of ambient clips first. Okay. Don't love that. Don't love that. That's cool. I'm gonna throw that on here. This will be my just, like, ambient track. That's kind of cool. Maybe we'll put that on a different track. Soft tinnitus. I don't like that. That's kind of cool. Put that over there. That's cool. A couple more ambience. Cappering. Already did that one. Here's another good one. These atmost ones are really good for this. Let's just put a bunch of those in there. I like that. Okay, so now I've got, let's see, one, two, three, four, five. Let's maybe do one more. Sure, six. Okay. I got six clips there. So, let's fill this out. Let's add a little bit more. Let's see if we can add some percussion that's not too abrasive. That's kind of cool. Let's put that onto a new track. Now I kind of want some kind of cord. So let's turn that off. Let's go Cord. Um. That's kind of cool. Let's make this a harmony part. That's cool. I'm just kind of randomly picking stuff. That's cool. I'm not really paying attention to the harmonies and how they're working together. I think it'll be just fine. Okay. I need a couple more percussion things, maybe. Um, Let's actually just put that there. Sure. We'll put that there. Okay. That's enough. Okay, so now we've got something set up. We've got all these ambient things kind of just roaming around. Let's go to a new video and let's set up the follow actions. 177. Setting Up Follow Actions: Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. I could go here, click on this first one, and then I can go here and say, Okay, follow action. So what we have here is these two drop down menus, okay? And then this slider. So here's the easiest way to think about this is we're going to set this slider because this is a percentage is all we're really doing here. So I could say, I could leave it right there. 72%, 28%, okay? So 72% of the time, this is going to happen, and 28% of the time, this is going to happen. Okay? Pretty simple. So for this clip, I kind of want to say, 100% of the time, jump to a different clip, randomly choose a clip is what this one says. And then I can go to this linked or unlinked thing. Now, we've seen this before, right with envelopes. What this means is, if I say linked, that means that this follow action is going to trigger at the end of one time through this loop. I can change this to say four times or whatever I want. So four times through the loop, and then it's going to do this follow action. You go back to one time. But if I say unlinked, then we're just saying, at what point do we want it to trigger and we get a bars beats, and milliseconds read out here. So we can tell it at this amount of time, trigger the next thing. So we can say so now we have the launch setting so we can say how we want to launch it, trigger gate, toggle, or repeat. Triggers our usual one. That means, we're going to say go, and it's going to play all the way till the end. Git means we say go. And then when we stop saying go, it stops playing. Toggle means we're going to say go, and it's going to start playing. And if we say go again, it's going to stop playing. I'm not really sure what repeat is. I think it might just mean start over every time we say go. But for what we're doing here, it kind of needs to be trigger or else it's not really going to work. Okay, Legato is kind of a complicated idea, and I want to devote a separate video to that. So hold on to Legato for just a minute. We're gonna come back to it. Quantize means when can this launch, okay? Now, this is a tricky concept because Live is set up, as we've talked about a long time ago now, Live is set up so that when you launch a clip, it's going to wait for the next downbeat to launch, right? So that is defined right here. Okay? This is our global quantization amount, and it says 1 bar, meaning it's only going to launch things on the downbeat of a bar. Now, that might be okay. That might work for us well here. It also might not. So what we could say is, so the setting here is global, which means use that, okay? But I can change it. I could just say none and just say, Launch whenever you're ready. Whenever you get the follow action, launch it, okay? Let's do that, and I can adjust the velocity of it if I want to, but I'm going to leave it alone for now. Okay, now you see this play button has a little extra flair to it because that's telling us that there's a follow action on it. So let's try it. We've set this up. So I'm going to hit play, and then we're gonna see what happens when it gets to the end of this clip. See, it's got already arm another one. So this one's waiting. Did it come to the end? Cool. And jumps to it. Great. Okay, so at the end of this one, though, it's gonna stop because this one doesn't have a follow action. So what we need to do is set up follow actions on all of these, okay? And there's a quick and easy way to do it. Let's go to a new video, and let's do that. And let's also put a little envelope fade at the beginning and end of each of these. 178. Grouping Follow Actions: Okay, so first, just in order to make this to sound a little bit better and so nothing really jumps to it, I'm going to go to this first clip. I'm going to go to envelopes, track volume, and I'm just going to add a nice, gentle kind of fade in and fade out to this. Okay, so now Now we have a nice little fade in. I'm going to do that for all of these real quick. This one already has one. Not so much a fade out. Let's go to the next one. Fade in. This looks pretty good. Yo. Fade in. Fade out. You don't have to do this fade in, fade out step. I just like One more on our ambience stuff. Alright. I could do the same thing for the rest of these, but maybe I should. That one doesn't need one. This one kind of does. Actually, that's a guitar thing. Maybe that's okay. Let's leave the rest of them for now. Okay. So now, if I want to put a follow action on all of these, here's what I can do. Can select all of these clips. So I just clicked on the first one and then Shift Click on the last one. Now you'll see here, I'm group editing stuff. You can do this with almost anything, but it's a little dangerous, so you got to kind of pay attention to what you're doing. This kind of striped thing here is telling me that you're editing a whole bunch of stuff. It says six clips. I'm editing six clips at once. So I can change the volume, the warp settings of all of these clips all at once. That might be dangerous. So anything that's, like, all on or all off means it's the same in all of these clips. But if it does this kind of thing, that means that's on in some and not on in others. So be careful. So the follow action is on on some and not on in others. It's on on the first one. So I'm just going to click it and that's going to turn it on for all of them. I'm going to say jump to another one 100% of the time. Linked one time through. Trigger, quantize. None. Velocity is the same. I don't need to do legato here. Well, we'll get to legato in just a minute. Okay. Now, let's do the same thing with these, all the rest of these. I could have done them all at once, but other action 100% of the time linked quantas none. Las. Okay. So now I just need to start one clip per track, and it's going to just start playing music. So I'm going to launch this first scene, and then we're off to the races. Do Okay, pretty fun, right? Alright, let's talk about this legato mode, and then I'm going to give you this session. So let's talk about legato. 179. Legato Mode: Okay, let's look at these two clips. Actually, these three clips, really. Um, when we talk about legato, in a musical setting, what we talk about if we're going to play something legato, we've got we might have like two notes, right? And if I write that for a violinist and I say, Play that legato, what I'm saying is let the first note really kind of drift into the second note, like combine with the second note. And that's kind of what we're doing with legato here. So if I say legato, what that means is that I'm going to play this clip, and let's say it plays all the way to right here. And then a follow action is triggered, okay? So it switches to another clip. Now, without legato mode, what that means is that next clip is going to be triggered, and then it's going to start playing from its beginning, okay? So if this Kalimba clip is triggered next, it's going to start playing from the beginning of it, right? If Legato mode is on, and I'm right here and a new clip is triggered, what that means is, go to the same spot in the next clip and take over. So, this one's going to play to here, and then we trigger our follow action. And then, you know, we're at 1.3. So in this one, we're going to jump right to here 1.3. This clip is much longer, but but we're still going to jump to the same spot and take over. Now, the reason you might want to do that is if you're doing this follow action thing like with a beat, right? And you want to tell it to switch on every quarter note, like, this is actually kind of a cool trick. Let's do it super fast. Come on. You drum. Okay, let's see this on a new track. Sure. Sure. Okay. We'll do it on these three. So if I tell these to switch every quarter note, then without legato, then you're going to just hear beat one on these loops every quarter note. You're going to hear beat one, and then it's going to trigger a new clip, and you're going to hear beat one again. Then it's going to trigger a new clip and you're going to hear beat one. But if it's on Legato mode, you're going to hear beats one, two, three, and four, one, two, three, and four, jumping around between different clips. Let me demonstrate. So here, follow action. Let's go let's just go next. So they go in order. No action. But trigger every quarter note, Legato. Now, let's do it without Legato first. Oops, I need to go unlinked here and say one beat. Trigger every one beat, okay? Okay. So now we're just hearing beat one. Okay? But if we say gato for all of these, then we're going to hear all the beats. See, so that's what legado mode can do. It's gonna pick up where the last one left off and keep going. So if you're doing it with beats, it can be a really cool kind of rhythm generator. But let's turn that off. Okay, so now we've got our just beautiful little ambient music generator. So if you want to launch this, just launch one clip in each thing. You can do it just by launching the scene over here, or you could just kind of randomly pick things to launch in different ways, and now it's just gonna play. Let's just listen to this ambience, beautiful thing for a minute. 180. Converting to Session View: Okay, so what we're gonna do here in this section is we're going to try to set up a track for performance. So we're gonna get it all configured so that we could perform with it live if we wanted to. Now, typically, we do that with Session View. So our first job is that if we're not already working in Session View, is to get it over to Session View. So, I have a track here that I've been working on. This is a brand new track. It's early in the stages of it. Don't judge me. It sounds a little bit like this. Cool. So first thing we need to do is get it over to Session View. Now, there's a few ways we can do this. Really three that are actually, there's kind of a lot, but three are the most practical. And the third one that I'm going to tell you is probably the easiest. So the first way would be to just bounce out our stems. That means take this whole track, silence and all, export it as one audio file with this in it also and then do the same thing with this track. And then this track, and then this track basically makes stems of our track. Then we could import those to Session View. And if we lined them all up actually across and then hit Play, it would sound the same. That would give us a little control over them. However, not much. If you wanted to do that, the fastest way to do it would be to go to file export audio and video. And then in this menu where it says, rendered Track, select all individual tracks. That'll make you one audio file for each audio track. But that's kind of the long way around, and it's not great. So option two, getting a little bit better, we could select all click and drag. And while we're holding on to this, hit the tab key, and we could drop this right into our session view. And it looks like that, okay? Now, this works. This gives us access to all our clips, and we could click through and launch them. But if we really wanted this to look like a song and feel like a song, we got a lot of cleanup to do, right? We got to get rid of a lot of this extra stuff. We got to organize things and arrange them in a way that's going to be practical to perform them. So this works great, but it's not my favorite way. So I'm actually going to undo that. Okay. Let me go back over. Our third way is this called capture and Insert scene. This is kind of a newer way. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start playing this, and every time I get to a new section, I'm going to press Shift Command I. If you're on a PC, you can see that right here, whatever your key command is here. Capture and insert scene. Okay. So every time I hit that, it's going to basically make a scene in Session View. Now, when it does it, I'm going to have to hit it, and then I'm going to go hit the back to arrangement button because it's going to be thinking we're in session view for a second. And then I'm going to do it again, okay? So I'll just kind of talk through it. So let's go to this intro, and I'm going to hit Play, and then we'll just do it. Here we go. Let's go all the way to begin. Okay. So this seems like a good spot. Command Shift, I. Okay? And now I'm going to hit that back to Arrangement View. Let's go up to here, right? Command Shift, I. Back to Arrangement view. This section. Alright. Go here. Let's get to this next section and I'll do one. Hip. Okay, so I did it five times, four times. I'm gonna hit tab and go over to Session View. Okay? Here's what we got. So it grabbed all of the clips that were playing when I hit that. So now I've got a little bit easier to manage thing. So if I launch this scene, Next scene. Now my thing. Okay? Here's our keys. So it kind of arranged them upside down, which is interesting. But while I still have some cleanup to do to get this really in a way that is easy for me to see and deal with in a performance setting, I don't have very much, not as much as any other option. So I'm in pretty good shape. So that's my favorite one. Capture and insert scene. Command Command Shift I if you're into key commands. Otherwise, you can go to create and then capture and insert scene. Okay, next, let's clean this up and get it a little bit more ready to perform. 181. Setting up Scenes: Okay. So next, we have some creative decisions to make because I don't want to just play this tune, right? Like, if I just hit play on the whole tune, then there's no point in doing any of this. I might as well leave it in an arrangement with you, right? So I want to make this kind of more fluid. Like, I can do a lot of stuff. So let's go here. Let's select all this stuff, and I'm just going to pull it down to give me some room at the top, okay? Now, I think pretty sure I want to start with this. Maybe I want to leave that going. This can come in next. And, you know, I'm just kind of trying to put together sort of an arrangement. I don't even need to do it this much. But I want it so that worst case scenario, I can just launch scenes over here, right? So I can go over here and I can press Command R to rename. I can say this is intro. Maybe this is intro two versus Bridge, Command R, chorus, et cetera, okay? So now I can launch the intro stuff. That's this thing. At some point, we're going to move on intro two, which I think is the same. So I can probably get rid of one of those. Then make it to verse, Okay. Now, let's say I want to go off script. Take these out. As you minor in. Take this in. Yeah. Team back. Triggered a weird core progression. Okay. Great. So now I basically have it. So if this is what you want to do with your music, what you need to do next is arrange your clips so that they're allowing you to do everything you need to do. Let yourself kind of be free of the original track and, you know, experiment, get a little different with what you're putting together. Okay, so we've got our scenes set up now. Let's add a little bit more to this just to make it flow a little bit better. So let's talk about some transitions and things we can do. 182. Creating transition scenes: Okay, now, if this is what you're building, it might very well be that you have not just one track here, but a whole bunch of tracks. You want to build a whole set, a whole performance, right? So let's pretend we have two tracks here. Okay? So I'm just going to copy our first track into our second track. So let's set up some transition stuff, right? You might not need it, because if you have two good tracks, you could always kind of just leave the drums going on one and start the other one and kind of just piecemeal your way to the next one. But if you want to add more material, o Let's do this. I'm going to add another track here, and I'm just going to let's put this in the transition right here. Let's just put it here and then we'll so it starts while this last scene is still playing. Right? So we're gonna pull it down to just that. Then we'll start creeping in some of these other things. Are p there. Okay, let's take away those drums. Now we're back in to the next. Right? So all I did there was add another drum clip that could kind of serve as the glue to get us to the next track, right? So you can do that all day long. Now, there's also a ton of effects you can use that you could just kind of crank them up and then let the ambience drift away for a second and then drop down into this into the next track if you're doing multiple tracks. So we'll talk about that in the next section when we get into performance effects. So let's go to that right now. And 183. Mappings and Controllers for Performance: Okay, let's circle back around to performance controllers. And we've talked about this earlier in this class. But now that we have a set figured out, or at least the start of one, let's look at how these can be used. Okay? So first, I'm going to turn my push on so we can kind of see how that maps onto our session. Okay, as soon as that comes online, you're going to see that box around parts of the clip slot grid here. Okay? There it is. So we have this orange kind of box. So that shows us what we can see on the push when it comes to launching clips. I can navigate around using the arrow keys, but that's what that would be. If I was going to perform this with the push, I would go into the mode on the push that shows me the clip slot grid, and then I could just launch clips, you know, all day long. It'd be great. It is great. If I want to use something outside of this orange box, I can move the box around. Okay, so in this case, I don't need to do any mapping, like what we talked about before, because the push is set up just to see it and map to it. If I wanted to map a different controller, I could say let's go back to my remote zero SL, this one. And let's map that. Now, I only have like eight buttons on this. I don't have a whole clip slot grid, but I could map those to launching my scenes. So in order to do that, I'm going to go Command M, click the first scene and hit a button, second scene, button, third scene, button, fourth, go down that way, even if they're not labeled. That's it. Okay, I turn off midi mapping. Now I can launch those scenes using my controller here. So it's these Sears, there we go. It's hard to navigate this camera. Okay, so let's launch the first scene. And let's jump to the third scene. Chip all the way to nine. Oop, that one's silent. Let's get that new step going in. Woo Back. Okay? That's great. Now, I don't have enough buttons to cue individual clips here with this particular controller. But if I did have a bunch of buttons, I could do it. So look for that when you're shopping for a controller for performance if you are. Now, once we get to this point in our Ableton adventure, we're going to unlock a couple little secret things, okay? There's a couple of things that don't appear on the screen, but only in certain situations, they do. Okay? So let's go to a new video and talk about those. 184. Secret Mapping Controls: Alright, so sometimes it happens when you're recording hundreds of videos that something goes wrong, and that's the case here. So, I'm done filming this class, and to make a long story short, this video that you're about to watch didn't capture any audio. My mic wasn't working or something, so I'm just going to re record it. And the only reason I'm telling you that is because I have to go back and recreate this. This track is fine as it is, but I don't have this all set up. So that's why there's nothing here, because I'm going back and doing it that way. Luckily, when this happens, usually, I can do it without anyone knowing because I wear the same clothes every day. But in this case, you're going to know. Happens kind of a lot, actually. Anyway, so here's the thing that we're going to talk about these secret hidden controls. Now, When I was walking around and showing you the mini devices that I have laying around here, controllers and stuff, I showed you this foot pedal, right? Reason that I use a foot pedal, my old performance rig, when I used to perform a lot, this is really weird, but I performed on these, this set of gloves. So I had gloves, and they were mapped to all different sounds. It's kind of like the thing Imogen Heap is doing, if you're familiar with her, although I was doing it ten years before her, not that it matters, but I'm just saying. But in order to interact with my computer, I needed to use foot pedals because I couldn't touch anything. It would just trigger a bunch of sounds. So I relied heavily on these secret things that are happening. If I go into Mi mapping mode, okay? We're familiar with this now. I can map anything to do something, but I also get a couple new things. I get these things down here, and I get a big play button down here, right? So that's what this is all about. What these are going to do is let you advance up or down, okay? So I'm going to map a button on my Mi keyboard. To this down arrow, okay? So, what that means is that the highlighted scene here, I can scroll through it by mapping, okay? So I have a foot pedal that is lined up to that, two of them, actually, one that goes up and one that goes down. And it lets me navigate around like this, right? I can also, if I go back to Mi mapping, map this play button and this stop button. And what that's going to do is it's going to launch the scene that I'm on. So I can say, Okay, I want to launch the fifth scene. I go tap tap tap tap, and then hit the play button, this one to launch that scene. I could also use any of these to launch just the clip on whatever is highlighted, right? So I could go if I wanted to launch that Keys clip that's there, I could go up up and then map this to something to launch it from there. These little things only exist when you're mapping. If I go out of mapping mode, they go away. They're hidden. So they're super valuable, not just for foot pedals, but if you're trying to map anything to a controller with, like, a finite number of buttons, which all controllers have so keep an eye out for those. If you're trying to do an elaborate performance setup, these can be really valuable. Now, there's another thing that's kind of hidden away here, and that is a good old fashioned cross fader. If you've seen someone DJ before, like with two records, they had a cross fader to go back and forth between the two records. We have a cross fader, too, but it's hidden away. So let's cue that up and do some fun stuff with it. 185. Crossfader Setup: Okay, so if you've ever seen a DJ perform live and they maybe use two records, they have a mixer in the middle, and what they can do is they can cue up the one record, and they have something called a Crossfader which is a fader that moves left and right. So while you're hearing this record, they move the fader all the way over here, get to where you can see me. And then if they switch to this record, they move the fader over there, right? So that's the one you're hearing is the one where the crossfader goes. Now, you can do the same thing here. First, we have to find that cross fader. It does exist. It's moved in Live 12. It is not where it used to be. So in Live 12, we're going to go down here. We hit this button to show the mixer, right? But if we hit the little arrow to the right of it, there's a couple other things we can show or hide. And one of them is the cross fader. So when we enable the cross fader, we get two things. First, we get the actual cross fader, which is over here on our master track, and then we get these ABs all over the place. You may have guessed how this works already. So what you can do is you can say, this is A. And let's say, this is B. I'm just going to kind of arbitrarily split this. This isn't really how I would do it. I'll show you how I'd really do it in a minute. Okay? And let's put this as B. Okay? So now A is my record on the left, and B is my record on the right. So with my cross fader, let's just launch a big scene. Let's launch like. Here's A. Here's B, right? Okay. Right? So you can do some cool things with that. You could set up some tracks that are B and some that are A. One thing that would be fun to do in this case is maybe leave everything A except for this extra drum layer that we added, and that's B. Okay? So now, let's just get that going all the way. Now we're gonna hear our full track. Everything's cool. Now let's pull in a little bit of that extra B. Maybe let's go all the extra beat. Right? Let's launch our next track. Et's pull it back in. Right? So that's a great performance tool. That can be a perfect transition. Just keep this drum beat going the whole thing. And then when you need it when you need a transition, just pull your cross fader over and then pull it back. There's another way we can use the cross fader that is a really popular trick that a lot of people do, and it's a super helpful trick. Let me show you that. Let's go to a new video. 186. Setting Up Effects for Performance: All right, check this out. So we're going to incorporate a whole bunch of things that we know. First, we're going to use an audio effect Rack. So let's go to audio effect Racks. Let's go down here and let's find there's kind of a famous one that's used for this. And it is called Fade to Gray. Okay? Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to put Fade to Gray on a bus here. Okay? I'm going to call everything A. I'm going to turn this fade Degree up all the way and this already has a reverb on it. That's cool. We'll roll with it. I'm going to make this effect B. Let's make both effects B, even though I'm not really using B. Okay? Now I need to send a whole bunch of all my tracks to A or to my effect bus, A. Oh. Okay. So now let's review what's happening here. I've sent a whole bunch of that signal from all of my tracks over to this bus, okay? On this bus is this giant fade to gray effect, okay? This is going to basically take in all of the sound that's happening and turn it into a wash of noise that we can use as a transition. Okay. And then we assigned that effect to the B deck with our cross fader. So here's what that's gonna let me do. Okay. We're good. Cruising. Let's add our second drum beat in. Alright, fun. Okay, here comes that transition. And I'm just gonna pull this my cross fader over. There it is. I'm gonna go to the next track, and I'm gonna pull it back down. Okay, I'm not getting as much out of that fade to gre as I want right now. But it kind of doesn't matter. You can just build up huge effects. Echo fuzz. Let's just make something crazy here. Some huge effects. All right. That sounds good. All right. Now let's do that transition again. And then into the next tune, pull it back in. And then if we want to be even more extra, let's map that cross fade. Cross fader. So I'm going to go to midi mapping. I'm going to hit that. I'm going to put it on this fader. I'm gonna get out of mini Mapping. Now I've got that controller right on here. So if I want to do a big swoosh of effects, just. There it is. And then out, right? Really simple. So, you don't have to use a Crossfader that way, but it's a good trick. 187. DJ Performance Template: Okay, now, if you're really interested in getting into DJing, let me give you a little bit of a shortcut here. So I'm going to make a new set, command, and don't say this. Okay, now I'm going to go over here to my templates, and you should have a DJ set template that comes with Live 12 by default. So I'm just going to double click on that. And here we go. We've got all kinds of fun stuff happening here. So there's some content that's been sent over to Session View. So it has some kind of, like, placeholder content here. I don't think there's really anything here. And this placeholder content might even be something that I put in here. So don't worry about that. But check out the effects you have set up. We already have four sends created over here, delay, echo, filter delay and reverb. You've got some scenes created. You probably have your cross fader setup. Yep, you have an A and B and your cross fader. So you're more interested in DJing, check out this deja set template, and it'll help you get started. And again, yours might not look like mine. I think I've made some adjustments to mine that are not in the default. 188. The Mixing and Mastering Process: All right. Up next, we're going to talk about mixing and mastering. Now, couple of caveats here. I have two big huge classes on mixing and mastering. This is a really big topic, there's an art to this. It takes practice to get good at. So we're going to do two things in this section. One is that I'm going to show you the tools and techniques of mixing and mastering in Ableton Live 12 because that's what this class is about. And two is I'm going to show you some methods and strategies for mixing and mastering. But what you're about to see in this next section is not like a super comprehensive tutorial on how to mix and master. This is going to get you in the ballpark, and it's going to teach you what you need to do, but it takes a lot of practice, and there's a lot more that goes into this. So, um Again, I have these huge classes on these two topics that I would encourage you to check out if you really want to get good at this. So that being said, let's go into how mixing and mastering works. So first, let's define what these two things are, okay? First, mixing. That means we're going to go through our session. We're going to get all our levels just right. We're going to make sure nothing's popping out, and we're going to get it sounding exactly how we want, okay? There's more to it than just adjusting levels, but that's a big part. So mastering is probably the more misunderstood one of the two. So in mastering, what we're typically doing is our mix is done, okay? We're happy with our mix, and we bounce it down to a stereo audio file, okay? And that is what gets mastered. If there's something wrong with the mix, you have to go back a step. The mastering is just working on that stereo file, okay? And it's really just to add some extra shine to it and make sure it sounds good in as many places as possible. Okay, so we'll get to that when we get to mastering. So first, let's start off with mixing, though. So here we go. 189. Session Organization: Okay, so the track that we're going to mix and master, this is just a quick little thing I threw together just for the purpose of having a track. It is, you know, still me and I'm still in my weird little Synth Wave bubble. So I just really love Synth Wave. So it's kind of a dark cyberpunk thing with, like, a little bit of trip hop mixed in. Basically. Okay, you get the point. So we're going to use this as our example track, right? So first things first, we need to organize our session a little bit, and it's going to help us just do a better job at mixing it. So, um, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of any tracks I'm not using. We see this track here. Is there anything on it? There is, so that's good. So I don't have any empty tracks. If you do, it's fine. It's very common for me to have a handful of tracks that, you know, I made, I put something on them, and then I decided I didn't want it. So I've got these empty tracks just floating around. If you have any of those, delete them. Get rid of them. We don't have those. Okay, now let's organize our track order a little bit. So here's our bass. This is harmony things. This is a pad, so also harmony things. Here's our bells. These are also bells, and here's our drums. So these are ordered and pretty good in a pretty good way, I might group a few things together. I would definitely do this in a bigger session. I don't really need to do it because this is kind of a small session, but I'm gonna do it anyway, just for example. So both of these are harmony things. Wow. Okay. So I'm going to group those together. I'm going to click both of them, and I'm going to Command G, and I'm just going to make a group. And I'm going to rename it Harmony, okay? I'm just gonna tuck that away for a second. So now we've got Harmony stuff there. Base is okay. This is pad. I could put this pad into Harmony also. It's not a bad idea. Let's do it. Okay. So now Harmony has those three things in there. Let's make a bells group, Command G, bells. Okay? And then we'll leave our drums by themselves. Next, I should label each individual track, to what it is. So this is bass harmony. Let's call this Let's call this dark harmony, and this one's a bit brighter. Okay. I just want a way to know what is what? So I'm gonna call this brighter harmony or just bright harmony. So I have dark and bright. Here I have this pad. Sounds like this. Okay, this is bells. So one of these is really affected. Yeah. And this one's not. Okay, so I'm gonna put this one on top. Bells. Affect bells. Alright? And then drums. Cool. So now I go if I pull up my mixer, this is gonna be a little bit easier to deal with now. Okay, we've got bass, harmony, bells, drums. Sweet. Nice and organized. Okay? I don't think I'm using these returns at all, but I have so I normally might smush these and just make them really small. But I don't need the screen real estate. It's fine. But maybe I'll do it anyway, just for fun. Okay? Now I want the mixer nice and big. Cool. Alright, let's move on to the next step. 190. "Printing" MIDI Tracks: Alright. The next step in the process, we're going to print mini tracks. Now, this is not something that you have to do. This is not something that everybody does. This is something that I've gotten the habit of doing. So I'm going to show it to you. If you decide you don't want to do this, it's probably fine. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my mini tracks like this one, and I'm going to render them as audio. Now, the reason is audio tracks are a lot more permanent and easier to deal with for me than mini tracks. When a synthesizer makes a sound, there's a lot of variables that go into it. And at this point, I really want to eliminate variables, right? I want to make sure I know exactly what's going to happen and exactly what it's sounding like. And so, making these into audio tracks just makes them permanent, basically. There's a few different ways I can do it, but the easiest way is just to go control click on the track, and then we're going to go to freeze and flatten Track. It's going to take a second, and then it's basically just going to turn this into an audio track. Cool. Now that we've done that, now that we have an audio track, there's no going back. What we should do is immediately save this as so we're going to go to Save Live set as. And this was called the brilliant title of Track five. We're going to call this Track five mix or mix down, whatever you want. So here's Track five mix Because if I want to go back and change any of these notes, I can't really do it now, right? So save this as something new. Don't overwrite the version you had before. Okay? I'm going to do the same thing on this track. We use and flatten. And on this track, And that's it. That's all my mini tracks. So now I've got a whole bunch of audio. Again, you don't have to do this step. It's just something I've gotten the habit of doing, and it's made my life a little bit easier. Okay. Onto the next step. 191. EQ All The Things!: Okay, up next, we're going to IQ all the things. If you don't know this reference I'm making, I all the things. There was, like, this Internet meme a long time ago. An early Internet meme. I think it was clean all the things. And it was this kind of cartoon person, like, holding up a broom and screaming, clean all the things. Anyway, your parents know it. EQ all the things. So we're gonna put a whole bunch of EQs on this, and we're going to do two things with each one of those EQs. The first thing is we are going to put a high pass filter. So basically, we're just going to roll off the low low stuff, the stuff that no one's gonna hear, and it's just going to cause problems for us. Gonna roll off the low end. And the second thing we're going to do see if we can find any little frequencies that we want to boost or cut if there's any problematic stuff or if we just get a better tone. So let's start with let's go from the bottom up. Let's start with our drums here. Okay? So here's our drums. For all of these, I am going to use the EQ eight. Okay, so I'm basically going to put an EQ eight on everything. Okay. And I'm going to make this EQ nice and big so I can see it. I'm not that big. And what we're gonna do is I'm going to turn off all three. I'm just going to do this first one. We're going to do a high pass, more aggressive high pass. I'm going to put this right around like 30 hertz or so. That's pretty low. Now, this is drums, so we might let it go a little bit lower, but let's just hear it. Let's just loop right here in solo. The reason we're rolling off the low end, let's turn it off for a second. Okay, we're not really hearing it. We see the real meat of this kick right in this area. So we're not really doing anything to disturb it here. We're just trying to make sure there's no, mud down in the low end that's gonna just make it hard to mix. So we're just going to cut off all the low stuff. Now, if I want to try to sweeten this, I might make another point. I'm gonna tighten that up a little bit with the cue. See if there's anything. Like, do I want to get a little more thump out of this? That? I don't think I need it. That little wood sound there kind of nice. Kind of add in just a touch of that. But okay, that one sounds pretty good. Let's go to our next track, which is our affected bells. Okay, same thing here. Let's look where it is. And then let's turn off these. And I'm just going to go up to where I see that signal and just brush my filter right up against it right around there, so that I'm sure nothing is coming through down here. That's pretty good. Let's leave that one there. Let's go to our unaffected bells. Okay? This is the same kind of pattern. We do have some stuff down here, but I don't really need it. Let's explore this little node. Now, I don't want to boost right here where the main signal is because that's really just going to make it louder. I'm really looking for any frequency that's not represented well that I might like. Yeah, I don't think I need anything here. This sounds pretty good. Alright, I'm gonna move forward and do the rest of these. Maybe I'll do it in fast forward. Um, so I'm not going to do this group. I don't need to do this group because I've done these two individually. So I'm gonna skip over that one and go to this pad. Okay, this pad isn't happening here. There. Alright. So we can see a nice Let's see, I've got there is a lot happening down here. Right? But cleaning that stuff up is probably gonna help me. That's gonna make everything a lot easier. Go on to the next one. It's bright Harmony. Okay, let's go back to where we coming on. Coming. Coming. Coming. Coming on. Is see what I like. I kinda like that. So I'm gonna stick with that. Let's go on to our dart Carmony. You okay with that. Alright. And last, our base. Alright. This one's a little trickier. That's why I did that actually after some order. So our fundamental is here. Okay? So I want to do the same thing. You hear that? That's really where that is. But I do want to chop it out right about 30, if I need that. Pretty good. Alright. I just want to make sure I don't take away any of the hoof from this base. But if there's anything cluttering up down here, I want to get rid of it. And I think we've done that. Alright. That's fun. Alright, I think we got it. So we've cleaned up the low end. We've added a little sparkle to a couple other spots, and we've got this in pretty good shape. Okay, now let's start thinking about dynamics. 192. Dynamics: Okay, the next thing we need to do is a little bit of dynamic work, okay? So we're going to do a similar thing where we're going to throw a compressor onto most of our tracks, maybe all of them. Let's start with the drums. So if you remember, and I'm sure you do what a compressor does, how it works, it's going to smoosh our dynamic range, right? Now, the reason we want to do this when we're mixing is the smaller the dynamic range, the louder everything can get, okay? And if you want to learn about something crazy and wild, Google the loudness wars, okay? That'll tell you everything you need to know about this phenomenon. Basically, we want our music to be typically, maybe not always, but typically we want our music to be like kind of loud. We want it to be as loud as it can be in the mix. And this is going to help. Now, we don't want to just flatten out all of our dynamics, right? That's going to make a very boring mix. But we do want to taper it down a little bit and kind of control it. So here's a quick way to know whether or not you need to add a little compression. When we look at the meters in Ableton, you're going to see kind of two things at once. I think we talked about this earlier, but you're gonna see Let's go to our drums here. Okay? You're gonna see these little red lines, you're also going to see the green or yellow. See where that line is sitting. The distance between that green or yellow one and those stuck ones, those red ones that sit at the top, is the dynamic range. Okay? The space between those is the dynamic range. What you're actually looking at is those red ones that stick at the top. Those are your peaks, and the more moving one is your RMS filter, which is kind of like an average of all the sound So what we want to do is take those peaks down a little bit so that the distance between that and the RMS value is not as much. And a compressor is designed to do exactly that. Okay. So this one has kind of a lot of dynamic range, 'cause there's times where it goes down to just that high hat right there, and then it's really quiet. Then we have that snare hit, it's really loud. Okay? So let's take this down to give it a good amount of compression. So our ratio is at four. That's probably good for this. Okay. Another thing I want to do here is I want to set this to peak so that I'm really compressing the peaks. Okay? And then I want to turn makeup on. Okay. So my distance is better. It's not nothing. If I really wanted to go at it, I'd do that. But I don't want to do that. So I don't need too much. Right around there is good. Drums are gonna have a lot of variety in their dynamic range. Let's try these bells, which should be a lot less. Okay? So there's our peaks. So there's really not much needed here, but let's give it a little bit. Got a peak, makeup our threshold down a little bit. Just a touch. And now we have more volume here, but we can pull that down a lot easier. Okay, let's move on. Okay, that's pretty good. Here's our group, so we don't need to do that one. Let's go to this pad. We got to go to a spot where the pad is happening. B up here. All right, there's really not much here, but let's add a little bit just to help us control it anyway. Let's clipping a little bit. All right. That's good. Let's go on to this bright harmony. Let's get to a spot where we're hearing that. Where is that other one? That dark Harmony. Where is you? Alright, let's get to this base. Take a look. This actually is very flat dynamically, it's literally doing the same thing for the whole track. So you don't really need anything but for good measure. Flat out yes much. All right. All right. Now that we've got our tracks tamed a little bit, I always think of this step as these two steps, the EQ and the compressor as, like, taming the tracks, getting them less all over the place. So let's move on to kind of sweetening them up and doing some stereo stuff. 193. Mid-Side EQ and Imaging: Okay, up next, we want to focus on the stereo feel of it. We also call it a stereo imaging. That is to say, how much this track fills out the stereo field, right? That's the space in between our speakers and our speakers, and sometimes even past our speakers. So we're not going to do this by just going and randomly panning stuff, okay? We could, you know, we could say, you know, we want this pad a little bit left, this pad, a little bit right. Leave this one center. These affected bells, a little over here. We could do it that way. And I actually might kind of like that for these two pads. That's okay. But what we're really going to do is what's called mid side EQ. So what this is going to do is we're going to look at, um how much of our signal is out on the sides and how much is up in the middle. Okay? Let me, head on here. So mid means middle, middle, and sides, okay? So what we want to do is we want to go into each individual track and try to add some more sound to either the mid or the side. So which is which the conventional thinking on this is, let's divide all of our instruments into two categories. One is lead and second is supporting, okay? What is the lead thing in this track? Common lead would be like, your vocals, if there's a solo instrument, anything like that. This case, I'm going to say it's probably the drums and the bass that are kind of the lead thing. Okay? So the lead thing, I'm going to focus mostly on the mid and the other things I'm going to let have a little bit more motion on the sit. So let's go to our drums here. I'm not going to change this EQ. I'm going to add another one. Wait, here's another EQ. Okay? So this one, I'm going to put into mid side. And this is the drum. So we want a lot of this in the mid. So what you can do is just give it a little push. Okay? So actually, this is the bass. Sorry. Uh, but let's push a little bit on the mids and maybe take a little bit away on the sides. Your real money for this is the middle, the mid range. The mid range is where we can really hear the stereo affect the best. Not so much in the low stuff and not so much in the highest. Okay, so there's not a ton I can do here because it's so low. But let's go to this. And in fact, in this case, I could do this right on this group, right? Right here. Instead of doing it individually, I'm basically going to do the same thing for all three of these. So I'm going to do it right on the group. So I'm going to put an EQ eight on this group. I'm going to go to mid side. And these pads are more supporting, so I'm gonna give them a little extra jis inside. Oh, you can really feel like Alright. These bells? Seriously. Bells. Go to mid side, pull the middle down, boost our sides. Okay? That's really gonna start to feel really warm. Our drums were pretty much gonna leave alone here. We already have some stuff happening, pulled out the sides, added the mids. Cool. That's great. So if you want to do even more, you can do a lot more than this. You could put some kind of stereoeffect right before this EQ. We have a lot of different things that could be used as a stereo effect. This LFO, for sure, multi band dynamics could be used to increase the stereo effect. Auto pan, auto filter, those types of things, Autopan especially. So if you want more stereo effect, you can totally do that. All right, next, we're going to move on to metering. So let's just take a look or sorry, a listen to what we've done so far. A lot of what we've done has really messed up what our mix was, right? Because we did compression. We added a lot of stuff. Let's see if it still feels like our track just out of curiosity. Oops, let's turn our soloing off. What is solo? Alright. So here we are. So what I hear is, I mean, that bass is fine. The drums are fine. Here's that my synths are too loud, and that bell is too quiet. So, it's time to get into adjusting levels. Let's go to a new video for that one. 194. Gain Staging: Okay, let's start adjusting our volumes to get our tracks sounding really good. Now, the first thing we want to do here is look at our mixer. We want to what we're going to be doing is adjusting some of these volumes, and what we want to do is be able to take them up or down just a little bit and not worry about anything else. So if you have automation on any of these faders, right? Like, you drew some automation here, and you did that kind of a thing, now you can see the red dot here and you can see that there's automation there. That's fine. We don't want to deal with that, but it's cool that it's there. Here's what we're going to do to get around that. We're going to leave your automation there because there's a reason you did it, it sounds good, right? But for the purposes of mixing, what we're basically going to do is take that fader, put it inside of another fader so that we can adjust the whole fader. And it's very easy to do. We're just going to click on it, Command G. We're going to make a one track group. Okay? This was base. This is now base. Rename this base, close it up. There you go. You have a single fader that is for base. Your automation inside here, this is still going to happen. We're going to leave it doing what it's doing. But we're going to have a single fader that is not automated that we can use for our base now. Cool. So do that on any track that has automation on the volume. Okay. The next thing we're gonna do is called gain staging, okay? What that means is that we're going to set the gain of one thing and then start matching everything around it. So, what should you start with? You can start with anything, but I would recommend starting with something that's going to have the most power. If you're making dance music, start with drums or even better the kick. Most of the time, the drums are a pretty good place to start, okay? So what I'm going to do is turn everything off here. I'm not going to solo it because I want to slowly start adding these in. So now we're just going to have drums, okay? Now, here's what we're going to do for our first stage. There's a ton of different ways you can do this. If somebody tells you different, they're probably right. This is just the way I do it. This is the way I was taught to do it. It works well for me. Okay, go over to your mains, make sure that is sitting right at zero, okay? We're going to leave that right there, okay? Now, this box up here is our peak, okay? It shows where our highest volume is. On our signal, okay? So what we're gonna do is we're going to adjust our drum volume until our peak on our main channel is hitting negative ten, okay? So so we're at negative one right now. Remember, zero is the top, so we need to come down. Okay, reset it. Seven. Down a little bit more. Alright, pretty good. 10.1. I'll take it. Alright, so now we have a baseline for our volume. Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is focus on the base. Again, you could do something else, but the base in drums are usually kind of one of the harder things to deal with. So I'm going to deal with that next. So leaving the drums where they are, I'm going to pull my base way down, turn it on, and I'm just going to push it up until it feels good. I'm not going to worry about levels at this point, or, like, numbers and negative ten and whatever. I'm just going to kind of eyeball it or as we say, uterball it. That's not a real term. But here we go. They stopped go. Okay, I want this bass to be, like, really pronounced, because it's kind of driving the whole track. So I'm gonna put it right there. That's maybe a little hotter than we're used to. Now, you might be thinking like, Hey, man, this is so quiet. You've got this so low. That's okay. We want to leave it fairly low. Because headroom. We'll talk about that in a minute. Now, I'm kind of tempted to put a side chain on this base, but I'm not gonna do it right now. But we should have not affected our main peak too much. Let's see where we're at. Yeah, we're still good. Okay, we're up to 9.7. But pretty good. So we still should right be around the range of negative ten. So make sure that now that we have these two parts done, make sure that this is feeling nice and good. One thing you can do here is, if you feel like it sounds too quiet, turn up your volume, turn up your headphones, your speakers, whatever. Don't turn up anything in live. Turn up your speakers. Just make it louder so that it feels how you want it to feel. But don't do it with any of these and certainly not your master. Okay? So, get those two sounding great, and then we'll move on. In the next video, we're going to stack everything else up. 195. Blending All the Tracks: Okay, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to take all of these down, and we're going to blend all of these in. And again, we're just going to use our ear, but we do have a goal for our master fader. This fader, remember, we got it landing right around negative ten. Every time we push one of these up into the mix, we're going to add more to our master fader. Okay? Our goal at the end of this is to have our master fader sitting around negative six, okay? Doesn't have to be dead on, but that's what we're aiming for, okay? Now, the way I usually do this is I'm not going to think about my master fader for the moment. I'm going to do one pass just blending everything in by ear and then seeing where we're at and then doing another pass. Okay? So do these in the order of importance to your track, okay? So whatever the next most important thing is, do that next. In our case, we did drums and bass. If you have vocals, those would definitely be the next most important thing if they're not more important. In my case, we've got this harmony stuff and the bells stuff, and that's kind of it. So let's do the harmony stuff first. Okay? So I have this group, and I'm gonna leave that group at zero, and then I'm just gonna mix with the three different tracks. I think that's gonna be better for this. Okay. So let's do it. I got to go to a spot where they are happening. Okay, let's loop that spot. And here they are. I got to up the group. Yeah. I think that. Yeah. I was getting, like, a weird gap in the base, and it was because of that fake automation I put in it just to show that. So I'm gonna get rid of that. Okay. That's pretty good. Let's add our next one. Add these in slow. Err on the side of less. Whenever you're pushing these up, push it up until you feel like you have just enough, okay? Don't feel like you're pushing it too hard. Go for just enough, especially in your first pass. Very common to do multiple passes of this. Okay, let's go to a spot where that pad is happening, which is out here. Kind of like that. Alright, let's get these bells in here. So for the group, I'm gonna take that back up to zero. Turn it on now for our individual bells. Let's go to these first. Okay. Are the affected ones happening? Now, go to here. Pretty good. I want to check one quick thing on that track. Yeah. Okay. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that. Let's see. We got up to 5.8, negative 5.8. Remember, our goal is negative six, that's pretty darn good. Let's reset that, and then let's just go to kind of a big spot. It only got up to negative eight. There you go. L 7.9. I go six. Okay, so we're in great shape. We got negative six. That means we have a little bit more. We could go. We could push it a little bit harder with something if we wanted to, we've got the room. The headroom is the amount we have left over here. It's negative six to up to zero, right? So we have negative six dB of headroom, room to spare. And as we get into mastering, we really want to have about negative six of headroom for mastering to do its job. So we're in great shape. We don't have to push it. You end up with negative ten here, that's fine. That'll just give mastering more room to work. If you end up with a lot less, if you end up with negative 20, then I'd consider mixing it a little bit louder, just pushing all of these a little bit more. But for us, I think we're in great shape just like this. If we wanted to do another pass, we totally could go back and maybe leave the bass and drums where they were and just work on individual elements, maybe take them out and then ease them back in and see if you get to a different spot. Okay, last thing to do on this topic is to talk about how to render these things out. So let's do that next. 196. Render Settings: Okay, last thing we need to do with our mix is bounce it out because remember, when we get to mastering, which we're going to do in the next section, we typically, not always, but typically we master from a stereo audio track. So let's go to our export settings. So we're going to go to File, Export Audio. Okay, I don't think we've gone through a real heavy details of this yet. So here's what we've got. We've got all these different sections. So first, selection. What are we bouncing out? Almost always, you want to say main. That means you're master fader, you're bouncing out. We could bounce out any individual tracks or all of our tracks individually as individual tracks or stems. You could also do selected tracks only. Now, where do you want to start and end? Make sure that these are correct. I do have a little gap at the beginning. So if these aren't right or if you aren't sure if they're right or not, here's a quick trick you can do. Zoom out, go to the beginning, which is right here. Nope, that's not the beginning. Yeah. This is the beginning. Put your loop brace around the whole track. From beginning to end, maybe even leave a little extra at the end. Okay? There's beginning to end. Then click on that loop brace. Now you've selected everything you want. Now when you go to Export Audio and video, that's going to be accurate, okay? So moving on. Render options include return and main effects. We don't have any returns here, so that's off. But you could turn that on if you're using any return effects. Render as loop. We don't want to do that for, like, a full song that we're bouncing out. That's not what we want. Convert to Mono. We didn't want that. Normalize, you probably don't want this. Normalize is going to boost the volume of everything up as much as it can. If this is going to be mastered, leave normalizing off. If you're not going to master it but want it to sound like it's mastered in a quick and dirty way, you could turn normalizing on. Sometimes it's fine just to make everything louder really fast. But if it's going to be mastered, don't do that. Analysis file, we don't need that. Sample rate. Now, this actually is kind of important. You want to make sure that this sample rate is the sample rate that you're actually working on. So if I go back to my main live window, I see up here I am working at 48 kilohertz, so that's what I want this to be 48,000. Now, there is a possibility that I'm working with some samples here that are not 48 kilohertz, that are not 48,000 samples per second, right? I might have some 441 samples in there. If I do, that's okay. Live is going to have to convert those 44 ones up to 48. And that can introduce some noise, barely audible, in most cases, situation, but there is a way to minimize that to hold on to that thought for just a second. Then we'll come back to it. It down here, you have three different formats you can output your track to. PCM is your full quality audio file, your big audio file that you want. Okay? So you definitely want that to be on. File type. If this is going to mastering, you want this to be a wave, maybe an AIF file. Don't use flack files for mastering. If you want to use that for some purpose, there are purposes to use flack files. But almost always for mastering, wave is what we want. Bit depth. Let's leave that at 16, or you can raise that if you want. Dier options. P R one. Okay. What dithering is going to do is it's basically adding a very, very, very low amount of noise. You won't be able to hear it, but it's adding it in there to help cover up any sample conversion errors. So back to what we were just talking about. If you have some samples that are 441 and some that are 48, and Live's going to have to do that conversion when it exports it, the Dier can help you hear, okay? So if you're in that case, leave it on. If you're not in that case, and everything is 48 k, and you're 100% sure about that, leave it on anyway because it's not going to hurt. And if you aren't sure, leave it on. You could change it to no Dier or one of these other algorithms for your dir. I don't know what all these do. I just know that Pow R one is what someone told me wants to use, and that's what I've been using. So, there you go. So those are the settings for your main audio file. Now you can also kick out an MP three at the same time, turn that off. Now we're going to get two files. We're going to get our Big Wave file and a little MP three file. You do not want an MP three file for mastering. No good. MP three files are great for emailing to your friends. Um, but to go to mastering or to do any real serious work, we want the PCM file. Video. Now, if there was video in our project, which there is not, we could export a video file. We don't It's not letting me click that because there's no video here. But if we imported a video to this, Live can play that video. So if we were doing, like, a film scoring project and we had a video going, and then we were scoring to it, we could export a video, which would be that video plus our audio. If you want to import a video file, you can just drag it in the same way you drag in an audio file. But there's nothing here, so we don't need to do that. Alright, so then we hit Export. Now let's give it a name. Don't name it final, okay? Because then you're going to make a change, and then you're going to name it final final. And then you're going to name that one final final final. Then you're going to name the next one final for real final, and it goes on and on and on. Don't do that. Do this instead. Mix the date. Two, 924, which is what today is. Just put the date in there. Or if you really want, you could always do V one, then you've got V two, V three, and you know the highest number is always the most accurate one. Either way, that is just fine. Okay? Then we're going to make sure we're in the right spot, and we're going to save it. And it's going to render, and then you've got your file all ready for mastering or to be done with it if you don't want to do mastering. So let's go to the last section in this class and talk about mastering. Es. 197. What is Mastering?: Okay, lots to say in this video. So we're going to get into mastering now. Now, before we get into mastering, few things that we need to know about mastering. I already told you the big, big misconception, which is that mastering happens in your mix. Not true. Although at the end of this, I will talk about one kind of situation where it kind of does. But for the most part, we mix, then we bounce, and then we master a two channel final version, this mix wave that we have. So we already know that. Let's start with talking about terminology just real quick. Don't need to spend a lot of time on this. But I want you to be aware that there is a growing movement of professionals that are starting to use the term mastering less and less. It's kind of falling out of favor. Instead, we're saying maximizing. That's my preferred word, but also people are using finishing. So you might see maximizing, finishing, mastering. The reason is there's a lot of language around pro audio and probably everywhere in our society that is considered by some to be oppressive language and having a master slave relationship, which is a term we use in audio all the time, which is really strange. But we're trying to get rid of terms like that. So master is kind of going away, but, um, so just know that when you encounter mastering, it might be called mastering. It might be called finishing. It might be called maximizing. I'm going to try to use the term maximizing, but it's a relatively new term, so I might slip up and call it Mastering. Okay, that's thing number one. Um, thing number two, the goal of mastering loud and clean. That's what we want. Clean is maybe relative, right, because you might have, like, just really raw music, and that's okay, too. But we want it loud and let's say clear loud and clear. Now, let's talk about this loud thing for a minute. If you're like me, you're thinking, How can this song be loud? Loud is a function of, like, the dial on my stereo or my audio player, right? Like, that's how loud the track is. I'm just gonna turn it up or turn it down. That's true. I always used to think of it, like, remember those old beer commercials where they would say, like, This is It's the coldest beer, and you're like, Why? Cold is a function of my refrigerator, not your beer. That's really strange. But it's not really like that. The reason is when you hear a song on the radio, let's say you're driving down the road and you're listening to the radio and you hear a song. Then you hear another song after that, okay? If the next song is just quieter. Like, you didn't do anything to your stereo, I just is quieter than the previous song. So you reach for the knob and you turn it up, right? Because the music you're hearing now is quiet, relative to the previous one. So then the next song comes on, and it's loud. So it blasts you away. Now you change the radio station. So, suddenly, the radio station does not want to play your music anymore because it doesn't fit in with everything else. That's the loudness that we're talking about here. So our goal here is to really prevent people from reaching for the dial to turn it down or turn it up, right? We want it to mix in to blend with everything else. And the trend right now, and this is true for the last probably 20 years, is to try to get things as loud as possible. Just push everything up against the ceiling of how loud we can get before it distorts and try to get it to just sit there. So that it sounds as loud as or even better louder than the other music around it. So that's what the loudness thing is all about. If you want to read some interesting history on this, you can Google the loudness wars. That's what it's called. So more on that once we get in the weeds. Two more quick things. One is that what we're going to be talking about here is digital mastering or mastering for the purposes of streaming services. Um, there is a separate kind of mastering that is vinyl mastering. Vinyl mastering is a completely different art, and I don't know very much about it. So I've never mastered anything for vinyl. And I wouldn't someone came up to me and said, Will you master this for vinyl, I would say no, because it's such a different animal. We're not really gonna deal with that. I'm assuming most of you are not mastering to vinyl, but if you are, you really need to get a pro who's experienced mastering for vinyl. And that's not me. And then the last thing that I just want to say here is just like I said, for the mixing class or the mixing segment of this class, this is going to be an overview. This is not going to be detailed. I have a whole other class, like many hours devoted to the finer points of getting a master just right. So we're just going to do a couple videos here to talk about how you can master things in Live 12 the tools we have there and how I would make it work. We're really not going to be able to go into the level of detail that you would really need. So consider this an introduction to How to Master. We'll go into the real gritty stuff in that full other class if you want to search around for that. Okay. Cool. Next, let's get set up. 198. Mastering Setup: Okay, so here is our mixed version of this track. I'm going to set that aside for a second. Go to Live 12 and Command N. I'm going to make a totally whoops, totally new session, okay? You can do this in Session View or Arrangement View, but I'm going to go to Arrangement View. Okay? Now, before I pull in my track, I'm going to do two things. The first is I'm going to pull up my mixer. Gonna make it nice and big. I really only need one track here, so, actually, let's get rid of everything except one audio track. And then let's make our mixer nice and big. Okay? We're not going to need these sends. We really just need our main and maybe this. This track mixer. Either way, we're going to make sure both of those are set right to zero. Okay? Cool. Okay, so that's thing one. Make sure your levels are set to zero. Thing two, we are going to turn off our drid. So I'm going to control click somewhere on the timeline. And we have adaptive grid, fixed grid, and we're just going to go to off. Okay? Now we see these dotted lines. That's going to let me really just get anywhere. Not on the grid, where I need to be, okay? Now I'm going to pull in our track. All right? I'm going to line it up to the beginning. And I'm going to make sure it's got a little bit of a fade at the beginning and at the end. Now, you see, it looks like this already has music right from the Go. Let's hear it. Yeah, it's got that bass just starts right away. So what we're gonna do is we're going to zoom way in. This tiny fade in we need, it can be a couple of milliseconds. I just don't want to hear a click there. So that little fade in that Live did automatically is just fine. Next, I want to make sure that the end is right. Oh, actually, before I do that, I need to do one other thing. Double click on that file and make sure warping is off. Okay? Right down there. We're gonna turn warping off. We're going to make sure that we're not warping this. Now I'm going to open up the beginning and make sure we're getting all of it there. Okay? Let's go to the end. Okay, so when I turn warping off, it kind of stretched it out. That's fine. I'm going to delete that and then just reopen this all the way to make sure we're getting the whole track. Now, I'm just gonna look at what's at the end. So it looks like the sound stops here, and then we've got about 2 seconds of silence. Let's hear that. Hmm. Okay, so it just stops. Is that what I want to happen musically? Yeah. Okay, I kind of like it like that. So but what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure there's a little fade anyway. So here we're down to silence. Let's tighten that up a little bit. So I've only got maybe a second of silence at the end here, 57 to 58. There's roughly a second. And I'm going to make sure we've got a little fade at the end, okay? Even though we're in silence and fading to silence, we're just going to prevent any kind of clicking or anything weird like that, right? And that is good. That is our basic setup, okay? Next, let's start doing some maximizing. 199. EQ for Mastering: Okay, let's make this thing louder and maybe sounding nicer. So we're going to do more than just making it louder. Another thing we're going to do is make sure that there's nothing frequency wise going crazy. There's no, like, rogue frequencies going off or whatever. We're happy with the base. We're happy with the high end, the mids, all of that. So we're going to use three tools for this. First is going to be an EQ eight. Okay, so let's go to an EQight and throw that on there. The second is going to be a multiband dynamics, which if you remember, is three compressors in one. And then we're going to throw a glue compressor on the end, okay? So these are our three main tools that we're going to use. Now, I should also say there's kind of two other things you could do here. It is not uncommon to go outside of live for mastering. Even if you're a live evangelist, a lot of people like using a plug in or multiple plug ins. So what I'm going to try to do here is do it all in live. But when I'm really mastering stuff, don't tell anyone, I'm using ozone, more times than not. So there's a plug in called ozone that's designed for mastering, and it's very good. But if you don't want to buy that plug in, you can do it with what's in life. So that's what we're going to do here. Okay? So first with our EQ, I'm going to just to make sure we're only hearing what we know we're hearing. I'm going to turn those two effects off. Okay? Now let's go out to here. I'm just going to highlight something and loop it. First thing I'm going to do with my EQ. Let's make it nice and big. All right. Let's roll off that bottom end again. Just to be super sure. Right around 20 hertz, 21, that's good. Make sure we're not losing any big bass frequencies. And then we're just going to prevent anything from building up down there, any rumbly stuff. Okay, the next thing is, like, kind of, to me, the hardest part. Really, it really is, because it's real aesthetic choices that we got to make here. So what we're gonna do is what's called ringing it out. So I'm going to take just one band of our EQ, right here. And I'm going to just listen. First, I'm I'm going to crank up this band, and then I'm just going to kind of scrub. And first, I'm going to listen for any frequencies that just really pop out in doing this. And if there are a problem, then I'm going to invert what I'm doing, and I'm going to go like that, and I'm going to get rid of some of those frequencies. But also, I'm listening for any kind of sweet spots that need a little boost, right? So I'm just saying like, Oh, I like that. I don't like that. And I'm just applying EQ in subtle ways, just to bring out things that I think sound nice. So there's not a whole bunch of math to this. This is really kind of just kind of what sounds good. So let's do it for a minute. Okay, I don't really hear any problematic frequencies. It kind of looks like there's some stuff jumping out downward there bell. I don't really want to cut that. For boosting, I'm looking right in the mid range right around 500 to ten K. Fino ten K, maybe eight K. So right, you know, here to here. Okay, you're gonna give a boo a little boost up here. I just kind of like the way that that sounds. Okay. So, we're good with the ring it out stage. I could do that all day. I could literally sit here all day. That's that's really you got to stop. Okay, so that's our main work with the EQ. We could add more bands if we wanted and see if we can find anything else that's ringing or needs to come out or that we want to boost. Everything is about subtlety here, though, ok? So if you find yourself doing something like this, you might want to consider going back to your mix, right, because we would be really changing it a lot. So but something, you know, that's tighten up the Q. If there's something ringing, you might do something like this and just find it down there. Okay. I don't really hear that in this mix, so I think we're good with just that. So let's move on to our multiband dynamics. 200. Dynamics Processing: Okay, next, it's time to get over to our multiband dynamics. Now this is where we're going to try to get more loudness out of this thing. Okay? So I'm going to turn it on. I'm going to leave my glue compressor off, and I'll leave my EQ on. So first, if you remember what this effect is, basically we have three different compressors separated by an EQ. So we've got high mids and lows and compression that we can do on each of them, right? So let's set up our high and low threshold. So let's get rid of our EQ for a second. And we can solo each band. So let's listen for the highs. So what we're kind of listening here for is something that we can kind of use as, like, the center point, and the snare is pretty good for that. So what I mostly want to hear in the highs are all the shimmery stuff, distortions, things like that. Not too much musical material and not too much of that snare. So we can go up a little bit higher. The snare went away on me. There we go. Alright, that's okay. That's tad hi. But now let's go down to the lows. What we really want to hear here is the rumble. Again, not too much of the snare, but from the other direction. Okay, that's pretty good. So let's go with that. Okay, next, let's add a little bit of compression. So let's go here. Okay? So let's go back and solo the highs. Just look at the highs. So our main threshold is going to be here. So we're going to go down until we're doing some work here. Okay? Now, what's happening here is each of these vertical lines is ten DB that it can go up. So if we click in the middle of this bar and then drag down, and do something like this. Now each of those lines within that bar is also ten DB. So ten DB is now becoming a lot smaller inside the top of that threshold. It's a really weird way to look at compression. It's different than any other way in any other compressor. And to be totally honest, it really is confusing to me. Doesn't gel with my brain chemistry all that well. But that's what's happening. All right, next, let's go to the base. And we'll do basically the same thing. We're just going to go down until we're getting in the business of that sound. And then we're going to just kind of crank it a little bit. Bass always I usually use a little less compression than anywhere else. So I'm a little bit lighter in the bass. Okay, so let's maybe lighten that up just a little bit. And then we'll do the same thing to the mids He's up there. That's where I think a lot of our action is. There's not a lot of motion right now. But you can see the little yellow tick is showing us the kind of amount of our compression up there. Okay, now, I'm going to go out of solo mode, and then we need to balance these three things. So we have an output volume here, okay? So we're gonna kind of crank that a little bit to get our mix back sounding good. Our base is kind of good right there. Okay, so we're going to kind of delicately balance those things and make sure they are blending just the way we want. All right? Then we're going to go to one last layer of compression with our glue compressor. 201. Final Compression and Limiting: Alright, time to turn on this glue compressor. Now, this glue compressor does two things for us. It does another layer of compression, which we're going to use a little bit. But then it's also a limiter. So remember what a limiter does is it says, This is the ceiling. No volume is going to go higher than that, okay? And it's default built in ceiling is negative 0.5, which is pretty hot, but Um, that's okay. We'll get to that when we get to that. So here's what we're gonna do here. First, we want our attack and release for mass ring to be pretty fast. So let's just go there and there. I like the release just to be all the way as fast as it'll go. Ratio, we're going to leave put. Now, threshold, we're going to pull down just so that we're getting a tiny bit of compression here. There we go. Not a lot. We want this last compressor, just to be grabbing anything that's just popping out. A weird jumps. Okay. Cool. Now for the limiter, we're going to turn on this soft clip, and we want to send signal up into that and be hitting that ceiling just barely, okay? And we're going to do that with makeup gain. Okay? Now, heads up, this is going to get loud. When you do this, everything's going to start to get really loud, so you might turn down your volume or do whatever you need to do. And as you're listening to this, if you have headphones on right now, this is going to get loud. So just heads up. Keep your hand on your volume knob for the next minute. Here we go. So I'm going to push makeup gain until it hits that clip, and we see that light just a teeny tiny bit. There it is. All right. Perfect. Okay, but we're not done yet. So we need our final master to be right around negative four DB. That's kind of the sweet spot. That's what a lot of the streaming services require, although their requirements for volume are a moving target sometimes. But right now, I think it's negative four. So, what we're going to do is or what we've done already is because of the ceiling in our limiter, nothing's going to pop out and go over negative 0.5. That's fine. That's great. But what we need to do now is get our RMS up there. So remember that RMS is an averaging value, right? So if we look at our signal, the thing that's popping up at the top, those are our peaks. The thicker line that's moving up and down, that's our RMS value. We need to get that RMS value pretty close to our peaks and then have it sit right around negative four, okay? Our peaks are going to go up to negative 0.5, okay? So we need to push up our RMS. And the way we're going to do that is with this makeup gain. We can push that sucker all we want. We can push it all the way to the top. We're not going to clip because that soft clip limiter isn't going to let us. It's not going to let anything go past negative 0.5. So we got a little bit more to go. So let's see where we are right now. Okay. So we're around. Actually, we're pretty close. Okay, so we're looking at the green value. Right? And we're sitting we're sitting around negative seven, maybe negative eight, okay? So we're gonna push this harder to get those up to negative five. Pretty great. So now we are loud. We are nice and loud. Alright, so that puts us right where we want to be. Next, I want to talk about a few more things with mastering, but that is essentially a master. That is a pretty decent master. Um, let's talk about inline mastering, audio effect Racks. 202. Final Steps: Okay, first, let's talk about what we do once we're done. We're going to bounce it again, so we're going to go to our export settings, turn on MP three, if you want. The rest of these settings should be right on. Make sure your start and length are correct. Wave Power one, everything else should be the same. So we should be good. Okay, so earlier I said there's a few different things we could do, and I said, in some cases, I might use ozone. I kind of the majority of real world cases, I might use ozone for this because it's so good at it. But there's another thing we could do also, and that is to look at our audio Effect racks. If we go to audio effect Racks and look at some of these presets, there are a good number of mastering ones. Um, full chain master, media analog master, overdriven tape, parallel punch, punchy dance, you know, a bunch more. Let's take a look at one of these. Let's do this. Let's turn Let's see. Media analogue. How about that? Let's put a media analog master on it, okay? Now I'm going to turn my mastering off and just hear theirs. Okay. That's pretty good. Here's mine. Mine's a lot louder. But maybe this one isn't dialed in quite yet. I mean, we could push it a lot louder. I had them both on, didn't I? Okay, so here's mine. Okay, now let's turn mine off. And here's theirs. Push that. Yeah, definitely basier, much, much basier. But we could adjust that. I mean, we could go into this into the settings and adjust what it's doing. We could totally do that. So don't forget about those audio effect racks. They're really handy. Alright, one more thing I want to tell you about, and that is called inline Mastering. Let's go to one more video on this topic, and then we'll be done. 203. In-line Mastering: Okay, now, there is a new I don't know if I'd call it a trend. This is something I'm seeing some people do. I have one producer friends who swears by this. And that is to do inline mastering. Here's what that means. Let's take our master that we made. Let's get rid of this. So just our master. I'm going to turn it back on. I want to save this. So I'm going to put it into a group, Command G. And then let's click on the little disk and call it. It looks like I've already done this, but let's call it Js Mastering two. Okay. Now, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back to the session, the mix session. And I'm going to master right in this session. I'm going to go to my main track. I'm gonna throw J Mastering two on it, or whatever mastering you want. The idea here is that you're mastering right on your main track and you're not bouncing out to stereo and then mastering it. You're skipping a step. A lot of people are finding this to be really useful, especially if you got to work fast. You know, this is gonna sound pretty good. The advantage here is that in the mastering process, if you find something that you're not happy with in the mix, you can just fix it. You don't have to go all the way back, fix it in the session, bounce it, and then start over again, right? So it can be valuable for that. It can be a little harder to mix because just because there's more to keep track of or sorry, harder to master because there's more to keep track of. I haven't done a lot of this. I do mind kind of the old fashioned way, but it is a trend that some people are doing. I think it's pretty cool. I hope it catches on. I'm probably going to start doing it in some upcoming projects. So in line mastering. Now, you know. 204. What Come Next?: Alright. We have reached the end. I have a few more things for you. So first, what comes next? There is a Part seven to this giant series of classes. So in Part seven, we are going to focus exclusively on Max for Live. This is one of my favorite things. This is one of my all time favorite things. I love playing around with Max for Live, and the only thing I love more than that is teaching Max for Live. I love it. So I'm really kind of excited to dive into this. So, we've almost completely skipped over the real guts of Max for Live because it is its own animal, really. If you're not familiar, Max for Live is basically a programming language that lives with inside Ableton, and it lets you design and build your own effects, synths, instruments, media effects, audio effects, things like that. You can do some really wild stuff. I've been using Max longer than I've been using Ableton. So I know this. It's kind of my bread and butter. Let me show you what it looks like. Here's just kind of a Max device. You can click on this little button to open it up, and this is the real power of Max for Live. I can open this device, and I can say, This device is really cool, but you know what would be cooler is if I could reprogram it to do what I want. And now I can. This is what the code looks like. And there are more windows, things like this. So I might say, Okay, I really like this, but instead of plus one, I want that to be plus 20 or plus Pi or plus the current humidity in Tokyo. I can do those things. Um so it's really fun. It looks daunting and scary, but trust me, you can learn this. I did, so I'm sure you can. We can build instruments. You know, we can say, I like this, but I want it over here, or I want this value to be something different. It's so much fun. Anyway, part seven, Max for Live. It's probably out now. Please check it out. It's gonna be super fun. And we're gonna build a bunch of stuff, and I'm gonna give you a bunch of code. Okay. Let's move on to one more thing. 205. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I 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 in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.