Ableton Live 12 Complete Mastery MEGA CLASS

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to official Ableton Certified Training Ableton Live 12, the first in my big sequence of classes on Ableton Live 12. In this class, we're going to start from the very basics on how to use Live, assuming you haven't used any other version of Live. And assuming you don't have any real experience in music production. We're going to start at the very basics in this class and build up from there. Throughout this class, I'll be showing you how to use all of Ableton Live 12. I'll also be walking you through a couple of different tracks. There are three different tracks of mine that I'm going to walk you through. I've set up this class so that we're going to do a couple of things just to get us comfortable with this software, but then we're going to start making music. So pretty quick, we're going to start making our own music clips and putting together some music sessions. This class is designed to be a first big broad strokes into a lot of the content areas. And then we'll be moving on to other sections of this class where we dive in deeper to recording, editing, sound design, and all the other elements that go into music production. But it is the single best place to start if you're looking to learn Live 12. So without further ado, let's dive in and start making some music. Up next is drums. Now, in the drums category, we're going to find three different types of files. Okay? The first thing we're going to see here is more of these ADG files, Ableton device group. The reason I want that, again, is because that's what my microphone is plugged into, okay? If you don't have a hardware interface, you're not really going to be able to record a traditional microphone. You might be able to record a USB microphone or something like that. I'm going into Channel two here, okay? So this Channel one is my microphone, this is my guitar. So you can see that little thing right there, me make some sound with my guitar. Okay. So what are the elements here? Here we have 2. What is an Ableton Certified Trainer?: Okay, so let's start first, but let me just explain this Ableton certified trainer business because you're going to see that around online a whole bunch, and I want you to know what it means. So here's what it means. So I've been teaching Ableton for a really long time, like ten or over ten years. And I've done enough work to catch the attention of the Ableton company. And so I was invited to participate in one of their certified trainer events where they run you through all of these things. It's this long two day testing drill where you have to do all these demos and tests and all these things. And basically, what they're trying to do is make sure that you are at the very top of the game when it comes to two things. The first is the obvious one. And that is, you know Ableton Live well, like, better than the average person, better than most people. In fact, there's only about 100 certified trainers in the US. There's, I think, maybe about 1,000 worldwide last time I checked, but there's 100 in the US. So that's the first thing. You absolutely know everything that's going on in Ableton. Second thing and the more important thing, frankly, is you are super good at teaching Ableton Live. That's the thing that they're really testing for and really want to know. So it's not just that I know Ableton really well, it's that I've been given this stamp of approval by the Ableton companies saying, You are really good at Live and you are really good at teaching live. You teach live in a very dynamic way that shows all the different concepts, and makes it very accessible to people. So that's what that means. So when you see someone who is in Ableton certified trainer, they will be able to use this logo. It really just means that Ableton has studied their work, studied their teaching, and said, You are an awesome teacher. So I point that out not to toot my own horn, but just to say, you're in the right place. I'm pretty good at this. I've been teaching for a long time. I'm learning new stuff every day. And the reason I make these classes and teach this stuff in person is just because I love doing it. I'm just a super big nerd when it comes to audio stuff and all kinds of other stuff, actually. But especially Ableton. I'm an Ableton Live nerd. So come into this class, be nerdy with me, and let's have a good time. Okay. Enough tooting my own horn. Let's dive in. 3. Ableton Live Versions: Okay, in these first couple videos, I want to talk about just getting a setup with Live, which version you should get, where you can get it and getting it installed and setup. First, there are three versions of Live. Now, I'm not talking about the number at the end of Live. Like, we're going to be talking about Ableton Live 12. That's the version number I'm going to be working with in this series of classes. I also have series of classes on Ableton Live 11, ten, and nine, and I think eight is when I started making all of these live classes. But that's not what I'm talking about. There is Ableton Live 12 intro, Ableton Live 12 standard, and Ableton Live 12 suite. Okay? So if you look up here, you can kind of see that there's a breakdown of what has what? Basically, sweet is the big version. Sweet is the full version. Standard has less stuff than sweet, and intro has less stuff than that. So balance that against the cost of each one. Standard is cheaper than sweet, and intro is cheaper than standard. So you can kind of see here that where it really comes down to is the instruments and effects. So you can see here software instruments. In suite, you get 20 in standard, you get 11 and intro, you get five. Audio Effects. In suite, you get 58 standard 35 and in intro 20. MIDI effects, Mi toools, modulators. Software instruments, I guess, is another big one. You get 20 in Suite versus five in Intro. So you can kind of go down and see all the different things on this page. The page I'm at is ableton.com slash EN LIlashComPAE Additions. So what does all that mean? Let's put this into, like, practical understanding. If money is no object to you, get sweet. Always. That is the professional tool. You're going to want Sweet to be making professional music. Hands down, no question about it. But if you don't have all the money in the world, that's okay. You can upgrade. So you could get Intro. If you're just getting into live and you don't know if you're going to like it, get Intro. Get Intro, and then once you decide, This is what I want to be doing, then save up the cash and invest in upgrading to either standard or sweet. Eventually, you're going to want to get to Sweet if you are aspiring to do professional work. If you can afford standard, get that, and then you can upgrade to Sweet Okay, so my advice to you is, if you can afford it, get sweet. If you can't get what you can afford. And if you really like it, you can upgrade down the line and get sweet. Now, I can't really tell you what the prices are because they change all the time. But I do want to talk about the purchasing process here. So let's go to a new video for that because I have some tips that might get it for you a little bit cheaper. Let's go. 4. Where to Buy: Okay, where and how to buy Ableton. So first of all, Ableton Live comes with a free trial. You can get it right here. You're going to download the full version of the software if you hit that little button. Um, this is going to give you a full version, and it's going to work for 30 days. Sometimes they change that, but usually it's 30 days. And you'll be able to do everything. You'll be able to follow along in this class, make tracks, save tracks, export tracks. It's awesome. After 30 days, you're going to lose the ability to save things. So you can still poke around and work on stuff, but you're not going to be able to save anything you're doing. So that's kind of a big drawback. But use that free trial, right? Get 30 days out of it, make sure this is for you, make sure this is the thing you want to do. Now, after those 30 days, um, you can buy live from various retailers, and if you want a version that's in a box, then like a physical box, then that's a good way to do it. But if you don't care about having, like, a version in a box, and I've never bought a version of live in a box ever. I've never bought software in a box, I don't think, at least not in a long time. Then if you don't care about that, then just buy it from the Ableton website. Go right here, um and you can actually do it right from Win Live if you have the free trial. If you're working on the free trial, when you open it, it's going to pop up a little window that says, You trial expires in so many days. Click here to authorize this version, and then it's going to take you to the page to buy it. And that's buying it just directly from Ableton. You're never going to find it cheaper than that. That's always going to be the best price. Unless unless you are a student somewhere anywhere. There is quite a significant student discount. So if you are in college, in high school, studying around various places, you can qualify for the student price, which, you know, the price of that changes quite a bit, but it's roughly half of the retail price. It's pretty significant. There's no drawbacks to the educational price. There's not an educational version that can't be updated. Like, that was a popular thing at some point in other applications I've worked with, but that's not how Ableton works. You're just getting a break on the price. You're getting a full version. It can be updated. Everything works the same. So it's a very good deal. Now, you might be thinking to yourself. Well, I'm a student. I'm taking this class, right? That may or may not work. In the past, Ableton has let us do that where you can buy an educational license and then get a letter from me to prove that you are enrolled in some classes. That has worked in the past. I've heard that they're not gonna allow that to happen anymore. So what I would suggest you do is if you're interested in the educational price, which you totally should be because it's significant, and you're about to buy it, shoot me a message on this platform and just say, I want to get the educational price? Is that possible? And I will let you know? If it is possible, I can provide you with the documentation that Ableton will need to show that you're a student. And if they've stopped authorizing people to do that, then I will let you know that, too. But just shoot me a quick message, and I will be happy to get you that information. But don't buy the educational version until you do that because if I can't authorize it, then you're out of luck. So talk to me before you buy it if you want the educational version. Okay. Let's move on and talk about installation. 5. Installation: Okay, if you're on a Mac, you're going to download a disk image, and you're going to open it, and it's going to look something like this. It's probably not going to be orange, and it's not going to say Beta. I'm on the Beta version right now. It's just about to be released, so everything is the same as what you have. All you need to do is take this file and drag it over to the applications folder. And that's it. Nothing fancy to install. Now, when you launch it for the first time, it's going to take an extra few minutes because it's going to tuck some folders around your system. But you don't really need to know what's happening. After it does that, it'll open up and you'll you'll see the program interface just like I have. If you're on a PC, it works very similar. You just have to drag the file to the right spot or double click on it, and that will launch the installation process. But it's a very quick and very easy installation. So easy, in fact, that's all I have to say about it. Let's move on. 6. The Look and Theme: Okay, so we've got Live installed, and you've just opened it, and it looks like this, right? Maybe not. Does yours not look like mine? It might not. If it doesn't look like mine, that's okay. There's a whole bunch of different themes of live that are built in, and there's even, like, some people on the Internet that kind of hack together their own. And you can do some cool stuff by changing the colors around. One thing that Live is doing now is if you computer is using, like, a light or a dark theme. It's going to grab onto that. So it might look all dark where mine is, like, nice and shades of gray and stuff. If you want to adjust that, we're going to go to the preferences, okay? So go to live and then settings, or if you're on a PC, I think it's just command coma. We'll get you to your preferences. So here's our preferences. We're going to end up here in the preferences, like kind of a whole bunch. But just to get us started, I'm going to click on themes and colors and then theme. I'm on default. You might be on classic Dark. I think when I first launched Live 12, it took me to this one. And to be honest, when I'm working on Live, when I'm working on my own music, this is the theme I like to use. This is kind of my default. But when I'm teaching it, I go back to this one. This is kind of classic Live. I think it's easier for most people to see. That's why I teach on it, but you're welcome to use whichever theme you like. There's also follow system light and dark. Yeah, so this is the one I was on a my system is set to dark. But I'm going to set it to light. There's also some other things you can do here can adjust some of the tones, contrast, you know, things like that. Grid line intensity, brightness. If you All of this actually is new in Live 12. These fine tuning the colors and saturation and hues and intensity. All of this is new in Live 12, these different settings for intensity, brightness, hue, things like that. And they're designed to help people who have some degree of being visually impaired. So so if you if these settings help you see things better, then that's great. Adjust them. But I'm going to leave on default and the appearance set to light, you can use whatever you like. But if you're confused, why yours doesn't look like mine, that's probably the biggest reason. Now, you probably also don't see things over here. Maybe you see something like this. You can click around here and kind of explore if you want. I just have more stuff installed on my computer, so you're going to see more things. But don't worry. I'll be explaining all of this soon. 7. The 2 Views: Alright, so let's nip one thing in the bud right away. There's one thing in Ableton Live that trips up people the most. And it's the thing where if you have any experience in a different audio program or a different Da, then it probably it can be a little frustrating. So I just want to tackle it right away. Just let's just look at this and just rip this band aid off. It's not complicated. It's not hard, but it can be a little confusing right at first. So here's what I'm looking at. I see these boxes, and I don't see a timeline where I put music and can just see it scrolling across. The reason is live has two main views. Now, there's a bunch of little things you can show and hide in live, and we'll look at all of those soon. But the main working area, your main canvas is this big rectangle here, okay? And there's two different sides to it. It's like a coin with two different sides, okay? And they have names. So here we are looking at what's called the session view, okay? If I want to look at the other side of it, which is called the arrangement view, I'm going to press the tab key. Okay? Now I have something that might be a bit more familiar to you. This is a timeline. I can put things on that timeline and hit play and listen to them while it scrolls by. So Session View, Arrangement View, okay? Think about the arrangement view is the one with a timeline where we see things moving. Session View doesn't really have a timeline. Instead, it's got all these little slots here where we can put musical elements that Ableton calls clips and we can trigger them all over the place. This is more like what a performer would do, like what a DJ would do. They would launch things from here, right? And this is what more of a traditional composer would do. They would work here, right, and create things. So let me use an example. Okay? Here's an audio clip. Okay? This is a clip. Here it is, in the arrangement view where we have a Okay, cool. I can hit tab, and here is that same clip in Session View, okay? And I can launch. Okay, two sides of the same coin. And we'll spend a lot more time on this concept of Session View and Arrangement view on how to work between the two throughout the class. But I just want to point out right now, that's one of the biggest elements of live that people get tripped up on is the Session View and arrangement view thing. Now, I want to clarify one thing that I just said a minute ago. What I said is that Session view is where people perform and DJ and arrangement view is where people compose. While that is true, that is not exclusively true. There are a lot of people that compose and produce music purely in session view. This is a view where you can create music, absolutely. And there are some people who perform with arrangement view. That's fine, too. But when I look at the two, I think of this side as more of a performance side, although I know a lot of people that make everything that they make in Session Butte. So keep that in mind. Both sides are completely versatile to do whatever you want. It's just a very different way of thinking. I come from a more traditional music background, where I learned music by looking at sheet music and reading it from left to right. So arrangement view is much more comfortable to me when I'm producing music. But you can use Live however you like. Don't ever let anyone tell you different. Okay, let's move on. 8. Arrangement View: Okay, so now that we know this Session View arrangement view thing, let's just take, like, a big picture view of both Session View and Arrangement View, okay? So first, let's do Arrangement view. So I've loaded up here a little track that I'm working on. So what I want you to see here is the kind of different rectangles that are around the screen. We've got this big area here in Arrangement View that's kind of the canvas, right? Then we've got each track has some options over here. We've got our ins and outs. We've got kind of a mini little mixer here. We can get a bigger mixer on the screen if we want, but it's hidden at the moment. Over here, we've got what's called our browser. Down here, we have two things, actually. We have our clip view and our device view. So that means that if I click on any clip, we're going to see it down here. Now, remember, a clip is any kind of audio or midi information, any nugget of sound making thing. Okay? So here's an audio track, that means there's sound in it, and here's Mi track. Okay? These are all clips, okay? Anything you can put on the timeline here is going to be a clip. It's a very broad word that Ableton uses. Okay, so we can see that down here. Now, if I click over here, we can see the instrument that's on that track. Let's go up here. There we go. So here's the instrument. Now, don't worry about what all this stuff does. We're going to get into all of it. We got plenty of time. Don't worry. I just want you to understand the different kind of boxes where things live for now. Over here, I have a lessons thing. I usually keep this hidden, but I want it to be open just for now until I get a chance to walk us through these lessons, which I'll do shortly. And then up here at the top, we have what's called the Transport bar. This is our play, stop, Tempo, metronome, things like that. So what's important to note here is that when we go back and forth between Session View and Arrangement View, only this area here changes. Okay? Everything else stays the same, right? All of these outlying areas don't change. Okay? So, keep that in mind. So in the session view, we can click somewhere to put our cursor. That's this kind of teal looking line. And then if I press the spacebar, it's going to start playing. I've got different sounds on different tracks. So each one of these we call a track, and they have different clips on them. Now, there's a lot more here, but I just want to do big picture stuff. So I'm going to zoom in just a little bit, and then hit play and you can see the playhead, which is that teal line kind of scrolling as it plays the sound. You'll notice that at the top, we see bar numbers 24, 25, 26, 27, and at the bottom, we see time. So this is 1 minute in 105110. Cool. 9. Session View: Okay, now let's go over to Session View. Still looking big picture. Okay? So I'm going to press the tab key. Now, if you don't want to press the tab key, if you have some issue against the tab key, you can switch actually with this little thing over here, which I'll point out while we're here. If you look at the Ableton logo, you'll notice that it's three vertical lines and three horizontal lines, right, just like we have here. Arrangement view, Session View, Arrangement view, Session View. So the Ableton logo is actually the arrangement view and Session View buttons. That's how important this concept is to the program. Okay, so now we're in Session View. So no timeline here. But what we have is these little clip launchers, okay? So we can put little nuggets of sound in there, otherwise known as clips. Can put them all over the place. That's a cool one. And we can launch things as we want to. We can move around freely. We can click on things and get them in the clip view. And we have access to the same kind of mixer here, right? Here's the ins and outs. We saw that over here in Session View, but now it's down here. And we have our volume in a bit more of a traditional looking mixer than we just saw a minute ago. However, like I said, we can pull up the mixer in both views now. So if I launch a clip here, We get just this clip, right? And you might think, when I switch over, what happened to all this stuff? What happened to all my whole big track that was happening here? It's not here, right? It's gone. But it's not completely gone. The track names are the same. They come over into Session View, and the mixer settings come over into Session View. So what you need to remember is that Session View and Arrangement View are two different canvases of material. They have separate clips. They have separate audio content and midi content. You can build things separately in them. However, importantly, they share a mixer, okay? If you keep that in your head, then this will then you'll never get tripped up on what's happening. Okay? Watch. If I click this. I can say, Cool. Let's make that super loud. I'm gonna crank that up and move the panning all the way over to the left. Sure. Panning is like the left and right side. Now if I go over to Arrangement View and I look at the third track, go all the way up to the top. Here's the third track. Panning is all the way left. That's what 50 means. And the volume, which is this is cranked all the way up, right? And it's called The New Disco four. Okay? That's what it's called. Go back here. The New Disco four, and there's my stuff. But I have completely different clips on it, but the mixer settings are the same. Now, another thing you might have noticed is that when I went over to Arrangement View, this is all grade out, right? Ah. Hold, let me turn that down. That's pretty nasty. If I hit play, what am I hearing right now? O. I'm just hearing Session View, okay? If I go over here, I'm hearing this click. I'm hearing Session View. So what's happening is over here in arrangement view, everything's grayed out, and I have this little orange button now. This orange button says, Hey, you've got stuff happening in both Session View and Arrangement View. Which do you want me to use? So the orange button is saying, I'm going to use Session View because I think that's what you want. If I'm wrong, click me, okay? So I click you and now I'm back to arrangement. Right? So session view and arrangement view, two different content areas, but they share a mixer, and you can only play one or the other at a time. Okay. Cool. 10. Producing in Session and Arrangement View: Okay, so you might be asking yourself, Well, how do I use this? This is neat. I've got these two views. I've got, you know, two different kind of content areas, and they share a mixer. That's great. I get it. But why? How do I use that? So, my suggestion for you is that when you're producing music, when you're making a track, use one or the other, okay? Don't use both at the same time. You can. There are ways to do that, and we'll talk about that later. But until you get really good at it and really good at understanding what live is going to do, stick to one or the other. When I'm writing music, when I'm producing music, I'm almost always working in arrangement view. Sometimes I do some stuff in Session View, but I'm an arrangement view guy. I like arrangement view. I know other people that only work in Session View. They produce whole tracks in Session View, and that's just really comfortable to them. And that's awesome. If you're one of those people, that's awesome. There's no wrong way here, okay? But try to use one or the other. Otherwise, it gets really confusing, okay? So when you're making a track, don't use both sides. Make a track in session View or arrangement View, but don't try to use both sides simultaneously. You're going to just create problems for yourself. Cool. All right. Let's move on. 11. What's new in Live 12: Okay, before we move on, I thought I would just do a quick little what's new in Live 12 in case any of you have used Live 11 before, or if you are currently using an earlier version of Live while you're watching this class. The difference between Live 11 and 12 is a pretty significant difference. You could follow along with this class using Live 11. That would be more or less fine. I'd say there's probably about 10% of the program that's different. Nothing really in the way that we make music with it. There's just some tools that I'll have that you won't have. For example, there's a few there's one new instrument, one new effect. Things like being able to have the mixer in the arrangement view with this button down here. There's a bunch of new MIDI tools for generative things, meaning, we can tell Live to write us a melody or write us a chord progression, and it will. And we'll walk through how to do that soon. There's a bunch of new functionality in the library that we'll be going over just shortly here. And all this key aware stuff that's this here where you can kind of set a key and have all your devices just kind of follow that key or most of your devices follow that key. So there's a lot of new stuff, there's a lot more than that. I actually have a whole separate class on going over all the new stuff between Live 11 and 12. So if you want to dive into that, feel free. Otherwise, I'm just going to progress forward with this class, assuming you've never seen live before, and everything is new to you. So let's do that. Okay, in the next section, we're going to focus on navigation. So figuring out how to get around within Live, all the different rectangles, the different boxes here and there, and some kind of weird little workflow tips that'll save you a bunch of time, like how you zoom in and out, which can be a little strange to get used to. Okay, let's go over to that section now. 12. Navigation Overview: Okay, there's a lot of things that I love about online teaching. I really do, and I really believe in it a lot, but not the least of which is that you can't smell the onions on my breath from these delicious tacos I just ate. But anyway, back to Ableton Live 12. So, navigating Live. In this section, we're going to talk about all these different areas in more detail. So this top part is called the transport. Now, I know I already kind of walked you through these, but I want to do it in a little bit more detail first before we go into a lot of detail. So the transport, this actually kind of comes from an old tiny term kind of from when we had big tape machines to record on. And there might be over here, like, a big, like, reel to reel system, and then you might have a box about this big, and that had a big play, stop, record, forward, rewind button on it. And it was on a long cable, and you can kind of move it around the studio a little bit. And that was called the Transport box. So that's where we get this term, the transport. Over here, we have the browser. Now, the browser isn't the most sexy thing in live, but understanding your way around it really well will save you so much time, like hundreds of hours. So we are going to spend a lot of time on getting good at navigating the browser. Trust me, you're going to thank me for it. Then at the bottom, we have our device view and our clip view all in one. We can actually see both at once with these toggle buttons down here. So this is showing me my clip, and this is showing me my device. So we can see both at once. But if we only have one open, they're going to flip between the last thing we clicked on. Over here, we have help view or Info view, and I'm going to show you another info view that's going to come up in this lower left corner in a minute. Then we also have a few kind of strange things like this little tuning window that I can hide if I want. But that's really it. Ableton is really big on single window. Like, they want one window and you can do everything within one window. They don't want a whole bunch of other windows popping up on you. There is a way to open your mixer in a separate window if you're on, like two displays. You can do that by going to view the view menu. And then there are things like plug ins that will pop up in a new window, but those are not Ableton things. Those are kind of things that run within Ableton and are separate. We'll talk about those later. For the most part, Ableton runs in one big window. Okay, so let's go into Info view and help view in the next couple of videos because those are going to be super valuable to you right away as we start learning life. 13. Info View: Okay, I want you to do something with me here. Go to the menu at the top of the screen. We're going to go to view, and then we're going to go to InfoVew, okay? So when I click this, I'm going to get this little box down here. If you already have this box, do that same thing again to get it back because you probably just turned it off. Make sure that you see this box. This is called InfoVew. So view Info. You can also just press question mark. So this is such a handy little box, okay? Watch, if you look at Infoview and then move your mouse over literally anything, it's going to tell you exactly what it is and how to use it. Okay? So let's say this monitor Auto button. I didn't know what this was. I didn't know what this is, so I'm going to put my mouse over it, look at InfoVew and it says, Monitoring. When monitoring is active, attracts input is played through its device and heard at its output. Great. This can literally be anything. You know? Anything that is part of live is going to show up there, okay? So I strongly encourage you leave Info view open for, like, a while. To be, like, perfectly honest, I almost always have InfoVew open, but when I'm teaching, I turn it off to make it look like I know everything. But in between videos, I turn it on. No, I don't really, but kind of It's just a super handy little tool. And whenever you don't know how to use something, you can just put your mouse over it and look down there and say, Oh, that's the metronome. Now I know what that is. So keep that open. And whenever you're stuck, glance down at and it's going to tell you exactly what something is. Okay? Even, especially for these classes of mine, if I show you something and you don't catch what it's called or you want to get a little more detail on it, put your mouse over that thing and look over at InfoVw and it will really help you out. Okay? So just keep that open and glance down at it whenever you're getting stuck. Super duper helpful. Alright, now let's go on to Help View. 14. Help View: Okay, the next thing I want to show you is something called help view, and that is what I have open over here. Now, if you don't see this over here, go to view and then Help view. You can also press Command Option seven or Command, Command Option seven or Alt Option seven, I think, on a PC. That's going to open up this. Now, this is really helpful because this has a bunch of little lessons in it, okay? So you can click on a Tour of Live. Okay? And if I click on it, there's some text, and then it says, click here to load the set. Sure. I'm going to say, Don't say what I was just working on. And it's gonna load a little set, and then it's gonna walk me through it. Look at that. Okay. And then once I'm done reading it, I click Next page at the bottom, and it says, Here's this thing, and you can walk through all these little lessons, okay? And it loads you up with kind of a cool little track. Hello. Yeah, that's cool. So it's really gonna walk you through each thing. There's session view stuff. There's arrangement view stuff. And then we can hit this little home button up here to go back and walk through each of these lessons. Now, you have me here helping you learn live and walk through it, but multiple perspectives is a great thing. So what I'm really going to ask you to do is take a minute and go through each of these. Don't worry about mastering everything because I'm going to walk you through just about everything over the course of all of these classes. But this will give you a good idea of a lot of different things happening in live and show you some cool sets. So take some time and do that. When you're done, you can close this view because this is really the only purpose of this view is to show you these lessons. Once you don't want it anymore, you can just go to view and then re click on Help View to hide it, or you can just click a little X right here, and now it's gone. So I'm going to leave that closed for the rest of this class because I've watched those lessons. They're delightful, but I don't need them. And it frees up a little bit more screen screen real estate, we like to say, to hide them. So I'm gonna keep that closed for now and move on. So check those out highly recommended. 15. Zooming and Scrolling: Okay, so let's get to know navigating in live a little bit. And the main way that we do that is we have a couple kind of weird gestures to learn. So if you go so if you want to zoom in or scroll, so scrubbing is this way. We can zoom in this way, zoom in and zoom out, and scrub left and right. Now, you can do all of that with a single click. It's kind of crazy. And it takes a minute to learn it. So what you're going to do is click up here right above the numbers where you get the magnifying glass, okay? You're going to click and hold down. Now, while you're holding down, if you pull down, you're going to zoom in. If you pull up, you're going to zoom out. If you move right, you're going to scrub and if you move left, you're going to scrub. Okay? Left, right, up down, right? So the idea here is that you can navigate from the beginning of a track to the end of the track with one quick gesture. Okay? It takes some practice, but you can do it. Now, alternatively, if you have a track pad, if you're on a laptop or you're on a desktop and use like one of these, you can do two finger stuff, okay? So two finger kind of pinch in and out and two finger swipe side to side, does that. That's what I've gotten the habit of doing. But it's just much easier for me because I have this track pad thing. So anywhere that you can zoom in and out, that gesture is going to work or the two finger thing. That's true on a mini grid, as well. If we go down here, can do it up here. We can also do it over here on our notes section if we want to zoom into the notes. Just click and drag, click and drag or two fingers. That's how we zoom in, you're going to be doing a lot of that. A lot of zooming in and zooming out. It's just the kind of nature of live. You're constantly zooming in and zooming out. So get used to those motions either with a track pad or with a mouse by using the up down, left, right thing up here. Cool? Go ahead and practice it. I'll. And 16. The Main sequencer (Arrangement View): Alright. Now, let's make our way around the arrangement view sequencer window, our main timeline. Okay? So first, I'm going to hide a few things. You can easily hide stuff, but if you put your mouse over one of these dark gray lines like that, you get this icon that kind of looks like a kind of arrow going up and down at the same time. If I click and drag here, I can make that area bigger or smaller. So I'm just going to smush it all the way to the bottom and then it's going to go away. I can do that on the browser too if I really wanted to. But I usually keep the browser open. Okay, but now I can see a whole bunch of my arrangement view timeline. So for each track, okay, let's take a look at this track. Okay? So this is a Mi track. We have audio tracks and Mi tracks. This is an audio track. This is a mini track. The main difference is just that a midi track, I need to put an instrument on it for it to make sound, and an audio track, I need an audio file to go on it as a clip. So I can see that there's MIDI information on this track. Be you see these little dots. That says this is a MIDI clip. And down here, you see this waveform, that says this is an audio clip. Okay? So back to my track here. So I can see my timeline. I can click and drag on stuff to move it around. Now, you want to click and drag on the header of the clip. That's this top part. Okay? If you click and drag on the lower part, you're going to highlight something, and then if you click and drag on it, you're going to move just that part of it. Okay? I'm going to hit Command Z to undo that. Okay, but if you want to move the whole clip, you can move things around this way. If you want to split the clip, then we're going to put our cursor somewhere, and Command E is going to split it into multiple clips. This works on audio clips and medi clips. Going to undo that. Okay, now, over here, we can use this little triangle to minimize this track if we just don't need to see it very much, can do that. You can also kind of just grab the bottom of it and make it nice and big or nice and small, if you want. Here is our ins and outs. So this is a MIDI clip. So it's looking for midi information. So this is showing me all my possible midi things. These are MIDI devices connected to my computer. Okay? I've got some keyboards, this fishman thing is a midi guitar, push, seaboard is another keyboard, all kinds of stuff. Usually, you just want to leave that to all ins. That means any MDI thing I play here, it's going to record as MIDI information. There's not a whole lot of reason to say, listen to this one thing or this other thing. In most cases. Same thing with the channel. We're just going to leave it on all channels all the time. Our in auto and off, this is our monitor settings. This means what are we going to hear while we're recording? We're going to talk more about this when we get into the recording section. For now, just leave it on auto. Then this is our output. Where is the sound from this track going? In this case, we just want to send it to main. That's going to send it to our master track, which is all the way at the bottom down here. Everything should really be set to main unless you're doing some other kind of routing or something. Over here, we have kind of our mini mixer, okay? This blue line that says zero, this is our volume, okay? We can click and drag, pull it down, up. Here's a fun little tip. If you ever want to take something back to its default in live, this is true all over live, not just for this volume. But let's say we adjusted this and then said, I don't like it. Let's take it back to our default. Just click on it once to make sure it's activated, and then press the delete key and it'll go back to its default. Super handy. Okay. This number five is showing us the number of our track, so five, six, seven. But if it's yellow, that means that track is on. It's active. We call this the Abletons fancy term for this is the track activator. I kind of hate that term, but whatever. It's the track activator. It's kind of their version of a mute button, okay? Except it's backwards. So right now, it's on. If I click it, it's off. Now we're not going to hear this track. Okay? So the track is active or not active, okay? So you can see these ones up here, like this one, Track four, I've turned off. And the reason I did that probably because I was doing something on it that I didn't like, and I just turned it off and then eventually probably deleted. Okay, here, we have solo. That means turn everything off except for this track. So we're going to hear only this track. And then here we have arm to record. So this works a little bit different whether you're in an audio track or a midi track. But in a miiTrack, it basically means listen to midi devices. So I could play any MIDI device, and we'll hear it this track. And if I hit the main record button up here, it's going to record onto this track. Okay. In an audio track like this one, if I hit record, this is going to arm this to record audio sound. So I hit this to tell it I want to record onto that track, and then I hit this button to start recording. We'll spend more time, a lot more time on how to record with live in a little bit. For now, just know that if you're not hearing your midi track, make sure it's arm to record while you're playing something in. Here we have our panning. We can move a sound left or right. Now, if you're not familiar with panning, basically, if I go all the way left, you're going to hear this in your left speaker. If you're wearing headphones, you're only going to hear this on the left side. Now, some platforms that I put these classes on throw out panning information, kind of annoying. But let's try it. Here's how to know if you're hearing with panning. So I'm going to solo this track, so we're only going to hear this little synth riff. And if you only hear it in your left ear, then it's working. Right? And then here's only our right ear. Cool. And then I'm going to put it back. C means center, we're hearing it equally in both ears. This ominous negative infinity is our sens. So we can send things down to we have two sends by default. And they are down here, A and B. We can add more sends. We can add as many as we want, and we'll get to that in a little bit. For now, I'm just going to leave them at zero. Okay? So that's the main setup of kind of our minimxer in arrangement view. If we want to get a full mixer in arrangement view, we can easily do that by clicking this button down here. Okay? This is going and then I'm just going to make it nice and big Woops. This is going to pull up our full mixer. And now this is the same one we see in session. So let's go to Session View and talk about the layout of that. 17. The Clip Slot Grid (Session View): Okay, now let's go back over to Session View, take a look at the same stuff, but from that other perspective. Okay? So here I have the same track that I was just looking at but in Session View. So I haven't put any clips in here yet. Now, there's a couple things that might jump out at you. First, this IO section, the IO means our ins and our outs, like our like midi input, audio input, that section looks pretty familiar, right? Like we have the monitor, the inputs and the outputs all set up basically the same. We have a little more information here now, but we basically have the same information. Our mixer looks a little different, but it's doing the same stuff. So this is where our SNS are now. They look more like sends because we have a little bit more room. This is our volume of the track. Here's our panning, our track activator, which doesn't look normal right now because I left this one soloed. So let's turn that off. So our track activator. So remember, yellow means it's on and working. Solo and arm to record. Okay? This up here is just showing me my peak volume. So you can see this one has volume, so it's showing where the peak is. That'll be useful once we get into mixing and stuff. Now we have each track up here, and up here, we have this whole area is called the Clip slot grid. Okay, it's a grid of clip slots. Each one of these is a clip slot. Okay? Now you can now, we'll get into how that works later. But something I want to point out while we're here is you see this orange outline around some of the tracks? We also have it over here on the Master. What is that? That's a little strange. That means you probably don't see this orange outline. What it means is, I have a controller plugged in to my computer that's able to launch clips. Now, in this case, it's this thing over here. This pad, this is called an Ableton Push. It's kind of like a physical controller for live. So you see this grid here, all of these things. I can launch all of these clips by going down this way, right? I can also play this like a keyboard using this instrument because this is arm to record. I can Neat, huh? That's a cool toy, and I'll talk about how that works later in the class. We'll spend some time the push controller. But the orange box here is telling me what I can access with my push controller. Okay? So it's kind of giving me a window into what the push sees me doing. More on that later. Okay, now, there's a lot more here, but I just kind of want to keep it simple for the moment and just kind of go over the different areas of the program. So let's move on and talk about clip view. 18. Clip View: Okay, so whether or not you're in session View or arrangement View, the clip view works the same. So I'm going to take any clip. Let's take this one. I'm going to double click on it, and now the clip view pops open. Okay? Now, I can drag the little gray line right here, click and drag to make it nice and big if I want. So in clip view, it's kind of like putting a clip under a microscope, right? We're like, now, zooming in, focusing on that clip. So we have some controls for this clip. We have a bunch of things we can do to it. Just looking at some of the more simple ones, we can boost the volume or cut the volume. This isn't a great way to do that, but it's here. We can change the pitch. So if I want this to go higher, we can do that and do all kinds of funny things with the pitch. We can reverse it so that it goes backwards. I can hit reverse again to make it go back forwards. And we can change, is it looping, the time signature of it, the length of it, the position, do some quantizing, more on that later. Now, if you want to hide this, we have this little arrow down here. We can click on that and it goes away, and we can bring it back right there. Now, this area is shared by the device view which, again, we can get to with Shift Tab, there's no devices on this track. So let's go to one that does have devices like this one. Okay? So here's a Mi Clip. I just double clicked on a MIClip and made one. I can shift tab to go over to my device view, or I can click down here. Okay? Here's my clip view, here's my device view. Okay? Two of them. And if I want to see them both at the same time, I can just click this little arrow here and it's going to go Up. Now I have Clip View and Device view all open at the same time. Okay, let's talk about creating clips. 19. Creating Clips: Alright, so you're saying to yourself, Jay, this is all cool. I like to know my way around and stuff, but I just want to make some sound. I want to make some noise. Let's do that. So yeah, let's do that. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to make a new session. You might not need to do this, but I'm going to hit Command N, or you can go to File Create New. Let's say, Don't Save. Okay. So, should we use Session view or Arrangement View? Let's use Arrangement View first. So I'm gonna hit Tab, Arrangement View. So I'm gonna go to a Mi track. And I'm going to make a midi clip, okay? So the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to go right to the beginning right under where it says one, and I'm going to write on the timeline for this first track, and I'm going to double click. Okay? That's going to make me a Mi clip. Now I'm going to go down here and you see the piano roll editor. Okay? I'm just going to click in some notes. Okay? I just clicking on some spots here just for fun. It's gonna be really fast and frantic and chromatic, but that's okay. So, play around. Have some fun with this. Okay, cool. Now, if we hit play right now, we're not gonna hear this. Let's do it, just to prove. Hey. Nope, not going to hear it. MiTrack needs to have an instrument on it. You're not going to hear anything until you put an instrument on it. So let's go over here to our browser. I know I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but I just want to make some sound, right? So click on instruments. We're going to go through all of these instruments sooner or later. But let's just say analog, okay? Let's click and drag. Put drop that right on that clip. Okay? Now, move your cursor back to the beginning or just click on the clip and hit Play. It. We're making some sound, okay? From that, you can start having fun. Make some more clips. Put some notes in them. You can copy, you can paste. You can move notes around. But that's how you make a midi clip, okay? So there are basically three ways to make a mini clip. We can double click like I just did to make one. We can record one in. I can hit record and then play my keyboard. Or I can import a midi clip if I have a bunch of midi clips, with audio clips, there are really two ways. I can record one. I can plug in a microphone and hit record and go, wa, wa, wa, wa and record one. Or option two, I can import one. So in my case, if I go down here where it says samples in my browser, I've got all these clips. Cool. I can just drag right onto an audio track, which is these bottom two are audio tracks, these top two are mini tracks, just by default. That's what they are. And now I've got a clip. I can click and drag it around and I can have some fun. I can make some music with it. Okay, you probably don't see as many audio files as I do here because this is finding them all over my system, and there's, you know, tons of them. But you should have a few here. Okay, so take some time, experiment with that. Just make some sounds, go to the instruments, drag different instruments on to your clip. You can only have one instrument per track. So if you want a different instrument, it's got to go on a different track, okay? And if you want to get even crazier, any of these instruments like analog is the name of the instrument. If I click this little triangle here, these are all presets. These are different sounds. So here's a bass sound. Buzzing sound kind of thing. Strings, stuff like that. Okay. So experiment with that, goof around, have some fun. And then we're going to move into really starting to navigate our way around the browser. 20. Using The Browser - Why?: Okay, so in this section, we're going to deep dive into the browser. So this is going to be our first section that we're really going to go deep into. Now, before we do, let's talk about why why do we care about this browser section? It is arguably the most boring part of life. Let me show you how as a music producer, I organize all my files outside of Ableton. So first, I have I use the finder in Ableton. So here's all my hard drives. I have this tower of hard drives over here. And I've foolishly, at some point, I decided it was a good idea to name all of my hard drives based on lakes and bodies of water that have been significant in my life. So eight point Lake is near where I grew up. Like Michigan, like Superior Games Lake. A lake where I vacation sometimes. Lake Nicoms is just down the street. Anyway, you don't need to know that. But, um, so in Michigan, I have this folder called Sample Library, and I have, you know, a couple million samples in here of just stuff. Then in the games drive is just sample libraries. So this is just tons of sample libraries and hundreds of thousands of things. The reason I'm showing you all this is because how do I find anything? How do I Like, I want to find a cool kick sound. Where do I go? I don't know. I could go anywhere. I could spend hours digging around in my hard drives. So no thank you. Instead, Live knows about those hard drives, and it knows about that giant sample library folder. And it's categorized things quite nicely for me so that I don't have to deal with it. For a little while, I used a separate program. There was a program that exists for a while by a company called Audio file Engineering, local to where I live, Minneapolis, and they had a program called Sample Manager that did all this really cool stuff. It was a librarian program, and it also did some batch processing, and it was really great. But that company is long gone. And so was that program. So now the Ableton browser is our way to find samples quick. So now if I just go search here and I say, Kick, I can find a ton of kicks. So I can just audition them really fast. Okay. And I can just find the one I want. I can even be more specific. I can say hard kick, soft kick, different styles of kicks, all kinds of stuff. And this is my librarian, okay? And it's not just for samples. This is also my librarian for presets, scents, loops, effects, plug ins, all kinds of stuff. So this is so don't think of this as just the place where our samples live. Think of this as your whole musical librarian, because that's really what it is. There are some things you can do to customize it. As you probably see in this places area, you probably don't have the same things I have, and in collections, you don't have the same things I have. Don't worry about that. We're going to go over all that soon. But that's why the browser is so important. It's gonna save you so much time to really understand the browser and get good at navigating it. It is your musical librarian. Cool. Okay. So let's go in and talk about how to use this thing. 21. Sounds: Okay, I want to go through basically all of these little buttons here. And we're going to start with library, okay? So if you go up to library, you can hit Edit here and you can actually hide different things if you want. I'm going to leave them all hidden, but I'm going to show you a couple of tricks to make this a little more useful to you, okay? So I'm going to hit Done up here. And again, if you didn't catch that, put your mouse over the word library, and then you get an edit button. There it is. Okay, so let's skip all for the moment. We'll come back to that, and let's just click on sounds. Okay, so some of these terms are a little hard to follow, what they're calling sounds versus drums, versus clips versus samples versus grooves. So that's what we're going to learn. Okay, before we get into these, I want to do two quick things, okay? First, if you want to see more of the browser, grab this dark line here, click and drag. You can make it bigger. You can make it smaller. I wouldn't recommend doing that. I usually like to have it sit right about here. I like to be as small as possible. However, I'm going to make it a little bit bigger for the moment because we're going to spend some time here. Can do the same thing with this area. Make that a little bit bigger if you. Okay, the second thing I want you to do is take note of this little blue button down here. It might not be blue for you. If it's not, let's click it and turn it on. Make sure that is on. What that is is your audition button. What that means is that anything in this list, I can click on it. I can use the arrow keys to go down. Okay. So it's a little pair of headphones, right? And that basically just means, like, audition. Like, let's hear what we're what we've selected. Sometimes it can be kind of annoying to have it on, especially when you're trying to give a talk like this. So I kind of toggle it on and off on occasion. But when I'm working, when I'm not when I'm teaching, but when I'm actually, like, producing music, it's on 100% of the time. So, let's there. Okay, so now let's go to sound. So we're going to skip this all for the moment. We'll come back to that. So it can be a little confusing what's included in the different names they have here, right? Sounds versus drums, versus instruments, versus samples versus clips. These are all slightly different things to Ableton. So that's one of the things we're going to learn here. So sounds. Sounds, you're going to find two different types of files. You're going to find ADG files and ADV files, okay? ADV files is Ableton Live device. It is what Live calls an instrument. You can think of it as a synthesizer. So for all of the live instruments, which we can see here, these are all of the live instruments, okay? But in sounds, we're going to see a list of all of the presets for those instruments, regardless of what instrument they are for. This is just every preset that we have for the live instruments in a very long list. Okay? There's a lot of them. Okay? So if you might go to the sounds area, if you're just looking for a Synth preset, if you're like, I want a bass sound, I don't care what instrument I'm using. I just want a cool bass sound. Okay? And you can audition it by going through here. And just listening to all kinds of different sounds. Okay? Now, I'm going to point out, turn off for a second. I'm going to point out something about this audition that we're hearing right now. So with a Synth, it does depend on what note we play, right? Like, we have to play a Syth or put in a clip or something. So this little audio file that we hear is just kind of a preview. They've just kind of picked a note, and usually it's Middle C and said, Here's a recording of what this preset sounds like. Can modify it all day long. But that little audio file that we hear when we audition it is just kind of a preview. So it kind of gives you an idea of what the synth is. Okay, then the other type of file we see here is ADG. Okay? Now, an ADG file stands for Ableton device group. So Ableton has this way of combining instruments together into what it calls a RAC, okay? RACK. So a rack of instruments is a group of instruments put together. We're going to spend a whole bunch of time on Ableton instrument racks because they are a super powerful thing. So what you need to know for right now is that these ADG files are just another instrument, but they're like a group of instruments. That's the easy way to think about them. But for the purposes of just loading up a cool sound that you like based on all of these presets, they work the same as Ableton devices, okay? Whether you've got an Ableton device or an Ableton device for right now, they're functionally the same. You can kind of see the icon is a little different. An Ableton device shows a rectangle, sort of, and a device group shows like kind of two rectangles or maybe two squares. So that tells you it's a group. And then to load one of these things, both you would do the same. You can double click on it or you can drag it right over onto the track you want or onto empty space, and it'll make a new track. And there's our instrument that we made. A group looks a little different. It can look like that. Sometimes it'll look like that. You can open and close and show more stuff in the group, but it works the same. Okay, so under this sounds setting, what we're getting is a giant list of basically every preset for every Ableton instrument on our computer. Okay? It's a monstrous list, and this is even the whole list. If I go to the bottom, it says, Show Me. Sure. And it keeps going on and on, on and on. There's so much stuff here, okay? Now, if your list isn't as long, it might be because you don't have Suite or something like that. But in suite, it's a very, very, very long list. Okay, so that's what's in our sounds. Now, if we want, we could control click on it and rename this. And I kind of want to because in previous versions of Live, you couldn't rename it. So now we can. So I want to call it Synth Presets. That's what I'm going to call mine. So I'm going to leave it like that, okay? So that was sounds. And now I'm going to call it Synth Presets. Cool. Let's move on. 22. Drums: Okay, up next is drums. Now, in the drums category, we're going to find three different types of files. Okay? The first thing we're going to see here is more of these ADG files, Ableton device group. That is going to be a preset for an instrument, an instrument rack, specifically. That is some kind of drum kit, okay? So if I load this one up, I can put it on a Mi file. This is a drum machine. Oops. There my drum sounds. And if I make a new Mi clip, I can program drums. So it gives me a group of sounds that are drum sounds. So that's one type of file. Another type of file is audio files, wave files. So Wave files, AIF files, any files that Ableton that Live has found on your computer that it thinks are drum loops. So here's a drum loop Cool. So now I can just drag that right into a clip or if I'm in arrangement view, I can drag that right into my timeline whoops. Can drag that right onto an audio track. And now I've got it there as a wave file. It's not an instrument. It's just a audio clip. Okay, then the third type of file we're going to find here is an ALC file. This is This is an Ableton Live clip. Okay, so this is a MIDI file, basically. But it's a MIDI file that has a drum machine attached to it. In other words, it's got some sounds attached to it. So I can drag an ALC file onto a MIDI clip and drop it. And now we have a drum we can see it here. Let's solo this track. Click on it. Cool, right? So this clip came with a drum machine. If I shift tab to go to my device view, here's the drum machine that came with it. I can change that. Remember that in live, and this is true in all audio software, really. But there's a mini clip that tells the instrument what to do. And in this case, there's an instrument that came with the clip, but there are separate things. There's the clip and then the instrument. So if we go to an Ableton device group like this drum kit and put it on this track, now we're going to hear the same drum clip, the same rhythm, the same beat, but played through new sounds. Okay, that's pretty similar by chance, but let's grab this one. Guy, here's another kit. Right? So I've got the same clip, but I'm changing the sounds because I'm using different instruments, in this case, a device group, which is a drum preset and putting it onto this clip. Okay? So the clips show up in this list of drums as ALC files like that. And then we've got audio files that are just drum loops that go on an audio track, and then we've got ADG files that go on a Mi track, and those are drum presets. Cool? With me? Cool. See, it's really interesting to focus on the browser like this because we're learning a lot about how Ableton works just by looking at the way the browser is organized. Alright, let's move on to instruments. 23. Instruments: But Okay, up next we have instruments. Now, what you're going to find here is all of the Ableton Live instruments. These are the synthesizers and the samplers that come with live. Now, this is where we really see This is one of the places where we really see the difference between the sweet version, the standard version, and the light version of Live. I have the sweet version, obviously. So these are all the instruments that are available to me. If you have standard or the intro or light versions, you won't see as long of a list as I have. But all of these are basically different synthesizers and they make different kinds of sounds. So what we can do here is, let's take analog, for example. Analog is a synthesizer. I can put it onto a Mi track. You can just drag it over there and put it on a midi track. That's what analog looks like. Okay, I can dial in a sound. I can mess with this, and we'll learn how to use this later. But I can make a sound if I want, and that's cool. But when I did that, when I drug that over onto a Mi track, what I made there was the default analog patch. Okay? That's just like the default. What it sounds like right out of the box, which is this. I'm gonna make a mini clip. Let's solo this track. And let's hear it. Okay, that's what analog sounds like right out of the box. Cool. Nothing amazing, but not bad. It's kind of cool. But all of these devices are also folders that we can open with this little arrow, and then we have all of these presets for each device. Okay? Now, the thought that maybe just came into your head is, oh, when we were looking at Synth presets or sounds, we saw all the Syth presets. And now I'm seeing more presets for the Synth, right? No, you're seeing the same presets. They're just organized different here. Okay? So what we have in instruments is each of our instruments with all of their presets organized by instruments, here's the collision instrument and the collision presets. Here's the drift instrument and the drift presets, okay? So it's the same information organized differently, okay? So if I want to use a preset, I can just drag that right onto a Mi track. Oops. See what happened here is I tried to drag it onto an audio track, and it's saying, No, I don't know what to do with that. This is a midi track. Okay? So now here's that same midi note through the drift club base. Now, it sounds like this. Okay, wild. We can also, of course, audition these presets by turning this back on. Oh That's kind of cool. Let's use that for my midi note here. Cool. And maybe you just had the thought, Well, here's a drum kit, and the drum kit is just midi notes, right? Like, it's still got a drum set on it as an instrument. But could I just put a synthesiser on it and have it play these as mini notes? You sure could. Let's use Hickory bells. Okay? Now here's our drums being played with Hickory bells. Look at the mini clip. Maybe if we zoom in and look at that again, it'll help you understand. Right? It's just mini notes. So with this drum clip, we can put whatever sound we want on it. A drum set is going to sound the most interesting on it, but you can put any synth you want on it. Okay, so all of these presets are the same ones that we found in the sounds or Synth preset. Now, I've just organized differently. Cool. All right. Let's move on. 24. Audio Effects: Okay, up next is audio effects, relatively simple, but works kind of the same as instruments. So if we click on audio effects here, we can see all the audio effects in live. Again, this is somewhere where you will see the difference between suite and the other versions. You will have less of these if you don't have sweet. But inside each of these effects, we'll have a bunch of presets for those effects. And any effect we can drag right onto a track. It can be an audio or mini track, and it's going to show up. You can put a whole bunch of them on a track if you want like that and make big long crazy effects. Or you can open it up and grab a preset and put it right on a track. Now, if you're in a different version of Live, you might see these grouped into folders. There's been quite a controversy about this idea. In Live 11, they grouped all of these into, I think, five or six different folders, and then in Live 12, they got rid of the folders. So if you're in Live 11, you have all the same stuff. Well, you have most of the same stuff, but they're just grouped into folders. I Live 12, we don't have any folders. They're just in an alphabetical list, which is just fine as well. Just remember, open up these little folders, and you will get a bunch of presets for that effect. Alright. Nothing more to see here. Let's move on to Mdieffects. 25. MIDI Effects: Alright. Before we go on to Mdieffects, let me just say that later in this series of courses, I will be walking through how to use every single one of these audio effects and media effects. So let's go over to Mdia effects now. Midi effects are kind of a weird thing in live because there are not a ton of media effects, and they don't they are not super useful. I hate saying that. I feel like I'm disrespecting midi efects, which I guess I am. But they can do a handful of things, but of everything, this is probably the one I click on the least, especially in Live 12, because the most popular one to me was our peggiator and there's other ways to do arpeggiation now. But we will go through how every single one of these works later, and maybe you'll find something that's, like, super important to you. But for the purposes of the browser, just remember that these can only go on midi tracks. They can't go on audio tracks, only midi tracks. And inside each effect is a bunch of presets for that effect. And that's basically everything we need to know about MIDI effects for the moment until we really get into the weeds of MITI programming. So let's move on to modulators. 26. Modulators: Okay. Up next is modulators. This little button in the library is new in Live 12, but the contents of it are not necessarily. Some of them are. What we have here is a group of effects that modify other things. They are modulators. Some of these like envelope follower existed in previous versions of Live, but they've just been grouped differently into their own thing now. They are essentially audio or midi effects. You'll notice this icon looks a little bit different than the other effect icons. Okay? This one, there's one that looks like our modulator effects. But this icon means that this is a Max for Live device. Now, you don't really need to pay attention to that. We're going to talk about Max for Live in just a second. Actually, the very next video. So just hold on to that idea for a minute. For now, all we really need to know is that these work the same as anything else. They have presets on the inside. Like everything else, and they can go on audio or mini tracks. Right? Here's our LFO. You might have seen LFO before. It is something that is inside of a synthesizer usually. But we have this cool LFO effect that lets us basically put an LFO on anything, and it's super fun, actually, and really valuable. So these modulators are really cool. We'll get into how they all work later. But let's go on to Max for Live, and that'll help kind of clarify some of this business. 27. Max For Live: Alright, Max for Live. I hate to put it this way, but Max for Live can kind of be you love it or you hate it kind of thing. The good news is, if you don't want to really get into Max for Live, you don't have to. There's no you can use Everything in Ableton and make some awesome music and never touch Max for Live. But I personally love Max for Live, and I've been using it for a super long time. So what Max for Live is is essentially, it's a programming language that exists inside of live. The programming language is called Max, and it lets you build your own effects or instruments. It's very powerful. You can really do some wild stuff. Now, if you're not interested in programming at all, what this tool lets us do is get access to everyone else in the world who's making cool stuff, right? So there are websites you can go on, like, a great one is maxflive.com where people are posting instruments and effects that they've made that do really cool and wild stuff, and you can download them and use them. A lot of the time they're free, not always. So what we have here is a whole bunch of instruments and effects that have been built in Max for Live that we can play with. Some of these are mine, like, probably test demo class is something I made. And some of these other test ones, driller I think I made driller I don't remember. But the little icon shows that it's a Max for Live device. So if we go back to modulators, you can see this LFO. We can tell just from this that it's a Max for Live device because of this button here. If I click that button, that's going to open like the code editor, where I can actually modify it and make it do really really cool and customized things. One of the fun things about Max for Live is that a lot of producers, myself included, have their own little, like, secret weapons that they've built in Max for Live. And there are things that, like, they use on tracks all the time, but they'll never tell anyone about, and it's how they get these really cool, unique sounds. I have a bunch of those that I've made in Max, and I'll never tell anyone about. Um, so, circling back to the browser. Here we have a whole bunch of Max for Live things that Live found on our computer. We also have blank ones. This is a blank Max audio effect, Max instrument and Max Midi effect. So you can throw that on a track and start building something totally new. Now, we will go into how we do that at the end of this class. We will spend time learning how to use MAX at the very end of this sequence of classes. So if you don't want to invest that time to really learn how to use MAX, you're missing out. It's really powerful stuff. But if you don't want to do that, that's just fine. That's why I put it at the very end. But Max will come up a whole bunch because Max for Live devices are sprinkled all over throughout Live at this point. So remember that you don't need to be able to program Max to use Max for Live devices. These are there's tons of really cool stuff that you can just use like any other effect or instrument. 28. Plug-ins: Okay, moving on to plug ins. Okay? Now, let me first explain what a plug in is, and then I'll explain what this particular list is. So a plug in is its own little program. Think of a plug in as a completely separate program, okay? Now, these programs are designed to run within other programs. It's like program inception. Let's use an example. Right here, BBC symphonic orchestra. Now, this is an instrument. This is a synthesizer. It's really a sampler. That is an orchestra library. So I can load that as an instrument onto a track. In fact, let's do it. It's got to go on a mini track because it's an instrument and it's big. It's got a lot of stuff to it, which is why it's going to take a minute to load. Okay. Now, this instrument pops open in a new window because it is not Ableton. It is put out by this other company called Spitfire Audio. So Spitfire Audio releases this instrument called BBC Symphonic Orchestra. And I can use it to play orchestra sounds, and it's a quite good sounding orchestra. So at some point, I went and I bought this little program. I bought it. I think actually this version I have was free, actually, I think. But anyway, I got it, and I installed it on my computer. And so any audio program that knows how to deal with this particular kind of program is going to be able to open it. If I open garage band or logic or any other audio software on this computer, it's going to see this same program, and it's going to launch it because these little programs are called plug ins and they're designed to run within audio program. Okay? So this list here is everything I've installed on my computer. It's kind of a lot. So you might have nothing in this list because you haven't installed a bunch of stuff. I bet you have a few things actually that just kind of came with your computer. But I've been doing this for a long time, so I have installed a bunch of things. What's important to note here is that none of these are made by Ableton, okay? These are all separate programs that run outside of Oh. These are all separate programs that run inside of live. And they are mostly instruments and effects. Okay? So if we go to this instrument tab here, these are instruments made by Live. They run within live and they are part of live. If we go to audio effects, these are audio effects made by Ableton for live. You can only get these in Ableton Live. If we go here, these are plugins made by anyone but Ableton. There's a whole bunch of different companies that make these things. They're not Ableton. Alright, I'm gonna close this. So they are really the only thing that pop open in a new window because they have their own little interfaces. Some of them are little and some of them are big. Some of these are cheap and some of these are expensive. You can comb the Internet for audio plug ins or instruments. You can find a lot of free ones, expensive ones, cheap ones. There's things all over the place. Now, one thing that I want you to do is that if you click on Plug ins and you don't see any, then we might need to make a quick trip to our preferences. So let's do that. So I'm going to go up to the live menu and go to settings. Now I'm going to go to plug ins, okay? Now, we need to turn some stuff on here. Okay? So use audio units. Audio Units is a kind of plug in. Use Audio Units Version two. Turn that on. Use Audio Units Version three. Turn that on. If you're on a PC, you might not see that. That's okay. Use VST two plugins in system folder. Turn that on. Use VST two is another kind of plugin. Use VST two plugins in Custom folder. You can leave that off. Unless you're doing something weird on your computer, you probably don't need that. But if you do turn that on, you need to hit this browse and tell it where your custom folder is. But don't worry about it. Use VST three plugins in your system folder. Turn that on. Custom folder, you can leave that off. Okay, and then these plug in Windows, I like to have all three of these on, okay? And then if you're still not seeing anything show up in your plugins window, hit this rescan button. And if you still don't see anything, I might restart live just to make sure that it gets everything. And if you don't see anything after that, you probably don't have anything. So search around the Internet for some cool plug ins and you'll find some Install them. Okay. So that's what plug ins are. They're really fun. They're really valuable. After you are producing music for a while, you will build up a library of plug ins, and it will be and plug ins will become a big strain on your bank account because it's kind of addictive to buy plug ins. Okay, moving on. 29. Clips: Okay, y, next is clips. Okay? Now, you might think I've already told you a few different times that everything in our kind of content area here is a clip. This is a clip. This is a clip. This is a clip. And you'll be right. Those are all clips. Kind of every nugget of audio or MIDI is a clip. That is true. However, this button here, I don't like the way it's labeled. I don't like it. Because what we're seeing here is just MIDI clips. Okay? So I'm going to rename it, actually. Let's do it. I'm going to control click on it, or you can just press Command R, rename. Mini clips. Because that's what this is. This is all your Mi clips. You can see ALC Ableton Live Clip. Okay? So there's a ton of mini clips here, and some of these are pretty cool. This is just stuff that's been found on your hard drive. All of these things that are these really long lists, we have a really robust way to search through these lists, and we'll get to that in a minute. I just kind of want to show you what's in each of these. So like, Halftime trip hop. Sure. Let's put that on. I just drug it to the open area here and it made a new track. That's cool. This clip is going to load up a drum sound because this is a drum clip. Let's solo it. Now, you might have noticed that the preview played at a tempo and this one played at a different tempo. It's because this one is going to play at my session tempo, which is up here. It's cool. You know, we can add these things in. These are just mini clips. Some of these ones, the drum ones probably we've already seen in the drum list up here in the library. Same info just in another spot. But, you know, these ones are chords. So let's hear that. Arpeggiated chord. Now, what would happen if I did what I almost just did, which is put this chord onto this track. This track already has a drum machine on it because I put this on it, and that loaded a drum machine. Okay. So this has a drum machine, and a track can only have one instrument on it unless it's an instrument group. More on that later. But when I drug this on it, this clip is now going to play through this drum machine. So it's going to be weird. It doesn't know what to do with all these higher notes, but the lower notes had drum sounds to them. So if you want the clip to come with its own sound, it needs to go on its own track. Once a clip pulls an instrument on it, that instrument is going to stay on it until you explicitly put a different instrument on it. Okay? So I can easily change the instrument on any of these tracks. But if I want to use the instrument that comes with the clip, I need to put it on a new track. Cool. Okay. All right, so Mi clips. Now, samples is something a little different. Let's talk about that next. 30. Samples: Okay, samples are our audio clips. Okay? So, these are all gonna be audio files. And you can see there's a lot of just junk in this list. Like, these are things that I probably pulled in and lost track of what they were. Just a huge list of Dana Boo stuff. Dog licking. Mmm. You know, and like, we haven't even got to the As alphabetically here, right? I can do show more, and we're just getting, like, just through numbers. This is gonna go on for, like, years and Oldsmobile starting. Okay, so what samples is doing here is, I think it's just digging through my hard drive. It's finding the samples on all my hard drives and my lake themed drives, and it's compiling them into this crazy list here. Now, this crazy list is not super useful, right? Like, I'm not just gonna go through here and find something. So that's where the search functionality really comes into play. But if I wanted to just see all the audio files, I could just keep digging through here forever, never, never. So what you need to know is that in the samples is going to be audio clips, which are going to be any kind of audio file. We're mostly seeing wave files here, but AIF files and MP three files and any other kind of audio file on M that it knows about will show up here. 31. Grooves: Okay. Okay, let's move on to grooves. Okay, so this is a little bit of a weird concept, okay? Grooves are not clips, grooves are not instruments or sounds. They are let's say patterns. Here's how grooves work. Let's say I have a beat, for example, like Okay, so this is pretty straight. It's boom, bop, boom. B. So if I wanted to apply a groove to it, I can make it do something like swing. So swing is a very common groove. If I click on one of these, you can hear a preview of the groove with just ticks. Right? You can feel that. It's different than straight eighth notes. Let's go to okay, here's a kind of extreme one. So I'm going to apply this swing groove to that clip by taking this swing, this groove file, and dropping it right on top of that clip. Okay? Let's hear it now. Okay, so it's got that kind of groove to it. So groove files are swing rock, Rumba. Here's percussion conga, jazz rock, jazz African, House, hip hop, funk. There are all these different kind of stylistic patterns. That you can apply to a clip. They work on audio clips or mini clips, okay? So this button here in our library is just a big archive of a bunch of different grooves. You can also make groove files, which we'll talk about doing later, using this area down here that just popped up called the groove pool, okay? So this is the groove pool. It's a neat little area that comes up when you're using a groove. So the files here in the library, these are AGR files. That's the only thing you're going to find in this setting that's Ableton Groove. I don't know what the R is. Probably just groove, the R of groove Ableton groove groove files. Chachi, you can add a Chacha. Um, so those are a relatively new thing to live. They're not new to 12, but I think they came out in ten, maybe. We'll deal a bunch more with using grooves and making grooves later, but this is where we find them, and that's the quick thing on how to use them. So, let's move on. 32. Tunings: Okay, on to tunings. This is a new thing on Live 12, and it is probably the most mind blowing thing to Live 12 is the ability to apply global tunings, which is what this is. So let me explain it this way. If you look at a piano, okay? Let's use the piano roll editor to demonstrate. I'm going to make this nice and big. Okay, you don't need to know how to play the piano for this, but here's what I will tell you. You can see here this is C two. So the number here just tells us which octave we're in. So C two, okay? Now, this is D, E, F, G A, B, C. Okay? So if we take all of those notes and the black notes in between, there are 12 notes in an octave. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, and then it starts over. We're on C again, right? So that's an octave. C two to C three is an octave. And there are 12 notes in that octave. Cool. That's how music works. But that's not how music works all over the world for all cultures and throughout all of history. It has changed. And there are some cultures that use a different system, where they might have 13 or 14 notes per octave. That means every single note here is a little smaller. So if you want to make music that does that, your only way to do it historically was to do really complicated detuning things and figure it out. It's really hard to do. So a new feature that they added was you can retune this whole thing, and it's going to apply to your whole session. If we go into tunings, we can see all of these different settings. So look at this. These ones that start with 12, that means 12 notes per octave, but they're different. They're tuned different and strange. This 116 notes per octave. 19, 22, 24, 31, 41, 55 notes per octave, 72 notes per octave. Okay? I'm going to load that one up. Watch, I'm just going to I think I just double click on it. There we go. Now, look what happened. Like, my black and white key patterns went away because we're the notes that we know, CDE no longer apply. These are all now more complicated notes, right? And it's gonna be to my ears, extremely dissonant. To make music in this way. Alright? So I'm going to take this off, but I'm just going to click on this tuning area and hit Delete. So now we're back to normal Western tuning, also called equal temperament. Okay, so this tuning thing is wild. I love it. I'm so excited to hear the music that people are going to make with it. It's something that's not really for me. I probably won't really use it because, um, I really like working with the traditional system that we have. That's where all my music lives. But there's gonna be some really cool music coming out with this, trust me. So in our browser, the tunings section is just all these different tunings. If you double click on one of these and load it up, everything is going to get very dissonant if you don't know what you're doing. So unless you really have a desire to do this, I would leave this area alone. But look it up. Do some more research on it. You'll find it's really fascinating. If you really want if you want to know a composer who did a lot of this kind of work. Actually, an American composer, I think I think it was from Chicago or Chicago area. I'm not really sure. But look up the composer Harry Parch. He built all kinds of instruments around, I don't know, maybe the 60s, maybe the 50s. He built instruments that had non standard tunings, things like 43 notes to the octave. So look him up. See what you think. If you want to make music like him in Ableton, now you can. Okay, let's move on to templates. But 33. Templates: Okay, templates in live are just super handy little things, but they've got one kind of secret trick. So let's say I wanted to make a podcast. So I could set up a session over here with I'd have a track maybe for my background music, a track for vocal, for a microphone so I can talk, maybe a second mic for a co host, and then maybe another track for sound effects or something. But I'm going to do that every day. I make podcasts all the time. I don't. But let's say hypothetically, I do. So I should make a template that has all of that built into it. Okay? So here that is. I can double click on it. And there's a podcast template. Here it is Mastering Sweet music ambience VoiceOver. Okay? I can do it here or I could work with it over here. It's great, right? Let's do it over here for a minute. So you've got probably, by default, some Templates built into Live that came with you. You don't see as many as I have I've made some of these myself. Production 2021. This was for a project I was working on in 2021, and I just said, like, This is going to be my template. And I made a template. It's got a bunch of instruments loaded up. It's got a bunch of effects loaded up. It's got a bunch of sample libraries loaded up. It's kind of my favorite tools at that moment. 2022, February default, same thing. I made a new one. Default Liveset is another one. IDM template is one I made. So these are really handy. But here's the extra little secret that we have. We have this little triangle here that's going to give us more stuff. And what it's going to give us is the individual tracks. So let's go to the podcast one. Okay? So, here are the tracks, right? Here's the voiceover track. So if I'm in any session, and I'm just like, I have that voiceover track set up really cool for a mic. So you could go in here and grab just that track. You don't have to load up the whole template. And in this case, I could just say, I've got my template, but I need another voiceover. I've got two people coming in on this one. So let's add another voiceover track, right? And let's make sure it goes into that folder. Oops. There we go. So now it's going to have all the same settings, right? Do I need a third voice over this time? Sure. There. So you can add just tracks from the template. So it's a cool time saving feature. Once you get into a pattern of doing something, make yourself a template so that you don't have to set everything up the same every time. Like I said, you can put instruments, effects, like you can see here in this music track, we've got some phase, some ducking and an EQ, just already set up. So that things just fly together really quickly. It's a big time saver if you get used to it. 34. Places: Okay, so we've gone through all of our library places here. Cool. So in so doing, we learned an awful lot about the different ways in which life works. But let's keep going through the browser. We've got two more big areas to look at places and collections. So let's talk about places first. And now, this one, in your computer I bet you don't see what I see. You probably see a few things here, but all of these ones in the middle, you probably don't see. Almost for sure you don't see, because the thing about places is that we can add whatever we want to places. You can think of this as your bookmarks bar, okay? There's a couple things that just stay here, like packs, Cloud, push, user library, and current project. Those just live here. And those are useful. But these things, these are folders I go to all the time for different projects, and I've added them. So you can see add folder. So I could say, I'm going to click on a folder and say, Master. Here's a mastering project I was just working on. Sure. So now if I click on that Master, folder that's now here, I can get access to these files quickly. So the reason you would want to do that is if you are constantly going to the same folder over and over, just give it to yourself right here in the browser and save yourself a bunch of time. That's all. It's a bookmark. So you can see here I put my giant sample library in here, and that was cool. Maybe I didn't need to do that. Some files. I put a splice link here because I downloaded a bunch of files from Splice, which is a sample purchasing website. So I bought a bunch of stuff, and I just put a link here so I could see it quick. This the hack was some library that somebody put out, and I was playing with it for a little while just to try it out and see what it was like. And then here's this masterd. I'm going to get rid of this by just control clicking on it and say, remove from Sidebar. Cool. So there's some cool stuff here. You're always going to see current project, which is going to show you all the samples and files of your current project. For me, there are none in this current project. So that's a good way to get into the files should you need to for your current project, which sometimes you do. Now, the rest of these things, these other four things I want to address kind of separately because they deserve a little more conversation. So let's start with PACs. 35. Packs: Okay, so in order to talk about PACs, let's take a quick trip over to the Ableton website. So here I am on ableton.com, and I clicked on PACS at the top. Look at that. Now, you can see all kinds of stuff here. There's tons of them. Okay? Let's look at this one. Expressive choir made by Spitfire Audio. I think we actually already looked at a Spitfire Audio Plug in. Now, the PAs are not necessarily plug ins. There's a lot of stuff that can be in a pack. A pack can have a whole session in it that live calls a set. Set is the word that Live uses for its session. So a whole file of a track or something like that is called a live set. So a pack could have a whole set in it. It could have a set of samples. It could have a bunch of instrument presets. It could have some Max for Live tools. It could have all kinds of stuff. So if we look through here, we can see, like, here's a Max for Live pack. If we go down more, here's a sounds pack. Here's more sound packs. More MAC for live packs. So there's a bunch of different kinds of packs. And you can make packs yourself, and people do. Or you can download them. Now, if you go to the live website, there's a whole bunch of free ones that you can have and actually, you can get access to all this in live. So basically, you're going to go here. You can go to Live. Click on a free one, download it. And after you download it, there's going to be something that looks like a live file. Double click on that, and it's going to install it for you here, okay? These are what we have installed on our computer. Okay? So let's look at Orchestra strings. That's a good one. So this is a pack that I installed that Ableton makes, and in it, there's samples and sounds. So here is string ensemble. And another Orchestra sound here. I can also and then here, I can get access to the individual samples if I want. But this is the Ableton device group of those samples. So this gives me access to a built sampler that I can play with and use. Okay, so this is a pack that I installed, and it's a sample library. This is a pack that I installed, that's a Max for Live device. Okay, so there's a lot of different ones. Now, you can install more things just from right within live. So it says three updates. So these things have updates. I could click here to download the new update to the orchestra strings. You'll see that like any good string library, that's a big file, 4.3 gigs. So I'm not going to do that right now. But also, I have 194 available packs. I could just download any of these. So if I want u Ton track bully kit. Probably a drum kit that sounds kind of funny. Final classics. Let's find a really small one and just do it. 6.9 megs, transient machines. Cool. So I'm just gonna click on it, download it. There it goes. Once it's downloaded, I'm going to hit Install. There it goes. Now, if I go up here, I can see what was in that. Some presets, some more presets and two Max for Live devices. And over here tells us a little bit about what's in that pack. Cool. So this 193 available packs, that means that on the Ableton website, I bought or was given a whole bunch of packs, and I just haven't installed it yet. So this says there's a whole bunch of things that you've purchased that you haven't installed yet. So you're not going to see 193 things available. This is one of the perks of the Ableton certified trainer thing is they just give me all the packs. So I can install whatever I want. So a pack is just a really handy way to get new things into your version of live to build it up. It's not the only way. But it's a very efficient way. So get in the habit of checking out Ableton packs. And just remember that this is where they live. 36. Cloud and Push: Okay, let's move on to these next two, I'm going to address together. So Cloud. This is a new feature. I actually haven't used it yet, but the intention here is that you can sync up some sets between different machines. So if you're working on different machines, or possibly if you're collaborating, this Ableton Cloud will help your project stay in sync. Sounds cool. I haven't been able to use it yet. This is a totally new feature in Live 12. So looking forward to checking it out. Okay, so this push button here. So remember that push is the physical controller that we can use with Live. There are a bunch of physical controllers we can use with Live. Push is the one that's made by Ableton. So that's what this thing is right here with the lights. So without getting into too much detail on push quite yet, the newest push, as of this filming, is called the push three. And the push three exists in two modes. There's a mode where you plug it into your computer and you can use it to control Live. But then there's a stand alone mode in which there's a version of live in the push and a hard drive in the push. So in a standalone push, you don't need to connect it to a computer at all. You can just use it. It's got a computer in it and a version of live in it. But you still need to get things onto the push, like a set or files or whatever. So if you have one of those pushes in standalone mode, this is where you would click, and then you can drag things right onto it like a files or anything to get it onto your push. Okay? My push is not a standalone push. It needs to be connected to the computer, so it's not showing up here. But this is how you would get access to one of those standalone pushes if we had one. 37. User Library: Okay, onto User Library. Now, this deserves its own video for one purpose and one purpose only. Your user library is a single folder somewhere on your hard drive, and the very important thing about it is to not move it. If you do move it, there's ways to deal with that. But if you want to keep your life simple, just don't move that folder. So, your user library has kind of all of your live stuff. So this is where it's keeping track of a whole bunch of files, your templates, some samples, your presets, all that stuff. So if you have an issue where you load a bunch of things up and the presets are gone, there's no presets, then it might be that something has gone wrong with your user library. So if you want to know where it is, you can go to User library here in the browser, Control click and say Show in Finder on a Mac, I think you'll find something very similar on a PC. And this is what it looks like. It's got its own kind of folder icon here, and it shows you where it is. It's in music. It's in my user folder, Music Ableton user Library. Okay? So, if I move this, then Ableton loses track of everything. I can go to my Live settings, library and reconnect it this way. So if you have to move it, this is where you're going to go to tell live where you've put it so that everything can kind of go back together. Otherwise, you probably won't need to go into your user library here in the browser really at all. I don't think I've ever dealt with going into my user library here. So we don't need to see it in places. It's just there. But if we have a problem with missing a bunch of presets or templates or anything like that, it's probably because something's gone wrong with your user library. Go to that settings tab and relocate it. We'll fix any problems you have like that. Okay, that's it for places. So remember that if you want to add anything here, you just hit that extra folder, that add folder button, and then you can just add things like bookmarks. Alright, let's go up to Collections. 38. Collections: And Okay. So think about everywhere we've been in the browser so far is just saying, Here's all our stuff, okay? Everything in this library and places has been saying, This is all of our stuff. Cool. When we go up to collections, and then everything else that I'm going to talk about in this section for the next five videos, what we're looking at is how to find specific stuff, okay? So all of these things is about the stuff I have. But now we're going to talk about finding stuff. Okay. So the first way we can find stuff is with collections. Now, you might Now, yours won't look like mine. If you put the mouse over collections and hit Edit, you will see probably a bunch of colors here. And you can turn some on and some off. You can only have a maximum of seven different ones here, which is really bummer. Like, I would use a lot of these because I use these a lot. So you can turn them on or off with these yellow buttons here. And you can rename them if I go done. I go here, I can control click to rename them. Okay? Now, what this is is this is a tagging system. If you know what a tagging system is, you know what this is. So let's say I'm going to go to drums here and say, like, this drum kit I really like. I really like the way this drum kit sounds. So I'm going to control click on it or right click, whichever. And I'm going to add that to drums. Okay? Now it gets a little yellow dot. See? Nat. Okay? Now, if I go up to drums, it shows up there, right here. Okay? So these are all drum things that I've added through tagging. Okay? You can add whole folders, you can add individual audio files. You can add kits. You can add plugins. And that's the real powerful thing about this collection tagging is that anything can be tagged as anything, right? Like, let's say, this tuning. Like, this was a tuning I really liked using for sins or something. I could put a tuning file into my sins and now it's going to be there, right? Here it is. Okay? I don't really want that there, so I'm going to control click on it again and untag it, and now it's going to go away if I just kind of reload that. So you can put anything anywhere, okay? Now, I've seen people use this collections thing a bunch of different ways. I've seen some people use it for keys, keys and pitch content of samples. I've seen people use it for for, like, tempo related things, for whole tracks versus stems. But the way I've been using it, and there's no wrong way to use it. You should use this however you want. But the way I've been using it is these categories. So amp emulators. So I do a lot of guitar stuff where I plug in a guitar and play. So I'm always kind of experimenting around with different amp emulators. So I've got three of them here, and they each have a bunch of presets that I can play with so I kind of plug those in there. I like generative stuff, so I've been experimenting with a lot of generative stuff. That means, like, things like a plug in or a Max effect, where I can set some parameters, and then it'll start going. Like I can say, randomly generate a rhythm, and it'll do it. It'll just kind of make these random things. So I like playing with that kind of stuff, so that's why I have a folder here of that. Plug ins. Now I've put this one here because, as you saw, I have hundreds of plug ins. And when I'm working on something, the last thing I want to do is spend hours digging for the right plug in. So this is just my favorite most go to stuff lately. Things go in and out of this folder all the time. So these are just my favorite things. Samples. Similarly, these are just some of my favorite samples to go to lately that I've been using in different projects. I've got a whole project where I'm chopping up, like, Beethoven samples. So here's a wave file of Beethoven string quartets. These Mr. Bill samples I bought. They're really good. DX seven library I really like, and this is just like a bunch of random drum samples that I found online somewhere. And they were great. Drums, again, these are just kind of my favorite drum sounds for the moment. Since my favorite synth sounds for the moment, you can see that this DX seven is in both synth sounds and, I think, samples. Yeah, that's okay. You can do that. And then I put UVI here because I've been experimenting with this UVI plug in company where you kind of buy a subscription, and then they give you like hundreds of plug ins. I like it so far, but there's too many plugins to deal with. So I've just putting my favorites here so that I can kind of sift through what I like and what I don't like. So this is kind of a work in progress. But anyway, you can set this up however you want. Just think about the categories that you use that you access the most, and then think about making a little collection for them. What's the goal of saving you time while you're working? While you're making something, you're in the creative mode. You don't want to be digging through your whole library for that one kick sound you want. So make a folder of your favorite kick sounds and then tag it up here. Okay? You don't have to use it, but it'll save you a lot of time if you get good at it. Okay, now, next, let's go into searching for stuff and ways we can make sure that we find the right stuff. 39. Browser Tags: Okay, let's talk about searching. So let's search for a snare snare drum sound, okay? So I'm going to type in my search bar here and say, Snare. Okay? Nothing comes up. Why? Because I'm in UVI. I'm in this collection right now. So I'm going to go back to A. This is the best use case for library item A. This just shows you all of everything, which is otherwise useless unless you're searching. So when I go here, now I can drill down a little bit deeper. I find a bunch of stuff, right? Like, this is snare stuff, right? This is not useful to me. This is a very, very, very long list. So if you don't see these filters here, open up this little tab, right? Here's filters. So now I can say, Well, what kind of snare am I looking for? Am I looking for a sample or a preset or a groove or a device? Let's say sample. Okay? That narrows it down a lot. Do I want a loop or a one shot? A one shot is a term that we use for a snare sound that's just a crack. One, just that. A loop is, you know, going to be a pattern or something. So let's do a one shot. It's asking me if I want it in the ambient and FX category. No, I don't think so. Snare tag, yes. Do I want it to be a hit, rim or an articulation? Let's do a rim. Acoustic, analog, digital, let's say acoustic. Okay, that's enough to get me just a whole bunch of good snare rim sounds. So let's listen. Perfect. That was all of them. This last one, maybe not so rimmi. Okay, so now I've got, I don't know, maybe 20 here to choose from. That's way better than that giant list. So you want to use these filters and tags. Now, you can edit these filters and tags by going to this Edit button here and you can tag things certain ways, and you can see things about this particular sample, what it's been tagged as so it's tagged as hit. And you could say, Oh, this is actually a clap and add that to it if you wanted. But also, what's really cool is you can save this search. So if I said, here is a live search for all my RIM clicks, I could hit this little plus sign here, and it's going to put it right here. I'll say Rim clicks and return. Okay? Now this little button here in my library is a live search. So if I installed some packs or a new library or anything and it had a bunch of new rim sounds in it, it's going to show up here automatically, right? This list is going to grow as I do that. So that can be really handy. I'm going to control click and say, remove this. So that's browser tags. We can search I'm gonna click All search for Kick, and then we've got these tags we can use to help us drill down better and sift through the things we don't want much faster. Cool. All right. 40. Browser History: Okay, two more things about searching that'll make your life much happier. One is that we have these back and forward buttons here now, and these are a search history. So we can hit back and say, here are the different things I was searching for. So here's my snare search. I can go back even farther. Here's my kick search. And then here's probably some searches I was doing yesterday. You know, I'm just stepping back through where I recently been, so tuning. I'm just like walking through the browser history, right? So it's going to go back a long way. You can watch everything we did in this class so far in reverse, basically, by doing this. Okay, so backwards and forwards with your search history, we'll save you some time thinking, Oh, I just saw that snare sound, but now it's gone. Where was that? Just hit back. You'll find it. And save yourself some time. 41. Sound Similarity Search?!?: Okay, there's a new feature that will help you find things in kind of a freaky way. So and it's called the sound similarity search. So check this out. Let's go to What's a good Let's do Snare again. Cause that's easy. I'm going to go to A Snare. And let's do sample, one shot, snare. Let's do acoustic. And that should do it. Okay, so let's pick one of these. So here's a bunch of rims. Let's go here. Okay, here's kind of a bright snare sound. Okay, so let's say I'm working with this snare sound, and it's cool and I'm liking it. And I want to find more sounds like that. Here's what I can do. Watch this. Control click on it. Show similar files. Okay? Now it's going to say, Here's the snare you started with and here's a whole bunch that are pretty close to it. Let's hear. Right? They're all kind of sonically similar. I don't know how this works. It's like I think they take the name into account. Supposedly they take some degree of of analysis of the sound into account? I don't know. How it's tagged into account, I'm sure, but it's kind of wild. What I really like it for is, watch this. If I go to Loop. Okay, so let's clear out our search, and let's just say, I'm going to search drums, and I'm going to search drum loop. So I'm gonna do drum sample, loop, okay? Drum loops. Let's say acoustic. Okay, so here's a shaker, right? That's cool. Now let's do let's say I'm using that shaker in a track, and I like it. It sounds cool, but now I'm going to, like, a new section of the tune. And so I want something a little different but not totally different. So for that, I'm going to go sound similarity search. Now here's my original. I've got all these other things. And these are all good options for the next section of my tune to add some diversity but not get too far away. So the sound similarity search is not only good for finding your files, but it's actually, like, a really good compositional tool to help you find things that are close but not the same to work in the next section of your tune. So, super valuable. Okay, enough for the browser. We've learned a lot. What I want you to do now is take a step back, take a deep breath, go for a walk. We're learning a lot of stuff here. When you're ready, we're going to move on. And we're going to talk about basic recording, workflow, and lef. So when you're ready, move on to the next section. 42. Adding Content: Overview: Okay. So now we know our way around live a little bit. We're getting there. We definitely know how to find things and where to get access to all of our tools. That's over here in the browser. So now let's talk about actually, like, getting some music into this thing. So I'm going to clear this out. In fact, I'm going to make a new session. So I'm going to go Command. I'm not going to save this. Okay. I'm going to close this up, clear that search out, do a clean slate. So earlier I talked about the kind of three ways that we can get content into live. And those three ways depend on whether or not we're working with a MI track or an audio track. So for a MI track, we can record a MIDI file. We can just create MIDI and we can import a MIDI clip, okay? We'll do all three of those in a minute. For an audio track, we have two options. We can record audio or we can import an audio clip. So that's what I want to do in this section is get clips into our content area here, specifically focusing on the recording aspect of both audio and MIDI. So so it's a little out of the scope of this class to go into everything about audio recording theory. We won't have time for that, but I do want to show you how to connect a mic to Ableton and record. And the same thing with MIDI. Connect a MIDI Controller and record. So that's what we're gonna do. Before we do any of that, though, we need to take a trip to the preferences, our settings to make sure that we're set up to be able to record. So let's go there first. 43. Audio Settings: Okay, so in order to get to our settings, we're going to go to Live and then settings, or you can press Command comma. Okay, and this is the window we're looking at, okay? So here we can set up two things. We can set up our MI to be able to record and our audio to be able to record. Let's go to Audio first, okay? Here are the things we care about. Driver type, audio input device, and audio output device. Okay? So driver type, if you're on a Mac is always going to be core audio. So make sure that says core audio. If you're on a PC, you get all kinds of weird options. But you want the one that is whatever sound card you have that you can plug things into. So audio input device. This is what you're going to plug into. Now, maybe you've taken my intro to music production class and you already understand all this. But if you want to plug a microphone in a traditional microphone in, you need some kind of audio interface plugged into your computer. The one that I have is called Universal Audio Thunderbolt. It's right there. Universal Audio is the company, and the model of mine is Apollo Twin. It's great for small studios. But you want here whatever you're going to be plugging your microphone into. If you have a USB microphone, it should come up in this list. If it doesn't, you might need to install some drivers. So you can see this is everything I have plugged in here that can take in sound. Here is my actual microphone, this one, going into my Universal Audio thunderbolt. I have a webcam set up. I have a push three. My push three controller actually can work as an audio interface, so I could plug a microphone or my guitar into that and route it into live if I wanted to. Steam is like the steam gaming platform, if you know that. I think it's open right now, so it thinks it can take in a microphone. I don't think it actually can. Zoom audio device, that's a virtual thing. I'm not really sure what that is. And I can use my phone microphone if I wanted to that's coming up here. So I want Universal Audio Thunderbolt. The reason I want that, again, is because that's what my microphone is plugged into, okay? If you don't have a hardware interface, you're not really going to be able to record a traditional microphone. You might be able to record a USB microphone or something like that. Now our audio output device, this is just our speakers. This has nothing really to do with recording. In my case, it's always set to universal audio Thunderbolt, the same device because my speakers are plugged into that device. However, just for the purposes of recording this, I have to set it to Telestream audio capture. That's the software that does my sound capture for filming these videos. So you can kind of ignore that. Most of the time, it's here. And then this is just anything that can make sound, right? So wherever you have your speakers plugged into, this is what you need to select here. Okay, now, you may or may not need to do some input and output configuration. This just says, What channels can I record onto. And in my case, I have inputs on one and two, and I can do a stereo input of one and two. So that's the only thing that's selected. Okay, while we're here, you may as well select what sampling rate you want to use. Select 48 or 441, 48,000 or 44,100. You can select these much higher ones unless you're doing, unless you're recording an orchestra. These aren't really going to do any good for you, and they're just going to make massive files. So I would select 48 or 441. And then while you're recording, if you experience latency, latency means that I'm going to record a sound, and then if I hear it back, it's like, way behind. So it takes a while for the sound to get from the microphone, into the audio interface, into the computer, and then into live. That can take, you know, a couple of milliseconds. And if it's too much, this is where you can mess with that. You can control it a little bit to minimize that latency, that slowness between those two things. So you can experiment with this if you need to. We'll get more into that when we do, a more in depth recording in live thing in, I think the next unit of this class of this series. But okay, so our audio settings are figured out. The thing we really need is audio input device here. So that is our audio input settings. 44. MIDI Settings: Okay, let's get our midi settings all set up now. So what I have is a midi keyboard. Mine is a roly seaboard. It looks like this. This is the small Roly seaboard. But any midi controller will do. Most Mi controllers have a couple octaves of notes, and they're actually pretty cheap. Maybe 100, 200 bucks. It's not a major investment for a decent Mi controller. This is kind of a fancy one. I wouldn't recommend starting off with this, although I do love it. Okay, so this just has a USB connection, and I'm just going to plug it in right now. All right. So, let's go back to our settings. And let's go to Link tempo and MIDI. Okay, so this MIDI stuff down here is what we're looking at. Specifically, right now, we're looking at this area, okay? What this says, can I make this window bigger? I don't think I can. What this says is my inputs and my outputs, okay? So if you have a MIDI keyboard, you're going to play in notes. That's all input that is coming from your MIDI keyboard into live. So that's inputs. Okay? Outputs would be live going back to our MIDI keyboard. Now, in most cases, there's not a need for that. Most MIDI keyboards can't receive information from live. Some can, and that can give you some cool features. But if we just want to play in notes, we generally don't have to worry about the outputs, okay? So let's look at the input. So these are things that Live knows about that I've plugged in either currently or recently. So Seaboard Rise 49. That is not the keyboard I just showed you. That is my other roly eboard that is a full 49 key. That is, like, right there. Seaboard Rise is the little one that I just showed you. So I have two of these fancy keyboards because I'm a Dork. Sorry. USB MI interface. That is my I think that's my universal audio that can also route MIDI if it needs to. Fishman Triple Play, this is a MITI guitar, actually, that I have plugged in, and then my Ableton push three that I have plugged in. And there's two different settings for both of those. Let's not worry about that for now. So first thing you need is your keyboard to show up in this list. If it does show up, that's great. If it doesn't show up, read the manual and see if you need to install any drivers. A lot of keyboards, Ableton already knows about them, and so you don't need to install anything extra, but sometimes you but so that should get it to show up in this list. The next thing you need is to look at these four checkboxes for your keyboard. Okay? Turn on track for sure. That means this keyboard can track notes. It can play in notes and record them onto a track. That's the main thing we need to do. So do that. These other ones are optional, and some keyboards can use these and some can't. So sync and remote are for things like if your keyboard has, like, a play button on it and a stop button on it. It can control the main play and stop of live if you want it to. So you would turn on these controllers. So you would turn on these options. MPE is like, we'll talk more about MPE later, but it's like a high definition version of MIDI, which is an oversimplification, but that's kind of what it is. Some keyboards can do it, some can't. The board can. So I should probably turn that on as well. But for just inputting notes and things, it doesn't really matter. Now, how do I know my keyboard is working and Live sees it? There's a fun little trick. Let's say I see everything here, it looks good. I have reason to believe that this keyboard is working. I'm going to get out of my preferences window and back into the main Ableton window and check this out. If we go up to the upper right corner, see these two little boxes right here. The top one, this box, has one purpose only. The only reason it's there is just to be an indicator light for MIDI. That means that little box is going to light up whenever Live sees any MIDI information. That's all. And it's just to tell us, Hey, MIDI is working. That's all. That's what it does. So all I need to do is hit some notes on my keyboard and see if that lights up. And it does. So MDI's working. It's as easy as that, okay? So whenever I plug in a new keyboard to live, I always plug it in, make sure it's turned on, and then just, like, smash my hands on it for a minute, see that it's working, and then I say, great, Miti's good to go. So get in the habit of glancing up at that. Whenever something goes wrong, something you're not expecting to happen with Midi, look up there, and that'll tell you if it's working or not. 45. Recording Audio: Alright. Let's record some audio. So we're going to go to an audio track. I'm going to do this in arrangement view, but you can do this in session V two, and I'll show you that in a second. So here's an audio track. You can see my voice coming in here. So remember, this little block of stuff is our IO settings. In other words, our inputs and our outputs. So external in means I have an external microphone, a microphone that's outside of live. So that's good. That's what I want. And now I'm going to see which one. My remember when we hit that button that said input and output configurations, this is where we're seeing that, right? I could record one stereo track, which would mean I have two microphones plugged in to this at the same time. You might do that if you're recording like an acoustic guitar and you put two microphones on it, right? But if I'm just recording with one microphone, I want to select just one input. So input one, and you can see a tiny little meter there showing that it sees the correct microphone. It's the one I'm currently talking in. Okay? But this is our main meter. So why don't we see that going? It's because of our monitor modes here, okay? It kind of means, what am I going to hear while I'm recording? And this is important because it's very easy to create feedback. Okay, so right now it's off. That means that I'm not going to hear my microphone through my speakers right now because it's off. If I turn it on auto, that means that I'm going to hear it through the speakers when I'm playing it back, but not when I'm recording. And if I turn it into in, that means I'm automatically going to route my microphone through my speakers. In this case, that's going to be bad. That's going to immediately make feedback because my speakers are going to play the sound, my microphone is going to pick it up, which is going to play through the speakers, which is going to get picked up by the microphone, that goes in a circle. It gets louder and louder and louder every time, and then things start to explode, including my eardrums. So I definitely don't want to do that. When would I want to do that? When I'm wearing headphones? If I'm wearing headphones, that won't feed back. So I need to wear headphones in order to turn that on. I don't want to wear headphones right now, so I'm not going to. Okay, so if I want to record on this track, the record button is up here, but I can't just hit this button because I need to tell live where I want to record, and that's what this button is for. So I click this button, and now you can see I am monitoring through. I don't know if you can hear that in the way the screen is capturing me, but but there is a sound coming out of my speakers that is my voice. So I'm hearing myself twice now, and it's driving me a little nuts. And I am in danger of feeding back. So I'm going to turn that off so that it doesn't play through. Now it's a little more comfortable and I'm not going to feed back. So the audio setting is going to play through when you're recording. I think I maybe said that backwards a minute ago. So I'm going to leave that off. So now, this is armed to record, so you can see that there is a meter here now, but it's grayed out. It's gray because that means that it's trying to show you that there's signal here, but I'm not playing it. If I go back to Auto, you will see that we're playing it. But it's gray, means you can't hear it, but it's there. Okay, so I've armed this tract to record, and now I just hit the big record button. And now we are recording. Horay Bananas, bananas, bananas. And then I stop. Okay? We recorded something. If you want to record on multiple tracks at the same time, by default, it only wants you to record one at a time. But if you want to record multiple, you can command click or, I think, Alt click on a PC and enable two to record at once. So now I could record this microphone and this microphone if I had another microphone plugged into Channel two. C record them both on separate tracks. But there we go. Now we have our audio clip of me playing of me talking. So now I can play it back. Chord button. And now we are recording. Horay. Bananas, bananas, bananas. And we hear it. Cool. So super basic recording. I think in the later versions of this class, we go into the full nitty gritty details of audio recording. But in this first class, we're just trying to make some music. So let's move on and talk about midi recording. 46. Recording MIDI: Okay, so let's record some MTI. So in order to record MIDI, let's go up to a Mi track. Let's go up to this first one. So this, in a way, is simpler, but there's one tricky thing we need to address. Let's separate in our heads recording and hearing for a minute. So we can easily record. We're all set up to record. All I need to do is arm this track to record by clicking right there. Okay? It works the same as an audio track. And now up here, I'm going to hit record. Okay? And now it's rolling. I can play some notes on my keyboard and you see them come in. Okay, there they are. Now, let's listen to it. Nothing. We're not going to hear any sounds. And the clue to Y is right here. You see these dots? Dots means data. Lines means audio. Okay? So this is data. These are just a bunch of numbers. If I double click on this, we can see it here. This is saying play this note, play that note, play this, note, play that note. It doesn't sound like anything. A bunch of math. So we need to convert this to sound that we can hear. In order to do that, we need to put an instrument on it. We are not going to hear anything until we put an instrument. So let's put some preset here. Sure. I'm just going to drag that preset right on there. Now, if I listen to it, it sounds a little bit different. Pretty. So before I put that instrument on, I couldn't hear anything that I was playing in this track. I was just hitting notes. So if you want to listen to a track, it must have an instrument on it. Otherwise, it's just data, right? You see that as soon as I put this instrument on here, the data dots turned into an audio signal. Because there's now an audio signal there, not just data dots. Let's look at this mindiTrack. It's got data dots, meaning there's not an instrument on this track. Now, if I wanted to play some notes and listen to this track, I need to first put an instrument on it. Sure. Okay? And now if I played some notes on my computer, I'm still not gonna hear this track because it's not armed. Okay? Arming this track means not only does it mean when we record, we're going to record to that track. Arming that track also means that arming this track also tells live that I want my midi keyboard to go to that track, right? Because my Mi keyboard is technically hooked up to both of these tracks. So it's going to say, What do you want me to play? It's gonna play the one that's armed. So now I'm playing this track. If neither of them are armed and I play my keyboard, I get nothing, right? I got to arm one to hear it. So if I want to listen to this track, I do that, if I want to listen to this track, that. But that's only for recording. If I want to hear them played back, then it doesn't matter. They're always going to play back if something's recorded onto it. Let's do this. Let's record on this. Okay. Now, if I play this back, I'm going to hear both. Okay. So I don't need to have anything armed to record just to hear back what is on the track, to hear the midi clips play. But if I want to play in using a midi keyboard and have it play the sounds on that track, I need to arm it to record, just to hear it. Okay. Groovy. Let's move on and talk about recording multiple takes. 47. Comping and Take Lanes: Okay, so let's talk about take lanes. Here's what that means. Let's say I want to record myself doing something ten times and then pick the best take. You don't need ten tracks to do that. You can record the same thing and then right on top of each other and then pick your favorite. Here's how that works. You know, I was thinking, maybe to demo this I would sing, and then at the last minute, I decided, no, no one wants to hear that. So let's do a little guitar work. Okay, so this is not a mini guitar. This is just a normal guitar plugged in with audio into my audio interface. I'm going into Channel two here, okay? So this Channel one is my microphone, this is my guitar. So you can see in that little thing right there, me make some sound with my guitar. Okay? If I arm it to record, you can see it coming in here, but great out so I don't hear it. Now, I could do this, and now I'm gonna hear it. Okay? Now, it's not going to feed back because it's a guitar, not a microphone. So I could leave it that way if I wanted. So let's record something, and I'm going to kind of purposefully screw it up and record it multiple times. Okay? Let's go, I don't know, right here. And then I'm going to loop this. So this means loop, and this is my loop brace. So this means record This means just loop this over and over and over, okay? So let's zoom in. I'm just going to make this 1 bar. Okay. And now I'm going to add another new thing to the list. I'm gonna turn on my metronome, which is right here. Okay? So my tempo, let's take it down to 100. Turn on my metronome, and then we'll start recording right here. So I'm going to try to strum a chord in time with the metronome. And I'm going to do it a few times, and I'm going to screw it up. So don't think I'm a terrible guitar player because it doesn't sound great. I'm screwing it up on purpose. Okay, here we go. Great. Okay, there we go. Now, it looks like I recorded over all of those. Every time that this circled back, I rewrote over those. And if I don't do one very special thing, then that will be true. If I hit play on this, I'm only going to hear that last one. Right? But if I go over to our track header over here and I control click, I can say, Show take lanes. Show take lanes right there. Okay. Now, here is all my different times through that. Now, you'll notice that they're all darker than one of them. The last one is always going to be the not dark one. So what I can do is I can click and drag to select the one I want. So I select, and then I press Return. Now I've got that much is my keeper take. Now I can go here and say I want that, and that actually doesn't look good. Let's go there. That. Okay, so now my keeper take is beats one and two, three, and four. That's what's making up this. So let's hear it now. Okay, I selected four bad takes. But I actually think the fourth one through was the best one. So I'm going to select all four, all of that fourth take and press return, and now hear it. Okay? Not perfect, but that was the best take. I can go through and tighten it up using warping, which we'll talk about how to do later. But for now, that shows you how to use take lanes and select the best take. This is a process called comping, where we play over and over the same thing till we get it right, and then we select the best take. 48. MIDI Comping: Okay. Take Lanes in Midi works just about the same. So I'm going to go up here. I've got a loop going. I'm gonna arm this to record and start recording something on this clip. Okay. So we recorded a bunch of middy stuff there. We can now go to show Tans, and we can see a bunch of take lanes. Now, you might say, what are these? This is actually kind of wild. So this is my second take at this video. I did this video a minute ago, and I just didn't like what I came up with. So I'm redoing it. But even though I deleted the main clip, the other takes of it are still here. So, I mean, I thought I deleted everything, but it's still here. Interesting. But, uh, I can select things just like anything else and make the take lane and put together a composite take of the best versions of myself playing it. Now, there's a little bit more that goes into this. You can do there's something called capture, which will just automatically put on the screen the last couple mini things you did. It's kind of wild. So experiment with that. And then there's also automation record, which will record just non note midi stuff, things like dials and buttons that might be on your MIDI keyboard. So that's another thing to look for. Okay, let's move on. And let's just look at a track, right? We've been talking a lot about theory and how all this works. Let's look at something I've been working on one of my things, and talk through what I did just as a break, something fun to do. 49. Session Deconstruction No. 1: Okay, I think we took a peek at this track earlier in the class, but now that we know what we're doing, let's take another little look. So this is this kind of synth wavy, kind of funk synth wave thing that I was playing around with. Let's just look at this section, right? Right here. That's where I think the most is going on. So here's what it sounds like. Okay. So what are the elements here? Here we have a Mi Riff. Okay? This is just a mini thing. Now with this one, I didn't play this in. I just clicked through to make this. So, you can add notes just by clicking like that. So that's what I did for this. And then the Syth it has on it is the new meld sinth. We'll talk about how to do that. It also has an echo on it. Little delay. Here we have a drum sample. Let's see what this is. So if I solo this, I hit the S here, and then listen. Oh, no, this is that vocal sample I found. I think I got through some splice. Anything you get on splice, if you buy it on splice, and then you can use it Royalty are all covered. This is probably just this little drum groove. Cool. Here's another synth thing. Here's another percussion layer. And then some of the synth I added, and I think I did play this one in progression. And you can see the synth I'm using here. This is actually a plugin called contact. We'll talk about contact soon. Here's another sound. This is another Oh, this is FM eight synth. This is a plug in. If I open it, you can see what it is. This is a kind of FM synthesizer emulator. But sounds like this. And moving down, this looks like another FM eight. Because FM eights give that real kind of 80s sound that I'm really into right now. And then here's maybe another FM. No, it's another contact instrument. Just piano. And then down here, this, I believe is just a guitar track that I played in. Okay, so that's me. I'm running through this guitar rig amp emulator to give it kind of a nice clean sound. I recorded this the same way I just showed you. I just sat here and played it. Actually, I think I stood when I played it. And then there's a little delay on it, also. A little clap on the next track. Uh, what is this? Arpeggiated sinth kind of adding a little robotic sound. And then little bongos to thicken it up. So all of that put together sounds like this. Oops. On solo that. You want to hear basically the same thing, but with less context, with less going on. So different layers of things happening. But yeah, so it's just a little peek into a track. We'll look at another track, I think, at the end of this class. And it'll be fun. Okay. Now let's move on and let's talk about editing. Like, how do we get things lined up just perfectly? And what kind of editing can we do in live? It's a lot. A 50. Editing: Cut, Copy, Paste: Okay, up next, let's talk about editing. We know how to get clips into live. We know how to do a few things with them. So let's talk about how we actually start to build a song by cutting things up and moving them around. So in this section, we're only going to focus on audio. In the next section, we'll focus on MIDI. A lot of things when you're editing audio and MIDI are the same, but not all. So that's kind of why I want to separate them. So we've got a Mi clip here, right? The first thing that you should keep in mind when it comes to making edits, is that all of your standard functions from Microsoft Word or whatever will apply. If I click on this to highlight it, I can click on the header of it to highlight the whole thing, and then I can press Command C to copy, click somewhere else, Command V to paste. Okay? Cut, copy, paste, all that stuff still works, and it's the same key command that it is everywhere else. Command C to copy, command V to paste. Or on a PC, I believe it's Control C and Control V or Alt V, one of those for PC users. Whatever it is in Microsoft and everything else, that's what it is. We can select a part of a clip on the inside, Command C to copy and Command V to paste. If you want to select a finer amount, I'm going to use my two finger Zoom and just get in there. Now I can get little tiny pieces and paste it in. I can paste it into a different track as long as it's an audio track, and that'll be just fine. Like I said before, if you highlight something and then grab the header and move it, you're going to move just that. But if you don't highlight anything and just click the header, you'll move the whole thing, okay? Another kind of copy trick that I use all the time. Like, probably my most used key command is take something, highlight it, and then I'm going to hold down option and click and drag, and that's going to duplicate it, okay? So I can just press Command D to duplicate something, and I can do that all day long, right? But I can also option, click and drag. That's going to leave the original where it was and give me a new one where I want it. So that option click and drag is really handy. I use that especially on, like, drum programming, where I've got, like, a snare sample, and I'm going to put it all these different places. Option Click and Drag is a great tool. So if you forget any of these things, go up to Edit and you can pretty much find all of them. Cut, copy paste, duplicate. You can delete a clip just with the delete key. Deactivating a clip is something you can do, and you might want to do this from time to time. Just click on a clip and then press zero. That'll leave it there, but we're not going to hear anything. It's like muting just that clip. Which is a handy trick when you're trying out a few different things. I can press zero again to unmute it or to reactivate it. Okay, so just the standard normal cut copy paste things. If you want to split a clip, just put your cursor where you want to do that and then Command E. Remember you can zoom in farther to get more into that. And you may notice that we're kind of bound to the grid here. I can't move things in between the grid. You can always zoom in more and more and more to get a finer and finer grid. But if you just don't want the grid at all, you can always just control click and go down here and just turn the grid off. Now there's no grid. We can put things anywhere we want, okay? This is a dangerous thing to do, but you can do it if you want. I'm going to go back to using adaptive grid and medium. So adaptive grid means that the grid resolution is going to change based on where I'm zoomed in. Actually, I want it a little narrower than that. There we go. Okay, so it's going to kind of keep moving with me like we've been doing. Okay, so very basic things. Now let's talk about kind of what's built into a clip in terms of fades and things like that. 51. Magic Corners and Fades: Strong. Okay, now, every clip, it is a rectangle, but it's a mysterious rectangle because it has six corners. Okay? We have a corner here where this dot shows up when I put my mouse over it. We have a corner here, we have a corner here, we have a corner here, and we have corner here and here, okay? The header kind of gets its own corners. And each of those corners can do a special thing. I'm going to delete some stuff around here just to make room, okay? So let's zoom in. First, let's talk about the header corners, okay? If I put my mouse over the top right header corner, I get this symbol with my mouse. Okay? That means that if I click and open it, what's going to happen is I'm going to reveal more of that clip, okay? So I can keep going, and I'm going to get more and more and more. Okay? And it's going to keep going forever because loop is turned on for this clip. Okay? That means that when I hit the end of the clip, it's going to keep going. Now, you can tell I hit the end because there's a little black tick right there. See that little tiny mark right there? That means that's the end, then we're starting over. If I do this, I turn off loop. Okay? Now I can drag it out to the end and then it stops, okay? That's the end of my clip. Okay? So, what this means is that if I did something like this, let's copy just this little bit on the inside. Et's delete that. Okay? So now I have just that little bit from the inside. I don't really have just that little bit from the inside. I can always get more of the original clip back by going to the header and pulling open the clip. And I can do that on both sides. Okay? So now I'm back to the full original clip. I can smoosh it down by doing that. And all I'm doing, I'm not changing the time or the speed or anything like that. I'm just kind of opening up or closing a window into the clip. So if I want just this bar, I could just smoosh down to there and smoosh down to there if I want it. Okay? But Ableton and most every modern audio program uses a system of editing called non destructive editing. That means that if I was to go through here and I was going to, like, delete part of this clip, I didn't really delete it. I just hid it from live because we don't want it right now. If I want it back, it's always there, okay? So nothing ever really gets deleted from your session. It's there somewhere. Okay? So let's go back to our other corners now. So our opposite corner of that does the same thing. It can open it back up. Okay? Our other four corners, this one here is going to let us just draw a built in fade. Okay? This is our volume fade. And the corner at the bottom is going to let us tighten up that fade a little bit by making it longer or shorter. So, I guess, in a way, this one right now is doing the same thing that up here does. Except it's giving us a little control over that fade. We have a.in the middle or we can kind of sculpt that fade just a little bit, right? So these fades should be automatically on. So any clip, you can put the mouse over it and get these fades. Okay? And the opposite sides are the same. Okay? You can do that if you want. Now, if you don't have these fades automatically, you might need to go to your settings window and go to record warp and launch, and then down to create fades on clip edges. Make sure that's turned on. If you want this, if you don't want this feature, then turn it off. But make sure that's on, and then you'll automatically have these fades on the edge of any clip. Okay. And if you don't want to hear them once, you can always just smash them all the way to the side, and then they're virtually gone. They're actually gone. They're not doing anything. Or you can make them just milliseconds long by zooming way, way, way in. So it's a nice feature to have. Alright, so that's what our six corners do on the clips. The headers bring out deleted info from your clip, and then in the clip, these draw our fades, and the bottom ones control the bottom of the fade, really. 52. Reading the Timeline: Okay, it's time to take a closer look at our timeline at the top and at the bottom. Okay? So, the one at the bottom is relatively easy to read. This is minutes and seconds. If we zoom way, way, way, way, way in, we get some more info. And I think here we're looking at milliseconds. Okay? So minutes, seconds, one millisecond, 1.5 milliseconds, two milliseconds. So fractions of a second if you go way in. But let's look up top. This is a little bit trickier to read and also a little bit more useful a lot of the time. Okay, so we have this looks like an arbitrary number 37, 37.2, 37.3, 37.4. Okay? If you zoom in farther, you're going to get a three part number. So let's get there. Okay, here we have 37.1 0.2. Now, that number corresponds to up here 37.1 0.1, which is where my cursor actually is right now. Okay, when you see those three numbers, number dot number, what you're seeing always in live is bar beat 16th note, okay? So what bar number we're on? In this case, 37 what beat it is. So in this case, the first beat and in this case, the second 16th note. Okay? So let's zoom back out to here. Now, if we don't see a number, it's going to be the last number, and it means we're going to be at one. So here we have 35.2. Let's look at that. So that's bar 35 beat two is what this is. This is bar 35. If it doesn't say anything after it, you can assume it's a one. Beat one first 16th note. Okay? Let's do min a little bit closer to where we can get. Okay, what we're looking at here is we just see the bar. So 35. That means 35 means bar 35, beat one for 16th note. And this is bar 36. Beat one for 16th note. If you don't see something, it's dot one dot one. Like up here, 36 dot one dot O. So that means that we're looking at a whole bar between these two points. So four beats are going to be our four quarter notes. Okay? So this is 35 first beat, 35 second beat, 35 third beat, 35 fourth beat. So our grid here is quarter notes, beats, okay? So there's another way to know, actually, that we're looking at quarter notes, and that is to look all the way down here, you see this floating quarter that says, our grid is showing us quarter notes. Okay? Let's zoom in a little farther. Okay, now we've got 35 measure 35 beat three. So we've got all these notes that happened before beat four. Okay? So that means we are looking at a very fine grid. There's a whole bunch of notes before the next beat. Okay? So we are way zoomed in. And in fact, if we look down here, we are looking at 128th notes. That's pretty fast. So let's zoom back out 32nd notes, Let's go back to 16th notes. Okay, 16th notes, 35 to 36. So these are all our 16th notes between the two beats. So just remember that when we see three digits, it's bar, beat, and 16th notes. Now, why do you need to know that? Because when you're working on something like a drum beat, you're going to remember that well, the kick goes on you might want the kick on all your downbeats. So that's going to be here, here, here and here. You might want your snare on beats two and four, that's going to be here and here. I can see that pretty quickly because I know how to read this and see that that's beat two, that's beat four. Okay? So just get used to seeing that to know where you are in a measure so that while you're putting music together, you can be keeping track of the beat. You can quickly see the beat knowing where you are on the grid. Okay? Musically, it's more useful than the amount of time that has elapsed. 53. Looping: Okay, let's talk about looping. Looping actually can mean a few different things in live, so let's talk about all of them all at once. So we could loop a clip by clicking Loop down here, okay? Now, what that means is that this clip could keep going forever and ever, but it's only going to do what we tell it to do in our timeline. So let's actually find a new clip that might be a little easier to understand this. Okay. So I'm going to solo this clip and zoom in on it a little bit. Okay? This is a cat. Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay, cool. So let's say I just want this first meow. Okay? So I'm going to highlight all the rest of this and just press delete to get rid of it. Okay? Now I just have this meow. Now, let's say I want this meow to loop over and over and over, okay? I could press Loop here, okay? But then if I drag it out, we're just going to kind of reopen the file and get all those other meows that I deleted. So we're going to loop the whole clip, okay? So now it's starting over here, I can tell because of that little tick right there, it's starting over and I can just keep going, okay? And I can loop the whole clip, but that's not what I wanted. What I wanted to do was loop just this, okay? So let's go back. Let's delete all of that. So if that's what I want, if I want to just loop this much of then I need to set a loop length down here, okay? So I could do that much, and then press Command L down here. Okay? Now I have this loop brace actually set to be just this much, not the whole clip. Okay? So now, when I drag it out, I'm going to loop just that much. Okay? So let me explain again what just happened there. Before the let go, let me undo here. Okay. So loop is turned on, but it's set to be the first bar up to the fourth bar, right? That's this whole thing. This is my loop brace that says where the loop starts and ends. Okay? The loop starts at one and ends at the end of beat four. Okay? That's the whole clip. I don't want to loop the whole clip. I just want to loop this. So I'm going to change that loop brace and bring it all the way back in. Now, I have to do this in the clip view, not up in the session view, okay? Now I can loop this all day long. Okay? So that's one way of looping. Now, if I want to loop the track, the whole arrangement view, okay? I can highlight anything, really. I can click on a clip or I could just drag some space and then press Command L in the arrangement view. That's going to make a loop brace here, and it's going to also automatically turn looping on, which is this button right here, okay? So now let's make it shorter just to prove what's happening here. Now when I hit Play, agent view is just going to loop this part of the track over and over and over. Okay, I can put it here, restart it, and now it's just going to loop that, okay? So two different ways of using the same word loop. I can loop a clip. I can loop a section of a clip. I can loop the whole track that way, okay, with this loop brace. Now, in Session View, this is a little different because things loop by default. So if I was to put my cat sound, which I've lost. So let's go here and take my cat sound. So I'm gonna take this. I'm going to click and hold it. I'm not gonna let go. I'm gonna press tab while I'm holding it, and I can drop it into my track over here. Okay, so these just loop by default. So this is gonna keep going forever. Oh. Oh. But it's looping because the clip is looping just that amount. So it works the same, really. I just don't need to do the global looping because there's no timeline. There are other ways that we look at looping in Session View, and we'll come back to that later when we dive into actually producing music in Session View. But for now, hit my back to arrangement button, so it knows I'm looking at Arrangement view. Just keep track of the different ways you can loop something. You can loop a clip, you can loop part of a clip, or you can loop the whole session. 54. Automation: So next, let's talk about automation. Something very important if you're going to be making reasonable music. And what is automation? Automation is changing a parameter over time. Very simple. So the way we do automation, and this is the same in every do I've ever worked with is we make two points, and then we draw a line. So let's say I want to change the volume of my cat meowing overtime. I could draw in a fade this way, right? But that only lets me go so far, right? It only lets me go this far because it can't stretch over a loop in this way that I'm doing it. So let's say I want it to fade in all the way to be nothing here and full volume here, okay? For that, I need to go into automation mode. So there's two ways to get to automation mode. The first is just press the key A, no modifier, A. Now, that may not work for you. If you have this button turned on, this is our computer Mi keyboard. This means you can treat your letter keyboard like a music keyboard. That's cool. But you can't have that on and use this automation key command. So if you have that on, you can either turn it off or you can just go up to view an automation mode right here and select that. Okay, so now we're in automation mode. So we see these kind of pink lines going across our computer. So I'm going to go click on what I want to automate. That's the volume, which is right here, and it gives me a dotted line. Dotted line means there's no automation. That's cool. So I'm going to click on a spot on that dotted line where I want to automate, and then I'm going to click on another one, and I'm going to draw pull this down. Now, what this is going to do is it's going to change my volume over time. So if I start right here and I hit Play, let's turn our looping off. So I hit Play with the Space Bar. It's going to get louder and louder. Oh. Okay. And you can see my volume right here climbing. See, look over here. Okay, that's my volume. You can also see that there's this new kind of red pink sort of dot right here. Whenever you see those little dots in the corner of a parameter, that means it's been automated. There is automation information that has been created for that track. In other words, it's going to change on its own. How about panning? Let's do panning. So in order to switch over to panning, all I need to do is click on it. I click on panning and now I've got another dotted line. That dotted line is there because there's no automation, so it's dotted. It will become solid as soon as I put some automation on it. So it's right in the middle for center. Let's make a dot. Let's make another dot. Move that up. Here's another dot. Move that down. Another dot. Oops. Move that up down. This is how you make someone seasick if you do this nice and fast, which this isn't because I don't want you to be seasick. Okay? Now our panning is moving around. So now our panning is going to move around. It's going to sound like it's going from left to right. It's also still going to be faded in because our volume is still automated, okay? So we have two automated parameters on this track. Oh Okay. Really wishing I would have picked a better sample for this example, but whatever, we'll roll with it. Okay, so over here, you can see everything that is automated. Anything with a dot is automated, and we can switch between them here if we want. Or, again, we can just click on the parameter. Easy to. This is just a list of all your possible parameters. If we want to see both at once, if we want to see our volume automation and our panning automation, we can click this little plus here. And then click on volume up here, and down here is panning, okay? So this shows a new lane, we call it, a new automation lane. So here we can see both. If you do a lot of automation, these will kind of eat up a lot of your screen. So I can hide that panning there and go back to just toggling between the two by clicking on the different ones. Now, once you start working with effects and all kinds of stuff, you're going to have automation going all over the place. And I'll show you that in a minute. So key takeaways here. Automation is changing a parameter over time. Any parameter, virtually any parameter can be automated. And we're going to do it by going into automation mode, clicking the thing we want to automate, and then you'll see this pink line and you can move it to wherever you want it to go. You're always going to get straight lines doing that. I'll add one more thing to this if we want. To get rid of a dot, you can click on it. If you want a curved line, you can put your mouse right over the line so that it turns dark like that. You actually have to be a little bit under it. Then I'm going to hold option. Now my mouse has this little curve after it. Now I can click and drag and make a nice curve either up or down. If you want those automation lines, you can do that too. Let's look at another. A. 55. Session Deconstruction No. 2: So one of the things I've been doing for the last year or two is contributing music to podcasts. There's a couple of podcast companies I work with where I'm writing the music for their shows, primarily narrative shows, and primarily Sci fi stuff because that's the things I find really fun to work on. Doing sound design for Sci Fi is like dream job. Oh, here is an episode of a podcast. You can see if I go all the way to the end. It's pretty like 40 minutes long. I don't even remember this one. Oh, this is a really short one. This is only, like, 15 minutes long. But it's a narrative, and you can see what I have here is I really have all the different vocal tracks that were recorded by the actors. Then down here, we have some sound effects, and then at the bottom, we have music that I wrote for it. So it's just little chunks of music here and there. But you can see in this whole thing how important the automation is. So here I'm just fading out the volume. But as you mix something, you really have to do a lot of delicate automation, especially when it's a narrative like this, and there's, like, multiple people talking over each other. So anywhere you see this pink line, there's some automation in it somewhere. So looking at this section, you can see it's very subtle things that happen when you're working on anything, music or narrative or anything. So I believe these are all just volume. But here, you know, the volume of this character needed to come down just to touch. This one came up just to touch. And then this word looks like we wanted this word to be, you know, comparab volume. So I just boosted that word because it was recorded quietly. And the actor must have turned their head away from the mic or something. This is how we fixed that. It turned out, you know, really quite nice. Han. We don't do so awesome at a time like this. Oh, wow, Hannah. So, you know, it's neat. So it's a big session. Here's some musical thing I wrote for them, and then a couple other music things. So the music, it looks like, is just midi stuff. That's actually it. Let's listen to what's at the end of this. Did it just I'm afraid it did. Yep. Just pissed on him and blew up. Look, out the window. Is it? Afraid it is. Mars is no longer. Our discovery. Gone. Aton. You Pretty simple, but, you know, it's nice to see a whole big kind of session like this with all these actors going and then looking at how the music gets placed and put together. These are fun projects. I like doing 56. MIDI Tracks & Instruments: Okay, let's move on to talking about midi editing. The first thing I want to say is something I've said before, but it is the number one question I get asked at this point in your live training. And that is that you go to a MDI track, maybe you double click. You make some notes, or you play on your MIDI controller, but you can't hear anything, okay? Now, I know I've talked about this before, but just humor me. Because you're going to encounter this, and you're going to say, why can't I hear this midi track? Remember the principal, MIDI data is numbers flying through the air. There's nothing to hear. What you need is an instrument. Okay? So let's go over to instruments, and let's say let's go to sampler, and then we'll go to YY Let's actually just search for piano Grand piano. There we go. Let's throw that on there. Now, I'm going to hear things. Okay? You must have an instrument on a mini track in order to hear what you're doing. Also remember that when it comes to midi instruments, you're putting an instrument on the track, okay? Not the clip. So let's say I make some chord progression. Let's say, what is that an E flat? Let's do something a little easier. DFA. Here's a D minor chord with a weird gene in. Okay, so here's a D minor chord. Okay, so let's say I want to hear that in two instruments. Okay, I want to hear that in the piano, and I also want to hear it in this Wurlitzer keyboard. The way we're going to do that is we're going to go to another track, and we're going to put that Wurlitzer on that track. And then we're going to copy this clip and paste it down here, okay? Because you can only have one instrument on a track. Okay? All the clips that I put on this track are going to be piano. I might as well just name this piano. That was Command R to rename the name of the track. Okay? Now there is a way using instrument racks to group some things together, and we'll talk about that in the future. For now, just remember that you can only have one instrument on a track at a time. So now we're going to hear that this played through two instruments. Neat. Okay. Cool. So that's how tracks and instruments work just as a quick little recap. Now, let's go into basics of editing for mini clips. 57. MIDI Editing: Cut, Copy, Paste: Okay, when it comes to mini clips, we have a lot of the same editing principles as audio clips. So let's make this one a little bit longer. And what I'm doing here is I'm grabbing the top right, which is just going to loop this one chord. Okay? If I want to make the clip longer by itself, I can do that by double clicking on it on the header and then going down here and say, here's the start, here's the end. Okay? So let's crank that up to say this is, you know, 22 measures along now. And then turn off the loop. Now you see that I have a nice long midi clip and a chord here just at the beginning. Okay? Here's my whole midi clip. Mostly empty. So let's take this, and I'm just going to do Command D, Command D, slide it back to get it on the grid. We'll do that. Just go to make some different material for us here. Okay. So now we have a nice long mini clip here. Let me just kind of redo what I just did in case it was weird. So I can double click to make a mini clip. And when I do that, it's going to make that mini clip. Fit into my current grid, okay? So my current grid is, you know, these rectangles. And if I zoom in, I can see how long that is. It's 1 bar, 41 to 42. Okay? But if I made a mini clip now, it's going to make just a quarter note, which is one of these boxes. So it depends on how far you're zoomed, but it's going to make it the length of your current grid. Now, it doesn't really matter because we can double click on it and go here to the end box and just click and drag and make it longer. Turn off loop, and then I can just open it up and do whatever I want. Okay? So that's how we set the length of the mini clip. Now, I'm going to go through some tools to help you navigate this thing down here. This is called the piano roll Editor in just a minute. Let's focus on up here for now. So just the same as audio. I can select some stuff, Command C, go to another Mi clip, Command V, and paste it. Like, so I can do that all over the place. I can click the header to copy a whole clip. Let's delete that one, I can press Delete to delete a clip. And I can use the kind of magic corners that we talked about before, but those work a little bit differently. So I can grab the top to kind of suck it in and chop off the back stuff. I can grab the right side to do the opposite. But I don't have fades. I can't just zoom in and get an automatic fade on a mini clip because mini clips work differently in that way. Volume is determined by a thing called velocity, which we're going to look at in just a minute. So you can do that with velocity or you could do it with just volume automation on the track if you wanted to. Most of the time, though, you don't need a fade for a mitiClip. Otherwise, you can click and drag to move things around. You can move mini clips between tracks. Just remember that if you do, they're going to change instrument to the new instrument, right? So this is a piano and now this is a Wurlitzer organ. So your instrument stays on the track that it was on. Now, there's one other weird thing that you can do, which is drag these to an audio track. Let's maybe take a minute and just talk through that because it's confusing. 58. Transforming Tracks: Okay, so I've said to you before, Mini clips, go on Mi tracks, audio clips, go on audiotracks. That is still true. But if you drag a midi clip to an audio track or an audio track to a Mi clip, different things are going to happen depending on what your setup is. And what you're trying to do. Okay? So let's look at that. First of all, I have an audio clip here and I have a midi clip here, okay? So if I take this audio clip and I drag it onto the Mi clip and I let go, this is going to be fairly simple. What happened was it converted this to a mini track. It said, so Live said, You have an audio track and you're trying to put a mini track on it, but that audio track isn't doing anything. Right now, so it's fine. I'll just make it amity track because that audio track was empty, okay? Let's undo that Command Z. And now let's not make that audio track empty. Let me push. An audio file on it. Okay? So now there's an audio file on that track. So now when I drag this down, Live is just going to say no. I can't put that midi clip on that track because that is an audio track and because there's other things on it, I can't just convert it to a mini track. So that isn't going to work. Okay? It's just going to say no. Now, the same thing is kind of true for the opposite. I'm going to make a new Mi track, which I can do by going to track Insert MIDI track, or if you want, Command T will make you a new audio track, and Shift Command T will make you a new midi track. So this is how you make more tracks. Okay, so now I have a new MIDI track, okay? Now, there's nothing on this track right now. So it's a midi track. So if I drag an audio file up to it, Live is going to say the same thing. It's going to say, Oh, well, there's nothing on that midi track, so I'm just going to convert it to an audio track for you. And that's exactly what it just did here, okay? Now let's undo that. Now let's go here. So now that midi track has some midi information on it. It is now firmly a midi track, okay? So now, I'm going to drag this audio track to it, and this is where it's different, because Live isn't going to say no here. It's going to say Okay, I can take that audio track, but tell me what you want me to do with it, okay? So I'm going to let go. Okay, and this is live saying, tell me what you want me to do with it. What it's saying is, I can convert this to MIDI information. So if you have notes or drums or something in that audio file, I'm going to figure out what those notes are and make a midi clip for you. That's what Live is saying here. So, you want to help it out a little bit by saying, is this a harmony? Does it have a bunch of chords in it? Is this a melody? Is it a single note thing, or is this drums? Is it drum patterns? Now, this was just one note, so I'm just gonna say it's a melody. And there I found out what note it was. Now, before you get too excited and say, Oh, that means I can take a whole track and dump it into a mini track, and it's going to figure out what it is for me. Mmm. Yeah, kind of. This is not exact science quite yet. If you do this with something really complicated, it's gonna get in the ballpark and help you figure out what it is, but it's not going to be perfect. So I wouldn't use this as, like, a compositional tool, really. But it can figure out the pitches of relatively simple things. Let's find something else here. Let's find like a riff. Okay, that's a good one. Okay, let's hear this whole thing. Okay, now, my guess if I copy this and put it up here, tell it melody, it's gonna be pretty close. I think this will actually be pretty dead on. Let's put an instrument on this. Instruments. Sure. Little road sound. Okay, now let's hear both of these at the same time so we can tell how close it is. Y, got a little extra something there. That was weird. But so pretty good. If I did this with, like, a chord progression, though, let's find that. Okay, sure. Let's try that. So here's two guitar chords. Sounds like this. Oops. Okay, let's take it up to midi, say harmony. And this will probably get close. Pretty good. So anyway, it's not perfect, but it can do pretty good sometimes. So remember, if you want to trigger this thing, this asking you what's going on or what you want me to do, the conversion tool here, you need to make sure it's firmly a midi track first. So put something on that track, put an instrument, a sound, a clip, something so that it doesn't just convert it over to being an audio track. Okay, let's move on. 59. The Piano Roll Editor: Okay, let's go down here to the piano roll editor. So to get there, I'm going to go to any Mi clip, and I'm going to double click on it if it's not already open. If I want to see more of it, I can grab the little dark bar here and click and drag to make it nice and big. Now, you can scroll up and scroll down in here just like before. You can put your mouse up here and do the click and drag thing. You can also do it over here on these notes to zoom in that way. Okay, so this is called the piano roll Editor. If you've never seen one of these before, this is kind of emulating an old school player piano, if you've ever seen one of those. They were a piano that had that you would pump with your feet, and it had air in it, and you would punch out these little holes on this paper that would spin. That's what your feet would pump. And if air could get through the little hole, it played a note. Were called the roles were called piano rolls. And those pianos were called player pianos or sometimes they were called pianolas. Look it up. They're fascinating. You can still find them here and there. So that's kind of what this is modeled after. Now, this model of the piano roll Editor is not unique to Ableton. You'll see this in virtually every professional audio tool everywhere, even non professional audio tools. If you want to represent notes, this is just how everywhere does. So each one of these lines is a note, okay? So it has a start and an end. We can grab the ends and shorten it. We can grab the start and shorten it. So, let's tidy up these cords. Let's make them. So they all start right on this measure one beat two line right here. So I'm just going to tuck these in a little bit. Now in that one, instead of tucking it in, I slid the whole thing over. That's okay. I can do that, too. Let's make these end right on beat three. I'm going to drag them right up to the edge there. Okay. Looks good. Let's do it with this one, too. So I've got these two kind of stray notes here. I'm just going to click on that and press Delete and delete. I can select all of these. I can use the arrow keys to move backwards and forwards. And I can use shift arrow keys backwards and forwards to extend the length of it or reduce the length of it just going forward and back. Okay? So now just normal arrow keys back. Do that with this one, too. And it's just going to help me get it right on the line quickly. Now, some other things you can do with arrow keys. The most valuable arrow key for me while I'm actually producing music is if you click on a note, you can move it to a different note by going up or down. That's really handy. But to me, the most valuable thing is shift up, we'll flip it up an octave. Okay? So you can say, I like this whole thing, but it's too low. Let's make it an octave higher. Shift up. Okay? Still too low, shift up. Down, down. So you can move things by a whole octave that way, and it's really quite nice. Okay, let's set this to end on beat four or sorry, on measure four. So I'm just going to drag the ends of these in. Now, if we want to and we got the stray one over here, I'm just going to delete. Okay, so let's just hear this now. Pretty. Now, if we want to adjust the volume of this, volume in terms of midi is called velocity. And we've got velocity controls down here. This gives us some control, but the real Velocity settings are these dots right here. They're a little hard to see, so I'm going to grab this bar above it and just click and drag to make it nice and big for us right now. Okay, so every note has a corresponding dot. So if I select this one, that's that dot. I like this one, it's that dot. Okay? I can click and drag to move it. Okay? Now, in the simplest way, velocity just means the volume with the bottom here, one being very, very, very quiet and the top 127 being as loud as it can go. Okay, so if I wanted this whole chord to be quiet, I could drag it down here. And you'll see the color kind of change of the note. That's a good indication of the velocity. So this is a little bit darker purple than this. Okay? If I want everything to be louder, I can go up there. And if you've got a situation where like here, all these notes are slightly different velocity, and you just want to even them out. You can take them all and just smash them to the top and then pull them back down. That makes them flat. But also, if you want to just totally randomize your velocity, you can go down here and just it randomize. And now they're all random. So this isn't what I'd want to do here because in this case, that means some notes in this chord are going to be quiet and some notes are going to be loud, which isn't going to be a very good way to make a chord. Let's hear. So, like, different notes are gonna stick out. But I do like randomization features. So let's smush that all back to the top and then just set it right around. Okay, one other important thing I want to show you in the piano editor before we leave here is this little headphone thing here, okay? Now, what that means is that is just like this one from the browser. Remember in the browser, what that meant was, I can audition clips, right? If it's on. Here, if I turn it on, I can audition notes. So if I move a note around I can hear it, right? If I add a new note. Okay. I can hear it. If I turn it off, when I make stuff, I won't hear it. So it's probably a good idea to turn that on so that you can hear what you're doing. I almost always have it on while I'm working. There's really no reason I can think of to turn it off unless well, there is one. Like, if you're doing this, select all, and you're going to transpose this up with the arrow keys. So I'm gonna use an arrow key and I'm going to move it up a half step. And then, again, That's not a great sound. You might turn it off to do that. But otherwise, Otherwise, keep that on. Okay, so there's a whole bunch more to the piano roll editor, and we're going to go into more of those things in the next five or six videos here. A lot of these things are new in Live 12, like the Transform and generate tools, which I love, super fun. And some of them are just modifications of what we had before. And that is true with this scale tool. So let's go and talk about how to use the scale settings and the key aware features of live. 60. Scale and Fold: Okay, so I think we pointed out this box up here when we were looking at the transport. This is our global key setting, okay? So this says, we're in the key of C major. Let's change it. Let's say we're in the key of let's do, I don't know, C minor, okay? You got all these different modes here. Mode is a weird word, but it kind of works for all of these things. Not split hairs on that at the moment. Let's just go to minor, and then we can set a key. So C, C minor. Now, you can turn this little dot on or off this little symbol here. Okay? I'm going to turn it on. So when it's on, what that means is that this is our key, okay? C minor. It's kind of like posted in the clouds. C minor is our key. So any clip or device that is capable of dealing with notes, can reference that, can say, wait, what is our key looks up at the clouds? Or key is C minor. Okay. And then it can stay within that key. Cool, right? So if I go to this clip, okay, I have this turned on. So this is in C minor. Now, that doesn't mean that all these notes have to be in C minor. It doesn't mean that at all. We can go outside of the key all we want. What it means is that the notes it's making purple here, are in the key, okay? But the notes that are kind of light gray, dark gray, whatever you want to call it, are not in key, and I can still use them. Okay? If you know anything about my music theory content, you'll know that my motto is, if you 100% stay in a key all the time, you'll write a lot of very fine music. But virtually nothing brilliant. If you experiment with going outside of the key, yeah that's where you will find some really brilliant moments. So stay inside the key all you want. That's great. But experiment with going outside of the key. Now the way we have this setup now, scale is on, so it says, We are in C minor. I've got some notes like this one that are not in key. That appears to be the only one there it is again. So I could leave that there or I could change. And what I'm seeing here in my piano roll editor is all possible notes, not just the notes and key. If I wanted to turn off showing me the notes that are in key, I could go here where it says Highlight scale. C turn that off. Now I'm just seeing black and white notes. I'm still seeing the key kind of on the notes over here, but it's just showing me black notes and white notes. If you look at a piano, there's keys that are black and keys that are white. That's what it's showing me here. So I'm going to turn the scale back on. Highlight scale. If I want it to hide all the notes that are not in this key, not in this scale, without going too deep into music theory, key and scale are the same. So if we're in the C minor key or scale, and I want to hide the notes that are not in key so that I'm just working within that C minor, I can hit scale here. Okay? Now it's showing me only the notes that are in C minor and this one because I used it. If I get rid of that one, actually, let's highlight both of these and move them Okay. Now if I hit scale again and again to kind of reload it, that note is gone because I'm not using it. So it'll show out of key notes, but only if you're using them. So now that I'm using it, this is only showing me the notes that are in the key of C minor, my global key. Okay? And you might be wondering what this fold button does. It takes it a step further and hides all the notes that you're not using. Okay? So now it's only going to show me the notes that I'm using. This fold thing is useful when you're programming drums, primarily. I haven't found use for it otherwise. Okay, and if you're asking, what happens if I change the key here? Let's go to D minor, okay? Everything shifted. My notes don't shift. Okay? So now I've got some notes that are out of key probably. Yeah, here's one. These but I also changed my global key up here. Okay? So if you change it here and this is on, you're going to change it up here globally. But just remember, it doesn't change the notes. It just changes what's on your screen. You can adapt your clip to the notes if you want to. Okay, moving on. 61. Quantizing: Okay, let's talk about quantizing. So quantizing is maybe something that is on your mind that is the ability to rhythmically fix mini notes. So we play something in, we play it sloppy. How can we just magically tighten it up and make it block onto the grid? Is there, like, a key we can press that'll just magically do that? Actually, there is. It's two keys, but you can do it. So let's look at these. See how these notes are not perfectly on the grid. Let's doom in a little bit more. Okay? No quite perfectly on the grid. Let's select them. And let's tell it quantize. Quantize means look at each one of those notes, find the closest point you can Find the closest, grid marker, like vertical line here and snap it to that. So if I do this, I've selected these few notes, and I'm going to press the magic button, which is Command U for quantize. Do not make the mistake of doing Command Q for quantize because Command Q means quit the program. Don't do that. Command U is what we use for quantize. So command and then watch the notes on the screen. Boop. They just click together quite nicely. Okay, so you can use that for everything. I could select. Command U, Wink and I could get it tight. Now, what that's going to do is move it to the closest grid spot, okay? So if I'm going to undo that. Okay, so now I'm back unquantized. If I go in here and now I do it, see this one, it's just going to move it over to right there. All right, watch. Bronk. So that's very, very different than doing it out here, 'cause this one, it's going to move it all the way back to here. So the grid resolution does matter. Now, luckily, there's a way for us to adjust that. And one way is to zoom in and zoom out of the grid. But we can get a little bit more control by going over here, go to transform and then from this list, select quantize. Now you can say current grid or like quarter note or eighth note, 16th note, 32nd note or a triplet. You can also say quantize the beginning of the note or the end of the note, which can be important sometimes or both. Okay, so now we have quarter notes. Every note begins and ends on a quarter note. Okay? No, you can see this kind of radically changes our melody, so that's not actually what I want. And you can also tell it to have a little bit of flexibility. So if I do this and I turn the amount down, you can see it kind of breathing a little bit. And what that is, is at 100%, that's going to make it exactly on the grid. If I dial that amount back, it's going to let it have a little bit of flexibility. So it's going to give it a little more natural feel, okay? So quantizing, tighten up your sloppy performances or just make things fit onto the beat a little bit tighter. Now, this menu, this transform menu is a new thing, and I want to go over that next. This gives us all kinds of interesting tools that we can use to help us just kind of generate new material. It's kind of wild. This Generate button, this really lets us generate new stuff. This lets us take the transform option lets us take what we have and, like, spin off into weird directions and let Ableton kind of write music for us. So let's play around with that for a minute. 62. MIDI Transform Tools: Okay, let's do some fun stuff because this is really kind of fun. So if we go to this transform tool, you have all of these options, and these are just ways that I like to think of these as creative seeds. So you can take something you've got like this melody. And remember, this melody, we got from this clip, which was just a sample, right? We turned it into this melody, which sounds like this. Okay, cool. So now let's turn it into our own thing. Let's take it. I'm just going to select all. What the heck. And let's do something to it. So our peggit means we're going to play notes one at a time, and we can kind of tell it to if on that and play with it. That's more of a tool for if we have chords, though. We don't have chords here. We just have a melody. So let's go to connect. We can say spread. So it's going to add notes here in between the notes that we have. And we can say kind of where we want them to go. Density, do we want to fill up all the space or not? Rate. This is going to kind of make smaller faster notes or longer shorter notes, depending on what we do. And tile, I think this is the amount of overlap between notes. So let's say, I don't know, spread, somewhere around there. Density, rate, something like that. Okay? Now here's what we have. Now, it's adding all kinds of notes, but because of the key stuff, because it knows we're in D minor, it's sticking to D minor, right? So all these extra notes, like, kind of fit and are making kind of a cool kind of blues groove here. It's kind of wild. So connect Ornament means take the notes I have and add a little flourish here or there, right? So with ornament, I could say, add a grace note here or there. Now, I've got everything selected, so it did it. You can see, like, it added these little stutter notes all over the place. This is gonna sound wacky. Okay. I'm gonna take that off. Um, if I went to like High, it's gonna add a little note before or a little note after That's a little intense. So for that, you want to do it on just like a couple notes here or there. Let's look at quantize we already know. Recombine. This is kind of a head scratcher. So what this is going to do is it's going to separate our pitch and our rhythm. Let us shuffle things around, and then it's going to put them back together. What it kind of looks like, if we drag this rotate thing around, it looks like we're the notes we have are on a loop, and we're going to rotate through it. See watch. So you can see it kind of going this way. Now we'll go the other way. So it's keeping the notes the same but changing the rhythms apart. It's kind of confusing, but you can get some interesting results that way. Span is going to give us different articulations. If we want all of these notes to be short, we're going to say staccato. Now it's just ding Okay. Tenuto means the length that they're written, the actual how they're written. And legato means stretch them out a little bit more. Let them overlap. So, in this case, we can't really hear difference between Tenuto and legato cause we don't have a lot of overlapping notes, but Strum Strum is really great. Let's use strum over here. Watch this. Um one thing I'll point out because it just happened on accident is that we can we do have a pencil tool that you can get up here or you can command B to get a pencil tool. Y B, I don't know, because P was print. And with that, you can draw mini notes just kind of freely if you want. So you can toggle it on and off with the letter Command B or with this tool up here. Anyway, so check this out. I have this cord, right? And it just starts like this. What if I wanted to simulate we're kind of strumming that cord. We can take this strum transform and just goop. Look at that. Look at what it does. Now let's hear it. All right. This actually looks really simple, but if you try to just make it sound natural and, like, roll it like that, it's actually really tedious to, like, slide your midi notes over just enough. So, this is a huge, huge help. So yeah, strum. And time warp, this does all kinds of weird stuff. Let's go back to our melody here. This is you can kind of think of this as the rhythmic speed. So if a 16th note or the short notes are fast, and these notes are short, what we can do is say, put a bunch of short notes at the beginning and long notes at the end. So squeezed all of that stuff into there and stretched all this stuff out. We can also make a third point and say I want fast stuff in the middle, slow stuff on either side of it. So slow stuff, slow stuff, and fast stuff. This gets really kind of bizarre. Uh, Okay. Let's hear it now. Weird. But all of these things are taking that melody and just transforming it. Maybe none of these landed right where we want to land in terms of what we want for our track, but all of them are going to give you a new idea, spur your creativity and get you working with an idea that is now yours because you've modified it, you've turned it into something that is your own. So they're really fun to play with, if nothing else. 63. MIDI Generators: Okay, similar to the transform operations, we have generate operations. Now, these are super fun. Let's do this. Let's go. Let's take that, move that over there, make a new mini clip. Let's make it I don't know, a couple of bars long. Okay. Turn loop off. Sure. Okay. Now, let's just make something. So I've got no notes on this clip. Let's just say make me something. So I can say, make me a rhythm, okay? I can say I want, you know, this many steps, this kind of a pattern. Density. Like is it really full, kind of empty, something in the middle. Now, this pattern thing, what I'm what I'm pretty sure this is is they've taken a number of steps, so that's number of grid steps here by the density and calculated a number of possible patterns. In this case, there are 69 possible patterns, and you're just kind of scrubbing through possible patterns. Okay? So, think of this as something you might use for drums or something like that. You can add some splits to it, so you could say, like 39% of the time, it's going to split in half and give you double You could shift it left or right, if you want. You can do some velocity and frequency control, too. So this is not particularly brilliant. Here's what it sounds like. But sometimes you're working on something and you're just like I just need, like a rhythm. Spit me out a rhythm that I can start playing with. If I was like, programming high hats or something like that, this is wonderful for that. But let's keep going. Let's say, now, these next three seed shape, and stacks. Stack is the word they're using for chords. Shape is the word they're using for melody type things. And seed, I believe is just giving you a It's like spraying on a canvas. Like spray paint just on a canvas, give you some place to start. So we can say, the range of pitches, this is E flat two to C five. Let's make that a little smaller, maybe. You can see all these pitches that have just come up. Duration, long notes and short notes. Let's make some more longer notes. Velocity, you know, a randomized range. So it's going to basically randomize, make some notes in this area. Now, if you want this to be more useful melodically, let's make a smaller range for our pitches. Okay? A little bit more. Alright. I'm going to take these our initial rhythm out. Let's see what it made. Okay, that's cool. You know, what I could do is now that I have this, I could take this and I could go to transform, and I could say quantize, start and end by 16th. Yeah, let's make it rigid. And then span staccato, connect, you know, and I can really start doing even more to it. Ornament, quantize, recombine, kind of move it around. Now, let's hear it. It's getting somewhere. Anyway, back to seed. So seed shape is going to generate me a melodic idea, and I can just draw on here and say, Okay, that kind of a thing. And now I can adjust the rate, the tiling of it, meaning the different rhythmic ideas. Density leave some holes in it, and jitter is just kind of randomness, I think. So here's a brand new melody that Ableton just created for me. Cool. Let's go to the last one stacks. Now, this is cords. This one is a little bit weird because I haven't quite figured out exactly how these symbols work. But I can say root and inversion. And then I can select one of all of these different symbols. And, you know, here's my chord. Go back to more simple chords down here. So you can experiment with it and end up making some really cool chord. So all of this generate stuff is new in live 12, and it's kind of just wild. So play around with it. I'm going to make a whole class, I think, on writing music with this, I'm going to try to make a whole track just with this generate and transform stuff. So keep an eye out for that. I'll do it soon, I think. 64. Velocity Editing: Okay, we looked a minute ago at velocity editing, but there's a couple more controls related to velocity that I just wanted to show you here. So let's go back to our crazy invented malady here. And let's see what it did with the velocity. That's cool. So if we look down here, we've got a couple more controls. We can randomize the velocity. I've already showed you that and we can give it kind of some limits. So I believe this is setting an upper range, so we can say, don't go above 101. We can also set a ramp. Now, this is a new thing we can do. So we can say ramp the velocity up. This kind of takes the place of, like, a volume fade, but just in the midi world. So we could say, you know, start at one and go up to 64. So if I did, like, select all, and then I said, start at 17 and go up to 107. This is going to kind of ramp them up. This is a little easier than just drawing the velocity. And I can say deviation, like, give it a little bit of randomization, right? So that means that the velocity we get is going to be in this range somewhere. So adding this little bit of randomization can make it a little more human, right? So if I did this, then we're going to get a more natural sound. When a person plays this kind of a keyboard or any kind of instrument, you know, they don't play exactly the same velocity every time. Unless they're a robot. So to make a more natural sound, add this deviation just so that it's nothing that you would really notice if listening to it. But unconsciously, it'll make it sound a little more natural and human. Well, they're playing inhumanly fast, but if they were playing something more natural and human, uh, adding this would give it a little more control over that. Now, there's another thing built into the piano roll editor that gets us some cool opportunities for more of that kind of chance and randomness. So let's move on to a new video and talk about that. 65. Chance Editing: I think for this one, I'm going to load up a drum kit because the best kind of use case of this is in drums. And here's what we got. A slow it down just a little bit. So my global tempo up here is gonna slow everything down. Okay. Now, when I loaded in that midi clip, it brought with it a drum kit. I can shift tab over to see that drum kit. It's over here. It's cool. On the MI grid, I have this high hat. Okay? So for some reason, this clip has the grid off. So let's turn it back on, and I want to look at 16th notes. I'm going to add 16th notes all over the place in this high hat. I'm just going to add a ton of them. Not every 16th note, but I'm going to do some patterns here. Okay, cool. So now I have all these 16th notes. Let's add a few more. Okay. So here's what this drumbeat sounds like now. Okay, cool. A little stumbly over there. Let's clean that up. Okay, so let's make these high hats sound kind of natural. First, let's do a little bit of variation in our velocity with them. So we can go, let's take them down a little bit. And then vary our velocity like so. Okay, that's a nice start. Now, I'm going to click this little arrow down here, this teeny tiny little arrow, and I'm going to say show lane velocity. I'm already looking at that. Let's add chance. Okay. So now we've got this other lane here. I'm gonna make that nice and baby. Chance means like probability. Like, what are the odds that each of these notes are going to play at all? Okay? So I can go to Chance and I can just say randomize, if I want, right? Or I can just say, smash it up to the top and then bring it back down, say, 50%, okay? So for any of these notes, there's a 50% chance that it's gonna play at all. And when it does play, it's going to play at this velocity or in this range of velocity. But with something like high hats, this is now going to give me kind of a cool flavor. It's going to randomly choose every time it plays through. So this is really almost never gonna loop, technically, because the high hats are going to always be changing. Let's listen. Okay. Here we go. So it's just going to keep changing. If I want more, I can raise my chance probability. Right? So this chance improbability is really fun. It works kind of the same as velocity in terms of these controls we have for it. But it really can liven up a rhythmically repeating thing by just having it drop out every now and then. You can do some fun stuff like grouping things together. Like, let's say I wanted this whole bar of high hats to either play or not play. So in that case, I could say play one and group them together. Now I have one velocity control for all four of those or one chance control for all four of those. So they're either going to play or they're not going to play. Um, in this case, I don't want that, so I can ungroup them. And now I get four chance controls for them. So experiment around with this chance thing and randomizing it, it's really fun. 66. Session Deconstruction No. 3: Okay, let's look at a track. This is a track of mine. This came out on an album a couple of years ago. The finished version of the track is called Time givers. You can see the session is called ten Version two, because when I was working on it, this was the tenth track that I worked on for that album. I chose this one right now because it's got a whole ton of mini tracks in it. If we go forward, all these green things are midi actually in the red one. And there's more down here, and it's just a whole bunch of midi strings. So, like, virtually all of this is strings. So the way I made this was really I think I made this opening kind of riff and then I put some string samples on it, and then I just started adding layers to it in different tracks. So a lot of these tracks have the same string scenth on them. Uh, but I just kept building it and building it with more and more stuff. And then there's some keyboards and some pads and some bells and things like that that come in. This rhythmic loop. You can see down here, there was a couple other drum loops that I tried, but I muted them out because I didn't like them, but they're still sitting here. Here's where they do come in into some loops that I did like. So I'll hit play on this, and then I'll just kind of scrub around. It's kind of annoying to not be able to see everything, but you'll get an idea for what it's like. Just remember, it's a ton of midi stuff, a ton of different instruments. 67. Freeze and Flatten: Okay, one more thing that's an important concept in life that we just haven't touched on. That is, sometimes we want the ability to lock down a track and say, This track is the way it is. Now, there's a whole bunch of reasons for doing that. But the two most important ones are you are either sharing this track, like sending this whole session to someone else, and I'll talk more about that in just a second. Or your computer is just running too hot. Look, if you look up here, we see this 1%, right? That 1% is telling us how hard our processor is working. We can click on it and get a little bit more info, but if that's getting up pretty high and your computer's starting to go slow, then you might want to do this trick. And what this trick is called freezing and flattening. It's going to do is it's basically going to render a MIDI track as an audio file or render an audio file with out all its effects. So in other words, it's going to put all the effects into the clip and then turn off the effects. So it'll sound the same, but you won't be able to make any adjustments anymore, okay? So here's how we do it. We just go over to the track, control click or right click freeze track or freeze and flatten Track. If you freeze the track, that's going to disable MIDI stuff. Effects, instruments, anything. And it's basically going to be a temporary audiophile. You can kind of see that it turns blue because it's frozen. And this is like there's, like, a hidden audiophile that was just created. The reason you might want to freeze something but not flatten it is you can unfreeze things. I can unfreeze it, wake it up. But if I flatten it, it's going to turn it into an audio file, and I can't go back, okay? So I mean, I can kind of undo it right now, but once I get further down the road, I can't go back from that. But it's going to be kind of rendered as an audio file now. If I go to my audio file and they have effects and things on them, and my computers running really slow, so I might want to render those effects onto the track and then turn off those effects. That'll help free up your computer. Okay, so freezing and flattening is just kind of how we do that. Different programs call that different things. They might call it render in place. They might call it print. Like printing the audio is like a thing. It's a weird term, but it is a term. In live, we call it freezing and flattening. 68. Collect All and Save: Okay, so let's go down that road a little bit farther. Let's say you want to share this session with a friend, okay? Not this track. Like, you've made a track, you like the track. We're going to render that track out. And we'll talk about how to do that next. If you want to share a session, like everything I see on my screen, then there's an extra step you want to do to make sure that the person you're sending it to is going to be able to open it. First, you're gonna want to make sure they have the same version of live. In our case, Live 12. But then there's this extra little step. And in order to explain that step, let me explain kind of briefly how Live puts together the Ableton set. So when you have a session like this, what Live remembers, what it's keeping track of is kind of like a map. It's a map with spider webs all over your hard drives, and it's looking for all of these files that you've pulled in here, like this one. Not necessarily these mini files we made those, but these audio files and anything else you imported into your session. So it's got these kind of fingers all over your hard drive, and it doesn't make a copy of these. It just remembers where it is. So it knows that for this file, it's got to go into one of my hard drives, a folder, another folder, another folder, and that's where this file is. That's how it's keeping track of it. So if I send this session to somebody and they open it up, what it's going to do is it's going to open this file it's going to get to the spot where it's trying to load this file, and it's going to say, Hey, this is on the Michigan hard drive, and that's not connected to this computer because it's not. So the other persons not going to be able to open it because they don't have the same files that I have, and it's going to look like this. It's just going to get grade out, and it's going to say session or clip deactivated, it's going to say. So the way we fix that is before we send it to them, we're going to go to file and then collect all and save. What this is going to do is it's going to remake that map with all those spider webs going everywhere. And it's just going to take everything we're using and save a copy of it into a folder. And pack that all together as our session. So we want to say files from elsewhere. Yes. Files from other projects. Yes. Files from the user library. Probably safe to do. Files from factory packs that you can usually leave off. If you turn that on, it's going to make some of your sessions really, really big if you're using, like, big libraries. So I tend to leave that off unless I'm sure that I need it. And then you say, Okay, and it's going to take a second to think and then you can save that session, and it'll make a folder that goes along with your session that'll have everything you need. So then if you want to send that to someone, send that whole folder. That's what they need to be able to open it. Okay, last thing, let's talk about rendering out your track when it's done. 69. Exporting: Okay, so we've made a track. We're happy with our track. It's super cool. Let's export it as a wave file or an MP three file or whatever we want in order to send it to our friends or upload to the Internet. So if you're not sure what type of file you want, we basically have two options. Full quality big deal audio file. That would be a Wavefle or an AIF file or small compressed file. That would be an MP three file. Those are really our two options to export. If you want to post this on social media or email it to someone or something like that, you want an MP three file. If you want to upload it to Spotify or Apple or, more importantly, send it to a mastering engineer to master that track, then you want a wave file. Luckily, we can make both at once. So in order to do this, first thing we're going to do is select the region that is our track. Now, most of the time, that's going to be beginning until the end of your track, right? So you select the region. Sometimes it's easier to put your loop brace over the region. So let's say this is the beginning and this is the end. Now, we're not going to loop it, but what we can do with the loop brace, it's just a handy way to select everything within an area, okay? So this is what I want to select. This is my track. Doesn't need to start at the beginning of the session, although that's usually easier to deal with. Okay? Make sure nothing's soloed. Make sure everything is when I hit Play, we're going to hear everything that we want to hear. Okay, once we have that all set, we're going to go to File, Export Audio Video. Okay, so rendered track, what are we listening to and rendering main? The main track. That's this one down here. That's everything that we can hear. So that's almost always what you want. Here's our start and end points. Rendering options. You can do these things if you need to. If this is a rough mix, you may select normalize, that'll make the whole thing a little louder. But if you've really worked on your mix, you want to turn that off probably. Sampling rate should be the same as what you're working at. So you can see up here, it says 48.0 kilohertz. So sample rate here should be 48,000 kilohertz. It should be the same. Okay, now I have three export options here. PCM is that full quality big deal audio file we talked about. So encode PCM. If you turn this off, then it's not going to make that full quality audio file, and it's just going to make an MP three. That's fine. You can do that. If I do this, it's going to make both. So I'm going to set wave, bit depth, 16 is fine. Di options. You can either leave this at none or if you want to be fancy, you can do POW minus R one. That's what I always do. This just helps suppress any kind of glitchy things that might happen. We can talk more about dithering in the recording section, but don't worry about it too much for now. Okay, MP three, I can have it make an MP three or not. And video, I can have it make a video or not. Now, in this case, it's not letting me make a video because there's no video in this thing. It doesn't have anything to put in video, but you can import a video file into live. If you're doing, like, a film soundtrack or something like that, that is a handy way to do it, and then you can export a video. But there's no video here, so we're going to leave that off. Okay? Then we say export, it's going to ask us where to put it, and it's going to make those two files for us. And then you have it. 70. What Comes Next?: All right. So we've reached the end of the first part of this class. Now, this class is a big series of classes. So there's six or probably actually this time around seven classes in this series. So what I would recommend you do next is the next class in the series, and that is called recording music in Live 12. So we're going to focus on recording audio and MIDI. For that, I'm going to be walking through some guitar stuff, some vocal stuff. I might even take us on a field trip to studio I work at from time to time. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. I really like that class because I teach that class at a university, so it's kind of so it's something that I'm really excited to teach every time it comes up. So please check that out, and let's move on couple more things for you as we wrap up. 71. Part 2: Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to producing music with Ableton Live. This is the third class in my big giant Ableton Live 12 series. You don't need to have taken the first two. However, I'm going to assume you know your way around live a little bit at this point. In this class, we're going to focus on just making stuff. Start by getting comfortable with the arrangement view, and then we'll work on making a track together. Then we'll move on to Session View, and then we'll work on making a track together. We'll focus on beats and what goes into making a beat and what I look for in beats. We'll talk about the Ableton synths that are built in. Then all these new MITI tools that are in Live 12, there's all these new tools that will let you just generate things. So you can come up with a chord progression, and maybe you don't really like it all that much. You can click a couple buttons and have Lives say, Let me see what I can do with that and have it generate more material for you. It's hugely valuable and really cool. And then we'll close out with some extra techniques like side chaining, routing, busing, resampling, things like that. Before we wrap up, I'll leave you with a bunch of different sessions in this class so that you can have something to get started with and play with. They are completely yours to use however you like. So, let's dive. I can't tell you how many times. I've been like in the weeds, working on something and I, like, programmed, like this complicated beat only to realize I was like, think working on quarter view and arrangement view have different, like, content areas, but they share a mixer, okay? So that to really kind of make these more make these groove a little bit better and make them feel a little more natural. Two of them you already know. I remember back when I was learning how to use Session View and somebody showed me this thing that I'm about to show you and it just went click and everything made sense about Session View. So let's do it. So first all day. 72. What We Will Cover Here: Alright. Let's dive in. So here's what we're going to cover here in this class. So this is the second in my big huge series on Live 12. This one, we're going to focus on recording. That means recording audio and Mi. So we're going to dive in deep to a bunch of tricks to make your workflow really smooth when you're playing in midi stuff like on a keyboard or a midi guitar or some other things. I'll show you a whole bunch of midi devices when we get there. And also what you need to be able to record microphones and acoustic instruments, your voice, everything. We're also going to focus a lot of time on warping. Now, warping is live's internal engine for synching up time. Okay? That sounds like big and ethereal, and it kind of is, if you think about it. But what this means is that we can record something and then adjust the time to make it fit. It also means that I can drag in two drum beats into Live, and Live is going to automatically figure out what tempo both of them have been created at, and then it's going to adjust them both to play in time with each other. It's automatic time sinking. Now, there's a lot that can go wrong in that and a lot we need to understand about it to really use it. So we're going to spend a lot of time on that in this class also. So we're going to start with audio recording. We're going to talk about hardware interfaces, all of that stuff. Recording, comping, doing multiple takes. So let's dive into it. Off we go. 73. Introduction to Audio Recording Fundamentals: Okay, so recording. Now, some of you may know who have taken some of my other classes. I run a recording studio that it's an Ableton based recording studio that's part of my university position. So this is kind of especially up my alley. Now, we're not going to go into all of the really fine details of recording, like how to mica Cello and all of those things. I do have other content that is that focuses on that. But in this class, I really want us to focus on Ableton. However, in order to make the most of it, we do have to step outside of Ableton for a little bit first to get comfortable with some of the hardware that we're going to need to connect to Ableton. So we will talk about microphones. I will do a little shopping guide on a few different things telling you what I would recommend you buy for the different situations you're in and what you need to buy and what you don't need to buy. So first, we're going to go into some of that hardware stuff, and then we'll kind of circle back to connecting it all to lives. So let's start with a thing that most people don't realize is something that they're going to need, and that is the audio interface. So, let's talk about that first. 74. Hardware Needs: Okay, so what is an audio interface? I can explain this a few different ways. First, if we look at Live and say, audio input device, and audio output device, it's looking for our audio interface here. Now, now, your computer has a built in audio interface. So that's why we can select there like your headphone out or whatever. So what is an audio interface? This is the converter, okay? Another name for it is a converter. So your computer makes digital sound, okay? So it does everything in the digital round, okay? And that's great. Everything we're doing here is digital, okay? Digital is ones and zeros. Okay? Now, that's great. Computers can hear ones and zeros really well. The problem is, our ears need to hear analog sound. You as a human being, presuming you are a human and AI has not taken over the world yet, you cannot hear digital sound. You need to hear analog sound. Your ears can only hear analog sound. So we need something that can convert digital sound to analog sound so that you can hear it. And the opposite is also true. If I'm going to sing into this microphone, if I'm just even going to talk into this microphone, I can only produce analog sound. I cannot produce digital sound. But the computer needs digital sound, right? It needs something digital. So I'm going to talk into this microphone, and this microphone is going to go through this cable here, and this cable can only carry analog sound. It's going to go, and it's going to go down this wire, and it needs somewhere to be converted to digital sound so that the computer can deal with it. Okay? So an audio interface is something that does that conversion for us. It converts analog sound to digital and digital sound to analog, okay? Go back and forth so that we can hear what the computer is doing. Now, it would be nice if it was as simple as that, but to make things a little more complicated, that conversion can be done really well and it can be done really poorly. That's why we have different audio interfaces. Some of them are really expensive and they do it really, really well. Some of them are really cheap and they don't do it really well, and the sound suffers because of it. So there is an audio interface built into your computer already. If it makes sound that you can hear, there's one in there. Your phone has one in it because it produces sounds that you can hear. But the one in there is a little tiny microchip, and it's not the highest quality. If we want to do something with higher quality, we need a dedicated box. That looks like this. This is an audio interface. Okay? More on that in a second. Now, there's another reason we might want to have a dedicated box, and that's so that we can plug things into it. For example, here is a microphone, okay? This is a standard microphone. The output of it looks like that. It's got three pins, okay? Now, Look at your computer. Lo all over your computer. Do you have an input that has three pins like that? You don't don't have an analog microphone input on your computer. No matter what kind of computer you're using, I guarantee you don't have one. So, we take a box like this. It has a whole bunch of inputs for a microphone, and then it has an output to go into a computer, USB, USBC, whatever, right? So this can do the conversion for us. We can plug in a whole bunch of microphones and it can do the conversion and send that digital signal to the computer. Okay? So that's why we need one of these boxes. Now, there are USB microphones that exist where it's a microphone, and then it goes it has a USB output, and then you can plug that directly into a computer. Those exist, and I used to make fun of them and say that they're garbage. But I've listened and played around with a few of them in the last couple of years, and some of them are actually really good. I'm not gonna lie. Some of them are good. What that means, though, is that they have the converter built into the microphone, okay? Which means it's a tiny little converter. It's not going to be that great. Um, but again, I've heard some really good ones. So if you want to do that, that's okay. That is a cheap way around buying an audio interface. So that's what an audio interface is. Now, let's talk about if you need one or not. 75. Do you need an interface?: Okay, do you need an interface? Maybe not. There's a possibility that you don't need one. If you're planning on running a recording studio where you're going to record a whole bunch of instruments, yes, you definitely need an interface. But if you are in a home studio, if you're in a home setting where you're on a laptop, you're on a desktop, whatever, and you don't plan on recording a whole bunch of instruments, then you might not need one. Okay? So let's separate this into two different issues. The first is for recording, do we need an audio interface? And the second is for playback. Do we need an audio interface, okay? Because an audio interface handles both. So let's talk about recording. If you're going to record a microphone, a single microphone, one at a time, like, you're a singer and you want to just be able to lay down some vocals, you might not need an audio interface. You could get a good USB microphone. And you might be fine with that. That's actually kind of fine. Let's say you're a guitar player, and you want to record some guitars from time to time. You probably do need an audio interface because you need to be able to plug your guitar into it or mic up guitar amp or something like that. And that's really going to require an interface of some sort. However, you could get a really small and cheap one and be just fine. Let's say you are a producer and you have no desire to record anything. In that case, you don't you could be just fine without one. You might still want one for playback. We'll get to that in a minute. But when it comes to recording, I probably, other than the guitar stuff that I do, I probably almost don't even need one because I have a studio. So if I'm really going to record, like, a string quartet, I'm going to go to my University studio, do it, bring the files back here, and primarily edit. In my home studio here, I'm primarily editing. I might lay down a guitar track or a violin track. There's my violin, on occasion. But most of my recording, I'm going to do at the studio and then just. But okay, let's talk about for playback. So you can probably plug headphones into your computer. And if you're only going to be working on headphones and you just want to plug right into your computer, that's pretty fine. There's really nothing wrong with that. You can get by without an audio interface just fine. Let's say, maybe you have a nicer pair of speakers, and you want to plug your computer into those nice speakers. You could get one of those funny cables that is a little headphone jack. We call it an eighth inch jack or we call it a mini jack or there's a couple of different names for it, but little headphone jack. On one end and on the other end, it splits and is either a quarter inch LR, or whatever you need to plug into your speakers. You could do that. The quality of sound you're going to get is going to be lower than if you had an audio interface. But how much lower? Like, like a really small amount. Let's be like super honest here, a really small amount. So I have really nice speakers in this room. I have focal I can't remember the model number, but these focal speakers. They're right here. They're just out of frame. So if I just plug the headphone jack of my computer into them, they're still going to sound really good. But not as good as if I go through an audio interface, because the conversion of the digital signal to analog before it goes to those, it's going to be better. So the way I have it set up is I have an audio interface here. Mine, the one that I'm actually using is Universal Audio is the name of the company, and the model is Apollo Twin. It's a small one. I can only plug in two instruments at a time for recording. That's fine. That's all I need here. And then my speakers are plugged into that. Okay? So when I go to Live and I say audio input device, thing I'm using to record, it's Universal Audio Thunderbolt. That's that box. That's my Apollo twin. When I say audio output, that's the thing I'm listening for. It is also that box. Okay? Because my speakers are plugged into it. It does all my conversion for me. And that's typical. This one is the one I used to use here, but I switched it out for the Universal audio because I disliked it better. But this is an Apogee quartet is the model number here. This is a great one. This is a really nice box. I really liked it. It has a bunch of inputs and outputs, and it works really the same. So do you need an audio interface? You don't you probably don't need one, like italicized need. But it will make things sound better very, very slightly. And if you're recording, you probably do need one unless you're just recording one microphone. So if money is no object, get an audio interface. If money is an object, get a cheap audio interface. And if you can't afford to buy anything extra, that's just fine. Don't use an audio interface. You'll be just fine. Now, assuming you do want to buy an audio interface, let's talk about what you should look for and how much you should plan on spending. Okay 76. Audio Interface Buyers Guide: Okay, if you are going to buy an audio interface, here's a couple of things to keep in mind. First, in general, I find that with audio interfaces, you get what you pay for. In other words, the more expensive ones are generally worth it, and the cheap ones are generally fine, but they're not as good as the expensive ones. So here's what you should look for. First, make sure that it has what you need to connect to your computer. It has USBC, it has USB, whatever. Whatever ports your computer have, this is probably more of an issue for us MAC people because our ports keep changing. Second, make sure it has enough inputs, okay? So think about the biggest thing you plan to record in your like home studio or your setting, okay? So if you want to record a rock band, you need to be able to plug in a bunch of microphones for the drums. And then, so let's say, I don't know, five microphones for your drums, and then guitar bass and vocals, if you want to do everything all at once. Okay? So it is very common to have an interface that has eight inputs and then multiples of eight. So eight and 16 and 32. So if you want to record a whole band, get one that has at least eight inputs. But if you want to record a bunch of vocal tracks, you really only need one input, okay? So when we talk about number of inputs, we're thinking about how many things we want to record at the same time, okay? So if I want to lay down a vocal track, a violin track, and a guitar track, but it's all me, I really only need one input because I'm only going to do one of those at a time. I can layer as much stuff as I want. But the number of inputs means how many things we're going to record at the same time. If you go into a big studio, they're going to have 64 or 128 inputs available. But here what I use, I have two inputs available. This unit, this is the one that I have here. This is the back of it. I have two lines input. That's all I need for what I'm doing here. So I can record a mic and a guitar at the same time. It's great. Or two microphones at the same time. Okay, so think about how many inputs you need. Think about how many outputs you need. In most cases, you only need two outputs. You need a left and a right for your two speakers. Maybe you need a headphone output also. This has four outputs. I've got two line outs and two monitor outs. So my speakers are connected to monitor outs. If I look at the front of this, I also have a headphone out right here. There's another input that is guitar specific here, or it's just really an instrument input. Any instrument would do. If you wanted to plug directly in to the interface, you could do that. And then the thing I have on top, another thing to consider is just if this thing is going to sit on your desk, what controls you have. I have a big giant volume knob. It can either be my input if I hit this preempt button or my output, meaning, like, the volume of music I'm hearing if I hit this monitor button. Sandy. I just need one big volume knob is all I really need. This Universal audio is really nice one. Okay? This is a really nice, a high end but small unit. And so it's about 1,000 bucks. Okay? You can get much more expensive ones and much cheaper ones, okay? If you want to go if you want a really nice one that's not so expensive but has a lot of inputs, check out the company Mark of the Unicorn or Moto MOTU. I really like their stuff. They're less expensive but still really quite nice things. Now, I will also tell you the number one unit that people are buying right now that I see students buying and they're loving. They're really affordable and they're really reliable and they sound great is this one. The focus right scarlet two e two. Now, this two e two is kind of almost standard Normenclature now. Two inputs, two outputs is what that's really saying. So here's a unit. It's got two inputs. It's probably got a pretty on the back Look at the back. Yeah. So it's got two mic inputs on the back and two line inputs on the front. That means just like a guitar kind of cable. It's got a big volume knob and some settings for your inputs. It's got let's look at the back. It's got two outputs. It's pretty simple. It's got looks like USBC power. No thrills. But this one sounds good. It's reliable, and it's 200 bucks. These are really popular everywhere. I see them all over the place right now because they have these red casing. So I see students carrying these around. We've bought some of these for some of the smaller rooms at the studio that students are using. H. So these are great. You're not really going to find anything cheaper than this. There are bigger versions of this. Like, there's a four i four or a four e two. I can't remember. So something to consider. If you want to buy one, and the max you can afford is 200 bucks, this is a great option for you. Now, I'll just add here the website I am on is sweetwater.com. I do not have any affiliation with Sweetwater and get no kickbacks from what you buy from them. So just saying. And I'll remind you, you may not need an interface. 77. Hardware Setup: Okay, really quickly, let's talk about how you set this up. So let's assume you've got an interface, and you want to set up a microphone to go to it and speakers to go out of it. Here's how you're going to set that up. So you've got your computer. Let's say you've got a speaker here and a speaker here. Okay? So these are your speakers. Let's just put whoops. Speaker Bring to front. Okay. Speaker Speaker, okay? We always want two speakers. Just don't look lined up. They should be the same size. I don't know why one's bigger than the other. That's weird. Doesn't matter. Okay. I'm not a graphics person. I'm really, like, a sound person. Okay. So now let's go to our interface. Interface. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect our interface to our computer with whatever it needs, probably USBC. I wouldn't at this point, buy anything that's not using USBC, or faster. Um if anything is old school USB one, you might find some used gear that's using USB one. That can be okay. That's pretty dicey. It's just not quite fast enough. But if you only have one input and two outputs, meaning like one microphone and two speakers, you could probably be okay with an old school USB one connection as long as you're not doing, like, a whole bunch of tracks at once. USB two and anything faster than that is just fine. Okay, so now we're going to go to um, audio output. This may also be called Monitor Out or something like that. Um, usually be labeled left and right. I'm going to make this smaller, just to make it easier to fit. Okay. So you'll see two outputs named audio output, left and right. So we just need to connect our speakers to that. So the input on your speakers. So remember, whenever you're connecting cables, out goes to in and in goes to out. So this says out this. This will need to say some sort of input. F. Some sort of input and some sort of input. Okay, so now our speakers are connected. Now you will have a mic or line in. A mic is going to be that three prong thing, and a line is going to look like a guitar cable, like a single cable. If it's a mic, you can plug a microphone right into it. So let's say this is our Okay, so we can plug a mic right into that right on the same box. If it's a line input, a guitar cable, you can also plug that right in. You might want to go through for both of these, you might want to go through a pre amp or something. First, if you want a better sound, you don't have to, but you can. For my microphones, if I'm just talking like this, this microphone is going directly into my audio interface. My guitar goes through a preamp, though. We can talk about preamps later. It's kind of like a extra thing that makes the sound like a little bit better. Okay, so that's really all we need. Then in Ableton, we would just need to make sure that in our settings. Our input and our output device is set to whatever our audio interface is because here it is acting as both our input and our output, okay? Then you should be good to go. That's everything you need. 78. Microphones: Okay, let's talk about microphones. So again, I could talk for hours and hours about different types of microphones and what you might want to get and might not want to get, but we don't have time for that in this class. So instead, I'm going to go through the super basics about microphones. In the next video, we'll talk about for your situation, what you might consider buying. So in short, there are three ish, different types of microphones. There are dynamic microphones, condenser microphones, and ribbon microphones. Ribbon microphones are a pretty specialized thing, and unless you're building a whole recording studio, I would not worry about getting one of those. They're fragile. They probably don't do anything you can't do with the other two in a very basic way. So don't worry about ribbon microphones for now. So dynamic microphones look like this. If you ask a 5-year-old to draw a picture of a microphone, they're probably going to draw this microphone. This is a dynamic microphone. What a dynamic microphone is good at is just screaming into it. W. It's good at loud stuff, quiet stuff. It's very versatile, and they are not very fragile. You can, you know, drop this in a bunch of in a cup of beer, and it'll be just fine. This microphone is called an SM seven, and this is actually kind of a fancy dynamic microphone. But this microphone is called an SM 58. This is actually, kind of a different version of it, called Beta 58. But basically, an SM 58 is the most standard microphone anyone has that exists anywhere. These are great live microphones. And these are great for recording if you're recording vocals, especially if it's like a rock vocal, a rap, or Anything that's not, like, a super delicate, like maybe an opera vocal, I wouldn't record with one of these, but most pop music vocals, these are great for. They're great for drums. You know, put this on your snare drum, on your high hat, on your kick drum. They're just great. But when it comes to a very delicate sound, you might want something that is a condenser microphone. This is an example of one. There are 1 million different kinds. This is one that I like because it's rather affordable. This is Audio Technica AT 20:20. It sounds great. It's relatively cheap. These are like, I don't know, maybe 100 bucks. But it is a condenser microphone. It's going to be more sensitive. It's going to pick up more things. I used to use this as my vocal microphone for recording these lessons, but I stopped because it's too sensitive. I live kind of near the airport, and you would be able to hear planes flying overhead all the time. Whereas this one is less sensitive to sounds around me. So it doesn't pick up as much around. But if I'm recording, like, a lllo or any stringed instrument, really, I'm going to use this kind of a microphone. This is another example of a condenser microphone. This is what we would call a small diaphragm condenser microphone because it's the part that actually picks up the sound is small, and that's going to make it good at higher frequencies, more delicate sounds. This is actually a super expensive microphone. These are, I think, maybe $100 apiece or so. This is $100 a piece. And this one, I think these are like $150 a piece right now, maybe 120, somewhere in that range. So dynamic and condenser microphone, the two main kinds of microphones. If I'm recording, like, acoustic guitar that doesn't plug in, I'm probably using this microphone, maybe two of these microphones. If I'm recording an opera singer, I'm probably using a condenser microphone. If I'm recording a rock singer, SM 58 all the way. 79. Microphone Buyers Guide: Okay, I'm going to give you a couple scenarios, and then I'll tell you about what kind of mic I would buy in that case. First, you have like $150 you can spend on microphones, and that's it. That's the absolute top. Then hands down, no question. By an SM 58. You can use it on a ton of stuff, and it will never go out of style, and it will probably never break. So you could have that laying around for the rest of your life. It'll be a good investment. Okay, option two, you have about $300 to spend on microphones. I would get one SM 58 and one of these Audio Technica AT 2020s. Like I said, this gets you a condenser microphone that sounds good and is at a great price. Okay? There are way more expensive and fancier condenser microphones. But this one is just a weird little model that is cheap and sounds great. I love these things. I have, like, four of them that I use on stuff all the time. So that's what I would recommend if you have like 300 bucks, and you want to start building a little arsenal of microphones. Okay, let's say you want to be able to record vocals at your house in your home studio, and you have unlimited money, the same advice. One of each of these. This for your more aggressive vocals. Then if you're going to do something really delicate, maybe have one of these. But if you want to record vocals and you only have 150 bucks, this is really all you need. This is let's say you want to record vocals and maybe you want to do like podcast stuff. Podcast stuff, voice over work, anything like that. The kind of hip thing to do right now, and for a kind of good reason, if you watch video of people talking on a podcast, they're using one of these a lot. This is the very fashionable microphone to use. This is an SM seven. Like I said, I think this is an SM seven B I don't remember the price point on these right now. I think it's around $200, so it's not crazy. They're a great microphone for dialogue for talking. They're a great vocal microphone for singing in general. They really filter out background noise a lot. Um, so if you want to do podcast stuff and have 200 bucks, this is a great one to get. Now, if you're not going to get an audio interface and your only option is a microphone that is a USB microphone, then I have a hard time with recommendations because I don't have a lot of experience with USB microphones, but I do have experience with this one. This is the Blue Yeti microphone. The thing I really liked about this one and the reason I bought it is because it does have a analog output, so I could use my audio interface if I wanted to. It's got this special five pin thing, but it comes with an adapter cable to get it into a normal XLR three pin cable. But it also has a USB out. And it sounds pretty darn good. This is a condenser microphone. It's very sensitive. It's gonna pick up a lot of stuff. So it's a great, like, room mic. Like, if you just want to record everything that's happening in a room, like a band rehearsal or something, this is a really good one for that. The blue company actually makes really great mics. They have a really cheap version of this called, like the Snowball or something like that. I think I have one somewhere, actually. Those are, you know, not so good. But this one's great. Okay, so that's my mic buying advice. Something like this one that I held up, don't buy one of these. The only reason you should buy one of these is if you have a recording studio and money to burn. I'm sorry to say. They're great, and they sound great. But if you've got a home studio and you're recording a few instruments here and there, you don't need something like that. You need, you know, 150 bucks for an SM 58, and you're going to be up and running and doing just great. Okay, let's get back to live and talk about how we record stuff in live. 80. Setting Up Tracks to Record: Okay, back to live. Let's set up a track to record. So I think first, I'm going to go to a new session. Let's not save that one. Okay, now, we could do this in Session View or Arrangement View, and in fact, we're going to do it in both in a minute. But just to keep things simple, I'm going to start with Arrangement view. So the first thing we need to do is find our audio track. So remember, we have two Mi tracks here and two audio tracks here. So if you want to make more tracks, remember that it's Command T to make a new audio track and Shift Command T to make a new Mi track. But what I'm going to do here is just for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to delete my track. I'm going to delete this mini track. I'm just going to click on the header over here, hit Delete and delete. I have one audio track. That's all I want for right now. You don't have to do that. It's just cleaner. And now we have to go to our inputs and outputs section. Okay? So inputs. I need external in because I have a microphone from outside of live that is external to live, and it's coming in. Okay? I could configure that if I need to, but I so now it says from external, meaning that it's looking at my audio interface because that's what I told it in the settings was my input interface. It's looking at the settings, and it sees three possible things that I could do. I could use the first input on it. I could use the second input on it, or I could do a stereo track where I use both inputs one and two. So let's talk about stereo track really quick. A stereotrack is going to record two things at once, basically one for each speaker. I might want to do a stereo track if I was setting up two microphones like this and I was talking into it and wanted to record both microphones, that wouldn't be a great idea. But I could record them as one track, two microphones as one track. Maybe I'm recording, like, drums, and I'm putting two microphones over the top of the drums, just to get the ambience of the drums. That could be a good stereo track. But if I'm recording a single sound source, something that is just one thing, like one microphone or one guitar or one banjo, then I probably almost always want to record it mono meaning not stereo. So mono means just the one input, okay? If I record myself right now stereo, what it's going to do is it's going to record this mic on channel one, and then channel two is just going to be empty. So you're only going to hear my voice on one side, and it's just kind of annoying to deal with that. So don't do that. One microphone means just one channel. So I could use channel one or two. We can see here that my microphone, this microphone is coming in on Channel one. So let's select channel one. Okay. Now we see it coming in there. Now, that little level meter is just impossible to read, right? It's just so tiny. There's nothing there. Think of that as just kind of like a signal indicator, just to show you that, like, yes, there is signal coming into. Okay? So my input is set up. I'm listening to the right input of my interface, and it is this microphone. Now let's look at our outputs at the bottom here. Main, this track, I want to come out main. That's going to send it to my main mix down here, okay? And that's great. We'll leave that just how it is. Almost always you want your output to say main unless you're doing something with groups or something like that. We'll talk about that later. Okay, now, before I record, pro tip, rename your track. So I'm going to just click on it and press Command R. That's going to say rename, and I'm going to rename it what it is. And the reason for that is that once I record it, it's going to make a clip, and it's going to name that clip like Vox, if I set it upright. If I don't rename this track, it's going to record that clip and it's going to call it Audio one. And I'm going to record another thing, and it's going to call it Audio 11. And then it just gets confusing. If I rename the track first, it's going to more accurately um name the clip. Okay, so next thing to deal with is monitor modes. Now, this can be a little bit of a head scratcher. And I think we talked about monitor modes in the first class, but let's devote a whole video to it here because it can be kind of a dangerous thing. So let's go a new video and work through that. 81. Monitor Modes: Okay, monitor modes. So here's what these say. Basically, what these are controlling is routing your microphone or whatever your input is that you're recording, outing it through live and to your speakers, okay? So what we're saying here is, do you want to hear that microphone through the speakers? If I say off, I'm saying, No, I do not want you to play this microphone through those speakers. Okay? If I say in, I'm saying, yes. Route that all the way through the speakers. So here I go, now I'm doing it, and I'm going to turn it back off. The reason I only did that for a split second was because that's how you make feedback. Okay? And feedback can be really bad. It can hurt your ears. It can actually damage your ears. It can damage your speakers. I can damage your microphone. So what feedback is in this case is the speakers are playing what's going through the microphone. So it's so the speakers make sound. The microphone picks up that sound. The speakers play that sound. The microphone picks it up and it goes in a loop, and it gets a little louder every time, and it just goes, That's feedback. So if I always makes feedback, why would anyone do that? Well, there's a very good reason. If I put on headphones, it wouldn't do that. It wouldn't make feedback if I put on headphones. And there's a lot of time where you need to hear what you're doing. So if I was singing along with the track, I might want to hear this vocal through my headphones. So if I could do that, that would be great. But since I don't have headphones on, I'm definitely not going to click that I. You can think of this in in the input monitoring as your headphones button. If you're wearing headphones, turn that on. It'll be great. If you're not wearing headphones, don't turn that on. Now, that leaves us with auto. So auto means that it is going to route our microphone through our speakers when we are recording or when we're armed to record, but it's not going to do it when we're playing back. Okay? Like, right now, our track is not armed to record, so it's not playing through. If I turned it on, if I armed it to record, now it's playing through, and now we're in danger of feeding back. So we're gonna stop that for a second. So if I just want to record my voice here in my home studio and I don't want to put on headphones, I'm going to leave this off that I'm going to arm it to record. Now you can see I've got signal here. Right? It's coming up, but it's all great out. So that tells us that this track is seeing my signal. That's good. But it's great out, meaning, which is telling me that I can't hear it because monitoring is off. But it is going in there and it's not playing through my speakers. So, in most studio settings, leaving it on auto all the time is great. But for me, I'm going to leave it off while I'm recording for now so that I don't have to put headphones on. So that's what your monitor modes do. Okay. 82. Latency: Okay, one last thing before we get into actual, like, hitting the record button. I know, I'm talking too much. Like, just let some make some music. Jay, that's cool. Okay, but there's one last thing that I want to tell you about, and that's latency. What latency is is, if I set this to Auto so that it's playing through. So I'm in danger of feeding back right now, but I just want to do one thing. I'm going to clap my hands, and then I want to see if I can tell the difference between when I actually clap and when I hear it through the speakers. Okay, so I couldn't hear it. You probably could, because the screen capture software adds, like, a lot of delay, a lot of latency. But this is what I'm testing for is latency. Latency basically means, how long does it take for something to get through my microphone, down the cable, into my audio interface, converted, sent to live, Live deals with it, sends it back to the audio interface, converts it again, and sends it to my speakers. Takes a bit of time, actually. And if it's much more than 15 to 20 milliseconds, you're going to hear it. Technically, I think we can hear things that are anything longer than ten milliseconds, you can hear. But you can kind of live with it for ten to 20 milliseconds. More than that, it's really frustrating to work with. So if you have that problem, if there is a lot of latency, that delay happening, it doesn't matter too much for just recording, because if your recording is 20 seconds, 20 milliseconds behind, that's kind of fine. That doesn't really matter. If you're trying to play along with something that's already in the track, it can matter. And if you need to hear yourself while you're playing, it can matter a lot because you're going to hear yourself delayed by 20 milliseconds, which is going to make you slow down and it does weird things to your brain. So here's how to fix it. First, we're going to go to our preferences. Okay, you can go to audio, and we have this whole latency setting here, okay? Basically, what this tells me is that my overall latency is 26.5 milliseconds. It means my input latency live thinks it's about 14 milliseconds, and output is about 11 milliseconds. So, you can do some messing around here. So this buffer size is our big tool. If we make it smaller, the latency will go down. See, now it's down to seven milliseconds. But it's much more taxing on our computer. Our computer may slow down as well. So we have to find a balance between how much of our computer we can monopolize with this and how much latency we can live with. So you're going to have to experiment with this to get. Just right. This driver error compensation doesn't really do anything. What this does is just it just kind of adjusts these numbers to be more accurate. So if you do some tests and you know that your interface actually only has, you know, two milliseconds of latency on the output, then you can put that in there and it'll adjust it. But it's not really changing the latency at all. Is my understanding. It's just changing the number. So here, I'm going to take it down to 32 samples of a buffer size. That's going to drag on my computer, you know, like just sitting here, it's at 5%, right? If I take it back up to, like, this many, you know, 1024 samples of a buffer size, just sitting here, my computer's at 0%, right? So, the smaller this is, the less latency you will have, but the harder your computer is going to be working. So What you're going to need to do is the first time you do this, if you feel latency is an issue, it might not be an issue for you at all, but if it is, come here and play around with this buffer size thing. See if you can get it tolerable by playing with the buffer size. If you can't you might just need a faster computer. But probably not. You can probably make it work. Don't worry. You don't need to buy a new computer. Okay, let's record some stuff. 83. Tracking in Arrangement View: Okay, let's record something. So I'm all set up to record my voice here on this track. Okay? I'm armed to record. When monitoring is off. I can see my signal here, but I can't hear it. Perfect. So let's record something. I'm going to put my cursor where I want the recording to start. Then I'm going to record. Now, here we go. So you can see my signal coming in here. Nice and healthy. You can see the track I'm recording on. Everything is good. So now I've recorded a little snippet. I can go back and hear it by just putting the cursor at the beginning and pressing play. Record. Now, here we go. So you can see my signal coming in here. There it is. Everything looks great. If I want to continue recording, I can set another point and just hit record. And now I'm going to pick up right where I left off. Ha Okay. Great. Now, let's say that this was good, but now I want to record another track. Okay? Easy enough. Let's make a new track Command T. Okay, in this one, we're going to say, listen to input one. I can rename this. Let's call this Vocals two. Arm this to record, and it automatically unarmed that one, and I can do it again. Now, if I record here, I'm going to hear this while I'm recording. Record. Now, here we go. Now Track two. Nice. So this is vocal track I'm recording. Okay? So we heard this one while we recorded this one. Now, if I didn't want to hear that, I could easily just mute that track while I'm recording this one. That would be fine. I could also deactivate that clip with the zero key but easier is just to mute what you don't want to hear. Now, you might be wondering if that causes any bleed issue. Bleed would be the playback sound coming in through my microphone. And yes, that would create a bleed issue, and it is not the best way to do it. The way I just did it, or I recorded this while listening to this I would really need to be wearing headphones to do that correctly so that there would be no bleed because then this would be in my headphones and not get picked up in this recording. If we just listen to this recording, we might be able to hear this track. Let's find out. Now, here we go. Yeah, it's there. It's really quiet, but it's there. Okay. Let's talk about click Tracks and then multi track recording. 84. Click Tracks & Metronome: Okay, let's spend a minute and talk about the metronome. The Metronome is up here. It is these two little dots. If I click on it, it's going to turn it on. And now when I press Play, we're going to hear a metronome going at our session tempo, which is 120 beats per minute. Okay, that's what our metronome sounds. If I click on Little arrow next to the metronome, I've got some options. I can do a count in where meaning if I hit record on something, it's going to do 1 bar before it starts recording or 2 bars or 4 bars. I can change the sound to these three things. They're all fine. And I can change the rhythm a little bit. I can give it like a triplet feel, half time feel, a few other things. I can say, turn it on only when we're recording, whatever. So if I did, like, a 1 bar count in, it's gonna look like this. So I'm going to hit record and record on this vocal two track. Ready? Go. Yo, now we're recording. See, I counted four and then it started recording. This can be really useful, especially when I'm recording my guitar or something, I might set that to 2 bars so that I can hit record, grab my guitar, get all comfy, and then hit the downbeat right where I want it. Now, if you want to adjust the volume of the metronome, this is something that is surprisingly tricky to find. It's buried in a really weird place. So let me show you where it is. First, you can only get to it in Session View. So we go over to Session View. And we go all the way down to our master channel down here and what looks like the solo button. This is actually going to be our metronome output. Volume. Okay? And if you want to do something weird with the outputs, it's this Q out here. You can say, I want that just to go to my left speaker or my right speaker or something like that. Okay? But you can only get it in session view, as far as I know, anyway. So that will now go to our headphones. If I turn on headphones and I record, I'm going to hear the metronome in my ears, and it'll work just like a click track. The metronome will follow any time changes, meter changes, tempo changes, anything like that. So it's very easy to work with. So that's where your metronome is super important for when you're recording, trying to stay on a beat. 85. Multitracking in Arrangement View: Okay, let's talk about multitracking in arrangement view. So multi tracking means we're going to record multiple things at a time. Now, I only have two inputs on my audio interface, so I can only record two things at a time. If you have more, you can record as many things at a time as you have inputs for. Okay? So let's do it. So I'm going to make a new audio track. I'm going to make two new audio tracks. This one will be Jay vocals. That's me. This one will be guitar. Okay? So I'm going to set this one to be my microphone, which it already is. I'm going to set this one to be my guitar, which is plugged into Channel two. Okay. Now I have this track solos. I need to turn that off. Now, here's the trick. You'll notice if you just click on arm to record, you can only click on one at a time. So the default here is that you can only record one track at a time. However, there's a quick way around it. I'm going to hold down command and click Record on a second track. I believe it's Alt, I think, on a PC. So now I'm set up to record vocals on one track and my guitar on another track through a different input. Input two. So let's try it. Okay, little check of my guitar. It's there. It's a little loud. Remember, you don't want those meters to turn red. That means you're getting too loud. So I want to stay right in that range. I got a nice good signal. Okay. So let's record. I'm the world's worst singer. So I'm not gonna sing anything. I'm just gonna talk. Yo, now I'm talking. Okay, that's enough of that. Neat. We did it. Okay, so we can hear that back. I'm going to turn off arm to record here so that we can hear what we're doing. I'm the world's worst singer. So I'm not gonna sing anything. I'm gonna talk. Yo, now I'm talking. So weird. Okay, but it worked. So that's how we multi track record. Okay, so next, let's go into how comping works. 86. Comping: Okay, let's talk about comping. So comping is the term we use to mean, like, doing multiple takes. Sometimes this is called, punching in, although that's slightly different. But really what comping is is it's recording a bunch of takes and then editing together a perfect take. So let's do that. It's really easy to do. So let's go out here and maybe just so that we don't have to hear my voice anymore. I'll do this on guitar. Okay, so I'm going to record a little chord progression and then screw it up. So let's turn on the metronome. I'll go out to here, arm this one to record, and go. I should probably figure out what I'm gonna play. Okay, here we go. Okay, so I can see that that recording was quite quiet, and I could feel that it was all over the beat, right? So let's do it again. Okay? I'm just going to start right at the same spot and record that same thing again if I can remember what I did. Okay, that's pretty good except I kind of flubbed the ending. So let's go right around. Well, let's do one more take. Oh, that last chord. Okay, let's get just that last chord. So I'm gonna jump in right near the end. Okay, that time I played the totally wrong chord, so let's do it again. Mm. Okay. So now I have a bunch of takes, and it looks like I was recording over each take, but I actually wasn't. All the takes have been kept, and I just have to sift through them. Okay? So in order to sift through them, I'm going to go to the track header here. I'm going to control click or we click, and I'm going to say showTnes down here. Okay. Now we see all the times I played through. Now, if I remember right, my second take was good for about the first half. So I'm going to highlight that and press return. Okay? Then my third take was good for the rest of it, except for press return, that very last chord, which is going to be that one. Okay. So now what we have up here is the composite take. All of these put together. So if you want to take just, like, one beat of something, just highlight it and press return, and it's gonna sneak it into that composite take. Okay, I'm just gonna hit Undo to get rid of that. It does a pretty good job at cross fading to make this sound smooth. I don't know, but you can always tweak it. So let's hear what it put together. Okay, pretty good. I can turn off that metronome. Here it again, these changes. Okay, probably adjust that entrance with the volume a little bit. But more or less, it's pretty good. So this is really smooth. So if we're happy with this, we can go back here and just say, turn off show take lanes, and there we have our track. Or if we're not happy with it, we can keep layering more and more and more and we can have an infinite number of takes, I think. So it's a really great tool. Now, this tool was new in Live 11. So it's not new to Live 12, but if you have something older than 11, you won't be able to do this. It's very smooth. It works great. 87. Overdubbing / Punching In/Out: Now, I mentioned a minute ago that this is kind of like punching in if you're familiar with that term. But comping is a little bit different. So let's actually look at how you would punch in. It's pretty easy to do. Here's what I'm going to do. Just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to combine this into one track. Okay? So I'm going to hit I'm going to highlight it and press Command J. What that means is render this as a new clip, okay? So this is just going to make a new clip. It's going to merge all the different segments together. You don't have to do this. I'm just going to do it to make things clean so I can see, okay? Now, let's say, right here, I screwed up, okay? And I want to punch in. Now, if you don't know what this term means, in the old days, we had, um, when you were recording, you might do a take of something. And then if you screwed up like one note, you could do a take again, and there was a little controller, and you would hit record right when you got to the spot, and then you hit it again to stop recording. And because sometimes it was just a really short amount of time, people got really kind of tense. So they would kind of punch this machine, and they called it punching in and out. So you might do this whole thing again, and then we're only going to record for this little bit, and then we're going to get out again. So here's how you do it. These are punch in markers. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my loop bracket here. I'm going to put it around what I want. But up here, instead of saying Loop, I'm going to say punch in and punch out. I can have it loop also, but I don't need it to. So when I hit record now, it's not going to record through this. It is going to record right here, and then it's going to stop recording when we get past it. Okay? So let's do something completely weird. Okay, here we go. So I'm playing. It's not recording. Now it's recording. Alright, now it's up. Okay? So I just recorded that one spot. I didn't hit anything. I just set up the bracket, told it to punch in and out. And then I record right here, and it starts recording right on that spot only. Now, why would you use this over the comping method? To be honest, I would really only use the comping method at this point. I haven't used this punch in punch out thing in a while, because comping is just so much better. I can just play and then pick my favorite stuff. So there's not a huge need for this anymore, but if this is how you want to do it, then that's totally fine. It's still possible to you. Okay? If we want to hear the ugly thing I just created. Brilliant. Okay, so that's punching in, punching out. 88. Tracking & Multitracking in Session View: Okay, let's do tracking and multi tracking in Session view. So when it comes to recording, Session View works a little bit differently. So you'll notice that in our clip slot grid, we have a little square next to all of our slots. Square means stop, just like up here. Stop. Okay? Now, I don't need to stop anything at the moment, but you'll notice that my guitar track only has circles, and that's because it's armed to record, and it is all set up to record my guitar because that's what we were just doing with this track. So if I click one of these circles, it's going to start recording. And then I hit Stop. Okay? It's as easy as that. I just recorded this. If I double click on this clip, you can see there's that strum. Okay? So I could record more. I could record another thing. Sure. And another thing. And another thing. I don't even have to stop one. I can keep going all day long. Okay, cool, right? So I've got all these clips. Now, let's unarm that and we can launch them. Okay? We can obviously tidy them up if we want. We can say, you know, start right there or so. We can tell this one to start up there, can do all kinds of funny stuff with them. We'll get into that more when we start talking about really kind of producing with stuff. But and but recording in Session View is actually really, really easy. Multi track recording works the same. We can record there. I can command click and record here also. Just keep in mind your monitor settings are up here. And you may have asked yourself earlier and I didn't address it, but does the monitoring matter on my guitar? Not really. I could leave it on. I'm not going to create feedback because it's not a microphone. So I could leave it on if I wanted and hear things through my speaker as I'm playing. That would be fine. Anyway, so mind your monitor settings. Once I'm all set up here, I'm just going to hit record on both of these, and then they're going to start on the next downbeat. This is kind of how Session View works. In that there's a global clip launch, and it's this button right here. So that means that new clips are only going to launch on a bar, okay? So if I click Record, it's going to wait till the next bar to actually start recording. Even though my metronome is making us do that, too, this is what it's actually going to do it. So if I wanted to start recording, right away, I can set that to none. But having it set to 1 bar is actually really good because that gives me time to click both of these before the end of the bar so that they launch at the same time and start recording at the same time. So, otherwise, recording in Session View is virtually the same as arrangement view. And in some ways, it's actually easier and more efficient because we can just keep hitting these buttons all day long. 89. Effects: Okay, a quick word about effects. Let's go back to Arrangement View. Now you'll see everything's grade out because that's how Arrangement View works. It says, You are working in Session View right now, not Arrangement view, so everything's grade out. And I need to say, I would like to take back over Arrangement View, and I do that with this little button. Okay? Now we're saying we are in arrangement view, and Session View is effectively muted. So effects. If I want to put effects on this track, the way that signal flows in live, is that the effects always come after the recording. So if I was to put effects on this track before I recorded, those effects would not be in the audio. I can add effects later. Okay? Let me explain that a little bit better. Let's say, let's do it. Let's go to Audio Effects and echo. And let's put it on this track. No, wait. Even better. Let's put it on this track, okay? So now we're going to hear my voice through a bunch of delay. Okay, so I'm going to record it and you'll see. Check one, two. Here is my voice through a whole bunch of delay and blah, blah, blah. Okay. So I accidentally left that one recorded. Arm to record. That's fine. I'll just delete that. Okay, so here's what I just did. Check one Check one. Check Here my voice a bunch of delay Neat, huh? Okay, so the question is, is that delay in this audio? Right? The answer is no. Because this recording happened, and then it went down here and added the effects and then to the output. In other words, I can turn off that delay and we won't hear it. Check one, two. Here is my voice through a whole bunch of Okay. So the reason I'm pointing this out is to tell you that you can add effects later. If you add effects to a track that you're recording on, that's great. You can totally do that. But just know that you can modify those effects later. They're not printed into the audio. So I can take my guitar here, which has the blandest of tones and put on a guitar amp emulator. So this is a plugin called guitar rig that just has kind of amp emulators. Let's do styles. Um here's like a Prince tone. Okay, we'll put Prince's tone on this guitar track. The world's worst singer. So I'm not gonna sing anything. I've still got that big delay on it, too. Yo, now I'm talking. It's like the Purple Rain tone. Anyway, so I can add that after the fact. The effects do not need to be on the track before I record it. They can always be added after. Okay, let's move on. 90. A Big Recording Session: Okay, before we move on from audio recording, I thought I'd show you a project, recent dish project that I did. So, this was a project I did not here, but in my university studio. What I have here is a jazz band, like a big band. So one thing I've set up here that we haven't talked about is groups. So I have a rhythm section group. The advantage of there being this big group here is that I can close it and just tuck away all those tracks, right? Here's saxes, here's brass, here's a bunch of midi stuff. So if I look at the rhythm section, so to put something in groups, you can just actually select by using Shift Click to select a bunch of things and command G, like group. And that'll put it into groups. You can see this drums is another group. So you can have groups within groups. So here are all the drum mics. Okay. So this was a big project because we had to record the rhythm section, and then the saxes, and then the brass. And then I imported all this midi stuff just to reference so I could go through and clean up the pitches, like, a lot. So I just got the score as a MIDI file. And those mini tracks aren't doing anything. They're just there so I can see what note is supposed to be playing, and then I can help tune it. This was a big, big project to get it sounding really good. So here's a little taste. So this is a really early version of this before I really got in the weeds to edit it. But you can kind of see what I'm doing here with comparing the MTI to the recorded notes to help me adjust them. So this was a big project and a big recording session, but this is what a big recording session can look like sometimes. But 91. MIDI Recording Fundamentals: Okay, let's transition over to talking about MIDI. Now, MITI works a lot different than audio recording, primarily because when we're recording MIDI, the thing we need to remember is that MIDI is data. It's ones and zeros, right? We don't really need to go through an audio interface for MIDI because it's already digital. Like, if I press if I press a note here, it sends a message to the computer that just says note number 60 was pressed. And how hard I pressed. That's all it says. So my computer then has to take that information and say, Okay, note number 60 was pressed. What do we do with that? If we're connected to an instrument, then we know, Okay, make that note sound, and that's easy enough to do. So it's not analog, anything. There's no if I look at a mini controller like this, there is no audio going down this wire, okay? This wire is USB wire. There's no sound in that. This keyboard can make zero sounds, okay? This does not make any sound at all except for the plastic hitting together. Does not transmit any sound, I should say, to the computer. Okay? All of the sounds are in the computer. Mi keyboards, just send note on and note off messages. And they can send a few other things, too, but they don't but primarily, that's all they send. Okay, so this section, we're going to go over everything you need to get set up. To be able to input MIDI stuff to record MIDI. We'll look at a bunch of different MIDI controllers, midi instruments, setting everything up and then a couple tricks that are built into live for having a really efficient workflow, including automatically recording everything you do all the time. It's a little freaky. But I'll show you. Trust me. Okay, so let's dive in and talk about our hardware needs for MIDI recording. 92. Hardware Needs for MIDI: Okay, so when we talk about midi recording and midi hardware, what we're really talking about is some kind of midi keyboard, right? Now, here's the thing. When we think about midi keyboards, we tend to think about things like this, okay? Now, there's a lot going on here. What we have here is a piano like keyboard, okay? So it's got the piano keys that you're familiar with. It also has some pads and some dials. Okay? These can be mapped to do a whole bunch of different stuff. We'll come back and talk about those later. The keyboard part is what's going to play in notes. What's interesting about this is that most MIDI controllers look like a piano keyboard. And the reason they do is because most people know what a piano keyboard does, right? But other than kind of tradition, there's no real reason that your midi device needs to be a piano shaped one. They have midi devices for virtually everything if you want. You can find midi guitars. You can find midi saxophones, mini violins, millos. So a keyboard is probably the most versatile thing because we can just kind of flop our hands on it and do whatever we want. But if you are skilled with another instrument, you should totally get a mini controller that is that instrument, you know? Like, do what's comfortable. I'll show you a midi guitar in a couple of videos from now. But back to hardware needs. You need a mini controller of some kind if you want to do any kind of mini recording and playing. Okay? So so this is one. These the good thing about these mini controllers is that they are made of plastic. They're relatively cheap, you know? Like, this one is, this is, let's see, novation launch key mini. And I don't remember exactly, but it's probably about 100 bucks or less. Are not designed to go on tour and be on stage, really. They're kind of cheap plastic things, and they don't need to be anything bigger than that. I showed you earlier the Rolland seaboard that I have connected to this computer. That's a fancy one. That's like a really fancy one. This is a cheaper one. Um, so don't get anything fancy. If you want a piano like one, all you really need is some keys, and then you can decide if you want the keys to be full size piano keys. Do you want them to be weighted keys so they feel like a piano? Most of these are not going to feel like a piano. They're going to feel like pieces of plastic. And that's kind of what they're designed to do. If you want one that feels like a real piano, then you're going to be spending a little bit more. But when you're programming drums, you don't care if it feels like a real piano or not. This is really our only piece of hardware that we need is some kind of minty keyboard. We don't need an audio interface, although an audio interface may help you. And I'll explain that in just a second. Actually, I'll explain that right now. So when we plug in one of these to our computer, here's how we're going to do it. If you have one like this or anything that's new Ish in the last five or so years, it's going to have a USB output on it. This one, where'd it go? Right here, USB. So I can plug this in just with USB. That's all I need to do. So a lot of audio interfaces have a USB port for this reason. You can plug it into the USB port on the audio interface, but you don't need to. You can put it in any USB ports just fine. But if you have anything older, like a bigger keyboard or something, it might have actual midi outputs on it. So I was looking around my studio for something that has old school midi outputs. And the only device I could find quickly accessible was this. This is a novation remote zero. So this has no keyboard, although they do make a version with a keyboard. Just controllers. So it's faders. So you can map this to the faders on the screen. It's got some drum pads and some dials that you can map to do different things. I used to use this as a live performance tool. But on the back, you can see that it has where are they? Here, these are MIDI outputs and inputs, okay? So they have this five pin connection. So I can't easily plug this into my computer. So if I really wanted to use this with the MIDI ports, I need to get a MIDI cable, and I need to have a box that converts a MIDI signal to a USB signal, okay? I can get a cheap little box that does that, or a lot of audio interfaces have that built in as well. So something to consider when you're buying an audio interface, if you want to use an older keyboard like that, you're going to need one that has mini ports. Now, luckily, this one has both. It has Mi ports and a USB right there. So I can just plug this in with USB, which is how I used to use it. So we really just got to plug this into our computer, and then we're good to go. There's some setup stuff we need to do in live. So we'll do that in just a second. But I want to go into another kind of, like, like, buyer's guide thing, and also show you how mini guitars work while we're on the topic, 'cause I happen to have one right here. 93. MIDI Guitars: Okay, I'm gonna talk to the guitar nerds for a minute here. I say guitar nerds affectionately because I am obviously one of them. But if you're not a guitar nerd, this should be useful to you also, just to know that the vast different kinds of midi controllers that are out there, they don't all have to look like pianos. So when it comes to mini guitars, there are really kind of three products on the market right now that are interesting to me. There's a ton of products on the market, but these are the ones that have caught my attention. Um, the wackiest one is this one. This is made by a company out in Nashville called Artifone they call this the instrument O. This is This is weird because if you can see it, it's got no strings, but, like, just kind of a rubber fretboard and string feeling thing. So it's pressure sensitive. You can play it like a guitar. You can play it like a drum. You can even use an app. Like a phone and bow it virtually and treat it like a violin. It's quite versatile. It's weird and quirky. I've goofed around with it, but I've never really recorded anything with it. It's not quite as responsive as I would love. But I kind of dig the design of it. It's cool. It's got a little speaker built in, so you can do some stuff with it if you connect it to a phone. Another one is made by a company called Zivix which is actually here in Minnesota, I think, still. This is called the Jam Stick. You can get these. These are kind of all over the place right now. This is an early This is actually like early prototype. Don't tell them I still have it. I did some work for them in the early days of this product. The thing that's cool about this is that it has real strings, and they're just muted so you don't really hear those pitches. And then you just play like normal. And all the sensors and everything that it needs to make the MIDI data are in the fretboard. I think they're infrared, actually. So it's really responsive, it's really accurate, and they have a full size version of it now. They have a full guitar version that I haven't played around with yet. But that looks really cool because it gives you the real feel of a guitar. Like it's real strings. But at the moment, my favorite midi guitar device is this. So, this is a normal guitar. This is just any electric guitar, you can put this on it. This is a Mi pickup. And what's super cool about this is that this is a wireless midi pickup. So this is the Fishman Triple Play, which is the best one that I found. So what happens is, this is kind of the brains of it right here, and it goes through this wire, and then there's a little pickup right there. That's the actual MIDI pickup. So what that pickup has to do is figure out what note I'm playing, so it has to do kind of a lot of computation. Convert it to a midi signal and send it over Bluetooth to my computer. It's weird. But it works really well. So I have it connected right now, and I have it set to a piano. So you can see in live, it's coming in here, and there's a piano sound on it. So this is the benefit of, like, mini recording, right? Like, if I want to play piano, I could just play guitar. Like, you can hear it kind of stutter a little bit sometimes. You can clean that up in the midi, but it's actually pretty. It's, you know, pretty responsive and pretty fast. So I can just map my guitar to a piano. If I want to do something different. Let's say I want to map to strings. Let's go to orchestra strings. Let's say Cello. Okay, I want to play the Clllo. Sure. See, it's, like, really responsive and really nice. They can play chords. That's great. So I'm better at this than I am at piano. So sometimes I enter notes this way. Um, most of the time I use the piano because I can't play piano enough to do what I need to do. So there's a ton of different mini controllers out there. There's, like, literally tons of them. Okay, so let's do another little buyer's guide segment, and I'll show you what I would buy, depending on what you're interested in doing. 94. MIDI Controller Buyer's Guide: Alright, let's talk about what you should get here. So if you're going to buy a mini controller, the things you need to think about are really how big you want it to be and how many extra buttons and things you want on it. So this is the one I was just holding up. You know, it's got two octaves of notes. And maybe 16 pads and eight knobs and a couple of other things. So that's small. You're never gonna play piano on that, right? Like, but you can put in a melody, you can put in a drum beat, you can put in bass lines. It's kind of perfect for a small studio. So there's a bunch of different companies that make these. These novation ones, the novation ones, I find to be really reliable, really solid and very affordable. I've just been a fan of their Midi controllers for a while. So I like this one for just small little stuff. This is great. You know, it's 100 bucks. It's great. You don't need to spend more than 100 bucks on this. They also have bigger ones. Here's a 37 key one. So it's exactly the same, except it's got more keys. So, you know, this one's 200 bucks, 41, 49. Okay. So this is the novation launch key line. All of these are great. This is a different line. I have one of these, and I took it to the studio, but I've been kicking around one of these for years. I think this is also a launch key. It's a launch key 49 with weighted keys. So it's a little bit fancier. But seriously, I've had this exact keyboard for probably five years, and it's, you know, gotten thrown around and all kinds of weird stuff. And it's super solid. So these innovation ones are great. So that's what I'd recommend. You know, go to this one and just say, like, do you want a little tiny one that you can just play in some notes or something fancier. Now, if you want to look at different kinds of MIDI controllers, could look around Amazon, but you might want to look around some other music specific websites to find some of the custom controllers. And here is that Mi pickup that I like the Fishman Triple Play. It's a bit expensive for 30. But it's really the best midi pickup for a guitar that I've ever used. It's really solid. It works great. So I highly recommend that. So those are my recommendations. If you're gonna buy something, buy one of those. There's really no reason that you need to spend much more than 100 bucks on a good midi keyboard that you can do everything you need on. 95. Hardware Setup: Okay, let's get our MIDI Controller to talk to live. This is super easy. So we do need to go to settings or our preferences. And what's cool about this is that if everything works right, you should only have to do this one time. Once you set up a keyboard, it's set up for good, even if you unplug it and replug it in later. Okay, so we're going to go to preferences that's up in your live menu and on settings, or you can press Command or, I think, Alta on a PC. Okay, we're going to go to this Link tempo and MIDI tab. Okay. And then we're going to go down here. So we have two different chunks of stuff here. We have this MTI, where we see all these drop down menus, and then we have inputs and outputs, okay? So in MIDI, what we're really looking for here is any kind of control surface, okay? So, like, the push is a control surface. I don't know why it doesn't see my push three right now, but it still sees my push two, which is not plugged in, which is why it's grade out here. Okay? Here it sees the launch key mini. So let me define control surface. Control surface is something like this that has a bunch of controllers on it. It's a little different than a mini keyboard. However, a mini keyboard could be both. So like this one, This one has mini keys, but it also has some controller things knobs, faders and things like that. So it can be both. If I just want to play notes, then I'm going to go down to this input section. So if you're setting up a control surface, you need to make sure it shows up here. It might require you to install some drivers or something like that on your computer, A software that came with it. So you're going to look for it here and set up input and output, select the same thing all the way across. But for your average run of the mill midi keyboard, okay? So here's where you see my push three, my Fishman Triple Play, that's my Mi guitar, some other USB MDI interface that it doesn't know about, and my two eboard controllers. So you don't see this one because it's not plugged in right now. So I'm going to plug it in, and you'll see what happens. This is how easy this can be. So I'm going to plug this in with the USB cable to my computer. And if we look down here, there it is. No edits there, just popped up. Okay, so here it is. It shows up twice, and a lot of keyboards and things will show up twice. We can kind of open it and see some settings, but we shouldn't need to go into there at all. So once it shows up, and again, it should show up automatically. Really, any keyboard that's USB should show up automatically. If it doesn't to see if there's any drivers or any software that needs to be installed for that keyboard. Most of them won't need anything at this point. Okay, so now we're going to go over to all these old checkboxes. First thing you want to do is make sure the first check box under Track is turned on. Okay? So turn those on. The rest of these, you don't have to turn on. What the track setting is going to do is say, this can put things into a track. In other words, this thing can play notes. That's what it's allowed to do. If we go to sync, we can say, This thing can control the tempo. If we turn on remote, we're going to say, this thing can control the transport of live, essentially. Like, if your keyboard has a play stop pause button on it, you can turn this on, and it'll be able to control live. This keyboard, this novation launch key doesn't have a play stop pause, so I'm just going to leave it off. And MPE, MPE is kind of like a high resolution MI. Some keyboards can do it and some can't. These board ones can do it, so it's turned on. The Ableton push three can do it, so it's turned on. This launch key cannot do it, so it's not turned on. So if your keyboard is capable of it, turn it on. We're going to talk more about MPE in just a few videos. So just kind of hold on to that for a minute. I'll show you what MPE looks like. Okay? Now, whatever settings you do there, you might as well do the same settings for the outputs. So launch key, turn on track. I probably don't need these other ones. I'm not sure why they're on. And that's it. So now if I unplug this keyboard and then plug it back in later, the same information is going to come back. And then also remember, I think we talked about this in the first class, we have in the live interface this special little tiny square right up there. That little square has one function and one function only. It's going to light up when it sees any MIDI information at all. So when in doubt, plug in your keyboard, smash your fingers on the keyboard. So there we go. There is that light. Okay? So always just look for that. It's a really quick way to say, I MIDI working? Yep, MIDI is working. So that's your setup. It's actually really quite simple. 96. Chase MIDI Notes: Okay, there's a weird little problem in midi sometimes that can come up from time to time. And there's a kind of a strange setting to fix it. So in this video, I just want to tell you what that weird problem is so that you know how to spot it and then how to fix it. So if I make a mitilip I'm not even gonna record something now. I'm just gonna, like, put it in. Okay. Here's a midi note. Okay? And I think I still have a piano loaded now? Nope, I have a chum. But that's great. Okay, let's not loop it, let's just hear it. Okay. So what a midi note is is it's really two like messages from the keyboard. It says, When I play a note, it says, a note has been pressed and then the velocity at which it has been pressed. So the volume. Okay? And then it doesn't say anything else until I lift up my finger, and then it says that note has been lift up, sort of. So, nothing's happening in this area. It's just waiting for the note off message. So if this was to happen, watch closely what I'm about to do here. So here's the beginning of the note. That's where that message is that says, I played a note. So if that goes back, okay? Now I'm going to start playing from right here and stop playing there, what's gonna happen? Nothing. We're not going to hear that note because we didn't get the note on message. We didn't get the part of the message that says a note has been played. This used to be a really big problem, and it still is a problem if you don't if you're using a DA that doesn't know how to compensate for that. So what we need to do is get the start of the message over the start of the clip. Now, you might think, well, that's really obvious, but watch this. What if I was to do this? Boom, that's all it takes. I'm not going to hear that note. Alright? It looks perfect, but I'm not gonna hear it because the start of that note is just a hair off. Okay, so the solution is go up to Options and then Chase MIDI notes. What that means is that Live is going to kind of figure out what notes are happening and make their sound anyway. So now we'll be able to hear this note. Just be sure that Chase Midi Note option is on. Once you get into doing more complex midi sequences, that will be something that drives you nuts if you don't have that Chase Midi Note setting on. So leave that on. 97. MIDI Signal Flow: Okay, next, I want to talk a little bit about MDI signal flow, how MIDI travels around within live once it gets there. This is important, especially when it comes to effects. Okay, so I have a midi channel here. So when I play my little novation launch key mini here, it's going to come into this track. And the reason it's going to come into this track is because here on my inputs, it says, All s. That means it's listening to all mini devices that I have connected to this computer. Any of them are going to come in on this track right now. But they're also going to come into this track, right? The reason that I know they're going to route to this track only is because this one is arm to record, okay? So that means that this is the only one that is going to accept the MIDI data coming in. Okay, and it's got Callos on it right now, which is great. Okay, so the MIDI notes come in and they go into whichever track is arm to record, whichever MIDI track is arm to record. Now let's look down at device view. So I have an instrument here, okay? This whole thing is this particular instrument. It's a long one. So we can see over here the dots, right? I think I've talked about these before. These dots mean it's data. It's just numbers going in. Right? But on the other side of the instrument, we see an audio signal. Right? That is audio data. So this instrument is converting MIDI data, the dots to audio data, the sound levels, okay? So from here, our audio signal now goes out and then over to the main audio track here. You can see it coming in right there. There it is. Okay? Now, let's go back here because I want to point out two more things. If we go to Midi effect and we put a MDieffect on this track, let's say our peggiator. Okay, I dropped it on the track. You can see here here's our MIDI dots and here's our MIDI dots. Meaning the arpetiator needs to deal with MIDI information. It can't deal with audio. So we can put as many MIDI effects as we want on this track, but they must come before the instrument. Live is going to do that automatically. If I try to drag this out over here, it's just going to say no and put it back over there. So midi effects need to come before the instrument because they deal with MIDI data. Audio effects If I put an audio effect on this track, it has come after the instrument, right? Because audio needs to come in and audio comes out. So audio effects can go after the instrument because we have essentially an audio signal after that. It's kind of a cool sound. Okay? So media effects before the instrument, audio effects after the instrument. But either way, at the end of this chain of stuff, no matter how many things are in here, this signal goes up to our main or our master fader, sometimes referred to as the two track. I like to call it the master fader. That's just what I learned, but all of the above are true. Okay, now let's start recording some stuff. 98. Recording MIDI in Arrangement View: Okay, let's record some stuff. So here's what we're going to do. We've got this one track set up with my novation. It's got Cello sounds on it. Let's delete this echo and this arpeggiator. Okay? All right. Perfect. Okay, I'm going to go up to this fifth bar here just for fun. I kind of have an idea what I'm gonna do with these first few bars, but I'm gonna put my cursor here. I'm going to start my metronome. I'm going to give myself a 1 bar lead in with the metronome. And I'm going to turn the metronome on. Now I'm just going to play some fun. Like, I'm just going to noodle around in C major for a minute, I think, and play some alloy stuff. And then I want to try to add some drums to it, and we'll see what happens. Okay, so I don't have to worry about my monitoring really at all here because there's no microphones that are recording into live. And the MDI signal that's being sent is just midi. It's not there's no danger of it feeding back. So that is super easy. So I've got this armed to record, and now I'm gonna go to my big record button and hit it. Okay. Neat. That was cute. Let's go do another track here and let's put a drum machine on it. So I'm gonna hide my filters here. And let's see what we can do here. Now, I'm going to play in drums. So when I'm auditioning drums right now, I'm really just listening for the sounds, not the pattern that it's playing. Well, let's go down on the ways. That's cool. I'll do that. So I'm gonna throw that on this keyboard or on this track. Now, I have a drum kit, so now I'm gonna play some notes and find gonna find my drums. So you can see if you look down here, you can see what notes I'm playing. Like, there's no drum sound there. If I play a lower note, lower note, lower note, now I'm getting into the drums. So on my keyboard, if I want to get to the majority of the drums, I need to go down in octave with the octave button on this keyboard. Alright. Okay. So let's try to record some drums. This is gonna be a little sloppy, but 'cause I'm gonna try to hold the keyboard up so you can see what I'm doing. Okay, so I found that my main kick and snare I want is here and here. Okay? So let's try to record a beat with just those. So I'm on the next track. It's arm to record. Let's try it. Okay, it's Space Bar to stop. Not bad. Wasn't perfect, but not bad. Okay, I sure wish I had some high hats in there. So let's find some high hats. Okay, this is my best high hat. So I could overdub on this track. Okay, so the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to record right on top of this track. But if I just hit record again a second time, it's going to overwrite what I have, okay? And I don't want to do that. So instead, I'm going to click this little plus sign. Okay? That means midi overdub. So now that means that we're going to keep what's there, and I'm going to add more to it. So let's try recording now. So I'm just going to play in a high hat. And all the way through this, basically. Actually, maybe I'll have it enter right here with the rest of this. Okay, a little sloppy. So let's go in there and let's just select all of those and command for quantize. Okay? I should make it a little tighter. And maybe I actually quantize everything. Okay, now let's hear that. And we'll turn off the metronome. Let's turn our high hats down a little bit. I'm gonna select them all and then just grab the high hat velocity and pull it down a little bit. That was a weird quantize here or there. Okay, neat. So I recorded Cello pad thing and some drums. Great. So let's move on. 99. MIDI Takes and Comping: Okay, let's talk about comping and take lanes in the midi world. So what you just saw me do was use the overdub functionality to be able to play more midi notes and add onto a mini clip I had already made. It's like recording two things, but keeping both of them, compiling both of them. Now, that's not comping or overdubbing. Let's do a comping experiment here. So let's take my drums, and let's just try to do something really simple, but I'm going to screw it up and then we're going to overdub it. In fact, let's do this. Let's take 2 bars. Let's loop it. So let me hit Command L. So I'm just going to record these 2 bars over and over and over and over and over, okay? And then we'll see if we can piece together a good take. So this is going to work basically the same as it works with audio. Here we go. Okay, let's keep that last one. All right, so I'm going to go here and I'm going to select Show Tans. And here's all my takes at that, right? So let's zoom in. Okay. And the last one was kind of the best. But let's say I liked this and this and this and this. Okay? There's my composite all put together. This is going to be weird. Okay, I just grab random stuff. But really, what I liked was this one all the way through. So let's return on that. And now I have the best take. Cool. So what we have here is essentially the same thing as in the audio realm, right? We could just record and record and record, go through and splice together the best take by showing the take lanes. You can see that it showed the take lanes for the couple times I did this, but it's not showing them separately of overdubbing. Here's one with the overdub and here's one without. So it's just showing my two takes. Great, so I'm going to hide those take lanes, show take lanes, cover them up and move on. Okay, next, let's talk about capture. That's the spooky thing where it just kind of tells you what you were just doing. 100. Capture: Okay, has this ever happened to you? You're playing around on your mini keyboard or your guitar or whatever. And you find something that's cool. Look, where was that clap? There it is. And you're like, Cool. That was great. But I got distracted, and I lost it. I forgot what I was doing now. Or you figure out some harmony, and you're like, Oh, I got it. And then you can't find those notes again. Watch this. This is gonna blow your mind. See this little square up here? This is called capture. If I just click on it, it's going to say, Hey, here's the last couple things you were doing. So here's that beat. Right? It's just like magic. It's like it's always recording Mitt behind the scenes and just not telling you. So if I went up here and I said, That's cool sound. I liked it. Ah, shoot, I wasn't recording. What am I gonna do? Oh, hit capture. Boom. There's what I just played. It's, like, magical and awesome. So don't forget about that. There's nothing to set up or nothing to do. Just remember that if you're noodling around on a mini keyboard, and you aren't recording, you can always hit that capture button and get the last chunk of stuff that you were playing. It's almost creepy, but there it is. 101. Recording MIDI in Arrangement View: Okay, let's go over to Session View and see if we can do the same types of things. So remember, we have basically the same mixer here. So we have the same lllo section as loaded up, the same drums are loaded here. So if I want to record in Session View, I'm just going to hit one of these record buttons and start playing. Gorgeous. We're gonna record another one. Just hit another button. Hit another button. We can go on all day. Really simple works just like audio recording. If I want to switch over to this one, we're gonna switch over. Our arm to record is gonna come with us in this case, and I can just play some drums. Okay, weird. But you get the point. Okay, so super easy. Everything comes right with us. We just sit record and on a mini track, and we're off and running. 102. Velocity: Okay, let's talk about velocity and editing our velocity. Now, I know that we looked at this a little bit already in the first class in this series, but I want to go into a little bit more detail here. Well, it's in context of med recording. So remember, the velocity is the volume. If I play a note really soft on my keyboard, it's going to send a low velocity and therefore play a quiet note. If I play a note really hard, it's going to play a loud note using a loud velocity. But I can change it. Let's go to this one. So let's look at one of these clips. If I go down here, I'm going to grab this little bar and make this bigger. This is my velocity, okay? So why are they set the way they are? Because this is how I played it in. I recorded the pressure of me pushing every key, and this is how I did it. A. So I can do a few things with this. First, I could level them out. If I wanted to just flatten this, what I could do is select them all. I'm just going to click in this area and then select Command A. So they're all highlighted. So now I can grab one of them. It doesn't matter which one and pull them down or pull them up and move them around. But if I want to just flatten them out, the fastest way to do it is just to smash them all up to the top and then pull them back down. Going to, like, set them all to the top top top, and then you can pull them down, and now they're all even. There's not a great reason to flatten them off like this, especially if you want them to sound natural and human. This is going to not do that. It'll be subtle, though. So I'm going to say undo, go back to the way I naturally played it in. Now, another thing I could do here is give them a variation amount. So if we go to this deviation, I'm going to select all again, and this deviation, I'm going to turn up a little bit here. So what that's going to do is each one of these is going to play within this range now, okay? So it adds a little bit of randomness, and that can add a little bit of humanization and natural sound to it. So I've been having a lot of fun with this deviation thing lately so that it just gives it a little more expressivity. Again, very subtle. But it's rather nice. I can use this ramp feature just to say, here, I'm going to turn off deviation for the moment. With this ramp, I can kind of say, start low and go high, you know, or the opposite, high, start high, go low. I can do just kind of, you know, ramps with it, kind of give it direction. And then, of course, if I really just want to annihilate the stuff I played in, I can just hit randomize here and I can keep hitting it over and over, and it's going to send a random velocity to all the notes. This can be fun if you're just trying to switch things up and come up with some new idea. So something to play with. Now, I should have said it earlier. If you don't see your velocity window here, the place to get it is down here, okay? This tiny little arrow, click and then say Show Velocity Lane. Okay? So, now that we've done that, let's go to the Chance lane and play around with that for a minute. 103. Chance: Okay, let's look at the chance settings. This is really fun. Okay, for this one, let's go over to that drum track I made. So I'm going to go back over to Arrangement View. I'm going to click my back to Arrangement button, and let's go here to this one. Okay? So here's that beat I made. This very boring, uninteresting drum beat, okay? Let's start it up here. Okay, so I'm going to take just my high hats. I'm going to highlight them all up here, and that's going to also highlight them down here. Okay? So we can see the velocity where I played them. They're kind of all over the place, which is fun, because that's how I played them. But now let's go to Chance. And let's take those ones that are from the high hat, only the high hat notes, and pull Chance down to around 50%. There we go. Now, what this means is that for those high hat notes that are now down to 50%, you can see everything else is at 100% down in chance. Okay? What that means, this has nothing to do with velocity. This means that there's a 50% chance that those notes are going to play at all, okay? So imagine that every time one of those high hat notes comes up, okay, the computers basically rolling a two sided dice, and it either says play or don't play, okay? And it's just going to do that. It's going to be different every single time. Okay, let's hear what it did. Okay, that's cool. If I want a little bit more, let's raise the chance. I like it more sparse. Okay? So there's holes in it, and that's kind of cool. So once you start programming more stuff and recording more stuff and building up whole tracks, you're going to find this to be really useful that you can create kind of a system almost where there's a clip that has some notes that happen sometimes but not always. It's really fun to play around with. So explore that chance showing lane here. Of course, with Chance, you can also randomize it, just kind of set everything to a single value if you want. You can group things together, which would be the usefulness of that let's say, for this bar or let me give you a more useful one. Let's say I'm going to zoom out, and let's just say that all of these snare drums, okay? I want Live to decide whether or not to play that snare or not. But if it decides to not play the snare, I want it to not play any snares. I want to leave off the snare track. Okay? I could do that. What I do is I'm going to go into the chance lane. I'm going to highlight those snares. I'm going to say, play all to group them together. Now I have one chance thing for all of the snares. And if I want to undo this, I can just hit Ungroup. But now it's gonna decide to play the snares or not. Okay, decided to that time. Let's try again. Okay, this time, I decided not to play this snare. So that's how you can use grouped notes together. Okay, let's move on and talk briefly about MPE stuff. 104. MPE Editing: Okay, MPE is a really interesting thing. It got added to live in Live 11. And so it's kind of in its second big generation of it now with Live 12. And earlier I said it's like a high resolution MIDI. That's basically true. Now, not everything can use MPE right now. Only some MIDI controllers are capable of MPE, and only some instruments can do anything with it. So if we want to take a look at what we've got, we can go up here and we can go over to the MPE tab. And now, before you ask me, what does MPE even stand for? I don't remember. I'm not actually sure, and I think that there's actually even some debate about what it stands for. I like to think of it as, like, super MIDI. That's what it stands for. So it gives us a couple new controls. So in the MPE tab, we have these two new lanes, kind of like velocity and chance that we saw before. This one is called slide and this one is called pressure. I can see more. If I go here, I can also see velocity, which we've already messed around with, so we know that it has velocity and release velocity. Now, all of these things are only relevant to some instruments. I can't make anything in the slide lane because this instrument doesn't support anything in the slide lane. If you go to an instrument like wave table, you'll see that it has a lot of controls that say MPE on them. So those are going to give you some of these extra controls that you can play with? Some of them will add really nice versatile effects to what you're playing in. It can make it much more expressive. That's the whole, I don't know if that's the whole point of MPE, but that's the most interesting thing about MPE to me is that there's a lot more expressiveness in the keyboard when you're playing through something that supports MPE. That's why I like these Rolland eboard keyboards 'cause they do support MPE. So, play around with it. I don't want to spend too much time on it right now. We'll look at it again once we start deep diving into the instruments. But if you want to poke around, this is where you would find it in the midi settings. 105. Recording Automation: Okay, one last thing about MIDI recording before we move on, we can record automation with a MIDI device. Heck it out. So what if I wanted to use one of these knobs to record automation? I can totally do that. So here's how I'm going to do it. Let's say this track here, this little drums thing right there. Let's get rid of this and just do that. So what I'm going to do is turn on this button. This is automation arm. So this basically means I'm about to record some automation. Okay. And if we're going to do it over top of a clip that already exists, we should turn on overdub as well. Okay? Now, I'm going to go into the automation mode so I can see what I'm doing. So I'm going to press the letter A or go to view automation. So I can see all this automation stuff, right? So now, let's decide what we want to move around here. How How about just this drum bus amount? We're probably not going to hear anything, but that's okay. Okay? So with all of these things turned on, I'm going to hit record and watch what happens. As I turn this knob, I am recording automation. Okay. And now I can play it back, and it's there. You can see that automation moving down here. Now, you may wonder, how did I get that knob on that keyboard to control this? What's happening here is that this group of eight knobs, you'll see this all over live. This like eight knobs in a little four by two grid. You'll see that everywhere. And you'll see on all kinds of devices a set of eight knobs. And what happens is, if you have eight knobs on your device and one of these eight knob things show up, most of the time, they're going to automatically map, they call it automp to the thing on the screen, okay? So I can just turn these and they're automatically configured to control that set of eight knobs. So that's how I just grab something and it turned something and it worked for that instrument because of that auto map feature. Now, you can change that mapping, and we'll talk a lot about that later. So file that away for the moment. Okay, let's move on. 106. MIDI Generators: Okay, before we move on to the next section, I want to point out one kind of cool new thing that's here that we haven't talked too much about, and that is in a mini clip, you've got these transform and generate buttons. If you open these up, there's all these tools, and this is all new in Live 12. You won't see this if you're in a 11, ten, whatever. Um, there's all these tools that are effectively helping live create things for you. So with the transform tools, if you've made something, you can go to these transformed tools and say, Make something different, mess it up. Transform it. Or if you don't have anything, you can go here and just say, make a core progression for me. And, you know, like, kind of randomize something, and it's going to stick to the key and make you a chord progression, right? It's pretty wild. So these generate things are just going to, like, generate music for you. I've had some really good experience with them just using them as a way to create something random and then kind of sculpt it and play with it and make it my own. They're really great. So there's a bunch of different options here, and I just want to point out that we will go through how to use all of this, all of the transform options and all of the generate options in the next class in this series. In Part three, we get into a bunch of MITI tools where we will go over how to use every single one of these. I'm thinking about making a whole class just based on, like, Let's have Live create something for us, but I don't know if I'm actually going to do that. So more details on these in depth in the next series. For now, I want to move on and talk about tuning systems. 107. Why We Care About Tuning Systems: Okay, in the previous class, I talked about this tunings bit here, and I want to go into that a little bit more. Now, how does that fit into recording? It doesn't a ton. It's just that there's no great place to put this in my whole scheme of all of these classes. And so I wanted to put it here just to get it into your head while you're starting to think about producing music with live. So just a few videos on this. I'm not going to go into insane amount of detail on it, but so first, why do we have this? Why would you want to retune your whole system? So let me explain what this is one more time. If you look at a piano, you don't need to know how to play piano for this to make sense. So we have 12 notes to the octave. It goes here, and then the next black note. And then white note. And then black note, white note, black note, white note, black note. Oops, backwards black note, white note, black note, white note, and then white note again. These are the same, This is hard to do in mirror. These are the same note but an octave higher. Okay? So all you really need to know is this one is called C and this one is called C. Okay? These are both Cs. There are 12 notes per octave. So we take the span of an octave and we chop it into 12 equal notes. This is a system that we've used for the last several hundred years called equal temperament. And the system we used before that was pretty close to it, almost identical. But if you, you know, listen to people who perform music in a period way, meaning, like, they perform music exactly like Vivaldi would have heard it. It's going to sound a little bit different because the tuning system was very slightly different back then. But anyway, um, our system of doing it, equal temperament is not universal. Not everywhere in the world uses equal temperament. So this idea that we can change our tuning is something that is really exciting if you make music in a culture that doesn't use the same equal temperament system that we have. So this really kind of opens up the use of live to people from all over the world who may not have had an interest in producing electronic music before because there was no way for them to do it without doing really weird stuff or making music that was in a system that was very foreign to them. But also people that are, you know, that have grown up, you know, hearing the equal temperament system like most of us have, a lot of those people have been experimenting with alternate tunings for a long time. Someone like Apex Twin for years, has done things where he's retuned some of his synthesizers to get different notes. Um and that's why when you listen to some of his music, some of those keyboards just sound off in a weird, kind of disturbing way. And that's because he's tuned to a whole different tuning system. So it's really cool, that we can just change it. It's wild, and it's gonna do amazing things for music. So, let's talk about how you would change it if you wanted to do it. 108. Changing Your Tuning System: Okay, so here's this little mini cliff that I just made in the when I was talking about mini generation. Here's what it sounds like. Let's slow it down a little bit. Okay, yeah, pretty. But let's go to tunings. And let's say One of these ones. How about this 14343 notes per octave. Okay? So we normally split it by 12 notes per octave. This tuning has 43 notes per octave. That's a lot. So I'm gonna double click on it. Okay? Now you can see, everything spread way out. Black and white keys are gone because none of them are black or white keys. The names of my notes are all strange. Now, and my chords are going to sound completely dissonant, because now I'm in a whole different tuning system. Let's hear it. See it See it instantly sounds like AFX twin to me. It sounds like the selected ambient Works album of AFX Twin. So there you go. If you want to do that, you're more than welcome to. So how I did it was I just double clicked on one of these Okay. Now, there's a lot of information that's in the names of these. So if you want to get deeper into it, I don't understand where these names come from. The number they seem to be naming these by the number as being number of notes per octave. So 12 is normal, but there's a whole bunch of different ways you can divvy up those 12. Mean tone, Quintal WT probably means whole tone. And then you get into some of the bigger ones. Some of these down here, I don't know what all these mean, but if you like exploring this stuff, you're welcome to do it. So down here is where I have a little bit more information on it. If you don't see this lowest note, highest note, you can open it with this little arrow. So it's pretty wild. If we want to get rid of it and just go back to normal, we can just go to this tunings window and press Delete. Okay? And now we're back to where we were. And after I do that, it's not like my chords go right back to where they were. They're kind of forever altered, right? So now they sound very strange, but at least they're tuned normal. Right. So I'm gonna have to rebuild that mini clip. So if you change the tuning system with this method, it is global. It is changing it for your whole track, okay? So that's what you need to keep in mind. Now, you might be thinking, Can I make my own tuning system, and, like, invent a tuning system and be weird like Richard D James? You can. Let's talk about it. 109. Making Your Own Tuning System: Okay, if you want to find out more about each of these tunings, you can load one up and then click on this button here. This will take you to an Ableton website that'll explain a little bit more about those tunings. Now, after you do that, when you're on that site, there is a link that'll take you to a place where you can make your own tunings. So each of these tunings, you'll see that these are ASCL files. This is Ableton's version of a standard that has been created a long time ago called Scala Files, SCALA. This is like Ableton Scala Files. Follow this link and then it'll say, give you the option to make your own using an online tool. So here is Ableton'sOline Scala preset. So With this, you can design your own pitches. We can hear them, and I think this tool is still being developed a little bit. But if we go to code, you can see that each note is represented here and you can start playing with it. This is equal temperament. There are 12 notes per octave. You can get those here, but you can change them and then you can export this and bring it into live. It's pretty cool. All you have to do is start monkeying around with these. Let's say, D sharp, I didn't want to be 300 anymore. I wanted it to be 22. Okay? Okay, I still sounds pretty normal, but if we monkeyed with this enough, it'll start to sound really quite different. So, play around with that if you are interested in building your own tuning systems. 110. Intro to Warping: Okay, it is time to talk about warping. This is one of the biggest capabilities of live. And in fact, I think it's probably the thing that put Live on the map. Like if you ask me to list the five most important things Live could do, warping would be one of them. So what is warping? Warping is the process that we use and the tool that Live has that lets all of the clips that we put into a session play at the same tempo. Okay? Let me demonstrate. Okay? So I have here a bunch of drum loops, let's see. Actually, let's grab that one. Okay, well, let's grab this one first. Well, let's find something lotto like that. Okay. Sure. Let's use both of these. Okay, so here's this one. Okay. That's gonna loop forever, right? That's cool. That's great. Okay, let's stop that one. Let's hear this one. Okay. Fast. Okay. Alright, let's leave it as super fast. So the idea here is that I could pull in two drum loops that are at different tempos, and Live is going to do the math and say, Whatever tempo these things are, I'm going to play them both at my session tempo, which is this tempo of 95, which means that no matter what I pull in to live, assuming it has figured out the tempo correctly, it is going to play them in a way that they can blend together. So let's hear them at the same time. Here we go. The fastest. It's the fastest. It's the fastest. It's the fastest. This one is frantic. This one is frantic, but they're blending together just fine, right? Like, they're both playing perfectly fine. This one is double time of this one. Now, this is a great example because what this is showing us is that life has to figure out the tempo of the clip. And in this case, it figured it out at double time. That's fine. But I can go into the warp settings and tell it, you're doing it in double time, so I'm just going to hit this X two and say, it's actually double that. Okay. So now it's at a better time. Okay, so now it's less frantic. It's more in time. But what it's doing is Live saying, Okay, the BPM of this clip, Live thinks it's 148.85. Okay. But if that's correct, it knows how to do the math to get it to play at our session tempo, which is 95 BPM. Okay? Same thing with this one. It says, This one is 120 BPM, but it knows how to do the math to get it to play at 95. So both of these are going to play at 95, and that makes them. Okay. That also makes for an awful lot of bass. But let's find something melodic and see if we can get it to work in there, too. Let's say, guitar riff. Let's find something. Sure. Let's put that right there. Okay. Let's see if it warped this correctly. If it did, then it's gonna fit right into this groove, just fine. Okay, so it warped it correctly. It fits. It's cool. So that is what warping is. Warping is the way that Live knows how to make everything play in time. Now, the trick to warping is that live isn't always right. And so it gets pretty complicated when we try to help live and get it to warp something correctly. And that's what we need to learn how to do in this section. There's a bunch of settings that we can do to help live, learn how to warp. There's some techniques that I'm going to go over on making sure something is warped right. And then there's some really fun things we can do by warping something incorrectly and making some crazy sounds. So let's get into it. 111. Transients: Mmm. Okay, so when we pull a clip into our session, whether we like it or not, Live is going to try to figure out a tempo for that clip, okay? There's no way to stop it. Live is going to say, that clip looks like it's about 75.88. That's what it thinks the beat is. Now, how does Live figure that out? What it's going to do is it's really going to look for transients. Transients are like the attacks of notes. So if you just look at the waveform here, you can see this is obviously a transient of some sort, and this probably is this probably is, this probably is, this probably is. And it's going to try to figure out if that each of the transients that it sees is a kick or a snare or something that belongs in a downbeat and it does this for more than just drums. I'm just thinking out loud. But and it's going to do all kinds of complicated analysis based on where the transients are and where it thinks they go. You can kind of see the things that it thinks are important in these little gray little arrows, right? That's where it says, Hey, that's something. Now, there's a way to say, that's not quite right, and we can change it. We'll get to that in a minute. So transients, things that have definitive transience, Live is going to get right more often. In other words, so let's look at this one, okay? This is nothing but transience. You see, it's an attack and another attack and another attack and another attack. Okay? So Live is going to see this and say, Okay, these are quarter notes, they're dead on, right? So it's going to get this perfectly right every time. Anything that just has something so clear where we just see these attack points, you know, I saw a few other attacks here, but that's okay. It's not enough to mess around with it. So you can see this one, it thinks the BPM is 120.00. If you see a clip BPM that's a number 0.00, it's probably perfectly right. I live comes back with a BPM, that's like 140.85, it's probably a little off because no one made a beat at 1:40 dot 85. Unless you're analyzing like an acoustic drummer. Acoustic drummers, real humans do play at fractions of beats. But this one's probably a tad wrong. This one, too, it says is 75.88, that's probably 76. So if you have something that is made up primarily of transients, like a drum beat or something like that, it's going to be easier for live to guess the right tempo. 112. Session Tempo and Clip Tempo: Okay, this works in both Session View and Arrangement View, by the way. I'm just using Session View right now to give have a little bit of fun with Session View. However, I'll switch over to Arrangement View in a minute. But this warping works completely the same both in Session View and Arrangement View. Okay, so we have our clip tempo here, this BPM, okay? We can divide it in half to half time it or X two to double time it. Okay? So in a clip like let's go to the guitar one. If I get X two, it's gonna sound like it's going half time. And you can hear how it starts to get a little glitchy when you do that, right? The reason is the farther away this tempo is from your session tempo up here, the more kind of glitchy it's going to get. The more it has to stretch it out, the more artifacts that are going to get introduced. Artifacts are basically when your computer is, like, guessing because there's not enough information. So when we really stretch it out, we start to get artifacts like that. Okay? So let's go back down half again. And similarly, we start to get something that sounds unnatural, some of those artifacts. That has to do with the same reason. 37.9 is quite far away from 95. So either direction, the farther away we get from our session tempo, the more unnatural it's going to sound. Now, if you want to change the tempo of something here, what you want to do is not change it here. Okay? This is not a good place to change the tempo because it's going to mess up all your warping. You want to change it up here. If you want to say, I just want this track to go faster, you just change it here, and then the beauty of live is that it knows how to do the math. So if I say 103 BPM, it's going to play all my clips, my whole track at 1:03 BPM, okay? And it's going to adjust everything for me. So if you're in a situation where you're saying, I don't want live to play it at the session Tempo, I want Live just to play that audio file, how I brought it in. It was perfect where it was. This happens to me, like, kind of a lot, right? So let's say this guitar thing was exactly where I wanted it, and I don't want this warping to happen for this clip. But I want warping to happen for these other clips, okay? Then I'm going to leave these two alone, and this one, I'm going to turn warping off. If I turn warping off, that means ignore what Live thinks its BPM is and ignore my session tempo and just play that clip when I tell it to play that clip. That's all it does. So to recap, the farther away your clip tempo is from your session tempo, the more kind of distorted and glitchy it's going to be. However, I will talk about something called warp modes in just a video or two that'll help with that. And thing too that we learned in this video is, if you don't want live to do that. If you don't want live to warp your clip, you just want that clip to play exactly how you have it. You can turn off warping here. 113. What if something warped wrong?: Okay, here I have a beat that I've just imported. This is an audio file. Um, I imported from my library. It's just a rock groove loop, and let's hear it. Okay, this is not warped correctly. This is wrong, and we need to fix it, okay? So let's do that. First, how do we know it's wrong? There are three things I'm gonna look for to tell me that it's wrong. First, I'm going to look at what Live thinks it's BPM is. If it's not a whole number or really close to a whole number, like 88.99 going to assume it's probably off at least by a little bit. Now, this is pretty close. I mean, this might be 89 or so, but I don't think so. I think it's more off than that. So that's thing one. Th two is I'm going to count it. So this, like almost all beats is in four, four or four time. So I'm going to find what feels like the downbeat, and I'm going to make sure it lines up on a downbeat. Now remember, downbeats are these numbers one, two, three, four, okay? So what feels like a downbeat would be Boom. One. One. Okay? And they're not there. So, like, this transient right here feels like a downbeat. Like, that's a downbeat. And this, I think, is a downbeat. One, two, three, four, one. I think it's actually this. That's the downbeat. So those are not the numbers that I would expect them to be, so that's probably not right. The third thing is we can turn on the metronome. Okay? The metronome is always going to play at our session tempo. So if this is warped correctly, the metronome will be like right in line with it. So let's listen to this with the metronome on, and it should be just, like, rock solid type. And it's not. You can hear the metronome is All right, the metronome is not lined up with this. So that's probably the best indication that this is all worked wrong. Now, there's kind of a third or a fourth thing, and that's that. The name of this clip, the name of this file is actually 95 BPM. So we know that it's tempo. The clip tempo is 95 BPM, and Live thinks it's 88. So we know Live is wrong. Cool. So now that we firmly believe that live is wrong, let's fix it. 114. Warp Markers: Okay, so we're going to look at our warp markers, okay? So these little gray lines up here these little so these little gray arrows up here are kind of, like, suggested warp markers. These are the transients that live thinks are important, okay? They're not really doing anything yet. They're just kind of there for live to say, Hey, this is probably a transient. Um, if we want to turn it into an actual warp marker, we're going to double click on it. So let's go to this one. Okay? I think this sounds like it should be on this beat three, okay? So I'm going to double click on this suggested warp marker, and now it is a warp marker. So now that it's yellow, it's real. You can see I already have one other warp marker. There's one right at the beginning over here. It's kind of tucked away, but it's there. Okay, so now that I have this warp marker, I can click and drag it and watch what happens. Everything slides around on the grid. Okay? So, this was right here. I think this goes right there. So now everything before that has kind of slid around, and everything after that has kind of slid around, too. So maybe that fixed the whole problem. We maybe, maybe we got lucky. Um, so let's hear it against the metronome and see if that fixed it. Nope. So we still have more work to do. Next, let's look at the beginning, okay? I know something's wrong with the beginning because we have this little gap at the beginning. A lot of the time, if you import a file to live as a clip and it has some kind of gap at the beginning of it, like, even a fill or silence like this, that's going to throw off the warping. Okay? So it's a very, very common thing. Luckily, there's a very easy fix for it. So this is my downbeat. This is a little fill leading into it. So I'm going to double click to make that warp marker. Now I'm going to do a very special thing that you can only do at the beginning of the clip. I'm going to control click or right click on it. I'm going to go down to my warp settings down here and I can say set 111 here. That means this is the first beat of this clip, first beat of the first measure. Okay? I'm going to say, I'm going to click that. Set 111 here. Okay. Now it says, This is the beginning, okay? Now, this little arrow up here, this is our play start marker. Okay? So when I start this clip, it's going to start from there. But this is our loop brace. Okay? So, most of the time, you want these to be the same. So I'm going to tighten up our loop brace here so that it also goes to the beginning. Okay, now let's see how that sounds against the metronome now that we fix the beginning. Okay. I kind of felt like it started good, and then it drifted away. That's how this works a lot of the time. So the next thing I'm going to try is I can see that this I had put on Beat three, but now it's gone. Now it moved forward when I adjusted this. So let's get rid of this warp marker and see if Live kind of figures it out from there. So I'm just going to double click on that warp marker to get rid of it. Okay? Now let's listen. Okay, we're still wrong. But let's recap what we did. First, I found, just a big, significant beat somewhere, and I tried to line that up. And that didn't solve our problem. Okay? So then we went to the beginning and trimmed out the silence at the beginning by saying set one, one here. That helped a good bit. Now, in reality, that's what I would do first is go and make sure the beginning starts right on a downbeat. So then we got rid of this warp marker to see if that tightened things up, and it did not. So now we need to go through and create more anchor points for our warp markers. Okay? Let's go to a new video and start doing that. 115. Locking In Beats: Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through, and I'm going to try to latch on to any significant beats, and then I'm going to adjust them with warp markers to make sure they're on the beat correctly. Every time I do that, Live is going to kind of renegotiate what it thinks different things are, and it'll get closer and closer every time. Key to this is to remember that the more warp markers you use, the more you are degrading the sound, okay? Every time we put a warp marker, it's asking Live to, like, shift time around in this clip. And the more you have, the more likely you're going to get artifacts and weird sounds, okay? So if you want things to sound realistic, you want as few warp markers as you need. So let's see if we can find the moment that is this beat three, okay? So here we go. I'm going to turn off the metronome. And listen. Yeah, I still believe it is this kick right there. Okay? So I'm going to take that. I'm going to make my warp marker on it, and I'm gonna push it forward. Okay? Now let's hear it again. Okay. So what did you hear? You heard this sounded slower, and this sounded faster because it's trying to smoosh all of that into that beat. So it might be that our first half is right and our second half is not. So let's find another point in the second half that we can do. Let's try to find what goes on beat four. See if we can find that. Okay, I think it's this high hat hit right here. Now, the way I'm figuring this out, I'm just counting it. I'm counting one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. And I see that this high hat is happening right here. If that's too hard, remember, you can slow it down. You can just use the session tempo, slow the whole thing down like a lot. And it's gonna sound kind of weird, but it might help you locate what's supposed to go where. So I'm looking for the start of the fourth measure here. Three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Okay. So I think it's this. Now, there's not an automatic warp marker here. Oh, there is. There is an automatic warp marker here. If there wasn't doesn't really matter. You can make warp markers anywhere you want. Just double click and you'll make one. There doesn't need to be one of these gray warp markers here for you to make a warp marker. You can do whatever you want. Okay. So I'm going to pull that forward to where I think it goes, which is the start of beat four. Okay? So now that I think we're going to hear, I'm going to speed back up my tempo a little bit. What I think we're going to hear is that it's going to sound good all the way to this beat four, and then it's going to get really fast and strange at the end here. Let's find out. Yeah. I got a little strange here. So, I think that we have to find the downbeat of the fifth bar, which I think is early, and that's why. So let's try it again. One, two, three, four, one, three, one, two, three, four, one. Okay. I think this is the downbeat of the fifth bar. So I'm going to push that over to the fifth bar. Okay. Now let's listen to this with the metronome and see if we got it. Here's our metronome. Good. So, now that is all correct. We use one, two, three, technically, four that very first one warp markers. That's good. That's not bad. So we just did the downbeats. Now, if this didn't fix it, I would go in more. I would say, Okay, let's try to find, you know, this one. And or let's try to find beat two and three and four. You know, I've worked on tracks before where in order to get something to warp perfectly, I had to go down to the eighth note or even the 16th note and lock every single one of those in. You don't want to do that. You want to use as few as possible. So this is great. Now, we could go in here, and we could see that, like this measure two, if I zoom win, that's not on. I could double click, nudge that over and get it on if I wanted to. But I don't need to do that. Like, it's close enough for my ear. And again, the fewer warp markers, the better. So I'm going to double click that one to get rid of it. Cool. So before we go, let's take a peek at what our clip tempo is, according to Live, 94.9, okay? We could safely round that up to 95 and say, like, you know, we're basically 95 here. If we go back to our name, it says 95. So we're right in the ballpark. It's a little off, I think, probably from some of these very fine things, but those won't matter very much at all. So this clip is good to go. 116. ASD Files: Okay, I have a little experiment I want you to do to understand the next concept. Take a file. A file, but take it right from your desktop or a folder, not from the Ableton browser and drop it into live. Here's a guitar take I did for somebody else's project the other day. So I'm gonna bring it into Live. And what's gonna happen right away is that Live is going to generate in the same folder that that was in this thing called an ASD file, a version of that file that is an ASD. Okay? What is that? In fact, I could go to this clip. And if I find it in my browser, and then I say, Show and finder it takes me to here. Here's all my groove files. Here's that file, and right underneath it, ASD file of the same file. So what are those weird ASD files? After you do this for a little while, you're going to find ASD files floating all over your hard drive. ASD files are where Live stores all of this warping data. Okay? So, if I brought this file back into Live now, it should remember how to warp it because that ASD file is floating around, and it can find. If I went through and deleted the ASD file for this, it's going to reset my warping to what Live initially thought it was. So those files can be important if you have manually warped a file and you want to retain that warping information. Don't delete those. It's important to know that you need both the original audio file and that ASD file for live to remember the warping. That ASD file is a very, very, very small file. It creates I just has a little bit of code in it. It does not have audio in it. It's not an audio file. It is not a version of your clip. It is just a file with some numbers in it that kind of says where things are. And also, be careful when you're moving those files around. It can be kind of annoying to have those little ASD files all over the place, but just remember that if you move them, then Live will probably lose track of them. So that's why it helps to keep your samples organized before you load them into Live so that these ASD files stick with their original one. In the browser, you won't really see them very much popping up. But throughout your system, you may see these ASD files all over the place, something to keep track of. 117. Warp Modes: Okay, there's one other piece to the puzzle here. We've looked at warping these and how the more warping we do of a track the more glitchy it can get, the more degraded the audio can get. There are some things you can do to help with that, and the biggest thing is called warp modes. So let's look at them. So if I click on this, I can go over here and I see warp is on. So now, here it says Beats. And there's a couple of different options here. This list is our warp modes. The way to think about this list is, what do we want to preserve? What is the most important thing about this clip? Now, in this case, beats is set by default. I almost I believe all of live, beats is going to be default. When you pull in a clip, it's going to say beats. It's not going to try to figure out what it is. So beats basically means that if it's gonna glitch out on something, it's going to try really hard to preserve the transients, these attacks use that's the most important thing in a beat. Sustained tones, the area in between the attacks, it's going to let the degrading stuff happen there if it has to happen. Okay? So on any sustained sounds, that's where it might get kind of glitchy. Okay? So I'm going to try, let's see. Let's take this down to halftime. Okay. If I listen to it at halftime, we're really warping it a lot now. Okay? You can hear in these sections and like this one, where it's not a transient, it's really kind of glitching a little bit. Right? It's like, h. It's like, I'm trying to stretch things here. But that's cool because it's keeping our transients. The beats keeping that going. Okay, so let's say we were working on something where we did want to preserve the ambient sections more than the rhythmic sections, the transients, right? So we're going to sacrifice the transients in order to keep some of the sustained content. That's going to be the tones warp mode. If I play this through this one, you're going to hear these might sound kind of okay, but the attacks here, the transients are going to get a little funky. M. Okay? It sounds a little funny in this example, but if this was like somebody singing or something like that, this would sound way better. Okay, let's go to the next one texture. This is for, like, if something is a pad or an atmosphere or something like that, it's going to do what's best to preserve it. What you're really doing with these different warp modes is giving live a clue and just saying, Here's what this is, to try to help me out here. So this probably isn't in this context, go to sound wildly different than the tones one. Yeah, that's not gonna sound great. Beats is gonna sound the best probably here. So texture can also be good for if you have, like, a whole track, but it's not the best option for a whole track. There's a better one. I'll tell you that in a second. Re pitch is kind of a different animal. It almost doesn't belong in this list, but it's here. So I'm going to tell you what it is. Re pitch is classic, the old school way that we changed the speed of something was by slowing it down and speeding it up. And when we did that, the pitch would go down and up with it, right? Imagine you've got a record, right? You want that record to play slower. You're gonna put your finger on the record, right? And the pitch is going to go down as you slow it down, right? Re pitch basically is going back to that. It's saying, like, adjust the pitch the same way you adjust the tempo, okay? So it's going to if you warp something a lot, it's going to be the pitch is going to go all over the place. This is really kind of more of an effect than anything. I haven't found very few times have I found a really practical use for this, but it's kind of fun sometimes. So it's gonna be really low 'cause we're slowing it way down. Right, so it can be kind of funny. Okay, then we get to the last two, complex and complex Pro. So these are best for full tracks. If a track if you pull in, like, a whole song that's already mixed, complex or complex Pro. Here's the difference. Without getting too much in the weeds on these Complex is good for whole tracks or complicated things. Complex P is better for everything, but it's going to eat up a lot of your processor speed. So I could select Complex Pro here. But if I had, like, 20 tracks and I was all I was doing Complex Pro on all of them, I'm going to crash my computer, probably. Probably not. But I'm going to slow my computer down a whole lot because Complex Pro requires a lot of juice. It's going to sound the best. Right? It's pretty accurate, but I can only have a handful of tracks doing that at a given time. So if you need to use Complex on a lot of tracks, use Complex. If you've only got it on a few tracks, use Complex Pro. Okay. So always start with these top three and see if you can get away with using those. If it can sound really good with any of those, then you're in good shape. If you need something extra, go down to Complex Pro. I hardly ever use Complex, and I hardly ever use re pitch. So those are kind of the four that I go to use all the time. 118. "Printing" Warp Settings: Okay, so that usually leads to the next question. And that is, what if I set this to Pro to Complex Pro I had a lot of warping in it, and it's slowing down my computer. Is there any way to just write the warping into the audio file so that I can turn warping off, and my warp settings are just in that file. That file is just no longer warped at all because it doesn't need it. Yes, there is a way to do exactly that. Okay? It's actually super crazy, easy. What we're going to do is we're going to click on that clip, we're going to press Command J. And what it's going to do is basically like, print that clip. It's going to make that clip with all its effects, all its warping, everything is going to be written into that file. Okay? So now you can see the warping on this clip turned off. It's still warped, but I don't have any warp markers. My warp setting went back to beats. If I had any effects or anything on it, those are going to be now written into the audio file, okay? But now it's going to send it. Let's go back up to a non ridiculous tempo. Or let's go back to our actual double time. So it sounds pretty good, and now it's written in there. The only real reason to do that when you're working on a track is if your computer's getting bogged down. If your computer's getting bogged down by stuff, you can totally do that. Do that Command J. It's called Consolidate. If you go to the Edit menu, you'll find it in there. But it's a way to basically take all your edits, everything and just say, Okay, new clip with all this information. Just put it in there. So it's a handy trick. Yes. 119. Warping Beats: M. Okay, so warping can be hard. It can be a tricky thing to figure out, and it's not the easiest part about using live. So I want to do it a little bit more. Let's do a couple more, and I'll just walk you through my process on what I'm going to do. Now, before we do these, I want to point out one thing is that a lot of the time, Live is going to warp things correctly. Probably, I'd venture to say the majority of the time. It's not like 99% of the, though. It's probably, like, 80% of the time, depending on what you're doing. So I'm going to pull in clips that are intentionally warped wrong or I'm pretty sure are warped wrong, but just know that, you know, the majority of the time, things actually go pretty well with this. But I'm going to create some problems for us, just, you know, learning opportunity stuff. You know how it works. Okay, so let's do another beat. So this one I think is going to cause us problems. So it's short. Warp was turned off by default, which is surprising. So let's turn that on. Okay, we'll take a look at it. And let's loop it and turn on the metronome. Okay. So what I see here, first of all, I see a weird amount of time. So mmm. This should be two beats long, okay? And it's more than two beats long. It's hanging over by a little bit. So that's a problem. So let's tighten our loop to two beats and then here. Okay? Obviously, that's wrong. So let's see if we can figure this out. I'm going to slow down my tempo a little bit. And let's see. We don't have very many transients here because it's so short. So let's see if we can figure out where this big one right here goes. Oh, this is going to be a tricky one. I always make these examples, like, really hard for myself. But, okay, so well, let's let's double time this so that it's a full bar. And then this will be easier to deal with, and then I'll undo it at the end, okay? So crack. Boom, crack. That's what I want. So, this crack should go on beat two. Boom, crack, okay? So I'm going to make this warp marker and tuck this back on beat two. And then this I think should go on beat four. Okay? So boom, crack, boom, boom, crack. That means this kick should go right on beat three, and this kick should go right on the end of three, which is right in the middle of beat three. Okay? Now, that makes some extra space at the end here, but that's okay. Let's hear it. A. Okay, now let's get it back to the tempo we thought we were at and loop just two beats and see if we got it. Okay, let's our metro dome. Okay, great. So with this one, I warped all the transients because there was only five of them. And in order to really wrap my head around what's happening here, I slowed it down to halftime and then locked everything in based on where I think it goes. Now, what can be kind of fun about this is that there is some kind of subjective work here. Like, it could be that this kick goes on the last eighth note. Like, if I want that kick on the last eighth note, sure, put it on the last eighth note. Stretch it out. Go there. This area might sound kind of funky, but at this tempo, maybe not. Right? You can make some cool patterns this way. Maybe we want this kick to be like really fast. See, this is where the kind of compositional arrangement comes in. We'll do more of that in a few minutes. But for now, I think we got this one. It really takes an ear and it takes some practice to get these, but that's how we do it. Okay, let's go on and do something that's a little more abstract. This is where things get really hard. 120. Warping Abstract Clips: Okay, let's try warping something a little more abstract. So I grabbed this little kind of organ riff here. Oh, let's turn off the metronome. Okay, so where do these last two hits go? Do they go right on the beat? So, this one's a little late, and this one's a little early, or do they go on the 16th note? What about this? Is this early? Should that go on beat two? I don't know. There's really kind of no way to know. In a clip like this, you can kind of feel it, and, like, where this is landing right now is actually probably pretty good. But you really need some context for where you want to put any of these notes because warping is not only about finding what's right, it's also about finding where you want the thing to go. If I want these to be in a weird place, I can put them wherever I want. So in order to really feel where these go, I need contacts. So I'm going to put some kind of beat on this. So let's just go to Okay. This is a mini clip with drums. Sounds like this. Okay? Now let's hear that with our keyboard if and see how it sounds right away. Okay, so now in this context, I want to change this quite a bit. I want this to be I want the second chord to be right on the second beat. Now, this gives me the opportunity to point something else out. I'm going to undo what I just did with Command Z. So now if I drag this over to beat two here, watch what happens to this whole chord that's in Beat one. Right, it gets stretched out. If I don't want that to get stretched out, what I can do is put another anchor there, okay? Consider so with that warp marker, what I'm doing is just saying this part is fixed. Everything prior to this, I don't want to mess with. Now if I drag this warp marker out, I'm not gonna affect what comes before it. Okay? So there's that. And now, this one, I think I want right on Beat three. So I'm going to do the same thing because I don't want to mess with what's before that. Okay? And this one. Let's try putting this one on the end of three, okay? So let's hear it now. Okay, I actually want this on beat four. I changed my mind. Yes. Okay. That's a cool groove. I could get into that. Let's say I don't want this gap. I could pull this over here and see how I can get that to sound. It's a little glitched out. Maybe not so far? Yes. Yes. Okay, well, let's try changing to tones, see if I can get that a little smoother. Oh, yes. So by changing the tones, it smoothed this little gap. There was a little tiny glitch there, and we got rid of it with tones. If that didn't get rid of it, you can kind of juice up tones with some of the settings. Grain size is going to make it sound better, but also it's going to eat up a lot of your computer processing. So you can mess with grain size if you like tones. Okay, now let's talk about warping whole tracks. 121. Warping Tracks: Okay, I'm going to pull in a whole finished track. Okay? This is a This is a student of mine. His track. I don't think he'll mind me using it. Okay? So I'm just going to drop this right into my session. Solo this track. Okay, now, you see how it took a second before it was enabled? That was live doing its analysis. So you can see this is a full track, and all of these little tiny ticks here, those are the warp markers where it says, something's going on, so this is going to be a tricky one. Now, the first thing that I want to tell you about warping whole tracks is that there is a setting in live. If we go to our preferences and we go to record warp and launch warp settings, there is Auto warp Long samples on. You can turn that off you would turn this off if you're constantly loading in whole tracks or, like, long things, whole tracks. And you don't want it to warp them. You can turn that off, and then it's just going to open a track like this, and it's not going to warp it for you. That's actually, kind of beneficial sometimes because most of the time, if I'm loading in a whole track, it's to do a mastering project or something like that where I don't want warping on. But I'm going to leave it on for now. You can also do this. Where you can say warp short samples, and I always leave that set to Auto. But there are some controls for that. You can say default warp mode, beats. You can adjust that here, too. But let's go back. So it warped this automatically. Now, is this correct? Did it warp it correctly? Without even listening to it, I'm going to take a guess and say that, surprisingly, I think it did. And here's my clue. My clue is that there's no silence at the beginning. I see a new section here, like the waveform changes here, and it's pretty much right on. Same thing here and same thing here. Like, I see things happening right where they're supposed to happen, kind of. Like sections are lining up. So I think this actually warped pretty well. So I'm gonna turn on the metronome and listen to the beginning of it. My Okay, so so far, it sounds right on. Whenever that happens, I'm always tempted to jump to the end and see if it's still right on because if something is off by just a little, it can slowly drift further and further away, by the end of the track, it's going to be way off. So let's go out to here. Still sounds pretty good. So this is actually warped pretty great. It's right on. So let's assume that it's kind of d because I want to show you a few things. So let me go to, like, this point right here. If this was warped wrong, then one thing I could do would be to lock in this intro part, get it exactly perfect. And then you can see, like, okay, now it thinks it's 68.49 right here, it's 69.56. So if I think this is perfect, then I can click on a warp marker and go back to these settings and say, Warp from here, that'll say, redo it. Like, rethink your way through this. Now that I've warped a little bit of it for you, sometimes you can get closer there. You can say warp from here starting at 94 BPM. That's what Our session tempo is 94 BPM. Warp from here straight, warp 94 BPM from here. And I don't really know what the difference between these two are to be perfectly honest with you. What I almost always do when I come here is just say warp from here. So I say kind of redo it and warp it from there. You can see now it added all kinds of warp markers based on what I did back here. Okay? So in this case, I think I actually may have, screwed it up. In most cases, that will really help and keep you from having to go through the whole track. So warp a little bit in the beginning and then say warp from here after you're pretty sure you've got the tempo really locked in. 122. Warping Vocals: Okay, next, let's talk about warping a vocal sample. This can get tricky, because just like the other the keyboard one we did, vocals by themselves are really hard to warp because you really need a pulse to know where you want that to sit. So here's a kind of vocal if. Let's turn the metronom off. Oh Okay. Um, let's loop that whole thing, and let's put it against this drumbeat that we pulled in a minute ago. Oh. Okay, so that, you know, that works. Oh Oh. Or we could change it. Um, I could say, you know, I want that to fall right there and then give me a little more on the beat if I wanted to. Okay, we've got a little kind of glitchiness in this area, so let's go to our warp mode and change it to tone h. Okay, that's cool. Now, two things to point out here. One is that now that I've warped this to our tempo, it'll fit with anything else that's warped to our tempo, right? Which is everything in our track. Meaning that if I wanted to put this vocal on this Soul Survivor track, I super could. Let's just see. I don't know what's going on in this particular moment, but let's find out. Mm. So one. All right. Cool, which brings me to 0.2 that I wanted to make, and that is that while warping will make all of your clips play nicely together in terms of tempo, it will not automatically make them play nice together in terms of pitch. Okay? So if I wanted this clip to be in the key of this clip, then I need to adjust the pitch of this and play around with that a little bit more than what I'm doing now. It's not quite in the right key right now. So warping will do nothing to help you get in the right key. It's only going to help you get in the right tempo, okay? In order to get in the right key, you got to use your ear. Figure things out and adjust your pitch down here. Okay, let's move on and talk about how we can use warping as a tool to generate ideas and generate, like, musically interesting new material. 123. Warping for Editing: Okay, let's do something fun with this vocal thing. So Like I said before, we don't need to warp something correctly, right? Like, the way we pulled this clip in, it was pretty fine like that. It was a little kind of melesmatic thing, and we could line it up to fall on a downbeat, and that would be great. But we can also kind of make it our own by, like, playing with it a bit, making notes fall in different spots, and making it something different and unique. Okay, so here is a totally different clip. And this will fit more or less into our groove. Let's hear it. It sounds a little sickly, 'cause it's like, drifting between notes a whole lot. But it kind of works. Let's take that same idea and go back to this drumbeat, okay? So let's say in this clip, I wanted it to go halftime. Okay. And I want to rearrange the beat a little bit. I want that to go there, that there, that there, that there. Let's say this goes on beat two, but let's say I want it way back here. And then we'll put nothing on beat two. This goes there. Beat four we'll put there. So I can kind of create a whole new beat this way. There. Okay, you hear those, like, glitchy things? I kind of like them. But if I didn't, let's go to Complex Pro and see what that does to this. That's cool. I mean, we're stretching this out so much and we're messing with this so much. It's going to be very glitchy. So let's go back to Beats. I kind of like it. But, you know, design your own beats by using warping. Design your own melodies, rhythms, whatever you want. A. That's cool. So don't be afraid to kind of go nuts with your warping if you want to make something that is your own, move transience around, find your own sound within there. It can be really fun to do. Like, watch this. I'll take a piece of this track. Let's take Let's take, like, these two beats. Okay. Cool. Let's see if we can find something in here and let's be fun. So take this. M. Make award point, stretch that out. There's not much here, but maybe I can make something glitchy ha. Cool. What happens if I put that on Complex? So, you know, you can really have fun compositionally with this, as well. 124. Warping for Sound Design: Okay, so if we take that same idea and go to extremes, you can get some really cool sound design effects. Let's go to this. Let's go back to this vocal thing. And what I'm going to do is, let's do this. I'm going to consolidate it. So Command J. Okay? Now we've got some kind of fun stuff here. And now I'm going to take it and just see if I can get something really glitchy in it. I'm just going to stretch this way out here. Okay? Let's open that up. Okay, cool. Alright. So now this is crazy glitched out. Okay, let's hear it. Oh. Okay, cool. Now, let's take that to texture. Oh Lower the grain size. Lower the grain size, the more glitchy it's gonna get. Okay, great. I'm into that. So, let's consolidate it again. Okay? Now, all that glitchy stuff is here. Right? Like, that's printed into this file. So let's take it, and let's glitch it even more. Let's try. Texture. Ooh. See, that's a weird, freaky sound. Okay, so let's consolidate that. Again, let's chop off the beginning of it just deal with this middle part, okay? So now we have this clip that is just this. Okay? That's a pretty useful sound to me. Next time, I'm working on this Sci Fi podcast that I've been working on Um, this could be a good effect for me to use. So I just turned that vocal into something totally different using warping. I made a sound design effect by stretching it out, consolidating it, stretching it out, consolidating it, stretching it out some more. Whenever you stretch sound out far enough, you always get weird glitch things. There's just lots of amazing stuff buried into a sound file if you pull it apart enough to find it. So kind of a weird technique, but it's really fun, and I do it all the time. So have fun with that. 125. Grouping Tracks: Okay, I want to circle back around to this big recording session here because I just want to talk about organizing your session just a little bit, particularly how we do these groups. You may have seen this as when I opened this before. So basically, you can select any tracks that you want by clicking on one and then shift clicking another one, and then Command G. That's going to turn them into a group. So here's the group I just made. Then I can go Command R on the group and rename them. What do we have here, Base, guitar, and guitar. So I'll say base and guitar. Okay. There's a couple advantages to doing this. One is just to organize your session so you can see what's what. You can see how I did it here. I've got rhythm section, saxes, brass, a whole ton of midi stuff, and then more midi stuff that I didn't put in the group yet. But if I wanted to, I could easily take this track. Let's open this MIDI. I could take this track and drag it up into Al Midi, and now it's in there. So I could do that with these, all of these, if I wanted to. In fact, let's do it. I should be able to go down to the bottom and shift click to select all of those. Click and Drag to move them up there. And now they're all in this all midi tab. Okay? So now here's my whole session, right? I have this big, huge session just narrowed down to four things. So when I'm ready to work on the saxes, I can open up the saxes and get to work on them. When I'm ready to work on the brass, I can get in there this way. And the rhythm section, I can get in this way. Within the rhythm section, I have more groups like drums, bass and guitar, et cetera. You can have groups within groups. In fact, you can have groups within groups within groups. Someone in one of the Ableton trainer forums tried to figure out how many groups you could go deep on groups within groups within groups. And I think they got to, like, 1,000 and um and it still works just fine. So you can make groups within groups until your heart's content. If you want to ungroup something, I think it's Shift Command G or you can just Control click and go to Ungroup. Yeah, Shift Command G. So grouping tracks is super helpful when you've got a big session going. Even when I'm producing something, not recording, but I'm just working on building an electronic track. I'll group my drum stuff, my synth stuff, my bass stuff, and then my live stuff, like guitars or whatever into different groups so that I can focus in on them as I like. 126. Audio Effects in Groups: One more thing about groups is that actually, once you create a group, you can put effects on that group. So so here's my drums, for example. Okay? So my drum group has all of these different drum tracks in it. But when I make the group, I get an activator for that group, so I can turn off all the drums if I want. I have a volume for that group, so if I want the drums to all be louder, I can mix it there. That's not a great idea, but you can do it that way. I've got different sends I can use. But most importantly, I can put effects on all the tracks in that group by just putting them here. Effectively, this is like routing, another kind of bus sort of. So you can see in my drum track, I put the glue compressor on that track so that there's some compression happening on all of these files. In fact, I did that on all of these. So if I go to the saxes, they have a compressor, brass has a compressor. So that can be really handy to do. When you're working on a session, putting your effects on a group rather than on individual tracks, depending on what you're doing, that might be useful. It might not. But in recording these, I wanted the same kind of compressor on, like all my saxes. I did a bunch of effects to each track as needed, but the compression is all being handled on the outside in the group. So something to keep in mind while you're working. 127. Linked Tracks: Okay, one last organizing thing is linked tracks. If you're working on something and you say, for example, this Trumpet one and Trumpet two, I want to make sure that those don't fall out of sync, and when I edit one of them, I want to edit the other one of them. Okay? So I'm going to move these right next to each other for the moment so we can look at them. Trumpet one, Trumpet two, okay? So I'm going to do is I'm going to select both, and then I'm going to go down here and I'm going to select Link tracks. Okay? Now they get a little thing there, okay? Now watch what happens. If I move these tracks. If I move this one, I'm moving the other one, right? If I select something in one of those tracks, it's selecting it in both. If I cut something, it's in both. If I draw a fade in one of them, it gets drawn in both. These are linked. You can link, like, tons of tracks together to do stuff. You can even warp this way, which is sometimes really useful. See, it says, To audio class with different warp markers are selected into tracks. If I hit reset warp markers, it's going to get rid of them, but then it's gonna let me warp these together, which can be really useful. I don't want to do that now because I've already warped these a whole bunch. I can change some settings around it. I can change the volume of both of them at the same time, the pitch, anything I need to. So linking things together that you need to stay together is a really important tool. To unlink them, I'm going to select the same two tracks and just go to unlinked tracks. Okay? Now they're separated. All right, so explore linked tracks if you ever need to keep a bunch of stuff together. 128. End of Part 2! What Comes Next?: Okay, we've reached the end of part two of this class. So up next, in part three, we're going to go into producing. So producing music with live. We're going to go way deeper on everything that we've already talked about. We're going to talk about writing whole tunes with Arrangement View, doing the same with Session View. We're going to drill down deep into just making beats. We'll really focus on that in that section. Working with synthesizers, all those cool new Mi tools, the generative stuff that I mentioned. Get into working on effects and then some advanced production techniques like side chaining and all that good stuff. So, I'm really excited to start working on that, which I'm probably going to do in, like, the next hour or so. So, dive in. Hopefully, it's already out. But that is what comes next in this giant Ableton Live 12 sequence. 129. Part 3: Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to producing music with Ableton Live. This is the third class in my big giant Ableton Live 12 series. You don't need to have taken the first two. However, I am going to assume you know your way around live a little bit at this point. In this class, we're going to focus on just making stuff. Start by getting comfortable with the arrangement view, and then we'll work on making a track together. Then we'll move on to Session View, and then we'll work on making a track together. We'll focus on beats and what goes into making a beat and what I look for in beats. We'll talk about the Ableton synths that are built in. Then all these new MITI tools that are in Live 12, there's all these new tools that will let you just generate things. So you can come up with a chord progression, and maybe you don't really like it all that much. You can click a couple buttons and have Lives say, Let me see what I can do with that and have it generate more material for you. It's hugely valuable and really cool. And then we'll close out with some extra techniques like side chaining, routing, busing, resampling, things like that. Before we wrap up, I'll leave you with a bunch of different sessions in this class so that you can have something to get started with and play with. They are completely yours to use however you like. So, let's dive. I can't tell you how many times. I've been like in the weeds, working on something and I, like, programmed, like this complicated beat only to realize I was like, think working on quarter view and arrangement view have different, like, content areas, but they share a mixer, okay? So that to really kind of make these more make these groove a little bit better and make them feel a little more natural. Two of them you already know. I remember back when I was learning how to use Session View and somebody showed me this thing that I'm about to show you and it just went click and everything made sense about Session View. So let's do it. So first all day. 130. Introduction to Arrangement View Editing: Alright, here we are in part three of my giant Ableton Live 12 course series. So this section is all about making tracks. So we're going to focus on producing music with Live 12. So we're going to start in the arrangement view timeline. Now, if you've seen some of my other sections of this series, then you know that I kind of lean towards the arrangement view, but Session View is just as good for producing music. One is not better than the other. In fact, I use Arrangement View most of the time, but sometimes I'll make a track in Session View just because it makes my brain work a little differently. I know a lot of people who work exclusively in Session View. So if you're more comfortable in Session View, don't worry. We're going to work in both in this class because it's important to know how to use both. But we're going to start in arrangement view. So this first chunk of stuff will be a little bit of review if you took part one of this series. But I want to make sure we're all on the same page with our general editing functions. And then we'll start talking about building tracks from there. Okay, so let's dive in. 131. Timeline Commands: looping, locators, and key commands: Okay, let's talk about our general timeline commands. Now, I'm not a big proponent of memorizing 1,000 key commands. You can navigate live almost entirely through key commands now, but I really don't like spending time memorizing key commands, so I try not to give you too many of them. But there are a few that are super super helpful for navigating live very quickly. So let's go over a few of those as it relates to the arrangement view and editing. So the first is just kind of what I call our Microsoft Word key commands, right? So if I click on a clip, we can do copy Command C, V or Command V to paste. And if you're on a PC, it's what is it Alt or Control? I can't remember. But C to copy command V to paste, we can Option click and drag is my all time favorite thing. That means leave a copy where it was and make a new one. It's like pulling a clone out. I use that all the time. So copy paste. Option, click and drag. Let's talk about looping. If we want to loop a part of the arrangement, we just highlight something. Doesn't matter if it's got a clip on it or not, but whatever we highlight is going to get loop. So Command L is going to turn on looping. And no matter what I highlighted, all tracks are going to play in this loop, okay? This is our loop brace. We can move that around wherever we want. And lastly, let's do um ocators. These are little locators. You can see their tiny little play commands because you can click on them, and if I double click on them, it'll start playing from there. But they're great for just leaving yourself little notes while you're working. I use them all the time. As you can see, in this track that I just started, I put, you know, maybe a violin solo here and bring that arp thing back here. So to make one of these locators, we're just going to control click up here in the timeline and add locator and then say whatever you want to say. This part, whatever. If you want to get rid of it, control click on that locator again and delete or you can just hit Delete. So locators are super cool. You can move them around by clicking and dragging on the flag, and you can double click on them to start playing from that spot. Cool. Remember that if we select a section of a clip, we can copy from within it and paste. Same thing with audio clips. As long as we paste onto the same kind of clip. So if you're copying from MIClip, you need to paste onto a midi track. If you are copying from an audio clip, you need to paste on a audio track unless you want to do the conversion thing, which we went through a bit on the first class in the series. Okay, so those are our kind of main big picture commands. I just want to get in our head right away. Next, let's talk about some things we can do to an audio clip, in particular, reversing and a couple other ways we can modify clips. 132. Modifying Clips: Reversing, Warping, and more: Okay, we have a couple tools to modify clips. Let's take a look at some of those. So if I click on this clip, let's solo this and just hear what it is. Okay. Neat. Now, if I go to the clip view here, let's loop just this. If I go to the clip view here, there's a couple of things I can do that are just fun creative tools. The first down here is reverse. There's just a big old reverse button sitting right there. That can be really interesting if we're trying to modify a clip, come up with some new ideas, do something interesting with it. I use that a lot. This Edit button is interesting. If you click on it, it's going to say no sample editor application has been selected. This is for, like, if we really want to get down in the weeds and, like, do some very fine tuned editing to that clip. We could open a sample editor and it used to be really common that you would have a separate program that was, like, your, like, scalpel type tool to, like, really get into away form. There was one called Peak. There was one called Sample Editor. There were a bunch of different ones, but it's really fallen out of fashion now. Like, I don't even have one set up. So I never use that. And I never really find a need to. There's a lot that we can do right in live. So that's kind of a legacy thing that I don't think is around anymore. Another cool thing we can do is with the BPM here. Now, this is a warping trick, and we talked a whole bunch about warping in the last class, but I won't go into all the details about warping here, but if you want to do a quick kind of crazy warping thing, you can divide the speed by half or double it. So this is going to make strange things happen. Let's pull this out here and then double it. We're still backwards. Which is actually kind of cool. But let's reverse it so that we're going forward. With half speed. Go back up to normal speed and that double speed. Okay, just some fun things we can do. I like to play with these. Here we go. Lastly, while we're in this area, gain, we can just crank up the gain of a clip right here. But please don't do that. This is not a good way to do it. You could do it here if you just need to add a quick boost to a whole thing. Like, look at this little G minor arpeggio clip I have here. Okay, sure. In this one, I could go in and just give it like a little boost. That's probably fine. But the majority of your volume, you should try to use either your track audio or the clip fades or automation for them. There's a couple other ways, and we'll talk about that when we get into mixing, but this tool down here, this gain is kind of I think of this as kind of a last resort when we just need another big boost. So try to avoid using that at all costs. The reason is you're very likely to clip by doing this, which is what this is doing now. It's gonna be all distorted and nasty. And it's also just kind of easy to lose track of your boosting here. So it's just not a great idea. This pitch control down here, however, is fun. Go nuts with it. You can see I've already done some pitch control because I wanted to play around with this sample and it was not in the right key, but it was close. So I just used the pitch here. But this pitch is very responsive. So that's a fun tool to mess around with. Let's get back in the right key. Okay, just some kind of ways to get us started with some quick modifying of clips. Alright, let's talk about clip fades. 133. Clip Fades: Alright, I like to think of clips as having six corners. You've maybe heard me say this before. But let's go down to this clip here. So we have these four corners, and then we have two corners at the top of the header part of the clip, and they all do different things. So the header part of the clip, if I put my mouse over it, I can click and drag to pull out more of the clip. Now this is either going to just expose more of the clip that I've hidden or it's going to continue to loop the clip if it is set to loop. Okay. Let's go back. The same thing is going to happen on the left side, where if I pull back, it's going to expose more of the clip or loop it if it's set to loop. Now, the corners here are going to trigger a fade, so I can fade that way. And now I get this point in the middle where I can kind of craft that fade a little bit. And this point at the end where I can control the fade a little bit too. Okay? Same thing on the right. I can do a big long fade, craft that fade with this extra point, and adjust it with this point on the right. Right? And always remember, of course, Command Z undo. Command Z is going to be your best friend as we start making tracks, which we're going to do in just a few minutes. Okay, a few more editing tools. I just want to get us really comfortable throwing clips around, flipping them backwards, moving them around, chopping them up. And then we're gonna dive into working on a track. So next let's talk about split and join. 134. Split and Join: Okay, another kind of often overlooked thing is how to split up a clip. No, I end up spending a lot of time doing this because I like little glitchy things. So there's a few ways we can do this. One is that we can just kind of highlight something by our grid resolution, which in this case, is a quarter note. So I can grab a quarter note, copy it, go to a new track, and paste it, right? So I can grab little things here and there. If I want to do more, I can zoom in deeper. Now I'm looking at 64th notes, so that's much finer. So that's one way is you can just highlight little bits and do it that way. But if you want to split a track, you have two options. Like, if I want to cut a little piece of this out, I could put my cursor somewhere and press Command E. That's going to just kind of slice it, right? So now these are separate. And if I want to do it again, then I just cut out this little piece and I can move it around. Or I'm going to undo that. One thing that I do, which is actually, faster in a weird way is just delete something. Like, if I want to cut these two apart, just highlight something, delete it. And then if I just drag this back out, you won't hear that. It'll go right through it. But they've been cut into two. So Command E or just delete something from within it, and you'll get a slice. Okay, so I could just go Command E, command E, command E, and just chop this up all over the place. Move these little slices around 64th notes. This will be frantic and kind of neat, maybe. Let's hear it. I'm going to solo just this track. Here we go. Cool, sort of. Whatever. I'm going to undo all that. Now, if you want to rejoin them, Here I have all these slices all over the place. Rejoining them is super easy. We looked at this key command earlier in the other class. What we're going to do is we're going to select the whole clip, everything we want to be in one clip. And this could even go farther. I could select both of these two clips, okay? And Command J. Command J means consolidate. Now, what this is going to do is it's going to rejoin everything together, but it's also going to kind of print the track. So if there's effects, if there's warping, anything like that, it's going to save it into the clip, okay? Command J. Um, so now it's one clip. So I often do this. This works on mini tracks, too. Mi clips, too. So if I have something like there's nothing really great here. But let's say, um, let's say this baseline, okay? So this is a baseline. And let's say this base clip, I'm always going to do this twice. Okay? And so I don't want to have to copy this twice every time. I just want this to be one clip because that's the full, statement of this if, okay? So, sure, I'm going to go through Command J, merge them into one clip. Okay? Now I can just move this whole thing all over the place, and it's nice and easy. So Command J is consolidate. That means reput it back together or put disparate things together, and Command E is to break them apart. One more thing about consolidating, you can consolidate with empty space, too. Like, let's say these little swoosh things, I can consolidate this, and it's going to make an audio file that fills up that space. So I'm going to hit Command J. Okay? So there's my swoosh, bunch of empty space, and another swoosh. This could be useful if I want to put this somewhere else and I don't want to have to, you know, really dive in there and figure out how to line up those swooshes. This will make it a lot easier to line them up they're lined up correct here. So if I copy and paste them somewhere else, it'll be fairly easy to do. Okay. Let's talk about something that I haven't talked about yet, and that is using the finder. 135. Drag and Drop: In part one of this series, I spent a lot of the time talking about the browser and about how you can make your way through the browser and find everything you need, and that's true. The browser is the thing that's going to make you more efficient than most people if you really get good at using the browser. But one thing I didn't talk about is that you can just use the finder. You don't need to drag things in from samples. Like, if you go down to samples and you say, Okay, I want, like, a Naso a Sure. I want that Naso, yeah. Sample. I want that vocal sample in here. You can drag it in, and that's awesome. But you can also just drag it right in from the finder. If you have like, here's some little buzz. Cool. If I want to use that, I can just drag that right in. Okay? We should probably drag it down to a new track, but it is right there. There it is. Okay? Now, this could cause problems. If you drag in a whole bunch of files from all over your hard drives, you're going to it's possible that Live starts to lose track of them. So you're going to want to do a collect all and save fairly often. That's going here to file, collect all and save. That's going to wrap up all of those things and make a copy of all those clips that you've pulled into live. And put them into your session folder so that live doesn't lose track of them. So if you're pulling things in from the finder, get used to doing that. I'm going to talk a little bit more about collect and save in just a minute, but I wanted to just get into your head that not everything has to be done with the browser. You can just drag stuff right in from anywhere on your computer into live if you want. So keep that in mind. Okay, a couple more things. 136. Automation: So one of our most powerful tools for making interesting music is automation. Okay? So let's look at automation again. Remember that automation is just changing a parameter over time. Okay? We can set our volume. Let's do it with this track. Let's zoom way out. Here we go. We can set our volume of this track to be quiet or loud if we want. We can look at our mixer by going down here. We can pull up a mixer. Let's make a little more room. Okay? So here's our mixer. This track is right here. So I can pull that volume down or up. That's all fine. But what if I wanted to start quiet and get louder? Even just a little. That is what we need automation for. So in order to do automation, we need to go into automation mode. You can get that either by pressing just the letter A, or that might not work if you have this mini keyboard on. I'll just cause problems. So you can either turn that off and then just press A, or you can go to view automation mode. Okay, and with automation, we get all of these lines. Okay? So in order to automate a parameter, anything, click on it. Okay? So if I want to automate the volume, I can click here. Now that line is volume. I can also click down here. Okay? So let's say this is my volume. I'm going to make a point. And then at this point, I want my volume to be Okay, now that volume is going to get louder over time. Maybe I don't want it to be so extreme. I can do that. And if I want it to be curved, put my mouse over it till it turns dark, just like that. Hold down the option key and then click and drag and I get nice curves if I want that. Virtually any parameter can be automated, okay? So I can automate my panning. I can automate any kind of plug in. Let's go up to my instrument here. Here I have this instrument on it. If I want to this filter envelope, if I want to automate this filter envelope, I can do that. I just click on it once, and then I do it like that. And now, as I play it, you'll see it change over time. Anything that is automated gets a little kind of pinkish dot. That just tells us that parameter is being controlled by something else, okay? Let's look at what happens here. He goes. Okay, not a dramatic effect there, but, um, it works. Okay. So anything you want to automate, just go into automation mode and click on it. You should see it show up here once you click on it. In automation mode, you'll get these double dropdown menus. This one shows us the device, and this one shows us the parameter. So Dark Poly pad has these parameters available to it. Okay? I can also just go to, like, the mixer, and then I get panning, volume, cross fade, reverb and delay. Okay? So there's a lot of different things you can get access to. Automation will be the thing that makes your tracks go from good to great, okay? If you get really good at automating and doing the fine detail work in your track, that's where things start to sound really good. So it's very important to get comfortable with automation. Okay, there's a couple things that are actually really kind of hard to automate and that people ask me about all the time. One is the tempo and the other is, like, time signature changes and things. But if you want the tempo to go from a tempo to another tempo over an amount of time, that's actually kind of tricky to do. It's actually easy. It's just really hard to find. So let's go to a new video and do that. 137. Tempo and Time Signature Changes: Okay. If you want to change the tempo of your track. So our global tempo is up here. Everything is going to run on that tempo. And you can automate the tempo. It's a little weird. So you can either control click on the tempo and say, show automation. But sometimes it's not clear where that comes up. The tempo automation is in our master track, our main right here, okay? So if I go down to Main and I select mixer, I can say song tempo. Okay? So my range is 60 to 120. So 87 is my tempo. I can go up to 200. So yeah, that's how you do it. If you want to do a sudden change of tempo, this is how you do it. You just make a point and change it like that. And you'll see our tempo jumping all over the place. It's not solo. Boh. Crazy. Alright, let's chill that out. Now, if you want to clear all automation, like I kind of want to do here, I can control click on the parameter and say delete automation. That works for basically any parameter. Okay, now, time signatures. You cannot automate time signature changes. It's weird. But if you think about automating time signatures, that's kind of a head scratcher anyway, you wouldn't really want to do that. Live deals with times with time signatures in a weird way. Like, if I double click on a clip, you can see what the time signature is here. Live says it's four or four. I change this, like, Okay, now it's 416. Sure. It's going to sound the same. Live doesn't need time signatures to tell it how to play notes. All the time signature does is change our grid, okay? So, now you can see we've got four quarter notes here for some reason. Let's go back to four, and let's do, like, a five, four. Okay? Now there's five quarter notes in the grid, but my notes are still in the same spot. They didn't adjust to a new time signature. So all time signatures really do here is tell us is change the grid so that we can see where we are. That's really it. That being said, if you want to change the time signature, it's a little different than Tempo. You're going to go up here to the same spot that we use to put locators in and you're going to right click or control click and say Insert time signature change. And then you're going to type a number slash another number. It can be whatever you want. 16 37 time. Okay? That's weird. That's the weirdest time signature that's ever existed. But there it is. I don't even know how you'd count that. But again, this time signature, it's not going to change any note. It's gonna say It's going to sound the same. It's just gonna change your grid all around. Okay? So let's delete that. So that we're back to where we are. So tempo automation, and setting different time signatures. You can set as many time signatures as you want. You just can't create a time signature, another time signature, and draw a line between them. Really wouldn't do anything anyway. 138. Downloading and uploading a session: Okay, last thing in this section, I just want to remind you that the way we have to share sessions, I'm going to be sharing a few sessions with you. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the session that we're working on and go to file, collect all, and save. Now, like I just mentioned a minute ago, this is going to pack up all of our files from all over the place and make a folder. Okay? So when you do a collect all and save, you're going to want to do this. Whenever you're going to send a session to somebody. This is going to pack everything up and make sure that they can open it. It doesn't guarantee they have all the same plugins or instruments or anything like that. But it does at least guarantee they have all the right files. So I would recommend selecting these first three files from elsewhere, files from other projects, files from your user library. Turn those on yes. Files from factory packs, this is going to make your file really big if you turn it on, if you're using a lot of stuff. So I usually leave that off, assuming that everybody has the kind of main factory packs. But you can turn it on if you want. Okay? So if I click Okay, which I'm going to do, it's going to save everything into a folder. And that folder looks like this. Okay? So when you save something, you're going to get all of these folders that have a bunch of stuff in it. So next I'm going to turn this into a zip file. For me, on a Mac, I can just control, click and say compress. Okay? And now I have that project. I should probably give it a better name than untitled project, but whatever, you get the point. Now I can send this to someone using Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever. And it should open the same as I've been using it. But without that collect all and saves step, it won't. So when I post projects in this class, they're going to look like this. They're going to be a zip file. When you get them, you're going to double click on that zip to open it, and then you're going to have all of this stuff, and you're going to open that session. Cool. Okay. Enough talking. Let's make something. 139. The "Right way" to make a track in Live: Okay, in this section, let's make a track. But to be more honest about what we're actually going to do here, let's start a track. Let's make just the beginnings of something, and I'll show you my process, what I like to do and how to take advantage of these things that we've just talked about. So what we're gonna do is we're going to put something together, play around, be creative, have a little fun. And then we're just going to do that for a few videos, and then we're going to go back to learning how to do more stuff. And then we'll make another track, okay? So sometimes in my university classes, I get so tired from, like, talking about making music all day, and I just want to, like, shut my mouth and make music. So that's what we're gonna do now, except I'm not gonna shut my mouth, unfortunately, 'cause I'm gonna talk you through what I'm doing. So, first and foremost, what is the right way to make a track in live? I am intentionally kind of baiting that question because the answer is that there is none. Anyone who says, This is the correct way to do something in live is lying. There are 100 ways to do everything in live. It's a very versatile program, and there is literally no wrong way to use it. I've seen students do things that to me, are bizarre because they didn't know how to do the more complicated way. And they end up with amazing music. So no matter how they got there, if they ended up with amazing music, they did it right. So don't let anyone ever tell you that there is a right way to use live or that there's a right way to make music at all. The way that you do it is the right way. So I'm going to show you my way. I'm going to show you how I start to put something together, and you're welcome to use that. But if you do something different, that's fine. Okay. Let's dive it. And 140. Where to start?: Okay, where do we start? For me, the answer to that question depends on what I'm doing. So, I always think about, like, who's boss? Like, who's the boss of this track that we're about to make? If I'm working on a podcast, then the director is the boss, right? So I've got, like, a structure to work with in that case, and I'm not just totally on my own to do whatever I want. If I'm working on a film or TV project, there's a boss, and it's not me. So my role in those cases is to start from not zero, right? Like, I've got a script or I've got actors dialogue or a movie or something to work with. But in this case, I have a blank slate, and I'm gonna make music for me. So who's the boss? This guy. Okay, so I'm the boss, so I can do whatever I want. So, what do I want to do? Well, I'll tell you what I want to do. I want to make Synth Wave music, because that's what I'm super into right now. I'm about two thirds of the way done with a big Synth Wave project, and I'm really into it. I'm really having fun with it. So if you're not familiar with Synth Wave, it's like, really synth heavy and very, like, uh, futuristic 80s vibes. Think like cyberpunk, that kind of thing. So, I think I know where I'm going to start. I'm going to search my browser for Synth Wave, because I know that there's this audiople of this drum loop, that's what I was looking for. There we go. Very simply drums. Okay, so I'm going to throw that drum loop on here. And I'm just going to start with this. I'm going to put this on here. We might not even use it in the end, but we're going to start by playing with this a little bit. So probably from this, I'm going to build some chords, a bassline, maybe some sound effects, some other scents, just seeing if I can make a groove out of it. I'm not going to worry about the arrangement, meaning, like, the structure of the song for now. I'm just going to try to get something going that feels like interesting music. Now, do I always start with the beat? No, I don't, actually. It's fun to start with the beat, but sometimes I just start with a sound like a sample that's inspiring me to do something. Sometimes it's a synth. Sometimes it's the beat, but not always. Okay, so I think this beat needs a little bit of work before we dive into using it. So let's chop it up a little bit. 141. 13 ChoppingUpTheBeat: Okay, let's listen to this loop, and then I think you'll see what I want to get rid of. The end of it is a little wacky. Okay. So first, I want to know if this is warped correctly. And I can tell that it is because I can see things lining up on the beats that I expect them to. But if I want to be super sure, let's hit our metronome and just listen. Pretty good. Okay, so now to get rid of this crazy fill at the end, I can do two things. I could just chop it out, select it. I'm going to press the delete key and then replace that with something. I could replace it with basically the last part of the first time through the loop. So I can go there. I stretch it back. See how that sounds. See, that works just fine. Another thing I could do would be to just smoosh this down to a four bar loop rather than an eight bar loop. This is going to be exactly what I want. I'm gonna let's loop it. Okay, the only thing I don't like about this is that there's all this reverb ringing, and then when it circles back around, it's just dry. So that's kind of unfortunate. So maybe I will stretch it all the way out and see if I can go back to that first thing we tried and just paste in the end of the other loop. Oops. Let's go there, add that. Okay, let's loop this and see if when it goes back to the beginning, if it still feels dry. It does. I think that's just in there. So let's go with this. It works. One thing I'm going to do just to make my life a little bit easier is I'm going to recombine this into one file so that I can drag it around a little bit easier. But as I was saying that, I had another idea. I wonder if I could replace this kick with one that's full of reverb. Let me try. Like this one. Could I put this? Because the deal is that this one has all the reverb on it, and the silence here is what we would call wet, meaning there's there's still decay from that snare drum happening. But here, it's just flat. So let's try taking this one. Actually, this one might be better because it's got a little bit more time. Yeah. Let's take that. So copy. I'm going to go here, V. Okay? So I took this kick drum and put it here so that it was more wet. Let's hear it. Mm. Let's hear circle around again. See, that works really well, okay? So now I'm happy with that. Now let's combine it together. So I'm going to select everything here. I'm going to hit Command J to consolidate it. Alright, now I have my new loop. This is one clip, and it is exactly how I want it. Great. Let's try to add some harmony. And 142. Harmony: Okay, let's see if we can find a harmony that works on this. Now, if you're not familiar with writing harmonies, we can't go into all of music theory in this one video, but I'll encourage you to check out some of my music theory classes or my book. So here's what I'm gonna do. I have a habit of I don't really want to deal with sound design while I'm working on the track. In other words, I'm going to throw a grand piano on this track. And I'm going to write I'm going to work on my harmony with a piano sound. Once I get it to where I want, then I'll start messing around with finding a good sound to go there. But I just like working with pianos. It's just easier. Okay, so let's do a chore progression. Turn off Loop. And let's just start here. Okay, so I'm going to do a pretty simple harmony. Let's do Let's do C minor. So I'm going to make a C. Let's hold each of these for a bar for now. So now I just need to make the chords. So C E flat G is going to be a C minor chord. Let's maybe jazz this up a little bit by putting this note down on octave. Okay. Okay, cool. Now, maybe I'll shorten this clip so this is just that C minor. I could even name it right now. C minor. Okay? Now, let's make another clip. So I'm just going to copy that C minor. Okay, so let's make another chord. I think the chord I want here is going to be like a major four chord. So let's go up to A flat, which is G sharp. So we're going to go a flat, C, E flat. Okay, and then let's drop this note down just because I like the way that that sounds a little bit better. Okay, now let's make another chord. Oh, let's rename this one A flat. Shorthand here is that if it's a minor chord, you put a lowercase M. If it doesn't have any lowercase M after it or anything else, it's just a major chord. Okay. Now, here, let's do an E flat major chord. And you might be thinking, Where am I getting this? Where am I getting these chords? I know the kind of sound I want here is a progression that would be like a 1637 in minor. If you know anything about music theory, that might make some sense. It's just something I feel like trying out. So I'm kind of just playing around with chords, and I'm going to keep them as separate clips so that I can move them around if I don't like the order. So let's make an E flat. So E flat G, B flat. Okay. Let's take this note up octave maybe this note up in octave too. Alright. That looks good. We're gonna call that E flat major, and then one more. And we're going to call this one. This is gonna be a B flat major chord. So it's going to look like a sharp, whoops, B, D and F. Alright. Now I'm looking up here, and I just want these to work kind of just to flow between each other kind of well. So let's see. I could move that note up, leave it down, but I will move this one down. Okay, so let's hear it now. Remember, this is just piano. Okay. It's not bad. Let's loop just this first half so we can try to Okay, I kind of like it. I like it in this order. And so I'm going to turn this into one clip. So I'm going to join this together with Consolidate Command J. Okay? Now we have one clip. And so now I can look at it a little closer. So let's what I'm going to do now is called voicing. So I'm going to stretch this one out. I'm just going to try to make the path of least resistance between all of these notes. Okay? So let's take this one and go down an octave. That makes this to this kind of nice. None of these connect super well. Now I'm going to add some notes in here that aren't really part of it. Like this. So I'm going to add this note. I'm just going to stretch over. Maybe this note, I'll stretch over too. Okay, you're not really gonna hear that very much in the piano because the piano doesn't sustain a whole lot, but once we switch it to a synthesizer, you will. Okay. So I think I'm cool with this chord progression for now. Let's go to find a sinth to put on it. 143. Sound Design: Okay, so I want to answer two questions first. One is that why didn't I start at the beginning of the track? Why didn't I start way back here? I don't know, actually, that's just a weird habit. You don't need to start at the beginning. Sometimes I just like to have some space to work, since I don't think this is going to be the beginning of the track. So I like to jump in in the middle and then kind of pull it apart from that and work on the arrangement of the track later. So I might go back to the beginning. Later. But even if your track doesn't end up starting at the beginning of the session, that's kind of fine. You don't need it to. So it's just a habit. You can start at the beginning if you want. Second question is, um, should we do more piano stuff before doing the sound design? Normally, probably. Normally, I'd probably do a little bit more harmony work before I switch to sound design, but I kind of just want to show you my process. So we're going to go to the sound design step now. So sound design is just a fancy word for synthesis and playing around to synthesizers. That's all it really is. So we're going to pick a synthesizer to go on this that fits the sound I want. Now, this can be a big problem for some people because there's so much stuff in live that you can just end up digging through Syth patches all day long. And it can be what's that word? There's a term for this, like paralysis of ideas, right? You can have so many ideas. So many different things can sound cool that you're like, I don't know what to do. There's just too many options, right? So that's where collections comes into play, right? So I can go here and go to SIT. I can even close up my filters, say, What's gonna sound cool? You know, I know this DX seven library that I have sounds great for synth wave stuff. Now, I kind of don't want to use it because I should use some of the Ableton instruments because that's what we're doing in this class is learning how to use Ableton. So let's go to drift. Drift is a new instrument. We'll go over, like, how this works in a lot of detail later. But let's just look at some of the presets for now. That's pretty cool. So if you find yourself in the position that I am in now, where you're just going through a whole bunch of presets and saying, You, what's gonna work here? Instead of doing that, try putting into words the sound that you're looking for. I'm looking for a dark sound with some motion to it, okay? Kind of like that. It's a dark sound. It's got some motion, some wobbliness. Let's try it. So I'm just gonna drag that over onto this track, and let's hear it. Okay. I like it, but this instrument is a slowly evolving one. And my mini clip is designed for piano where it's like, right on. So I need to slow down my chords, which is easy to do. If I double clip, click on the clip. Select All, and then X two, open it up. Okay. Now each chord takes twice as long. Okay? If you didn't see what I did there, I just went into the piano roll Editor, Command A to select A, and then X two just stretched it all out for me. Okay. Let's open up my loop brace a little bit longer now let's hear it. I like that. It's still not letting the whole thing speak as much as I want. Let's try going up and octave. I'm going to hit Command A in the piano roll Editor and then shift up arrow. Now let's hear it. Okay. I kind of like it, but we need more. I need more definition on that harmony. It's a little too ambient. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to duplicate this track. G to go over here, control, right click or Command click Duplicate. Now I have that same track. Now I'm going to put a different instrument on this one. Ah. What's that? I'm gonna solo this one. Actually, no. I'm gonna mute our other one. That's a little bright, but I don't hate it. So I'm going to keep that one and do one more. And you know what I'm going to do? This is gonna blow your mind. I'm going to go back to piano. For this one. Because here's my logic. What I'm thinking is this adds a cool texture, this adds a cool texture, and this is going to give some definition to our chords. So I'm going to take this one back down in octave, maybe even No, just. All right. Now, let's hear them all together and see what we've got. Okay, I really sort of don't like this middle one now. So let's try one other thing on that. Let's go back to instruments. Still looking at the new Meld. Let's try that on this one. Do. Okay. It's getting somewhere. It's like a power balld. But it's got potential. So the thing that I feel like this is missing right now is a baseline. So let's go to that. O. 144. Bassline: Okay, you want to know the easiest way to make a perfect baseline? Take your chord progression, duplicate it again. And then we're going to go into it, and we're going to get rid of everything, but the bottom note. Boom, there's your bassline. This is going to fit with those chords perfectly. It's not going to be the most dynamic and interesting thing in the world, but if we're just looking for bass notes to hold down the harmony, this will work great. So, let's find a cool bass. Okay, let's think about what do I want? What kind of sound do I want? Let's go to the meld instrument. Mm I want something with some motion to it. Wow. I kind of like that for a synth. Let's go to try that. Alright. This one's good and got some matrix stuff going. Let's see what it sounds like. Alright, this one clearly has some fun tuning things happening, and that's not gonna work for me right now. It sounds like just really out of tune. Wow. Let's try that one. Okay. Some of our tuning issues might be coming from our synthesizers, but let's try one more thing. Since we're just working with presets, I'm going to go down to wave table. This has some really good bases in it. Dig this. Let's try that. No Okay, this has got potential. I kind of like it. I like how kind of crazy and frantic it is. Let's try one more. Okay. This is kind of cool. I like this. I'm going to go with this. So now I'm feeling, let's do one more layer on this and then we'll move on to other things. Then we'll come back to this track again later, I think. I still want this harmony to come out a little bit more. So I think let's just put some strings on it and see what happens. 145. Strings: Okay, so for strings, I'm going to take one of these and duplicate it again, but I'm going to pull it down here. Okay? I'm going to rename it Strings. Okay? Now, let's find a good string library. If I go to Pax, I have the Ableton one, which is called orchestral strings, and they're pretty good. I have other string libraries, too, but I'm going to try the Ableton string ensemble here. So I want long slow notes. That's going to be a legato. Okay, pizzicato is going to be plucked. Staccato is going to be short, Tremlos gonna bet. So we want legato. Okay. Now, I might need to mess around with the octaves on this to really get this to speak well. I want a fairly tight ensemble, so I'm going to move these low notes up an octave. And now let's hear it. Let's just hear the strings. Okay, I don't love that. Let's go down and knock it. Right there. And let's hold off on that note. My gut was wrong. Let's take out that note. Okay, that's nice. Let's hear it in context. Okay. Now, I might not want all these things happening at the same time, but they all work. So what I might do is put together an arrangement where, you know, maybe this starts and then that comes in, this comes in, and then we go to this. And then that's where the baseline enters. Maybe strings happen in the beginning and in this part, and then we add that. So now we've got the start of a short arrangement. So let's hear what we've got. Okay, so it's not the most brilliant thing I've ever written, but it's a start to something. Okay, let's move on to some more new stuff. And 146. Introduction to Session View Editing: Okay, let's go over to Session View now and get a little bit more comfortable with producing music in Session View. Okay, so I'm going to hit Tab key, and now we're over in Session View. Now, remember what I told you before about one of the most important concepts with Session View, and that is that Session View and Arrangement View have different content areas, but they share a mixer, okay? So that means that all of these tracks have the instruments on them. Like this one has the strings, right? And this one has this synthesizer, and this one has the piano and the other synth and the other synth. Okay? They don't have any of the clips. But they have all of the settings that we had over in Arrangement View. Now, just because they don't have the clips in Session View doesn't mean that we can't get them, okay? There's an easy way to go get them. We'll do that in just a second. But I want to put this in your head first. As you're working in Session View, I want you to be thinking about each one of these little clips slots. Okay? Imagine these are each a little spinning record, okay? So you've got all these little spinning records going all over the place. Okay? Now, you want to do two things with those. First, is you want to craft what that spinning record is and making sure that it is exactly what you want. Then you're going to drop the needle on it whenever you're ready. So we're gonna have all these little spinning records, and we're going to, like, pull them in as we want them in, okay? So let's do it. 147. Moving Clips to Between the Views: Okay, so let's go get some clips from the arrangement view, okay? There's a few different ways you can do this. Obviously, we can just pull things in again if we wanted to. Like that drum loop, I could do search for Synth Wave in A, sample piano keys. And there it is, okay. But remember, I kind of cut it up and changed it, so it would be easier just to go get it. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to hit tab. Here's that loop. Now I could hit Copy. Okay? So Command C, copy, go over to Arrangement View, go to the same track and type Command V for paste, and then we're going to bring it over. Okay? That's one way. Another way is just to click and drag like we're going to move it. And then while I'm holding it down, don't let go yet, press tab with your other hand, and now I still have it, okay? And I can drop it in right there. Okay? It's all the same. Same thing with midi clips. I can grab this mini clip, hold on to it, hit tab, and I can put it on a mini track. Now, remember your instruments are on these tracks, so it's gonna matter where you put it. But there it is. I can play it. If I want to stop it If I want to stop it, I'm gonna hit this stop at the bottom here, okay? Let's actually talk about the playing and stopping of clips for a minute. 148. Playing And Stopping Clips: Okay, this deserves special attention because it can be confusing and it can be a little frustrating. So if I play a clip, okay, I hit the little play button on a clip. Okay? Now to stop it, I can press Space Bar if I want. Now, this can actually be kind of problematic because sometimes you might stop something and other things will keep going. See, I just started this clip and my drum clip took off. Okay. So to stop the drum clip, I'm going to hit that, but now this one's still going. Okay? So I'm going to go down here and hit Stop down there. Uh, so here's what you should keep in mind. Space Bar will stop everything. Okay? But when you restart, when you start up again, it's going to start all the clips that we're just playing. It's going to start those playing again, too. If you want to stop clip individually, you can hit the stop button underneath it or actually any stop button in that track. Or if you don't see one, you always have one down here at the bottom. Or if you just want to stop everything, there is a kind of master stop everything button, and it's right here. Okay? That's just going to hit all your big stop buttons. So stop all clips. And, of course, you can always hit the big stop button at the top, too, but that will function the same way that your space bar functions. So just keep that in mind. Those are our kind of main stop buttons. They're kind of peppered all over the place in a way. It's kind of strange, but you'll get used to it. Trust me. Okay, next, let's talk about the behavior of the clip slot grid here. 149. Clip Slots and Scenes: Okay, so here's how the clip slot grid works, okay? So this whole thing is called the Clip slot grid. We can play one file at a time vertically, okay? So only one file per track can be playing. Let me demonstrate by loading up a few different drum loops. Sure. Sure, maybe one more. Sure. Okay. So if I want to play this drum loop, I can play, and that's great. If I want to play another one, I'm gonna get played right underneath. Okay. Now, it's going to have warped all of these, so they're all gonna be in time. That one was, like, kind of double time, but whatever. And they're always gonna launch on the downbeat or on the global launch setting. That means that there is a setting called Global Launch, where you can say, only launch on a downbeat every bar. Okay? So if I click this one, and then I click another one, you see it blink for just a second? It's waiting for the next downbeat, and it's only going to launch on a downbeat. That makes it so you can kind of navigate through the clip slot grid all you want, and it's going to keep you from, like, launching in a weird spot and losing the beat. It's always going to launch on the downbeat. Gonna keep you tight in the groove. If you want to change that, this little setting right here, this 1 bar, that is your global launch setting. Okay? So we can say only launch something new every 8 bars. If you're doing, like, a really long set and it's complicated and you're launching clips all over the place, maybe you just want to chill for a part of it and say, every 8 bars is when something new is going to happen. Keep it easy. Or you can say none, and then things will launch right when you click them. Dangerous. Or you can say, you know, every quarter note, every eighth note, whatever you want. Okay? I'm going to leave it on 1 bar. Okay, so only one of these can happen at a time. I can't launch I can't play two at once in the same track, okay? That's true for all tracks. But I can play as many as I want horizontally, okay? So let's say, whoops. Let's say I want to play this clip, this drum groove, and this chord progression. It's cool. Now I want to switch to a different drum group. Kind of a dt. And let's say there's more stuff here. Here's our strings. Okay. So maybe now I want to add in this play the sinth. Maybe the strings. A This is our baseline. I put the core progression in it. So I can move around and launch as many as I want horizontally, but only one at a time vertically, okay? Now, on top of that, if I want to launch a whole bunch of stuff all at once, let's say I want to launch everything in this row, okay? The row is called a scene, okay? And I can launch the whole row all at once by going right here. Go to a different scene. Okay. Now notice that when I launch I I launch this first, then I go to the second one. It's going to launch the Stop button, right? So it's going to stop anything that doesn't have a clip going in it. It's going to hit the stop button. If you want it to not do that, you can select some stuff and say Command E. That's going to hide the stop button, so that this one will now continue playing as I launch. See how this one just keeps going? Because there's no stop button. No one told it to stop, so it's going to keep going. Now, this is how people very often navigate Session View. They go to the scene and they change the name. So it's do Command R and S intro Command R Verse chorus. First two, whatever. Okay? So now we go to the verse. Launch the right there. First two. So launching by scene, which is the row is how it's often done. But again, don't forget. You can do things however you want. Okay, let's move on. 150. Setting up loops: Okay, let's talk about setting up one of these clips so that it is exactly how we want it for our imaginary, little spinning record. Okay? Let's go back to this clip. So let's stop everything and hit play here. Okay, this is familiar to us. We've already messed with this. Okay, so first, let's make sure this loops. So a lot of things in session view, by default will loop. But because we pulled this over and it wasn't set up to loop in arrangement view, it's not set up to loop here. So in order to get it to loop, all we have to do is turn on loop down here. Okay? Now it's going to loop. I'm going to turn it down a little bit so I can talk over it. So we have some of our same settings here. We have warp settings, you know, pitch volume. This should be familiar to us by now. We also have these launch settings. We can do some special things with how we launch this clip. We can say, use our global launch setting. That's what this global thing means here. Legato means that if we launch another clip, it's going to pick up where this one left off. You can adjust the velocity and we can set a different type of launch method. Trigger means we're going to hit it and it's going to start going. Gait means while I'm holding the play button down, it's going to play. But as soon as I let go, it's going to stop playing. Toggle means I'm going to press it once to start it playing and again, to stop it playing. And I'm not sure how repeat is different than trigger just with a general loop. But, okay, so what if I wanted this to loop only half as long? Okay? What if I wanted this to be just a four bar loop. Okay? All I have to do is find my loop brace, which is this and pull it in to be half as long, okay? Okay. Now, what if I want this to have a little fill? What if when I launch this, I wanted to go Tahom, bah, boom, a and then start on the downbeat, right? Here's what I can do. This little arrow right here, this means, where is this gonna start from when I launch it, okay? So, 99% of the time, we leave that at the beginning, but it doesn't have to be at the beginning. I could put it right here. Let's put it right here. No, I take that back. Let's put it right here. So now when I launch this, we're gonna hear beat four and then beat one. Or, sorry, we're going to hear the fourth measure, and then it's going to go back to the first measure, and then it's gonna loop throughout the whole thing. Okay? So when I launch it, watch what happens. Right? So that's a way to get a little fill in the beginning of it. Okay, I'm going to move this back to the beginning. So I can make my loop as short as I want. Here's just 1 bar. Sure. Extend it open. One thing you'll notice in session to you is that we have this little pie right here. That's just kind of a visual cue to tell us when the beginning of the loop is coming around again. If I make it longer, Now you can see it. So when you're performing and you're doing a bunch of stuff all at once on stage, these little pies are handy to tell you when the ending of the loop is going to come and so that you're ready to do the next thing that you plan on doing. Okay, let's talk about setting up some strange loops, like a loop on beat two. This is a good way to understand how Session View actually works. 151. One-Shot Looping: I remember back when I was learning how to use Session View, and somebody showed me this thing that I'm about to show you, and it just went click and everything made sense about Session View. So let's do it. So first, I'm going to find a kick sample. Sample one shot. I just want to thump. Okay? Not bad. Let's do this one. Okay, I'm gonna throw that somewhere. How about right there. Okay, here's my kick. Okay, now, that is a very short sample. If I loop that sample, that is basically useless. Okay? Now, I can't loop it right now because that sample isn't warped. I have to turn warping on to loop it. So if I loop it, it's just going to do this. Watch. That's not very useful to me. Okay? I want that to be in time, okay? So I want that to be on a quarter note, Okay? So now, in order for that to be a perfect quarter note, I have to make sure that the length of this loop is a perfect quarter note, and it's not. So let's take let's make this loop longer. See, I can loop the empty space here. Now I can get here, and now this is a quarter note, one to 1.2. Okay, that is a first beat. Now if I launch this, now it's a quarter note. Okay. Now, this might be all you need. That's what's kind of cool about this, is that, like, if I have this hook going, and I just want a pattern that is just, like, a solid kit. I see one kit, set it to right? I don't need a whole loop here if it's just one note. Okay? So let me set this to loop. Okay, now, but what if I want it on every other note? Okay? That's easy enough. All I have to do is stretch this out, right? 'Cause now it's going to go kick, nothing, kick, nothing. And that kick, because the loop length is two beats, it is going to be perfectly on forever. I could let this play for 20 years, and that is never going to fall off the beat. It's just gonna be perfect. Okay, now, what if I want to do the same thing? But I want the kick to be on Beat two instead of beat one? How do I do that? Think about it for a minute. To do this, I put silence on the back. So if I want this to be on beat two, I need silence at the front. So watch this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my loop position. I'm going to type in negative one. Okay, now I'm at a whole bar in the negative. That's not what I want. So I just want these two beats, okay? Here's one and here's negative one. So we're going to start. We're going to move our start position back. Okay. And our end position forward end position isn't really going to matter here, but I like to move it out of the loop brace just to be safe. Okay? So now we're going to start here at negative 1.4 and play one. Now it's gonna be on Beat two. Okay? So you can go negative. Alright, so hopefully that kind of opened your mind as to what we can do here in Session View. 152. Clip Envelopes: So what about automation? You remember that in arrangement view, we could draw a line. We could say, I want this to get louder over time, right? And we would say, start here and here and draw a little line using automation mode. We don't have automation mode here on Session View. We don't need it. So here's how we do automation in Session View. Let's go to a clip. Okay? We have two tabs up at the top of our clip view. We have sample and envelopes. Now, we're going to go to envelopes here, and we see automation and modulation. And here we see automation. Now, envelopes in this setting, envelope kind of means repeating automation, like automation that kind of comes back around over and over and over, which is what our automation will do here if because it's looping, you'll see the term envelopes used a lot more in synthesis. So when we get into the heavier synthesis stuff, which we will be doing soon, that term will make more sense. For now, let's just think of it as a looping automation. So here we can automate something. We can say, mixer track volume. Sure. And we can say, this is going to start really quiet and get really loud. If I make another point. Cool. Now, if I play this clip, Okay. Cool. Now, we'll come back to this modulation setting later. We don't need it right now. Just remember that anything you can automate is going to show up here and remember that you can switch to a different automated parameter just by clicking on it. So here's our panning and our mixer. If I click on that, our automation goes to panning. Okay? So I can pan things around all I want. Now, what's tricky about this is that we have to remember that our automation is going to loop back. So in this case, what's going to happen is my panning is going to be right here, and then it's going to loop back, and it's going to jump to down here. It's going to be like really kind of strange. Well, we're not going to hear it because of the volume automation, but the volume automation has the same problem, right? We ramp up, and then we jump back down to nothing because it's looping. So we could avoid that by just making sure we start and end in the same place like that. Now it won't be so jerky, but it's not very interesting musically. But there is one other way we can kind of play with this idea, and it is through this button here, linked and unlinked. So let's go to a new video and talk about unlinked automation. 153. Linked and Unlinked Automation: Okay, this concept can be a little bit like, like quantum physics, kind of, in a way that it can mess with your head a little bit. But basically, here's the deal. What if I had you've probably heard this before where there's, like, a pattern that's happening in a track, and it, like, there's a filter on it, and it slowly that filter slowly opens up over a long period of time, and it gives us this big energetic moment. Let's do that. So here's what I mean by filter. If I go to Effex, we'll do this more later, but I'm going to go to I'm going to go EQ eight on this track. I'm going to turn off everything except one band, give it some resonance, and we'll do that. Okay, so what I want to automate here is this frequency. Okay? So I'm going to click on it. Then I'm going to go over to our clip view and make sure EQightFrequency A is selected. Okay. So now what I can do is say it's closed and it's open. Okay? Here's what that's going to do. Okay. We'll talk about how to use EQs and what they're actually doing later. But what I want you to understand is that right now, this is cool that this is happening over the course of a loop of, you know, 4 bars. That's cool. But what if I want it to happen over the course of 8 bars or 16 bars or 32 bars, right? I can't do that because I got my loop is only 4 bars. That's where this unlinked setting comes in. So I'm going to click this Linked, unlinked. Okay? Now we see this is the length of our loop. That's cool. But I can also say I can say length and make this way longer. Now, basically you can imagine that that clip is looping, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times. Let's make it eight for good measure. So now I can say that parameter is going to go over eight measures. Okay? So now the clip is going to loop, and this automation is going to start going. And then the clip is going to loop again, the automation is going to continue continue, and it's going to continue over many cycles of the loop before it starts over again. Okay? So let's check it out. Let's go look at the So now it's going very slow. So we're halfway now. Maybe I shouldn't have made this so long. Oh, my panning automation is still in there, still chumping around because the panning automation is still linked, right? So it's still a 1 bar loop of automation. So not everything has to be linked or unlinked. Okay. And then it closes up again. So this parameter is unlinked. But if I go back to mixer and my panning, this one is still linked. So it's going to repeat every cycle of the loop. Okay. So let me say this one more time. When we're unlinked, we are not bound to the length of the loop with our automation. Our automation can be as long as we want. But when we're linked, our automation can only span the length of one cycle of the loop. Let's look at that on our kick here. See, this is I'm going to switch this back to being every two beats on the beat. Okay. Now let's go here. Now our automation is gone. Now I'm going to say the length of this will say, I don't know, long. So now I can change this over time. So these automation settings stay with the clip. So if I go to a new clip, even if it's on the same track, it doesn't have that automation. The automation, whether it's linked or unlinked, stays with the clip, not just on the track. Okay, let's move on. But 154. Tempo and Meter Changes: Okay, a couple more sort of utility things in Session View. What if we want to change the time and meter in Session View? We're going to do that in the scene launch, okay? We can say when I launch this scene, I want to change the tempo. I want to launch this scene, I want to change that tempo. Here's how we do it. If you're in a clip, so we're going to go over to these scene launches. And when I click on one, you might see different things. But what we want to see is this. If you don't see that, click the main heading in your main track here and then go click on one of your scene launch buttons, and it should come up. There we go. Okay, so we can say the tempo here is, you know, let's say we want to go down to 108. Okay? Now you can see that this clip, the play button on this scene launch turned this, like, teal color. That means that there's, like, tempo automation information in it. So this one, let's say, goes down to one oh four. Sure. Let's say this one is going to change our meter to 34. Now, again, that's just going to it's really just going to change the grid, but it can be valuable depending on what you're doing. You definitely want to do it. If your music is actually in 34 and you want to launch on downbeats, you need to make sure that Live knows that. So now you can see, if you look at our global tempo, if I launch intro, it goes to one oh eight. If I launch verse, it goes back to stays at one oh eight because it doesn't have there. This one drops down to one oh four. This one stays at one oh four, but switches to 34. So what we realized is that this one doesn't do anything. It doesn't have any tempo information in it. So if you start putting tempo and meter changes in one scene launch, you should get in the habit of putting it in all of them. Just so that if you jump into one, it is set to the right tempo and meter. Because if we don't give it any information, it's just going to keep doing what the previous one was. So it's a good habit of if you're going to change the tempo or meter in these scene launches, do it for all of them. Cool. Okay, a couple more quick things. 155. The Back to Arrangement Button: Okay. You may remember we've looked at this before where if I've been playing around in Session View and I go back to Arrangement View, this is all grade out, right? That's intentional. That's by design. So I want to go over this one more time while we're here. What this means is that Live is saying, Hey, I can only play Session View or Arrangement View. At a time. And if you tell me to play something, I'm going to play Session View. That's what it's saying. So it's giving me this orange button here. This orange button here is called back to Arrangement. That means, hey, I'm done with Session View. Let's listen to Arrangement View. So if I click on it, everything comes back, okay? Until I go over here again, and then I kind of can take control of stuff all over again. And now, if I go back, these two tracks are great out because they're the only ones I touched. So these two tracks are not going to play from Arrangement View. They're going to play from Session View. So if I want to take those tracks back to arrangement view, I can do two things. I can hit back to arrangement, and that's going to bring everything back. Or I can just click these little arrows here and that's going to bring them back. And now our back to arrangement button goes away because we're firmly in arrangement. Don't forget about that back to Arrangement button. I can't tell you how many questions I get from people who are saying, everything in my arrangement view is grade out and I can't hear it. What's going on? What did I do wrong? And they start digging through their settings and trying to figure out what's going on. That's not the problem. It's just that orange button. Click that, go back to Arrangement view. Live just wants to know what you want to listen to. That's all that's happening. Okay, now let's talk about recording to arrangement. 156. Record to Arrangement View: Okay, let's say I'm working on Session View. I've made something cool, but now I want to, like, capture it, right? I want to capture my performance of it in a way, because I'm going to go through. I'm going to launch some scenes, I'm going to do some stuff. And I want everything I click to be recorded. So what you're going to do what you're actually asking to do with that is, can I record what I do into the arrangement, right? And use Super Can? Let's do it. So I'm going to go over to the arrangement view, and I'm going to start way out here because I don't want to record over that. Okay, so I'm going to put my cursor right there. Now I'm going to go back over to Session view. I don't have to arm anything to record. I'm just gonna hit record. Okay? Now I'm going to start playing. Okay? Well, that's ramping in. Let's hear that. Okay, maybe let's launch our verse Oh, I had this track solo. Let's solo. And let's launch our next set. I like this so much. Now, maybe, let's just launch this kick. And this stop that, launch that.'s adjust the volume for this a little bit. Let's go. Okay, so let's just say I just recorded a whole, you know, 20 minute jam. Now I can go over to Arrangement View and see I just recorded everything I did. I'm going to hit back to Arrangement View. This is everything that launched and when it launched. We can even look at when I started messing around with the volume back then, if I go to automation mode, there it is. That was me messing around with the volume. So everything recorded when I launched it. If I hit play on this, it's going to sound exactly like it's going to exactly like it did when I was just playing it in Session View. So this is called record to Arrange. You don't have to do anything special. All you have to do is in Session View, hit your global record button, and then start going. And it's going to record it to Arrangement View. This is actually really fashionable to do lately, because what we see a lot happening is deejays, like big name dejas going on stage, playing like a two hour set. Using Session View and recording it to arrangement, right? And then they get offstage. They might go back to their hotel. They're going to tidy it up a little bit. Maybe they'll be like, Oh, whoops, I accidentally started something there before I was ready. You know, this is a little early. Let's stretch that out. Let's make sure this comes in right where I want it to. Maybe put a gap here because it sounds cool. So just maybe fix it a little bit. And then export this, post it to SoundCloud, you know, literally an hour after their whole set. So that's how you do that. It's a pretty cool trick. Okay, um, that's enough Session view for now. Keep playing with it. Session view is like an instrument. It really requires practice. So keep it going. Keep working with it and practicing with it if you're interested in working that way. Now, if you want just something to practice with, I'll give you this session. There's nothing particularly brilliant in it, but you can have it. And maybe it'll be a starting point for you to do something with. 157. Beats!: Alright. Let's make some beats. Now, in a way, this section is a little strange because everything that we're doing is about making beats in a way. I mean, it's about making music, and this is just another term for music. So everything that we're doing in all of these classes should be contributing to your ability to make great music and make great beats or soundtracks or whatever it is you make. But in this section, I want to focus on drums, okay? So the modern term of a beat means like drums with means, like, basically, like an instrumental track, really, or a short loopable instrumental track. But what I'm really going to focus on here is drum programming. And then in the next section, we're going to focus on synths and adding more layers to it. So we will make kind of a traditional beat. But we're going to focus on drums here. So we're going to go through some techniques for drum programming here. Remember, you can do whatever you want. There's no wrong way to make stuff with live. So I'm just going to show you some techniques here, some techniques that I use, some techniques that other people use that have showed me and different tools that Live has that make drum programming a little bit easier. Okay, so let's dive in and talk about techniques for making killer drums. 158. Terms and Definitions: Okay, before we dive into Beats, I want to get us a little more comfortable with the grid and revisit this one more time because it's going to get really important. So what you need to be able to do is look on my screen here. What am I looking at here? What do each one of these numbers represent? You think, you know? If you said a measure, then you're correct. Each number here is one measure or 1 bar. Okay? What do each of these blocks represent? What is this in relation to that bar? If you said one beat, you're correct. If you didn't say one beat, then I'm going to explain it again. Okay, so let's look at Y. Remember that the whole number 17, 18, 19, that is the first digit in this three digit number. So 17 means 171 dot one, bars, beats, 16th notes. So we are on bar 17, the beginning of it, one, one. If I go here, we're at 31, 1731. That means the 17th bar, the third beat and the first 16th note. And we're not seeing the 16th notes here because we're not zoomed in enough. So let's go in deeper. Now we're seeing the 16th notes, okay? So one, two, three, four. Okay? Then it starts over. One, two, three, four. Okay, so these are going to be kind of important because we're going to be making a pattern in four bar chunks. Usually, sometimes two bar chunks, sometimes 1 bar chunks. But we're going to need to go through here and say, Okay, what's happening on Beat four? What's happening on Beat three? What's happening on Bet three. So getting comfortable with the grid and what you're looking at is going to be really important. Don't forget about this little clue down here. Okay? This shows that my grid is showing me quarter notes. That is these quarter notes. I can't tell you how many times I've been like in the weeds, working on something, and I, like, programmed, like, this complicated beat only to realize I was like, thinking working on quarter notes. But I'm really looking at 1024th notes because I wasn't paying attention to the grid, and then I hit play and it just goes, and it's just impossibly fast. Okay, so pay attention to where you are on the grid. Otherwise, you're gonna have to kind of remake everything. Cool. Time saving tip. Okay. Let's go into some techniques. 159. Working with Loops: Okay, so we're going to start by using existing loops and chopping them up. Okay? So here's a fun little time saving tip. If you want to find a whole bunch of loops on your system, you could search through here and find drum loops. Like we could go drums and then go sample. And these are going to be some drum hits. So fills, some single hits, whole tracks. But if you want to quickly find drum, just like drum loops, here's something that I always do. Most of the time, if a drum loop has been kind of professionally made and found its way onto your system, it's going to be called some creative title for that loop, and then it's going to say the BPM in the title. So it's going to say, like, like, burnt Cookies loop 110 BPM. So if you just search for BPM, you're going to find a whole bunch of loops drum loops. And some other stuff. Okay, so let's just find something kind of interesting here. Wow. Okay, so I'm going to drag this one in here. I'm just going to work with audio loops for now. So what do we remember about working with loops? If I drag it in and it perfectly fills some amount of measures. So in this case, two measures, and it goes right up to the end, right? It's like, kind of perfectly in a two measure box. Then we can kind of guess that it's warped correctly. When you see something that looks like that, like, it's more than two solid measures, then it's probably not warped right, but this one is probably warped right. So let's turn on our metronome and double check. Cool. That sounded pretty good to me. Alright, so we got a loop. What can we do with this? The most fun thing to me about this is chopping this up and trying to make it our own in some way. We could just use this assuming this is a royalty free loop or a loop I paid for or something, I could just use it as it is. There's nothing wrong with that as long as, you know, you've purchased it and it's cleared. But sometimes it's nice to make things your own. So let's see how we can turn this into something that is unique to us. And the first way we're going to do that is by chopping it up and putting it back together. 160. Chopping up loops: Okay, so what I want to do here is chop this up by transient, okay? That means every attack I'm going to make into its own clip. Now, there's a few ways to do this. There's kind of a manual way and an automatic way. I want to show you the manual way first just so that you understand what we're doing. And then I'll show you another way to do this. Okay? So in order to chop this up, I just need to get the cursor as close as I can to every attack, every transient. Now, this one, looks like I'm not going to be able to get right on there, but what I actually want is not that quiet part, but that loud part. So I'm going to go right there and command E to cut. Okay? Here's a little transient. Let's grab that. There's a big one. That might be one. Why not? That might be one. That looks like one. That looks like one. I'm just kind of eyeballing it. It's putting little slices. I could go right there, but same thing there. Alright, that's all of them. Okay, cool. No, I kind of feel like this is one. Let's grab that one. And there was another one over here, that one. Good enough. Okay. So now just using Command E, I've chopped this all up. Now, it's still gonna sound the same. I haven't made any changes to it yet. Okay, cool. Let's loop these 2 bars, okay? So I'm just gonna select that whole area. Both those bars command L to loop. Okay, cool. Now, let's piece this together our own way. So let's say I kind of want that so I'm going to move this onto a new track, another audio track, but I'm going to kind of shuffle things up. So what do I want where? Let's take these small little quiet things and put them let's zoom out so we're looking so we know what we're looking at. So I'm looking at quarter notes where the numbers are, okay? So this is a quarter note. This is a quarter note, but I'm actually going to put this maybe halfway through the previous quarter note. Let's grab this. I'm going to do this three times on the three 16th. Okay, so this is the first, second, 16th, third, 16th. Might be kind of cool. And then let's grab this on beat four. Maybe this on the second half of beat four. And then that that maybe that. I'm just kind of randomly placing stuff. If it doesn't work, I'll adjust it. Let's copy that one over to there. I put that there. Sure. Okay, now let's solo this second track and listen to what we just made by kind of almost randomly, not totally random because I kind of can see where the big beats are, but I'm really just moving stuff around. So here's our first shot at it, and we'll see where we landed. Okay. Um, I don't think I like this beat here. So I'm going to copy this because I liked this thing. Let's put this right there. Let's take that out and put that right there. Sure. That's not bad. That's how it works. Okay, so that went pretty well. I'm kind of liking what I have here. Okay? So let's go back up to this track and delete that extra stuff that I didn't use. And let's say this is my new track. That's great. Now, I've made this drum loop kind of my own in some ways. Now, there's a funny little trick that'll work a lot of the time to, like, supercharge this. So let me show you how that works. 161. Consolidating & Doubling: And Okay, so I'm going to do two things. The first thing I'm going to do is consolidate this, which is going to turn it back into one loop. Okay? So command so I'm going to select what I want, Command J. All right. Now we have R loop. What I could do now is export this and give it a name like my loop, right? And add this to my arsenal of loops that I've made, drum loops that I've made. And that's cool. I can do that. But what I the second kind of trick I want to do is I'm going to take the original loop back in. Okay? Now, I'm gonna play these at the same time. I'm gonna combine these together and layer them. The only thing I'm gonna do that's different is, let's solo this one. And where that kick hits, I'm gonna cut it out. Okay, I think that's a kick. This might be a kick, too. Let's see. Okay, I'm gonna cut out. That kick. Okay, I'm gonna cut out this kick and cut out this kick. Okay. Now, so let me explain what I'm doing here. So this is our loop that we just made. This is the original loop, and I'm going to layer this. I'm gonna play them both at the same time. But if they both have that big kick sound, it's just going to be too much kick. So I'm going to get rid of that kick, and now I'm going to play them both at the same time and see what I have. Okay, I'm going to turn the original one down quite a bit so that it feels like macho. I like it. Okay. So now let's consolidate this top one. But I need to consolidate this as a full two measure loop. So this isn't going to do it. Okay? I want this to be a full two measure loop so that I can easily move it around and play with it. So if I just do this, it's going to be this I don't know, eight beats or so. But that's not what I want. I need this whole two bar loop. So I'm going to highlight this whole 2 bars, and now I'm going to hit Command J, and now it is a full two bar loop. So I can play these at the same time. Okay. Now, you might say to yourself, C I consolidate these two things together? You can't do that. Consolidating only works on a single track. I could export these as one thing or render them or record them onto a new track and make a single clip that is the two of them together. However, I don't want to do that right now because if I'm making a track or something, I might want the ability to do something like this, like have have this one come in and out. So I kind of want to keep them separate so that I can play around with the density of the beat, it being more dense when they're both in, and less dense when just one of them's in. I might even want just this beat by itself, right? So now I have the possibility of three beats. This one solo, this one solo, and then the two of them together. Okay, a bit they're subtly different, especially these two. But still, they're giving me more material to work with. So experiment with this. This is a technique that I use a lot. It's just kind of a fun way to get some new ideas going. So like I said, this method of cutting them up using Command E on the transients is one way to do it. There is another way to do a similar thing. And let's learn that now. 162. Slice to New MIDI Track: Okay, let's do this again using some middy magic. Okay, so I'm going to actually leave this alone because I kind of like it, but I'm going to take our original loop again. Okay, so I'm going to take our original loop again and go out here. So here's again. So what I'm going to do with this is a technique called slice to New Mi Track. Okay? So basically, what we're going to do is we're going to ask Live to chop this up, and there's a few different ways it could do that. I'll show you that in a second. And then put it into a midi instrument and let us use it that way. Okay, so here we go. In order to chop it up, we're going to control click on that clip or right click and we're going to go down to slice to New MiTrack, okay? Now it's going to say, how do you want to slice it? By transient? That would be what we just did automatic or manually. So if we say slice by transient, it's going to take every attack point and turn that into a new clip, just like what we did. And that might be best for this particular clip, but we have a few more options. We could say by warp marker if we did a lot of warping to it, which we didn't, so that's not a good option here. Every bar, that's just going to give us two samples. That's not very good. Or we could say every half note, quarter note, eighth note, 16th note. Quarter note would be the best one here because that's where I see the beats lining up the most. But that's not great for this. So I'm going to go transient. And then there are these slicing presets. I always just use the built in. Okay? And this says the current clip region is eight beats long. This will result in 21 slices. Cool. Let's say Okay. Okay, now here's what is going to happen. It made a new mini track. It's right here. We can open that up with this arrow. And now it looks like it's just playing through a bunch of notes. But let's examine what this is a little bit more. Let's double click on this and open up this mini clip. So here's what happened. So you can see here, it says slice one, slice two, slice three, slice four. So what this is doing, it looks like it's just going up and playing like a big weird scale or something, but it's actually playing through the whole one slice at a time. And the slices are different lengths. So this shows kind of where they are. So we can see we can line up. We can say, like, this one is probably that big hit right there, right? This one is that first kick sound. So if I solo this mini clip and play it, it's gonna sound more or less the same. Right? Blue bit. Okay. But this means more than that because there's a few different things I could do here. First, I could just very easily rearrange this by saying, Okay, I want this here, this there, this there, this, there and just start playing around with moving things to different spots. I can, you know, literally move anything anywhere. I could put this here if I wanted. Okay? Let's I'm just randomly shuffling things around, but okay, now this is what we have. Okay, it's like, super frantic, whatever. So one thing we could do is move around the midi notes and create our own beat that way, that's pretty similar to what we were doing before when we just manually chopped up things here. The first time. But another thing we could do is just play this in with our midi keyboard. So now I'm using my midi keyboard to play this in. If we look at the instrument, this is what's called a drum rack instrument. Each of these little dots is a slice of that clip. And I could find tuning. Right? If I double click on this, I can see what it found. And I could adjust it and change it and do things if I wanted to just volume, whatever. We'll go more into how this works shortly. Actually, I think in the next video, but this is a mini instrument. I can play it with my keyboard. So I could just play and but there's yet a third thing I can do. Let's go to drums clear out our search. And let's just find a clip that is a drum pattern. Okay. Now, remember how MIDI works, right? Like these midi clips are going to be drums, but they're just midi notes, right? Okay. This one's cool. Let's take it. If we put this clip on this track, it's going to do this drum pattern through these sounds. In other words, we're going to play this pop rock straight pattern using these crazy sounds. So here's what that sounds like. Okay? Not very interesting. Let's find another one. Let's try this one. I kind of like that. Actually, if we put that over top of this beat, which was the one we sliced up, we get some kind of cool results. I kind of like that. I kind of like that a lot. That's Lupus. Okay. Now, that's a far cry from our original loop, which was this. Right? So by doing that slice to Numidi track, we've really changed it up and created something completely different. Okay, let's go back into this drum rack. And let's explore how drum racks work a little bit. 163. Working with Drum Racks: I see. So a drum rack is a mini instrument. It's designed for drums, but it kind of doesn't have to be. You can do anything you want with it. But we get these kind of pads that show us what's happening. So in a case like this, we made one by doing the slice to new midi track, but we can just make one from scratch, and we'll do that in just a second in the next video. For now, I just kind of want to explore what's here. What we're seeing is a few different things kind of all at once. So here is where all of these boxes is where our samples are stored, okay? We can play them by hitting this play button. It's a quiet one. Or am I muted? Yes. Okay. We can mute it, so this one never plays or we can solo, so only this one plays, it's cool. If we double click on the slice, we can see effectively what we have here is another midi instrument. This is a midi instrument called a simpler. It's basically just a tiny sampler. And so Live has loaded this simpler instrument onto every one of these slices, okay? So they all have a simpler instrument on them, and and they all contain a little piece of that drum loop. So there's a lot of things I can do with simpler. We'll go into, like, the deep dive into the simpler and, like, what every dial means soon. Don't worry about that. But I also have these dials out here. These are called macros, and we're going to see these all over the place once we start getting into instruments. But these are some controls are going to affect all the samples. Okay, so loop length, start offset. I can kind of squeeze forward where the sample starts and stops. This set of four, we're going to see a lot. Attack, decay, sustained release. This is a very common thing that you'll see everywhere. This just kind of has to do with the shape of the sound, how long it sustains, whether it fades out or just comes to an end. Does it fade in or just start right on it? So we can kind of sculpt the sound a little bit more there. Again, we'll do a ton of this when we get into sound design. So one kind of tricky thing is that if you want to play this with a midi keyboard, you have to look here. So this is basically the range of your whole midi keyboard as if it was all done in these little blocks. So if I did this, Okay? I'm playing a midi note, but I'm not hearing it. And here's why. I'm playing a midi note down here. It's too low. These ones, the lighter gray color, that's where there's a sample. Okay? So I need to go up higher. There we go, to get to where my samples are. Similarly, you might play some notes and be like, way too high, okay? So if you're playing notes and you're not hearing them, Make sure that you're playing in the right range. Look at this little grid to see where you are, and then you can go down. Now, here's a pro tip if you're working with a drum rack. Rename your slices, okay? And this is why. Watch this. Okay? This is some kind of kick. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to do Command R, and I'm going to say kick. This is kind of nothing. And when you do this slice to new Mi clip, you're going to get some of these nothing samples. So I'm going to rename these and just call this one dash dash. That's kind of neat. Let's call this quiet kick. Okay, and this is a bright kick. This is, like, almost like a finger snap sound. Let's call that snap. Okay, there's our snare. It's kind of neat. It's almost like a gunshot. Let's call it a gunshot. That's kind of nothing. Okay, let's just go with those for now. Normally, I would go through all of them. Um, if you have more, you can scroll up and down through this, which is what I was just doing here. Okay, so I've renamed these bottom eight. If I go into a mini clip and look at the notes here, they all just say slice 21, slice 15, whatever. But the ones I renamed show up correctly here. So that means if I'm going to make a new clip. So up here, I'm going to double click. I'm going to make a new drum clip. And let's make it a little longer. Okay, now I can kind of see what I'm doing. Now I see kick snare, do this gunshot thing. Maybe gunshot, quiet kick, snap. No, that's bright kick. Snap. And maybe I want to do that whole thing twice. Command D, slide it over. Okay. Let's see what I made there. This might be nothing. That's kind of neat, actually. Let's loop that. Well, it's a little happy, but I works. So now I'm just making more stuff with this same crazy clip. So you can see why renaming those slices is valuable. Like, I know I don't want to use this one or that one. Now let's talk about making a new drum rack. Let's say you just want to make your own drum rack from scratch. You can totally do that. Let's go and talk about how to do that. 164. Creating your own Drum Racks: Alright, let's start from scratch with a drum rack. Let's go let's go down to a new track. Let's just make a new midi track. So Command, Shift, T, New MiTrack, okay? Instruments, drum Rrack. Just go to drag an empty one onto this track. Okay? Empty drum rack. Now we just see all of our blocks, but there's nothing on them. Okay? So what we can do is we can drag a sample just right onto these spots. So let's say I want to go kick. Okay? Let's clear our search, go to A, and then say kick. And let's find an audio sample one shot, kick. Okay? Let's find the kick we want. And let's build a drum kit. So let's use this 90s kick. I'm gonna put that here. Okay? So now it automatically loaded that simpler device that I was talking about before and put that sample in it. Okay? So here's what it sounds like. Cool. Let's find a snare. That's cool. Put that one right there just so. Let's maybe do another snare. Snare grit. Sure. Put that one right there. And let's find a few different high hats. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. Okay. So I just made a drum rack. I could save this drum rack as, like, my cool drum rack if I hit this little save button right here. But now we can make something with it by programming on this track or we could actually just grab this mini clip and say, Cool. Now let's hear this beat through it. Okay. Why does that sound so random? Look at these pads up here. There's all kinds of things that we don't have, and we're not lining upright. So let's see here. So we've got kick. We're using the C sharp. Let's move that up here. Anything we're not using, I'm just going to move up to a note that we are using or down to a note that we are using. Okay, let's take all of these and just move them down. Sure. Okay? Ooh, looks like I missed some. There we go. So these notes aren't sounding because we haven't put a sample there yet. So I'm just gonna move them down to where we have samples. Okay? Now, let's hear it. Okay? That's a mess. Let's quantize that. Command U. That didn't help. So, we might have to make our own for this. So let's make a new mini clip. Let's take it out to be 2 bars long. Okay. And let's put our kicks on our downbeats. Let's just do, like, a four on the floor kind of thing here. That means, like, a kick on every downbeat. Let's do our snare here. We'll just do kind of almost a techno thing here. And then I'm just going to kind of randomly do a whole bunch of these high hats I like little ticky sounds happening all over the place. Okay, I'm just going to copy this. Do it again there, maybe adjust it like that. Okay. Let's hear that. Okay, well, that's not bad. I kind of accidentally made some weird syncopation with one of these high hats. Which is cool. I like it. Okay, so making a drum rack from scratch is super easy. You can drag whatever you want on it. Watch this. We could even go back up to our original drum clip. And say, I want to add this snare drum. I'm gonna copy that and paste it out here. Let's tear that, make sure I got it. Yeah, I want that snare. So okay, cool. So I just copied it and pasted it out here. Now let's go down to that drum rack so I can see this grid. I'm just going to grab this beat and plop it right there, not this beat, but that snare hit. And now I have it. In my drum rack. So you can take anything from anywhere and put it inside that drum rack. Now, you can get even more complicated with drum rack by adding more things to this. But let's leave it there for now. We're gonna go deeper into the drum rack once we get into instruments and sound design in, I think, part five of this series of classes. So hold on to that. But now you know everything you need to know about the drum rack in order to start making really cool drum patterns. So, play around with it. Have some fun. 165. Recording/Writing Drum Racks: Alright, let's reinforce what we already know about recording MIDI and apply that to our cool new drum rack that we just made. Okay? So let's say I want to play something on my keyboard and record it. Okay? So first, I'm just going to I'm going to kind of fiddle around to find my notes. Okay? As I can see, I'm too high. I'm going to hit my octave down button on my MIDI keyboard. Still too high, Octive down. Still too high. Octave down. There we are. So let's see. Okay, so first pass through, I'm just going to do kick and snare. Okay, so let's go out here. I'm going to record on this track. Do I have my Metrodome set up to give me 1 bar count in? Let's turn that on. Okay, here we go. Whoa. Let's slow down. I'm about to play keyboard here. Let's go down to actually, let's go down to really slow. Let's go down to 82, okay? Because one of the awesome things about Mitty is I can record as slow as I want and then speed it up and make it really cool. So here we go. Okay. So kind of turned into kind of a weird, like, old timey waltz kind of thing, but that's okay. Now let's overdub on it some of those high hats, okay? So if I click this plus, now I can overdub on top of this. And what I want to fun is all of these high hats. Let's see. Okay, so I'm going to use these three notes. And I'm gonna do something weird here. I'm just going to kind of hit these notes as fast as I can, and then we'll quantize them to make them sound good. Here we go. Okay. So that looks like a mess, but let's see if we can fix it. So I'm just gonna go to these high hats. I'm gonna do Command U to quantize them. And then let's turn and then let's hear what we got. Okay? Something went weird there with my kicks. Okay. Let's take all my velocities. I think my velocities are just really strange. Let's crank those up. Okay, let's tighten up this one. Okay. Yeah, not bad. But recording, overdubbing, the midi overdub here. All of that works great with drum racks. Okay. Let's move on. Okay. 166. Using Take Lanes: One last thing about recording drum racks. Don't forget that you still have take lanes when you're recording midi or any drum track. So I can go to show Tanes and I can see the different passes I made of this loop. And I can kind of go back and say, like, this one was the best. But I'm going to get rid of my overdubs there. So I kind of have to keep my overdubs on there if I want them. But if I don't want them, I could easily just go here and say, I want that and use this kind of like a rewind button. So I want that and then lay my overdubs down in a separate track. This can be handy sometimes. So if I duplicate this track and I just delete this other stuff, then in this one, I just focus on those high hats. And I do copy, paste, paste, paste. Now I have the high hats as their own clip, and I can control them a little bit better. This is sometimes better, not always, but sometimes because I could maybe put delay on this or something like that. And it'll probably sound a little bit better. Okay. This needs some work, but it gets you the right idea. Explore what you have in your take lanes if you're not happy with it, and separating elements into separate tracks can be good. You don't have to do that, but sometimes it can be good for putting effects and things on parts of your beat. 167. Hi-Hat Variations: Alright, while we're here, I want to get a little more life out of all of these high hats, and there's three things that we can do to really kind of make these more make these groove a little bit better and make them feel a little more natural. Two of them you already know, and one of them is new. So let's do the two that you already known right now. So the first is play around with our velocity. Okay? So let's go here and select all. Here's our velocity, and let's just randomize it. So I'm going to hit randomize. Now let's hear these high hats. Okay, while we're at it, let's tighten up this. So kick snare, snare, kick. Let's get rid of that. Snare snare. Maybe we'll do a little extra kick here and then here. Cool. Okay, now, back down to our high hats. So just by randomizing our velocity, it's actually giving them quite a bit more life. I have some that are kind of sticking out this one, right? So let's just pull that one down. Give you a few of these higher ones. Right now, it's like, suddenly, you just has so much more life. So I'm gonna leave that just like that. I like it. Okay, so that's thing one. Th two that you already know is chance. Let's take our chance parameter. So let's select all. And then let's move our chance down. I don't want it to be 50. That means there's a 50% chance that any node is going to play or not play. So let's move it back up to, I don't know, 77 75. That's good. That means, basically, there's a three out of four chance that every note is gonna play. Actually, that seems a bit high. Let's go down to 60. Okay. So roughly a one and three chance. Okay, let's hear that. Okay. That's a little thin. Let's turn that back up to 70. Okay. I really want to crank up my tempo now. Cool. We're developing a good group here. Okay, it's going somewhere. It's kind of interesting. If you don't like that chance thing, you can turn it off just by smashing these back up to the top, and then it's effectively off. So I'm going to take it and pull them down to just maybe, like, let's go back to our 80% 79 close enough. Okay. Cool. Now, now that I hear these high hats, this isn't the third thing that I want to talk about, but I'm just kind of feeling that these could use a little bit of delay. So I'm going to put an echo effect on them, and I'm really going to kind of turn it down. I don't want very much here, especially not in the feedback. Okay. Yeah, that's feeling pretty good. Now, especially when you've got this chance stuff happening, a little delay? I don't know. I just feels really, really warm and nice to me. Okay, now let's go on to the third thing, and that is the triplet grid. 168. The Triplet Grid: Okay, we're going to talk about doing something kind of strange to our grid here, and it's called a triplet. So if you know what triplets are, hang on for just a second. I'm going to explain what triplets are. So what we have let's zoom in here. So what we have here is bar three and bar three, beat two, okay? So in beat one, there are four 16th notes, okay? Four. Alright. So that makes sound like this. Daca, deca, Tecatca taka, taka, Tecatca taka, taka, taka, tack That's one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Every beat has four 16th notes in it. That's most of the time what we want. But if you want to do something fast and rhythmic and a little bit different, you can switch that to having three notes per beat. Okay? That makes 1.2.3.4. Or in other words, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Now, if you program a whole beat that way, you're going to end up in a waltz, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And that's neat if you're like, in old timey Vienna and you want to write waltzes. That's great. But if you're doing something like this with high hats or any kind of rhythmic thing, switching over to triplets can be really cool. A triplet is when we have three beats in the space of four. Okay? So there's normally four beats here. If we put three, it's rather nice. So let's do it. Let's find a spot where we think it'll work maybe here. Okay? So what I could do is get rid of one of these and take this and space it evenly over three. Beats, and I kind of just have to eyeball it, okay? That kind of looks right, but there's a better way. The better way is Command three. Now we're looking at triplets, okay? And you can see here I was a little off with that second one. That's pretty right on with that third one, though. Okay. Now you're thinking, I see more than three there. It's right because we're looking at 16th notes now. But so we have six. One, two, three, four, five, six, okay? So this is still a triplet grid, and it's a triplet grid for everything, right? So I'm gonna adjust these to be triplets. Maybe I'll do it with the next bar, too. I'll do something a little different there. Okay? Now, if I get out of triplet mode, which I can do with Command three again, you'll see that it looks like these ones are off the grid, right? Because they are. They are off the grid. They're on a triplet grid, not an eighth note grid or a 16th note grid, which is what we're looking at here. Okay? But they're going to add some kind of fun and different variation. They'll probably throw off our delay a little bit. We might have to turn off our delay for this to work well, but let's try it. Yeah, let's turn off that delay, and we'll be able to hear him a little bit better. Okay, let's try now. You hear that? Two, three, four, Tata, ta, ta, ta, ta. I'll increase the velocity of that first one. I like that. Okay, cool. Another thing we could do, I'm going to make a new version of this. I go to a six tuplet. Six tuplet is going to be six notes in the space of four, and that's going to be double a triplet. So I'm going to go back to the triplet grid with Command three. You can also get to the triplet grid by control clicking and going to triplet grid right here. Okay? So if I want to do a six tuplet, I can go just each one of these little things. Get rid of that one. Okay. That is gonna be a six tuplet. And it's gonna sound like, What do you do 456? That sounds weird, out of context. Let's hear it. Okay, these didn't work very well. Let's go up there. Uh Okay. These are a little bit harder to get them to work. Sometimes they work better if you're just doing the same sound. So it's going What do you ph. So what I could do here is take all of these, put them there, and then use this ramp tool to go like that with the velocity. So now the velocity is going to go it's going to start quiet and then ramp up. That'll make a nice little riff. Right? So let's loop this, you'll feel that a little bit better. Oh, and we got to get our chance. I'm going to turn chance off for those. There we go. Cool. So to recap, what we did is we turned on the triplet grid with Command three, and then we used 16th note triplets, which is effectively also called a six tuplet. And we filled into space on the triplet grid. If we go back to our normal grid, we can see these are all off the grid, but that's okay because they're on a triplet grid. And then we highlighted these notes and then used the velocity ramp tool to create this arc so that they start quiet and then just kind of ramp up in volume. It's kind of a cool little subtle fill. If you're into, like, trap or anything like that, then these kind of frantic high hats are going to be your best friend. So learn a lot of tricks for doing different styles of Things with your high hats. 169. Arrangement: Okay, so now that we've made a few things, let's try to organize this into something. We're not going to get a full track out of this, but I want to make, like, a few beats that you can use. And then I want to give you this session because maybe it's interesting to you. Okay? So there's nothing on this or this, so I'm going to delete those. Let's see. Something there, something there. I think this we wanted there. Let's take all this and just, like, scoot it over. This was nothing. So I'm just kind of moving stuff around so we can have sort of one long and frantically evolving beat. Now I'm going to make a few more variations on it. Let's take this. No, let's take this and put it here, and let's double it with this first crazy one we made. That one, I think, is going to be my favorite. And then maybe we'll do our very original beat. Okay. Turn off loop. Let's just hear all these variations that we ended up with. Here we go. Oops. Still soloed. Okay, here we go. Alright, pretty cool. This one right here, though, that's the jam. I could listen to that all day. It's It's Cool. I'm just going to leave a little locator there and write. This one is the jam. Okay. Now, now I'll give you this little track. Maybe this is useful to you. You're welcome to chop this up and do whatever you want to it and play around. But let's take this beat, especially this beat, but maybe a few of the variations and keep developing it by adding some synth layers to it. So I'll give you this and then we'll keep going and build on it even more. And 170. Introduction to the Live Synths: Okay, in this section, we're going to start looking at the different synths within live. That is to say instruments. So these instruments are all the different synthesizers, samplers, sound making things of live. We are going to go really deep into using all of these when we get into the sound design class in this series. But for now, I just want to get us comfortable making some music with these cents without knowing what every single dial does. We already know the drum rack, so we're off to a good start. So I think what I'll do is I'm going to take this clip or this drum pattern. These three things. I'm just gonna put them out here. And then I'm going to, you know, paste them a whole bunch so I have some room to play. That was just Command D for all of that. Okay? So now here's what we got. I kind of love this groove. I'm like, super into it. Okay, great. Let's So for each of these synths, they each kind of do their own thing. You can kind of ignore for the moment, these DS things. The Those are Max for Live devices, and they're a little different. We will look at those, but hold off on those for now. Our main instruments are these other ones. And each one of these have their own kind of thing that they do particularly well. However, they are also really versatile. So I couldn't go through and say, like, This one is good for bass lines, and this one's good for leads, and this one's good for pads. Like, I couldn't really say that because they're all kind of good at everything, or at least most of them. But they do kind of have different characteristics. Like, collision is particularly good for percussiony things. Electric is particularly good at electric pianos, roads, organ, that kind of sound. Tension is good for, um, string like things. So let's load one up. We've got two ways we can load up one of these cents. Let's go to wave table. Okay? Wave table is probably one of the most complex cents we have, but that's okay. I can just drag a wave table right on a track, but I don't want to put this one here because I do have this percussion here. So I'm just going to drag it down here, and it's going to make a new midi track. There it is. I can open it up right there. And there's no MIDI information on it because I just dragged an instrument on it. I didn't do anything else. So I didn't make any material for that instrument yet. Now, remember the way MIDI works in that every track every midi track can have an instrument on it, only one instrument. So if I was to put this instrument on this track, it's going to get rid of my drum rack. Okay? So that's why I made a new track. So the next thing I'm gonna want to do is make a mini clip. I just double clicked, make some notes. I can start experimenting with different settings in the instrument, in this case, wave table. So let's put something here. Let's do F A flat C. I'm just going to make a little F minor triad, and we'll just hold it for this whole thing. Okay, now let's play it. Okay, that's really long. Let's cut that in half or more. Let's just go to there. And then maybe we'll do another cord. So I'm going to highlight those Command D. And then let's go to FHRpGSharp. D, let's do that. That's kind of weird. Let's try that. That's a weird cord. Okay, it's a start. Now, let's maybe make another one and we'll go G chord. I'm just kind of using music theory to sort of decide what notes to pick here. Okay. Let's try that. So here is my weird little chord progression. Let's done. Okay, that's fine. We'll just play with that for now. But now, let's experiment with different sounds. That one that we have is pretty bland. Let's see if we can find something with a little more rhythm to it and a little more excitement. So let's explore just the different presets that we can have. But 171. Exploring Presets: Okay, so we made some mini notes. Let's look at what we have to play with. We can program wave table all we want. I'm going to hit Shift Tab and get me back over to Wave table. This is a complicated instrument. I can build all kinds of crazy stuff here. But since we haven't really explored how it works yet, let's start by just playing around with some of our presets. So if I go here to wave table and open this up, we have all of our different presets here, okay? So I could say evolve organ. Here's a little preview of it. Let's try that one. Okay? So I just drag that preset right on the track we're good to go. Okay, this is interesting. So this particular preset is monophonic, meaning you can only play one note at a time. That setting is right here. So let's turn that off so that it can play the full chord. And interestingly, the pattern that this one is set up to do is a triplet. We just learned what triplets are. You can tell because it's going one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Triplet. Actually, it's a little off of a triplet, but it's close to a triplet. Okay, I don't really like that Synth anymore, so let's keep exploring. Remember that we have this up here, which I believe was called sounds, and I renamed Min Synth Presets. This is like all of our presets. So let's try searching for what we're really looking for. How about rhythmic. Let's just say rhythmic, rhythmic. And now I'm going to go here and say sounds. Maybe a pad is the kind of thing I want. Rhythmic pad. It gave me two. That's cool, too. Let's try that one. Now, what instrument are these? Before I drag this onto our track, let's explore this a little bit. Which instruments are these? We don't really know just by looking at these presets, we don't know what instrument they are. Does it matter? No, it doesn't matter at all. I'm going to drag this preset over onto this track, and it's gonna switch my instrument to whatever it needs to switch it to. In this case, it switched it to an operator, okay? Great. So my wave table instrument is gone, and now I'm on an operator, and that's fine. So when you're working with these presets, live really doesn't care what instrument you have on the track. If you drag a preset for a different instrument onto that track, it's just going to switch you to that other instrument, which is great. Makes things easy. Let's hear what we got now. I like this one. Okay, that's got potential. I want to leave this one on here, but I also want to keep experimenting. So what I'm going to do is duplicate this track. And then I'm going to take this and go over here. Move my loop brace over here. Okay. So now let's experiment with this one. So let's see what Let's see if we like this rhythmic. Your rules. You rules. Kind of. Kind of do like it. Um, let's do a third one. Move my uprese over again. Alright, let's try not PAD but keys. Is that the same one we just used? How about ambience and effects? Not really wild about any of those. How about tar and plucked. That's kind of interesting. Let's go back to piano. Kind of like that one. This one monophonic also. So, this one's monophonic. It's not really getting what I want. Let's try. Okay. Let's try switching our word to piano. Find various pianos. Kind of like that one. So we'll use this one just to accent. I need to rearrange these notes a little bit. Okay. I just want to spread the notes out a little bit to get a better voicing for the piano. They'll sound a little bit better. Okay, so I've experimented with presets, found three things that I liked. What else can I do with this? Let's experiment with layering them. 172. Layering Synths: Layering sinth is one of my favorite things to do. It's like, quick and dirty sound design in a way. We can take multiple synths and layer them to make something new and unique. And it's a very simple technique, right? So let's go back to this first one. Okay, that's cool. Let's check out what this one is. And let's check out what this one is. Okay. What if I did all three of these at the same time? I'm going to need to balance them a little bit. I want a little bit more on that. I think a little bit less on that. And let's try it. Let's loop this section. Okay, it's cool. I'm kind of into it, but you know what? It's just missing is a bass. So let's find a cool bass sound. Wow. Wow. We could try this. I don't think it's gonna work, but we'll do it. Okay? So I just made a new track with that base sound on it. I'm going to take this, both these clips, copy, and paste. Now, a good base sound is going to be monophonic or at least a good base line is gonna be monophonic. So in this case, I can just delete those two things. Take this down an octave. Wow. Two octaves. So go to highlight these two. Press delete. Highlight these two. Shift arrow key down twice. Wow. Let's hear it now. Okay, that base that's a little too much for me, but I'm okay with it for now. Let's maybe arrange this a little bit because we could take this baseline, duplicate it, and then maybe in this next one, we have just these three And then if we want to maybe we want to make way for a verse, so we're going to do just these two or something. When you're layering synth, there's just a lot of variation you can do because you've got all these different elements to the sound. Now listen to the start of an arrangement that we have. Maybe here, the baseline should come out. Okay. So we've got some interesting things started, right? Now, what I'm kind of tempted to do is put arpeggiator on this or use some of our new MITI tools to transform and come up with some new creative ideas. So let's start fresh and go over to exploring those new transform and generate tools. That's these down here where we can really have live make some stuff for us. This is really fun. But before we do that, I want to give you this session again, but it's gonna require us to freeze and flatten. So let's talk through why we need to do that right now. 173. Freezing and Flattening: Okay, we know now what freezing and flattening is, and here's why I'm going to do it. These Cyth patches, if I just send you this session, and if you have the same version of live that I do with the same Syth patches, this will sound great. But if you don't will sound probably like nothing. If Live can't find this synth patch, it's going to just not play that clip. And so when you've got a lot of mini clips and you want to make sure that it gets played correctly. You want to flatten them so that it sends it as a wave file. So I'm going to give you this session as both with these flattened and with these out with these just normal. Okay, so let's flatten these. So I'm going to go to this track, Control click and go to freeze and flatten. That's going to turn this into an audio file. Okay. Same thing here, freeze and flatten. And you'll notice that like this one, it went longer than the midi was. It's because the sound just trails off and it wants to capture that sound. Um, Now, you may notice that I have to freeze and flatten an entire track. I can't do this just for a segment. Like, I can't just, like, say, I just want to flatten that. It's going to be the whole track. Okay, let's do it with this also. Basically, I'm going to do it with all my midi stuff. Okay. This one also and this one. Okay. So now, if you don't have the right patches, anything like that, it doesn't really matter because we're just gonna be playing audio files. So you just need to make sure that you get the right audioples. So I'm going to save this one and then I'm going to make sure I do the collect all and save step so that you get all of these audiophils with it, okay? So play around with this if you want. But this is a great case for doing the freeze and flatten process. 174. Transformations: Okay, up next, I want to go through some of these new MIDI tools that are here. There's a whole bunch of new things that are going to give you that are designed to help you create new ways of generating midi notes that'll both help you get around if you're if you're not so savvy at music theory, and also just if you're looking for a new idea, say, like, generate a new idea and see what you think of it. Uh, they're really fun. Some of these tools we've seen before, if you've ever used, like notation programs like Sibelius or something like that, some of these types of things have been around in those for a little while things where you can say, like, Here's a melody, shuffle the notes and come up with something new, kind of a randomized type of thing. So they're not all entirely new to, like, the world. Some of them have sort of existed, but I've never really seen any in a da before, and they're super fun and super handy. So in order to get these things, we're going to look at some of these new windows in our clip view here. Okay? We have launch controls. This will be all pretty familiar. I don't think there's anything wildly new here, our follow actions and stuff like that. But here we have some pitch and time controls. Here we have transformations, and here we have generate, okay? So we're going to look at all three of these in this section now. So let's dive in. Let's look at stretch and transpose first. 175. Stretch, Transpose: Okay, so let's start with a fresh mini clip here. Now, for stretch and transpose, these are all pretty easy. So I'm just going to make a nice little F major chord here. Sounds like this. Pretty. So I'm going to go to this pitch and time window and open that up. Now, there's a few things we can do here. We can fit it to scale if it's already not. Now, my scale, you can see right here is C major, and that's getting it from the global scale up here. So I can fit it to scale if it's already in there. I can invert it if it's not. I can highlight some notes, and then I can actually just click and drag on this box to transpose it, if I want. That's kind of neat. This inversion tool, I'm not really sure what this is doing. It's not doing anything at the moment. Typically, what an inversion tool would do would be to take, like, the lowest note and put it at the top, like that. So I'm not really sure about that at the moment. Maybe that's still on its way. But if we want to do a little bit more mathematical transposition. Okay, so if I select this chord and then I just start dragging this up, you can see what it's adding, right? It's adding a whole nother version of the cord on top of it. Okay? And then if I click out of it, we have it. Okay? I'm going to undo Cool. So we have new ways of adding more notes to it. And, you know, these are all going to fit within the scale if we want it to. And so they're probably all going to sound pretty good. Now, for stretching, we've got a couple new tools here. This just simply we can just dial this up or down and make our notes really long. We can also X two, X half. Whatever we want. There's also this new feature, which we'll see in a second. But if I click and drag on the darker bar up here, this actually might not be new. I just never noticed it before. But what I can do is now I've got these two points that kind of look like loop points, but they're not, and I can click and drag on them and put them where I want them to go. And it's going to extend everything in that bracket. Okay, so some handy tools for just transposing and adjusting the timing of our mini notes. 176. Humanize: Alright, up next is human eyes. Now, this is almost funny because the old days, we had human eyes. Human Eyes was a button that I don't know if it was in Ableton, but a long time ago, I used to use Digital Performer as my main Dd. This is like forever ago. And digital performer is a good program. And it had human eyes in it as a function. I don't know if it left. There was a while where everything had human eyes in it, I feel like. And then it went away, went kind of out of fashion, and now it's back, which is great because I missed it. Here's what human eyes does. Let's take something like this, and let's make this like just totally on the grid. Okay. So now this is exactly on the grid. I'm going to select all of this. Now, here's humanized, and I can give it a percentage. Let's, like, move it around a little bit. See, you see what's happening here? Everything's sliding off the grid just a little bit as I move this humanized button around. Now, why is that? So let's put it at 12%. Oh, and I turned it off. Humanized. There we go. So now if I zoom way in, you can see, like, this E is early. Um, this F is late. Things are not exactly on the grid. They are, you might say, how a human would actually play it. Humans are not robots. When we play stuff, we're not perfectly on the grid, and that's what makes things sound natural and cool. So Um, this is very subtle, but it'll go a long way in certain situations. If you have, like, a piano line that you want to sound very realistic, then Put a little bit of this humanize on it. Not too much, just a little bit. That'll make it feel much more natural. Drums Oh, man, drums for sure. If you have a drum pattern that you sequenced in the Midi grid, and you want to give it that natural feel, if it's feeling too robotic to you, select all the notes, dial in a little bit of humanize, and it'll give it a much more natural feel almost like you played it in on pads. So it's kind of funny, right? Like, we call it humanized, and what we do is we basically make it sloppy. But you only have to make it a little bit sloppy, to make it sound like a human plate. So very powerful tool. Use it on a lot of stuff, just to touch. And it'll sound much more natural. 177. Transform: Arpeggiate: Alright. Let's get to arpeggiate. Now I'm going to close this little pitch and time window here and open Transform. Now, I've got a whole bunch of options here. I'm going to go through most of them. Right now. Let's start with arpeggiate. Now, you might be thinking. Hey, we already have an arpeggiate thing. We have a Midi effect called arpeggiate. What happened to that? Still here. You still have it, and it still works the same. Except it's got actually a couple new bells and whistles. But this is a little different. The main difference between the peggiate media effect and this arpeggiate is that the apegate media effect, you can put it on something and it's going to arpeggiate it, which maybe I should define. What arpeggiate means is, if you give it a chord, it's going to play it one note at a time. Okay? So if I give it this, it's going to play this. Okay? That's pagiating it. Playing one note at a time. With the MIDI effect, that's gonna just happen. But with this, we're going to be able to write it into the midi clip so we can see what's happening and have a little more control over what's happening. Okay? So, um, let's take a look at it. So first of all, the style. Now, this is actually the same as our midi effect. So we can say go up, go down, go up, then down, go down then up, go up, blah, blah, blah. And then some weirder ones, C and diverge, pinky up, pinky down, thumb up, thumb down, play order, random, random, other random ones. So play around with these. There's some fun stuff here. You can find some fun patterns. Let's set it up and down. Okay? I don't know why it repeated, well. Okay, so what it's doing here is it's going to go up and then down, and it's going to repeat the top note. So the way this is going to work is it's going to arpeggiate for the duration of the notes that you gave it, okay? So I'm going to undo this. And then I'm going to say, I'm going to take these notes. I'm going to do this trick again. And I'm going to stretch these out to be, I don't know, a full bar long, okay? Now, I'm going to arpeggiate. So let me talk about these transform controls here a little bit. They're a little different than you might expect. So when this is yellow, and it says transform, that means it's kind of doing it. And if I change anything, it's going to apply right away. But if I want it to So anything I change, like, if I adjust any of these dials, it's going to snap into all of these settings right now. If I just wanted to do the settings that are on the screen again, the best way to do it is with this little button here. Okay. So now it's doing. Alright, so I'm going to undo that because I want to walk you through some of these settings. Okay, let's do these two first because they're the easiest. Right? What is each individual note going to be? A 16th note is what I have it set to here. I can make it longer or shorter, right? Cool. Not a 12th note. Let's go back to 16th notes. And then gait is going to be the length of the note, basically. 100% is going to fill the whole duration of the 16th note. I can make it shorter if I just want short notes or I can make them longer if I want longer notes. Okay? But I'm going to set that right to 100%. Okay, now, steps and distance. This actually, I had to, like, really work on this for, like, a while to really understand what's going on with steps and distance because there's no manual yet. So here's what it is. Steps. This is both these two buttons are going to add notes to the chord, okay? They're going to transpose and add things. Okay? So if I take steps down to zero, we're going to add no notes. Okay? It's just going to be the notes that I put in F A and C. Okay? It's FAC, FAC, all the way up and down, okay? So the number shown here is how many notes are not in the chord? How many notes do I want to add to it? Do I want Ableton to add? So I have zero right now. Let's say one. Okay. I have one note. So now there's going to be one note somewhere that's not in the chord that it added, and it's going to be this E it added up at the top. Neat. So, how is it deciding what note that is? It's with this distance thing. So this is determining the interval of the chord tones or of the notes that it's going to add. Now, again, it's going to stay in the key. If I ask it to, which I have done by turning this on. So now I can add all kinds of extra notes. I can say make ten extra notes, crank this up. Let's take this up to something so we can see all of them. See, now it's adding all kinds of extra notes, and this actually makes kind of a cool effect. Right? Let's change our pattern. Let's make less. Okay? So we went from that just an F major chord, just three notes to this crazy thing. So we can a little about we'll get back out. Okay, let's go random. Oh, and with this distance, you can go negative, and it'll add lower notes. Cool. So it's all over the place. So that is what our new supercharged transform arpeggiate option does. Cool. Alright, so let's look at another one. Let's look at Connect. 178. Transform: Connect: Okay, let's talk about connect. This is actually a really fun one. And if you've watched any of my music theory content, then this might be familiar to you because I talk about doing this kind of thing all the time, where we might make a re progression, we want it to sound more natural and symphonic. In order to do that, we're going to, like, connect the dots a little bit, right? That's exactly what this is doing. So let me give you a simple tutorial here, and then I'll try that. So transform, select, connect, and then we've got some options here. So I have this little almost just a scale here. Sounds like this. A little creepy little scale and sort of F. Not really. So Connect right now isn't going to do anything because it doesn't have room. What it's going to do is it's going to try to add a note between the notes that I select. So I'm going to select all the notes. And then I'm going to make them a little shorter. Okay? Now I've got a space in between each note. So now I can say, add a note. Put a note in between each note. And now I've got some controls to tell us where those go. So density, I'm going to say 100% because I want all of the gaps to be filled. Spread, I can kind of say how far away that note should be, that extra note that it's adding. Right, what kind of note is it? I could make a shorter note, a longer note. I have 16th notes here, so if I add a 16th note, it's just going to automatically do it. And then I'm not exactly sure what tile does yet. I think if I make a short note, we'll be able to see it. Okay, so it's stacking the notes in different ways. But if I have this set to a 16th note, it has nothing to do. So here's what I made now. Okay, let me play spread a little bit. And the rates. Little swing in there. Yeah, super weird stuff. Okay, so it's pretty cool. Uh, let's go and try my little string thing. We'll see if it works. Okay, let's give this a try. So what I've done in the magic of editing there is I made a fairly simple little chore progression, 1625 in minor. If that means anything to you, if it doesn't. And then I loaded up kind of my favorite little string library at the moment, which is the Cinna strings solo. So this is not a big orchestra sound. This is a small chamber orchestra sound, but it's really quite nice. Here's what it sounds like. Okay. Cool. Now, let's try connect. So here's what I'm gonna do. Let's take the top two voices, I guess. Just the top couple of notes, and let's make some room. So let's go like that. Okay? Now, let's say connect. Oh, interesting. Uh let's go down to just A half note. Now, that's interesting. It's adding a few notes. But let's see what it did. Uh, it's not bad, actually. Um, let's give it a little more variation ability here. Not bad. It gives me something I can work with and I can play around with. Let's try taking all of these and making them smaller and just tell it, add another chord in between. Let's see what happens. Alright. That was pretty impressive. Cool. So it just made a whole new chord progression for us. That's wild. Let's change the spread a bit. Let's see what happens now. I rather like that. Um, it's not perfect, you know, I needs some work, but okay, let's try one more thing just to push the extremes of this. Okay, so here's my original one. I'm going to select, A, I'm going to go down to a quarter note. Set this to a quarter note. Tell it to fill that up. Oh, I want a whole bunch of corn. There we go. So this is what tile does, I suppose. Okay? So now I've got a whole bunch. I think I want the spread to be smaller so we stay within an octave. Okay? Mm. That's okay. Alright, so now I gave it one cord per bar, and it's gonna make three more cords per bar for this whole thing. Let's hear it now. Pretty cool. Let's take all these super low notes that it made and just move them up in octave. Interesting. I feel conflicted about this because this is so cool that it's gonna people are going to do this instead of learning how to do music theory, but probably not. It's cool. You should do it. So yeah, that's wild. That's the connect feature. 179. Transform: Ornament: Okay, the next one is a little more simple. This is ornament. So if I select ornament down here, it gives me basically two big choices, a flam and a grace note. The main reason to use those two things, flam is going to be more conducive to doing with percussion stuff, primarily drums, and a grace note is kind of the similar thing, but with pitches. So a flam is like on a drum set, like, let's say, on a snare drum, you can hit the drum with a stick, that sounds cool. But if you hit it with two sticks at the same time and one is just a little bit in front of the other one, it goes like that, but that was exaggerated. In real life, it would be like, like that. That's a bit of a flam. A grace note is like an ornament, which is what these are called, which is what this transform effect is called. So a grace note is when you've got a melodic thing, but you add a quick little note before the note that you're going to play. So here, it's saying, do you want the pitch to be higher, the same or lower? And then you can say the number of pitches, the velocity, the position, and the chance that it plays. So let's take I'm going to go back to this little melody. Let's speed it back up a little bit. Okay, let's take this D. And let's add an ornament. Let's add a grace note that's higher. Okay? You can see it's got a little titer doot before it. That's what we just added. The tue Dot technical term for titer Dot is a grace note. Tardos Okay. Yeah, that's cool. It's a grace note. Um, if you want to get really into the nitty gritty young grace notes, um, this is a type of ornament. There's names for all of this stuff. I think this one is this a mordant? No, it's close to a mordent Anyway, it doesn't matter. Let's just call it grace note. 180. Transform: Quantize: Okay, let's talk about quantize. So maybe you already know what quantize is. That is when we have notes that are not perfectly on the grid, and in the past, we could use Command U to quantize, and we can still do that. But if we want a little more control in our clip, we can go to transform and quantize. So our options here are the current grid, which is going to be, you know, what I'm looking at here. Or we can say quarter notes, eighth notes, 32nd notes, 16th notes. So we can adjust things that way. We can add triplets, which can be really handy if you're programming, like, really delicate stuff, really complicated stuff, like maybe some of those, like, trap beat high hats or something like that. Flipping over to triplets really quickly is really handy. So this is a good way to do it. So now you see we've got eighth note triplet, 16th note triplet. They're a little different now, I am at the moment, adjusting the end notes, ends of the notes. So I can do start end or both. So if I do start notes and end notes, it's going to look like that. They're going to stay really uniform triplets. And then we can say the amount so we can, you know, have a little flexibility. This is in a way, quantizing is, like, the opposite of humanizing, right? Like, it's undoing humanizing, basically. It's going to make you more on the grid where humanizing is going to take you more off the grid. Okay, so you can think of human eyes and quantize as kind of two sides of the same coin. They're opposites in a way. But more or less, it works the way that quantize works in the past. Just gives us a new kind of interface and some kind of easy control to see how it's going to work. Cool. Let's move on. 181. Transform: Recombine: Okay, let's go to recombine. Now, this one is really interesting because this is a really powerful tool, and it took me a minute to figure out why we're calling it recombine. So just kind of hold on to that for a second. I have a theory, but we'll get to it in a minute. Let me show you what it tells first. So first, we can choose which parameter we're going to affect pitch, length or velocity. Let's just look at pitch for the moment. Now, imagine this little melodic thing is, um on like a scroll, kind of. And we can kind of scrub through its alignment with this rotate feature. So you see this F is the first note. If I go over by one, now that F is the second note. Okay? If I go over by two, so the F keeps moving over. And what was the last note becomes the first note. Okay? So I can really kind of scrub through the orientation of this, the first and last note. Okay? So that's cool. Now, if I do it with length, it's going to keep the pitches in the same spot but change the length. Now, right now, that's going to do nothing because all the lengths of my pitches are the same. So let's take this last one, whoops, and make it a long note, okay? Now let's take length. And now you can see that long note kind of scrubbing through there. So that can kind of show you what length is doing in a weird way. So now it's the D. If I go back one more, it's going to be the F. So it's applying the rhythm, the length of the note, to a different note. And the same thing with velocity. All my velocities are the same right now. Let's randomize them. And now, if I scrub the velocity, they're all changing and the note length still. And we can say the pitch. Let's do all at once, right? So now everything's just kind of shuffling around. Now, if I want to, I can also just hit shuffle and just have it shuffle the notes and rhythms around and velocities. Or I can say mirror. So what's up, go down, what's down, go up, what's long, go short. Whatever. Mirror image of everything. Okay? Now here's what I got. Something totally different. Cool. So this is really cool. Okay, so why do we call it recombine? What I think the logic here is that we're going to take notes and rhythms, separate them, shuffle them around, and then put them back together kind of and recombine them. I think that's why they're calling it that. Um, I may have called it like rotate or shuffle, actually, would have been a good name for the whole thing. It's a feature here, but, um, it's also like what everything is doing. So that's recombine. Another great tool to help you just generate new ideas. 182. Transform: Span: Okay, up next is span. Now, this one really has to do with the articulations of the note, and it gives us three options here. So legado means connect notes together. Let one note drift right into the next note. Tenuto means let each individual note play for its full length. And staccato means cut things short. So it's got a nice little graphic here showing you the actual musical symbol, which I love. So let's go back to our orchestral sound to hear the difference between these. Okay, so you can see when I kind of crank this up what's happening. Like the ends of the notes are drifting a little bit longer to connect. I wouldn't really want to do it that much, but I might want them to overlap the hair. Variation is gonna get you just a little bit extra little. If I go tenuto, It's gonna let me just kind of control the ends of the notes up to the next note. And staccato obviously is going to make everything. I can make it shorter. A little bit of wiggle room for variation. Okay, so three quick articulations, we would call that in the more performance world. Handy for really crafting your midi notes. 183. Transform: Strum: Alright. Up next, strum. Now, this is a handy little tool. It does one thing, and it's super obvious what it does. If I just do it, you'll get it. So if I load up Strum, we see this, watch this. Oop. Poop. That's what it does. Um, it's, uh, you know, strumming, like strumming a guitar. Um, so here I've made a chord using our synth, but this is how a guitar would voice like an E major chord. Okay? So it doesn't sound like a guitar, but these are the notes of a guitar when a guitar plays an E major chord. So let's strum it. Let's put a little bit of phalange on that there. Put a little bit of angle to that. Right? I kind of rips right up like a guitar would do. Okay, let's look at it on our um orchestra thing here. You know, you can really see what it's doing when I do that. But let's just do it a little bit. Now, this isn't going to sound very good, and this is something you have to consider when you're doing the strum. Because these notes, with this kind of orchestra sound that we have here, these notes take a second to speak. So we're probably not really going to hear it all that much, in this case. Let's find out. Yeah, let's do a little bit more. You kind of hear it. Let's go back over to this one and do it as extreme as possible. Yeah, that's cool. Neat. You know, I've spent a lot of time just, like, nudging things around little by little to get to make this sound. And this just gives us our nice, really easy effect to do it. So it's gonna save you a lot of time if you like this kind of effect. But 184. Transform: Time Warp: Okay, two more. Time Warp. So, this one is kind of kind of wild. This kind of a head scratcher. But the intent of this one is you see how I have here all notes are equal length. This is going to give us some flexibility to change that kind of wildly. So with this little grid here, think about this is the beginning of this clip, and this is the end of this clip, okay? And then higher is faster. So if I move this up, that means the durations of notes on this side are going to be faster than on this side, okay? If I move this down, they're gonna be faster over here and slower over there. But I can also add a third point. Now, they're going to be faster in the middle or slower in the middle. Okay? So it's, like, really kind of wacky. Now, you might think, Well, isn't this just throwing everything way off the grid? It is. But I could also just turn on quantize and then now everything kind of snaps to a grid. So it's still there. So let's take a listen to this now that so I've made it basically start at the same speed and get faster rhythmically, not tempo. The rhythms are shorter. So it's different than just speeding up the tempo. And let's see what happens. Down to where you started. Okay, weird. So this really lets you treat time like a rubber band with your midi notes. Um, it's kind of wild. 185. Transform: Velocity Shaper: Okay, last one, in this whole big section of transformations, kind of is under its own little heading because it's actually a Max for Live device. But it all works the same. You don't need to worry about the Max for Live stuff at all. It's just here. So this is a velocity shaper. So let me open our velocity a little bit more so we can see what's happening here. And it's pretty obvious, right? You can see this arc and what the velocity is doing, right? We can move it around and just kind of see what it's doing. So, you know, we can really kind of craft our velocity to do what we want here. We can make more points on this line by just clicking on it. Um, you know, it's a velocity shaper. It is exactly what it sounds like. But it's giving us a lot more control over our velocity than we've ever had, which is quite enjoyable. I like it. You can set a loop here so that it's going to go through this a few times, in this case, six times. So it's kind of hard to see what it's doing. But if I send it down to two, maybe we can tell. And let's go like this. Okay, so we can see the arch, and it's going down. It's there, and then it starts over again here. So it's going through this pattern twice in this case. So pretty cool way to really sculpt your velocities. A handy tool. All right. Let's move on and talk about some of the midi generators in Live 12. 186. Generate Ryhythm: Okay, let's move on to these mini generators. Now, these get really exciting. So to get to it, we're going to go down to this Generate tab and open that up. Okay? And now we've got a bunch of options here. So I'm going to select Rhythm. So the difference with these is with the transform objects, we're going to start with some music or some notes in our Midi grid, and then it's going to transform them. With generators, we don't need anything. We can just say go. So here are some settings. I'm going to hit the regenerate button, and there we go. We made a rhythm. Um, so here's what our settings are. Our steps are the number of steps in the pattern. Now, that may include empty steps, right? It's not going to put something on every step. So in this case, there are six steps to the pattern. So that means in our case, so one, two, three, four, five, six. So this is where it starts over again. So you can kind of see that it goes note, not a note. No, no, no, note, note. So note, not a note, no, no, no, note, note. So that's the pattern. There are six steps to it. I can make it, you know, longer if I wanted. You know, 16. It's cool. Let's do that, actually. Let me make my loop a little bit longer here. Okay, so now in this clip, the pattern isn't going to repeat at all because there are 16 steps one, two, three, four, eight, 12, 16 in this whole clip. Okay, so density, how many notes are going to happen within that pattern? Okay, so if we say 16 notes are going to happen, then they're all going to be on because we have 16 steps and 16 notes. If I say eight, then about half of these are going to have a note in it. Okay? And then this pattern, this is, I believe this crazy high number we're seeing now is a number of possible patterns that could happen, right? And it's like, you know, 6,000 and some. So we can just kind of dial through here until we land on a pattern that we like. Right? Cool. So this is just generating a rhythm for us, right? So if you're like, Oh, I need a rhythm, let's say you're working on, like, high hats, and you're like, Cool, I need some cool high hats, and I want them fast and frantic. Let's set this to a 32nd note and, you know, crank up our density a bit. Cool. That'll be good. All right, I'm going to go back to a 16th note here. There we go. Alright, we can also do some stuff like splits. These are fun. So let's say like I don't know, 20% of the notes are going to split. That means they're going to be a doubled rhythm. So you can see one just happened right here. So it's split that into two notes. So that's really going to add a lot more variation to it. Shift is going to rotate just like we saw earlier in one of the transformations. So if I turn this up, we can see it's just kind of rotating around. It's actually easier to see if you look at the tiny Mi grid down here. Watch, keep your eye on that, and you can kind of see what shift is doing. It's just kind of shifting it on the grid. Let's take that back down to zero. And then we've got some options here with velocity and what frequency it's generating. So it's pretty handy just for generating rhythms, right? Great for drums, great for anything once you put some pitches to it. So you might say, Cool, let's do some stuff like that, and that and that. You know, and now you're generating some kind of cool melodies. There. Let's hear it. Oops. Okay, nothing to write home about out of context, but a very handy tool if you're just looking to generate some stuff. 187. Generate: Seed: Okay, let's go down to seed. Now, seed is a weird word that they've used here. I think they're trying to avoid using the word melody because you could use this for so much more than a melody, but that's also kind of what you can do with it. So this is really actually quite simple. So we've got three parameters, pitch duration and velocity. So let's say pitch. Let's go to C three to C four. I want this whole thing to stay within that octave. So I'm just going to set this to C three. Actually, can just click and drag right here. There we go. And here, I'm going to go to C four. There. C three to C four, okay? Just that octave. Okay? You could already see it generating some stuff. So let's say duration. I want 16th notes and up to eighth notes. Sure. Velocity. I want a pretty stable velocity. So let's say, you know, up there. Now, voices. Voices is an interesting term here. You can think of voices as, like, how many things are going to happen at the same time? Like, if someone was going to sing this, how many people would it take to sing it? That's an easy way to think about voices. So, one means there's gonna be no overlapping notes. Let's go up to four just for fun, see what it generates. And then density. So at 62%, that means we're gonna have 62% of the area filled with notes. I want to actually fill that out quite a bit more. Let's go to 100%. What the heck? Alright. Here's what we got. Now, remember, we're all within a scale here. We're all in C major because of this up here and up here. So looking at that first card. We'll see what it did here. Let's take a listen. That's weird. It's a bit. Let's make some longer notes. Let's go up to just 16th notes. Now, just out of curiosity, well, let's hear it one more time. Then I'm gonna try one more thing. Now, this is interesting because what I heard here, in addition to some stuff I didn't like, I heard, um I think that's what I heard. The last two notes might be wrong, but that's a cool little melody that's buried in there. Did you hear that in there? Here it is again. That's pretty cool. You know, let's take this entirely Ableton created melody, and let's put it in my strings. What do you think it's gonna sound like if I put it in the strings? Listen. Pretty cool. So we can do some interesting stuff with this generate. If you're working and you've got a deadline, this is a good way to get started with something. If I was working on this, what I might do is get rid of this get rid of some of these other notes. Oh, maybe extend that out. Make sure we really hear the things I want to hear. I lost that note. It's a great place to start for something really interesting. So seed. 188. Generate: Shape: Alright. Up next, shape. This is another melodic kind of idea. So we've got right here, it's kind of hard to see, but right here, we've got some presets for directions. So we can go flat, up down, up down, arc down. So if we go flat, we're going to make just flat notes. But we can also say, whoops, here, arc up. Cool. So obviously, you can see exactly what this is doing. We make an arc and it's going to make an arc, and it's going to conform this to our scale. That's gonna be great. We can also just draw on this little window and just do this kind of stuff thing. That's neat. We can define our pitch ranges here so we can say if we don't want it to go so high, can do that. Now, we can change the rate. This would be like our rhythm. Tie seems to mean that some notes will hook together and we'll get some longer rhythms. Like if I turn it up just a little bit, get this note connected together in making one longer note. So I'm going to turn that up a little bit just to add some variation. Density, 100%, there's going to be no gaps. We're going to have a note on everything. But if I turn that down, there'll be some gaps in it. That's cool. And Jitter Jitter tends to mean, I think, in this context, kind of like glitches, like getting outside of the pattern. So if I do this, let me just go to that flat thing. And then I crank up Jitter, we're going to get some notes that drift out of it. So think of it like, you know, a glitch kind of thing. Randomness adds something cool. Let's do that. Okay, here let's see what we got. There you go. Just completely randomly generated. Not a bad place to start for a little violin solo. I got to say. 189. Generate: Stacks: Okay, next, we get to stacks. Now, stacks means chords. So let's just generate some chords. Now, interestingly, and I probably shouldn't say this, but in a very early version of the Beta version of this, this was just called chords. But they must have had an internal discussion. And they said, You know, technically, what we're generating here is not chords. It's stacks of notes because not all of these are functional harmonic chords, which is true. It's splitting hairs. They called it stacks. Let's call it stacks, but this is generating cords. So, here's what we have. We have all these shapes. Now, these shapes are really quite interesting. So, I haven't figured out yet the correlation between these diagrams and the actual shapes and what it's generating. But this is a major cord. So let's make it. So here we go. So I said, root is C inversion is zero. So I'm going to make it. And now we're going to have a C major chord. So all we need to do really is set a root and then a shape and maybe an inversion. I'll show you. So let's make a second chord here. Okay? So now I have two chords. With this second one, let's say the root is E. And let's change the shape. Okay? That's a minor chord. I don't know why. I don't get it, but you've got these other ones that are getting at of interested. They're going through different us, and they're fun. Okay, now you see how this is stacked really high. What an inversion means in, like, music theory world is the order of the notes. It's not going to change any notes. It's just the order of the notes. So if this sounds like too big of a leap from this to this Right? It's like, way up high. So let's change the inversion. Okay, so that stacks all the notes. Now let's move the root down an octave to there. So, now it's right in the same thing, in the same range. So the inversion just changes the order of the notes through octaves. That's all it does. So now I got something kind of cool. Let's add another cord. Let's add two more chords, actually. So with this one, let's say the root is A. And let's change the shape to Let's go here. This is rather nice. I'm gonna adjust that inversion. What's nice. The fourth one. Let's go That's cool. Maybe I'll take that inversion down there. Alright, now we have a An Ableton invented chord progression. Let's hear it. Okay. Pretty cool. It's a nice chord progression. Alright, we can change the duration of the whole segment if we want, or each individual cord say this cord is short. So clicking on each one of these adjusts it so we can make them different lengths. And then offset is just going to kind of push it to a new spot. Okay? And of course, you can also just, like, click and drag and move stuff like the old fashioned way. That's just fine, as well. So that's how Ableton can write chord progressions for you. Pretty cool. 190. Generate: Euclidean: Okay, let's go to Euclidean. So again, this one is listed under Max for Live within the Generate Menu. That means that it's designed using Max for Live, it also means it's probably going to be a little weirder, and it definitely is. So so far, with this, I've only been able to really generate, really dark and creepy things, but maybe that's great. So what we can do is we've got these different patterns. We can click on this circle and make different things just in the center of the circle. We've got so there are rotations around a circle. We can turn off voices here. We can go to these voices and specify kind of what note they are. Um, and we can shift the whole thing up or down. We can give each note a velocity. Okay. And basically, this is what it generates. Um, it's weird. Pattern. So a lot of the same controls, just a very different kind of way of doing it. What's interesting is that I don't think this is just choosing notes for us, and it's more than happy to ignore our scale. Because we can just set the notes that we want, but let's force it to be in a key. There we go. It's too full density. 16th notes, 16 steps. Sure. Can see what this would be good for. This would be good for if you have one chord and you're going to sit on that chord for a while. And you just want some rhythmic things you can do with that chord. You could dial in that chord here, let's say, G. Let's take that up a little bit, though. Let's say E. Let's just make a E minor chord here. E, G, B, and then another E. So really simple. Okay, so I'm setting in an E minor chord. Ooh, so I want this be down in octave. Sure. Okay. Now I can go here and just generate patterns and ways to, like, keep this interesting. It's kind of like arpeggiate in that way, but just a little more dense and complicated. So interesting effect. I could see finding a use for this. 191. Basic Audio Effects: Okay, in this next section, I want to start talking about effects because we are talking about producing music here, we need to deal with effects. So we're going to go into a disgusting amount of detail on all of the live audio effects here soon. And I think the fifth class in this series, yes, the fifth class. But I want to introduce you to them now and give you kind of a big view of what we have and how we typically apply them. All of the effects that we have, we can kind of group into three different categories, okay? They are dynamic effects, that would be effects that mess with the volume in some way or another. The second is pitch effects or frequency effects. Those would be things that mess with the frequency content of our sound. And the third would be time effects, effects that mess with time, like delays, things that add time, things like that. There are a couple other effects that we have that don't really fall into any good category, like, like some of these utility ones and things like that. But the majority of the effects that we have fit into one of those three buckets. Now, there's no right or wrong way to use effects. Put them on as your heart is content to do. However, if you want a starting point, a very broad rule, and there's more exceptions to this rule than there is the rule. But a good place to start would be to use them in that order, okay? So put your dynamic effects first, put your pitch effects, second, and your time effects third. If you're putting all three of those on a single track, that's a good order to start with. But the order does matter. The order will change the sound. So, let's mess around with some effects. I think I want to play around more with this high hat and some of this faster stuff and see what happens if we put a little delay on it. So let's look at some of the effects we have and how they fit into that. 192. Applying Audio Effects: Okay, let's just take a look at what we got here as a little reminder, going back to this loop that we created here. Okay? Right. Okay, so here's the whole thing. Okay, I think I'll go here and see if I can liven this up a little bit. So let's see what's on this track. We have this drum machine that we made. Now, what's interesting here is that we can route effects within our drum rack. If we go over here, click this and then say, send in return, we can do some internal audio effect routing right in the drum rack, but that's not what I want to do right now. We'll do that later. But right now, I just want to put effects on the whole track. So what could I do to this sound? First thing is that it's awfully quiet. I could just turn the volume up down here, but that's going to adjust the volume for just this slice of it. So let's try putting a dynamic effect on this whole thing. So our biggest dynamic effect is a compressor. Now, if you don't know what a compressor does, it basically smooshes the sound, compresses it, and then boosts the whole thing. So it takes away some of the quietest stuff and the loudest stuff and levels them out, but then it boosts the whole thing. So it gives the perception that everything is louder. We'll go into a lot more detail on that soon. Don't worry. But let's see what we got here. Let's turn on makeup. Okay. Now we got a lot more volume out of it. That's cool. Okay? Now I could do something like a delay. Delay would be a time effect. Let's do something simple like this. So when I add effects, I'm just dragging them right onto the track in this case. There are cases where we'll get into routing within the track using SensinRturns. But for now, I'm just going to put my effects right on the track. I'm going to adjust my settings here. That's home on my speed. Turn the wet up. Remember, if you haven't encountered this before, dry wet means that if we go all the way dry, we're going to hear all the signal without any effects on it at all. If we go all the way wet, we're going to hear nothing but the effects. So normally, we want that somewhere around in the middle. O. Okay, let's get on K. Okay, so that's adding a nice little layer. I like it. Now, if you want to mess around with your audio effects, you can change the order easily just by click and drag and move them around. In this case, I don't think the order is going to have a big change on the sound, but there are cases where the order matters a lot. So I just want to introduce effects right here just to get them on your mind, in your head. And also to help us through the next section where we're going to talk about things like side chaining in just a second. But before we get over to that, let's talk about automation and how we can automate these effects. 193. Automating Effects: Okay, we've looked at automation a few different times. We know that in order to automate something, we need to go into automation mode and then just click on that parameter. And everything basically is the same when it comes to effects. So let's go into automation mode by pressing the letter A, or you can go to view automation mode. And now on this track, I could go down here and say, Let's say this delay and the dry wet amount. I can just click on Dry Wet, and then you can see that I switched me over to that parameter. Now, this is an interesting thing that can happen sometimes. If I just take this and pull it down so that I can ramp this up, that. Maybe that's what I want to do, but notice what happened. This was being affected by that delay. I'm going to undo, undo, undo, okay? So the delay was on for back here. Now, if I wanted that on, before I make this point and pull it down, I should make another point over here just so that I don't mess with anything prior to what I'm doing now, okay? So with that point there, I can smash this down and then build it up like I wanted to. And sometimes just to be a little extra, I like to do this. Um, just to I don't know why. There's no good reason for that. It's just what I do sometimes. Okay, so now we're going to automate the dry wet amount of our delay. Let's hear it. It's gone. Cool. So note your little double drop down menu here. We always have device at the top, and then parameter at the bottom. So if mixer is our device, these are available parameters in the mixer. The now, I have a ton of devices here. And the reason is that every slice of my drum rack has all of these devices, right? Because it's a whole simpler instrument. So I can go through and say, Okay, slice 14. This is another good reason to name your slices. So let's say here's that slice one kick. If I want to automate any of those parameters, here's all the available parameters that I can automate on that device. But if I want to go to my delay, I'm going to go all the way down here. Eighth groove is the name of my delay preset. So now I can see that dry wet is automated because it's got the little pink ish Dot, and I can automate anything else that I want that's here. Or you can do the much more sane thing of just click on the parameter that you want to automate, rather than digging through these lists, which can be kind of a nightmare. Okay, great. Let's move on and talk about some advanced production techniques. 194. Introduction to Production Techniques: Okay, up next, we're going to talk about a few more techniques that we haven't been able to get into this class yet. And there are things that people ask me to learn a whole bunch. Now, all of these things are things you can do for different musical effects. And in the right context, they'll add a lot to your mix. But you don't need to use any of these. I see a lot of egotism going around, especially online about effects like side chaining and things like that. Maybe you've heard of side chain but people always come to me and say, Oh, it's just not right unless unless I set up a side chain on this track. And I completely disagree. It's right if it sounds right. So don't think you must use any of these, no matter what anyone told you. If you've got your track sounding good, then you've got your track sounding good. And you don't need to do any of this fancy stuff. But if you find a good musical purpose to do these things, then you can do them. So let's go a new them. We're gonna talk about side chaining. We're gonna talk about routing, busing and resampling. Okay, so let's do it. 195. Side Chaining: Okay, so what is side chaining? Side chaining is basically using one track to effect another track, okay? So there's a lot of different ways you can do this and a lot of different effects you can use it on. But the most common way this is done is with a compressor. So let's go to one of our synths here. Let's see. Not that one. Maybe not that one. Something with some sustain to it. So maybe this one. Yeah, that'll work. I'm going to turn it up a little bit. We'll do it on there. So what I'm going to do is put a compressor on this track. Okay? Now, remember what I just said about what a compressor does. Compressor is going to squash or compress the signal and then boost it. But it's going to squash it based on some parameters that we tell it. And what we're going to tell it here is squash the sound based on the volume of another track. Okay? So first, let's set up this just to do kind of a lot. Ya Ya all the way wet. Sure. That works. Whatever. Now, we need to set up what's going to control it. So the way we do that is our side chaining settings are hidden in this little arrow right here. So if I open that up, we can select what we're going to side chain it to. You can choose whatever you want here. You can choose a different track. One thing that I like to do is side chain to, like, rhythmic things, and you can actually make, add a lot of rhythm to this track. But the more common way to do it is to side chain to your kick. This is like side chain one oh one. This is what people do a lot of the time. So let's listen to this beat. Okay. That's not what I want. Let's do this one. Okay, so I want this kick. I want this four on the floor kick that we set up. But I don't want to side chain it to everything else. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to duplicate this track. I'm going to go in here and I'm going to get rid of everything that's not the kick. Okay? And now I'm going to delete all the rest of this and just duplicate this out. Okay, so now what we have on this track is just this. Delete this just so I don't screw that up. Okay, cool. Just a thump. Alright, so now let's go back to where we're side chaining. Alright, we're going to select side chain input from. What's the name of that track? Five drum rack. Okay? F five drum Rack. All right. We can say post effects. We can say post mixer. Those are settings that'll affect our volume, really, but in our case, they should be fine. So let's hit it. So now we see that line right there. That's our kick coming in. And let's pull this down. Okay, so now that kick is really affecting our volume, but we're not hearing it yet. Let's solo this two and listen. You feel that that pulse in the Syth. Basically, what's happening here is we're telling live that when these two sounds are happening at the same time, the kick wins. So use the compressor and scoop out the volume every time the kick hits. So the kick hits and the Syth goes down, and then it comes back up, and then the kick hits, Synth goes down, and it comes back up. That's what makes that offbeat feel. We can even mute the kick and not hear it, and we'll still get the effects of it. You feel that? So you've heard this 1,000 times every in, like, tons of pieces of maybe primarily dance music where it's just got that, like, feel to it. And that is a really aggressive side chain. So it has this effect of, like, almost being nauseous in a way if you use it really aggressively, but you don't need to use it really aggressively. There are a lot of very subtle things you can do with a side chain that are really helpful to your mix. And when we get into mixing, we might even hook up a side chain to help us get certain aspects of the mix under control. So you don't have to do it as aggressively as I'm doing it here. Let's listen to this in the whole context. That kick. A lot of kicks. So you don't even need to hear the thing you're side chaining to if you don't want to. I just wanted us to have a gaff on the floor, really straight kick to side chain two. So, to sum up, if you want to side chain something, take whatever you want to side chain. It should be something that's got some sustain to it. Put a compressor on it, open this little arrow, click side chain and select what you want to do. You can do a little adjustment to the signal here. There are other effects that will let you side chain. So when you see this little arrow, sometimes it's going to have side chain controls in it. So keep an eye out for those. But that's how you side chain. 196. Routing & Bussing: Routing. Okay, so let's take a step back to where we talked about the signal flow of live. Let's use this track as an example, okay? Okay. So this is an audio track. So this track is going to play. And then it's going to go through any effects down here. And then our volume here, and then it's sent to our main track or our master. Now, we can kind of interrupt that flow with routing, okay? So these little negative infinity things. So let's talk about how this works. We have, by default, set up into a default session, we have two Return tracks. Those are these down here, okay? We can make as many of these as we want. We just have to go to create and insert return track. Okay? Now I have three. Our new one is called C return. Now you'll notice when I made a third one, a third negative infinity popped up on all tracks. Okay? If I make another one, Great, insert return track. A fourth one pops up on all tracks and a fourth one down here. Okay? So I can send this signal down to any of these if I want, by just turning up some volume here. Okay? So let's say I want to send this to my A return track. Let's give it some volume. That's how much volume is going to get sent there, okay? Now, my volume is still going to go out normally to my master track. But it's also going to go to this return track. Okay? So why would I want to do that? The reason is I can put some effects on these return tracks. So this one by default, has reverb on it. So this is a cool trick because let's say there's a bunch of different stuff that I want reverb on throughout my session. I can put a reverb effect on any track I want. But if I want the same reverb for all the instruments, I'm going to have to keep track of what my settings are, what my dial is on all the different tracks that I put that reverb. Or instead of putting a reverb on all these tracks, I could just send some of the signal for all the tracks that I want to have reverb, let's say, these top three down to this return and then put my reverb there. Okay? So now this track has nothing but reverbed tracks. Okay. That's solo, just my reverb. It's kind of neat. So this track is nothing but reverb. So now I can blend that in. It makes it a little easier to control the mix this way for some things, and it makes my reverb really consistent. So times when you would want to route your signal down to a return track, we also sometimes call these bus tracks is primarily when you're doing a lot of time based effects. Time based effects are good on these return tracks. Reverb is a type of time based effect. Delay is a type of time based effect. But you can do whatever you want. If you want to take this delay one and put, I don't know, a bunch of delays, amplifier, some distortion, whatever you want. Make a big crazy effect and then say, Okay, I'm going to send all of my sinth to that one. Okay? This one is return B. So all I have to do is turn up the second one. And now, all of these are going to go through this crazy chain of effects, and it's going to sound crazy. Okay. I kind of like it, actually. It's kind of a cool sound. So that's how we route to these return tracks. You can make as many of them as you want. These two new ones that I made are going to be empty. They're just sitting there called return tracks. I'm going to get out of automation mode here. But I can put whatever I want on them. So when we work with more effects, we'll find more uses for these, but we'll see these in action a little bit more. But if you want to experiment around with them, you send audio to them just with these little dials, or if you want to pull up the mixer, they're these dials. So you send A, B, C, and D. And if you're wondering how I just pulled up the mixer, it's down here. So we can send whatever we want. Here is those four return tracks. And they can be really handy for routing sound around your session. Okay, let's talk about resampling. 197. Resampling: Resampling. We've kind of been doing resampling for a while throughout these courses because there's that command J thing that we've been doing where we consolidate something. That's kind of a way of resampling, but it's resampling just a single track and on a single track. Resampling basically means taking what we have, the sound of what we have, and processing it as its own thing. There's a few different ways we can do it. You could say, like, this beat. I want to capture this beat as a single clip. There's a few ways I could do it. I could first I could flatten all of these, but that only gets me kind of halfway there. I want them combined into one clip. I could export. I could solo these clips these tracks and then go to File Export and export just these and then import it again, but that's a bit cumbersome, but it would do it. So all of those ways will work, but there's one other that's just kind of easier. Let's make a new track, a new audio track because I want this to be an audio clip. Okay, so I could go here to my new audio track and just say resampling. Okay, now what that's going to do is it's going to grab hold of our main output and record it all into this. So I only want to hear things that I want in that. So I'm going to solo this beat. I'm actually going to leave off this little kick, and then I'm going to go here and hit record. Oops. I forgot to arm this to record. Okay, so I'm gonna arm this to record. Then I'm going to put my cursor where I want it and hit record. Okay. So now I got it. And if I solo this, it's gonna sound the same as if I had all of these three soloed now. So why would you want to do that? Sometimes I find this to be a handy thing to do. If I want to do some, like, quick, glitchy stuff, and I just want to make this sound strange for a second and like, chop it up. But maybe you want to do that or whatever. Let's take that and I duplicate it there. Sure. And then cut that out. For 1 bar, it's going to do this crazy thing. Maybe I want to take these out. Now if I play the whole thing through, it's going to sound like these are still in but all glitched out. Like so. Solo vis so we don't hear our crazy sent. All right, so that's what you can do with resampling. You kind of smooh everything down into an audio file and then play around with it that way. There are some times where that's really useful. So now you know how to do it. Okay, I guess I'll give you this session again if you want it. It still does have that side chain setup. So if you want to pick apart how that was put together, this might be useful to you. So I'll post this again, and then we'll move on to wrapping up this section. 198. What Next?: Okay, that brings us to just about the end of class three of the series, focusing on production techniques. Coming next is class four. And in this next class, we're going to focus on sound design and synthesis. That means we're going to learn to use every single one of these instruments and how to make the sounds that you want to make with them. We'll also be learning some basics of sound design principles about how synthesizers work so that you can apply what you learn about how to use these different synthesizers to any synthesizer that you see. Including a cool big old analog synthesizer, like that one I have right. Oh, this is hard to do backwards there? I have a sound design curriculum that I've been working on for a long time and I'm really proud of. So I think you're gonna be a master of sound design by the end of that class. So please join me for P four, sound design and synthesis. 199. 76 WrapUp: Okay, that brings us to the end of P three. We're like, almost halfway through this whole long series of mastering Ableton Live. Hopefully, they're not sick of me yet. Thanks for sticking with me this long. If you are sick of me, I totally get it. I'm getting a little sick of me, too. Hearing my voice just talk to a screen in an empty room is not for the faint of heart. But I just want to say thanks for being a part of these classes. Thanks for watching them. I do have a good time making them, even though I'm a little condescending of myself from time to time. Uh let's press on. I'll see you in the next one. It's probably out already. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being awesome. Keep on making awesome music. Bye.