Transcripts
1. Trailer: Ableton Live is uniquely powerful audio software because it's equally strong in three areas helping you to create, produce, and also perform music. Though other software is useful for one or two of these, nothing comes close to being as good at all three. This class, part of my Ableton series here on Skillshare, is perfect for getting started and learning the fundamentals of Ableton Live 9. Whether, you're a producer, musician, sound designer, DJ, or just interested in working with audio or MIDI on a computer. In this third class, we're going to get into recording audio into live. I'll show you how to set up your audio interface, how to set good levels, and then how to manipulate your new audio recordings for practical and creative effect. We'll dig deeper into warping audio clips as we cover a central concepts and techniques for working with long files, such as whole songs, which is great not only for Dj-ing with live, but also doing remixes, mashups, and sampling in general. Finally, I'll introduce you to Ableton's core sample playback virtual instruments: simpler, impulse, and drum racks. So, you can use MIDI to perform parts with any sound that you want. My name is Brian Jackson, and I'm an electronic musician, audio engineer, author, and educator based here in Brooklyn, New York. I've been around music my whole life and had been making music with computers since the mid '90s. I was one of the very first Ableton certified trainers and I'm the author of the Music Producers' Survival Guide Chaos Creativity and Career in Independent and Electronic Music and its companion book full of interviews, the Music Producers' Survival Stories. For well over a decade, I've taught every level of student from true beginners to Grammy winners. Music and music production is my passion and I love teaching people how to do what I do for a living, Let's get started.
2. Audio Preferences and Dealing with Latency: So, you may have guessed that we're looking at recording audio right now. Well, in fact, the topic of this class or this class in general is going to be about audio and sampling, but recording audio is going to be a big part of it. So, I figured it'd be a good way to start out and show you how that would work. But mainly for this particular topic, is going to be looking at the preferences and a couple of the basic configuration and setup items that commonly cause people a little bit of problems. So, first off, let's go into our preferences. Before you start on anything, you need to make sure that you have the right driver selected, on Mac this will always be CoreAudio, in Windows, use ASIO A-S-I-O if possible. I have here my Fireface 800 selected as my input and I've also told it which inputs to enable, you can save a little CPU if you have some of them turned off. Then for the outputs, the same although for our purposes right now the output's not going to be as important as the input. Then the sample rate which you can see I have set here at 44,100, that will serve most people most of the time. Then for my recording settings here, the file type I was recording was an AIFF and see the track name was bass and so it name my file bass.aiff and you can see there it's 44.1 and 24 bit and that's because I picked 24 bit as my bit depth and that's the one I recommend you use. There's really no reason to use 16 bit, and 32 bit is really a special case kind of use. So, just use 24 bit for all your recordings if possible. Then we'll come back to this a little later but I did also tell everyone early on in my first class to turn off the start transport with record option. Now, one of the issues people commonly have problems with is what is known as latency. So, let me go back into the audio tab here and you'll see under the latency section, you have your buffer size and this is always given in samples and in samples in the same way that there are 44,100 samples per second for my sample rate. There's a trade off between how hard your CPU has to work and how much latency you have. Now, when you're recording with virtual instruments with a midi keyboard, this isn't as big a deal because there's only the output latency. But if you're recording vocals or bass, you may want to play around with this. Now, the fact of the matter is, I just set my buffer to what my CPU could handle because I wasn't even monitoring the bass through Ableton. To make sure that you're able to hear that, I had to do a couple different things while this was recording. The fact of the matter is as I was listening to my bass performance through my audio interface and notice that the input here was set to off. So, we'll come back to this in a little bit later on. But basically, because your computer needs to handle things like making sure the mouse moves, drawing the images on the screen, accessing the hard drive, it needs to buffer some samples ahead of time and everyone's computer is a little different. So, you can use this test tone not just for the purposes of hearing to make sure you're getting sound, but notice you can turn the CPU usage simulator up to 80 percent and then you can set your buffer until you start hearing crackles. So, let's jump all the way down to 32. Yeah that's no good. A little better. Well, I just set it 512 and not worry about it. Have a few cracks there so maybe I want to go to 1,024. The only reason I'm even having to set that high is because I have screen-capture software running in the background. So, you can use the test here to figure out what your buffer setting is but the fact of the matter is you want to do what's called direct monitoring. So, if you do a search on any of your search engines, you'll find an article called Living with Latency on Sound on Sound website which by the way is the best audio tech magazine out there, I highly recommend it. This will walk you through why you have latency and it's good reading to do. Also, you will find that there are a lot of other websites. So, here's one I found on starthomerecording.com and explains how direct monitoring works. Basically, it has the output going to your headphones from your software at the same time, your guitar vocals are going in and you can mix between them. For those of you that are curious, this is my interface here. It has lots of functionality for helping me do all this direct monitoring stuff. So, let's go back into live. So, in the coming lessons, we're going to come back into recording audio and using audio for sampling and all sorts of different techniques and workflows. So, these basic configurations are the ones you're going to want to make sure you're comfortable with and I do recommend doing a little bit of reading on direct monitoring and latency. So, you don't really have to worry about it. But just one last little demo here. Let's set this backup all the way and I'm going to record enable this track that has my voice coming in on it. Check. Let me set the monitor to auto. Check. Check. Check. You can hear a delay there right now that's because we're monitoring through my interface right into where I'm recording my voice, and into live and you'll hear me talking at the same time. What if I go to 256 samples. So, notice there's maybe a little bit of an ambiance but there's no more delay. That's really the example here and you'll notice that my CPU is going to change drastically too. If I go to 128 I'm going about 21 percent and if I go all the way back up to 2,048 where I have an echo, you'll notice that the CPU dropped by about 10 percent. So, that is why we use direct monitoring and we don't have to care about what our buffer setting is.
3. Recording Audio in Session View: Now that we're all configured for recording audio, let's actually look at some workflows for recording audio in session view. Now you may recall from class two that we went over a lot of the different features you'd use for recording MIDI, and for the most part, they're all the same, whether we're talking about the metronome, the count in and also the quantization setting here in the control bar. So we don't need the metronome now because I'm going to use this drumbeat here, and this is just one of the loops that comes with live suite in the solid sounds pack. Then whenever I'm ready, essentially, I can click on this record button here and according to the quantization, it will come in and start recording. Now I want to first set the levels and that's something we've yet to talk about. So I have an analogue synth out here in the real world that I have plugged in. I have a coming into my audio interface. You can put 19 and 20 on your interface. It would be different depending on how you set everything up, and the level is set in the hardware. See, if I turn this down in here, it's not going to affect the level coming in. So you'd have to do that at your audio interface or on the synth. So what is a good level? Well, that would be a little too low and we are recording at 24-bit so we don't have to be all the way up. Somewhere above the minus 36 and between minus 6. So this would be a good level. If you record really low, at 24-bit, it'll still sound okay, possibly it'll still sound okay, but it'll be hard to see the waveforms. So, this would be a good solid signal for my 24-bit recording. If you're working in 16-bit, which there's no reason you should be, you might want to try to record it a little harder but this would be a good level regardless. So now that I'm sure that my level is set good, I'm not clipping, its not too low, I'm not amplifying too much noise, let's go ahead and do a couple takes. So actually maybe I want this to play. I'm going to practice along a little bit. Okay. That's going to go ahead and work great. So whenever I'm ready, I can just click on this circle to start, or I can give myself my count in and I have the trigger recording on launch preference set up here and let's go ahead and do this now. I want to see what I'm doing here. If I want to do another one, I can just click here whenever I'm ready. While we can't quantize audio in the same way, we can use our warping to tighten up our performances and we can do some basic quantizing. So I'm gonna do my shift command U, eighth-note triplet and let's see what it does. Essentially, you could see it did some quantizing for me. Let's go to tones. Let's go into this one. Let's set this to one bar. Let's just go to a straight eighth note. If I wanted to do another one, I can just go ahead. You'll see this sometimes when you're working with MIDI and synths, there'll be a little bit of latency at the beginning. So I'm going to drag that over, and then maybe I want to quantize this. So you can go back into any of the warping functionality we talked about earlier on. In the next class, we are going to talk about editing on the timeline in arrangement view, but the next topic is going to be about recording in arrangement view, and I'm gonna show you a loop recording technique that can be really useful when you want to keep trying the same thing over and over again and then picking just the best take. So that's a quick overview on recording audio in session view. Let's go onto recording in arrangement view now.
4. Recording Audio in Arrangement View: Now, the reason it's not recording anything, is because I've not turned on the Record button in the control bar. This is the first time we've actually talked about using this button up here. Now, this is the reason also I told you to turn off this preference in the Record Warp Launch tab. Start Transport with Record, if I had that on, the second I enabled Global Record up here, it would've started playing and for most people, you're not going to like that. So, this is what you're going to want to do. Set up the track you want to record on, set your levels, hit Record and then whenever you're ready, you can go ahead and have your Count-In active if you want or not. I'm going to turn off Loop and I'm just going to tell it where I want to start from. So, notice this was more of like a longer part. I had it going on for, in this case, eight bars roughly. Now, if I was going to do two bars or four bars then working in Session view is just fine. If I'm going to do 8, 16, 32 or even longer, then that's where Arrangement view is really useful. Now, I can zoom in here and I could do edits on the timeline, move things around, we could still do all of our warping, tricks down here in the Clip view and notice though that Loop is not on. This is the kind of stuff we're going to come back to in the next class, which is all about working in Arrangement view. So, that's one of the reasons I might want to record in here and that would be because I want to do a longer section or maybe I want to do a Loop recording. So, I'm going to use the Loop brace, which acts more or less like the Loop brace in Clip view except for it's going to be for everything in the song. So, let's say I wanted to loop just this section. Now, because I already have audio there, I'm going to go ahead and record somewhere else. It's not like MIDI, you can add overdub into audio. So, if the Loop switch enabled here, I'm going to press Record here and then I'm going to let it loop a bunch of times and enable punching. So, it's going to start from here and then start recording here and now, watch what happens when we start playing. Don't worry I missed one. So, it looks like I just have this one clip here, but look what it did. Every time it looped, it actually set the Loop brace in the start, for each one I last did. So, if I want to use this one, I'll turn loop on, looks like I kind of stopped in a weird spot. Let me go back here and line this up. I want to make sure I have a nice two-bar loop, there we go. Now, once I have loop on, I can pick the take that I want. I'll quantize that, maybe I want to check this one out. Let's turn this down a little bit here. I'll turn Loop off, drag this out for however many times I wanted to play. So, a couple of different things we did here. One of them was I started introducing you to a bunch of the features and topics we're going to be getting into in the next class, but the main point was to start getting used to seeing the way we can record in Arrangement view, not just Session view. Finally, let's just say I had done a longer recording in here, I'm not stuck in here, I'm just going to click on this Command C to copy and then Command V to paste and I can go back into Session view and I could also copy and paste stuff back and forth this way, and that's what we're going to start looking at in class four. In the meantime, we're going to dig back into further warping techniques for working with recorded audio, in addition how to take our recordings and turn them into sample playback instruments.
5. Beats Mode in Detail: So, when we're working with drums it's really important that we have the right warp mode set up, and we talked about that earlier in other classes about using Beats mode. Well, we didn't go into anything other than the fact that you should pick Beats mode from when you're slowing down or speeding up audio that's drums or percussion bass. There's a lot of other things you can do with these few little settings that are available down here under where you actually pick the mode. So, if we go over to this other version of the same file, notice I've slowed down to 70 bpm from what was originally 112, and if we go back up for this one listen to how it doesn't sound so hot. There are all kinds of weird stuff, and here's one with just a few different settings. So, what I did was, is I changed the Preserve setting to half of a bar and by default, usually this is set to Transient, and what that means is that everywhere it detects one of these little events, it puts a little triangle. That is a transient mark and it tries to line up each of those with the current tempo with the musical grid. But if you're slowing things down, sometimes it doesn't really know what to do with that additional time. So, it's going to loop it backwards and forwards, or it's going to try to restart it, or I'll show you what you can do some cool stuff with the one here, where it just goes to the end and then stops of the segment. But if you set the preserve a little shorter, you can get some cool different feels out of it. If I went to 16th note. Or if I went to quarter note. If I don't want that backwards piece there, maybe I wanted to go forward and then forwards, we'll get little double hits. Sounds a little drunk but it could be a fun beat to build something around. Let's go back to Transient. I guess it sounds way glitchier that way and you may like that. But let's go back to our half note here. Now, let's check out another one. So, this here was originally in 95 bpm. You can see it's set to the default which is Preserve, the Transient. Set to loop backwards and forward. Again, this is really only for when you're slowing down audio when you have the Transient setting. Now, let's check out one where I've made some changes to it, and let's go to our forward-forward. Now, what if I don't want that happening? I'm just going to go to Transient, and check this out. It's going to go to where it detects the transient and then stop before it gets to the next transient, if there's extra time. Notice how it sounds a lot tighter now. So, there's a couple of different ways to approach using Beats mode. One of them is to try to make things sound as natural as possible, kind of what I'm doing here. The other one is to just have fun with it and use some different techniques to try to bring out different grooves and feels, and you should try this all out when you're speeding up audio as well, not just slowing it down. Now, there's one last piece I want to show you. So, I want to go over to this drone all the way over here. So, this is a drone and I have it set to Beats mode, which it normally would be set to Texture and we're going to look at that in the next topic. But what if I really misused the warp mode here? So, essentially, I'm forcing a rhythm on top of this droning part and let's actually go ahead and transpose this up. Maybe set this down to 16th. Essentially, this acts as a gate, this little field right here. What if I go- Let's try this one. Let's put a quarter note. Go forward. Maybe shorten it more. Let's go back to say, 16th. Let's go to 32nd note. So, Beats mode can be used for everything from making your drums sound natural at a slower or faster tempo to, as you hopefully can see, obviously really neat creative options. So, on the next topic, we're going to go into the other warp modes more in detail.
6. Other Warp Modes in Detail: So, on the last topic, we left off messing around with beats mode for creative usage. Now, we're going to look at the other warp modes a little bit more in detail. So, tone's mode is really ideal for tones. You can hear a little bit of glitching in there. So basically, the only other parameter we have for tones mode is the grain size and just play around with it. Usually, smaller settings, the default of 30 tends to work pretty well on most sound. But as you can hear with this one, this single piano hit, a larger one seems to work better. Again, you'll notice these much more when you're slowing something down. So, it was guessing this was originally around 112 and we're playing at about 88. So, let's look at texture mode now. So, texture mode is designed for textures. Something like this droning sound here. We can try to play around with it a little bit. Let's hear it without warp on. So, I want to try to find it. So, the grain size is how big of a chunk it's analyzing and warping, and flux is random fluctuation. So, grain size and flux are essentially fine tunings for how it's going to try to keep a texture sounding like a texture. Now, that's for making sounds seem as natural as possible. Let's check out some fun things you can do with texture move. So, what did this start out at? This started out as this. Instead of using beats mode, I slowed it way down. I hit times 2 here until it was as long as it possibly could be stretched. Then we can play around with the grain size, give it some fluctuation. Take a bigger chunk of last parts. So, that's fun with texture modes, and then let's go look at repitch. So, here is a funk drum beat that I've done a lot of warping on. That's the natural sound and notice there's no other parameters and transposing is even disabled. So, let's hear what happens when you put it on a voice. So, here is me talking. So, that's kind of cool. But what if we wanted to do some transposing and a voice and have it sound a little bit less chipmunk. So, let's try. Hear what this sounds like in tones. Notice I've transposed it up a full octave and that was what it would sound like in tones a little bit like an elf or a chipmunk. So, it's great for sound design for video games or cartoons. Let's hear it in complex mode. A little better but let's go to complex pro. So, the format parameter here is especially good when you're transposing. Notice it sounds more chipmunky here. No, it doesn't sound like me, but it doesn't sound as bad. What if I will lower this? Notice you get more of the Darth Vader monster effect with performance turned all the way down. The envelope has to do with how it's shifting around the frequency content. So, you can hear it sounds a little bit glitchy but notice it doesn't have the common transposing issues. Let's go even lower here. What will happen went out of tones? So, that's the same sound in tones mode, texture, repitch, complex and let's do this. So, hopefully that gives you some idea for some fun effects but also why you might use this when you're doing some transposing and maybe I'll go back to something a little bit less extreme. So, it doesn't sound like me but it doesn't sound like the typical Darth Vader, chipmunk effect. Now, complex and complex pro were really designed for whole songs. So, this is a track I produced over a decade ago now in a project called Memory Systems this came out in late 2002. Let's hear this now, set to maybe beats mode. It was around 100 ppm originally and playing in 88. Let me make this even slower. Stride tones, texture, repitch, complex, and then complex pro. So, back up 88 here to 89. So, complex pro and and complex do use more CPU but They're going to sound a lot better especially when you're slowing stuff way down let's say, tones or beats. You hear how wobbly the bass is there. Stop ahead here a little bit. This is the original with no warping but slow away back down in here. So, I was able to slow it down quite a bit and maintain most of the sound quality. So, if you're going to be using live for deejaying or doing mashups or remixes, and you're working with whole songs or pieces of audio that are complex in terms of having beats, tones and textures, use complex and then if need be, use complex pro. So, in future topics we're going to get into warping long songs, some more of the finer points when dealing with bigger chunks of audio, and then also how to grab pieces for sampling or just to make them smaller and more manageable.
7. Sample Box Parameters: For the project steps, you're going to do a bunch of warping, and just playing around and having fun with different types of audio, using the different warp modes and other features over here in the clip view that we've already talked about. So now, I want to just go ahead and show you the rest of what all of these parameters are for, so when you're messing around and doing your stuff, and working on your projects you'll know whether or not you even need to care about some of these. Now, some of these is in the Preferences. So, let's go into our Preferences, and in the File Folder tab, you'll see they have this section here called Sample Editor. That's going to be for when we hit this Edit button. So, if we want to open up our file on another piece of software, which I'll show you how to do momentarily, you'll want to make sure that you have something set up here. I'm using one called DSP-Quattro, of course there's WaveLab, there's a free one out there called WavePad. There's a whole assortment of other pieces of software you can use if you want to do permanent destructive edit and again I'll come back to this in a second. The other place that you're going to want to reference is over here where it says Fade in the sample box. That has to do with this preference right here, Create Fades on Clip Edges. Now I do have that on and I'm going to demonstrate this and show you what these are in a little bit. So, those are the two places in the preferences that are relevant to what's happening here. Of course, we've already talked about warping in other topics and classes and that's where you'd find these other preferences but we've already done that. So, let's go back over here and let's check out this sample. So of course, we have basic controls like volume, which I find to be very useful especially when you have a bunch of different clips on the same track and you don't want to worry about automation, a lot of times I will just turn down the clip. First, we can transpose and detuning here is for fine tuning, so there's a 100 cents per semitone. So, notice as I go past the certain amount, it just moves the knob here for me. Little trick I mentioned before, whenever you see the little box on our parameter to go back to your default just press Delete. Now, what if I wanted to reverse a sample, let's do that. Then, once you've reversed it, it's going to be instant the next time. So, if you have a really long song, it can take awhile. I don't recommend reversing whole songs and we're going to talk about cropping and taking out smaller pieces in a little bit. Now, the RAM Mode here is left over really from older versions of Live and more or less, it'd be more accurate when people had slower older computers. Now occasionally, this will be useful. All the way here in the upper right there's this little D button and if this comes on orange with that saying is that your hard drive is too slow. So, this is really useful when you're launching a lot of little tiny pieces really fast. Now, high-quality mode here, is for high-quality sample transposition, and sample rate conversion. You may or may not even notice a difference here, depends on the type of sample you're working with. But the high-quality mode I usually have ON by default. Again, like I said sometimes you really can't tell the difference other times you will. Now, the Edit button here which I mentioned at the onset of this topic has to do with destructive edit. So what I mean by destructive, I mean permanent changes to the file on the hard drive. So, if I hit Edit, says sample offline and it opened it up in the piece of software I specified in the press. Now, I might use a piece of software like this for fixing clicks. You'd go into a pencil tool mode and zoom way in here and get rid of little clicks and pops. But for the most part I'm not going to be doing that because you can usually just do editing in Arrangement View and then bring it back over, so again be very careful. If this file was being used in another project or another piece of software, any change I'm making here would be updated in every single other piece of software that was using that file. So, only use Edit if you really have to, and for the most part I don't think most of you will. I don't honestly remember the last time I actually had to use that feature but it is very useful for some people. Let's talk briefly now about the Save button. This is really something that's more relevant for when you're working with longer chunks and you've spent a lot of time warping them. If you don't want to have to rework them and it doesn't have to be for whole songs, it could be for any variety of little chunks or pieces. If you pressed this Save button, it is going to right to a file. So, let me show this in the Finder, and you can see here there is this.asd file and that's an Ableton analysis file. Let me see if you can see the name of it, over here on Kind, where it says Sample Analysis File. So, this.asd is a couple of things, one it draws the picture the wave form, but if you hit Save here any settings in the sample box. Any settings in the sample box, so the Start, the End, whether Loop is on, the Warp Mode and any other parameters you have set up over here, it's going to save that into that asd file and then the next time you import that file into a Live-set it will remember those settings. So, we'll come back to that a little bit more detail when we get to warping long songs. You can always open up the Info View at the bottom here, and it will tell you what everything is. Last thing here is I wanted to show you the Fade settings. So, if I hit Tab to go back into Arrangement View, you'll see here at the clip edges we have this little fade, so if you want to see them, you can go into here and we're going to come back to this stuff in Arrangement View in a little bit more. But this is happening in Session View when you're looping even though you don't see it and then when you do bring the clips over into Arrangement View, we can adjust them and fine tune them. But sometimes you'll notice it takes the puncher impact off of drums or percussion and you may want to go in here and get rid of them. But if you're having trouble with that just turn the Fade off here and then you won't have to worry about deleting them out later. So, in the next couple of topics we're going to go more in depth into warping and working with audio in a couple of different ways.
8. Warp Options in the Context Menu: So, in previous topics, we looked at warping for a bunch of different scenarios, but the one thing I promised we'd come back to is looking at how to deal with long files, and in particular, whole songs. So, before we get started, I just want to make sure you have a few preferences set up in the record warp launch tab. I did recommend a while back that you turn off the auto warp long samples preference. This is only useful to turn on if you really already know what you're doing and you have a workflow that you've come to that makes sense to have this on. Otherwise, it's not the end of the world if you leave this on, it just can cause you a few extra steps if you have to undo some things. The other one, is in the file folder tab here. You'll see they have something called the decoding cash. Now when I dragged in this MP3, live actually decoded this into a AIF file or wave file depending which platform you're on. Because trying to play back in warp, MP3s or other compressed formats, would just be too CPU heavy. So, they convert it into a PCM audio file, which is your standard AIF or wave. Here you can kind of manage how much disk space it can take up if you want to clean up the cache itself, if you press this cleanup button it'll get rid of all of the decoded files except for the ones that are currently in the open set. Then your projects actually manage the MP3s or whatever decoded files you've imported into the project. But if you do move the set to another computer, you might have to wait a second while it decompresses those. So, the decoding cash here, you can see I've set it to be on a different drive than my startup drive. But as long as you just pay attention to this and set it up for how it makes sense to you, then you'll be okay. So, let's go back into here now, and this is a song I produced in 2002 and we heard it in one of the other topics. So, let's just give this a listen really quick. I'm going to turn on the metronome. So, we can tell it doesn't match the tempo at all of the current project. So, what I want to do is first of all, whenever you're dealing with any long files, you always want to zoom in right at the beginning and make sure that you set the one exactly where it's supposed to be. Now for this song, I know this actually comes in on a one, and in a lot of cases though, it's not going to actually come in on a one. There might be a pickup note, a lot of times there's an introduction that does not actually start in any sort of reliably rhythmic way, and there's ways of dealing with those things we would do in a more advanced class. But for right now, just find where the one is, and then go ahead and right-click and choose set 111 here. You'll see what it did, is it set the one and it put in a few warp markers and you'll notice here just set this at 120, and of course I know this is not 120, but live didn't. So, I'm going to set this to complex and then I'm going to right-click again, right where on the start and you'll see it gives me five options. Warp From Here, Warp From Here Start at, Warp From Here Straight, Warp 120 BPM From Here and Warp as Loop. They got the tempo numbers here from the global tempo. So, if I actually knew the tempo of the song, it would've been a good idea for me to type it in before I turned on warp and that's one of the reasons why you want to have the auto warp off. So, when you turn this on you have a little bit more control over what live does. But let's just go ahead and see what happens if I choose Warp from here. Notice what it did, it didn't round it off to 100 but 99.99 essentially that's a 100. So, let's go ahead and turn the metronome and let's give it a listen. So, now my 100 BPM song is playing back at 120 BPM. Maybe I want to set this to 100, and the reason I'm turning the metronome on is so I can tell if it warped it correctly cause it may be speeding it up or slowing it down, but at least I'm able to tell whether it did it correctly. So, this one worked right away just choosing the warp from here option. Now, we're going to come back to this one, the warp from here start at in a little bit. Let me just talk briefly about these, warp from here straight would be if you knew there was no tempo changes at all or there was no shifts. It would just pick whatever the tempo is it wants to start with and make sure that it was a straight beat. Then warp 100 BPM from here would be if I was a 100% sure, that it started at 100 and I wanted it to just make this whole thing 100 BPM. It may seem like they're all the same, but they are slight differences in the algorithms that able to news using in the background. So, that the start at 100 would make adjustments on the fly, whereas the warp 100 from here is pretty much just going to set it to 100 even if further into the song it changed. Then the warp as x bar loop, in this case 64, would be useful if you knew as a certain number of bars, eight bars, six bars, seven bars what have you. So, I'm not actually going to demo these right now, what I want to do is, show you one of the other ones. So, this is another song I produced, I did this one in about 2005 and again I want to zoom in here at the beginning and I want to set the one where I want it. So, I'm going to move this over here and I'm going to try set one. Then if you do the warping while it's playing, a lot of times, you just stop and then start. Now it just happened to be that this song was also about 100 BPM. Let's see what happens a jump ahead here a little bit. I could see everything is around the beats, I should be able to play these two songs together now as if I was a DJing, and they should be in tempo. So, that would be the basic approach that you would do for songs are going to warp right away and just work for you. Then one last thing, as you may recall from previous topics, once you've spent time warping the songs, make sure to press the Save button over here. So, you don't have to keep doing that every time you import those files into a new live set. Now that information is stored in this live set right here, the one called warp options and context menu. But if I were to drag these files into another brand new set and I had not hit save, I would have to go again and warp them all over. So, in the next topic, we're going to look a little bit more in detail in some of these other options particularly the warp from here. For when you're having trouble getting the tempos to work right, and then also a couple more things having to do with fine-tuning, the warping that you've already done.
9. Intermediate Warping Techniques: In the last topic, we looked at some of the basics of warping long songs, and now I want to show you a couple techniques for helping you out when the straight ahead warp from here option isn't doing what you want. So, these are a couple of songs I produced back in 2006, and one of them is pretty straightforward and the other one has a weird introduction. So, let's first start out with the one that's more straightforward. Zoom in here, and I want to set my one. So, I am going to right click, set the one here, and then I want to go back in and warp from here, and make sure you just set the complex mode of course. You'll notice sometimes if you warp it after it's already started, you just have to stop and start again. But notice, it still sounds a little off and part of the reason for that is this first kick, was a little soft. So, what I want to do is find the first strong kick. So, maybe after the first bar, right here where it should be on the two, Iet me try setting the one there, and then I'll go ahead and choose warp from here. Let's see if that did a better job. You see it thinks it was a 130, so, let's see what happens if I set it to 130. So, it should sound the same now if I turn more above, and if I turn it on. Then, what I could do is I could backtrack and figure out why this first kick wasn't coming in exactly as it should. But for our purposes, this is actually fine. I don't really need that extra bar at the intro. So, that one wasn't too tricky, but let's hear what happens now if I try another song or the intro is not really in four four. Try to figure out where the one is on something like this. So, this was a trick that I actually learned from listening to a lot of the artists on compact in the early 2000s, where they would bring in the kick out of one. But because of the way the intro was arranged, they would feel like it's coming in in a weird spot. So, really what I'm going to do, is I'm just going to get this right on before the kick comes in. Set the one there, and then I'm going to try a warp from here, and let's see how this did. Get I want to make sure this is on complex mode. So, that worked pretty well. Now, I'm going to show you another technique in case you're having a hard time figuring out exactly what the tempo is of the song. So, I'm actually going to drag this all the way back to the beginning and set the one back at the top there, and I'm going to pretend like we didn't actually get this warp correctly. I'm going to type in this field here, but I don't recommend you ever do that unless you're 100 percent sure what the tempo is of a file, and by a 100 percent sure, I mean really the whole file being that one tempo. But I did that just to reset everything back to what would be a default if I hadn't done things correctly. So, let's go back in here and zoom in. Make sure that my one is where it really should be, and so, I'll go ahead and maybe set my one there and then give it a listen. Okay, so that's not working, maybe I'll try start at. That's not really working either. So, what I want to do is, I want to tell live what the tempo is of the song. Now, I happen to know it's about 130, but let's just say I didn't. So, I'm going to turn this off, and if we go into MIDI map, you'll see that I mapped a button to the tap tempo. Of course, you can just tap on that, or you can map a key, or any sort of MIDI parameter on your controllers. But I don't like using the mouse. So, I'm going to go ahead and launch this, and by the way, you have to do this step in session view. If you don't, it's going to jump around and you won't be able to tap along, and you want the metronome off too. So, I'm just going to hit play and tap along. So, it seems to be around 128. So, I'm going to actually leave that at right where it is, I could round it off if I wanted to but that's not that important. I'm going to go ahead and choose warp from here, start at. Because it's starting there, it doesn't matter if this is in a rounded number, it's going to make adjustments on the fly. So, let's hear how that did. So, it's on tempo, but of course the count is off because the intro is not an even number of bars. Now, if we zoom ahead, you can see it is starting to drift a little bit. So, this is where again, I would recommend you actually find where the first downbeat is. Set the one there, and then work from there and let's hear how this did. Let me jump ahead here a little bit. So, let's say I want to set my tempo to 125. Let's hear what would happen if I were to deejay these. So, there's some syncopations and they may not match all the notes, but at least we can tell that these are in tempo. Should I choose I wanted to play these together, then they would work. So, if there was going to be an advanced topic in this class, it would be going into what to do with these intros after you've warped it. But as a beginners class, this is something we're not going to get into now. So, look for advanced warping techniques in future classes.
10. Cropping Clips: This is going to be a pretty brief topic. It's a really useful technique to know how to make big files into small, usable pieces, and there's a feature called cropping. Now, let's say, I wanted just this kick drum, and I wanted to use that to drop into one of my samplers, something we'll be looking at later, and something you'll be doing as part of your project steps. So, I don't want to crop the one I just spent all the time warping, I want to make a copy. So, I'm going to option drag. Then on the one here, l want to make sure I have this selected, you may even want to change the color on it, so you're sure you're looking down here. Notice I have the loop brace set to surround this one kick. I'm just going to go ahead and right-click on it here and choose Crop Sample. Then notice it got rid of everything, except for just the piece I wanted. So, what I might do is then make another copy, and again, I might want to change the color on it to make sure I'm cropping the correct one. What I can do is, using the tricks we've learned in previous topics, is use my loop brace. So, that would be a hi-hat. So then I could go ahead here, I'll right-click, l'll crop the sample, and now, I have just a hi-hat. So, I have a kick and a hat. Now, of course, we're not going to use these later on just for looping them like this. We're going to turn them into playable instruments. Then one last little thing. Let's say that I didn't want just a tiny little chunk. If you have the loop brace after the start, so notice if I have the start here, and then the loop here, when I crop it, it's going to go from there to there. So, let's do that. Notice it kept the part before the loop brace but then it went up to where loop was and what if, I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of this now, what if loop was off? When loop is off it's then going to use the end and notice it did something kind of weird here that, actually, in my opinion is a bug. So, let me go ahead and bring the end flag over. So, when I crop now, since loop is off, it's just going to keep what's between the start and the end flag. So, essentially, when loop is on, it uses the loop brace, or if the start is to the left of the loop brace, it's going to keep that amount of time. If loop is off, it's just going to use the start and the end. Now, I would have this little chunk here. Let's turn off that hi-hat, don't need that, and then let's go ahead and loop this. So, I'd have this one bar section that maybe I wanted to use for a remix or a mashup. Any audio files that you crop are new files. It doesn't actually make an edit to the old file, and you would find those in the samples folder in your current project under processed crop and you could see the names of the files they came from, and it's just going to keep adding numbers after them. So, I would go back through and name them. You can just do command R when you're up here or always rename stuff from within Live. I would not want to rename it from the finder or Explorer, or then Live's not going to be able to find those files. So, rename everything from within Live and then you'll be good. So, in a few topics, we're going come back to what to do with things like this but cropping is a really useful technique, whether for finding individual drum hits or just finding loops or pieces that you want to sample from larger chunks of audio.
11. Clip To Sample Instrument: Before we dig in to Ableton's course sample instruments, I wanted to pick up where we left off last time when we are talking about cropping clips. But this time, I'm going to show you some other ways of thinking about grabbing pieces of audio. Then, this time, we're going to actually dump them into some instruments and play them with MIDI. So, first of all, let's give a listen to this scene of some of the loops that come with one of the live packs. So, let's say that I just want to grab one of these bass notes. So, let's go ahead and solo this track and launch it. Maybe, I just want this first piece. So, just like we did when we were cropping, I'm going to select it and then loop it. But this time, instead of cropping it, I'm going to go over to a MIDI track and you see where it says drop an instrument or sample here. I go ahead and drop this down here, and it just created a simpler for me, me on solo. So, now, I'm able to play that. We're going to come back to simpler in the next topic. Now, I could do something similar with drums. On this track here, I have impulse, another device we're going to look at shortly. Let me find a couple sounds. So, let's say, I want to grab this kick. So, what I'm going to do is set my loop raise, go back to impulse, drag this here. Then, let's say, I want to grab a snare, I'll just go back over to it. Now, I'm going to find tune, my position there. Then let's go back over the impulse and drop this down here. Also, I did was pencil in a few different notes and let's give this a listen. So, nothing too great, but the moment. But, I just put in a really simple beat here. So, right now, we're just hearing the kick and the snare. Let's say, I wanted to grab some of the high hats. So, let's find the high hats in this. It's a little bit more like a shaker tambourine, but that's fine. Go back over here and I maybe drop this over here, and let's give it a listen. So, notice, we didn't even have to crop anything. All you have to do is set the loop raise and drop it either onto an empty track to have it create simpler or in impulse, you can drop it into any of these slot. In the next topic, we're going to look a little bit deeper into each of these devices.
12. Impulse and Simpler 101: Okay. So, I guess I've been channeling my inner ED, Sci-Fi, B movie soundtrack here for this one. We're going to take a look a little bit deeper at Impulse and Simpler. Before we get back into where we left off last time, let's actually look at Impulse a little bit more here. So, on this track, I have the Dub Delay preset pulled up, and you can find this under Instruments, and then under Impulse, under Dub Delay. I actually turned off the effects that they already had built into this rack, and so Impulse is the center section here, and they've mapped out some of the volumes for the different sounds. So, what we're looking at are eight different slots. As you saw briefly in previous topics, you can dump a sample into each one of these. Then, over here on the bottom, you have controls for each of the samples. So, let's say, for this kick, if I didn't want that distortion on there, I could turn that off there, and then of course, we also have things like Decay, Panning, Velocity, Sensitivity, which is usually at 70 percent, and we're going to leave it right, though you can turn that up or down. Then, we have the global controls which affect all of the samples in Impulse. Now, one of the cool things about Impulses is that, it was set up to work with your computer MIDI keyboard. So, right when you turn it on by default, if you haven't moved the octaves up or down, it's just going to trigger. So, Impulse does not follow the general MIDI mapping. It starts at C3, right here, and then it's just C major from C3 to C4. So, there's no black keys, it would be just the white keys in the key of C from C3 to C4. Let's look a little bit at how I program this. You may notice that this ride sound that I have at the end here. When it gets to the first hi-hat here at the beginning, it shuts off, and I'll explain that, but just give it a listen. What if I move this down to this hi-hat? Notice how it wrings out longer, and the reason for that, you undo there, is because there's one setting that only shows up when you click on the eighth slot, and you see there's a link button here. What that means is that only one of these two can be playing at a time, so slot eight can be linked to slot seven, and it's what's known as a choke group into really simple feature, but it's a nice way if you want to mimic open hats and closed hats. In this case, it's a ride cymbal and a hi-hat. So, if I have this link off, it doesn't really matter. I can leave this there, or if I move this down, and then go back in here. I'll move this back up. So, Impulse gives you some really cool ways of manipulating the sound really fast. We're going to look at Drum RFdrumacks in the next topic, which in some ways gives you a lot more options. But, there's certain things you can only do in Impulse, such as affect the transposing and the timing, which would be all of the decays and stretch parameter for all the samples, which something you cannot do with the Drum Rack. Even though Impulse is pretty basic compared to what a lot of people are into using these days, I do recommend that you actually start out doing your drums in Impulse, and we looked in the last couple of topics on how to find pieces of samples from either loops or songs, and then drag them in down here. Now, you can put the samples wherever you want, but generally speaking, it's going to be kick, snare, possibly another snare clap sound, then percussion, and then hi-hats. Though, you can see in this kit, they did a little differently with a couple of hi-hats at the ride cymbal. So, that is a quick look at the Impulse, and I do recommend spending some time playing around with it. By the way, we are going to come back to it in Class four when we look at routing, where I'm going to show you how to route the kick and snare and all the other sounds out onto their own tracks for mixing. Now, in the last topic, we looked at grabbing this bass sound and dragging it into a Simpler. So, let's see what I actually did with that, and let's look at the track here, and I fine tune the sample a little bit. To do that, you can just drag around the sample start and end here in the waveform overview, and you can also play around with the sample controls here. Now, since this is a bass sound, I didn't want to play around with the synthesis controls too much, and I added some effects to get a little bit of a Bootsy Collins kind of a feel to it, and this is stuff we're going to talk about in Class for a little bit. Now, before I move on to showing you a little bit more about Simpler, I do want to point out that because this bassline was originally in A, this first note was an A, and I wanted it to be able to trigger on the normal keyboard. If I play a C, I want to here a C, so I transposed it up three semitones. So, A, A-sharp, B, C, and that's why it's playing key right now. If you don't know the note when you play on your MIDI keyboard, when you see the notes you have in here, say D-sharp, in this case it may not actually play a D-sharp unless you know the note that it's supposed to be playing. A lot of times the samples will tell you the note and the name. In this case, since we grabbed it ourselves from this loop over here, I just had to figure that out, and I guess that the node A was the first note which in fact it is, and then I went over here and just transposed it up. So, when I play the note C, it plays the note C. So, let's look a little bit more at some of the synthesis type parameters that you have here. So, this section here lets you control the sample, how it plays back, how it loops. If you want the sample to actually be able to play longer than the note, you hold down, when you're dealing with samples at something you'll bump into. So, you want to turn loop on, you can play around with which part of the sample is actually going to be looped, and then we have synthesis type controls, such as the filter, which you can turn on over here, an LFO, which I could use to modulate my filter. You see, it's set to a sample on hold on an eighth note, and then we have three different envelopes. Let's say, I wanted the sound of feed in a little bit more, take a little longer to feed in. Also, this, you'll notice was transposed up. Now, this was a preset called Warm Bubbly Pad that I grabbed from the browser, and it looks like they did the same thing here. They transposed this up four semitones, so when you play a C, it would play back in C. So, this is just a quick introduction to Simpler and Impulse. In future classes, you get more into advanced sampling, but this is a lot for you to get started with. There's tons you can do in here. For those of you that are wondering, if you did want to do more than load in one sample, if you right-click anywhere on the top here, notice it was cut off at the bottom of the screen, but you can convert Simpler into sampler, which is a more sophisticated sample instrument. Instead of only being able to load in one sample, I can load in multiple samples, and map them to different keys. So, if you've never gotten into sampling before, this is probably not going to make a lot of sense to you. But for those of you that have played around with other samplers, you can use Sampler instead of Simpler if you do have Ableton Suite. And then, if you convert it back to a Simpler, you'll see this multisample mode, and you're also going to bump into that when you load a lot of the Simpler presets, whether they're using a single sample or not. So, hopefully, between the last couple of topics and this one, you have a basic idea on how you can select pieces from different types of files, drop them into the various samplers, and then if you go back to the stuff we covered in class two, dealing with recording MIDI and editing MIDI notes, you can start recording your own sounds and making your own music with existing samples, but not using the performances in using your own performances to create your own music. So, in the next topic, we're going to get into Drum Rack, which are a more involved version of Impulse, more or less, and I will talk to you more about options when we get there.
13. Drum Racks 101: So, this topic is about drum racks, and I promised we would look a little bit closer at these really deep fascinating devices. Now, impulse can do a lot of things really quick and easily, but if you want more sophisticated drum options, then drum racks are something you're going to want to look into. Now, we're looking at a couple of their presets that come with the live suite, and for example, this one here called, Kit big punchy. If you look at the bottom, they've mapped out all 16 of these sounds with acoustic samples, loaded up into instances of samplers, some of their built-in devices. This is a pretty sophisticated sample instrument, this would take you a long time to build out yourself. Now, they've also gone ahead and mapped out additional sounds, you can see I just press the up arrow, so I could see, the other more 16 sounds that they've added up in here. So, a drum rack can have up to 128 sounds loaded in, and they actually don't have to be just samples, they can be whole devices. So, a drum rack technically is a container for other devices. When you drop a sample on one of these squares, let's go over to this empty drum rack here, I've dropped a few things in here, I'll explain in a second. But let's say if I were to drop a sample in here like we've been doing in the past. So, I set up this clip, to have just this kick drum ready to go like we looked at in the previous topics. So, let's go ahead and drag this over. Since I'm dragging a sample in, it's actually creating a simpler for me, and by default, that's what's going to happen. When you drop a sample in any of these squares, it's going to create a simpler. Now, you'll notice if you look at the bottom where my mouse is, keep your eye here. If I put my cursor over one of the pads, it gives a general MIDI suggestion as to what sound should go on that note. Now, you can do whatever you want. For example, in this kit-core 606, they really have kept it still you can see all 16 of the sounds at once that are not necessarily following the general MIDI mapping, but they've tried to keep it as close as possible. The reason to do that is so you can take the same beat, like this one I have here, and all I did was copy this over onto this track and it should trigger the same sounds. Even though there are different versions of those sound, one is an electronic kit, one is an acoustic kit, they're both kick drums. So, you can follow those recommendations though you don't have to, and then one other thing here you'll notice I've dropped in an impulse, into this square where it said a snare drum should go. Now, when we looked at impulse in the last topic, I said impulse could do some things that you couldn't do in drum racks, and that's not entirely true because you can drop impulse into a drum rack. Now, it's only going to trigger in this first slot. So, if you do use an impulse, it will only trigger one of the cells here. Like I was saying, you can do things like changing the time in transposing really quickly and easily, but if you want it to have that work on all of the sounds in a kit, you'd have to do some pretty extensive mapping, and that would be for an intermediate or advanced drum rack class. But just keep in mind, even though I told you certain things you had to do in impulse you couldn't do in drum racks. You can put impulse in drum rack, and not only that, you can actually put synthesizers, full-blown synthesizers into the drum rack. Now, this is only going to trigger this one note. So, I can use this synth as a Tom sound. I wouldn't be able to play it poly-phonically unless I spent a lot of time putting multiple instances in here. So, there's some really neat stuff you can do with drum racks by combining samples, and synthesis to create your sounds. Now, what if I didn't want to spend a whole bunch of time going through a sample like this, whether it was a song I warped, or it was just a loop I want to do grab some sounds. Then, set the loop race, drag it over, set the loop race, drag it over. If you have two or three sounds that's good to do, but what if you want a whole bunch of them? Well, notice in this copy of the same clip here, what I did, was just set it so it would only loop one bar of this four-bar stock loop that comes with live. So, check this out. I am going to right-click here and choose slice to new MIDI track, and this is going to create a drum rack for me, and it's going to map out the slices based on what I specify here. So, I'm just introducing this feature. You can go really deep with it and customize all these presets yourself. As you can see, some of them go to sampler, as well, but we're just going to use their built-in, let's do it on eighth note, and let's see what happens. So, it's going to automatically create a drum rack for me, with some of the macro is mapped, and if I play this back now, it's going to sound like it did, for but notice what it's done here, it's just created MIDI notes. So, let me set my grid, something a little bit bigger there. Let me get rid of all these and check this out. Now, I can pencil in, settling velocities up here more. If I wanted to I could go in here, rename these. I can edit them, but they also give us some really cool macro controls. So, that's just a little sneak peek into some of the power of drum racks, and as part of your project, you can choose how much you want to use the drum racks or impulse, but you can see that simpler is going to be involved either way. Now, if you wanted to use simple beats, again, I did recommend starting with impulse, if you want to build your own kits. But, it can't hurt to jump right into some of their core kits, especially the ones that are only using 16 sounds, and then once you get good at this, feel free to spend more time getting into all of the possible options that Ableton gives us for doing drums. So, in the next topic, I'm going to show you how to save out your custom presets.
14. Saving Custom Presets: Once you've spent time making your own presets whether drum racks, impulse, simpler, or anything else, you want to be able to save them. By saving them, I don't mean just in the current set, I mean somewhere in the library so you can quickly access those anytime you want to get to the same sounds or the same presets. So, go into your preferences and under the library tab, you'll see here you have the location of your user library. I moved mine to a different drive. But as long as you know where this is, your fine. That means anytime you want to take your presets with you to another computer or back them up, this is the folder that you want to manage. Also, up top here where it says Browser Behavior, Collect Files on Export, this does a lot of different things, but one of them is related to saving presets that have audio samples in them. I highly recommend that you either set this to ask, which is my preferred method, or always. The only reason you set this to never is if you were doing a certain project and you knew that you had a lot of the same samples already and you're managing them carefully. So, never is pretty dangerous unless you're pretty expert digital audio user. So, always or ask, again, ask is my preferred one. So, let's close this up, and what we're looking at here is the drum rack that I made in the previous topic by slicing this loop up and I cleaned it up a little bit, I renamed some of them, I did some high-pass filtering on a couple of the sounds. I've spent a little bit of time in here, and I don't want to have to redo all of this in the future. So, what I'm going to do is over here, in the middle part of the title bar for this particular drum rack, you have this disk button which is the save button. When I click on that, it's going to ask me what I want to do with all the different audio files. Now, this particular one which is being used and for all of the samplers in here was part of the factory packs. But I might not always have that pack installed on every computer. So I'm going to go ahead and leave that one on, and then I usually recommend leaving all of these on when you're new at this until you really know where all your samples are, where they're coming from. So I'm going to go ahead and hit copy, and then it's going to ask me what I wanted to name it, and I'll just go ahead and just hit return. So now, this preset is over here, and anytime I want to access it, I would just go to my user library and then under presets for drum rack. Now, I also have this baseline that we did a few topics back, and let's give this a listen so you can hear how I combine these two pieces. So, here is my drum rack that I programmed myself, and here's that same baseline from the few topics back, but it's that up and I've also modified the distortion a little bit. Now, what if not only do I want to save this sampler here that has the sample in it, which I should go ahead and do, I'm going go ahead and say yes. Now, let's go ahead and hit return. But what if I want to save this with all of these effects in here, too? So, I'm going to select all of them by holding down shift, and then I'm going to right-click and choose group. Not group the drum rack, just group. This creates what's called an instrument rack, and we're going to get into this stuff a little bit more in future classes. But for right now, think of it as a good way to make a super preset, which is how a lot of their presets coming anyways. So, for right now, we just want to be able to save this out. So I'm going to click on the save button, asked me what I want to do with the samples, I know a copy of this already but it's not going to take up a lot of disk space, so I'll go ahead and do that. I'm going to call it My Funky Base. Now, we'll have that preset with me anytime I want to get to it. So, let's just say I had deleted this out of here. So, I'm going to delete out all this stuff, and if I want to get back to it and make a new part, see it brings everything in for me. That is the last thing we're going to cover in this class. Just make sure to pay attention to how you manage all of your presets and samples, and file management is something that takes a while to get good at, but it is highly recommended that you spend a little bit of time between creative sessions to organize your files and presets so you don't end up as one of those people that inevitably will lose data and lose work and it really sucks when that happens. So, just make sure to put some time in between creative sessions to take care of all these bits. So when you're working on music, you don't have to think about managing files.
Brian Jackson, Ableton Certified Trainer
