Ableton Live IV: Finishing a Track

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, deejay, or just interested in working with audio or media on a computer. In this fourth class, we're going to focus on finishing your song. We'll look deeper into arrangement view, lives and mixer and audio effects, automation of parameters, and of course how to export your finished arrangement. By the end of this class combined with topics covered in classes one through three, you will have all of the fundamentals at your disposal which are necessary to produce a quality song in Live 9. 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 I've 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 Producer's Survival Guide: Chaos, Creativity, and Career in Independent and Electronic Music, and its companion book full of interviews. The Music Producer's Survival Stories. For well over a decade, they have 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. 3. Volume, Pan, Mute, Solo, Crossfader, and Cue Out: Welcome to Class Four. We are going to get deep into Arrangement view later on in the class and we're also going to look at automation and audio effects. But we're going to start out by looking at Live's Mixer. As you can see here, I have the clip-view hidden at the bottom, what's also known as Detail View, and I have the Mixer extended so you could see the ProMixer. We get much more resolution this way. Let's start by looking at just the basic controls. So, I'm going to go ahead and solo this track. So, solo means that all of the other tracks will get muted. There is a preference if you want to make it so that each solo will not turn off the previous solo. You can go ahead and check those out in the "Record wall launch" tab, or you can also hold command on that, "Control" "Windows" to add additional solos. I can also mute tracks. Just so you know, Ableton actually calls this the track activator switch, even though everyone else will call it mute and even on Push, it's referred to as mute. Then, of course, the other most basic parameter other than "solo", "mute" and "volume" would be panny. So, we can move our signal around in the stereo field. Sometimes it's called Panorama, but Ableton calls it Pan, which is the more common of the two. To get back to the default, I'll just press delete. Then, let's go ahead and bring my other tracks in. If you have your keyboard set up for standard function keys, it's F1, F2, F3, F4 all the way up to F8, to mute and unmute your channels. Now, let's say that I was doing more of a performance or a DJ style approach. You'll notice that I have the "Crossfader" visible despite clicking down here in the bottom right. I can show the crossfader. Any of the tracks that are assigned to A will only be audible when the crossfader is to the left, and anything assigned to B will only be audible when the crossfader is all the way over to the right. But if you have it somewhere in the middle, you can do a mix of the two. This is for DJ style crossfader, but a lot of people find this useful in performance, even if it's not a DJ performance. Now, I have mapped a knob to control the cross fader, and you might want to do that as well. Also, if you right-click here, you'll see that there's some different options. So, instead of just the standard cross fader options, you can have it behave differently. So, it's worth playing around with, if you should find yourself using the crossfader a lot. Now, something else that you'll find useful when you're performing on stage with Live is the ability to use a different output for anything that you're queuing up. Now, over here in the IO, I have set my "cue out" to 7/8. By default, it's going to be the same as whatever your "Master out" is. You may recall from previous classes that we talked about going into the "Audio" tab of the prefaces and making sure your multiple outputs are enabled. If you only have your "Max" built in output, you will not be able to do this. So, you need an audio interface that has at least two stereo outs to do it properly. What that means is, now that I've set that is, if I press "solo" over here and the master turns to "cue". So, if I have any of these tracks turned down, and I had this 7/8 output going to headphone amp or to another amp on stage, even though the volume is turned down all the way, we can still hear the guitar because its going out to "cue out" here. Then I could feed it up whenever I'm ready. So, now the PA will be getting this signal and I will be getting it in my headphones. So, you notice it was really louder there, because it was going twice to where I'm recording this for you. The same thing, if I wanted to check out the base part before I feed it in to make sure it was what I wanted, I could go ahead and do that, and then feed it into my mix and sync it with the drums. Then, whenever I'm ready, I can bring this up here. Now, if I have all of these on. Volume is controlled over here at the Cue Out. So, right now, only the PA would be getting the signal and the cue is turned all the way down. If I bring this up, now the headphones would start getting the mix. See, we're not hearing anything because cue is down and I have all of the track activator switches turned off. So, in the next topic, what we're going to do is start looking at some of the other options for moving signals around within Live's Mixer, and we're going to talk about the return tracks, finally, which we really haven't gotten to in any of the previous lessons. 5. Return Tracks and Sends: So, the one type of track we've yet to discuss in any of the classes in any detail are the return tracks. We've talked about audio tracks for audio files, we've talked about midi tracks for midi clips and virtual instruments, and the other type of track is known as a return track. Of course, these are created by going to the ''create menu'' or with the shortcut or with the right-click, but you'll also notice that there is a reverb and a delay return set up automatically in Ableton's default. Now the reason for that is because these are so commonly used, and I did mention a while back that you may want to use these just for effects and that's primarily what we're going to talk about them for, though you can use them for setting up things like headphone mixes either in the studio or on stage, and there are some advanced cool tricks you can do, especially once you start integrating some of the Max for Live devices that can help you mimic surround sound workflows. But for our purposes, I want you to think of these as affect sends for the moment. So, I'm going to go ahead and solo this snare drum, and I could have just put a reverb right on here, and we're going to come back to talking about these devices in a few topics. But I could have just done this, and then gone over to my guitar part and gotten the same thing, and just put a reverb right on the track and then if I wanted reverb on the drums over here, I could have done the same thing. But that's a really inefficient way of doing things. So, I'm going to turn this off and go back over my guitar and I turn this off, and instead of putting an effect and each of the tracks, all I have to do is turn up the sand that is associated with the effect that I would like to add to my sounds. So, think of the return tracks as effects loops or as signal flow only tracks. What I mean by that, is that you cannot put clips on these and there's no reason to, in arrangement view, in session view some people wish you could. But that's another story for another day. So, let me demonstrate what I mean. I'm just going to turn up A, and I do a reverb over here, I'm going to go ahead and put up on the guitar, and then I have a delay setup over here, this is the device we're going to spend a good amount of time with shortly and check this out. But I also have the advantage that I can just turn down these effects for all the tracks that are going to them. So, even though I have a couple of tracks going to this reverb, I can just turn it down or set it's taste. So, I could have maybe a lot on the snare and then a teeny bit on the guitar, and then balance the overall reverb level. Then same for the delay, and when we get to automation later, you will appreciate this setup having sends and returns for doing the automation with effects is going to make your life a lot easier. So, there's other reasons why we tend to use the returns, other than just the ease of use. In fact, for reverbs in particular, it has a lot to do with the fact that reverbs are meant to simulate the sound of rooms or sound of acoustic spaces. So, you don't want to have all of your sounds in different rooms and even if you have the same settings, if you wanted to change it, you'd have to go onto each track, I'd have to go on the ''snare track,'' change the setting, then go to the guitar track and change the setting. Just imagine, if you had 30 or 40 tracks in your project, right now I only have a couple here. So, we're going to come back to these effects in more detail pretty soon, and the next one I'm going to show you how to do some cool routing to follow up on what we did with impulse where you can have your drums go out on their own tracks. So, we could do things like we just did in this topic. 7. I/O and Routing Between Tracks : So, we're going to talk about something I promised we'd go over a few classes back and that is routing sounds between tracks, which you'll be doing as part of your project steps. So, let's have a look at this impulse and give it a listen. Remember, when we talked about impulse, we talked about how there's eight sounds you can load in and they would all just go out the stereo out on this track. But notice I have the kick, the snare, and all the other sounds routed out here and I have a go into the sense, add some delay and reverb on the snare. So, let's talk about how I did this, and jump back over here to a track where nothing has been routed yet, and I'm going to go ahead and create a few audio tracks and make sure that I can see the I/O. Then what I want to do here is, on this track called 10 Audio, I'm going to go Audio From, Impulse and then pick the Kick as my input and then set the monitor to In. Notice that now the kick is over here. It is no longer on the track with impulse anymore. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that again. I'm just going to duplicate this track and then I'm going to pick the snare drum sound. I hit command R, rename it. Little trick, you can use a tab and then go to the next one, and then I know I'm going to do the clap sound here. So, the monitor being set to In means that the track is only listening to the input. You will not hear any clips that are on the track. You'll only hear what's being routed in through the input. Then, if I go back over to impulse here, remember, there's eight different sounds we could load in. The two of them are high hats. So, I don't actually need to route these out. I'm going to leave these here on this track, but I am going to finish up routing the rest of the toms here. So, I have one, two, three, so I need three more tracks. So, I'm going to do command T three times. I'm going to select all of them, set the monitors to In, make sure impulse is the input for all of them and then, I want to deselect and set each one to its own input. So, that will be that tom, that tom, and that tom. So, you have to do this through the I/O. There's no other way to do it other than making sure you can see the I/O and you can pick an input from any other track. Though, it's only the multi output instruments such as impulse or any of the other racks such as drum racks or instrument racks that will show you additional input options here in the bottom chooser. Let's go back to how I had this one. Notice all of these are in this group. So, I'm going to show you how I did that. I'm just going to click on this, hold Shift and then you can see group tracks. A group track serves a couple purposes. One, it allows me to hide all of these down under one individual track. So, we have the full control of just basic mute and solo and things like that, as though we'd not done any routing. Then, if I open it up, I can actually see all the individual pieces. Additionally, we also have these launchers for any of the clips that are inside of the group. So, it's only going to launch clips that are in the group. You can mix and match audio and maybe you can put any of those types of tracks in here. Then, one last thing here, you don't have to do this with a drum rack. I have this 909 drum rack loaded up here already. Also, you have to do is unfold it and then you can see each of the individual chains in the drum rack. So, technically, these are not tracks, these are chains from within the drum rack. But, it acts the same way. So, I can see my solos, my track activator often known as mute, my volumes, and my panning. So, in the next topic, we're going to look more at the effects and how to additionally setup more things than just the sends and returns. How to put stuff on the individual channels and what we can do with some of those. 9. Working with Live’s Audio Effects: So, all we're doing now, is working with Ableton's built in effects. Ableton Live ships with a whole bunch of these, and we're going to talk about most of them in some capacity in the next few topics. But for right now, I just wanted to go over the basics. So, you noticed I was just dragging and dropping the specific devices that I wanted onto the individual tracks. We saw way early backing and more of the first classes, that you can also select the track that you would like, and then go over to the browser and just double click and that will added to the selected track which can be much easier than dragging something all the way over. Now, in all cases what you saw here with one exception, was I was adding the default. So, when I drag this compressor onto the drums, this was the default preset for the glue. This was the default overdrive, but when I grabbed this particular ping pong delay, notice that this was unfolded here and I grabbed one of the presets. If you don't unfold the device list here, you just get the default setting. That's usually how I do it with the case of EQs and compressors, but with things like delays and reverbs, it's really useful to work with presets. You just click on one of these, and pick the one you want. Now let's say that I wanted to swap out this ping pong delay preset? I would click on the hot swap, and it's going to jump me to the presets for that device. So, maybe I want to go to Ping. Let's hear how that sounds. Maybe I wanted pong, and then maybe I'll pull back the mix here a little bit, and get out of hot swap mode. Now if I wanted this to be my default every time I pulled up the ping pong delay, I would right-click here, and just choose save as default preset and then I don't have to open up the folder there, to actually get to this particular preset. So, another thing I want is talk about here was the order of effects. So, let's say on this base track, I have this overdrive, and then this compressor, and then this chorus. Let's solo this. Now, if I put the overdrive afterwards, it's going to sound a little different. The signal flow goes from left to right, and that means that the bass is going through the overdrive, then the chorus, and then the compressor. If you change the order, it can change how things sound. What if I liked this order and I wanted to save this as a preset? I would just hold shift, so they were all selected, and then I would group them. So, I have an audio effects rack, and this is a nice way to make a preset full of presets. A while back, we looked at how to deal with this with your sample based instruments, but it is useful to review. So, I'm going to go ahead, and make sure I can see the chain here so it's easier to rename it. Call it, My Bass FX and then I'll hit the save preset button here, and notice it's going to be ready to go. I'll just go ahead and hit save. There's no samples here to manage, these are just audio effects. If I liked the preset for this overdrive, I would then want to save that separately. I'll call that, my overdrive. That's it for the general usage in the next topic, we're going to look at some more devices in more detail. 11. EQs, Filters, and Dynamics Processors 101: So, maybe you've guessed that EQs and filters are a big part of what we're about to talk about. Ableton gives us a bunch of options for controlling the frequencies of different sounds and controlling the dynamics of different sounds. So, let's start out by talking about their couple of different EQ's. So, EQ three, the one we were looking at right here is really designed for DJ style performances. It can be used in the studio as a creative tool, but it is not meant to be a clean precise style of EQ. It's definitely a creative EQ. Then we have the EQ eight, which is a fully parametric professional studio style equalizer, and it does have a built-in spectrum analyzer, which you can open up to fold here. Additionally, if you have the spectrum analyzer showing up top, you can see each of the bands of the equalizer all at once whereas when the spectrum analyzer is overlaid under the overview here, we can only control one band at a time. So, if you're new to equalizers, the term band can be a little confusing sometimes, and there is the term bandwidth, which is a range of frequencies, and then we have different types of EQ bands, and EQ eight is called EQ eight, because you have eight different bands that you can utilize though there are all possible from the same list. So, I can make any eight of these the same one, or a different one. So, here we have a 48dB high-pass filter which gets rid of low frequencies, this is a low shelf, which is basically the same as the base nub and a home stereo. You can see we also have the high-shelf, which would be like the treble. Nub and a home stereo, a low-pass filter which gets rid of all the frequencies above a certain setting, and then these are commonly called bell or peak notch. These are the most precise ones, a mid-band sweep is what they are often called on various hardware mixers. So, EQueuing takes a little bit of practice to get good at. I just wanted to demonstrate to you one of the ways that I used it in this project. So, the drums here, I have some EQ, on the base,] I have some EQ, the piano part, the guitar, different leads, the strings, the timpani, and hi-key map, the numeric keypad seven to turn all of them on or off for me. So, I've just turned off every EQ on all the tracks, and let's give it a listen. Let me turn them all back on now. Turn them all off, back on. So, a lot of what I was using the EQ for, is to cut out frequencies from the various sounds. So, let's listen to the lead here. Without it, let's hear the lead over here. You get that back on, about these strings with no EQ, and now with the EQ, and same with the tempo here. Let's go ahead and turn that off. So, one of the first lesson and you're going to learn even before you may even understand what all these different parameters are, is that, learn to cut before you start boosting. If you do a lot of boosting, it's going to tend to make the frequency sound more smeared and only really good EQs actually sound good when you're boosting. Now, you can make EQ eight a bit more high-quality, and though it's cut off at the bottom here, but if you right-click and go all the way to the bottom, you can turn on what's called oversampling, and then it'll sound a little better, but it will use more CPU. So, let's listen to all of this again. Let's go back onto my master here and hide down all of this. Now, notice, I've also added some dynamics processing. So, dynamics processors do a couple of things: They're meant to level out, for us, and they also add punch-on impact and control peaks. For the way I have this one set up on the master is more of like a mastering or mix plus style approach, but what if we go over to this lead sound? Let's solo this, and I'm going turn off all the processing I had on here. As you can see, it started out at decent volume, then gets pretty quiet, and then it comes back in and its panning back and forth. So, first of all, I used the utility plugin just to make the width zero percent, to make it mono. I then added some EQ to help make it sound a little bit more how I wanted them to mix. But, I wanted to level it out. So, let's put the compressor was good for. So, let's listen without the compressor for a second. So, do you notice how it's getting loud and then quiet, and then loud, and then quiet? So, at its most basic, a compressor is an automatic volume controller. We're not going to have time to go in depth into compressors right now, they're pretty complex devices though they can be used pretty simply. Essentially, you lower the threshold until it starts reducing enough gain, and then you can turn it back up if you want. I highly recommend turning off this makeup which actually means auto make-up. I recommend turning that off. Then the ratio, you can think of as the strength of the compressor, the attack is how fast it turns down, the gain, once it crosses the threshold, and then it releases the opposite. But in this case, I'm squishing the sounds. So, let's bring it back in, and let's go ahead and maybe look over here at the drums. Live does also have multiband compressors which is essentially a compressor that would only work on the lows, the mids, and the highs but then, all put together into one device. At times, it's useful for mastering and also for sound design or working with drum loops as in the case we're looking at right now, and then gates are devices that increase dynamic range, and they do that by turning the lower signals lower. So, I'm using a gate to chop up this particular drumbeat right now. So, only signals that go above the threshold will open the gauge, and everything else will be shut off. These are cool for practical and creative uses. Then, let's go back over to our master. The glue compressor which is part of Live-9 Suite is a SSL G-series Bus style compressor, licensed from cytomic, and this is meant to add punch and impact, and glue together your mix, thus the name, and then the limiter here is technically a brick-wall limiter. So, nothing will go above whatever you set the ceiling at. You can add gains, and then it won't clip. Now, go light on these, it's easy to make things really loud, but they won't necessarily sound really good. So, that is a really quick overview into the EQ's filters and devices that we have in able to live. In the next topic, we're going to look at time-based effects like reverbs, and delays, and then we're going to look at some other effects like modulation and distortion style-effects in the following one. 13. Time-based Effects 101: If there is a delay involved in an effect, technically it is a time-based effect. Ableton gives us a few different reverb options and also a few different delay effect options. Let's look at how we have our Sends and Returns setup here. Of course, I have a reverb on the Return or Send A, and I have a few delay options set up for the Send labeled B. If it is a reverb or a delay and it's a time-based effect which those all are, generally speaking, we're going to put those on our Returns. We're going to use those as Send effects. Now, it doesn't mean that we can't put an individual effect on a specific track. Let me go ahead and turn these down and let's solo just our snare. You can put a time-based effect on an individual track. But as we talked about earlier, it's just a good idea to use your Returns and your Sends unless that effect is just for that one track, and you know you're only going to be using it for that one track. Now, if you have it on an individual channel like I do here on the snare, I want to make sure that it is mostly dry. This means 25% wet. Whereas, if I were to put this on my Return, I want to make sure it's 100% wet because I'm using my Send to split off the signal and then mix it back in with the Return at the master. Just pay attention whenever you use a time-based effect, whether it's a delay or a reverb, if you have it on the channel, set it to something other than a 100. When on the Return, set it always to 100%. Ableton gives us a few different delay options. We have the simple delay, and you'll notice that the simple delay, the ping pong delay and the filter delay all have some similar parameters. The timing here is based on 16th notes if you have it set to sync. This would be the equivalent of a three-sixteenth notes in length delay on the left channel and a two-sixteenth or eighth note delay the right. The feedback is sometimes labeled as Repeat in other effects, and we can link the left and the right, and we can turn sync off which is what I was doing at the beginning. Let's go to our ping pong delay. Now, it's called ping pong because it knows you want to jump it between the left and right, which is a very popular use of delay. We only have one set of settings for controlling the timing of the delay tap, and we have a nice little filter here. If I were to turn the feedback all the way up, notice it only goes to 95%. Just be really careful anytime you have feedback because that go up higher than that. If I were to go ahead and turn sync off, I can then set my time in milliseconds. Notice we get more of a metallic kind of a sound instead of an echo. If you're less than say 30 milliseconds or so, you're not going to get an echo, you're going to get more of a just shift in timbre, especially at the lower feedback settings. They do also have this freeze function here which is pretty cool. If I stop playback, now the reason we're getting those pitching effects is because I've picked Repitch. There's a jump option, and fade is the default. This is what the fade would sound like. There's different timings. Then we have the filter delay which is a bit more involved. We have a left delay with a filter and a time setting, we have a left and right, and then we also have a right. All of them have their own independent settings. On a Return, you want to make sure this dry is set to minus infinity, which means off. Now, the filter delay is pretty sophisticated, and a ping pong delay is a lot of fun. What if I wanted something even crazier? On the drum group here, I have the Grain delay, which is more than just a delay. It does pitch shifting, granular spray, which is what's happening here. This XY is going to control whatever two parameters. Right now, it's controlling pitch and frequency. I'm going to go to spray and feedback. See, feedback is all the way down, our spray is all the way down. That's a pretty cool delay effect. Then finally, just talk about the reverbs here a little bit. Ableton's built-in reverb can be pretty good if you set it to high quality and you spend some time learning about the settings. In the Info view, of course you can open that up and it will tell you what the various parameters you are going to view here. If you have Max for Live, they do have an audio effect under the Max for Live Audio Effects. I'm going to do a little search, the Convolution Reverb Pro which is what we're looking at here. This is a pretty cool sounding reverb. It actually uses recordings of different types of spaces, and then it does some fancy math to overlay the reverb sound on your sound. Right now, I'm using a EMT 250 plate. Time-based effects can be everything from very creative to more practical. Delays tend to be more creative effects, but there are some pretty cool subtle uses of them if a reverb is too obvious and you just want to do some subtle spreading, stereo field kind of stuff. Reverbs can be used strictly for creative, but they're often used to make sounds seem like they were done in the same room, and most modern production now, things are recorded or sampled pretty dry. In the next topic, we're going to look at more of the other effects, the modulation effect, and some of the distortion and other weird ones. In the next topic, look forward to those. 15. Other FX 101: In the last two topics, we looked at the EQs and filters which you can see here, EQ three, EQ eight auto filter. We looked at some dynamics processors which included the Gate, the Limiter, Multiband Dynamics, the Glue Compressor, and Compressor. So, in this one, we're going to go through some of the rest of them. I'm going to explain the different categories for you and then we're going to look at a few examples on some of these. So, modulation effects are any effect that uses an LFO. So, technically speaking, a couple of the other things we looked at may have been a mod effect, just as some of the mod effects have delays in them which means they may technically also be a time-based effect. But generally speaking, Auto Pan, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser and Frequency Shifter, plus Auto Filter, all have LFO, so those are all mod effects. We're going to look at some examples of these in a bit. Distortion effects range from everything having to do with amp simulators for a guitar in bass. This one here Dynamic Tube emulates different tube behaviors, ones that actually degrade the signal, Lo-Fi effect such as erosion, redux, and vinyl distortion and then of course also Saturator and Overdrive which are more of your traditional distortion effects. Then live also ships with some really cool, neat weird stuff like Beat Repeat and Corpus. We looked at some delays in one of the previous topics. The green delay could also be under the miscellaneous effects because that has all kinds of stuff in it. Looper is more for live performance, so that would be for a loop pedal jam man style of performance. Resonators we'll look at and a Vocoder for your favorite robot voice affects. Unfortunately, we're not going to have time to get into the Vocoder because we could spend easily a whole hour just on the Vocoder. But let's have a look at some of these, so let's play what I have here. Some of this you heard before when we were doing the EQ in Dynamic. But I've done some modifications, so let's look at the, this is the vinyl distortion here, so I'm adding a Dubplate modl you can see some of the presets they have here. Let's go to awful. What about I don't know. We can add some crackle for those of you missing your vinyl. Now, let's go back to Dubplate. That's more crackle back in. Then maybe let's look at some of our bass amp here. So, this is the bass sound before we added the amp. I pick the bass setting and they also have this device called Cabinet, which is meant to emulate the different speaker cabinets you'd use. So, we can have a couple of different options for guitar, one for base. This is like a stripped down version of something like Guitar Rig, but this ships with live suite, both Amp and Cabinet. Then let's go to one of my favorites, Beat Repeat. So, at first Beat Repeat might seem like a delay effect. Let's turn this off. To some extent, it does have a delayed type character but it does a lot more than that. So, it has some filters built in, it has this cool way of rhythmically approaching different types of material. If you're going to put it right in on a channel, just pick the insert one here. You can try playing around with some of these other options as well. But be repeat is very cool and it's a favorite of many people that use live on a regular basis. Now, let's look at the classic modulation effects. So, Chorus is a combination of LFOs and delays, it's been around for a long time, good for just thickening up sounds. Also adds a nice sheen. Even though this is basically a mod effect because we have a modulation parameter here, having to do with how much the LFO is modulating and how fast it's going. If you have a feedback setting, that's telling you there's a delay and you can even see there's a delay built in. So, you can get much more extreme settings too out of your chorus, but we'll go nice and subtle for now. Then Flanger is also a really classic mod effect. We have more of a rising and falling swishing character and a lot of cases. It can seem really similar on some material but they are different. The LFO is actually modulating the delay time in the case of a Flanger. Then with the Phaser, they added some filter, some notching filters that sweep around. Give it a little bit more of a species sound if you switch between Earth and space. So, I have it on guitar but those are good on all kinds of stuff. Chorus, you can use on a lot of material, just be careful with the Flanger and to a lesser extent the Phaser, because they can sound kind of cliche. So, let's go to our Auto Pan effect here. Now, I have this setup to act like a tremolo. So actually, let me go back to our Auto Pan. So, an Auto Pan is actually the simplest of the modulation effects. It uses two LFOs to turn the left and right channels up and down, so it sounds like it's panning. So, let's go to slower. So, you can get a sense as this one is turning up, this one is turning down, so it makes it seem like it's going back and forth. But if we set the phase of the LFOs instead of doing an Auto Pan, it becomes a tremolo. So, Tremolo which is a very common guitar effect also for different organs. It's basically going to be your Auto Pan in mono. Do some weird stuff here as well. But let's just go back to our standard Tremolo effect. Then I want to show you the Resonators here. So, Resonators is definitely weird one. Let me turn this off here. So, it's going to create tuned resonances, so it has the appearance of creating note. So, it can give us synthesis type effect and I would recommend playing around with the presets on this one for sure. Then one of the other classic modulation effects is the Frequency Shifter. It's a classic mod effect in the sense that a lot of the early analog since added some sort of frequency shifting. In this case, I'm using it as a ring shifter. Let's go to some of the presets here. What if I played electric distortion? Let's make sure we hear just the part we want. Maybe I'll try another one of these presets here. How about transmission, let's do Spacebirds. So, that can be a fun one for out-there species 60's type of sounds. Then finally, watch your ears. I'm going to use the Redux and blow this up a bit. So, let's turn this off. So, this is a distortion effect that does bit reduction and down sampling. One little tip, when you're doing the bit reduction, be very careful. As you get down to the last couple of bits, the volume is going to jump substantially. Two bit. One bit. So, just keep an eye on your speakers once you get down to those last few bits. That's good a hard. So yes, it's not even musical that point. Let's go back to soft down sampling and bring everything back in here. 17. Automation 101: So, we're going to look at automation and a related concept in live known as modulation, not to be confused with the mode effects that we looked at in previous topics. So automation is like having a robot that remembers your movements in a mixer and then replace them for you. Believe it or not, there was a time when records were made without automation not that long ago, and Ableton gives us a lot of options in live for working with different types of ways of controlling parameters, without us actually having to do them every time. So check this out, I have a couple of different places. Where there was red dots, you see I have one down here, and see this is moving around by itself, and the spots where these are grayed out, is whether it's automation, but I adjusted them. So this button came on up here, which is the re-enable automation button. If you've moved any of the parameters that were already automated, so check this out. When I click on this orange button, these are going to start moving around by themselves again. So re-enable the automation. Now this pad is panning back and forth, this send over to the delay. This is going to turn up only when there's a snare drum. Go back over here, and the envelope box, which is only visible in clip view and you have to show it here with this button, and give us some choosers. And we have the option of having it show us all of our options for only the ones that we've adjusted already. Show only adjusted envelopes. So, Live uses the term envelope, whenever we are dealing with some sort of line that we can draw in, or pencil in, or record in, that is going to control parameters for us. So they can be on the tracks in arrangement view which we're going to look at in a few topics, or they can be in the clip. And within the clip, there's two types of these envelopes. There is automation, which means you're actually going to see the parameter moving around like we do right here, and then they have one that is called modulation. And modulation is primarily related to the clip parameters in Live nine, and you'll notice here that I've drawn in some transposing modulation. And by modulation, it means it's not going to move that parameter, it's going to make relative changes to it. So it's turning up the transposing here, you can see a little orange indicator, and then it turns down. So this is a relative change, and what I mean by that is, if I were to transpose this up inactive, it's still going to make relative changes to whatever this position is. So in that case, it's going to first turn it up five semi-tones when it hits here, and then turn it down 17. And if I were to go back to my default, it's still going to turn it up when it gets there, and then turn it down. And I did a cool little trick here where I unlink the envelope. I had a two bar loop originally set up here, but then when I went over to my Envelope box I chose unlinked and typed in four. So that way, every other time it plays, it does something different. So in addition to these couple of controls up here, the automation arm button, and the re-enable automation button. So we need to have both of these in our consciousness while we work with automation and additionally, we go into the preferences under the record warp launch tab and they have this recorded session automation in, and we can toggle between all tracks and arm tracks and I don't necessarily have a strong recommendation on this parameter like I do with the start transport with record being off. This one primarily, is going to make the most sense to you based on how you work. So for right now, I'm going to leave this on all tracks. So when we get to our next topics, things are just going to work a lot faster. But when you are working with midi or when you're actually recording parts while you're doing automation, you may want to toggle this two armed only. So in the next few topics we're going to dig back into automation. How to record it, how to draw it, how to edit it, and just keep in mind that we already talked about these two buttons up top here, and I will refer back to these ones we come back to relevant topics. 19. Recording Automation in Session View: We're going to pick up right where we left off in the last one. I am going to leave my record session automation in preference set to all tracks. Now, we're going to talk about recording automation in session view. So, we talked about the Automation Arm button briefly, so we're going to make sure that this is on right now and then we're going to need to enable the session record button here since we're going to record our automation while in session view. When we get to looking at automation in arrangement view, this button will still be relevant but then we'll also be looking at the Arrangement View Record here in the control bar. So I'm going to session record and just hit play. Notice that all of the clips play buttons are red. That means now any parameters that I move are going to get automated. So let's go do some reverb here, and maybe I want to turn this up for a second then back down, and I want to have my reverb up here. Let's bring the volume up. I want to do something on this chorus. So if I turn off the session record button you see what it did, it recorded in all my movements. In the next topic what we're going to do is go into editing all of this and also dealing with if we just want to draw it in. But for right now let's say that I wanted to record a longer section. Notice it defaults to recording the same length as the clip. So if I wanted to have more time to do this, I want to un-link this envelope and instead of it being two bars I want to type in 16. Now when I record the chorus wet dry parameter, it's going to give me 16 bars to make those changes on. I want to do something similar with the descend here. So I'm going to right-click on this parameter and notice I can show automation. It's going to jump me down into here, as long as I click on the Envelope box I'll see the red line and of course I can see what I did here and I probably don't want too much delay on the base. But I'm going to make sure that this is set for two bars as well. I just noticed it somehow on this clip this got set to a weird length. Let's make sure that's an even two bars, and let's go ahead and do this again. I want to make sure I see my parameter here, and now I'm going to go ahead do a longer period of time. You'll see here I had 16 bars now so did over that first bunch, and then maybe just want to leave it there for that. For the base I just want to do a quick little bump there because you don't want too much delay on base. Let's go to our show automation. I want to make that four. I'm going to hold that down there and then maybe right at the end bump it up again. Let's go ahead and show automation. Again, this is only two bars so maybe I want to make this five, so it's not going to be so repetitive. I'm going to wait till it gets to where I want it, and then pull that back. So if I were to move any of these, say I just wanted to hear what something sounded like with these parameters turned down, I can give it a listen and automation is temporarily disabled. That's what is grey lines are now indicating and the red dot turn grey here, it's going to re-enable my automation. So in the next topic what we're going to do is look at how to edit all of this and manage it a little bit, and just so you know the techniques we're going to look at for drawing and editing in the clip view down here, are relevant for when we're going to be looking at the tracks. We're going to see that we can do the same editing in here even though it will be on the track instead of on the clip. So get ready to edit and draw in automation. 21. Drawing and Editing Automation Envelopes in Clip View: Notice that I've changed the name of this set to Draw/Edit Clip Envelopes, even though we're talking about automation. We have been talking about editing automation and able tune's terminology for the way we actually interact with that is envelope, as we previously discussed. So, I have the sample box selected now. I don't see any of my automation, so I just need to make sure I click on the Envelopes Box, and this would be exactly the same for MIDI. The envelopes work the exact same way, but you'll also additionally see MIDI Controller information above the mechanics of it, it is totally the same. Notice that I've made it so I only see the envelopes I'm working with so I could go back to show all envelopes in which case I could see only the Mixer is being used right now and then track volume and the reverb send. The reason I'm starting with this one here is I realized that when I recorded this, it gets a little louder than I really want. So you see that jumps up a little too high. There's a couple different ways we could deal with this. Remember back from MIDI days we could turn Draw mode ON or OFF and we can just press B to do that. With Draw mode OFF, we see these breakpoints. It's just a single click to Create and Delete them. I could also select a range of them and then if you right-click, you'll see some commands that are just for the envelopes. So I could cut, copy, paste and I can move them around and also just clear the whole thing out here if that made sense. But in this case, I just want to clean it up a little bit. So let's give this a listen. I noticed that maybe this one is taking it up a little high. Still a little high. So I'm going to select just these and press Delete and then clean up this one here, and that's a little bit closer to what I think I was really going for in the first place. Now you can also draw in Automation, so a lot of times what I like to do is get the rough idea recorded in and then I can kind of see where I want to draw it. So if the Grid is enabled, when you go to drum mode, it is going to try to snap to the grid. In this case, it's 16th note and this is a really cool feature if you're trying to do certain types of effects like this. So I could get almost like a tremolo chopper getting kind of effect. I did this way manually, but if I turn the Grid OFF, I could either right-click and do that or you can hold Option when you're drawing. So let me turn my Grid back ON and so it's trying to snap. I'm just going to hold down Option and now I'm going to draw in the shape that I actually was trying to record. Then, if I turn Draw mode OFF, maybe I'll select all of these and pull them all down a little bit. So let's go to our Guitar Trap over here. I actually do want to do more and one of those kinds of cool effects I was talking about, but we're going to do a panning one. So I want to go to my Panning, I could either find it down here or I can right-click on the Pan and choose Show Automation. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. I'm going to set my Grid to 16th notes from Draw mode ON and then do something like this. This is going to point left right left right, and since this can take a while to do what you might want to do then is copy and paste this. So I just selected it and did command D for duplicate, and then I want to do a little cool curve thing here. You select those and then if you hold ALT you also get this way to do these kind of curves. I want to do a little smoother, kind of option. Again, you just hold option or ALT depending whether you're on Mac or Windows. So Draw mode ON, draw mode OFF. It's just like when you're working with MIDI, except, in this case, we're manipulating these curves also known as envelopes and it's exactly the same as if I wanted to do anything related to the modulation. So I'm going to duplicate this clip here. Let's clear out this envelope. I could see there's no red dot so there is no automation anywhere on here and let's do one of our cool warping tricks. I'm going to go to Texture, stretch this way out. It's one of our crazy sounds and then I'm going to turn the Grain Size all the way up in the Flux all the way up and because I'm going to do a modulation on the grain size, I need to have it up all the way so I can turn it down. Notice it's given in percentages right now. I'm going to hold Option and draw in some stuff here. So one of the lessons, whenever you're dealing with the modulation, is that you have to turn the parameter up to its maximum value and then you can turn it down from there. Something can only be 100% of whatever it is. So if I had this set all the way down here 100% of this is almost nothing still and then maybe I want to make this a little bit smaller or we going to work on just this little chunk here. Actually, let's reverse this, let's find where that piece went, there we go and then check this out. I am going to unlink my envelope and then make it three bars. I'm going to start out by making this really low down here and then drag this up. I want to bring the Flux down here a little bit more. So let's bring the Flux down. So this started out as this little kick drum piece we had from this loop and now I've built myself some sort of a sound effect that I could use to drop in for all kinds of stuff. So let's go to I'll show only adjusted and I could see I have my green size. If you want to give this a little jump here, it is out of Drum mode. Pull this down, give it a smooth curve and then I'm back into my main beat. I'm done with my funky break down there. So all of the techniques we just looked at for a draw mode ON, draw mode OFF are exactly the same. They're exactly the same mechanics and techniques for when we're going to be working with automation envelopes on the tracks in Arrangement View. From here on now we're basically only going to be doing Arrangement View stuff and we're going to start out by talking about how to go from Session View into Arrangement View and that is our next topic. 23. Recording from Session View to Arrangement View: The one of the major advantages of working with live is Session View. At some point if you're working in the studio, you do have to go into Arrangement View because we need a timeline to do our edits and figure how long we want our piece of music to be, and then export it out, so we have a finished file. So, you may recall from previous classes that we can use our scenes to organize our session and you can see over here, I have an intro laid out, I have what I call just Beat, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Outro, and I've removed some stop buttons, so I can go ahead and do something like this. But let's say that I'm thinking I need one other part in here somewhere, so maybe while I have the beat going and I have my verse going here, and then I have the chorus happening, maybe I realized that I really want all of these on one scene, somewhere after the bridge before I go into the outro. So, I'm going to go to the Create menu and choose Capture and Insert Scene and notice what it did. It copied all of the currently launched clips onto a new scene in the Bridge one because I had Bridge selected. So let's call this Chorus two. So now, I have a way to go through my whole song while I record my performance into Arrangement View from Session View. So, there's a couple of things we just want to double check before we do this. First of all, you need to ask yourself whether or not you want to record automation into Arrangement View while you're recording out of Session View. I'm not referring to automation that we already have here. All of this is going to get converted into track automation once we get into Arrangement View, but the question is, do I want it to record any other movements? If not, I want to make sure I turn off the Automation Arm button and couple other things, I want to go into my Preferences and just double check the Start Transport with Record option. So, I'm going to turn this on, because I keep telling you to turn it off. But I want you to see why you probably wanted off, so I'm going to leave that on for right now, and then what I'm going to do is make sure that no clips are playing at the moment, so I'm going to hit the Back to Arrangement button and this button is the topic of our next topic. So, we're going to talk about this in detail coming up, and then I'm going to go ahead, press Stop twice because I want to make sure it's going to start at the beginning here, and I often like to see my Overview while I'm in Session View recording into Arrangement View. Then let's say I'm ready to start recording right now, so I would go ahead and make sure I record arm the transport and look at that, it just started going right away and I don't want that. So, I'm going to go back into my Preferences and turn off Start Transport with Record, of course you can hold down Shift when you click on it, just to arm it but that's not what we want. So, I'm going to arm record and then whenever I'm ready, I can just start launching the clips. Now, I'm going to use my scene since I already spent time doing that and I also have the Select Next Scene on Launch Preference, so all I have to do is press Return and notice how it went to the next scene, so whenever I'm ready, I can bring that in and I'm going to set this to a two bar quantization, so everything will happen in two bar increments. I'm going to go the next one, instead of making you sit here for four minutes. So, let's go to our Chorus. Now, I'll go back to the Bridge and then let's go to Chorus two, and then whenever I'm ready and I hit the last one, it'll stop all the clips. Remember, I have all my stop buttons here. First, I removed these by making sure these clips would not stop when I launch those scenes and let's go ahead and launch our Outro and you'll see what it did, it recorded everything that was happening in here. I'm going to press Stop, so it rounds off the clip in and so everything I did got recorded into Arrangement View. Now, we're not hearing anything because we need to talk about these buttons. But the really quick way of talking about it is just press the orange Back to Arrangement button and we will hear our arrangement and anything that had automation on it, that automation is now going to be in Arrangement View. So, I can look over here where my Drums were and I can see just turn into track automation. So, in the next topic, we're going to get into the Back to Arrangement button in a little bit more detail and then after that, we're going to look at ways of just copying and pasting from Session View if you know how long you want your parts to go so you don't have to sit here for five minutes and actually record in your whole song. 25. Back To Arrangement Button: So the question is, why am I still hearing audio right now even though it looks like I've recorded into my arrangement? The answer to that is the Back to Arrangement button, over here on the Master track next to the stop all clips. Now, that will stop the clips from playing in Session view but the Back to Arrangement button is going to make sure that we can hear what we actually have in our Arrangement view. Notice when I press that, it disappeared? So, you cannot turn this button on by clicking on it, you can only turn it on by launching clips in Session view, and you can actually turn it on by launching stops. If I launch a stop here somewhere, that's also going to turn it on, which means I'm not going to hear these clips in Arrangement view. So the whole idea behind this button is unique to Live. It's only Live that has a Session view and an Arrangement view, and because the track share the same mixer, so the track drums, the tract base are the same mixture tracks in both views. Live gives us a way to figure out where we're hearing the audio from. One of those ways is with the Back to Arrangement button which is global, or we have the track by track options here. So, let's go back into Session view, I'm going to launch this scene because it has something on basically every track. Let's say, I wanted to bring back in just the guitar here, notice we're now hearing this guitar part. Let's say, I wanted to bring back in the drums so I can go ahead and stop the drums here, notice we're not hearing yet because this is grayed out, so I could go ahead and bring my drums back in. Now, the cool thing about this is I could play around with some different ideas, so I'm going to launch this chorus part here, just to hear what it would sound like if this drum part was going and then maybe also these two here. But if I want to make sure that I'm only hearing my arrangement, press the Back to Arrangement and then notice that the track status field show me little mini arrangements here, so I can kind of see what's coming up, could also see in the overview. If I were to launch this baseline and see that it's showing a little pie chart, and that's how I know this is not playing from Arrangement view, it's actually playing from Session view, same with this drum beat now, and I'm going to go ahead and press my Back to Arrangement. So for the most part, there's no reason to actually be jumping back and forth between the views. Once you have an arrangement in the Arrangement View, most people just stick in there. But there are some cool intermediate and advanced techniques where you can mix and match, just remember if you want something going from Session view at the same time it's going from Arrangement view, you need to have different tracks, one for each set of clips. Also one other thing, these clips in here are now copies of these, or to be more accurate, these are copies of the clips in Session view. If I were to make a change to one of these, let's say just trim this red, it did not update the guitar part in here. So, these are referencing the same audio files but they're different clips. It's no different than if I did a copy and paste anywhere else. So think of recording from Session to Arrangement as a musical Copy and Paste. Now, if you use previous versions of Live, you would also deal with the Back to Arrangement button for automation. But in Live nine, they separated out the automation from the Back to Arrangement button and they gave us this Re-Enable Automation button up here. So, if you're new and just starting with Live nine, that won't mean much to you, but if you were using Live eight or earlier, just keep in mind that they separated the automation from the clip playback in Session View compared to Arrangement view. So in the next topic, I'm going to show you how to copy and paste between the two views so you don't have to sit there and record everything in. 27. Copy & Paste Clips Into Arrangement View: Sometimes you already know how you want things arranged and you don't want to sit there for five minutes, six minutes whatever it is and record in what you've set up in Session View into Arrangement View. So, I'm going to show you how you can just do a normal copy and paste, not the musical copying piece that the record does for you. So, I want to make sure I can see everything I need to see in Arrangement View, so I have all the tracks folded down. You can open them up this way, I could hold option and unfold all of them, but I want to be able to see everything at once here and to make my life easier, I may want to color code one of these tracks somewhere in the middle, just to give me a sense of reference for where I'm at, and then I'm going to click on this part, Command C, this do standard copy, a tab and then because that was the guitar part, I'm going to click and paste. Now, because I have loop enabled here in the clip-view, all I have to do now is drag this out. Let's say I want this to go for 32 bars and then I can go into my drums and do that, which is my preferred method. I will walk you through that in a second here maybe I don't want this to start on bar nine, so what I did there is instead of copy paste, I clicked on the clip as though I was just going to move it down a slot but I held the click, hit tab once and then notice it's still under the mouse here, so I'll drop that in and loop that out. You can do that for as many clips as you think you can handle. I'm going to hold Shift here and select all of these, click on this as though I was going to move them, just hit tab once and notice what it did. I just want to make sure I align this upwards supposed to go and then because these all have loop on and they're all the same length right now, I can just drag them all out. So that is how you copy and paste between Session View and Arrangement View. 28. Editing in Arrangement View 101: So, we're looking at an arrangement based on the same vinyl classics live pack that we've been working with in a few of the previous topics. This time, we're going to look at how to find your way around, how to navigate the arrangement view, and then we're going to get into some editing techniques. So, of course, right across the top here, we have the beat-time ruler. I can I click here and zoom in, I can also drag left or right. Of course, I have the overview showing here. Let me go ahead and press Stop. You can show that from the View menu, if it's not visible, or you can use the shortcuts, and you'll notice that I can also zoom in and navigate from the overview. But just be aware, let's say, I wanted to zoom in here at bar 37, be careful when the overview is showing. If I were to click up here, it's going to jump me all the way over to the right, like that. So, just make sure, if you want to use the overview, that's fine. But make sure that when you're zooming in, you're not clicking on the overview. If I right click, you'll see I can also choose to Show All. But if nothing is selected in here, you can also just double click, and that will also jump you all the way out. You may also notice that I have these locators put in here to mark up the song at different parts. They have the same names as the scenes in session view, but Live did not automatically put these in here for me. Wherever you want a locator, just click and press Set, and then you can do things like rename. If I want to delete it, notice that the Set button will turn to the Delete button, when you're not playing back. These are pretty cool. Not only can I use them to give myself some notes, but I can also navigate, and I can also set a loop raise, which you can enable from here, by right clicking on any of the locators. The Loop Race acts just like it does in clip view. I can hold command, and then press my down arrow, or up arrow to double or half it, and I can also just use the down arrow or up arrow to navigate. Now, the left and right arrow keys are going to be more useful than they are usually in clip view. You can see in the bottom right, my grid is set to two bars. That means now, every time I press the left arrow key, it moves over in two bar increments. Now, if I were to press Stop, it's going to play from that location. If I want to jump ahead, I can just go to the scrub area, where you see the speaker and click there. Notice that just like with the locators, everything is quantized. That is because I have this set to one bar. If I set this to none, I could just jump around immediately. If I zoom in a little bit closer, you can actually do proper scrubbing. So, let's say, I was looking for a certain sound. I want to do an edit-on, I could zoom in and scrub that way. But if you want to make sure everything stays on the beat as you jump around, you can go ahead and set it to something like one bar. Now, some people like to have the screen follow the play head. So, I could just turn on follow here, then that is going to move around, by clicking anywhere to stop playback. Now, over on the right, we see the names of the tracks. If you want to see the information in the clips, just go ahead and unfold them. If you hold option, that will do all of them at once. So, we can see here, I have the choosers related to automation, which we'll come back to the next topic. If I have the mixer hidden, notice that's all we'll see. But if I want to see the mixer, I can see not only the track activator, the solo, the volume, the panning, and I can also see my sends. This would be send A, and send B. Just like in session view, we have these knobs to save space, able to adjust as these little boxes, and then the returns are also showable and hidable from down here. So, return A here is the same return A over here. Now, let's talk a little bit about editing now that we know how to find our way around. So, if I want to edit just the length of the clip, you don't have to have the tracks unfolded. You can just go to the edges here, drag these around. You can also move pieces around. If I click here, say hold option, I can make a copy. By option drag, you can do your standard cut, copy, paste, and delete. But if I want to go into more detailed edits, I need to have the track unfolded here, and then let's say, I wanted to click here, and make a new copy here. So, what do I mean by that? Well, if we look closely, you will see these little brackets here. That's letting me know where this particular clip is looping. By double click, it'll open up the clip view for me, Let's see this was a four bar clip, and that means every four bars will see one of these little hash marks. If I want to split this right here, it would make a selection, and I'll go Edit, Split. So, learn that key command, it's very useful. And now, this is its own clip. It's still referencing the same audio file, but it is different. So, let's do some fun edits here. I'm going to double click to zoom in because I had that selected and resize my track, and because this is selected, I can also press command L to move my loop raise there. I'm going to press command E a few times here, just split this up a little bit, and then check this out. Now, that I've separated them, I can do things like this. Maybe, I want to transpose this piece a little bit, maybe I want to make this one backwards, and then maybe here, I'm going to transpose this down a little bit. So, the grid moves around and changes just like in clip view. I can see it's set to one bar right now. By right click, I can switch between my adaptive and my fix grid. When we're working in small mini clips, a lot of times the fix grids really useful. But right now, that's not so useful to have a 16 no grid. Although, live nine is pretty good at trying to help you snap to the right location. I generally speaking recommend something like a medium or a narrow grid in here, and I can see them down to quarter notes. So, this would be a quarter note selection, and I'm going to command E, and then option drag. That's a good way to make variations. So, even though I started out by dragging in this one clip, and then just looping it out the whole way and start chopping it up, and having fun with it that way to make some different permutations, variations, little drop out there right before we hit the chorus, you can also see that a few kind of cool things in here. So, I'm going to loop the bridge section. It's going to do solo my drums. As you can see, I did the same little reverse trick here, and I made myself a little fill, let's jump ahead. Let's turn loop off. So, we are going to look at automation in the next topic. But I did want to show you something that's related though it is separate. The fades that show up on the clips in arrangement view are technically not automation. Though, they do show up in the same spot where you pick the automation, you hit tab and go back and do a clip. Remember we have these little fades. These are micro-fades at the edges, so we don't hear clicks. Once that clip is in arrangement view, you notice that the little fade button is gone, and that's because we can go in here and edit these. So, I'm using this for a fade out on this clip. What's nice about that is, I haven't actually automated my volume. I still can turn the track up or down without having to deal with editing automation. So, this is a good way to do a little fade out at the end of the song. Maybe I want to change the little curve there. Then, one last little thing here. So, every time you click on a parameter, it's going to jump you to the automation for that. A lot of times, you may not even be dealing with automation. It's just a good idea to turn off draw mode when you're working on edits in here. So, you don't accidentally draw on something. So, maybe, it was thinking I was going to make an edit there, but notice I accidentally drew an automation. So, I'm going to hit on View, turn off draw mode, and now I can select what I want. Now, you can still create these breakpoints by accident, but it's much easier to do something like this with drum off. I'll hit command E, and then maybe here, I want to go up an octave, and do something like this. Let's jump ahead a little bit, and I do recommend if you make an edit like that, you change the color of the clip. Even if it's just a little bit, so you know that you made a change. One last thing actually, before we go, I want you to make sure that you know how to start and stop playback from a couple of different locations. So, right now, because this is my selection, it's going to start from here. It's just going to keep going, chorus would be what would loop if I hit command L. Let's say, if I jump ahead here. When I press Stop, it's going to jump back to here when I start playback again. But if I hold shift, when I press spacebar, it's just going to keep going. Finally, to go back to bar one, just press the stop button twice. So, that is a nice introduction to navigating and editing in the arrangement view. In the next topic, we're going to dig back into automation in arrangement view much more detail. 30. Automation in Arrangement View 101: So, as you saw there, I simply made sure that the automation arm button was enabled and then I pressed the arrangement view record up here in the control bar and notice that I did not record enable the tracks here at all. All that I did, was set up those two buttons and then whatever parameters that I moved, it recorded in as automation. Now, we looked at editing automation in the topic on session view automation, and the mechanics are exactly the same when you're working with draw mode on or off. There are a couple things you need to arrange and a few that we'll look at in a second. But first of all, what I wanted to show you was how to see all the different data. So notice over here, I have a couple of these red dots, I can see that the mixer and the chorus have automation and I can go ahead and pick around in here, but maybe I want to see all of that data at once because I might want to edit a few things at the same time. So, I'm going to right-click and choose add lane for each automated envelope, and then notice what it did, it showed me the information here for the feedback on the chorus, for the ping pong delay send, and a couple of other parameters here as well. So, a lane is just a way of looking at a specific automation performance or something that you want to draw in or want to edit. I can see here, I have the feedback and the dry, wet on the chorus actually automated so to edit this stuff, it's just your standard cut, copy, paste. If I right-click, I'm just going to see the standard key commands for this stuff. Now, let me fold this back up so I can hide that away and notice, it didn't delete it, it's still there, it's just a good way to hide all of that. If I am looking at automation on the track not even one of the lane, when I right-click, I'm going to see additional options because now, Live isn't sure whether I want to edit the clip or the envelope. So, just add the option or Alt in front of your key command and that will let you cut, copy, and paste just the envelope. Also, let's say I'm given this to listen, I realized that I really don't want any of this automation on this track at all. I am just going to right-click and choose clear all envelopes. But a clear envelope would be just the one I'm looking at. Clear all envelopes of mixer, would be just the volume panning, but not anything to do with the chorus and clear all's going to get rid of everything. I'm just going to do that and notice there's no more red dots anywhere on the guitar track. So, let's say I did move some of this here and notice I just moved this band, I want to hear maybe how this sounded up here until we got into the piano part, and then the re-enable automation button came on, and this is letting me know something has changed. So, I'm just going to go ahead and press that, if that turns off and any automation that I moved is now re-enabled. So, another way you can do this is with MIDI controllers and from session view, even. So, maybe I don't really care about seeing my clip. I'm going to go ahead and drag that all the way up, and then you can think of this view as your mixer view and remember, if you have two monitors, you can do a second window. So, I can have my arrangement for you in one monitor and my session view acting as mixer in the other. But for right now, let's leave this here, and I want to see my overview so I can see where I'm at in the song, and maybe what I'm going to do is go ahead and jump to the verse. So, I could have mapped something to that so I didn't have to switch views, but that's okay, I'm going to jump in here. I'm going to make sure this is ready to go and this is ready to go. I've mapped some knobs to these sends here, makes your life a lot easier if you have some knob. Let's go onto the piano part, and I can see this going on down here in the beat repeat. When I hit tab, just remember, because I had the arrangement view record on and not the session new record, even though I'm looking in session view, it's doing it in arrangement view. Then, couple little last things here before we wrap up. Let's say that I wanted to move this clip over a little bit, but leave the automation there. So, maybe I realized this should come in here, but notice the automation came with and maybe I wanted that automation to stay there. So, I'm going to hit undo and then I'm going to lock the automation. So, that's what this little switch is for, over here. Now, I can move my clip over and notice the automations stay there. If I wanted to delete out some of this clip there, the automation stays there and then maybe I could do something like that. Whereas, if I did not have this on, when I delete this section, notice it's the clip and the automation. So, you can get to that from the right-click. You could also map a key or something like that to it. In the next topic, what we're going to do is talk about how to think about getting the final song out into a.wav file or.aiff file, and just a couple other exporting option. So, we're almost done here, in your project step, you should be thinking about your arrangement, the stuff we did in the few previous topics, and then you'll do a final balancing out with the volumes, the panning, and just have some fun with the automation for right now. So, use your send and maybe map some knobs to a couple of the devices or other parameters. 32. Exporting your Finished Song: So, now I'm just double checking that my outro is sounding exactly the way I want. Notice some of the automation I put on here at the end. So, add some reverb, and some delays that go up until about bar 93. So, just make a mental note of that. Let's say that I'm ready to bounce out my song. So, I'm going to the File menu, choose Export Audio Video, and there's that Shift Command R. They used to call this Render, which is why they use the letter R, and I'm going to go ahead, select that, and notice it's giving me a bunch of options here. Now first of all, Render start, Render length. Notice that it automatically filled in based on my selection. So, I had this last clip selected while I was checking the end of the song. I went from bar 67 to bar 91 there. I don't want to do that. I'm just going to hear this amount of time. Let's go ahead and hit Cancel. You can just hit Stop twice, Shift Command R, and then notice what it did. So, if you have nothing selected, it's just going to start at the beginning, and go until the very end. But remember, we counted out that it went up until about bar 93. So, I'm going to type in there, and that way it's going to bounce out at the beginning all the way to the end. But then it's not going to cut off the reverb tail and the delays that I had at the end of the song. So, that's something to be careful with, especially if you have any synthesizers that can have long decays that go on after the node or after the end of the clip, and of course with any sort of time-based effects, especially reverbs and delays, the main ones, you're going to bump into that kind of thing. Let's also look at a couple of these other options. Render Track means whatever your hearing it's going out through your master. But notice you can also bounce out individual tracks or everyone. So, if you chose individual tracks, it will give you an audio file for all of the tracks including the returns, if those were visible. We'd be able to see there was a reverb and a delay, though we're still going to get Tracks for those even if we have them hidden and the Master. So, that's a good way if we want to go into another piece of software, and maybe finishing mixing there. Then, we can pick our file type so, AIFF of WAV, they sound the same. You might want to pick WAV just for compatibility, don't change the sample rate, and always leave it at 24 bit with No Dither, unless specified otherwise for a specific project. Or if you're going to burn in audio CD with the file, then you do 16 bit, and you can pick any of these dithers, POW-r 2 is a good one to start with. But you only do 16 bit if you're going to burn a CD, and only do 32-bit if you're working with really high-quality material. You're going to continue to import it, and process it in other pieces of software. Some mastering engineers can handle 32-bit files, but for the most part 24-bit, and no dither is the way to go. Just be careful with some of these other options. Convert to mono would be a bad idea right now, although if I was just bouncing out maybe just a snare drum, or just a kick drum, I might want that. Normalize, you can ignore that most of the time. It's pretty good for sound design. There's some good articles online about the myths of normalization. Create Analysis File is just good if you're going to go right back into live, it will save you a little bit of time. So, if I were to go ahead and do this, it's just going to chug through it as fast as it can. So, it's asking me to name it, and I'm going to go ahead and make sure this is going somewhere useful. Let's go up into here. I'll say Save. Now, it's going to do this as fast as it can. So, I'm actually going to hit Cancel, because that's going to take awhile. Then, you'll end up with a WAV file, or AIFF file on your hard drive, and you're all done. So, one other last thing. What if I was working in Session view? I'm going to go ahead and launch this POW-r 2. Maybe I like just this part of the song right here. So, what I might want to do is, make sure that I have the loop race maybe set at the end of the song here somewhere so, it was just keep playing this section. Then, if I were to go to say File Export, I can see it's going to do a four bar loop. We don't really care about the Render Start at the moment. I just did that because there is a couple of weird little things that can happen if you have a mixed state of arrangement in session. But this way, I can see it's going to do four bars, and it's going to take out whatever is currently launched in session view. That would be my file. So, exporting your song from Arrangement view is actually part of your project steps. It's the last thing you're going to do. Once you have all of your song done, you'll just go ahead and make sure you export it properly, and don't cut off any tails. Congrats, you're now done with our four Ableton courses.