Transcripts
1. Introduction AUDIO recording in Ableton Live : Alright. Welcome back to beginner Ableton Live with
mainly Todd. Here we go. Today, we got audio that
we're going to deal with. Not just in the audio, the audio, the beautiful voice. That's what we're gonna
do today. Very simple. We're going to
record our vocals. We're going to do a
couple fun recordings, and then we're going to
make beats out of them, and we're going to get in
all sorts of shenanigans.
2. Recording Vocals : So the first thing
you have to do, you got to look at Ableton, will you? You open it up. You start a new Jam Burno, a new file, file. Open live set or new live set. New live set for today's lesson. And then we're going to
go into our settings. So on a Mac, we go to live settings. I want to make sure
that I have it would be nice if you have headphones that you can plug in directly. Sometimes there's a
little bit of leg with Bluetooth, which is fine. You could reduce latency. I'll show you how to
do that in a second. And then for today's purposes, we are going to MacBook
Pro Microphone. But if you have an
external sound card and a mic that you want to
use, then please so be it. But for today, we are just using everything with
our laptop, okay? Here we go. So MacwukPro
Microphone check one, two. What is it? We are going to
go to Audio three, right? So you can see here that there is it's taking in
the information, right? It is reading my voice. Now, if I was to press Auto
for some self monitoring, Auto or in, which you can do. If you have headphones, I'll
feedback just because I have my speakers
blasting out my voice. So I do not want to do that. Right now, I'm going
to keep it off, but you should self monitor
if you have headphones. And then I'm going
to scroll down here. We learned that
this was a record, so I'm going to hit record. And now you can see that I'm also processing
the information, my voice, right here. So, there are a few
things we can do. I think we'll just start off
with a real basic audio. I'm going to account to four and have a couple weird
sounds in the mix. My metronome, I'm just going
to keep it off for now. My 1 bar, none of these
things you really need to change for this purpose. So here we go. I'm
going to record. One, two, three, four. Meow. Woo. E. Ya. Hey. Oh. Oh. Shaka aaa. Space Bar means stop. So I'm going to stop.
Now, you can see that an audio clip has appeared here. I'm going to scroll down. You can see also that there is all this audio here as well. Let's play back and hear
what that sounds like. One, two, three, four, now. Eh. Mm. Hey. Ooh, Shua, gaa, gaa. Spacebar means stop. Great. So I have
my audio recorded. There's a few things
I can do with this. If we go into we can
make it into a drum kit. Okay. That's one thing through a drum rack or sampler, right? We can go we can
do that here with also an instrument
rack if we dare do.
3. Using the Instrument Rack with Vox Samples: My instrument rack.
Boom, I'm going to drop my sample into here. One, two, three, four, one, one. So what happens
when I drop it in my instrument rack is my keys. Remember we talked
about the keyboard in the first all the white
notes that we're playing? One, one, one, one, one. When I press these
keys, you can see. It's even going up
higher, too, as well. One. Da, da, da, da. So I'm just playing my Cs
right now. It's up to you. Do we just have one as a
sample, right? Here we go. One, one, one. Or the Ooh. Remember there's
an ooh in here somewhere? Let's find the ooh. There we go. Sha Let's find the ooh. Let's work with this ooh. Beautiful. So now I
have a keyboard of z. Very fun. Great. So I'm going to call this instrument rack
that has my z in it. I'm going to command
R, which is renaming it oh instrument Rack. Great. So my oh
instrument rack is here. And I can apply the same things. Ah, Majestic. You can play with a few
things resonance frequency, decay attack, all
these sorts of things. So if I was to
change the attacks slightly et's see if we can move in a little
closer so you can sort of see what's
going on here. And my decay. Alright,
you're gonna have to You can also change the volume here on
the individual sample. You can also change it
up here if you like. But for now, we're just going
to keep it pretty simple. Great. So we're
also going to make, let's say, we're going to get into some kind
of fun stuff here.
4. Building a Drum Rack with Vox Samples: Drum rack. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag my audio. These are my samples.
I'm just going to rename it just to keep it all clean. Command R. I'm going to
title my samples here. I'm just going to
delete a few things. So I'm going to get rid
of this second audio. I'm going to get rid of
that first mini track. Actually, sir, I'm going
to keep that mini track. And then in here Oop, in here. I'm going to now create
some of my samples. So I'm going to
drag one down here. Great. I'm going to use
these flags, these markers. One. I'm going to
bring all of this. So we have beginning
and end points. That's my one. Good. I'm going to bring this
all the way down here. And I'm going to
make this my two. So I'm going to bring
these markers here. So this is one, two. I'm gonna bring my samples down. We're just going to
do this four times. I'm going to go
down to three here, make it nice and tight three. And then I'm going to
zip this one down. Maybe we just try
something else. I think there's
like a cat, meal. Yeah, let's do that. Get
my magnifying glass. I'm gonna zip right
in here. Even more. Great, great, great. Good. Okay, and I'm going
to rename these, too. So I'm going to command
R. This is my dog. Command R, this is my three. Command R, this is my two. Command R, this is my one. You can throw other
drums in here as well. So you can actually throw in, like, a kit and a kick. Like if you go to sounds, and let's say you
want to go to Oops. Let's see. I'm going
to go to my search. I'm just going to go to kicks. Great. I'm going to go to
a seven oh seven kick. Perfect. And then
I'm going to find, like, a snare somewhere. Sure. I'll bring this
snare down here. Great. So what I'm going
to do essentially is what I did for my mini rack. Remember when we filled in with our marker boots and pants, I'm going to basically
boots and pants it, part drums that I've pulled from these other kits and
part my own vocal sample. So what is that? We've got two things that are very not obvious in Ableton. One of them is in this clip. We have to double click, boom, for this to come up. That's one. And here we go. So how do I
make my cursor into a pen? There's a few ways
we go to that top, we can click and make
it yellow or we go down the bottom and we press B.
Let's try the shortcuts. I'm going to boots
and pants, kick. We're going to keep it easy. We've got 1 bar. Boots. And pants and boots and pants. So we have our regular drum. One. Whoops. I just want
to play my drum rack, and I want to solo it. So I'm gonna solo it just to
hear my drum rack. Great. Three. So see how that didn't. Let's try to get it
on a beat. Three. Three. Three. Three, two. Three, two, one. Three, two, one. Three, two, one. Two, one. Great. So part vocal, part actual drum rack. I'm going to scroll on down. Let me take a look here. We have a few things that we can jam on each and
every single one. So I have my snare. I can either fade
in or fade out. Certain things you can
see changing, right? I can transpose it, which I'm probably
not going to do with my snares or my kicks. I think with my dog sound, I'm going to transpose
it down two. And here we go. Let's hear
what that sounds like. Yeah. Great. My one, I think I'm
going to transpose it up. Two notches. And
I think my three, I'm going to click on it, and I think I'm going
to transpose it up. Two to five. Yeah. Two. Right. I have my
keyboard, as well. So I'm going to unsolo. I have my samples here, right? But I'm going to
mute this track. I have my instrument rack, which when I press it,
I can't hear anything. Why? Well, when I press
my keys on my keyboard, but my keys are fired off here, it's because I need to have this record fired off as well. So be sure that your I just move this over just so they're closer.
I'm gonna have both. If I press command, I'm gonna
have both of them fired up, so I can play key my keys and then still have the drums going
at the same time, too. One, two, one, two,
one, two, one. Who knows what's going
on with my tune. I'm an improviser
at heart, folks. Alright, so those are
some ways to use it. Let's explore a little bit
more here for fun sake. So I'm going to click on
this midi empty column here. And I'm going to
go to instruments. Let's make sure
that my search is also clean and
clear of anything.
5. How to use Simpler with your Vox Samples : Let's explore my simpler here. Let's bring down my
audio drop sample here. I will drop it there. One, two, three, four. Mow. One, one, one, two, three, three, four. Four. One. I'm getting lost
in the sauce here. Right. Right. Getting
lost in the sauce. I just want to try this
other jammer out here. It does the same
thing the Rack does. One. One. One. Yeah, it's like sampling. Constant sampling. Kind of the fun thing is, like, all these other things to modulate and to change
some stuff around. I do like even a
reverse, you know. But I'm gonna let's
get rid of that. Okay, we're gonna
get rid of that. We are now going to work
on just what we have here. So we have drums. We could probably add a little bit more in the drums here. I actually kind
of want something like a high hat just for fun. So I'm gonna click on drums. I'm gonna go with high hat. Um a high hat bleep. We got some kind closed 505. Sure. Yeah, let's just get, we're just gonna
pick all sorts of random things and maybe one Tom. Why not? A hi tom. Let's see what that
sounds like. Great. And then I'm gonna scoot
down to my midi here, and I'm gonna high hat a
few Jambornos in the mix. Yeah, I don't want to
overcomplicate it. Oh, wait, these are Tom's. Woopss. I don't think Toms sound the best
when there's tons of them for these
purposes today. A few high hats. Quite fun. Never hurt anyone, you know? Let's hear what that
sounds like. Two. Two. Great. And now we're going to fire off
our instrument rack, too. We've got that volume going. Great. Let's bounce it down. Let's bounce it down.
A, six, seven, eight. One. Right, so I just played a whole bunch of
shenanigans, okay? And I did a little bit
of a boo boo here. Alright. When we go tap, so we're going into
arrangement view, I did record my midi notes here, but I didn't record them here. Okay? And you know why that is? Because I didn't press
record at the tippity top. So I'm gonna get rid of
this. We're gonna do that again. We're going to go here. I seven Oh. One, two, one, two, one, two, one. Space bar. Great. So we have our
arrangement here. I did the same thing twice. I'm going to show you if
you did kind of mess up, you can always fill in
an array stuff and like, make things a little
bit longer here, your mini notes, et cetera. If you found you just
like you a few bars here, let's say, and you want to
make this a little shorter. Again, this is a
looper right here. So you have this to work with. You two, two. Yeah. Sounds crazy cool,
in my opinion. I'm gonna show you
one more thing, and then we keep it quick
and dirty, you know? This is the quick and
dirty version of things. Okay, long form with questions
and all, and people. Those are the other videos. Alright. So for these samples, for example, we had a
few things going on. Let's have a listen. I'm gonna solo by pressing S.
I'm gonna go back up. One, two, three, four. Meow. Ooh Ooh. M. Hey. Ooh. Spacebar means. So let's see. I think
I want a few of these samples on their own. What I mean by that is, I'm just going to bring
this down for a sec. Bring down all the weight.
Just for a second. I'll bring it back
up in a second. I'm going to duplicate
this Command D. Okay. And I'm going to I think I want to like now
I clicked on this one. I'm going to bring my
looper, my one shot. I think I'm going to bring
it over here on this one. I'm going to take the loop off because I just want
to do a one shot, and that one is Say Hey, I'm going to rename
that so I don't forget Command R. I'm
going to name that. Hey, and then I'm going to
go to my next one here. And I think I had an somewhere. Whoops. I took the
looper with me. I didn't necessarily
need to do that. There are two flags on the top, two arrows. This is
a starting point. This is the ending
point. What we're doing is we're creating samples. Oh. You don't need. Oh. We don't need a looper. These things need
loopers because they are going to be
playing the loop. I'm just going to
be doing one shot. So I could get a little
more funky with it. We got these. One. TT Yeah, let's do four. Meow. Let's do the meow. Let's get that meow going.
So I'm going to take start. I'm going to take
the end slooper. I'm going to take it off. So we've just got
a meow in here. Meow. Meow. Great. I'm
going to command our MOT. Forget about that one. So, the other thing that we can do here is we can
use our key command. Command K. This is a dish a different way to
use the key command. I'm gonna press one on the hey, two on the ah, three on
the meow. Command K. Hey. Meow. See how it was sort
of pulsing like that. It's anticipating the 1 bar. So now this comes in handy. I'm going to turn the 1 bar
off to none. Check it out. Hey. Oh, meow, meow,
meow, hey, hey. So now it becomes a
sample pad, right? What I'm going to do is I'm going to take off.
I'm gonna stop this. I'm going to take off the solo, so we can hear everything
now in its entirety, right? Put this back on,
so it's not muted. So all my tracks are fired
up. They're ready to go. I'm gonna press
play my spacebar. I'm gonna take my drums down
just a bit so you can hear. I'm gonna even take
down my synth a bit. Hey, hey. Yo, yow. Hey. Hey, yo. Huh. Hey, hey. And there we have it. We made a glorious
track by just using our vocals with a little bit
of drums and percussion. Now we're gonna bounce
this down, okay? So I just have a loop going. I don't have an intro,
a verse or anything. It is just a vibe
happening here, okay? So I'm gonna press record, six, seven, eight. Hey. Hey, you now? No, no. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.
Hey, hey. Hey, bake. So ridiculous. You know what? I really am just hankering
for some reverb and delay, and a whole lot of it, sisters. So we're gonna blast
it off into space. I'm gonna add a little
bit of this here a little bit like
Harry Conic junior and a little bit of recipe. Hello. So, here we go. Hey, hey. Hey. It's so ridiculous. Record.
Here we go. We got gold. So you can see what's going.
Watch out those turts. Alright.
6. Finalizing Track: Arranging, Top line and Exporting Track Out.: I press tab, my masterpiece of my samples and my
tunes and all my uh, shenanigans are all recorded. So what's the other random
thing about Ableton? We got to click on this
orange flag, and here we go. We can now listen to the beauty of the
sounds of my music. And we love what we hear and
we hear what we only like. Thank you. I just got it cut. We're going to go up to
File. We're going to go down to Export Audio Video. Yes, you could do video on
here, believe it or not. Or you can go, Command
Shift R. And then, again, I just reco just for now until you get
more computing power. Oh, let's get nuts. Let's get frigging nuts here. I would just keep it at V
three and then export it out. The other thing that you can do. One more thing is, let's say we want
to add a top line. You're a vocalist,
you're rapper. You love poetry, et cetera.
We're gonna go to create. We're going to go to
insert Audio Track. The other way to do
that is to go Command T. And in this blank
Jam Borno here, we're going to fire
off the audio. I would put it on Audo or
I so you can self monitor, make sure you have
headphones so it doesn't feed back with your internal mic in the laptop and your internal speakers. And then now I'm going to
hit record and sing my tune. ****, turrets, turrets, *****. Taking their time, doing their
thing, loving their life. Everybody loves it. Everyone's
got to do it. I'm a dog. I'm a doke. Doug, do dog. I eat food and then Pooh. That's what I do. I eat
food and then Pooh. That's what I do.
Hey. And, of course, with my classic hit. I'm gonna scroll down
to the bottom left. I'm gonna pitch this up. The Jamborino So It's not at all chaotic at all. That's what to do. Hey. This is clearly gold
here, science and gold. So getting a little
bit of arranging. I got my magnifying glass. I'm gonna get a
little closer here as I see what the
heck is going on. TBH, I do believe these
samples are quite chaotica. So I'm just gonna mute it for
now and just pay attention to my lyrics and my
drums and my sins. Taking the time. Right. Thing is when you
don't have headphones, everything gets recorded
into your vocal. So a bit of a Nish Nish, aka. And that's why those
headphones are Importiante cause let's solo my beautiful
work as a lyricist. Right. I'm gonna get rid
of the high pitch just so I could hear
what this song. I'm making fun, so
much fun here and now. Okay. So, headphones
are key here. And, yeah, you can
pitch this up and down. You can kind of pitch all these Jamborinos as you see fit. You can add effects
on here if you like, whatever it is that you need
to do to work on your tune. Now that we've got this real complex, fun, beautiful tune. Okay, I'm going to mute my
main vocal and my samples. This is kind of cute. There is a way of doing a
little bit of arranging, okay, in clip few. So let's make this thing
freaking huge already. Let's get right in
here and get involved, even a little bit of arranging. So let's say we did it a
different way in clip view, Tab clip view. Now we're
in arrange with you. We just had a loop have
a loop going here, and quite frankly, I want to start arranging
this a little bit. So there's a few ways
that we could do this. Let's say I want to mute
this first half, right? To deactivate a
clip and to mute, I'm going to press zero. So my drums don't come in off the tip at the top,
two, three, four. And let's say this is my intro. Let's say I want to
start making markers and organizing this
a little bit, right? So I'm going to right
click or double click. Really depends on what you
have, mouse or free hand. I'm going to add a locator. And then I'm going
to name this intro. And then I'm going
to name this verse, and I'm going to
name this horas, and then this is
going to be Moutro. So These are all jammed in. I'm gonna probably take
out a lot of the chaos. So I'm going to just mute, delete a few things
here and there. This is by random. This
is not by design, folks. Not by design, by
pure Rando Reno. My chorus. I'm also going to mute this and my
Otro for funsies. I'm going to mute this. So let's hear what
it sounds like. This is another way to Range. Hey. Had to do with it, huh? No. Hey. Now, one, two, one. What a song. What
a beautiful song. What a song that's going
to change humanity. This is the We are the World
of Tunes, I do believe. Then I'm going to
go to a file with my 5 minutes song that's going to change the course of humanity and
culture, as we know it. I'm going to go to
Export Audio and video. File, Export. Export here. Everything looks good. Great. And that's it. That's a course right there
in a Cl's notes form, Canadian Cl's notes,
cliff notes, US version. Thank you very much.
My name is My Todd. Watch the long form
for more tips and tricks with also folks and
people asking questions. It's going to be helpful. There may be some
questions that you're also asking and looking for more
answers and stuff like that. And I think a lot of stuff
is covered because there's more brains that
have more queries, et cetera. Thank you very much.
Skillshare Member Todd, Where Tech, Music & Art Collide
