Music Production in Ableton Live: Learn How to Use Ableton Live

1. Introduction to Ableton Live: Ableton Live is the best music production software. Okay, I might be a little biased, but even though it looks a little scary at first, it is by far the most intuitive music production software I have ever used. Fair warning. Once you dive into music production, you'll never want to stop. Y type papain That's why, in this class, I'll teach you everything you need to know about Ableton. From the layout, the menu, the sounds, to the intricacies of music production. I'm Benza Maman. I have a degree in music composition, and I've been working behind the scenes in the music industry since 2010. I've written and produced songs for countless artists, and I've had the privilege to work with the writers and producers of artists like Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Luke Combs, and Many More. Recently, I've even gotten millions of streams, views, and some viral videos of my own, and I can't wait to share this decade of knowledge with you. In this class, I'll teach you how to use Ableton Live. We'll go through every feature, function, sound, and workflow so that you can become an Ableton master. Once you get the technical part out of the way, you can unleash your imagination and make the music of your wildest dreams. This class is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge to take your music to the next level. Whether you're just starting out or trying to refine your skills, I'm here to guide you every step of the way. And don't worry. We'll keep it engaging and straightforward with plenty of practical tips that you can apply right away. The assignment for this class is to follow along and make your very own music in Ableton live. So if you're ready to make the music of your wildest dreams, then let's dive right in to Ableton. 2. Chapter Overview: This chapter is going to be a deep dive into the technical side of Ableton. We're going to go through the layout, the functionality, what all the different buttons do, what all the tabs do, so that you're familiar with how the actual program works. If you already know the basics of how Ableton works, you can go ahead and skip to the history and resources chapter because from then on, this course turns into a creative course of how to make the actual music. 3. Navigate the Top Bar: Now we're going to talk about the top bar. The top bar has the Tap tempo function, the BPM, Time signature, Metronome, the Metronome dropdown menu. The playhead stopping and starting, recording, looping the Pen tool, the keyboard and CPU. So first, we have the TAP tempo, and it's exactly as it sounds. You can click it in a certain tempo, and it will change the number here on screen, which is the global tempo or BPM of your song. For example, if you are listening to somebody else's song and you want to know what tempo it is, or you want to make a song at that tempo. Just tap along to their song, and your Ableton session will be in time with theirs. Let's say you are a musician and you have a song you're playing on guitar. You can just tap this along to the beat of your song so that your Ableton session will be in the same tempo. You can also scroll by clicking this number and scrolling up or down is another way to change the BPM or tempo of your song. You can also click and type the different tempos that you want to change to in case you know, I want to make a song at 128 beats per minute. Next, we have Time signature. Now, more than 90% of commercial music is in 44. So if you are not sure what time signature you want to make your music in, just go ahead and leave this alone. For those of you who do know that maybe you want to make something in 68, you can type and change the numbers. You can scroll through just like before. But if you don't really know what time signature is and you're new to music production, I would highly suggest just leaving this at 44. Next we have our metronome. If you click the metronome and hit Spacebar, The metronome will start counting quarter notes at whatever your tempo is set to. So if you were to change the tempo, the metronome would speed up. If you want to change the count in, for example, you want the metronome to come in immediately, you can hit none. If you want to change the sound of the metronome, you have three options here. My favorite is classic or wood, but you can choose whatever sounds best to you. Here I have the rhythm on auto, which usually defaults to quarter notes. But let's say you wanted to count eighth notes instead, you can select a different rhythm here. Obviously, it's much faster because we're now counting eighth notes at this fast tempo instead of quarter notes. If you're unsure what you want to use, just leave it at auto. Now we have our global playhead, which when you hit play, it plays, you can also trigger this with the space bar. This is how you just hit play and hear the music that's enabled it. We also have our global stop button, which when you hit it, it'll stop. Another way to trigger that is also with the space bar. If you hit the stop button twice, it will reset the playhead to the very beginning of the song. This is useful if you're working on a middle section or a section deep, deep into Ableton, somewhere over here, and you just want to restart from the very top, you hit the Stop button twice. Here is our global record button. When you hit it, you are ready to record. We're going to dive into recording a little later because you do also have to arm the specific track that you want to record in order for this button to actually do anything. If you noticed when I hit the record button, was blue for a bar before we started to record. And that is back in our metronome setting we have a count in. So I have it set to 1 bar. You can choose two or four or none. What this means is that after you hit the record button, you're going to hear 1 bar or 2 bars or 4 bars worth of the metronome before it starts recording so that whoever is about to record can get synced up with the right rhythm. Over here, we have our loop button. When you click it, it turns this on, and this is exactly as it sounds. This will loop from here to here. You can change the length of the loop by dragging these. You can also select some space and hit Command L, and that will also turn on and off the loop. Next, we have our Pen tool. Our Pen tool we will use in various different ways, and we will dive into all of those ways later. But the basic way that we use the Pen tool is when we are drawing in midi notes. I know I just used a lot of hot keys, and I moved really fast to get to this menu. We're going to go over how to every single one of these. But I just want to show you when you toggle on the Pen tool, we suddenly have a pen that we can draw notes with. When you turn off the pen tool, that option is no longer there. But we have a cursor that we can select and delete and move things around with. Next, we have our keyboard button, and the keyboard button is really cool. Because when you turn this on, it turns your actual keyboard on your computer into a musical keyboard. We're going to explore the sounds of Ableton in another chapter. But just to show you how this works, we're going to take an instrument here and This enabled and I arm the track. Suddenly, it turns our computer typing keyboard into a musical keyboard like so. And lastly, we have our CPU. This just tells you how much of your computer CPU is currently being used by Ableton. This is largely irrelevant unless this number gets close to 80 or 100 in which case, you will start to have some trouble with your session. We're going to cover how to troubleshoot all of that. I know that's a lot of information, but we're going to be using all of those tools frequently in Ableton, and soon you'll know it like the back of your hand. M. 4. Explore the Left Bar: Let's talk about the left bar. In the left bar, we'll be able to search for sounds. We'll find drums, instruments, audio effects, media effects, plug ins, samples, grooves, our current project, and custom places or folders. The left bar is this entire section here. So this is one of the most important sections of Ableton, and let's go through what everything means. At the top here, we have a search bar. And this search bar is more of a filter. For example, if you type in kick, and then you go to a folder, it will only show you things in that folder with the word kick in it. So, for example, the samples folder, which is a lot of kicks, is even bigger if you get rid of the word kick. Suddenly, now, everything in this folder is available. So just so that you're aware this acts more as a filter than a search. Next we have this collections tab. And this collections is where you can save your favorite presets. And we'll dive into audio effects and presets in a different lesson. Next, we have categories. Now, this is where the sounds of Ableton really live. You have this sounds tab, which creates a convenient way separated by the kind of sound where you can start dragging in different synths and drum machines that Ableton has to offer. And you simply open this little triangle, which acts as a drop down menu, and you can double click or simply drag the instrument into the session, and it is ready to go. Next, we have our drums tab, and this has many of the different drum kits available in Ableton, including the drum rack, which we will cover more later. Here we have instruments, which has every single synth and sampler Ableton has to offer. So you simply click the dropdown menu and you can look at all the different presets and categories of sounds that are already made, or you can drag the sound in as it is, and you'll have the default template patch of that sound. You'll notice the drum rack again. You'll notice some of the same synths that you found in the sound and drums tab, and that's perfectly normal. Next, we have audio effects, and here we have the different audio effects available in Ableton. They live in their separate folders and each folder has its own drop down. Here we'll look at EQs, and you can see the different EQs available. Again, if you open the drop down here, we have all the presets that live inside of those audio effects. Midi effects work in the same way. We jump down to plug ins. These are third party plug ins. You won't have any of these if you're a beginning music producer, and that's totally okay. I will use some third party plug ins in this course, and I will link to every single one that I use in case you're interested in getting them for yourselves. Clips is a great place to find some amazing presets, some amazing drum racks that are already put together. Again, you can double click them or you can just drag them into the session over here. The samples folder has all of Ableton's samples, whether you want drums or synths, or guitars or anything you're looking for. This is where you will find all of Ableton's samples. We'll explore grooves in depth later, but this is where they live, and a groove is a preset rhythm that you can apply to tracks in your song to give them more of a live feel. We have templates, which we'll explore how to make your default template. Finally, we have places. Here you have your user library, your current project, and then you can add your own folders in case you have a lot of samples in a folder you use frequently, or you keep things in a dropbox, et cetera. The left bar is basically where everything lives, and you'll get very, very familiar with the left bar as we go through this course. 5. Ableton 12: Browser and Filter Tags: This section, we're going to be covering the new and improved browser. There are some massive upgrades to the browser, and it makes finding the right sound easier than ever. What's immediately obvious is this is taking up more real estate. We have some new tags here. So let's explore what these mean and how this makes finding the right sound easier than ever before. So this is what's called the filter tab. If you open it down, there's a bunch of new functions here. If you close it, this is basically exactly how Ableton's layout used to be. You can click through the different options in your library, you can click through the different collections that you have, different places on your computer, or hard drives, and your plug ins. This is all exactly the same that it used to be. So the big upgrade here is in this filters tab. This allows you to tag your sounds and the sounds of Ableton with specific tags so that you can find what you're looking for even faster. For example, if you want a bass sound, you can simply click base, maybe you want an analog base, and maybe you want it to be a synthesizer. All of Ableton's sounds and instruments have been pre tagged. So by simply clicking here, you are now only looking through Ableton's analog synthesizer base sounds. Saves you an enormous amount of time if you're working on a track, and you know the kind of sound you want, but maybe you don't know exactly where to find it. By clicking these tags saves you a ton of time and gets you straight to the sounds that are going to be a good option for your song. You can also tag your own sounds with any tag that you want. The tags work for both instruments and for samples. So here we have our kick loop. If you want to tag some of your own sounds, your own plug ins, or your own samples, or even add tags to Ableton sounds, you want to click over here to this edit panel. You want to click over here to this edit panel. This will pull up a menu of tags that you can add to any of your sounds. For example, if we go over to Splice, here we can go to this splice pack that I like. We'll find some drums. And let's say we want to be able to find this again under some tags. So now we can go in and start to tag this. So it's a loop, drum loop over here. We can add any descriptive character that we might like, can add your own tag. For instance, this has a tribal feel to me. Now we can click this tribal tag anytime we have a tribal feeling sample or sound. You obviously do not need to use all of these tags, if for instance, you just want to organize things by genre. Maybe you just want to have all of your house sounds and samples organized under house, and your hip hop sounds and samples organized under hip hop or whatever genre of music that you like to make. You can add your own entire group. If, for example, you want to have a whole group of galactic sounds. Now we have Galactic. Underneath Galactic, you can add drums, bass, synths, or whatever sub tags makes sense for you. So now if we go over to splice and we have all of our samples here, we can click on the tags that we've made. Let's say you want to search through just the loops, the tribal sounds. And there we go. You can understand how useful this is once you have tons of favorite sounds tagged in all sorts of different tags and categories, which makes finding the right sound sample or instruments so easy. If you have a sound that's close, but not quite right, when you click on it, you'll see this new icon. This will pull up similar sounds to the one you've selected, so you can sift through sounds that are similar to what you have. And now we have a bunch of other loops that Ableton thinks sounds similar to the one we chose. As you can see here, we have a rating score of how similar Ableton thinks it is. This one being pretty similar. And let's go to the bottom, it probably will be less similar. Exactly. So, let's say you have a high hat. Remember to unclick your filters when you are not looking for a specific filter. Let's say you have a high hat sound. And that's close, but you want other high hat sound that sound like this. Click the button, and This feature really saves so much time in finding and auditioning the right sounds, and it helps you not settle for a sound that's pretty close because it's so easy to just once you've found something that's basically right, you can click this button and just quickly audition 20 other sounds similar to make sure that you found the right one. Another workflow enhancement is, let's say you're deep in your sample library, finding the perfect sound. And then you move on and you look for something else. Maybe you wanted to find an audio effector or you do something else. You can now use these buttons here to retrace your steps like a command Z that just works for the browser here, so you can go back to where you were before. This is so useful because so many times I'm searching for a sound and then I'm working on the track, and my attention goes elsewhere. And then I'm like, Oh, where was that sound I found 20 minutes ago? Here, you can go backwards and forwards in your search so that you can easily find everything that you've come across so far. So you can assign your own tags, you can use Ableton's pre tagged sounds, and you simply Click on the folder over here, for example, splice, and then you click on the tabs, and it'll pull up everything tagged within this folder, according to the tags and filters that you chose here. You can do this with your plug ins. You can do this with Ableton's instruments. Come pre tag, like I said. One of the most frustrating parts of music production for me, has been searching through all of the sounds and samples. When I'm in a flow state, and I have the inspiration coming through, I don't want to spend 20 minutes searching for the right sound. I want to keep letting the music flow through. So, although sometimes I do enjoy searching for sounds, when I'm inspired, I often want to get right to the music. So this enhancement to the browser with filters and tags makes finding the right sound so much easier. 6. Create Audio & MIDI Tracks: Talk about audio and Mi tracks. What are audio and Mdy tracks? Well, all of music lives within these two tracks. Audio tracks are any track of audio. This is any recording, any sample, any existing song that you want to remix, anything at all that lives in an audio track form. Midi is anything that you are programming into a Midi synth or drum rack in Ableton or Third party. And between these two are every single sound possible. So we're going to jump in here and explore the two different kinds of tracks. If you hit Command T on a MAC or I believe Windows T on a PC, you create an audio track. If you hit Command Shift T or Window Shift T, you create a midi track. You can also go up to the menu and hit Create Insert audio track, Insert Midi track. You can go to an existing audio or Mdy track. You can hit Command or Windows D to duplicate them. And here you have the audio and the Mi tracks that create all of the music that you will ever need. They have slightly different functionality, and we will dive into all those in depth in a later lesson. An easy way to think about this is if you are recording or you're using a sample, you're going to use an audio track. If you are using an Ableton synth or your own drum rack, you're going to use a midi track. If you go over to the left bar and you drag in a synth, it'll automatically create a midi track. You could have your midi track selected and drag your synth into the midi track, and it's ready to go. If you have a sample, you can drag that straight onto your audio track. You'll notice that if you try to drag it onto your midi track, it will try to convert the audio into midi, which is something we're going to cover later. If you want to record a voice or a guitar or piano or something in the real world, you'll record it to an audio track, and if you want to record a midi keyboard or a beat pad, you'll record that to a midi track, but more on recording in a later lesson. 7. Introduction to Samples & Synths: Talked a little bit about samples and synths. But what are samples? What are synths? What are loops? Let me explain. Samples are anything that has been previously recorded. Samples can be an entire song. Samples can be part of a song, samples can be just a guitar part. Samples can even be a one hit, like just the hit of a snare. This is just one note of what sounds like a harp. This is just one hit of a drum. That's a whole drum beat. That's a whole banjo ho down sample. And samples really are just that. They can be anything. They can be synths, they can be acoustic instruments. They can live in this sample folder here. You can have your own third party samples. I have given you guys some samples to use in the student resources folder. Samples really make up a lot of mic, and it's really worth getting to know samples. Loops are a sub category of samples, referring usually to parts of a drumbeat like a high hat loop or a tambourine loop or a shaker loop. And a loop is just something that you would want to, well, have it loop on itself as time goes on. And a loop is something you just want to repeat throughout the song. This is a drum loop if you want to loop it on itself, and you can do that by dragging it into the session, and then when your cursor turns into this little paragraph icon, and when your cursor turns into this icon here, you can grab it and extend it or shrink it. This is a quick and easy way to create a loop. Synths can be samples, and they can be loops. But to keep things simple, synths are the sounds of Ableton. So you go into the instruments folder, and we have analog, that's a synth, collision, electric, operator, tension, wave table. These are the synths of Ableton. And you can explore the different presets that the synth has. Let's say you want a bass sound. You can look for the basses. Let's say you want to pat, a piano, keyboard sound. You can look here. When you find a sound you like or something that you're curious about, you can drag it onto an empty mit track. You can drag it into an empty space, and it will create its own mit track. You can even drag it onto an existing mit track with an existing synth, but that will replace what was there before. Don't worry too much about that because we're going to explore synths in depth. Soon. We're going to do a whole section on recording. But just to give you a brief overview, if you have an empty audio track, and I just created that by hitting command T, which would be Windows T, and you just hit this arm button here, which we will cover what all of these functions do soon. But you click this on, and it turns red. This means the track is armed. If you have a microphone connected to an audio interface, which we will go over all of that very soon as well, then you simply have the right input selected. Turn it on it record. And it will record what's ever coming into that microphone input. Maybe you have a keyboard plugged into your audio interface. Hitting record will record your keyboard input. And you will see that this will turn into the recording of whatever you are recording. Next, if you go over to a synth or a midi track, and you, let's say, you want to play on your computer keyboard, or you have a midi keyboard or a beat pad you want to use, you can arm the track here and then hit record here. Now, we've recorded our part into Mitty. There are such things as synths in the real world. These usually look like electric keyboards, and we can record those into audio tracks. But usually when we talk about sins, we're talking about the instruments ableton or third party instruments that live on your computer. I know this is a whole new world of synths and audio tracks and samples. And it might seem like a lot of new information coming in. These are the building blocks for music, and we are going to practice this over and over and over. H. 8. Unleash the Audio Effects: This lesson, we're going to be talking about audio effects. What are audio effects? Well, we went over recordings. We went over samples, and we went over synth. These live on audio tracks, and they live on midi tracks. But we can put audio effects onto those tracks to tweak those sounds. The main audio effects that we're going to cover in this course are compression, EQ, reverb, delay, and distortion. We can jump over to our magical left bar that has absolutely everything that we need, and we go over to the audio effects section. Here, you can scroll down in dynamics and grab a compressor. You can go to delay and loop to find a delay, You could go into the reverb and resonance, open up the reverb tab, open up the rooms tab, and find the small room reverb preset and drag that on to your audio track. You can also drag these on to midi tracks. You can drag them from a different track here or from the left bar here. Once you have a audio effect on your track, the track will sound different. Here is our drum loop without the delay. Here is our drum loop with the delay. That obviously has a very dramatic sound because that's a very drastic audio effect. That just goes to show that audio effects can be very, very powerful. There are many different uses for audio effects. You can change the sound that you're working on. You can remedy the sound that you're working on. You can tweak it slightly, you can enhance it just a little bit, or you can change it completely. Audio effects are a world on their own, and we are going to explore all of the main audio effects here in Ableton. 9. Unleash the Audio Effects Part 2: Know you couldn't get enough of audio effects, so we have just a little bit more about the different audio effects available here in Ableton. We talked about EQ. Now, we have a whole section in depth about each of these audio effects, but I want to give you a brief overview of what they do so you can start understanding them. EQ affects the frequency of your track from the lows on the left, the base sounds to the highs on the right, the high sounds. Obviously, the middle is in the middle. If we solo our drum loop, you can pull these points up and down, which this is pulling up the base of the sound, and this is pulling down the base of the sound. You can also pull down the high end. Or pull up the high end. There's a lot you can do with EQ, and most of the time, it's pretty subtle. But this is what EQ does. It affects and shapes the frequency of your track, dynamics, or usually referred to as compressors, contain the dynamics of your track. And what that means is the volume. So if you look at the waveforms of this track, you can tell that this is bigger than that. Meaning this is louder than that. What a compressor does is it contains the dynamic range. So you could bring down all of these louder notes so that this loop looked about the same size, which means it would sound more consistent. And we'll explore when you do want to do this and how you want to do this in a later lesson. We have drive and color, which is distortion. Distortion just adds frequency to your sound. And the easiest way to think about this is you have a clean sounding guitar, and then you add some distortion, and then it has a lot more going on. This is obviously largely subjective, but there are sometimes when you want to use subtle distortion, just to enhance your sounds. Delay and loop, delay is an echo. So if you put a delay on a track, it'll sound like it's echoing. You can tell when I stopped the track, the delay kept going. So the delay is an echo echoing after your track. You can change the length of the delay, the quality, and we will explore all of that. Reverb makes things sound like they're in a cave or in a really, really large or small room. We put some reverb on our drums, and suddenly we're in the Tazma Hall or some huge palace or the Grand Canyon or something. So reverb makes your track sound like it exists in a space. This is very useful for music production that's done in Ableton because a lot of the time, you don't have live recordings. Live recordings are recorded in a real space, and they have their natural reverb, makes it into the recording. Here in music production, especially in the 21st century, we have to add River back into our tracks to get some of that organic feeling. That was just a quick overview of some of the effects that Ableton has to offer. We're going to explore all of the effects in depth later in this course. 10. MIDI Effects Magic: This lesson is all about midi effects. So let's create a midi track. I'm going to hit command Shift T. We have a new midi track. I'm going to go to instruments. I'm going to go to this electric piano and keys, and I'm going to drag this E piano basic onto the midi track that I just created. I'm going to hit arm. Then I'm going to make sure that this keyboard is on, and I am going to play the keys on my keyboard like a piano to create some chords. I'm now going to hit record. And now we have a C chord. This wasn't exactly what I wanted to play. So we're going to move this note here. We're going to move this note here. And now that's the C chord I meant to play. We are going to look for this icon at the edge of the clip. Now when you click it, you can move the clip in, and we've created a nice, clean cut. Now we're going to click on the clip. I'm going to hit Command or Windows L, and we're now looping. This is a middy track. We're going to go over to midi effects, and there are a lot of different media effects. The most commonly used is the arpegiator. It has different presets here, but we're going to drag it down right here. It is breaking up the chord I played into individual different notes in a repeating pattern. Middy effects affect only midi tracks. You can use all of these different midi effects. This one creates chords out of just one note. This can change the note length. This can change the pitch. This is a randomizer. This will put your notes into a scale. This will affect the velocity, and we'll cover each and every one of these in a later lesson. But I just wanted to give you a quick overview and a quick rundown about midi effects. They live right here. Unlike audio effects. Audio effects can affect mid and audio track. Midi effects only affect midi tracks. They go before the instrument on the track down here. You'll notice audio effects says after this. This is our instrument. And MDia effects go before. You can't drag a midi effect after. It will automatically always try to put it before. So mini effects affect midi tracks. They affect the information that you have played or programmed here into Ableton. And with these notes that I played, it then will change them into different chords, different lengths, pitches, and patterns. Midi effects are a lot of fun, whether you know music and can play all of these on your own without the help of midi effects, or you aren't much of a musician, and you need to stimulate your creativity. Midi effects are amazing for coming up with brand new ideas and changing what already exists and just giving some life to your track. 11. Learn Send & Return Tracks: S and Returns. This lesson is about explaining what they are, how to use them, and where they live. Sens and Return tracks live here at the bottom of the screen. Sens and Returns are really Sens and returns are synonymous for each other. So these are all return tracks. They're all sent tracks. Ableton technically calls them return tracks. So that's what I'm going to call them. If you click Option Command or Windows T, you create a new sen track. A new return track. Return tracks are used to enhance your existing tracks. You can have your drum loop here. And you can put a reverb on a return track. Then you can send part of your drum track to the reverb. We'll explore why would you want to do that, when you want to do that, and how to do that in later lessons. But just to give you a brief overview, these different sections here correlate to the different return tracks you have here. If I were to delete these return tracks delete these options here. If you have a return track, A corresponds to the first one. B corresponds to the second one, and so on and so forth. So if you were to drag this to zero, that would mean 100% of this track is going to the rever on the return track. If you want less of that huge echo sound, maybe you'll try sending less of your drum track to the rever. There we have a little bit going to the reverb, but mostly it sounds dry, which sounds better to my ear. Return tracks are used mostly for reverb and delay. But you can put any audio effect you want onto a return track. And there are a lot of different reasons and workflows why you might want to do this. And remember that there are never any rules in music production. But to keep things simple as a general guideline, you want your reverb and delay on return tracks, and you will send your other tracks to those reverbs and delays via the return track. Mm. 12. Learn Send & Return Tracks Part 2: Now we're going to do a little explanation about return track. So we could have a reverb on the actual audio track. I'm not going to send our track at all to the reverb here on this reverb send. Instead, I am just having a reverb on the actual track. We're gonna solo this track, and we're gonna listen. That sounds very washed out. Now, let's turn off our River, which you can turn effects on and off with this yellow button here. You go over to the return, and we're going to send our audio track. We're going to send our drum loop to this rever all the way. You can already here. That sounds a little bit different. Now, we're gonna turn off this return by clicking this A button. This yellow button. We're gonna turn off this return by clicking this Yellow A. Once it's grayed out, it is off. Likewise, this is grayed out. It's off. We're gonna turn this rever back on and listen to and listen again. That's what the reverb sounds like on the track. Turn it off. Turn on the return. And this is what the reverb sounds like on the return. So why does it sound a little bit different? What's happening here is that when it's on the audio track, 100 when it's on the audio track, all of the audio track is going to the reverb. And the reverb sounds kind of like a cave. Therefore, it sounds like everything. Therefore, it sounds like the whole audio track is coming from this cave. When you have it on a return track, you are hearing the audio track without anything on it. You are hearing that. You're just also hearing the reverb at the same time. So you're getting what's called the dry unaffected drum loop with the wet affected drum loop, and you're hearing them together. And what that sound is creating, it's creating a drum loop that's cutting through still, but also you're getting some of this cave sound. This is useful because you can simply dial down the amount you're sending your drums to the reverb to have more of a crisp drum sound, but still have some of that ambience. 13. The Session & Arrangement View: Ableton has two views. This course is going to center around one of those two. But I'm going to give you an explanation of both of them so that you understand what Ableton has to offer. Here is the arrangement view. This view is where you want to live for music production, making music. This view is similar to all the other Ds, logic, pro tools, FL Studio. They all exist in a horizontal timeline, meaning zero or the very start of the song is here at one on the very left. And it counts time to the right. Here is 1 minute and 10 seconds. Here is 1 minute and 20 seconds. And if I had anything in the session, this can keep going for 2 minutes, 3 minutes, an hour, 10 hours. This can keep going to the right, and it'll go as long as your song is or as long as you have information Since I don't have anything here, Ableton' is not creating more space beyond 1 minute and 20 seconds. The key to the arrangement view is that it's horizontal time being left to right, start to finish. This is very helpful for conceiving the structure of a song because you'll say, Okay, the intro is from here to here. And then around this 22nd mark, we have our first verse, and then around this 42nd mark, we go to our chorus. So this is helpful for master mining and plotting out the plan of your song and creating it simultaneously. The other view in Ableton, which you access by clicking from here to here, these little lines from horizontal to vertical. You can also switch views by hitting Tab, And the session view is what you want to use when you're performing live. It's a great way to start musical ideas, and this view works vertically. It works from top to bottom. So this would be the top. This would be the next section. This would be the next section. So you might have an intro here, and then a verse here. And then a chorus here. I'll give you some quick examples of this so you can better understand what I'm saying. Here, I type in BPM, because I know when I go to samples, everything that has BPM next to it is a usable loop. L et's drag this house beat here, and we just want some music to go along with it. So I'm going to grab this piano sample as well. Now when we hit this, I'm going to change our BPM so that it's closer to what I want the house song to be, and when I hit play. This is playing in an indefinite loop these two samples. Let's say, let's say I want a different sound to come in for another section, I can drag that sound into Ableton. And I dragged it instead of on this horizontal line, I dragged it onto this one. I'm going to shift click both of our existing track. And I'm going to hit Command or Windows D. Now, if you hit here on number one, this playhead. It plays our first two tracks. If I hit two, It adds our third track. So you could compose vertically bringing things in and taking things out, layering, and expanding the different sections of your song vertically like this. This view is also nice because you can see the levels, the volume right here. And you can change the volume right here. This is a little more intuitive maybe for sen tracks as well, because you can see visually. This is not being sent to the return track at all. Here, you can see it's being sent all of the way. So this view has its purpose, and it's really great for certain things. But for the purposes of our course, we're really going to be living in the arrangement view here. And if you noticed, when I click over from the session view to the arrangement view, it's great out. These weird play heads are here. And most importantly, this orange button. And this means that things are not working as they should, and you're not going to hear everything as you need to. This is a warning that's very important to pay attention to, because you need to click this orange button. Then the screen goes back to normal. It's not grade out anymore, and now you will hear what's actually happening. I don't know why this functionality exists, but basically, if you play something in the session view, you go over to the arrangement view and you see this, you're not going to hear what is actually happening in the arrangement view. So just all that to say, all that you need to take away from this is that please click this button before you Now, like I said, this course is about music production, and music production really does exist in this horizontal timeline where we're going to go from start to finish through every section of the song, and this is the layout and the view that we will be working in this course. 14. Arming, Soloing, & Muting!: This lesson is about arming, soloing, and muting. So if we go over here, we will notice that we have this number one, two, three, four, this big yellow button. This also counts the amount of tracks we have, and it has, we have an S here, and we have this little circle here. So let's go over what these buttons do. I'm going to drag some tracks into our arrangement here so that we have something to listen to. Notice how this one is longer than that one. We can look for our cursor, and we can extend our drum loop so it's a little bit longer. I'm going to click the drum loop, hit Commander Windows L, and then we are looping our section. So, what do these buttons do? If you hit this yellow button on any of these tracks, it turns the track off. This is effectively muting the track. Next, we have this S. The S is solo. Let's say you have a lot of tracks. Let's just drag some more tracks in just for this example. And we have now four tracks playing at once. And you just want to solo one of them. You hit the S, and now you will only hear the track that you have selected. You can command click or Windows click another solo button to hear two tracks or three tracks. Or all the tracks, but why would you want to do that? And then if you hit a solo button, again, it takes away the solo for everything. Next, we have the arm track. This means record ready. If you're on an audio track or a midi track, and let's just create a Md track, Command Shift T or Window shift T to create a Md track. And for this example, let's just get any synth in here. There we go. I just dragged this synth here into the midi track we created. If you are in a midi track or an audio track, and you hit this red button, that means it is record ready. If this button paired with this button here, means you will start recording. But as you can see, we are recording nothing over and replacing the audio track that existed here already. So in this scenario, you wouldn't want to do this. But that just shows you when you hit this button and you hit record, it starts recording. Now, audio tracks will only record from a microphone or an instrument input that you have in your room. So you only want to record audio if you have a mic or like you have a keyboard or something that's plugged into an audio interface. We'll talk about audio interfaces later, but this is how you record, say vocals or guitar. If you want to play a mite part onto a synth, a Syntha Ableton or third party synth, You would arm this midi track. And then if you have a midi keyboard connected, your midi keyboard would then trigger this synth. Also, if you turn on this keyboard function here, your computer keyboard will trigger this synth. Or if you have a beat pad, it'll do the same thing. Just remember, once something is armed, you have to also hit the record button for it to work. And then if you are done recording, you want to make sure to turn it off just in case. For example, let's say you had the record arm here on this house beat, and then you wanted to actually record in this new synth, and you hit the record button. It started recording over the drumbeat, erasing it. So if you didn't want to do that, you would want to unselect this drumbeat before you start recording. And if you ever make a mistake, Apple Z, command Z, Window Z, all of the Zs. That is your best friend. That is Undo. And you really want to use this tool whenever you need to, because this is how you undo what you just did. These buttons are pretty straightforward. The numbers here just count how many tracks you have. There's no relevance besides that. You mute something by turning it on and off. You sol something by clicking the S, and you get it record ready by clicking the record arm button here. 15. Creating MIDI Clips: Let's talk about creating midi clips inside of your Midi tracks. We've talked about midi tracks. We know how to create them. We can double click here and hit Insert Midi track. We can go here to create Midi track, and we can hit command Shift T or Window Shift T to create a MDI track. We are midi track creating masters now. But what do you do with a MTI track? You need to create a midi clip. Now, a midi clip is what this is here. It automatically creates a midi clip if you start recording But let's say you want to create a MIDI clip without recording. Once you are in the proper MDI track. Let's say we want to create something here in this MIDI track three. You want to highlight and drag over the selected region. And let's say you want to do 4 bars or 1 bar. If you're not sure, just create 4 bars. That's just the easiest way to go. And you want to hit Shift Command M. You can also once in a MIDI track, select the area that you want to create, and right click and hit Insert empty midi clip. You can also, as we did before, hit the record button, hit this record button, and let's delete this. And it created part of a middy clip. Let's say you wanted to create a longer midi clip through this record way, you need to record for a longer time. Now, it created a midi clip for this entire 4 bars. But I think the easiest way is to select the space you want to create, select your bar, your 4 bars, and hit Shift Command or Windows M. Once your midi clip is created, a piano roll appears. This is where the magic happens. We'll do a whole section on the piano roll coming up. But basically, if you activate your pen tool with Command or Windows B, you can start programming or drawing in notes. These notes exist in a certain size on what's called the grid, which we're also going to cover later. But if you right click inside a piano roll, you can change the size or the note value that you are drawing. We can go from 16th notes, which are small to bars, which are long. Mini clips are part of the bread and butter, the very basic foundation of music, and we'll be using them all throughout this course. 16. Unveil the Piano Roll: Time to unveil the piano roll. Let's dive into the piano role. So we learn how to create midi clips. Again, you select the region that you want to create in and shift command, and you have a new midi clip. Now we're in our piano roll. You can scroll with this magnifying glass here. You can click and drag, you can drag in and out. And this is how you scroll the different size in the piano roll. You can also hit the plus or minus on your keyboard, and this will change the view you're seeing on the right here. But if you want to change the global bird's eye view of how many octaves you're seeing, you need to do it by clicking and dragging in this area here. Notice this tool is not available here or there, only in this little region here. Next, we can engage our Pen tool. Now, the Pen tool we'll start drawing notes at whatever length we have already selected. So here, you click and click, and click, and click, and we're creating midi notes at what looks like 16th notes. Yes, when I right click in this empty space, it pulls up this menu where I can see what's called the fixed grid, and it shows you the note value that you're working on. L et's say you want to work on eighth notes, you would have to change that value here. Now your pen tool is working in eighth notes. Let's say you want to work in quarter notes. Change the value yet again, and you work in quarter notes. Let's say you want to work in bars. You change that yet again. And now we're working in bars. Now our screen no longer shows us everything we're working on, so that minus button comes in handy, so it shrinks everything so we can cleanly see what we're doing. These are actual musical notes that I have drawn. They probably won't sound good because this is totally random. But let's now organize them into a nice sounding pattern. So I'm going to delete what we did. We're going to stay in quarter notes, and I'm just going to draw up this C major seven chord and back down again. And now, we're going to switch to the bar mode, and we're going to draw in our C major chord. Next, our Steam Major Cord, and we're going to select all of these notes. Go to this icon on the right, and we're going to extend it to the end of the clip. Now when I hit solo, We have a musical masterpiece. Just kidding. You can now hear what we're actually doing. So we're drawing in notes, if you wanted to draw in a harmony part, notes that layer each other. Oops. There, you see, I was in bar mode, and I wanted to layer this quarter note. So what we're going to do is it Commander Windows, right click in side of an empty place in the piano roll. Go back to quarter notes, and now when I engage my pen tool with Command or Windows B. I can create a quarter note length note, which is what I was intending to do. Now we're going to layer these original notes with a harmony part, and we're going to have a harmony playing the entire part. If you want to hear the notes while you're creating them with your pen tool, you hit this little headphone icon on the right. Now when you hit here, it plays you the notes, you can hear it. So let's say you remember this. You're like, you hit Spacebar to stop and start, and you remember what that sounds like. And then you are auditioning this note, and you're like, Oh, that's probably not gonna sound good. And you're like, Oh, yeah, that one probably sounds good. This is helpful if you have a good ear, and you want to use your ear to help you make decisions, which I do suggest. If, for example, you know what you want to do already, and you are getting distracted by putting in the different notes, you can click this icon off so that you don't hear what you are creating. You can also right click and go into this adaptive grid. And the adaptive grid is usually where I like to live. I like this narrow view because when you zoom in and out, the view or the note values change. So when you're out, they're bigger, and when you in, they get smaller. This is very intuitive for me because when I zoom in, I usually want to work in a smaller section. When I zoom out, I usually want to work in a bigger picture. Notice that when zooming, you have to scroll your pen tool. You have to scroll your cursor to this narrow region right here, because when you're here just above and here just below, you don't see the magnifying glass. So only when you're right here or by using the plus n minus button on your computer, can you zoom in which changes the adaptive grid? The piano roll also has velocity down at the bottom, which will dive into more in a later lesson. 17. MIDI Clips Extras & Zooming: We'll dive a little bit deeper into mid clips in the piano roll to show you all the functionality that's available. If you look here in our mid clip that is next to our piano roll, we have some functionality here. This loop affects if the mid clip loops or not. What this means is that if you hover over this section here, which will create a new icon if you're just at this bar right here. This will allow you to change your view, where you can see only the piano roll or only the timeline. I usually like to leave it somewhere in the middle, but this is really helpful if you say, want to work in depthly on some midi notes. If you find this narrow little bar and find this icon, this is how you change your views there. Now that we're back in the timeline. If you find this icon that extends and shortens your clip, and you drag it to the right when loop mode is not engaged, you're extending the length of your clip for new information. Let's say you want it to just record more or program more to your part. Let's say you like this, what you've made, and you want it to loop. Then you hit the loop button, and when you drag this mini clip, it starts looping it over itself. Now, it's looping it every 4 bars because this is what we set the length to. If this length was five, then you can see every fifth bar it loops. If this length was six, it would be every sixth bar. If this position one wasn't 111, started on three, then it would start on the third bar and on the sixth bar. You really never want that. You always want this to be 111, and you probably want this length to either be 4 bars or 8 bars. But if you're in a specific scenario and you know that you need this to be 9 bars or some other value, this is how you control the length. Of your middy clip. Because if you drag this in this view, but you change the length here, you can see visually that now, even though you had this looping on itself, now it's listening to this seven bar count, and every 7 bars it's looping, so you have blank space here, to add more musical information. But like I said, if this is confusing to you at all, leave this on 111 and leave this length on either four or eight. When you scroll over this section here, the cursor changed. We talked about this. You can click here and change this view. You can also click this bar and change the real estate here. You can have less of the left bar, more of the left bar. You can even click here and have less of this top part and more of the timeline or more of the top part and less of the timeline. This top part is somewhere you can visually see your track, and this is helpful when it's a very long and full track, and maybe you can just zoom in to a section over here. But for this example, we really only have anything at the start. When you see this magnifying glass and you zoom in all the way to the right, we don't have anything there. So we're not seeing anything. But when you click here, and you zoom in, we're zooming into these tracks exactly right here. This can be an easy way to find things in your session. But I tend to keep this rather small and I tend to keep this pretty even this about here. Of course, this is all custom to you and your preferences. If you find this magnifying glass in this narrow bar, just like in the bar above it, it will zoom in to the section of the song that you are selected. So let's say we want to zoom in on bar 25, we're doing that, but there's nothing there. Let's say we want to zoom in on bar five. Here we go. You can also hit the plus and minus on your keyboard to zoom in and out. 18. Decoding the Bottom Bar: Let's talk about the bottom bar. If you've noticed anything about this bottom bar is that it changes. It's a chameleon. It looks different at different times, and we're going to now explore all of these different functionalities. First of all, when you click a mid clip, here the piano roll shows up. But you'll remember we can also drag audio effects onto midi clips. But where would we do that? Because here we see a piano roll? I'm going to tell you. You hit Shift tab. Shift Tab goes from the piano roll to the synth view, and the synth view is where you can see the kind of synth that you have. You can see the knobs and the ways to tweak that synth. You can see the audio effects that are on that track. So if you wanted to change synth, we go to instruments. Maybe you're like into operator these days, and you want to base sound. We have a new synth in the synth window, and you want some audio effects. So, sure, let's drag this here and we'll drag this gate on here. And now in this view, we see a synth, and we see the audio effects that are on the synth. Let's say, just to make it a full party, you even had a midi effect on your midi track before the synth. You hit Shift tab, and we're back to the piano roll. So this bottom bar is kind of a chameleon bar that turns into whatever work station you are currently working on. The same concept applies for audio tracks. And as you can see what I did here, you click on the part of the audio track that has the information, and you can drag it over the part that was empty. Now, when you click on the midi track, you see the piano roll, when you click on an audio track, you see the audio. This view here, this is the same thing. I'm going to scroll here. I see that my magnifying glasses appeared. I click and drag, and I'm scrolling this hit is the same as that hit. One, two, one, two, one, three, one, three. So you can affect the audio clips in two different ways right here on the grid or in the clip internally here. But this view is where you see the actual audio. There's different effects here, which we'll go through in a different lesson. And you hit shift tab and you're back to this audio effect view. Now, I'm going to delete these two, a midi clip has a synth in it, and then some audio effects maybe. An audio track does not have a synth. So an audio track will have if you want to drag the same gate and an EQ. If you want to drag audio effects onto an audio track, you will not see a synth or anything before, obviously, because it's not a synth. Shift Tab will switch to the audio view. Shift tab will switch to the audio effects view. And just to clarify, shift tab is how you switch between the views. So Shift tab will bring you to this view, and Shift tab will bring you to the other view as well. Remember that regular tab tabs between Alton's two views, and Shift tab is how on an individual track, you switch between the audio effects view and the Synth or Audio view. Next, if you click a send or Return track, now the bottom bar has populated with that track. If you click on the Master Track, now the bottom bar has populated with what's on the Master Track, whatever you click on will become what you see in the bottom bar. 19. Ableton 12: Bottom Menu: Ton 12 has introduced a menu on the bottom bar which allows you to customize how you view your session. If you notice down here, there is this triangle, which will open a MIDI editor if you're selected on a midi note or an audio file if you're selected on an audio clip. You can also close down this menu by hitting the same triangle. Here you can preview what you're looking at, and we also have the name of the track selected down here. With this triangle, we can open up the effects window, which on this audio file, we don't have any effects. But for example, on this midi track, we do. So here we can open up and view the midi instrument, and then all the different effects with this tab here. This also allows us to click through if we have a lot of effects from the beginning to the end. But what's really different is these meters here. If you click this on, in the arrangement view, we now have the mixer, which in previous views of Ableton, we used to have to tab from the session view to the arrangement view to view the mixer. Now, straight in the arrangement view, you can see the mixer. I find this incredibly useful because I like to see the levels while I'm working on a track in the arrangement view. Of course, if you want to turn it off, you click the same button that turned it on. And finally, there is this little drop down menu here where you can click on your return tracks or off, as well as turning on all of these different functions, such as the sens, ins and outs, volume, et cetera. So Over time, by just creating some music in Ableton, you'll know what you like to see and what you don't like to see, and you can just create the space you need to create, and you'll slowly customize your view to what works best for you. But this is another place to look if you're not seeing an option that you would like to see. This is a huge upgrade because I spend most of my time in the arrangement view, and I love being able to see the levels while I'm working on my tracks in the arrangement view. 20. Gain Staging Essentials: L et's talk about gain staging. Now gain staging is the signal flow of volume throughout all of the different elements in Ableton. Let me explain. When we talk about volume in Ableton or in music production, zero is pretty high. Most volume is in the negative 20, negative ten range. And that's how volume works in music. Zero is super super high, and usually we work in the negative below. The first and most obvious place to talk about gain staging or volume is the actual track volume. From there, we have the source input volume for a sample. How loud was the sample recorded? We have plug in volume, effect volume, and master track volume. So let's explore what this means. The first and most obvious thing, like I said, was the track volume itself. So we're going to solo this acid base. And we see here that we're in the green, this green is almost this little line here, which means it's close to zero. Like I said, this is the main view for this course. But it can be helpful to hit tab and jump over to the session view when you are looking at the volume in detail. Because here we see -4.41. Like I said, zero is high, so minus four is h as well. This track is hitting a minus four. Ableton does a really good visual representation of gain staging with green and red. Green being in the clear, you're all fine. We have yellow, which is in between red, and then red, which is distorting, and you usually do not want digital distortion. This track is not distorting. But we are getting into the yellow, which is getting close to red. I will explain more about utilities in a different lesson, but I want to just put on this volume utility to boost the volume to show you what distortion looks like. There. That is distortion, and you usually never want digital distortion. So we're obviously artificially boosting the volume here. Let's say though the track was naturally this loud. What we would do is pull down this fader to pull down the track volume. So this is the first part of gain staging. Make sure your track isn't distorting on its own. Now we dive in to the different stages within our track. We have the synth, and it has its own volume here. You could boost the volume here. That made it distorted. You could turn the volume down here. This makes it inaudible. So here is one other additional place that is also affecting the volume. Now, what is the difference between this track volume and this volume here? Well, this volume knob here happens first. And it's important to remember with gain staging that it is a path of volume to volume to volume. So the first place where the volume starts is in the synth or the sample where the volume is originating. Then we go to the audio effects that are on the synth. Here, We are not distorting, we're in the green. Now we're going into this shifter. This shifter has volume on it as well. So let's say this was distorting. Now it's distorting in this output here. You can see a little green and red bar here. You never want to see the red. And because it's red here, it's going into this plug in in the red as well. So, let's say we turn down this track volume. We are still distorting here and here, because the track volume is the volume of everything here at the end of this chain. So the correct way to do this would be to turn down the first place that is distorting. Now we can turn this up because it's super quiet. Now this is in the green. It's going here in the green, which is then going to our gate in the green. When this was in the red, Everything in the chain was being distorted, and everything was in the red. So we fixed this one level here, which made this go into the green, which made this go into the green, which made this still go into the green. So there's a series and a pathway that you have to attend to. If there's a problem, something sounds distorted or crunched The first place that check is here. Then we go into the track itself, and then we have to follow each and every single place to make sure that the volume isn't distorting. Now, some audio effects, such as compressors and EQs, have volume on them themselves. So this is called the makeup volume. So let's say we're in the green here, we're in the green here, we're in the green here. This git actually is bringing down the volume of our sound. That's what a git does. We'll get more into that later. So for now, I'm going to delete this, and we're going to listen. We're in the green, we're in green, we're in the green, and let's turn out the output volume of the compressor. There. That's distorting here. We're in the green here here, but at the compressor stage, we have distorted. That is also making us distort here on the track itself. So some audio effects have volume, and you have to be mindful of that. Finally, when everything is in the green and this track level is looking good, we then have to look to the level of the master bus. We'll do a whole lesson on the master bus. But what the master bus is, it's the sum and final place that all of these sounds together, everything goes to this master bus, this master channel. So, this is the final destination for all sounds. You can have multiple sounds in the green, and it's possible for them cumulatively to distort the master bus. So I layered a bunch of different one hit drum samples all on the downbeat. And as you look here, all of these levels are in the green. But cumulatively, because the master track is the combination of all of these individual tracks together, cumulatively, it was too much volume, and we distorted it in the master per. So just like there's a chain where you have to go through the synth volume to the audio effect volume to the track volume. The master bus, you can't just turn this down and it fixes the problem. You actually never want to touch this master fader ever. And we'll explain more about that later. The correct way to do it is if you like the ratio of volume in your track. Like, you like how loud the piano is compared to the drums, compared to all these, but it just happens to be in the red. You will select all tracks, or you can click one track and hit Command or Windows A, and then all the tracks are selected. And you bring down the Fader for everything so that you are not getting into the red on the master bus. Let's talk about audio files real quick. If you grab the same shifter and compressor and we'll copy them, you can shift click both of them, and then hit Command C or Window C, we'll go over to an audio track. We'll paste them with Commander Windows V. I'll delete these other audio tracks. And we can listen to our audio file. It works in the same way. Let's say this compressor was before this shifter, and we turned up the volume boom. Is distorting, which means it's distorting into here. That wouldn't be good, and we would have to turn this down. So this works the same way as Midi. It's a little bit easier because there isn't the synth volume also. But the trade off is that when you double click the sample, this has volume here. Some samples are distorting to begin with. There, the sample, even though it's in the green here, it's coming in at the red here. So you would want to go and hit Shift tab to switch views and click the gain number, and wherever it was, you would want to bring it down lower so that's not distorting. Visually, if the lines on the sample are sort of beyond the scope of the clip, that's distorting. And if it's just below your good. Sometimes you encounter a sample that is distorting, and it sounds good, always trust your ears. But as a general, general rule, and to keep things simple, you never want anything in the red. Gain staging can be a lot to take on, but it's really quite simple. There's a pathway of volume from the source to the next piece of the chain to the next piece of the chain, finally to the master, finally to the end. And you just want to make sure that all along that road and every link of the chain, nothing is distorting, so your music can sound good. 21. Connect Your Audio Interface: Talk about audio interfaces. Now, an audio interface is something that interfaces from your computer to a microphone or your computer to a guitar input or a keyboard input, like an actual keyboard, not a midi keyboard. And they are not necessary for music production, but they are what you want to have if you plan on doing some real life recording. This is my audio interface, a focus right scarlet. It's very affordable, and it sounds great. Let me give you a breakdown about what this is. So here we have two inputs. This is where you will plug in a microphone cord, or you'll plug in a guitar ox Cord, and you have two inputs. So you could have a mic going in here and a guitar going in here, or you could have a stereo keyboard left and right, going into both of them at the same time. You have phantom power, which we'll talk about this a little bit later on our recording stage. But if you have a microphone that needs phantom power, this is what you click. You have your gain staging here. The specific model. It around this ring lights up when sound is coming in, and when it's in the green, it lights up green. If it distorts, it lights up red. It's the same universal language that we have also in Ableton, when green is good and red is distorting. You see the same thing here. So if this is in the red, you can believe that it's distorting before it even gets to Ableton. So what you would want to do is turn this down so that this is not in the red. Now, we have our two channels. We have how you control the volume of the input of the channel. We have phantom power, which gives extra juice to a mic that might need it. This is the master volume, which controls the volume. And here we have a headphone input where we can control the volume of the headphones. Now, this audio interface goes in between a microphone and your computer, it can also go in between your computer and your speakers, if you have studio monitors or speakers that you're using to produce your music on, you might want to hook them up through an audio interface as the central middleman hub of all the different audio things you have going on. So I plug my speakers into this audio interface as well. If you have a relatively new computer and you have an audio interface plugged in, your computer audio might automatically just sync to your audio interface. So if you have your speakers plugged into the interface and you plugged in the interface to your computer, you might just hear music on your speakers that will not happen in Ableton without your intervention. In Ableton, you will need to go to live and settings. This is called system preferences in older versions of Ableton, and you go to the audio section. There are different sections here on the left. We're talking about the audio section here. Driver type, you want to leave this at core audio. Audio input device. This might be at no device or your computer's internal microphone. But what you would want to do, if you're planning on recording and you have an audio interface, you would select it here. I had a focus scarlet that I showed you. So when I go to audio input device, I want the input to be the Focusrite Scarlet. When I click here, that means it can receive audio information from the audio interface. Now, audio output, you would, if you had speakers that are plugged into your audio interface, you would want to select your audio interface here as the output. I'm going to leave it on multi output device because I am teaching a course right now, and I need the audio to go to multiple places in order for everyone, including me to hear what's happening. But in this audio output device, you would select your audio interface if you want to hear from the speakers connected to your audio interface or your headphones, which might be connected to your audio interface. Let's say you want the audio in from your interface, but you just want to hear them on your computer speakers, then you could select your computer speakers here. Really, wherever you want to hear the music from, this is the place to choose where that's going to be. Probably want this to be at 441 because that's what's best for music. Right now it's on 4,800 for me because I'm doing a screen capture of this page, and 4,800 is what's best for video. So 44 for music, 48 for video. If you're composing or writing music for a video, then you want to be in 48. This buffer size has to do with latency, and what that means is the highest sample rate is the highest quality audio. When you're listening to your track at 20:48, it's going to sound the best. This is where you're getting the most accurate representation of what you're listening to. Why wouldn't you always want it to be at 20:48? Well, because when you have a high sample rate, you have something called latency. This is when I hit a note on my midi keyboard. I don't hear that note in Ableton tell a split second later. That's very disorienting when you're performing music. You're not getting instant feedback, and you could be hitting notes on a keyboard and then hearing them after you've played them. And by that time, maybe you're hitting a different note on your keyboard. That's just really hard to deal with. In that scenario, you lower the sample rate. If you choose 128-256, this is the perfect sample rate for recording music, whether you have a microphone or a midi keyboard or a guitar or anything. If you had this low sample rate, you won't have any echo or delay in your recording. So when you're recording, you jump down to 128 or 256. When you are listening, you want it to be at 20:48. So you usually want this to be at 20:48. I have noticed when you go down all the way to 32 and you're recording audio on a mic, sometimes the recording doesn't sound so good. So I don't go lower than 128 when I'm recording. I try 256 first. If there's still some echo, I'll go down to 128. But when you're recording, you don't want to go lower than 128, and you won't have to. When you're recording midi from a MIDI keyboard, you can go as low as you want. That information always gets captured correctly. It's not necessary for you to have an audio interface. But if you really want to be producing music at a professional level, you're probably going to come across trying to make music on speakers or trying to record, and in which case, it's time to incorporate an audio interface into your toolbelt. 22. Customize with Preferences: Let's talk about some custom preferences available in Ableton. So we'll go up to live and hit settings. Now we're going to look at look and feel. Here, you want to go down to theme. Now, theme, you have several different options, but it is my suggestion that you go to dark mode, like there's no tomorrow because this makes Ableton look the best. Of course, this is just in my opinion, but this is where you change the skin of what Ableton looks like. Next, we'll jump into the record warp and launch tab. Here you have the file type that Ableton deals with. I like wave files. You go to the bit depth, and you can have 24, 32, and you go down to this Warp slash fades. I like this loop slash warp short samples to be warped one shot. Now, what does this mean? Unwarped would mean when you pull a sample into Ableton, it'll come however the sample was originally made. If you have warped one shot, it will warp the sample to the tempo that your currently at, which is very convenient because let's say someone recorded a slow guitar part, but you're making, like, a fast house song. If you had unwarped one shot, you would have to go in and manually line up the audio to make it in sync with your track. Warped one shot will probably make the guitar in line with your track or at least pretty close. One shot versus warped loop. A loop will automatically loop that audio track. So I like one shot because I want to decide what I want to have looped. I don't want any decisions made for me. Next, you could go to Auto, which will shift between different modes, depending on what Ableton thinks you're trying to achieve. Auto Warp Long samples. This is convenient to just leave on usually, but for me and my workflow, I have it off because I work with a lot of stems, but we'll talk about stems later. So for you, I actually do suggest that you have this auto warp long samples on. Default warp mode. We'll dive into the different warp modes and a different lesson. But for the purposes of this right here, you should leave it on complex. Create fades on clip edges. This is just nice to have on because sometimes samples have rough edges, and you can hear little blips and things when the sample comes in and out, and I like having some fades to just make everything sound smooth. There's a lot more in the system preferences, but we'll cover everything that you need to know, when you need to know it. 23. Ableton 12: UI Upgrade: Most obvious upgrade in Ableton 12 is an upgrade to the UI to the user interface. Everything looks a little more streamlined, sleeker and just a little bit more modern. So let's dive into the UI enhancements. So we see the familiar Ableton interface here. Obviously, there's some upgrades to the filters and tags, which we'll talk about, and some new functions up top, some new functions on the bottom. You can slide this over and read the release notes for Ableton Live, which goes through all the new features here. So the preferences menu has been updated aesthetically, which is now called settings, and we have the same exact functionality as we used to before, but it just looks a little bit more modernized here. And if you go to themes and colors, you can click through between some new aesthetic themes to change the look of A. Other than that, the rest of these functions remain the same as before. I I open this session here, we'll notice in the arrangement view that some settings such as the track delay have moved, and they have moved to the menu. If you go to view arrangement track controls, this is how you turn on and off the return tracks, making those disappear. Making them reappear, our Is outs volume and track option. There we go. So if you want to have the maximum controls visible, make sure that everything here is click. If you want more space on your Daw for your arrangement itself, you can click any of these off. In general, if there was a function or something that used to be in Ableton 11 that I'm not thinking of that you liked to use, most likely it moved up here into this menu, and most likely it moved right here under the view tab. The mixer controls have a similar function of being able to click on and off different meters. You can search for any function here in the help bar, and it'll tell you exactly where to find it in the menu. If you're looking for tuning, we have all the places that tuning is mentioned in the menu. So just some modernizing, the scroll bar looks more modern. Lots of little enhancements that don't affect the workflow, but are just kind of nice and make it seem like a new version of Ableton. So on the next lessons, we're going to be covering the other upgrades in Ableton 12. 24. Ableton 12: Keyboard Navigation: Ableton has updated the keyboard navigation system. This makes using the menu a lot faster. So once you click into the menu, you can hit Tab to scroll through the different menu options here. You can then use the arrow keys to scroll down, left, right, or back. You can also hit Shift Tab to move the tab backwards. I believe Ableton did this because they did move some functions around from the previous version. Now, you might be using this view option here in the menu more often. For example, I do find myself clicking on and off these arrangement track controls. So with this new workflow of being able to hit tab, shift tab, and use these arrow keys, it really makes using these a breeze. I think that these improvements really do enhance Ableton. At first, I was shocked when they moved some of the things around that I used to use, but knowing that I can find them easily in the menu and being able to tab and scroll through them really hasn't hindered my workflow at all. 25. Recording Techniques: This lesson is all about recording. So let's die right into recording. We'll talk about recording setup, system preferences, buffer size, Ableton's workflow, including doing multiple takes and talk a little bit about headphones. So we have our audio interface. We have two inputs here for a mic or a quarter inch cord. We have 48 volt or phantom power here, if we need, and then the speaker volume and the headphone volume. So here I have my microphone. I will then plug in an ExcelR cord, which is a three pronged cord that plugs into microphones. So the Excel R goes into the mic. The other end of the ExcelR then goes into the audio interface. We then plug in the audio interface into my computer. And I tend to have this live over here where it's more discrete. But for this lesson, I'm just going to have it be more visual so we can explain what we're doing. Next, I'm going to plug my headphones into my audio interface. Oh, now that I have my mic plugged into my audio interface, which is plugged into my computer, and I have my headphones on, we need to make sure that the routing is correct in Ableton. So this routing we need to do in the real world and routing we need to do in Ableton itself. So we're going to go over to live, go to the settings, and make sure that here in our audio settings, everything is as it should be. So the first thing is the input needs to be your audio interface, because if your mic is plugged into the interface and your input is from your computer or something else, you're not going to be getting the sound from your mic. So the input here has to be from your audio interface. If you're listening to headphones that are coming from your audio interface, you want your output to be the audio interface as well. For me, because I'm screen capturing my computer to teach this course, I have this multi output device, but for you, you would select your audio interface as the output as well. Again, you would want this to be 441, if you're doing just music. I have it at 48 because for a screen cap, 48 is better for video. Now we get into sample size. So 2048 is the highest quality sound, but the most latency possible. Meaning if I were to speak into this mic, there would be an echo. And so that is very disorienting for musicians. So what we do here is when we're recording, we jump down to 256 or 128, and when we're listening, we jump back up to 2048. So since we're going to record, let's jump down to 256. Now that this routing looks correct, we have our phantom power on because this mic needs phantom power. And when I tap the mic, we see that it lights up, meaning that we're getting signal. Now we jump over here. So you can notice that this number one has a green level next to it. That's good. That's a sign that on channel one, we are picking up some volume. Channel two has no volume, and that makes sense because nothing is plugged into the second input in our audio interface. You don't want to record on one s two because it'll put the sound in just one ear. So you want to make sure you're on whichever channel you have your microphone plugged into. So if you had something plugged into two, you would want to select two. If you have something plugged into one, you want to select one. If you have two different microphones plugged in, you need to know which one you want to record two. Because if you are on the wrong channel, you're going to record the wrong signal. So you need to make sure If you have a microphone plugged into number one and you want to record that microphone, you need to have number one selected here. When next, we're going to switch from off to in. You can also record in auto, but I like to record on in. That changes a little bit what our track looks like. So here it's yellow, here we have this blue color. So that lets us know that this track is on in monitoring. Next, we can turn on the record enable and hit the master record button to start recording. We're recording. Oh, yeah. And there is our masterpiece. Notice how I forgot to hit the square twice. So we recorded in this random section over here. Let's do that. Now, I want to record from the very start. We're recording, yeah. That was the best vocal performance of my life. I'm about to get a record deal because of that. It was amazing. And since we're on in, you can see that this looks kind of ghostly. It's kind of grade out. So what you would want to do is turn it back off, and now we can listen back to what we did. We're recording. So, there it is. There is our recording. Let's say maybe you wanted to do multiple takes. So What we would do here is, let me pull up a quick little beat two Sing two. Let's say we want to record multiple takes. We'll keep this in loop and we'll hit record. I don't really know what I want to saying. I didn't think I'd be singing today. No. I don't really know what I want to say 'Cause I didn't think that I'd be singina M I don't really know what I want to say a I didn't think I'd be singing today So here we have different takes that I just recorded. So what we're going to do here now is you always want to get in the habit of turning off this record enable whenever you're done recording, because accidents can happen when you leave things on record enable and you forget and you hit the master record button for a different track, and you accidentally erase what's on here. Any audio track is at risk of being completely erased if you leave the record enable button. So be sure to turn this off. I'm also going to switch this back onto O. I'm also going to switch this back to the off mode. Now, I'm going to click the track that we just recorded onto. Can Command T or Windows T to create new audio tracks. And now I'm going to make sure that the clip that's in there starts nicely at the very beginning. And we are going to copy this and paste it by clicking this line right here at the end of the loop. This means that when we drag to the left, this will be perfectly in time. We're going to do that again. Grab this, paste it right here to the right of the loop, and then drag, and this will be perfectly in time. Now we command E or windows E to cut the excess, delete it, and we have our three takes that we can choose from. I don't really know what I say. I don't really know what I want to say. I don't really know what I want to say. So there we have our takes nice and layered perfectly in time that we can choose how we want to proceed with. So let's talk a little bit about mice positioning. The closer you are to your microphone, the more base is going to be in your voice. The further away, the less base is gonna be. And so it's this dance of finding the perfect rags for the style that you're going for. I tend to like to record right up on the mice. And then in Ableton, I will take down some of the base in my voice. Some people like to use a pop filter, which will attach to the microphone and be an actual filter in front of the mic in between the voice, which helps cut down like the wind sounds, the P sounds, because sometimes you can get an explosive sound recording into your mic that's not desirable. So if that's the case, you can use a pop filter to help mitigate that problem. Obviously, some mites have a mic stand, and you would just have the mic in the stand. You would then plug in your Excel R cord into the mic and then have the mic go to your audio interface, and it works in the exact same way. I like to hold the microphone, but that's completely subjective. So you can totally use a mic stand instead if you want to attach a pop filter that works. All the same things apply. The general rule for singing into a mic is you want it to be about this far away from your voice. So you have your mouth here, you have the microphone here. That's a good healthy distance because some microphones don't sound good when you're too close. This microphone, in particular, does tend to sound good when you're really close. But most microphones, you do want a little bit of space. So, this is a general rule of thumb as a starting place that you can start with. And then from there, you can start experimenting and seeing, Ooh, you like further away, you like closer up. If you are more that Phoebe Bridgers, Lizzie Mc Aalpine, Billy Irish, kind of whispery vocal, you're probably going to be closer to the mic. And if you're more of like a yelling rock type person, then you might be a little further from the mic. But it's really up to you, and as you keep recording, you will refine what works best for you. Obviously, mics work for more than just voices. There's also instruments as well. So if you have a guitar, you would want to probably aim the mic somewhere around this general area. You kind of want to hit the sound hole, sort of, but sort of a little bit on the fret board too. Something like that will probably be good. And a similar distance from the voice is a good place to start. Of course, you always want to use your ears and be like, Well, does it sound good or not? And sometimes you can't tell what it is you're hearing, but you know it just doesn't quite sound right. Listen to that intuition, move the mic around. Experiment with getting a good recording sound. You know, find those good distances. And You only have to do it once, as soon as you decide, Okay, this is how far I like to record my guitar. This is about the position I like. You might like to record more of the fret board up here. You might like to record more of the sound hole over here. As soon as you discover how to place and how to record your instrument, your voice, et cetera. Then you don't really need to reinvent the wheel every time. You can just be like, Okay, I know that this sounds pretty good and for, like, I'm making a similar kind of music, then that's where I like to start. All the same things apply if you're recording guitar, you want your headphones on. You want to record takes in a similar way. And it's just the same as recording a voice, except you're recording a guitar or a saxophone or whatever instrument you happen to be working with. Maybe you have an electric guitar or an electric keyboard or an electric bass that needs to be plugged in with A ox cord. Well, that works in the exact same way as well. You plug in your ox cord into your instrument. Then you plug in the ox cord into your interface. You do not need phantom power for an ox cord or a quarter inch cord, whatever you want to call it. And here now, you can record in the exact same way. And there you go. It's just really that easy. As soon as you plugged in, you're in the right channel, you can go to in monitoring, record. And now when you play something on your guitar. You can tell that was even a little hot, which would mean we would turn down the input on our audio interface. There we go. So that's in the green. If you record it in the red, it's always going to be in the red. So if it's ever too hot, you would turn down the input volume here. So from this was all the way, turn it down a little bit, and then you're good. Let's say you had your vocal microphone plugged into the first port, and your guitar plugged into the second port, you would need to select number two here to record the guitar. You could even record both of them at the same time, but you would need two tracks, one of them on number one, and one of them on number two. And if you did that, it would record both at the same time. In order to do that, you're going to need to shift click both record enables. So this track would be on number two, and this track would be on number one, and then you make sure they're both record enabled, and you will be able to record both mics at the same time. I do tend to record one instrument or a voice at a time. That's totally subjective, and some audio interfaces have 16 ports so you could record a whole band at once. It's really up to you. There's no wrong answer. The only thing you have to remember is that whatever you're trying to record on a given track, make sure that that number is correctly selected here. Otherwise, you won't record what you're trying to record. There is a whole art to recording with using different microphones, using different placements. And the world of recording is endless. I just wanted to show you how to do the basics, so you can start recording your voice, recording your instruments, recording your guitars, et cetera because it's so exciting to add that live element to music production. And I always encourage recording something, even if you don't think you're innately a musician, get a mic and record different sounds in your room. Try to add some original textures to your music. 26. How to Save: Let's talk about saving. The most important part about working on music. So let's say you have a masterpiece. And I know this doesn't look like a masterpiece, but just humor me. Let's say this is the best thing you've ever ever heard, and you want to save it. It's important to know that Ableton does not autosave. If the session crashes, it will prompt you to reopen the session with your last work. In which case, you would want to say yes if you haven't saved. And then you can pull up the session, and it will have what you did. So in that respect, it auto saves, but it doesn't auto save like a lot of other programs do. You need to save manually. And how you do that is command S or Windows S, and you really want to live on that command S, and you want to do that all the time throughout your producing so that you're always saving what you're doing. You can also go down to file. You can do Save. It doesn't let me do that because I just saved. You can save as, which will keep the current session as it is, and it'll create a new session from this basically duplicating the session from whatever point you're choosing to do is save as, save a copy, and collect all and save. Collect A and save is important because let's say you have different samples and different instruments and different sounds in your session. And let's say maybe you use some third party samples, like in the student resources folder that I gave you. And God forbid, you're a little unorganized, and maybe you're not sure where that folder really lived. You do collect A and save, it will pull all of the spiles that you're using from everywhere in your computer and save them in one place. This is really handy, and you want to get in the habit of doing this in your big projects, just because if you accidentally download a sample, it lives in your downloads, and you're using it in a song, and then you move that sample out of your downloads, and then suddenly Ableton can't find that sample anymore. You don't want to have to go through the headache of re linking, so you just want to collect all and save when you have different parts in different places. So if you wanted to do a Save as, command Shift S or Apple Shift S. It pulls up this menu. You will find a destination to save, and you will click the name. I have an external hard drive, and I have a songs folder, and this is where I keep all of my song files. So if I were to do a Save As, I would do Save as, and I would maybe call this two, and then I want to hit Save. And then this would populate here in here in my Songs folder. But let's say I wanted to create a Save As, but I wanted this session to live within the same session as the original, then you can click here. And now when I do two, I'm going to hit Save. We're going to go to Finder here. Now when I go to Finder and I click on the session, we can see that it has now both sessions in here. This also has the backup, which is if it crashes, where it would load from, it has the project info. And if I had any samples, you would see them here. Let me show you in a busier session like this song here. So, this was a bigger, more fleshed out song that I made, and you can see there's a samples folder. It has processed and recorded samples. I did a lot of recording for this, as you can tell, and all of those bits of recording, every vocal take, every guitar take, every bass take. All of that gets stored in this folder here. And then the processed audio folder has any audio I consolidated, which will go into, any audio that I've frozen, which will also go into, and any audio that I've reversed. All of these three concepts here will dive into in a later lesson. It's important to understand how Ableton thinks, and there is a current project tab here. What that means is if you're in a session, and you have other versions of your songs, other sessions saved there as well, you can access that information quickly in the current project tab. Let me show you this more in depth in a bigger session that I have. Here I've loaded a song that I was working on for a long time. It has a lot going on. And when you click this current project, now this populates with really a lot of different things here. I created some of these folders myself. Ableton creates the samples folder on its own. But what you can do is you can open these folders within this view and you can quickly access the different sounds that are in the folders. You can go into the samples folder, you can go into recorded and grab a different take. You can go into the Mx stems folder that I made and grab the base export. Or you can go into the different save files here, and you can see the actual tracks in that session, and I could take the bass mide from that section or a vocal or a recording or any of the tracks in that original session. I suggest having a unique folder where all of your songs live, and within that folder, I would keep different versions of the same song, different as stations in the same place so that all of the samples, all the recordings, all of everything, collect all and save, all the information for everything to do with this song, Parkside Paradise, lives inside the Parkside Paradise project. Also, I wouldn't want to save its over, OPs, open the coal gates, off the wheel. I wouldn't want to save all of those different projects in my Parkside Paradise project because My samples folder would be flooded with absolutely everything. So I would suggest having a unique project for every song and then save every save as within that project. It's super important to remember to save all the time. And when you feel like you've made it to a significant stage in your song and maybe you want to audition a new idea, you could do a Save as. You could have your pop song and wonder, do I want to go more in a dance direction? Do I want it to get more Vb in the end? You can do a save as alternate version, try putting a build and a drop in there and see if that works, and if it doesn't, you still have your original untouched version. Or maybe you finished your song and you're ready to go into mixing. In that case, you could do a save as and create a mix session. But we're going to cover all of that in the lessons to come. 27. Organization Tips: Go over some organizational tips. Now, obviously, you can organize your computer however you want to. But I would suggest having a samples folder for all your samples. And later in this course, we'll go through where you can source some samples outside of Ableton that are really high quality and sound great. When you get to that level, I suggest having a samples folder where you collect all of your third party samples. You can have this on an external hard drive if you want in order to free up the space on your computer, so your computer doesn't get bogged down with 1 billion song files and 1 billion sample files. I also have, like I said before, a songs folder. And in the songs folder, I have a individual project for each song. And every iteration of every song lives within the project file. So it's easy to find. I have version five, version four, version two, version three. The more wild and free your creative process might be, your sessions might end up looking something like this, and that's okay because it's all neatly organized in the same project file, and it's separated from all the other projects. So you can really organize things however you want, but it's helpful to know where things are, and it's not bad to have them on an external hard drive so that your computer doesn't get bogged down with all of this information. 28. Living on the Grid: Welcome to this chapter. In this Ableton Advanced chapter, we're going to be diving into Ableton's more advanced features. Again, if you are already familiar with how the technical aspect of Ableton works, I urge you to skip ahead to the history and resources chapter so we can dive into why music production is the way it is and how to make music itself. But for those of you that want to know the functionality of Ableton and some of the more advanced tricks that you can do, this is the chapter for you, and let's jump right into it. So we're going to be talking about the grid. And we talked about the piano roll before having a grid. Also this whole timeline view. This is all a grid. And what I mean by that is every single bar line, every single line here you sing is a point on what's called the grid. Now, I have it on the adaptive grid. So when I zoom in and remember, you can do that with the plus and minus key or when you've scrolled to this exact place here, not here or there, but here, you can have the magnifying glass and click and drag. The grid is changing its values to adapt to how I'm looking at it versus if you right click and go to quarter notes, these are quarter notes, no matter if you're super zoomed in or super zoomed out. Depending on what you're trying to do, you might be changing the grid, but I like to leave it at narrow. So let's talk about when you want to change the grid, how to use the grid. Here we're in 44, which I suggest you leave your session at, and I want to create a mid clip. So I'm going to select this four bar range. Here we have 1-2, two to three, three to four, and four to five is 4 bars. Now we can do windows or command shift M to create a mid clip. And we've created a mint clip that is 4 bars long. Now we can scroll. We can drag this to be 8 bars long, 16, 24 bars long. And this is all living on the grid. Another example is you can have a drum loop or a drum sample. And you can just pull that onto an empty place. It'll create an audio file, or you can pull it onto an existing audio file. And your drum hit is on the grid. And this might be the best way to understand it. I'm going to go ahead and select this space from the first bar to the second bar, which is a 1 bar space. Gonna hit commander Windows L for loop, and now I've created a loop. So let's say I want to put this hit on every quarter note in this loop. I can go over to quarter notes here, right click and select quarter notes. Now, I can click on this bar line because this is a little bit longer than a quarter note, and I can hit Command or Windows E, which will cut. Now I've made a cut right at the quarter note mark, and I can delete all the excess. Now, I click on my perfectly cut quarter note, and I can hit Commander Windows D, Commander Windows D, Commander Windows D, which is duplicating that hit four times, and now this will hit on every quarter note. If you turn on the Metronome, That's the grid. It's perfectly on the metronome. It's perfectly on the grid. Now, live music doesn't tend to be perfectly on the grid. So you can actually turn the grid off by hitting command or Windows four. This turns the grid off, and then if you click a clip and you drag it around, it's not gonna snap neatly to a grid, it's gonna go wherever you want. So now we can have this hit slightly before and this hit slightly after, and then we'll drag this forward because the end of this clip cut the beginning of this clip off, and we'll leave this one the same. And now we'll listen to this. It's not perfectly on the grid. We'll turn on the metronome. This now has a push and poll. It has a little bit more of a live feel to it. And although the grid is super helpful, and we want things to mostly exist nicely and organize on the grid. We love a little bit of chaos, a little bit of pushing poll, and a little bit of live feel. So sometimes it's great to turn the grid off and drag things around so that you have that dynamic feeling. Now, you can create eighth notes on the grid, and you can have more different parts. Let's drag this in. And let's drag another drum hit in. Here I'm going to drag in a high hat. We switched the grid to eighth notes. We're going to have a high hat hitting on every eighth note. And what I did there was I copied this one with Commander Windows C. I click on the next line, which is the next eighth note. And I hit Commander Windows V. It works the same to duplicate or Command C and Command V works the same. I have copy and pasted this hit. Now, this is hitting exactly on the grid for every eighth note. So, this is what perfectly on the grid sounds like. We can again, turn the grid off and move the hits a little bit around. Maybe you want the off grid hits to line up with each other. This one was sort, and the rest were kind of okay and listen to what this sounds like. This really has a skip feeling here. This might be a little bit too dramatic, but it shows you on the grid as that very robotic perfect feeling. Of the grid has more of a live feel. And for your music, you want to probably have a combination of the two. If it's electronic music, you want to make it lean a little bit more live. If it's live music, you maybe want to clean it up a little bit, so it's a little bit more on the grid, and you probably just want to have a hay symbiosis between the two. So the grid exists here. You can switch it by right clicking to narrow, and you're here, and you copy and paste. You're creating this clip on every single line here, which is way more frequent than every eighth note. This looks like even smaller than 32nd notes. Nope, it's actually perfectly 32nd notes. So if I were to stay on this narrow adaptive grid and zoom out, suddenly, if I were to if I were to copy and paste on every line, these are more spread out because of the way that the adaptive grid changes. If I zoom out even further and paste it on every hit here, and then I zoom in, I can see when I was very zoomed in, it created all these lines. When I was more zoomed out, it created those lines. When I was very zoomed out, it created these lines. So the adaptive grid is good when you're moving around and you know what you're going for. If you are not sure what to do. Sometimes it's safer to live in the classic fourth or eight note bar. So the grid lives here, you can turn the grid off by hitting command or Windows four. The grid also lives inside the piano role. So I'm going to select this space between the first and second bar. Hit Shift Command or Windows M to create a mid clip, and we've created our piano role. And if you remember, when you scroll right here, not here, not here, but here, you can click and drag and make the piano roll bigger. Now, the piano role has the same numbers one, two, one, two, one, three, one, three, 1414, and these are those exact same places. So if you create a hit on 12 here, it's creating it on 12 here. This is exactly the same grid. It's just the grid living inside of the MD clip. So you can create different notes here. You can have them every quarter note by right clicking and going to the fixed grid, and you want quarter notes. This is creating a quarter note hit. You can go to 16th notes, and you can have and you can turn your pen tool on with Commander Windows B, and you can drag. And when you do drag, it'll just create a note for every value on the grid. And since we're on 16th notes, we just created a bunch of 16th notes. Now, we have a bunch of 16th notes, and you can change this to eighth notes, you can change this to quarter notes, you can live in the adaptive grid just like before, and you zoom in and you zoom out. And no matter what you do, 12 is always going to be 12 right here. It's always the second quarter note, second beat of the bar. And you can trust that. Even if you see a lot of subdividing lines or very few subdividing lines, this beat right here will always be this beat right here. So that's the grid. You can go off the grid within the piano roll, moving these around so that they're not totally on the grid. You can tell sometimes if I scoot this note back into that one, it's deleting it because it's scooting over the start of the next note. If that's not your intention, you can command or window Z, and you can scroll to the end of your note, and you can bring in the length that way. When you scoot it back, it's not erasing the note that was behind it. So that's really the grid. The grid is the perfectly metronomed, cookie cutter, perfect rhythm, where eighth notes are hitting exactly where eighth notes hit, and 16th notes hit exactly where 16th notes hit. It's important that you know what you're going for with your music because things being very on the grid has a very specific feeling. A lot of trap high hats are very on the grid and robotic feeling on purpose. If you want something to have a looser feel, you want stuff to probably be less on the grid. So if you play something in, you probably won't play it in perfectly on the grid. And then you can maybe leave it or tweak it subtly, or maybe you program your drums and then turn the grid off and move them off the grid to taste whatever you approach, know the emotional value of what you're going for. And now that you understand the grid, you can use it to your advantage. 29. Ableton 12: Scale Awareness: Alton introduced something called Scale Awareness, where each session can now be aware of the scale that's being used in the song. If you look up top here, you'll notice that you can turn on and off this scale awareness button. Here, you can choose the scale of your song. For example, this song is in a minor. Now, this alone is good for a reminder in case you need to remember what key your song is notice that this icon appears in other places in Ableton, and once this is globally turned on, it activates this functionality for a lot of Ableton's tools, and that's where this gets really interesting. So let's go ahead and look at our sound here. When this is turned on, it will also be activated here in the Mi clip. You can turn it off, which globally or on, which then allows us some enhanced functionality within the MDI editor. You can also change the key here in this menu if you need to. Let's go ahead and highlight the scale. Now, all of the notes that are in the scale are highlighted purple. In case you don't know what notes to pick that are going to sound harmonious with your song so far, now you know you can use any of these purple notes and they will all be with scale. You can also click this scale button which will get rid of all notes that are not in the scale. As you can see here, it did keep this F sharp, which is not in the key of A minor because this is a note I already was using with the Cord. So this chord goes a little bit out of key, which you know me. I do tend to like that kind of thing. But if you don't, you can click this fit to scale button, and suddenly it moved the F sharp to an F, and now every single note is in the key of A minor. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with the scale awareness feature. In the lessons to come, we're going to dive deeper into how you can enhance your music using the scale awareness. 30. MIDI Programming: Let's talk about Midi programming. So for this lesson, we're going to create a new Midi track. Command Shift T. We are going to go and shrink this view by pulling that down. We're going to go into the Instrument folder, and we're going to go to the Instrument rack. And I'm just going to grab piano and keys. And let's go for this piano straight. Now, we can select this clip here. And we are going to hit Insert Midi clip. And now I'm going to arm this clip. And we're going to program some midi notes in here. So, the grid is largely a rhythmic thing. The piano rule adds the harmonic dimension. So now you have music, which is living between both worlds. So we have this piano that lives on the grid, and let's say we want to do some eighth notes, and we have eighth notes going here. That's cool. That's a rhythm. But now let's say we want to add some harmony, some depth to this. So we can click above here, and we could even select and hit command D to duplicate and delete the excess, and now we have harmony. And let's say we want even more harmony. You can copy and you can paste and hit shift arrow, which will jump the information up an octave. And since I hit copy and paste, it duplicated it, and then I shifted it up an octave so that I can now bring it down to the note that I want. Here, we have our chords, and the chords are playing. Now we can select all the information that we made. And I'm going to drag this cursor to the end of one of the clips, and with everything selected, when I drag them in, it's making them all shorter, which will have a staccato effect. So when you're programming, maybe you know exactly what you want, and you're like, Okay, I know music, and I want this chord to go like this, and I want that chord to go like this, and these are the notes that I want. And And you know exactly what you're going for, and you're programming a masterpiece, like a classical composer would be writing music on the page. Or maybe you don't know music. You can hit the scale button here, and we can go, let's say to A, minor. And it will highlight in orange, all of the notes that are in the key. That way, let's say now we'll go to the grid and we'll make it 16th notes. We'll turn on our pen tool. And you can just kind of click around in all of the orange notes. And all of these notes will at least be in key. So now suddenly, you can compose in key, even if you don't know all of the notes in the scale by heart. So let's make this grid a little bit bigger, and we'll go to quarter notes here, and we'll make some chords. You're like, Okay, that's in the key, that's in the key, that's in the key. And then this is in the key. And then this is in the key. Creating content that's going to sound good and sound harmonious to itself because you know that it's on the same scale. You can select a variety of different scales. And we're going to go into scales later in this course. You can do a variety of different keys, all of them. Or you can turn the scale function off and just go free flow because you see all the notes here, and maybe you just don't need that because you already know which notes that you want. Remember, right click to change the grid. I like narrow because you can zoom in and out and it'll change the amount of values, and I know that 12 is this 12, right here. It's always the second beat of the bar. And so I always know where I am. The world of programming notes is actually a ton of fun, whether you are a musician or not, because you can turn on the scale function and you can see the different notes available, or maybe you are a musician, and you want to look at music a little bit differently. Sometimes it's nice to program things because when you see it laid out visually like that, it might spark some different ideas. 31. Create Drama with Velocity & Chance: This lesson is about velocity and chance. So, what is velocity and chance? Vlocity is how hard you're hitting the note. So let's go back to our piano right here. We'll turn on eighth notes. I'm What I just did there was I clicked in an open space. I hit Commander Windows A, which selects everything. And then I hit Delete, which well, deletes everything. Now, you can right click, it eighth notes, and then you can turn on your pen tool. Commander Windows B. And let's just draw a bunch of notes here. For the sake of this. Let's just have them be all the same note. P, we had a rogue note down here. I'm going to delete that. These are all at Max velocity here. You can see the velocity menu is at the bottom, and we can even drag this up so we can see it a little more clearly. Actually, they're not max velocity, they could be a little bit louder. So let's select them all and move them all up. Now, down. A lot of sounds react dynamically, where if the velocity is very quiet, it's going to sound different. This is the same as playing a piano key with all of your force, slamming your hand down on the piano key, or just playing it very quietly. The piano actually has a different sound. So do these sins. So maybe you're doing it from a sound design perspective, and you're like, I like this sound better. Or maybe you just want to add some variation. And this we hear a lot more with drums, and I'll show you that in a second, just so that you can see what we're doing here, we'll turn every other one up in volume. This is the same note, but we're changing the dynamics of it, which is making it way more interesting. It almost sounds like the notes are changing, but they're not. It's just the quality of the velocity that they're being played. Chance is the chance that the note that is played will actually play. So usually, you want this at 100. But let's say you have a drumbeat and maybe you want to get it a little bit of a random feel. You can turn the chance down, so it might miss, for example, some of the high hats. Let's turn this chance for everything all the way to zero, and none of them will play. Turn the chance halfway. It cuts out sometime. So you probably don't want that for a harmony part. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But for drums, it gets a little interesting. So let's dive into drums now. If you go to impulse, you can go to vintage, funky Good time, pull that in, and select some space here, create an empty Mt clip. Pull this section up. And you'll have a drum kit that's already loaded with all of these different hits. Let's turn on solo and arm the track, and listen. These are all available. So, let's go ahead and draw in a kick pattern here. Draw in some snares. Turn this on so we can hear what we're doing. That's not the right drum. So you can click this key, which selects everything in the whole row. That's the more of the one. So, let's listen to what we've made. That's cool, but maybe this high hat's a little overbearing, so we can click this key which selects all of them and bring down the velocity of the high hat. Maybe a little higher than that. And maybe that's a little closer to what we want it. You could bring down the chance of the high hats just a little. And it'll skip some, which maybe you want, or maybe you don't. But this is just to show you the power of velocity. Let's say the kick drums, you want to select all of them, and you want to move them up. This high at chance thing is actually really throwing me off. So let's just bring that back to 100. You can select all the snares. Maybe those should be louder. Oh, obviously, the chance wasn't 100%. We could hear that 97, and we heard it miss one. So maybe you do want it at 100, maybe you want it a little bit lower. It really depends on what you're going for. But velocity changes how hard something's being hit. So here the kick drum is being slammed. Here will be very, very quiet. We couldn't even hear it there. So these are subjective choices, depending on the sound design you're going for or the feeling that you're going for. It's important that you understand velocity and the different times where you can use it and how you can use it to really convey the story of your song. 32. Ableton 12: MIDI Velocity and Chance: Velocity in C chance for MIDI notes has also gotten an upgrade in Ableton 12. So let's go explore these enhancements. So if you look at the bottom here, we can click on and off the velocity and the chance. So if we start with Chance, you can obviously click on this high hat, for example, and affect the chance that it's going to play, which if it didn't play, would give a little bit of a live feel to say a high hat pattern. You can randomize select the percentage here. But what's interesting is that you can now select all of them and hit play all and affect the chance of this entire group of notes together. You can also ungroup, and, for example, maybe just group the ends together. Now, the end of every bar, which is maybe where I want a little bit of a fill, are controlled by this one global chance knob so that they all have the same chance that they will be played, which just adds more of a human random element. If you click over to velocity here, we can now look at the velocities of our different hits. You can hit randomized, which will give random velocities. You can affect the percentage here. But what's interesting is now we have this ramp. You could say ramp up the velocity of this part over time. So it's going to start coming in really quiet and then be louder. This is really useful for a build section. So on the left here affects the beginning of the pattern, and the right knob affects the end, in case you wanted the opposite effect. You can also choose the deviation, which is, does it strictly follow this line, or does it jump around a little bit? And that's really cool because it gives a lot of life to this otherwise kind of robotic eh pattern. I really love the ramp feature in velocity, and I use this all the time now, especially in my build sections. 33. Playing MIDI Notes: Let's talk about playing midi notes. Maybe you have a midi keyboard, or maybe you don't. That's totally okay. If you do have a midi keyboard plugging it into your computer, Ableton should probably just recognize it, and it does most of the time. If you have some trouble connecting and troubleshooting your midi keyboard or B pad, we will cover that in a different lesson. But for now, most keyboards, when you plug them into Ableton, it just works, and the technology is really, really great that way. Remember, you can also toggle on this keyboard icon in Ableton, which turns your computer keys. Into a keyboard. I do have a midi keyboard. I plugged it in, and it's just worked. So I'm going to show you how to play minty notes by playing my Mitty keyboard. Here, let's make a four bar loop. Remember, just kissing the fifth bar is a four bar loop because 1-2, two to three, three, four, 45, four. There we go. And we can see visually boom four categories, and the different colors of gray indicate the different bars. So here we are going to record some midi notes. I have my track armed with this button here, and I'm going to hit record in Ableton. And because I have this 1 bar count in on my metronome, we're going to hear 1 bar count, and then we're going to play. And I'm going to have my metronome on for this so that I can play in time. And I stopped. Let's see here, click, Zoom out, and we have a four bar loop. I'm gonna turn off the metronome now. And remember our gain staging, I saw this distorted a little bit. Turn it down just a hair. So, now I can click here and we'll look at the notes that were created. You can see these are off the grid. Some of it's tastefully and intentional. Some of it maybe isn't. But you can easily just play in your minti parts by just clicking, record and just playing. So, now I'll pull up a different sound. And I'll drag that in this empty space. And we will use our computer keyboard just to show you how to do it, and we're going to layer the part that we just played. Notice how I turned off this record so that we're not recording this again when we don't want to. Because if this record was on and I hit this button, it would start recording over what we just did. And maybe I just wanted that one hit at the beginning. And we can turn it down. This just goes to show you another way that you could play midi notes by simply using your computer keyboard. Let's go back and investigate these notes that we made a little bit more. I'm going to go ahead and turn off that new stab that I made. And let's dive in to these notes here. And maybe we liked that it was late, but it's a little too late, so we're gonna hit command four, and we're going to scooch this note a little bit to the left. And maybe we want this to really have the last note hit exactly on the beat, Let's hear what that sounds like. And then maybe this sounds like it's coming in too soon. So we're going to select all of these notes. Or maybe we don't. Maybe let's just select these notes and move them over a little bit. So that actually sounded way worse. And in this case, it's like, Okay, I'm off the grid, and it was played that way, and it sounds good that way. Of course, you can replay it so this's more on the grid. You can tweak it a little more exactly. If you're like, Okay, that might want to hit there. This might want to hit there. So, in this case, I would probably just replay the part so that it can get a little bit closer or maybe I decide that I like how it sounds. And if I really look at what I'm doing here, I think that maybe this note actually wants to be coming in early like that. What does this sound like? I actually think this just wants to be a small note jumping into this note. There we go. So it took a little bit of trial and error to find where this chord was actually trying to hit. And it is supposed to come in early right here because that's what feels the best. Some people know exactly what they're going for already, and they can look at this and be like, no, this would be here, this would be there. Some people are a little more by ear and by feel. It doesn't matter your process. What we're talking about here is just playing middy notes and what you do with them. You can notice that there's different colors here, which are representing the different velocities. And you can look at our velocity map, and it's a little bit all over the place. Let's close the chance menu just for now. And let's say you don't want any note to really be this quiet. So you're kind of combing the bottom here and you can move this note up a little. Or let's say you want every note within the or to be the same. You can shift, click and drag down and select all these notes, and you can move them all to the very top, which will reset them to the same volume, and then you can move them all down so that they're quieter. There, we are starting to control the velocity, and maybe I played it perfectly, and maybe that's exactly the right feel. But maybe you want to tweak it a little, and you want this one to be a little quieter. This one will be a little quieter. This one to be a little quieter so that we're kind of making this arc up to this high note. And then that's gonna be really the loudest note. This also might just sound like it's poking out way too, but let's hear what it sounds like when we're trying to shape this sort of staircase into this higher note. And that sounded pretty good. This is another pivotal note in the sequence, and maybe this doesn't want to be quiet. Maybe this wants to be loud. And maybe this is sort of a staircase into that no, and this is another kind of staircase into that note. It's really up to you to decide what you're going for. But what's important here is if you want to record midi, you can create a loop of 1 bar, or you can just turn on your metronome, arm your track, and just play. And now I just improvise. I just played a section. It's not any particular length. But it did actually happen to be 8 bars. And that was not actually intentional, but the whole four bar eight bar thing really does come from what feels right. And most musicians do to feeling. So 4 bars and 8 bars are generally good amounts of time just in music in general for how long a section should be, for how long you want to set your loop for, for how long you want to record for. And that just comes out of what usually feels the best. And I just happened to play it in 8 bars, even though I wasn't intending to. So I've created here this eight bar loop. Remember, I could have also played this on my computer keyboard if I wanted to. You can click into the MDI file. You can make this menu bigger. We could tweak all these velocities, we could scoot these notes around, you could change them. You could be like, Oh, you know, I did this chord for every single note. And I'm going to click this note key on the keyboard which selects everything across the board in that note and you're like, you know, I just wanted to be like that actually instead. You can change what you did. You can do Commander Windows B, get your pen tool out, you could change the size of the grid, and you could add a different note on top of everything. And you can maybe bring that down in velocity. You can turn this off so that we don't hear it when we're programming. You can turn off the metronome, and you can just really get as creative as you want. This is what the piano role is for. It's for you coming your music. 34. Quantize to Perfection: Time in every musician's life when you got to learn about quantizing. And for you, that time is now. So what is quantizing? Quantizing means enhancing and adjusting your performance to be more on the grid or more off the grid or whatever you're looking for. So, let's switch this to 128 beats for minute. Turn on the metronome, arm our track, and we're going to record a new part. It looks like it's about to start from here, so let's double click this square, and we'll start from the very beginning. So, that's a super basic part, just to show you what Qantin is all about. I made a mistake here in the middle, and we can fix all of that. So right now, men. I'm playing pretty close to perfectly on the grid, but not quite. So what we're going to do in this open space, hit Command or Windows A to select everything, and then command shift U or Windows shift. And this brings up our quantizing menu. Now, what this does, it will snap the notes to whatever value we pick at whatever percent amount we pick, and we can do this to the beginning or ends of notes. So let's say we select everything and we want everything to be the length of a 16th note, and we had apply. Suddenly, everything moved to the closest 16th note. From the start of the note to the end of the note, everything is going to be starting and ending at a perfect 16th note somewhere. So, it sounds a little bit more robotic, and we can hear what the quality of it being perfectly quantized does. I made a mistake, and I played one of the notes too early, and it was confused, and it put it in a different position, but it actually sounded kind of cool. Let's say Command Z or Window Z. Undo that. And we'll again, click the play space, Commander Windows. A, to select everything. Command Shift to pull up the quantizer. And let's switch this to eighth notes. And then instead, we're going to move this percent down. And you do that by dragging up and dragging down. So here let's go to 80%. And actually, let's just leave it at 16th notes so you can really hear the comparison. And that sounds a lot better to me. It doesn't have that robotic feeling, but it is a lot more in time. And this little mistake I made is actually growing on me and kind of has like an old school tropical house kind of feel. It feels good, and I like this mistake. So you can quantize the beginnings of notes. You can also quantize the ends of notes. So here, let's select everything. Come. And let's only quantize the start of every note, and we're going to do it perfectly to the eighth note at 100%. Now, the starts of every note are going to start at an eighth note. That has a more organic feel to it when the ends of notes were still more live, how I played them. Let's try the opposite effect. Let's command Z, command Z, and we're going to select all, and we're going to hit command shift. And let's just quantize only the ends of all the notes and have them ending on the ears dh note. So the starts of notes will be how I played them live. You can hear how drastically different when you do not quantize the beginning of the note, it really has that live feel, but in kind of a sloppy as I played it. So you can hear the effect of changing the ends of the notes or the beginning of the note or both the ends and the beginning. And to be honest, I think it sounded best when we only did the beginning and not the end because that still had some live feel while being more in time. And to my ear, that sounded much better. So obviously, you can quantize things very subtly here in the low percents. You can quantize things completely. You can choose different note values depending on what you're going for, and you can quantize the beginning or the ends of notes. You can also quote of quantize things manually by going into the grid and you go into eighth no mode, and you could start moving the front of every note to every bar, like, so. And what I'm doing here is essentially manually quantizing. Maybe you'd want to do if you don't want to globally quantize, let's say you only want to change one note to be better or a few notes, but you want to leave most of the notes how they were normally played, then you could go and do it manually. Remember, you can always click in a blank space, do command four, turn the grid off and slide things freely versus them snapping into whatever grid you have selected. Now that you understand how to quantize, I urge you to quantize responsibly. 35. Dive Into the Groove Pool: Dive into the groove pool. Here we're gonna go to impulse. We're gonna pull up our favorite wicked chilling impulse, drums. We're going to go ahead and select a four bar loop as we do. And then we're gonna insert an empty mite clip as one does. Then we're gonna loop it. And then we're gonna make it big. We're gonna grab our Pen tool, and we're gonna go Pen tool crazy. We're gonna draw. Actually, this is kind of Pen tool, very slow. So let's go to quarter notes. Yeah, there we go And because it's a drum hit, the hit gets triggered. And the sample doesn't know the different lengths like a synth does. A synth would play this like, dep dep dep, and this is like, d d, d. Like, more staccato or more sustained, but a drum hit doesn't work that way. A drum hit, as soon as it's triggered, it's triggered. So these notes will actually sound the same because they're drums. We're gonna add our rim shots in two and four. We're building a house beat people. And we'll talk about that a little bit later in the class. Don't worry, we're gonna cover all the drums. So let's listen to this. Well, something has happened horribly horribly wrong. That's not at all what I wanted. Why I wanted a high at. So let's click here and move this up. Oh, so let's move this rim shock, 'cause that's really not working. You know, sometimes, you want to do good, and good doesn't happen. So let's replace this drum kit with this backbeat room. And I did that by just dragging that over this clip, and we're going to go click here and we'll check out our pattern. We're gonna click this note here to move this down. And I need to hear what these sound like. That's pretty good. That's fine. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. I just think that maybe we want these high hats to be eighth notes instead. So let's draw all of these. That's more like it. So here we have a pretty computery sounding drum beat. So what is the groove pool? Well, the groove pool is here, and you can click this button, and it will actually throw you into the left bar again into the groove section. Now, the groove section, these are pre programmed grooves. And what a groove is, it's a curated off the grid feel. So let's just expand this and make this look a little better. Funk late on the sixteenths. We don't have any 16th notes, but if you were to click here, It kind of gives you what it's going to sound like, and you can apply these grooves to your tracks. It doesn't have to just be drums. You can do this to synth parts, you can do this to absolutely everything. And let's just show you what this sounds like. So let's click on this groove here. And now we can see Funk late on has been selected, and now we can hear our drums. It sounds like it has a little bit more of a live feel, which is exactly what we want. And different grooves have different feelings if they're leaning in the beat or pulling at the beat. And sometimes you have to explore to see, what is it that you really want the most? And what's happening is that these grooves are actually affecting the velocity, they're affecting the timing. They're really affecting everything. So now this drum beat sounds very different. And this is maybe like way too much. So let's hit command Z. This is way too much. Let's go find a different groove. Hip hop Late eighths. Click on this one. We can drag this into here. This actually is pretty nice. The high ads are a little bit quiet. So what's nice about this is that you could apply this groove to everything else in your song. So let's say you had a synth part here. We're going to record a part. Now, our synth part, let's just drag this to the end of the bar here. We can apply the same groove, this hip hop ate eighths to our synth part. So now the drums and the synth are both groven to the same groove pool. And I just didn't really play this too well. So we might do manual quantization, b. And that sounds cool. You can honestly apply this groove to every track in your session, giving everything the same feel. And if you program everything, this will be a lot more exact, because if you play it in, you might play to the groove already, and it might have your own natural musician groove to it. But if everything is programmed, you can apply the same groove to everything to give everything a live feel, which is really great. Maybe you just want to do some groove on the drums, or maybe you just want to do some groove on the high hat. You could isolate the high hat track on its own track, find the perfect groove for the high hat, and just have that going. It's great to add some groove, some live feel to your tracks. You can also extract groove from songs that you like, and I will show you that now. So you can drag a track in. It's really cool to do this with, like, a Michael Jackson track or like a really good funk track. That is a great groove. But let's just go in here. You can double click the audio track, and this is just a complete song that I dragged straight into Ableton. And you double click here. Ableton is now working its magic, and it's going to extract this groove. The groove would then show up in your groove pool as an option that you can apply to every track in your song or some tracks in your song, whatever you want. So I highly suggest if you're programming your drums or programming any part, that you do add some groove to it. You can do this manually by pulling things on and off the grid, or you can do this with the Ableton Groove function to save you time. 36. Ableton 12: MIDI Editor: This lesson, we're going to be exploring Ableton twelve's MIDI editor. So let's dive right in. So to deconstruct this visually, we have these property tabs here on the left, and then we have pitch and time utilities, Mi transformation tools, and generative tools. So we will go through all of these different tabs in the lessons to come. This lesson will focus on properties. So we can affect the stop and start of our midi clip here. I like to keep these at nice even numbers. 111 is always where it wants to begin, and 511 would be a four bar loop. You can hit duplicate, which will just duplicate your section. There we go. Do brings us back to a four bar loop. You can choose to loop your Mdy, which, for example, if you just wanted to loop this part, you'll see that we're just looping this section, and that is reflected up here that we are only looping this one chord over and over. The signature is 44, which you probably want to leave. Let's say you wanted to have a bar of three, four. This is how you can change the timing of this clip. Here is where you can add some groove from the groove pool. We have all these different amazing grooves to choose from. Let's try this. And if you don't like it, you can click this button here. We obviously have the scale awareness that we talked about. And what's exciting is you can actually reverse midi clips now. By clicking here, now the notes have been reversed. This fit to scale button will make all the notes part of the scale that you have selected. This invert button will inverse all of the notes. Let's try that with this lead here. Let's hit invert. So, this has a dramatic effect on this lead. If we go back to our pad here, let's hit fit to scale. Let's hit the scale tab, and let's add an interval. So I'm going to add plus three, and this will add additional notes to our chord. You could do plus 12, add that interval. And because we have the scale function on, it moved everything to a note that's in key versus if we had the scale function off, you can add a fifth interval, but it's not necessarily going to be all in key. So this is a quick way to add some more notes to your chords. This two will make the length of everything twice as long. Now the chord will last double as long. This half will divide it in half. You can hit Legato, which will just join all of the notes together. This can be handy two if you just simply click one note and you want it to be the length of the whole clip, you can hit Legato, and there you go. You can also change the grid here and do set length, which will change the length of everything to whatever you have selected. Lastly, we can humanize. So here we can have a 10% humanization to the notes here if we zoom in, we can see that they're moving a little bit. Let's do 100%. That's a lot different. Now it's going to sound even more humanized. Adding a lot of imperfection, moving it down closer to 10%. We'll have a lot less variation. This is especially helpful if you're making electronic music to really make it sound less computerized and a little bit more organic. There are massive upgrades to the Mdy editor. So we're going to cover the rest of them in the lessons to come. 37. Ableton 12: MIDI Editor Part 2: Next, we're going to explore the Generative tools in Ableton Live twelve's MDE Editor. So in our MDE editor, we can click over to the final tab on the right here, which is the Generative Tools. Here, there's a drop down menu to explore different generative tools. I have here a drum rack that's soloed. Let's go ahead and delete what we have, and explore this rhythm generative tool. It essentially just generates rhythms. So here it's just coming up with some rhythms for us. We can explore with these different knobs, which changes the pattern, the steps, the density, and the step duration. Which is the note values. It's nice to generate some rhythms when maybe you don't know exactly what rhythm you're going for. This is where Ableton can give you some ideas if you're feeling some writer's block, or maybe you just want to explore and see what would some rhythms be that Ableton will generate? Next, we go to SD, which will help us generate some harmonic notes. So we can go ahead and click Generate, move some of the pitches around, the duration, the velocity, the voices, and the density. Let's go ahead and turn the scale on to make sure that these notes are going to be in scale. Of course, if scale is off, you come up with different notes, which might not be in scale, which would be cool for a specific use case, but generally, you want the scale function turned on. And if you want to regenerate, just click this button here. And this will just give you some new melodic ideas in case you don't know what melodies or chords you want to add. Here, you can change the amount of voices you want to play with. More voices is more notes layered on top of each other, less voices is less. One voice is just a single melody here. And you can just keep playing around with these different options to find something that you like. But if you play around with 16 voices, you might just come up with some really interesting chords. And what's even cooler is that this is all harmonious in key with your song. Next, let's go to shape. So for this next one, I'm just going to hit legado. It's going to make this chord the entire length. And now we're going to play with these shapes here. Hit generate. Now we have a shape going up. You could hit down, and now we have a shape roughly going down. We can change the rates here. You can change the tie, the density, the jitter, draw in your own shape, or explore any of these preset shapes. You can hit generate So this is an interesting way of approaching music visually. If you know you want your music to say bounce up like this or to bounce down or any of these other shapes here. Lastly, we have stacks, which is for building chords. So let's go ahead and say, we don't know what chord we want to build here. Here, we can play around with these shapes, and instantly it's generating notes. We can change the root note. The inversion. And that's really cool because we just had one note, and it generated an entire ort. Here, we just have one note again, move these around. And we get some really interesting harmony. And remember, you can always change the route. For example, if you know you want something built off of C, but you don't know what the court should be, There you go. And as long as you have the scale function, everything will be in key. If you turn this off, you can get some interesting out of key options, but I usually like to leave it on. The generative tools really can jumpstart your creativity, because even if you have an idea that you like that you're working with, you can just explore some of these generative tools and see what other layers you could add on or what other places can you take your existing idea. And then obviously, if you're running into writer's block or you're not sure where you want to start, the generative tools can really kickstart your creativity. 38. Ableton 12: MIDI Note Editing: Not only did the MIDI editor gain some new functionality, new tabs, and a new look, but you can actually edit midi notes themselves in some brand new ways. So let's dive right into editing Midi notes in Ableton Live 12. So what we can do now is you can hold down E and simply click anywhere and it will make an incision, cutting the notes. By doing this, the synth is retriggering at these different places. You can obviously select and move things around. And this opens up a whole new world of creativity. If you want to join some clips together, you can hit Command J, and it will form them back into solid notes. So by holding down E, you can click off the grid and make your own incisions. You can also select whole chords or notes and hit Command E, and it will cut everything neatly on the grid. This is amazing if you played some solid chords and you wanted to hear what they would sound like instead as a vamp. Obviously, this will go a long way for drum programming. For example, if you wanted to program in a high hat, you could click this high hat, make a note. Legado, which will then fill the entire space, and then hit command E, which will cut the high hat to the grid. If you wanted a slightly different grid, you could go to eighth notes and try it again. And if you were doing some interesting trap like high hats, you could switch the grid again to, let's say, some triplets and command E, just those. So, this just makes programming and moving some rhythms around just a little bit easier. Like all the other updates in Alton 12, it just makes your workload faster. You're able to audition different ideas quicker and move things around just from the Midi editor itself. 39. Audio Editing: Sculpt Your Sound: Let's talk about audio editing. So I drag some audio tracks here into Ableton. I actually drag the poolside stems that you have in the Music Production Masterclass Student Resources folder. And we're going to talk about audio editing. So audio editing is exactly as it sounds. You need to edit the audio sometimes. First of all, let's actually switch the BPM of our session to the BPM of the song, which is written right here. Now, let's go ahead and edit this drum part. Let's say on this hit here, we wanted to make a cut. So what we would do is you select the line that you want to cut and notice that everywhere that I'm clicking, it's creating this glowing line, which is indicating where a cut would happen. Now to actually make a cut, you hit Command or Windows E. That cuts the audio. Now this is separate from this. We can now move this around. We can change either one, and it won't affect the other. If you wanted to, you could click over here and also do Commander Windows E to make another cut. That way, we have isolated this one hit, and we can do whatever we want with this. We could even get rid of it. So that's the fundamental of audio editing. It just shows you you have a clip and you can make incisions on that clip, and then you can remove it in a future chapter. We'll go through different audio effects that you can do internally, such as reversing, pitching, warping. But for the actual editing, it's really straightforward. Let's do some editing here with this syn. F. Let's say you wanted to get rid of the last part here. You could highlight this region, Commander Windows E to make a cut, and then you could delete. If you wanted to say, repeat an earlier section, you could select say this four bar loop and then hit Command E, which would make a cut, and then you could click it and hit Commander Windows D to duplicate. Therefore, you are just duplicating this first four bar loop. The sky is the limit. You could cut this second loop and this fourth loop. You could move this hit earlier to do something like this. This is essentially what audio editing is. You're just cutting and moving pieces around. A lot of remixing is done this way, and you can start to see how you can get creative and almost use the editing as an instrument. So you could create a completely new part by making smaller incisions and moving things around. And suddenly, you're creating a completely new part. So you can use this tool as a composer. You could zoom way in and make lots of small, little incisions. What I'm doing here is I'm selecting the clip that I have cut, and I'm hitting zero. What zero does is it deactivates the clip. It's still here if I hit zero, it's back, but when you hit zero, it's turned off. The clip is still here visually to remind me that I made an edit, but it's not on, so we're not going to hear it. And this will sound like So you can use editing as an effect of, Oh, let's just move this drum hit around or maybe I don't want this last high hat. Or you can be a composer saying, Let's remix this sound. Let's change what we're doing. Let's make this really glitchy. Let's like move this chord around. Let's just repeat the first part of the chord a bunch, because that has a certain sound to it. And the sky is really the limit. And you're doing all of this with just the cut tool, which is pretty cool. So again, you find what you want to work on. We'll look at this guitar. Let's say maybe you like this guitar hit, and you want to select here and duplicate it and create your own rhythm. That sounds a little ridiculous, but you can really move the guitar part around however you want. Let's copy this reason and paste it here. And now we're creating a completely different part. So this is really the power of audio editing, and it's supposed to really open up the possibilities. You can drag some stems and completely remix them. You can just go to a regular sample here in Ableton and do the same thing. We'll go to the Stutter synth. Drag it in here, solo it. So we have the synth loop here, and it has different edits. You Nat by now, you know, you can select the part that you want, you can copy it, paste it, duplicate it. You can take apart from somewhere else, move it earlier. And I'm doing this completely randomly. And there is some merit to that, but you probably want to listen to your sample and have an idea of what you're going for before you just start cutting and pasting. Otherwise, you end up with something completely random, but I'm just trying to show you how you can use these techniques for any audio track, any recording that you have. 40. Warping: Bend Time & Space: This lesson is all about warping. What is warping? Well, warping is changing an audio tracks natural state and making it into the tempo of your song or into something else entirely. So let's go here and we'll go to our vocals and we'll pull them in, and we'll click on this audio track. And what you can notice, same as all of these stems that I have pulled in from the poolside Stems folder is that Warp is Great out. Warp is off. So what does that mean? Well, if we listen to it, And we turn this metronome on. We are in time. These are unwarped, but they are unwarped at 110 beats per minute. Our session is 110 beats per minute. Let's jump this up. And now let's listen to the metronome and listen to our stem. Oh. Suddenly, chaos. It's not working anymore. And everything is aligned. So what happened there is that the audio tracks were no longer warped to the tempo. And you can do that. What you can do is click here. Go to War. Click Here. Go to War. Click Here, Go to Warp, so on and so forth. And the tracks will stay in rhythm, even when you change the tempo. So if your tracks are warped, they will then bend and change with your tempo. This is great for getting creative and changing things around. But sometimes it's not so easy. Ableton is super intuitive and usually gets it right. Usually you turn on warp, it synks it to the tempo, but sometimes it doesn't. I'm going to drag a different sample in here, and this is a combination of lots of different loops. So this might be harder for Ableton to intuitively understand what we're trying to do here. So let's take this middle loop. And this is the one we want to warp to our tempo. So what we're going to do is we're going to cut. I just cut before. I'm going to cut after. Remember you select on the line you want to cut, and then you hit command or Windows E. Delete. Move this down, turn warp on. But in this case, as you can see that these hits are not lining up with these numbers, and you can trust, these are the big downbeats. There's probably going to be some drums on these downbeats. So we can assume that these hits are supposed to hit on the downbeat. And if we're not sure, we can listen. Yeah, and we can just hear that it's just not syncing up at all. So, this is a pretty big and long sample. What we can do is click here and hit crop sample. This is going to get rid of all of the information that was before and after so that we only have the part we are working with so that we don't get confused with extra information visually. Now we can scroll in, and this yellow marker is a warp point. And what you can do is you can create your own markers. So let's say we want this to be on the downbeat, and we know that this is just not really helpful. So you can get rid of that first one. Once you have created a second point, you can get rid of the first point. You always need at least one when warp mode is on. And let's move this hit over here. To the downbeat. Now, this drum hit is hitting where the drum beat is supposed to start. But even though that hits working, the rest of it doesn't seem like it's syncing up well. So there's several different ways you can go about it. You can go about it, very detailed going, Okay, well, this big beat is supposed to hit there. Maybe this big beat is supposed to hit here, and maybe this one's supposed to hit there, and then kind of do it by ear. And you may or may not get that, right? I'm going to apple Zee. And that is certainly a very time intensive method, where you're creating lots of little work points and getting something exactly how you want it. Another potential strategy is you can see that this ends here. And it probably wants to end on an even bar break. So you can move this here and see what it sounds like ending here, which would make this a nice, even two bar loop. And that sounded a lot more in Tempo. It kind of gets a little bit off here. I didn't hear it so much, but maybe you would want to move that on this big beat. And suddenly, everything else is seeming like it's lining up, and you can move that one there. Now we have warped this loop in to the right tempo. And what we did was we created the first work point, and we started that where the beat wants to start. We had it end where the beat wants to end, and then we had to tweak a couple points in the middle to really line everything up. And you always want to use your ears. You never want to do it just visually. But it is helpful sometimes, especially with a drumbeat, where you can really see that these beats are probably supposed to hit somewhere on the grid. Of course, Maybe you warped it so much that it got rid of its live feel, and that might not be your desired effect. But this in a nutshell is how you warp a loop if simply turning on warp doesn't do it for you. You can also turn on loop mode and suddenly loop this, and you can tell Hmm. That's weird. It's creating the space here, and that's because this isn't ending neatly at 2 bars. So let's just hit two here, which makes this 20, zero. And now we can see our clip is ending on the third bar. And then when it's loop, it's just looping a nice two bar loop with no spaces. There's also different warp modes. We'll get more into this a little bit later. But just as a quick overview, you click here, and you have these different options. Here's beats, tones, texture. Complex. Complex pro. Complex Pro was a little cleaner. There wasn't a huge difference in the quality of sound on these drums. We'll explore the differences of these qualities on some other samples, which have a drastic difference. But it's always worth experimenting here and just clicking on the different warp modes just to hear what they sound like in case there is a warp mode that does happen to sound better. I usually live on complex or complex P. Warping is a wonderful and powerful tool in Alton, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that in the lessons that come. 41. Warping: Bend Time & Space Part 2: Let's dive a little deeper into warping. So we explored how to warp a drum loop. Now, let's explore how to warp a one shot. So we're gonna go to our samples here. And let's take this piano sample and drag it into Ableton. Now we can listen to our piano. And it's just a one shot. So there's different things you can do with that. First and most obviously, you want it to start where you want it to start because there's not much else that this thing does. It's just a pluck. But you can use warping to really change the sound. So let's explore what that means. You can create another point, and you can drag it out a ton, and hear what that sounds like. Now we're using warping as a sound design tool, and let's see how far we can bend this thing. Now we've really changed what this sound is from a short little piano stab to a really long siren type of sound. Let's go to a different warp mode. There you can hear that this warp mode has a very different characteristic to it, and you can explore tones. You can mess with the grain size. You can explore texture, which also has its own parameters, grain size, and flux. You can go to re pitch. You can go to complex and complex pro. So you can hear the complex and complex pro, where the cleanest sound. So depending on what you're going for, maybe you want something kind of fun and glitchy, or maybe you want something just really clean. So warping can be used creatively to compose and change and remix sounds, as well as just simply place the sounds exactly where they want to be in the right tempo. 42. Advanced Audio Settings: Time for the advanced audio settings, and I'm very, very excited to share these with you. You can do a lot of audio editing within the clip. So let's explore a little bit what I mean. Let's go to this drum loop. You can hit this button here to change the time. So these two buttons will make the loop happen twice as fast or twice as slow. There we sped it up. That's so fast, it sounds ridiculous. Slow it down to where originally was. Slow it down again. That's maybe usable. Let's listen to that across our other drums. Let's speed this up. So you can do that with any sample at all. Let's listen to our guitars. Slow them down. Let's slow them down. You can tell it moved where it was in space because we're changing how fast it's playing. So this is another creative tool and a quick way to try different ideas out. In this case with these drums, they were maybe too fast for the song. So this is a quick way to just slow them down. If you're messing around with some vocals, I can give you some interesting remix type ideas right off the bat. Let's keep going and exploring more that you can do with audio effects. You can pitch your audio to any pitch that you want. O. And you just do that simply by moving around this pitch knob. So obviously, if you're in a key and you have music playing and you pit something around, it will need to still be in key for it to sound good. Let me show you what I mean. If we pitch this up 12 a full octave, this will still be in key. If we pitch this up four, it's not gonna be in key. So you can really pitch anything anywhere you want, but you always just have to be listening to what you're doing to make sure it's still musical. Let's keep listening to this isolated so we can explore in depth what you can do pitching these sounds around. You can go to complex pro, change these functions. Pitch it down. To You can go to texture. Beats. Pitch it up. And for vocals, complex pro really has the most control and the most chains to what we're hearing. You can also reverse clips. So if you make a cut, you can go here to these arrows pointing opposite ways and click it. This reverses your audio. Let's explore what that would be in this section. We we vert. Bring the audio back down to zero. We, we vote put send. Let's go back to just regular complex mode. We, we vote put send. W W W. And let's reverse it. W, we ot puts. And let's reverse this. And now this sounds like this. W, o s. So, this is how you can start getting into vocal chops where you're cutting, reversing, maybe pitching things up. But more on vocal chops in a later lesson. So for now, I just want to focus on that you can pitch audio around. We can pitch anything around, we can even pitch the drums. You can reverse sounds, you could reverse the drums. You can go to beats. You can make your own warp points and really do something freaky and change the timing. And get really, really creative with just audio editing, which is really important to incorporate in making modern music. Even if you have more live, more acoustic music that you're making, you can use some of these techniques to really put your own unique twist on things. So this is just to show you the technical aspect of audio editing, but also how you can use it creatively. 43. Ableton 12: Audio Editor: Audio file editor also got an upgrade. So let's jump in and explore how to edit audio in Ableton 12. So first look here, we have our utilities, which look very similar to previous versions of Ableton. You can click on and off the Warp mode. You can scroll through the different warp modes. Each warp mode has its own dropdown menu here. For example, Bach, we can play around with the transients, Tones, we can play with the grain size, and each of these have their own menu here. We can also slow down and duplicate the length of the audio file. To me, this has the sonic effect of a slow mow video, or we can speed it up. Bring it back to where it was originally. We can reverse our audio here and affect the pitch. Remember that the different kinds of warp modes affect the pitch as well. Pitching it down in complex has a different sound than pitching it down in texture. We also have quantis here, which if we scroll in, we can see this loop is not exactly on the beat. If we click off to the side here, we can hit command A, which highlights this whole area, and then we can quantize everything to say quarter notes, which moved everything right on the beat. We could change the amount. That changed it a little too much, or we could change what we're quantizing too. Next, we can click over to envelopes. Now, this is located in the middle of the clip in Ableton 12, and here we can choose through the mixer, which then has a dropdown menu over here of track panning, volume, et cetera, and the clip which has different dropdowns such as gain, transposition, envelope, and sample offset. A feature that I use often is the clip transposition. Now, this allows us to transpose the clip with the Pen tool, for example, drawing in a decreasing pitch. Or increasing. Or maybe something a little bit more random. So if you want to play around with the transposition, it is now located in envelopes, clips, transposition. I feel like editing audio is now a little bit more streamlined than it used to be, and I love finding all of these features right in the audio editor itself. 44. Unlock Resampling: Welcome to the world of Resampling. What is Resampling? Let me show you. Resampling is creating an audio file from different tracks, audio file, synth, My, and just printing it into a nice, clean track. So let me explain a little bit more in detail what I mean. Here, we have an edit I made to this vocal. This is a vocal chop feeling thing that I made by just cutting and pasting, reversing, and moving different parts of this vocal around. Originally, it sounded something like this. Now it sounds a little bit more like this. Oh. So let's say we like this, but this looks a little bit messy, and we would rather just have this be its own audio file. There's several ways we can do this. The first way, we could make sure we delete all the space in between. We could select the first clip, shift, click the second clip, and then hit Command J or Windows J, which is Consolidate. This prints all of the tracks down and combines them together into a new audio track. So maybe that's all we wanted to do, and that sounds great. Let's say we had some audio effects on this, maybe, drag some effects here. Maybe a little bit of distortion. Maybe even a little bit of delay. And let's say we were going to send this to a reverb. Suddenly, there's a lot going on here, and let's say we really liked how this sounded, but we would rather have the whole sound contained into one audio track. Instead of having some go to ascend, having all these effects, all these cuts. What we can do is command or Windows T to create a new audio track. Now we can click this x in over here and go down to resampling. Now we can click rm to get this track record ready, and we can have the track we want to resample soloed. Let's say we want to resample everything we're hearing all at once. We could leave everything like this. Or if we liked how everything else sounded, but we just wanted to resample just this vocal, we could solo it. Now, we click to the beginning of where this vocal starts. We have it soloed. We have a new audio track on resample. We have the record enabled, and we're going to hit the record button. This audio track, all of its cuts, all of its audio effects, and the reverb. So now we can click from Resample back to XN, turn off our mode, and let's slo what we did. So now we have more control around this clip, and we could pitch the whole thing up or down, including the reverb and all of the effects together. Resampling can be useful for midi synth as well. Let's drag this Canadian Keys synth from the instrument track, and we're going to select some space here and create an empty midi clip. Now we're going to switch this to bar mode, and we're going to make some s. Let's solo synth here. Now, let's listen to these chords. Let's say we like this synth, but maybe we would rather have it in audio form. We can go to our audio track. You can either create a new one Apple or Windows D or go to the one we just used and go to, have the synth selected, and turn on the arm button. Go click to the beginning, click to the beginning of the clip and hit record. This took our MDI track and turned it into an audio track. Change this from resample to XN, get rid of arm and listen. This is handy because sometimes audio effects are easier to deal with, and sometimes you can edit them even further in different creative ways that you can't or don't think of to do when you're working with MDI. So, for example, you could reverse part of this hit here. You could pitch this one up, and I always do suggest doing this by ear and not just by looking at it, but I just want to show you all the different possibilities that you can do. So this was our chords then printed into audio so that you can manipulate and enhance and remix them. Another thing you can do is print several different things to one track using resampling. So I've pulled in all of these pull side stems. I'm going to create a new audio track with Apple or Windows T. I'm going to go to resample, and I'm not going to solo anything this time because I want everything to be printed together. Now I'm going to arm the track, and we're going to hit record. So what we have here, I'm going to turn off of resampling is now I've resampled six tracks into one. So now I have one nice neat audio file that I can pitch up, down. I can switch the warp modes, I could reverse the whole thing. I could do some creative editing, moving things around, taking different hits. And you can see how resampling can be used for individual tracks, individual audio tracks, midi tracks, lots of tracks together, audio and midi tracks, and the sky is really the limit. 45. Automation Techniques: Dive into automation techniques. So let me show you what automation is. Let's say you have this song. And you want to get rid of the guitar part here at the end of the second bar. Well, you could highlight this section and make a cut and hit zero, which will turn it off, or you could click this, which would mute it. But the problem is when you click this, the whole track mutes. But now this is where automation comes into play. You can right click and say, show automation. Now, if you activate your pen tool with Commander Windows B, this line is on, and you can draw another line, which will be off. So suddenly, you can automate from on to off. That will turn the guitar off automating on the mute button at this end of the second bar. So you can automate absolutely anything and everything. You could automate the volume. You could have the volume drop down to zero there. And if you ever want to get rid of an automation, you can double click, delete automation. Another way that you can do this is you can click and create an automation point and drag it around. For volume automation, you usually set the volume somewhere to begin with, and presumably you like where it was set. So for volume automation, I suggest using the pen tool to draw some thing down. Therefore, it's keeping the rest of the level exactly where you set it. Alternatively, you could make three points, one point here, one point here, and then a point in the middle so that you're still keeping most of the track at the volume that you set it, and you're just moving around the part that you actually want to change. So let's see what this sounds like. This is essentially automating down and up the volume. So, of course, these points are random, but sometimes you would say, Okay, at the beginning of this beat, I want the guitar to be louder. And then throughout this bar, I want it to be getting quieter, so let's make a nice line like that. And let's click here so we can hear it. You can create more points, you can move them down. You can automate as much as you want. You can also cover your cursor near the line and hit Option. What this will do is we'll turn the line from a straight line to a curved line. So let's make it a much bigger line so we can really see what this is doing. There. Now it's a curved line instead of the straight rigid line. Option, click, and you can curve it either way you want. So let's listen to this nice curve descending line. It's a very smooth way to fade out. So you can automate any of these parameters here. You could also automate going to a send, so you want this line and this line only to go to the reverb. You can also automate audio effects. And we're going to do a whole section on audio effects later. But I'm just going to show you in this automation lesson how you would automate audio effects. So let's go ahead and pull this sloppy delay here and we'll put it on our guitar. And now I'm going to delete this audio automation of the volume because I want to just hear what we're working with. You can automate on an audio effect. So let's delete automation, turn it off, and you can always right click Show automation, and it'll change the parameter here. You can also select here, which is the mixer, which is the track itself, or any of the audio effects that are on the track. We could select the sloppy delay this way. I find it's easier to find the parameter that I want to change and just right click and say show automation. And we can turn on the audio effect right here. So this part we'll have delay. Let's say, let's delete this automation. We want the delay on the whole time, but we want some of the parameters to change. Timeline and the T. So let's see what this would be like. Let's right click here and say, show automation for the feedback, and let's create a point here, create a point here, and create a point here. The reason why I did that is that you can then click and delete these other markers just by clicking on them. And suddenly, you have a nice triangle. Another way that I could have done this hitting Apple Z to undo, you could click here, click here, click here, and move this up. Now, you can listen to what the feedback automating and then back down sounds like. Die. Let's try with this phaser. Let's go to the rate. We'll automate this up here and then down in the middle, and then up, and we'll see what this sounds like. D. Obviously, the rate when it gets too fast sounds ale crazy. Automation is how you can really give some life to your track, because things can be changing in time. You can be changing the volume. You can be changing the amount and effect is on there, which really gives it more of an organic and live feel to it because things are not just stagnant staying the same throughout the whole song. You can also do automation on automation doing layers of automation. So let me explain a little bit about that. Here, we right click, and choose this line and we're automating. You can hit this plus button which opens up another lane of automation. And here we can right click this feedback and do show automation. We could have also chosen show automation in new lane, which then creates another new lane. Now, this part here is the feedback. We could create an opposite pattern and see what that sounds like. You could also automate the volume. We could do show automation a new lane, and maybe the volume gets a little bit quieter when things are getting a little bit crazier. Or maybe things get louder when things get a little crazier. So you can tweak any parameter. You can also tweak the parameters on synths themselves. So command Shift T or window shift T to create an empty midi clip. Let's go ahead and pull this basic bell here. This highlight an area. Insert My clip. Let's create some chords. I'm going to change the grid. I want this to be F minor chord. I want the next chord to be a C minor chord. And we're going to do a whole section on music theory in case this doesn't mean anything to you. Yet it will. And then we're going to select this, and we're gonna sol it. This is an instrument rack, and I hit shift tab to switch from this view to this view. And we're going to go ahead and tweak some of the parameters here in the basic bell. Now, let's say we like moving this cut a. We right click, show automation, and we can automate the cutoff, which is automating this n here. Or we can automate it the other way. You can automate any one of these. You can even open the synth itself and automate any single parameter in the synth. If you touch something, it becomes the parameter that you see here. Which is really handy because you're like, Oh, yeah, I like to mess around with that. And you could automate this going up here. You can automate absolutely anything and everything. Automation really goes as far as your imagination can go. You can automate every parameter, every effect, every part of every synth. You can do automation upon automation, different layers, and the possibilities are truly less. 46. Automation Techniques Part 2: Let's explore the magical world of automation just a little bit further. We know how we can automate effects in different parameters. On these tracks here, but you can also automate within the clip. In order to do so for an audio clip, you do need to have the warp on. And then you can click over to this icon here, and you can see that we have different options. If you're selected to clip, you have gain and transpose. So audio clips and MD clips have different functionality here. Gain is volume, and what you can do with our Pen tool, Commander Windows B, is we can draw in different volume automation. You can also click and drag, click and drag, and this is going to be automating the volume within the clip. So let's undo this automation with Appler Windows Z. And let's say you want to transpose the clip. This will, like it sounds, transpose the clip. You can even jump something all the way up. Let's scroll in a little bit. Remember, when you hover here, not here, not here, but here, you can click and drag in, and let's do some freaky jumps. So you can automate within the clip itself. You can automate all of these different functions depending on which warp mode you have selected. Suddenly, now we have more functionality. You can automate the flux, and you can also link or un link your track to the automation. So this is what we're going to do. With this clip selected here, we're going to zoom out. We're going to right click, and we'll do clear envelopes to get rid of all previous automation. Next, we're going to click over to Warp Mode, Right click again and hit crop sample. Now we're gonna hit loop, and we're gonna switch this Warp mode, and we're gonna just loop this hit. So, now this is gonna sound like this. I'm doing all of this just to show you about linking and unlinking your automation. So let's look this. When you zoom out, this is a one beat loop, and you can see that visually here. If you link, now we can go to transpose this clip beyond the length of the audio. So what does that mean? You change the ending amount here, let's say to four. Now we can have a long piece of transposition that's moving over time. And even though our sample is just repeating, it's going to keep going down in volume because the automation isn't linked to the length of the sample. So let me show you what this means. So, you can hear how this is a loop. So normally, this is just sound like the same thing happening over and over, but this transposition is happening in a longer span than our loop is. Because we un linked the length of the automation from the length of the clip. There are some specific use cases for this. I don't end up doing this too often, and I definitely don't want to confuse you. But I just want you to know of all the different options that are available. Now, let's create a mini track. Commander Window Shift T. Let's go into instruments. Let's go here. We'll drag these bells and swells over here. We're going to select the space. Insert a mini clip, we'll draw on a quick Cord Right click to pull up this menu, it bar. Let's just create Apple B or Command B to get our pen tool. Let's create an F minor chord. Solo it. Now, let's go and look at this button here. You can see we have pitch bend and all of these different effects. And these are things that we can automate from our midi controller if we have a midi keyboard or a beat pad attached. If you don't, you can go here to the mixer, and you can automate the panning and the volume or the amount of sen. So let's say you want to turn this volume down. You can do that in the clip. Let's change our grid to fourth so we can affect things differently. Now, this is just like with the audio track, we're going to change the volume within the clip. That's one thing we can do. We can also go to the actual synth itself and go and automate some of the parameters within the clip. This is the cut off. And you can see visually what we did there. It's kind of clean and sort of zen to have your automation within the clip because then it's not living in the timeline here. But personally, I like to do as much automating on the timeline as possible, because sometimes I just forget. And I could be listening to this sound. And I'm like, Why did it do that there? And I might forget that I automated within the clip because it's not that easy to see. So you can automate within the clip if you want. I choose, usually, especially if it's a move like this where I could do the exact same move here. I would choose to do it here because then when I'm working on the session, I can be like, Oh, yeah, I'm automating this here, and it's easier to see. So I prefer to work in the timeline, but maybe you would prefer to work in the clip, and I want to make sure that you know that that's possible. 47. Fades: Smooth the Edges: This lesson, we're going to be learning about fades. So let's go ahead and clean up the session here. And we're going to go to samples, and we're going to drag in this sample. Now, there are two views within the arrangement view in Ableton. And there's the automation view, which we've talked about automation. When you hit this icon here, it toggles on and off the automation mode. So there's either Fad mode, which happens when this is gray, and there's automation mode, which happens when this is blue. You cannot automate anything when this is gray, you cannot add fades when this is blue. So to toggle between the two, you simply click here. And you'll notice visually, our automation that we made is visually here when we click this, and then it disappears, and then it's back, and it disappears. So if you're ever trying to automate something or trying to add some fades, and you just can't see the option. It's just not even letting you do it. You have to click this, and it will toggle between these two views. It's also pretty obvious because when you look here, there's no automation. You click this. Suddenly, this menu appears. So let's scroll into this audio clip with the automation off, and suddenly these points appear. You can drag things at the beginning, you can drag things at the end. And these are called fades. Auto fade is on, so everything is faded just a little bit for the beginning and the end so that there's no weird spikes that sometimes happen with samples. But you can use fades more intentionally. You can have this hit here, fade in more dramatically. But this faded in so much that we lost the initial hit, and we're just getting the rever above this, which might be what you want. But maybe you wanted this original hit to sound like it did. Faded in a little bit. Or maybe you liked how the intra was, and we can shorten this. Remember, when you scroll to the end of the clip and your cursor turns into this shape, you're able to lengthen and shorten the clip. Let's lengthen the clip here, and we're going to go and shorten the end. Let's go and lengthen this even more, and we're going to really fade out the end, and we're going to pull this point down. This was using FAD almost as a sound design because we changed the hit from having a lot of echo in the background to just being a really short hit. And we did that just with FADs. Let's extend this. It's important to know that this amount of FAD that we've created impacts the sound less when the clip is longer because we're just fading out the end of the clip, which doesn't have a lot of information anyways. When we move this here, it has a pretty dramatic effect. A, we've cut all this audio anyways. And then B, we're fading down pretty quickly. So you can adjust the length of your fade. You can adjust the length of the clip, how you want the fade to come in, the shape of the Fade. And you can really just use this to make sure that your audio effects and your samples are exactly as you want them to be. Fades are often for transitions when ne clips, if you need to repair something because there's a weird blip or click sound, you can use a fade to fix the beginning or end of a clip, or you can use it more creatively. But Fades are really here to help you customize your sound. 48. Groups: Organize & Optimize: Comes a time in every music producer's life when you need to learn about groups. And for you, that time is now. Groups. Welcome to the magical, wonderful, amazing world of groups. We have individual tracks here, and you know, they're kind of lonely. And what we're going to do about that is we're going to say, Hey, drums, and base, you guys can be a group. You can team up. And what that means is we're going to select them both and hit Command or Windows G. This creates a group. Now, both of those tracks are in one group together. Why would you want this? Well, now let's close this group and turn it off. We've turned off the drums and the bass. You Now we could turn up the drums in the base or down. We could send them both together to a reverb. We could put an audio effect, say, a compressor on the group compressing all of it together. N. So groups are handy because you can make big bold moves across general sections of your song. You can name this. You can solo it. You could even create a guitar group, and you can lend the sins in there, so this will be Harmony. So now we have a rhythm section, Harmony, and vocals. Let's get rid of the harmony. You pull side in the heat. Get rid of them. There we both put summertime floating free. Yeah. Let's throw all the harmony into a reverb. And you can So groups are handy when you want to make bigger boulder moves or just to organize your session because sometimes you have lots of little audio effects on individual tracks floating around and maybe you don't want to resample them. You can just group them all together in these bigger groups so that your session looks cleaner, and you can make bigger bolder moves tweaking things all together. 49. Groups: Organize & Optimize Part 2: What you're thinking. You need more groups. Don't worry. This lesson, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into groups. So one more thing you can do with groups is you can group groups. So you can have the harmony and the rhythm section be their own group. And you can call this all music. So now we have our vocals, and we have our all music group of two other groups, and you can even group groups and groups. There's no limit to how many groups you can make. But you just want to group things to what makes sense to you and how you want to organize things. But here we have our group that is two other groups, and you can turn them all off together. Yeah. Yeah, never. Can do them on. Y, never. You can compress them all together. Let's get rid of this reverb on this harmony. And. This is really just here to make your life a little easier organizationally. If you want to affect them all together, if you want to turn them all down together. And like I said, if you have lots of different parts, you can make a group for the audio effects, a group for the drums, you can group those groups together. You can then group that group with base. Whatever makes sense to you? So you can go absolutely group crazy. There is no limit to the amount of groups you can make. 50. Insert & Delete Space: This lesson is about inserting and deleting space. So let's dive into our session here, and we have these groups on groups on groups. And what we're going to do is we're going to hit command or Windows Shift G, which deletes the group. Then we're going to hit Command Shift G to delete this group and command Shift G to delete this group. And when I say delete, I'm actually using the wrong word. We are grouping. We're not deleting any of the audio effects or media effects that are in the group. We're simply getting rid of the group. If I command Z and undo that, You'll notice we had an audio effect on this group. And when I do command shift G, that audio effect is gone because the group is gone. But what was inside of the group, which was the base and the drums, those remain the same and untouched. So, let's talk about creating and deleting space. Let's say here at bar 29, we're like, You know what? I want to add some space here. I want this section to go a little bit longer. What you can do is you can select the space that you want to insert. Let's say you're like, I want to insert 4 bars, and you can select this space here, and then you can do command i. Or Windows eye. This literally saves everything that is before and saves everything that's after and inserts that amount of space right here into the timeline. Let's say you want to delete some space. You can select the space and hit Command or Windows Shift Delete. You could also select space that has information in it. This 4 bars and hit command shift delete. This keeps everything before it after the same, but just the selected area gets deleted. Again, if you want to insert space, you select an area, you hit Commander Windows eye. If you want to delete a space, you select the area you want to delete, and Commander Windows shift delete. This is handy when you're working on a song and suddenly You are like, you know, after the second verse, I want a little bit of an instrumental breakdown before we go to the chorus. Instead of having to move everything individually, you can simply just insert the space there, and you're good to go. Or let's say you had a drop before your last chorus, and you're like, You know what? That's just not working for me. You can just delete that space, and the rest of your song will be intact. One more strategy I want to show you is, let's say here you have this section. And you're not sure if you want it. So what you can do, you can open up the top track, click here, and you can click to the bottom of the bottom track or even here right there on the master bus. And so you've selected this entire region. Now, you can command or Windows E to cut, and we can copy Command C or Windows C, and scroll over to the end of the song here. And just paste it with Commander Windows V. Therefore, we've saved this section. We've saved our work, it's here. It just we moved it over to the end of the song where it's not bothering anyone. Now we can select this space by just clicking this clip. You don't have to select the space like this when there's a clip that has a cut and start point exactly where you want to select. Because if you click a clip, it does automatically select the entire length of that clip. Let's click here and we're going to do Command or Window shift delete. Now we've deleted this section, but we saved it over here. I will keep sections at the end of my songs until I really have everything locked in, because sometimes I have a part that, let's say, this intro part is like, you know, that's really cool. We're going to copy it. We're going to paste it over here. And we're going to delete it for now because, like, it doesn't really fit right here. So then you have this part. And with you. And then working on the song, sometimes near the end, I'm like, Oh, you know what would be perfect right here would be that intro part that I already made. So in this section, you could just select, insert the space, insert more space, and pull the section that you saved to where you want to move it. I like to keep things here at the end of my session so that I have more ideas to pull from. And I often find if I had a creative idea, even if it doesn't fit in immediately, sometimes they seep in later. Of course, you don't want your session to just be flooded with tons of ideas just floating around. If you're someone just making decisions on the spot, it's totally fine to delete and work however you want to work. For me personally, I do like to save some ideas at the end of the session till I've really locked in the song. Then I'll do a save as and delete all those sections so that I don't have a messy session. 51. Plugins: Pro Level Audio: What are plug ins? Maybe you've heard other producers talk about plug ins or you've seen something on the Internet about plug ins. We're going to talk about plug ins in this lesson, so you never have to wonder what they are ever again. We talked about audio effects briefly, and we're going to cover them in depth later in this course. We've also talked about instruments briefly, and we're also going to cover those in depth later in this course. For now, let's go over to plug ins. When you click on Plug ins, if you don't have any third party plug ins, that means you actively haven't bought or downloaded a free version of a plug in, you won't see anything here, and that's totally normal. If you have, then this will populate with whatever plug ins you have. And unfortunately, in music production, unfortunately, in music production, there are a lot of third party plug ins that professional producers use. Some of these cost money, some of them are free, and each of them have their own interface. So when I first started producing, I had a little bit of frustration around, why do I have to use these plug ins? Can't I use the Native Ableton sounds, and you can. There's a lot of amazing songs that do just use the native Ableton sounds. But a lot of amazing songs also use these plug ins. And the more I've been producing, the more I tend to use plug ins over the Ableton stock sounds. So I want to explain to you what plug ins are. Plug ins are either audio effects, just like the ones in Ableton or instruments, just like the ones in Ableton, except for they're made by a third party company that specializes in certain things. For example, Fab filter has an amazing EQ and an amazing distortion. They also make some other plug ins that are great too, but my favorite is the P Q three. Now, this pro Q is an EQ, just like Ableton has an EQ. They look kind of similar, but I prefer the sound and the layout and the functionality of this pro Q. You'll find with a lot of these plug ins, Ableton does have its own compressor, its own E Q, its own delay, its own reverb. So you can create similar sounding effects with what we have in Ableton. But there are also plug ins that sometimes they just made a better reverb or a better reverb for this specific use case of yours or a compressor that just sounds a little better. And each audio effect does have a little bit of a character sound, meaning it's not usually totally transparent, even though that's the goal. Transparent being if you put it on the sound, it won't change the sound at all, except for exactly what you're doing. Unfortunately, or fortunately, some effects when you put it on the sound, it just existing on the sound without tweaking anything, changes the character of the sound slightly. Sometimes this makes things sound better, and sometimes it makes things sound worse. It's usually very subtle and it's important not to get stuck in the weeds. But plug ins are any audio effect can be a plug in. They can also be synth. Let's go here, create Commander Windows Shift T, select the space, insert a midi clip, and let's go ahead and pull in a third party synth. So we can go to Omnisphere. Omni spheres made by specter sonics, which specializes in making sounds like bass sounds, pianos, synths. And here is just like in Ableton's instrument tab with these different instruments, this is a synth that has different sounds. And this particular synth is pretty popular, and you've probably heard a lot of these sounds in some popular song. So you simply click the preset that you want, and here you can play this synth, just like you can play any synth in Ableton. If you wanted to use a plug in audio effect, let's say you want to use a re verb, you can go over to Valhalla, which has a really good reverb. We like this vintage verb. Drag it on. Each plug in is made by different manufacturers, and they work in different ways, and you could learn how to use each plug in on its own. This is both exciting and daunting because some plug ins like serum, for example, are very, very popular, but they might look a little bit confusing to use. Let's go ahead. I type in serum. I'm going to drag serum down here, and it's going to replace Omnisphere just like if you drag another Ableton instrument on top of existing Ableton instrument. And here we have serum. Serum is very, very popular in EDM, and it's what most EDM producers are using to make their sounds. There's amazing presets available. We're going to go through where you can source these presets and how to use serum in later lessons. But for now, I just want to show you that each plug in has its own interface and works in its complete own unique way. There are a ton of plug ins out there and it's important not to get overwhelmed. I have built my plug in library over a long period of time. I have a lot of friends who are music producers. I follow a lot of great creators on YouTube, on TikTok, and it's important to just find and let the information come to you and you'll be in a session with someone who has a plug in you never heard of or you'll read about a plug in. You can try it for free hopefully. Over time, you'll start collecting and understanding the plug ins that you really like. During this course, if I ever use a third party plug in, I'll always show you what it is and where you can get it. But don't get too overwhelmed by all these plug ins. You don't need them to make music. Ableton has amazing sounds, and that's all you need to get your creativity flowing. 52. Plugins: Pro Level Audio Part 2: Having so much fun with plug ins. We need to talk about it a little bit more. Let's go over here to this plug ins window. Let's go to Fab Filter. We'll pull up this saturn. Oops. We pulled up the P R. That's fine. So let's say we are going plug in crazy. Let's delete these other plug ins, and we're also going automation crazy. But how do you automate the plugs? So here you can go and move these different parameters. But as you can see, it looks a little different when we're moving the parameters in Ableton. Let's turn on plug in mode here. We were changing this distance, and now we can see that the line is moving. So let's go over to our plug ins window, and let's pull on this EQ. And now we can click, make sure that the automation window is on you can click here and start dragging around and you can see that this line is moving, meaning the Abletons understanding, this is the parameter we're tweaking. So if we wanted to automate this, we could start drawing on this line, and this would affect what we're seeing here. So that's one way to automate the plug ins. Another way is that you can click down in here, and any parameter that you have touched will appear in this menu. And then you can select the menu. You want the gain one, and this could be gain two, and then it shows up here. And you can notice that this has a little circle on it. This when you move, is this a plain triangle. This triangle has a little dot on it. So that dot is indicating that it has some automation because we drew some automation on the track. If you wanted to automate this, you could drag this up and down, and it'll appear here in Ableton. You could also right click and say show automation. You could right click here and say show automation in New Lane. You could right click on this one and say show automation in New lane. You could hit this minus to get rid of a new automation lane. You could hit plus to add a new automation lane. You could hit this little triangle to close the fold down menu or open it to open this menu up again. Here, we could do layer of automation, like we've done before. We'll automate both of these things at the same time. Then we can see visually what we're doing. We're bringing both of these down. One thing that you may have noticed is that this is grade out, and this is not. This is red. Also, this button here has appeared, and it's orange. When you see this orange button, it means you are not hearing exactly what is happening in your song. So if you see this, you always need to click this because you can turn off the automation and let me show you what that means. Here, we've clicked it. Now, every time we listen to this, it'll sound exactly how it actually sounds. But let's say we do have some automation, meaning it's always going to be from this point to this point. But let's say we drag that somewhere else. Now this is no longer at this point or at that point, meaning we can still mess around with things that we've automated, but it suddenly gets grayed out, and this appears. This lets us know that if we're happy with how this sounds, this is not exactly how our track actually sounds. And this can be a problem if you forget and you've tweaked something, and then you export it, and suddenly it's like, Whoa, this doesn't sound like how I thought, because when you hit this button, it automatically brings this point back to where it was in the automation. So when you see this button, you always need to click it to make sure that you're hearing an accurate representation of what your track actually sounds like. So automation on plug ins works basically the same, and this orange button happens for automation on Ableton stock sounds and on plug ins alike. Another thing I want to bring up about plug ins is their use of CPU, meaning some plug ins, because they're third party on top of Ableton, do use a little bit more of your computers processing power, which sometimes can bog down your session. So, occasionally, you have to take this into consideration whether to use a plug in on a busy session or not. If you jump into Ableton, this 3% here means that these plug ins that we're using are not taking up that much CPU. Is possibility, especially with some synths that this number jumps way up, which is not a problem until it gets to about 80, and then your session might start lagging. In which case, you may want to resample those plug ins down into audio effects and maybe doing a save as so that you can delete the synth or whatever plug in was causing the CPO to creep up. But for now, this probably something you keep in the back of your mind and hopefully won't come across this too much. Plug ins work just the same as the native instruments and the native audio effects in Ableton. They have their own specific twist, but ultimately Since work like since, EQs work like EQs, and the automation is relatively the same. 53. Ableton 12: Tuning Systems: Ableton 12 has introduced tunings, which is fascinating. Without getting too deep, basically, all computer music is defaulted to be tuned to A 440 with a steps mimicking the piano. But now Ableton has introduced these micro tunings, which allow for completely new notes. First of all, you want to go to view and make sure that tuning is on. Secondly, you want to make sure retune set loading tuning system is on. And now you have this tuning window. You may have noticed these tunings on the left here. This is where we get to explore. So this is what our chords sound like with the regular tuning. Now let's pull in some new tunings. Drop it in here, continue. And you see that these have notes, G A E, and then this is a new note here. And it has a different sound to it. Let's audition a different tuning. This has two alternative notes. This is like changing the tuning of a guitar string on the guitar. Because even though you're playing the same thing you would on your guitar, if you change the tuning of it, it's going to change how it sounds. So even I'm playing the notes on the keyboard here, by changing the tuning, it's going to change how they sound. So not only can you explore the 12 notes of the piano in Ableton. Now you can explore all of these other tunings. The quick version is that the distance between one note to the adjacent note on a piano is called a half step. But there exist quarter steps and eighth steps, and even different harmonic differences between half steps. And so this is what Ableton's tunings have unlocked. We have different micro tunings which just change how the notes sound themselves and change the actual note quality. This really opens up so many possibilities, and I can't wait to start listening to some music with alternative tunings. 54. Exporting: Share Your Masterpiece!: Alright, dream with me here. You made your masterpiece. What do you do with it? We're gonna talk about exporting, because without exporting, the masterpiece can never reach the world. Alright. Here we go. This is our masterpiece. We're in love with this. It's gonna be a hit. It's gonna be big. So, what do we do about this? Well, we're not gonna have these sections here at the end because it's perfect, just like it is. Now, we're going to select the space that we want to export, which is the whole space of the song. And you can hit command shift or Window shift. R, which will pull up the Export window. You can also go up to file and hit Export Audio. I always like the Hot key Command or Window Shift R. Now let's look at this menu here. We'll talk about Master Last. 441 is the right sample rate for music. If you're working with video, like your song is going to exist in a movie or for a video, then you want to explore at 48. 100. This isn't a huge deal nowadays, but it's important to know 44 is best for music, 48 is best for video. Here you want a wave file, bit depth. You can choose 24 or 32, and then you hit Export. Here, it'll pull up a menu, and this is where you will name your song and choose where you wanted to export two. I keep everything in a Exports folder in Dropbox. You can keep everything wherever makes most sense to you. Then you would title your song and Boom, it save, and it'll start exporting. Talk about this render track. Master means you're going to render the Master track. Everything's going to the master track. So this is what the music you're working on sounds like. You could, however, choose all individual tracks, which would export every single individual track here, as well as every single Sen track individually. You could export selected tracks. Let's say we selected these vocals in the Synth commander Windows selected tracks, it would only export the selected tracks. We could also export any individual track that we select here. So these are important use cases for specific uses, like you want to give somebody the stems to a song. You could do the individual tracks. But if you really want to export your finished sounding song, master track is what you want to use, and master track is what you should probably just default this to unless you know specifically that you are trying to export one or many individual tracks. 55. Hot Keys: Accelerate Your Workflow: Now it's time for Hot keys. Let's talk about the most important and useful hot keys in Ableton. We have Commander Windows B for the Pen Tool, Command Windows E, the Cut Tool. Command Windows C and V, the old Copy and paste. We have Command and Windows T for a new audio track. Command Shift T, new MDI track. We have Command R to rename something. We have Command Shift U to Quantize, Command G to group. Command Shift G, which I don't say here, to group. We have command I to insert space. Remember, you have to select the space you want to insert first. Let's say you want to insert 4 bars, you have to select 4 bars and then hit Apple. Then you have command shift delete, which you select the space you want to delete, and it deletes the space. Obviously, command S, which you always want to be doing. Command Shift R for export, and the plus and minus buttons so that you can zoom in and zoom out easily and quickly. 56. Template Creation: In the spirit of saving you time, let's talk about templates. Let's say when you're producing, you know that on every audio track and on every midi track, you love having a certain plug in. I always end up having this Pro Q three, and I love this EQ eight, and I want this on every single audio track and every single MDI track. You can click here. And that save as Default Audio Track. This will mean that every time you create a new audio track, I'm going to hit Command T or Windows T, which creates a new audio track. It'll show up with your favorite plug ins. You may have noticed that all of my tracks tend to have these plug ins because on all of my MIDI tracks and my audio tracks, this is my template because these plug ins are frequently used on all audio tracks and all MI tracks. So I save them that way. Midi works the same way. You click here. Save as default. Mi track. So maybe you really like having the EQA And you also really like having a compressor on everything. You could delete these. Go here and do Save as Default Midi track. And every time you create a new Midi track, these will appear. Let's say you notice that every time you start a session, you always have a drum rack, and you always have an empty audio track. You also always love this rever this delay, a snare reverb, and a bigger reverb. And you're tired of creating those every single time. Well, you don't have to. You can create a template, or every time you load a new Ableton session, it will have all of your favorite tracks and plug ins already there. You could have whole sins preloaded in there if you wanted, and I used to have a piano in my template every single time. If you create a template that you want to reuse, you go up here, go to file and save as default set. Can also save as a template, and it will appear in this template folder here, and you can choose from all of these different templates. But if you want a live set to be the default set every time you open up Ableton, save as default set. And once you start producing enough that you find, you have a style, you have your go tos, and you just want those to be ready to produce. So as soon as you have an idea, you open Ableton and everything's ready to go. I suggest saving your favorite effects to your audio tracks, My tracks, and then saving your favorite session as the default set. So you can start producing even faster. It's important with creative projects to minimize the barrier to entry. So as soon as you have an idea, you can just get right into it because it takes a lot of effort to be creative and a lot of energy, and you don't want any little things getting in the way, especially the thought of creating reverbs or mini tracks or audio tracks. You don't want any of that stopping your creativity. 57. Keyboards & Beat Pads: This lesson is about keyboards and beat pads. So let's dive into keyboards and beat pads. Mostly, they will be plug and play. If you have a keyboard or a beat pad, you should be able to plug it into Ableton, and it should just work. There's some troubleshooting we can do in case it doesn't just magically work. And obviously, when things are plugged in, you need to make sure that your tracks are armed. And there's some system preferences, some settings, things, we should at least go over, but hopefully you'll never have to use them. So, I have a keyboard here, and it's plugged in. Via USB straight into my computer. And because it's plugged in, I arm this midi track, which has a piano synth on it, and it just works. But, look at that. In case you have a keyboard, and it didn't just magically work. Let's go over here to settings, and we go to Link Tempo Midi, and there are several different things we can do here. Hopefully you will see your keyboard or be pad down here. Now, sometimes Ableton, and I think this is really a glitch, wants more of these boxes checked. Normally, all you need is track, and it should work, but sometimes you also want remote checked, and then sometimes you also want sync or MPE. It shouldn't be this way, but I have seen this in the past. So my suggestion is to check one box and then try it. If that still doesn't work check another box. If it still doesn't work check another box, and go through the process and even audition checking the boxes in the out section. Again, it shouldn't need to work this way, and I haven't seen this problem in a long time. So maybe since the update in Aton 11, this will never be an issue again, but I have in the past seen some things where I've had to check many of these boxes before I was getting the output to sound like I wanted it to sound. Always check one at a time and then play so that you can see which one did you click that made it work. Then from there, maybe you can uncheck the extra ones and see if just that one would work, or if do you need all of them and try to start understanding, so it's not something random because the last thing you want is, well, I don't know how it works, and it just kind of works, and then it just doesn't work. And you want to be somewhat methodical so you can understand why it works. The next thing is sometimes you need to go ahead and select your device from this drop down menu. Again, normally will just work, and you shouldn't need to do this. But as you can see, I have many different devices here because these are all the different keyboards and beat pads that I have used over the years, and Ableton remembers these. So if you don't see your selected keyboard or beat pad here, maybe you will have to search through this menu and select it from here. Buffer size in audio does affect your Mitty playback. So if you're at 20:48, You might get some delay. You might have to jump this down to 256. Now, unlike audio recording, since audio recording is recording actual sound into Ableton, I don't like to go below 256 if I can help it because the quality might get compromised. For midi data, I have never seen the middy data be compromised, so you can go as low as you want and still record your midi. It'll sound weird in the playback, but you can record at 32 and then jump quickly up to 2048 when you're ready. I have not seen Ableton make a mistake in recording the midi even at these low sample rates. That being said, I generally try to just do 256 as a starting point in case I also want to hop on a mic and sing something or whatever. So here we have our midi keyboard that's plugged in, and now any midi track that we have selected will be triggered by our keyboard. Any sense that we choose will be selected by our keyboard. You can go here. You can go to instrument Rack. Let's go to Malets and drag these on. Now, all of these sounds are available to be played on our Mitty keyboard. We have an octave button on the keyboard because the keyboard only has 49 keys. Hit the octave button, it jumps up an octave, octave down, and it jumps down an octave. So you can kind of find where you want your sound to live. Let's say you pull up an impulse. Well, those have notes as well, but it's not here. So, the impulse will live generally on the C three range. So once you find it, you can play your drums. You can play any synth you want. You can play any drum rack or impulse that you want. You can pull a sound into sampler and play that on your keyboard. Keyboards just allow you to play all of the sounds in Ableton. Now, maybe you don't have a keyboard or maybe you do, but let's say you also have a beat pad. So a beat pad will work in the exact same way. You plug in your beat pad into your computer. Your beat pad should just work. Again, you can do all the same steps to troubleshoot in case it doesn't work. You can go to Link TEP O Midi. You can see if it doesn't show up here. You can click some of the other boxes. You can select it from this drop down menu. You can try to see if it doesn't work, troubleshoot in all the same ways. Again, the latency will work the same in this buffer size. But usually your beat pad is plugged in and it's ready to play. So you can play drums with your beat pads, which is probably usually what they're used for. And you could create your own custom drum rack with your own custom samples and play that with your beat pad. Here, we'll pull in a kick drum. We'll pull in a snare. Hat. And there you go. You could have a very full drum rack or a very full impulse, and you could play lots of different sounds on your Bat pad. Some people are super good at beat pads and can really map out entire songs and entire symphonies and play them all there. And each beat pad has a slightly different interface in the way that it works. So you'll have to spend some time with your beat pad to see exactly how your beat pad works. For example, this launch pad has different modes. You have the user mode, which is like your own custom template, the keys mode, drums mode, and the session mode. So each of these modes work in a slightly different way. But the general concept is that each pad corresponds to a note on the keyboard. Now if we jump back into drum rack here, you'll see that each place has a note value. So it's essentially one of the pads on your Bat pad will trigger the E one note. And then if you have a sample on that E one note, you will be triggering that sample when you hit that specific pad. So that's essentially how it works. It's just a one to one correlation. You could play synths with your beat pad if you wanted to. You don't only have to play drums. We can pull in the synth here. And it's cool to play some melodic sense on a beat pad because it's laid out similar to a piano, but also different because of the way that there's keys above and below, and sometimes you just come up with ideas that you wouldn't have if you were playing a normal keyboard. I highly encourage using a keyboard, using a beat pad because these give some live elements to your productions. Even if you're playing some of the stock samples, some of the stock synth, you're still actually playing them instead of programming them, which there's nothing wrong with programming, and you can totally program something and take it off the grid and do the velocity thing and get it to sound perfect. But it's really fun if nothing else to actually play some parts in. 58. Analog: Dive Into Synthesis: Welcome to the Sounds of Ableton Chapter. The sounds of Ableton Chapter is about exploring the different sins and drum racks that Ableton has available. If you already know about the sins and drum racks in Ableton, go ahead and skip to the next chapter, which is called History and Resources, which is where this course really begins. If you want to explore the sounds of Ableton and understand, what are the sins? What are the drum racks? What are the main ones? How do you use them? This is the right chapter for you, and we're going to start right now right here with analog. So, let's go over to instruments, and let's go up to analog and explore what this is. First, we can just drag it into an empty midi clip here or drag it into an empty space, and we've created a default analog synth. We can also open this drop down menu and explore some of the presets. And when you're just getting to know a new synth, sometimes it's nice to just start with the preset and understand, what are the capabilities of the sound? What are other people doing? So let's go ahead and drag these tron strings down, and we're going to go and copy this mite part that I already made for the learning activity for Chapter two, and we're going to go ahead and listen to it. As you might have noticed, I had to click a few buttons to see the analog synth. That's because this is an instrument rack, and we will cover instrument racks later in this chapter. For now, we just want to look at what's happening here in analog. We can drag in a new synth, Let's go to this organ rato. This is not an instrument rack, so you just have analog. We can notice different settings. These knobs are in different places. Go. We have synthythmic. Let's see what this looks like. Another instrument rack. And this sounds really cool with these cords. So this is really exciting. We also have base track. So let's go ahead and find our base here. And let's create a new Mitty track. And let's just drag down here a base, and let's pull this part down and listen to it. Let's try this track. And you can see there's some really interesting sounds being created here. And now we can add the drums back in. We can go down to this smooth square base. Pure square base. Basic analog. And maybe we want to change these strings. You can always preview what the sound is gonna sound like just by clicking on it. That could be cool. And listening to this base part, I really think all these bees should actually be sees. And it's important to just have fun sometimes with the precess to really start understanding the sound. Let's create a new audio track. And maybe we will copy this pluck sound here and we'll paste this in and find interesting sound here. We can use for the pluck. This might sound good. It might not. Try sweet lead. And actually, I preferred this rhythmic uplifting string by far. And it's just cool to see, like, how far this synth can really go. We haven't even tried any of the paths. Well, that's maybe a good thing. Try one of these. Oh. That's a vibe. As you can see, analog has some amazing presets, and I love just diving in and seeing all the different options available. In the next lesson, we're going to cover how to actually tweet the different parameters inside of analog and decode a little bit about how it actually works. 59. Analog: Dive Into Synthesis Part 2: Now we're going to look at the different functions of analog, the different knobs, and all the different capabilities, so we can figure out how it really works. So let's solo this pluck part here. And let's go ahead and pull analog a fresh default template on here. And the way that you do that is when the menu is closed, you just drag analog into an empty midi clip. We're gonna go ahead and delete my custom template that always shows up on every Mt clip, so that we just have this alone, and we're gonna listen to. So immediately, we want to know what's going on here. Here we have shape, and this is going to have a dramatic effect on the sound. What are the different waves that we're using to create the sound? And all synthesis is created by different waves. And there are four classic waves. There's sine waves, square waves, saw waves, and triangle waves, and this also has a noise wave. We'll cover. All of that more in depth later. But the most important thing to understand for this is that these are the first part of the building block of your sound. So this is a sine wave. L et's go ahead and turn off Oscillator two. It has two oscillators, and maybe that's a better place to start. With none of these oscillators on, there will be no sound at all. Now, we turn on one oscillator, and oscillator is something that creates sound, and it creates sound using the waves that we just talked about. Now let's explore with this sine wave. Saw wave. Square wave. And noise. Noise is noise. I often like sinewaves because they're kind of mellow. Next, we have octave. So if you want this to play exactly where it was played where the mini notes are, you leave this alone. But let's say you want this to be an octave higher. And this is easier to hear for this sine wave. This one jumps one octave, which is 12 half steps. If you want to jump some semitones, half steps are also called semitones, semi half. And this will jump in between an octave. So let's go ahead and jump six. This will be halfway between the octave or a tritone. Jumping octave will keep it in the same key. Moving the semitones will change the key. Detuning will detune in amounts smaller than a semitone. There is still distance 0-1 semitone, and we can get there by detuning, detuning it by 0.50 will be halfway in 0-1. We can do -50, which is halfway between zero and minus one. Minus one is the same as minus one. This goes all the way to minus three, which is the same as turning this to minus three. The real value of this D tune here is in values 0-1, and I would use the semi tones to do values greater than that. Next, we have a filter. Notice how when we click on this section here, this pitch envelope shows up in the middle. We can move these points, which is the journey of the pitch of the sound, which is easier to show you than to explain. This means that every time a note is played, every trigger, it starts going from up to down. Since these notes are being played very short, it's always going in a laser from down to up mode. If we move this, it's having a super quick pitch envelope at the beginning of every sound, giving it an interesting character. We could also go from bottom to up. That's what that sounds like. You can get some pretty interesting creative sounds by messing with the pits envelope. This is such an extreme pits envelope that it's changing the sound in a very dramatic way. But let's say we just want to keep it here at zero. Next, we have a filter, and if you turn this down, you can start hearing what the filter is doing. This is the shape that the filter is creating. This is essentially there's no sound. Turn this rezone up a little. Now let's open it up. And you can affect the tail. Can have it start later. That's starting way too late. You can also affect the attack, which is the first part of the filter and the start of the sound just by dragging this number value. The closer to zero, the closer to as soon as the sound is triggered, you hear a sound. The further away, the sound is triggered, and then it takes 15 seconds here for the filter to reach Mx volume, which is basically going to be if you going to hear the sound. Let's move it to a more reasonable place. It has a slow attack now, which gives it this interesting sound. The next is the decay. How long is this sound? Two With this particular shape, the decay is not having a huge effect, and also the length of the sound is pretty short. But if you start messing with the sustain, you'll understand the importance of the decay. Let's put the sustain all the way up and now all the way down. Now let's move the decay around. You can hear now it has a cleaner end to this. That has a more open sound. Let's open up the sustain again. Now, finally, let's tweak the release. When the sustain is all the way down, the release doesn't have much of an effect, but when we turn the sustain up. Has a very open sound at the end. No release. It just cuts off right at the end. Here. The release is like the pedal of the keyboard. It gives it a little bit of space after the sound. Next, we go to the amp. The amp has all of these same parameters, but instead of affecting the filter, we're literally just affecting the whole shape of the sound. Because notice if we turn this filter off, It's changing the amount that we are changing the sound. You can also move the rezo up. But if we go to the amp, this is just just the volume. We're not playing with the filter really at all. We're just affecting the volume of the sound. And don't worry, we're going to explore filters more later in this course. Let's just focus on this amp. And maybe let's turn this filter off. And you can affect all these same parameters having the envelope start later sooner. The attack somewhere in the middle. Affectat and the release. You can tell that the release on the amp itself has a much more dramatic effect than the release on the filter does. Let's turn this filter back on and let's tame this release a little bit, and I sometimes like just messing around with the shape just by grabbing it instead of moving the parameters this way. Little bit of release though. Next, we have volume. Volume obviously is the overall volume of the sound. We have vibrato, which you could turn on and go 100%. At a fast rate, slow rate, or less percentage. Which is making the sound soundly, it's doing it to the pitch. Then we go to Unison Dune, which is just a global detune to the whole sound. This is essentially doubling the wave and splitting them up, so it's a wider, thicker sound. We can also do glide. It will glide from note to note. This is a little bit extreme, so let's just turn it down. Next, we have a noise oscillator. Let's look at that. This is just literally adding noise to the sound. This is the frequency where we're adding the noise and the volume. A little bit of quiet noise on a synth can be nice. We have a second oscillator down here which we can go through this whole process with again. We can choose our filter for it. We can affect our amp. And finally, we can change the routing. Now, the routing is the order of which things are going to. So right now, the oscillator goes to the filter, which goes to the amp. You can instead have both oscillators go to the same filter and then go to a different filter, and then go to the amps, and so on and so forth. And I encourage you to try these different routings to see what sounds the best. Here, both of these oscillators ultimately go through the second filter and second amp. Here, both of these oscillators ultimately go through the first filter in the first amp. We spent more time detailing the first filter in the first amp, so this sounds the best to me. There's an endless world in analog, and you can really go the distance, just really spending some time, tweaking everything. I suggest finding a preset that you love, study it, understand how they got there, decode it, recreate it. Just spend some time in the synth itself. You don't need to know what everything does. You just need to listen and trust how it makes you feel and what sounds good to you. 60. Collision: Master the Mallet: Let's talk about collision. Here, if we go to our instrument rack, we have our next synth here called collision, and let's explore what this sounds like. It's a mallet type synth that has mallet type sounds. Let's explore some of these presets. We have this rolling high tech perk. That's pretty interesting. I'm not sure that's the right sound for a melodic part, but it maybe is, and that's pretty cool. Let's check this one out. That's kind of nice in its own way. Little Synth piano. I really like how that sounds. Toy Bells. Sounds about right. We have Mallets. So these are Zyphae emulators, Viber phone emulators. Bells. Music box. Glockenspiel. Oh, Marimba. More bells. Ay bells. Some other things. Guitar and pluck. So these are some stri emulators. Here's a tube harp. That's cool. Ocean pluck. What's got of five? Drippy cave pluck. Acoustic string. That's cool. It's a crazy sound. So, now I'm gonna go ahead and solo these chords, and we're gonna look at the paths that I skipped over. We have sand ban. This is one of my favorite pad sounds. It's just so fresh and other worldly, ambient and evolving, high pad. I has a similar quality to the Sandman. Slow pad. This one. This one. So you can see that collision is very, very interesting. They have some interesting character sounds from mallets to dreamy pads in between. I really love collision, and I use it all the time in my music. In the next lesson, we're going to dive into the specific functions and parameters in collision. 61. Collision: Master the Mallet Part 2: Now we're going to go into collisions, parameters, and functions. Here we'll drag a collision from this menu here, without the drop down menu pulled, and it's going to pull up the basic template of collision. We're pulling it on to my arp sound, and we're soling it so we can hear what we're doing. Volume. Mallet. When you turn off the mallet, it was like turning off the oscillator in analog. There's no sound. Turn on the mallet. You can change the stiffness. The noise. This is sort of like the noise of something hitting a mallet and the color. Now, we can go over here to noise and add some actual d noise in our track. And thus adding some sparkle. Next, we have the filter here, low pass, high pass, Remember, a slow attack means a long time for the filter to go the shape that it's going. This doesn't have as nice of a visual representation, but it works in the exact same way. So this will be a very small sound, and this will be a bigger sound. The release on this really goes far, which is cool. For now, let's turn this filter off. And let's go over here to resonator one, and resonator two. So resonator one. We have beam, Mba string, and all of these different options, and these are synonymous to the sine wave, square wave, and saw waves that we saw in the previous synth, except for these have different sounds and different names. So let's go ahead and explore these different qualities. Beam Mamba. String. Membrane. Plate. Hi. Tube. And you can add a second resonator. And now we can click here to the first resonator, and we can even affect the opening of the second resonator. We can affect the tune? Remember, if you are tuning something that's not a perfect octave, you're gonna go out of key. This is now we're creating a major third. So let's go a nice clean octave. We have the fine tuning here. If we're tuning in between half steps. Pitch envelope. Remember in the other Senth we had a nice visual representation of the pitch envelope. But in this one, it's doing the same thing. This is going from down to up, sliding into the note. This is going from up to down. And maybe we want to keep it the same. The time No time at all. It happens very fast. Lot of time. It's going to take a long time for the pits to slide. So let's go ahead and leave this alone for now. We'll talk more about painting in a later lesson, but essentially, painting is where in the stereo spectrum is your sound. The center zero is the center is C, center, and, you know, left and right. So this will be all the way left. And this is all the way right. You can affect the panning in other ways as well. You can affect the panning here. Same thing, C for center, RFA right, RFA left, and there's 50 values in between the center and extreme left, and extreme right. 25 would be in between the two. We have the amount of voices in case we want to have more voices, which will add more of a choir type effect. Which is not immediately obvious with the sound that we're making now. We'll go back to four voices. We'll turn this off, and turn it back on again. Maybe we want to turn off the noise. Lastly, we can go over to this FO, which will modulate something in this kind of shape. And let's say we want to FO the volume. Slower. Faster. Less. Let's say we want to go in perfect time. 16th notes. Eighth notes. Do it all the way. You can assign this LFO here to wherever you want, and it can go to two destinations at once. You can even assign the second one to the pitch. Oh boo. Which, you know, if you're moving the pitcher around a buns, that's kind of what you get. Mallet stiffness. You can have two phos going to four total different destinations and really have a really complex and evolving sound. Colision is a really cool, unique to Ableton sound. And I highly recommend that you spend some time with collision and just play with it. Have fun. You don't need to have any specific goal in mind. Just listen to what all the parameters do, and you'll find something amazing. 62. Drum Rack: Get Your Groove On: No producer can go without the drum rack, because the drum rack is how you make beats. Let's dive into the drum rack. Here we're going to pull this drum rack into our session, and you'll see that it's empty. So don't worry. We're gonna fill it up with all of our favorite sounds. I'm going to select this empty space, right click and insert Mdy clip. Now we'll hit shift tabs to get back to this view. The drum rack is a sampler. A sampler needs samples. So what we can do here is we can go to our music production master class, go to samples, drums, and we can pull some samples from here. Or we can pull some samples native from Ableton. You don't only have to pull drum samples. You can put any audio file you want in here, but I use this primarily for drums. So over the psycho simplicity, let's keep it to that for now. Here we'll go to the different kicks. Pull this kick in here. And maybe you wanted some options. Et's pull a snare in here. Let's see. Maybe we even want some high hats. Four and five seem like they go together. And now we've pulled some samples into our drum rack. These can be triggered by a mitt keyboard or a B pad, or even your computer keyboard. But to do that, you need to arm the track first. And you'll notice I hit my keyboard, and we're seeing this is glowing yellow here, meaning I'm in the wrong octa. So you can change the octaves of your computer keyboard with Z and X. So I'm playing too high, it. Still too high. There we go. Now I'm playing. So we'll click in here, and now we're going to start programming. So what we can do is we can draw in a drum part or you could play your drum part, however you want to do it. For now, I'm just going to program this in. And we're going to slo this for now. Let's get our snare. And in this instance, it's distracting for me to hear every time I create eclipse. So I'm going to actually turn this icon off, meaning every time I create a new note, I'm not going to hear it. I'm not sure about this kick. Don't worry, we're going to do a whole section on how to build your own drum beat. I'm just going to do this to show you how the drum rack works. And honestly, let's make this loop a little shorter just to save some time. So I'm going to click in length, hit two, hit enter, and now this is the amount of space that is looping. Now the straw no. That's a little too fast for this. So let's actually change the grid to eighth notes. Let's go up. By the way, if you click one of these piano keys, it selects everything in that same row. And then you can hit up arrow or down arrow to move those notes around. That's kind of nice. Let's turn this down. I'm turning down the velocity of just the high hats. Now we'll turn this back on. We want maybe that on every fourth snare. And then maybe also we can create a 16th note of this. Let's turn this down in the velocity. But first, let's turn this down. So, we just made a little beat in drum rack. Now, we can go over here. And we're triggering these different sounds. And this is usually how I use drum rack. But what's interesting about it is that you can affect all of these sounds individually. Let's say you want to switch this kickout. You could go here and find a different kick and just click on it and suddenly that kick will appear in here without you changing the pattern at all. And we can go over to the kick we're actually using, and we can substitute that one for a different sound. And here's a quick way to audition new sounds. I still like our original kick, but this is a quick way that you can audition different sounds on the fly. So you can use drum rack to audition things. You can also change the samples within drum rack. You could move the start time. Let's go over to our high hat for an easier way to hear this. Let's move this sample 'cause this is our high hat. Let's move it. There. Now the sample is starting after all the fun is happening, so we're not actually hearing anything. Let's cut off the top. That still sounds good. We have the warp mode in case you want to switch it to beats, tones. You can mess with the different qualities that come with each warp mode, and we could pitch things around here. We can transpose it up, down. We could fade it in, fade it out. You can control the volume and the velocity. And what's really cool is that you can drag individual audio effects just to one track. So you can drag this compressor instead of onto every single thing in the drum rack, just to the high hat. So now we're just compressing the high hat in this drum rack, and everything else is free. And you could compress or EQ or do any audio effects you want individually on all of these different tracks. And that's really convenient. You can also save some of your favorite drum racks here by hitting this button. This will then create a save folder here with the title of what you want this drum rack to be called. You could change the name. You can even save your favorite dm racks as a preset, but we'll dive into presets a little bit later. I use drum all the time when I'm making beats. It is my go to sampler. 63. Electric: Crafting the Perfect Keys: Electric pianos are some of the best sounds ever invented in my opinion, and electric is Ableton's electric piano synth. So let's go ahead to these chords here. Solo them. And let's pull down electric and see what we got. Basic keys. De Tuned. That's very cool. Old school. Wy. Hola, Wir. Soft vibes. Ooh. Wir soft piano? Marimba. That's really nice. I'm a huge fan of this sound. Go up here. Maybe even change the octave. Let's duplicate this by clicking here, it Commander Windows D, select this. And then we're going to click in this empty space here, and we're going to hit command or Windows A to select everything, and we're going to hit shift arrow key down. This jumps everything down and octave. That's nice. That's that classic electric pano sound that we love. Let's go here and pull electric on here, and this is what it looks like. This is a pretty basic synth compared to some of the other sins that we have available, and it's meant to emulate a piano. So these presets really go the distance as far as what this synth can do in my opinion. It's always cool to drag some new presets and explore and understand, Okay, what are they doing here? How are they making this sound? But at the end of the day, I usually just use the presets, just because there's not that much to this synth, and you really are going here for that old school electric piano sound, which these presets really, really encapsulate very well. Of course, if you find something you like and you want to tweak it, go for it. For electric, I highly recommend spending some time with the presets. It's super fun to mess around and make your own sounds as well, but I go to the presets basically all the time when I'm using electric, and they sound great. 64. Impulse: Shape Your Percussive Soundscapes: Pulse is the other way you can make drums Alton, and impulse is a great place to start. So let's jump over to our instrument racks here and we'll go over to impulse. Impulse, like drum rack is also a place where you can host your own samples. What I really like about impulse is that they have some amazing preset drum packs ready to go. So let's check out this vintage funky Good T. Drag this here. Select the space, insert My clip, and let's see what we got going. I'm going to solo this. I'm going to turn this on so we can hear every single beat, and This is cool. This has, like, this does have a vince, funky, good time kind of sound. Let's turn this off for a second. Cat kick drum action. And again, let's make this shorter just for time's sake. So we're going to click here, hit two, and we're shortening our loop. I did not mean to turn down the velocity of that so recreate it. Turn this on for a sec. Okay. This might be too fast. Yeah, yeah, Let's switch this to eighth notes. Turn the high head down. And we can have some fun with these toms. So that's kind of cool. And what you can do with impulse is use the templated sounds. And they have different parameters here, like the volume of each sound. So if you turn down the velocity and it wasn't a sign you wanted, you could still turn down the high hat with the volume. And maybe these toms are all just too loud. You can turn down the toms. We turned those down a lot, and you couldn't even really hear them. So that's cool, too. And then each individual slot, you can quickly replace with the hot swab mode just like in drum rack, and you hit the little arrow here, and then you can select a new sound. Let's do it for the kick, which is a little bit more apparent. So you can go through this process really perfecting your drum kit, making sure you have all the best sounds. And you can also tweak the samples here. So, unlike drum rack, which is more visual, here you can still affect the start time. A slow start time is like a slow attack. So the sound is too short, and we're not even getting any of it. We can transpose the kick and go up and down, and we can stretch it. Or shorten it. You had these cool effects here. You can change the delay, the panning, and the volume. This obviously has some automation and tweaks already because Ableton made this drum pack and decided what they thought sounded good. You could make your own impulse rack from scratch that doesn't have any effects on it with your own samples and tweak them however you want to, or you can use an existing Ableton kit and add some of your own samples just to have your own flare. Or you can just use a kit as it is, and I do this all the time because they really sound great. Impulse is maybe the best way to start making beats if you're a brand new producer. When I was first learning, I loved just being able to grab a drum pack that's ready to go and just start making music right away. And as I got a little bit more seasoned, I started being pickier with the exact drum sounds that I wanted, and then I started moving towards drum rack because that's a little bit more customizable in my opinion. But I spent years in impulse and I made some of my favorite music using impulse. 65. Instrument Rack: Organize and Optimize Your Sounds: Now you've already seen the Inspirn rack, you maybe even played with the Inspirnt rack, but today, in this very lesson, I shall declare that we will finally understand the Instrument rack. Let's go over to instruments, and we will open up the Instrument rack. So let's look at some of these presets, because these really have the best presets in the game if you ask me. So we're going to go to our pad. And let's go to Pads. And let's try some of these out. That's pretty cool. Basic pad. Different kind of basic pad. Slow moving pad. Sandman. Yeah, we like that. Band the man. Very extreme. It also has some great piano and keys. You'll notice it has some of these e pianos that you might have recognized, and you might also recognize the Sandman. So keep that in the back of your mind because I'm about to blow your mind. Just kidding. I'm gonna explain why we're seeing some of the similar presets that we've seen in other since so far. Oregon transistor. Some strings. Really, all of these presets are really amazing here in the Instrument Rack. And the Instrument rack is usually the first place I go. When I'm searching for a new sound just to play an idea or get inspired, I sip through these presets here first because these are the most complex sounds, and I'm about to explain why. So why are these sounds so complex? Why does this look like this? What's happening here, and I will go back to pads, and I'm gonna show you the Sandman again, because you'll remember the sandman from earlier. Now, what's happening is we have these different knobs, but we don't see the sandman. So what happens is the instrument rack is essentially a synth, which is one of the different synths in Ableton, one of these synths that's pulled into an instrument rack, and it's coupled with some audio effects. So, effectively, we have just this collision synth. But what we've done here is we've added some audio effects, what Ableton has done. They've added some audio effects to that sound to enhance the sound. And then we've gone over here and created macro so that we can easily customize the juiciest parts of the sound. So that's why I love the Instrument rack because they're complex sounds. They're great sys that were made with great audio effects, and then the macros that are really easy to tweak the best parts of those sounds. So this is why I love the Instrument rack. Let's go ahead and pull a brand new instrument rack right here. So an instrument rack on its own, has got not a lot going on. So let's go here, and let's say we made an analog synth that we really love. And for the purposes of this, I'm just going to pull in this muted piano. But let's say we took the time to make a sent that we liked. Now the instrument rack consists of, well, this piano. And then let's say let's go to some effects here. We'll go to drive in color, and we'll go to a bit warmer. And we'll turn this drive up. And now we're going to hit this top button here, which is the Macros. How do we add a macro? So you find a parameter that you want to tweak, and let's say I like tweak in the drive. You right click it, and then you click Map to Macro one. Suddenly, here's our macro. And we can easily switch this like this. You can tweak literally anything that you can move. So let's say you want to move this frequency. Map to macro two. You can add more macros with this button. You can subtract macros with that button. And then you can right click here and automate, and you can automate this macro. So Instrument racks are very complex sounds where you can layer audio effects, you can layer synths, and you can combine sounds to get something unique and something super interesting. And I love using the Instrument rack, just because this workflow here of just having the macros, of the juiciest parts of the sound that I want to tweak, and I want to automate just staring at me. They're just begging for me to automate them, and they're begging for me to use them. And this is another thing that encourages some more interesting mic at just purely by existing here as a workflow. The Instrument Rack is my favorite place to go when I'm looking for new sounds in Ableton, and I hope that you have some fun finding the amazing sounds in the Instrument rack and make some amazing sounds of your own that live in the Instrument racks. 66. Operator: FM Synthesis Essentials: Operator is an amazing Syntha Ableton, and we are going to show you how it's done. So let's go on to our plucky sound. Let's go over to instruments, and we'll pull out the operator hello. So, as I like to do, we're just gonna jump into these presets, and we're going to see what this sounds like. So let's go and do this Belfin pad. That's interesting. Detuned broad pad. That's cool. Sustained dynamic and harmonic. Ooh, busy. That's cool. Grow and shine. Sunrise waters, huh? That would probably be better on an actual longer sound. So let's just audition that on our pad. That's pretty cool. We also have base. We can try different bass sounds here. Acid base. Mellow base. Burned base. That's cool. Basic wash base. We'll go to here. Oh, that's cool. Actually, let's turn these bees to seas. That sounds cool, and there's a lot of others to play with. Brass. Hi, honestly, kind of like that vibe for this. That's obviously way too loud, but that sounds cool. Components. These are more basic type, sound effects because operator is not limited to simply sins. We can actually do effects. Here's a wind machine. Swishy. That's pretty cool. So you can make your own audio effects with operator. Guitar and plucked. So we explore the different plucks here, FM star. Maletz. They have an other category, which they weren't sure what these were. World Space pad. Ooh. Piano and keys. We have synth rhythmic, which we'll go through really briefly Voices. Choir. Oh, pan flute. Let's try that. There are too many amazing presets to go through even half of the presets that you want to be using with operator. So I highly recommend to just make a habit of going into operator, find a new preset, and explore it. Understand what makes it tick, why it sounds cool. And then in the next lesson, we're going to go through the functionality of operator. 67. Operator: FM Synthesis Essentials Part 2: Hello operator. Operator, P two, we're going to go through the functions and parameters of operator. So here we have our first oscillator, let's turn the other ones off, and we can remember oscillators from some of the past synths. An oscillator is something that generates sound and an oscillator has different waves. But this time we can visualize these waves a little bit differently. This is what a sine wave looks like. This is what a saw wave looks like. And this is what a square wave looks like. Triangle and noise. So another thing you can do in operators, you can draw in your own wave. And you can affect the amount of hailers you have to draw with this. So, it's interesting to be able to interface with an audio wave this way. You can, of course, just choose from one of these preset waves, or you can draw your own custom wave, which is pretty cool. Now we'll go over to envelope, and this is the shape of our sound. This is an open sound, closed. Here's a small sound. Here's the attack. Taking a while to kick in. Fading in. And here is it as soon as it stops, it's gonna stop really quick. It is almost a dead stop. Here it's going to drag on a little bit. There, it didn't even stop at all before the next note came in. I so smart. You can affect all these parameters down here, the attack, delay, release, sustained, but I really do like to play with the shapes when I can actually touch them and move them around because it's pretty intuitive to me this way about what I'm going for. So you can also turn on this AFO here. Which give you the sound some wiggle. This is the amount. And you can have it wiggle the pitch of Oscillator one or Oscillator ABD, or you can assign it to the filter. But in this case, I have to turn the filter to really hear it. We can go over here to Pits envelope down. Have it go down to go up to down. Cool, but you probably don't want that on every single hit, but as the first hit or opening of a song, that's interesting. You can have glide which will glide from note to note. That'll be more apparent in a part that's not block chords. Let's pull a new instance of operator down here, and we have different oscillators to work with. So here's our basic sine wave. So let's turn on Oscillator two. Now we can move this filter down. We could change the wave form of Oscillator two. Let's try so. Try to change the two. E fine tuning. You could add a different oscillator, as well. Very complex sound now. And even another oscillator. Let's have this on a sign wave. This is a pretty complicated sound now. You could draw on your custom wave for any of these. I could turn on your o. Oh. You can move your filter around. Your pitch envelope. Spread which makes things sound wide. The transpose, which is the global transpose of this whole thing should be down in Octave. Well, down in Octave would be Maxi -12. Maybe this pitch envelope. Look ale extreme. You can mess with the time. That has a trippy sound. The tone. The volume. And the routing. So right now, the routing through each other in a straight line, but what if we wanted a different shape? Change the tone. Two. Very different. The way when both of these oscillators go through those two or when they're in a square. The very different outbu can change the amount of voices. And so much more. There is so much to operate, and it is so much fun. The most important thing is that you do have fun with it. You don't have to go in there thinking that you already understand how everything works. You just want to use your ears, remember how it makes you feel. Notice how it sounds, just try something. If it doesn't work, just go ahead and restart, pull a new operator in and just start from scratch, because it's really important just to explore and to get into the synthesis where it's debilitating, but use it as something fun to enhance your creativity, and you can always go through the amazing presets and start there if you're unsure. 68. Sampler: Take Control of Your Samples: Now we're going to talk about Ableton sampler. So let's go into instrument racks and find the sampler and drag it onto its own mit track. Now, the sampler looks like this, and without a sample, it's not working. So we need to find a sample to use in the sampler. You can do so here in Ableton. And let's drag that in. Now we have a sample in our sampler. And now we can play that note with our keyboard. So the sampler instantly turns something into a synth, essentially. Try a different note. And that's pretty cool. And then we have all these different things that we can tweak about it. So let's go here. You can move the start time. The end time, making it shorter. We can affect the sustained mode. This is like a loop type mode. And I just loops and retriggers on its own. There's this mode. Which is cool too. It's another loop mode that goes backwards and forwards or the regular one shot mode. I usually use the one shot mode, but sometimes it's cool to experiment with these other modes. I'm just holding the keyboard down. I'm not retriggering, and it just keeps playing over and over. So that's pretty cool. We can reverse it. That takes a long time to get there. Obviously, you'd want to move this. You can unreverse it. You can snap it to the grid, not to the grid. You can detune it. You can turn it up the volume. The panting. You can go here and you can effect it with this envelope shape, just like in some of the other sense. We can have filters. The filter envelope. You can even add some distortion here. You can even go to modulation. You can go to LFO. And what do you want the LFO to effect? Well, let's do the filter. Or let's do the pitch. Or the volume. So there's a lot of functionality here. We also have this pitch and oscillator, so we can go ahead and turn this oscillator on, turn up the volume. And this is adding an oscillator on top of it. So we're adding a sound wave now. Saw wave. And this is drastically changing our sound. You can also just use drum hits here with the sampler. And you can maybe do something freaky to them. Reverse it. Do this mode. And that's pretty crazy sound coming from a kick drum. Most of the time, I just want to take a nice sample or one shot that I have and turn it into a playable synth. And that's what sampler is the best for. It's important to know all of these different functionalities and possibilities with sampler. But like I said, I usually just find a sample that's like, Oh, that's a really cool sound. I wish that was a whole synth, boom, you throw it in the sampler, and it is a whole synth. Of course, you can tweak things, reverse things, pitch things, oscillate things. And just like with everything in Ableton, it is fully 100% customizable. 69. Sampler: Take Control of Your Samples Part 2: Sampler has some amazing presets as well, and now let's dive in and show you some of them. Here, let's go over to our bass sound, and we're going to go and audition some sampler basses. Bite sized base. Good old it's fat base. Saw filtered. They have pads. Ooh. Spooky. And we have effects. That's pretty cool. Low foo. Interesting. Saw percussion. Rezo clicks. That's a pretty crazy sound. We have fat, heavy drone pad. Seashore. I do really like Seashore. Synth Keys. Gliding s on base tools. Rhythmic sense. And templates. Now, the templates are just here waiting for your own sample. So we can pull one of these samples in here and see what it sounds like. And so on and so forth. I love the different presets and sampler, and I encourage you to explore them and find your favorites. 70. Simpler: Streamlined Sampling Made Easy: Where would we be without the simpler? The simpler is a simpler sampler. And I know that almost sounds like a rhyme, but the simpler really is a smaller, more broken down sin of the sampler, so let's dive into it. Here, the simpler has its own amazing presets. We can listen to some of these. We can listen to their pads. The rhythmic sense. And that's pretty cool. You can also just drag a plain sampler here and drag your own sample in here. And it has a lot of the same functionality as the sampler. It is a little bit easier to use and a little bit less complicated. So we have our different modes here from classic to one shot, to slice. And if we go to classic, we can turn on loop. Which will create some kind of loop. You can samp it to the grid. We have the volume here, the frequency of a filter. This you can tell is a very high pitched sound, and we're not hearing much of it. But then when you turn the filter down, we're getting rid of all the high frequencies, so we don't even hear any of it. Let's pit this down a little. So now we can actually hear what we're doing. The resonance. We can change the amount of voices, and we can change the attack decay sustain and release. Slower attack. Get rid of that clunkiness at the beginning, turn it down because it's distorting. Sustain decay, and release. Finally, we can change the warp mode, like we've been doing, Warp here, you can go to complex. You can go to texture, and so on and so forth. Simpler is nice when you just want a really quick sampler and you don't want to deal with all the different functionalities that sampler has to offer. And I think the layout is actually a little bit cleaner. So that's when I go for simpler. M. 71. Ableton 12: Drum Rack and Simpler Upgrade: Searching for similar sounds function in the browser made its way to the drum rack and the simpler, which helps keep your flow state going when you're using the simpler or the drum rack. So let's dive right in. So if you pull up a drum rack here, and let's grab this golden kit. So here we have all the sounds that came with the golden kit drum rack. Hey. If you hit this button here, now all of these can be swapped out by clicking through these different arrows here. If you want to go back to a sound you had before, simply click here. If you want to switch out the entire kit, you can use the big arrows up here. Now, the whole drum kit has changed. If you want to change it again, click here to listen. So here you can quickly sift through completely different drum kits in case all of a sudden you weren't feeling the choices you initially made. Or let's go back to the beginning by clicking this back arrow. Now we have our original kit, but let's say we click here. Maybe this kick drum sound that is mixed with the high hat doesn't sound as cool as we thought. We can click here and just audition different kicks. Maybe that's more the vibe. To me, that actually does sound better. Now, let's say we like our kick drum, but we're not that into anything else. You can click this button, lock the kick drum, and just switch out everything else in the entire drum kit. To me, that sounds much better, but let's just click through a few different options to see what we have to work with. It's keeping that same kick that we like, but switching everything else out. Of course, if you decide you like the high hat, we could lock that as well and just keep switching everything else out. This obviously makes finding the exact perfect sounds super quick when you're working with drum rack. Now let's pull up a simpler. So I'm going to drag here this simpler, and we have that same looking functionality available right down here. Let's say this is close, but not quite what we're looking for. We can click through some different options here. That's pretty cool. And I like that one. Of course, if after all that, you decided you like the first one, you can click back here. You can also click the Hot swap mode if you want to decide which sound you want to swap this out with instead of having Ableton suggest some options for you. You could click this Worley piano, and there you go. Or you could use these tags to decide, Okay, I want something analog, and I want it to be housy. And maybe you want to base all of a sudden, so let's try this. You can even sort things by key if you've decided to tag your own sounds this way, or Ableton has pre tagged the key for most of its sounds. These upgrades to the drum rack and the simpler our next level. I use the functionality all the time, and it really does make making music so much more enjoyable. 72. Tension: Create Expressive String Sounds: L et's jump into tension, which is Ableton's string emulator. Here, instruments will grab an instance of tension, throw it on here, and instantly, we have a lot going on. So, as always, let's go through some of these amazing presets. I love rhythmic always. That's really cool. That's super cool in a different way. That's a nice thick chord. Strings. That's pretty nice, too. And I bet you that this might even sound nice with this arpeggio. That's pretty cool. Malets. In my favorite guitar and plucked. Clean basic guitar. Let's maybe even pitch this up a little bit. Oh. That sounds really cool. And for those of you who maybe need a little bit of a reminder, if you click inside the empty space here, and then you hit Commander Windows A, selects everything inside that clip. Then if you hold down shift and hit up arrow or down arrow, it jumps all the information up or down in octave. So if you want to do everything up and octave, or down an octave, it's a really quick hack to do that. In the next lesson, we're going to be going over tensions, functions, and parameters. So I can't wait to see you there. 73. Tension: Create Expressive String Sounds Part 2: Tensions parameters and functionality. If that's what you're in the market for, you're in the right place. So let's dive in to tensions parameters and functions and buttons, and let's go. So here we're in our pad, and we're going to drag our instance of tension, so we just have a brand new instance. Now, as with everything, you turn off the excitter, this acts as the oscillator, and without it, no sound. Turn it on. We got sound. We can change these different parameters here, which is essentially like our waves, saw wave, square wave, sinewave, except for here, it's Bow hammer and plectro. Bouncing. Hammer. Boat. So each of these actually have a pretty distinct and unique sound. You can then affect the stiffness. The velocity position and the dampening. You can turn on the dampener and change the mass. We can go to termination. Pickup, adding a lot of pluck and body. Do you want a piano body, guitar body, violin body, or generic? We have our vibrato here. And we can mess with the string. So let's see what we want to do, increase the ratio in harmonics, dampening, and decay. Our brato is really kicking in there. Let's get rid of our decay. Make it wave pluck here. Turn down the ratio. In harmonics. No, I like it like that. Dampening. And we also have our fixed position. Which I like? I like how that sounds. We can hop over to the filter section, change the kind. And you can turn on the filter envelope to change the journey. You can turn on the Fo. We can change the octave up two, up one, the semitones, down 12, which remember is the same as an octave. We can have it on Unison mode, two voices, four voices, detune, detuned. The delay between them. And this is essentially simulating having two violins and that they're playing really tightly together, or a little sloppy. That's too sloppy. But it can sound pretty big, especially if we have four of them. But then that sounds too bad. Turn down the D tune, and that sounds pretty good. And we can turn on the portamento, which is a glide between notes. You can tell it's sort of gliding into the note here, and we're distorting, so let's turn this down. But let's check it out on our arpeggio. Now, it's taking so long to glide from note to note. It's kind of inharmonic, but it sounds cool. Turn us all the way down. And it sounds normal here. So that's the glide function. Tension is one of my favorite sins in Ableton. It's very unique and you can get some really, really cool sounds. So I encourage you to just explore and have fun and see what you can find in tension. 74. Wavetable: Explore the Power of Synthesis: This lesson, we're going to talk about the wave table in At. Let's go over to Wave table, drag it on over to our pad, and let's give it a listen. Turn this off. The default pad is pretty nice, but let's see what some of the presets have to offer. These are really nice, slightly more modern sounding sounds to my ear. Here we have our guitar plucked. Water pluck. Males. But that's a really cool sound. Fizz bells, Oh. That's nice. Pcosive. Well, this is a kick drum, so let's try this fluffy sap. That's funny. We have our piano and keys. Strings. Synth keys. Oh. He so good. That's pretty chaotic, but it's called chaotica. Who would have thought? Alright. Angry management. Maybe not. We're getting Cynthia. Let's go to Juno. Hell, yeah. Cynth rhythmic. What do we got? And it has some amazing bass sound. So let's just listen to a few of those. Heavy. Funky Grim. Very deep. Ooh. Nice. This does have some of those grittier EDM style bases. Wave table is one of the new additions in Ableton, and I really like how it sounds, and it sounds very high quality and very modern to me. So I love using wave table. 75. Wavetable: Explore the Power of Synthesis Part 2: Explore the parameters functions and capabilities of wavetable. Let's jump right into this lesson. Here we're going to build it on our pad sound, so let's drag a new instance of wavetable down here. We have our basic shapes, and this is our first oscillator. We can scroll through our different waves here. O here or here. We can lay our oscillators on themselves. We can go to more elsa. Oh. And you can tell by just selecting the wave tables that there's so many different options just there just to begin with. You can tell that this synth is a very serious synth, and that there's a lot going on here. We can add a sub octave below the synth. To add some umph, to add some base, to add some depth to the sound. You could pitch the whole sound down an octave. You can also choose waves this way. Finally, after the endless amount of options of just getting your wave table selected, you can jump over to the filter. Turn of the resonance. Bah, bah, bah. Resonance gives it a little bit of a peak, a little bit of peak to your filter. You can change to a high pass. Band pass. But Lowpass is really the classic filter. You can even add two filters. But a high pass and a lopas kind of make a bandpass, which is this shape. So let's turn off the second filter. But these would be the knobs you would control the filter with. Next, we go to the amp, which is, again, the volume envelope. We know about our slow attacks. We know about a big sound, small sound. We know about a really short decaying sound. And a kind of regular sound. We have different envelopes and a LO. We can assign that pho to different things in the synth. So let's assign it here to pitch. So that sounds absolutely ridiculous. Let's assign it to the m. Let's go slow down our pho, so it's not just go crazy. Oh. And that would be something fun to automate. I'm getting distracted, but that's so much fun. That's so cool. You can assign the amp, the envelopes, and the LFOs to a variety of different things here. So let's say you go to envelope two, and you're gonna make this shape here. Right now, it's not affecting anything, but you go into the matrix, and you will affect now the pitch. So now the journey of the pitch goes on this journey, which is, like, exactly what it Sounds like it is doing. Opposite, You can affect the amp. And what's happening is that because this just stops, the amp is just being cut down completely here. So if you wanted to open up the sound, you open it like this. Let's do the tack. It's going to take a really long time. After the notes triggered to go all the way here. And that's when we finally hear the sound. So the matrix is where you assign all of these different LFOs and envelopes. So you can have two envelopes, two Os, and an unlimited feeling amount of different wave tables to choose from. You can even distort your filters and different kinds of filters, and drive, add some drive here. This is distortion. You can turn on the glide, turn on the voices, the Unison, you can do shimmer. Go amount. This just makes it sound super wide and thick, which is really, really nice. Wave table is a very complicated synth, and it will take a lot of time just exploring to really figure it all out. But now that you know the basic parameters, go in and find some unique wave tables to choose from. And spend time doing the interactive drag mode because when you're looking at the names, that's one thing. But when you're changing the shape and you can kind of see it, it gives you more of a feeling for what it's doing. And then just really dive into the presets, find the ones you like, recreate them, deconstruct them. The wave table is so powerful and so much fun, and I can't wait to hear all that you create with this amazing synth. 76. Ableton 12: Roar: New saturator in town, and its name is RR. If we go over to audio effects, we find the new member of the team the dynamic saturator, RR, which has some incredible presets. I've pulled some here already to demonstrate some different capabilities. So as we can see here, we have a really nice warm sound, and I really like what they've done here. This routing is what makes this stand out the most to me because you can choose between different routings from single serial parallel multiband mid side and feedback. Each one of these has a drastically different sound. Here we have the direct version, and then here's the feedback. That would have kept building, obviously. We can go to multi band, which then we can just saturate differently the lows, the mids, and the highs. And what I think is really interesting is this mid side. I pulled up the preset they made. This saturates the sides more than the mid to make the sound come to life in a stereo environment. Versus Yes, we're getting some volume, but we are getting more stereo width because we're saturating the sides more than the middle of the sound, which is really, really cool for just adding some life in your mix. I think a lot of these presets sound great. I would go ahead and explore. These are the basic knobs for how saturation you want. And then the amounts over here. You can affect the frequency. And definitely explore these different routings. If, for example, you know, you just want to saturate the middle of your sound, but you want to leave the lows in the highs of, you can do that. Or you want to just saturate the lows. We can turn off the other options. Or maybe you just wanted to saturate the hives. Alternatively, you can have all three going, and you can choose between different kinds of saturators if you want the lows to be saturated with a soft shaper. The mids could have maybe this tube preamp. And maybe the highs, you want to sound like they're going through a bit crusher. That's a little extreme. But what's exciting is that you can play around with the different kinds of saturators here and affect each band differently. Obviously, you could do the same with mid side if you wanted the sides to have more of a tube sound and the mids to have maybe a soft sign. You can also open up this modulation matrix. Click over to Matrix, and we can see that our POs are moving here. You can change the shape, the rate. Morph the shape here, smooth it out a bit. We have different modes, if you want it to be synth triplets, dotted, 16th notes, for example. Here we have our envelope. I'm just changing the attack and release settings, and we have our noise mozurus here. You can change the different modes. Here in the matrix, you can affect the percentage. If you go back here, how much the LO is affecting. We have the shaper amount that just showed up because I moved this dials. So let's go ahead and automate this. So now we're effectively modulating the amount, and you can click through the different tools here and assign them to the different parts of your matrix. So I just slow down all of the mod sources, which means that the wave of distortion will grow much more gradually, which makes a little bit more sense to my ear. We can also experiment with this FM mode, which just gives some added texture. To me, that adds just some more emotion to the distortion. This sounds really cool. It does have, like, an nostalgic sound almost. And lastly, we have a compressor. It's activated when it lights up here. And this is in case you want to balance out some of the added distortion and maybe volume that you're getting, you can turn on the compressor and maybe turn down the output volume if you need to. I really like what they've done with this saturator, and I've been using the midside quite a lot to give some added dimension to my sounds. 77. Loops & Samples: Curate To Perfection: Can't talk about the sounds of Ableton without talking about loops and samples. You just can't. So in this lesson, we're going to talk about loops and samples. By now, we're familiar with the samples section here in Ableton. So let's go and explore it a little bit more. We're going to type in BPM because when you do that, it finds samples that are loop to a certain BPM already. F minor, let's drag this in here. And let's listen to this. Maybe we don't like that. Let's try this one. That's cool. So samples are really that easy. You can just drag a sample down and start using it. But let's say you want to take it to the next level. That's fun. Let's do this sample with these new drums that we made. They're ready to go. There's already music here, and it already sounds good. That's how easy you can get making music with loops and samples. But you can also use loops and samples to enhance the music that you already have. And if you wait for your sample while this blue icon is on, you can hear the sample over the beat that's playing. So this was my favorite, so we can drag this in and listen to it. Wow. So we just enhanced the groove of our track by just throwing in this loop here this sample. And you can use samples and loops to start songs from scratch, or you can find an existing beat and just add a little bit of flare when you just need, You know what, I just need to pick up the groove a little bit here. You can add some drums, you can add some sens, you can add some guitars or whatever you're looking for. And Ableton has an amazing sample bank here for you. My favorite part about music in the 21st century is that you can play something live. You can resample it into an audio file and then tweak it, and then you can add some samples to it. So you're really doing the whole spectrum of music creation to find something truly unique. 78. Audio & MIDI Effects: Expand Your Creative Palette: Welcome to the audio effects chapter. Here, we're going to be going through a little more in depth into audio effects. So audio effects. We've used some of these already. We've talked about reverb, delay, EQ, compressing, distortion, chorus, phasing, tremolo, and utilities, but we're going to go through a little bit more in depth into all of these to make sure that you really understand them. So audio effects ableton live in the audio effects region. So you go here, and we have all these different effects to pick from. Delay and loop is where your delays live. Drive in colors, where your distortion lives. Dynamics are where your compressors live. EQ and filters are where your EQs and filters live. Modulators. We have pitch and modulation, where you can find your chorus and your phaser. We have reverb and resonance where you can find your reverbs and utilities where you can find your utilities. So we're going to go through and demystify audio effects at Ableton. So I'll catch you in the next lesson. 79. Reverb: Craft Immersive Sonic Spaces: L et's talk about reverb. Like we've said, you usually want to use reverb on sends, you want to be mindful of the dry wet. And then the tweakable parameters really are the size, decay, room type, and low and high cut. So here we have a piano, and let's go ahead and drag a reverb onto this send here. The audio effects. We go to reverb and resonance. We have different reverbs available in Ableton, and I encourage you to try all of them. Here I have my classic EQ. You can do this with the EQ eight, 200 to 7,000, like always. You can try this hybrid reverb. You can try this regular reverb. Let's go ahead and maybe find a medium room. Now, we'll send our piano all the way so we can really hear the reverb. Increase a the K time in size. A little less. And now let's send our drums to the rever just so that we can really hear what we're doing. Foo Foo So you can hear how you can really tweak the size of your reverb to get the right size room that's like affecting your song in the way that you want. Now, remember, we don't want to put reverb on our kick drums, so we're just really doing this to hear the size of the reverb. If you really wanted to do reverb on the drums, you'd probably duplicate the drums, do a high pass, and low pass, separating the kick from the rest of them. We don't need to do all that right now. I just want to show you how you will pull a reverb onto a send, and you just start tweaking it to ear with something sent all the way, so you can hear the quality of the reverb that you're working with. And then once you're dial in, you want to pull back the send. And that's nice. It's actually just giving some good space to our drums, some good dimension. And that's really what you want reverb to do. You can try starting with a different preset. This large space chorus has a really huge reverb sound. And this is the air of, like, a really big space that is behind all this, which maybe is what you want or maybe really isn't. So you can try starting with different presets, getting something that's close to the vibe that you want, and then go tweak from there. You can try this hybrid instead. Same knobs here, size. Okay? Algorithm. I like dirt Hall better. Damn thing. And when you're tweaking something that you don't know what the parameter does yet, you just move it all the way and then all the way and just do the big extreme movements to really try to catch your ear onto what the thing is actually doing. Oh. Remember, pre delay is the amount of the sound that cuts through before the rever kicks in. So the longer the pre delay, like your sound is hitting the dry hit comes through, and then the reverb comes in. This is nice for letting the first part of the vocal or like the hit of the drum come and clean without it getting drowned in reverb. And that actually sounds. There are a lot of amazing ways to use reverb in Ableton. And I highly suggest just finding a cool preset and tweaking from there. 80. Delay: Add Depth and Movement: Can't talk about audio effects without talking about delay or echo. So let's dive into delay. Delay like Reverb wants to live on a send. You want to be mindful of the dry wet. The tweakable parameters are time, feedback. You might want to re Q your delay. And there's also texture and quality. So let's dive write it. So here we have our classic EQ 200, 7,000. You can do this with the EQ eight. I have I'm going to delete Echo boy, which is my favorite delay, but it's not combinatd with Ableton, and Ableton's delays do sound amazing. So let's go ahead and find delay here. Clean delay, and we'll do this eighth note. Now, let's send this panel all the way so we can really hear this. Turn the dry wet up. And we can hear it. No delay. With delay. Let's change the pattern. This is longer. Here is a different rhythm. Here is two different rhythms. The amount of feedback? Which is just how many delays really are there? No feedback just means there's really gonna be like one delay, and then a lot means there's gonna be many, many delays. M You can filter it. Just the high end, the low end. And really tweak this to get the right sound for you. You can even try a different preset. Here it's on Ping Pong mode, which is going to go left, right, left, right. You can change the rhythm here. And if this is clicked, when you click a rhythm here, and this is clicked in the middle. When you change the rhythm here, it will change these together. If you unclick it, they can move separately. You might want to delay the time a little. Or maybe you don't want to delay this time. So delay is really, really cool for adding some subtle space to things. It's more subtle than reverb. And a lot of the times they blend better into the mix without adding a huge wash of reverb. So sometimes when you're like, Oh, I want a little dimension, I want a little space to something. Grab a delay instead of a reverb and see if you can get the delay to give you the space you're wanting instead of adding a whole reverb, because the end of the day, reverb takes a lot of space, and sometimes you just don't have the room for that. Ableton has a lot of amazing delays. I'm not going to go through all of them right now, but I do encourage you to pull in some different presets and start exploring and seeing what sounds good to you. Delays have the function of giving your track echo. So the different delays in Ableton just have different approaches to doing that. If you just go ahead and explore some of the presets, you'll start understanding what kind of echos, what kind of delays call you, and what do you like best to use in your music. 81. EQ: Sculpt Your Sound to Perfection: L et's explore EQs and filters. Filters are basically EQs that just run a big old high pass or low pass. Filters have some different functions, which we'll talk about. Some common EQ frequencies that you might want to think about are 60 Hertz, 100 hertz, 1,000, 200010000. Don't worry if you don't remember these, you can always download these slides to reference whenever you want. We will talk about shelves. We'll talk about the higher you are, the narrower the Q and vice versa. And just to remind you that too high end can sound cheap and might not always be what you want. So, let's go ahead and reach for an EQ eight. Here we go. And we have our EQ. We're pulling it on our piano. Remember, an EQ is a tool that affects the frequencies. So we have different kinds of points here. This is a low pass, which just globally brings upward down anything below this point. So let's bring down everything below one K. Let's bring everything up. At this down. B it's like this. And this is probably how I would actually treat this. Now we also have a hot pass. You could also have these bells. So these are points that are more shape like this, that you can affect the e, which is the width of them and move these points around if you want to just kind of generally boost this middle or pull this part down, but maybe a little bit more narrow. And in general, the higher you are, the more narrow you can be, and the lower you are, the wider you can be. This is just in general because lower notes take up more space, so naturally, you'd want to affect probably the whole note, which means you're going to be a little bit wider. You can also turn these into low pass or high pass, which makes them very much just like filters, but we'll dive into filters in a second. Here we're going to roll off all the high frequencies above this point. Now we're going to do the opposite. And we're really tweaking and shaping our sound. 60 hertz is something you want to pay attention to for your kick drums because 60 hertz has a lot of power on kick drums. 40 or 60 hertz is usually where the really kind of big feeling kick drum low end comes from. We can already see this has 60 hertz. Or a little bit more like there. Maybe you want to add a little bit more umph, or maybe it has enough, and you want to take some down, but 60 or 40 hertz is important for kick drums. 100 hertz is a good place because I do tend to high pass a lot of things at 100 hertz. One K is important because it can sound powerful or make something sound a little less powerful, so a boost at one K or a dip at one K. When something doesn't sound right, sometimes I reach for one K and see if that does anything. I also tend to high shelf my vocals at around two K, and then ten K is a really important point because a little boost at ten K usually really calls attention. Usually really perks the ear. Let's quickly dive in to filters. We'll grab this auto filter. Now, as you'll notice, if we turn this EQ to a low pass filter, and turn everything else off. This looks kind of similar, and they are. They're effectively doing the same thing. The auto filter just has a little bit of a character sound. It has some more functionality. You can add some wobble to it. You can distort it. Ad. Change the filter type. Turn this off. Turn this on. So I reach for filters when I need to do a global high passer lowpass. It has a little bit of a character sound that I like. So I tend to reach for the auto filter when I do want that big high passer lowpass. I tend to reach for the EQs when I'm doing some more fine tuned tweaking, sculpting, or sound design. 82. Compression: Tighten and Enhance Your Mix: Here we are in the land of compression. So let's dive right in. Compression. You want to choose your compressor because each compressor has a slightly different sound. We'll talk about soft clips, when in doubt, compress lightly, but do compress, and I'll explain the logic behind that. There's such things as parallel compression. Presets are your friend, but you always want to tweak something to be right for your song. You can use multiple compressors to make sure that one compressor doesn't work too hard. There are multi band compressors and limiters. So we've gone through the basics of compression as far as pulling down the threshold, setting your attack and release, and kind of finding a sound that works for your track. So let's go ahead and talk about some of these other compressors, because you do also have this glue compressor, and the glue compressor works in the same way, but the parameters look a little different. Still the same. Quick, slow release, quick, slow, this would be medium, this is medium. This would be. Turn this off with the threshold. O. But this has something called soft clip, which sounds particularly good on drums. So Maybe, let's go ahead and throw this on the drums, and I'll show you what this means. It means if it clips, it distorts a little bit, but this kind of distortion just sounds good. Here. We're getting some of that soft clip. And it just helps the drums just sound good, and we love how this sounds. One thing that you can do with compressors, you can get a sound that you like, but you can also use them in parallel on a send. So let's go ahead and put this compressor on a send real quick. Turn this off and send this all the way. What this allows you to do is maybe get a really aggressive compressed so that you normally wouldn't go for. But in this case, sounds really good because you have the raw track that is uncompressed with the track that is very, very compressed. You can also try this drum bus here and try that on parallel, which is kind of a distortion and compressor combined. You can use some of these presets to affect the amount of distortion with these knobs, the amount of low one with this one, how much hit there is. The transient is the first part like the stick hitting the drum there is. So if you want it to cut through, your mix more, you want more transient. So you can use your compressor on the track itself, which I do recommend. But sometimes you want to compress things a little bit more and you don't want to suck the life out of it. So that's a good time to reach for some parallel compression, and we do this a lot for drums. So you can have your compressor actually on the send, and now we're doing some parallel compression. So you would obviously set to a level that you like. And then pull down the send and find something that worked well for your song. Next, we can talk about multi band compression. Now, multi band compression is right here in this multi band dynamics. A lot of people really like this OTT pset, and it kind of got a little bit of a fa thing going on. The OTT is famous. So let's dive into the OTT. Let's put it on the piano. So multi band dynamics, we're compressing things at different rates here, and we're choosing the frequencies with these knobs here. So what that means is we've separated our sound into three parts, 250 above from below 250 to above 88 and then 88 and below. So we can change these around. So now this middle part is 250-300. We can compress this less. Compress it more. Let's compress the low end more. Let's compress the middle little bit more. Let's let the high end breathe. Pull this part up. So this is a way to shape your sound. And one way you might want to use this is a guitar, let's say an acoustic guitar that has a really clay, bright high end that's just competing with the vocal. You could compress the high end by pulling this down a lot. You can maybe tweak it, so it's really only just the highs and compressing just the highs, without compressing the whole sound, we'll let the body of the guitar kind of flow without the top of it being overbearing. So Multi band compression actually has many uses from vocals to guitars, to drums and everything. And I highly recommend you reach for your multiband compressor and start understanding how it works. Presets are always a good place to start. You can always just grab the generic template here. Set your points. Let's say you want 200. You could decide on your points based on your EQ even. You could go here to your EQs and filters. You could look at this, be like, Okay, it seems like 100 and below, seems like a logical place to split up the sound because there's another point. And then maybe you want to isolate like this. You're like, Okay, so it seems kind of like from 220 and above another point. And so you could do that. You can do multiple compressors in a row. Compressors don't like to work too hard, and sometimes it doesn't sound good when you push them too much. So if you use a compressor, maybe you want to also layer it with a second compressor or a different compressor. Like you can use your main compressor just to give the sound a little bit of a hug, but it's not quite doing it for you, then you can layer on a multiband compressor as well, or maybe a limiter, or you can go for the glue compressor, or you can just layer two of the same compressors, either right next to each other or with some space in the chain if there's some other audio effects in between. Why you'd want to do this is because you don't want any one compressor to work too hard because they just sound better when they're not compressing too. Let's talk about side chain compression. So if you open this little window here, you have the side chain option, and then you can turn on side chain and select input from something. Use side chain needs the input from a different source set. If we select from our drums, then the compressor will be triggered by the drums. So why would you want this? Let's pull down a threshold. Oh. Now, our piano is pulsing to the drums. Every time the drums are hitting, the piano is ducking in volume. So if you side chain pretty aggressively, it will give a pumping feeling, which used to be a very popular technique in house music. People still use it, but it's not like the main sound anymore. But what you can do is have your drums trigger and make your other elements groove to them, which serves a double function. Every time the drum hits, the rest of the track ducts, which creates more space for the drums. So the drums are cutting through the mix more, and then also gives some more life and some more groove to your other part. So it's really kind of a win win scenario. You can use side chain compression with elements that are in the song, but you can also use side chain compression with elements that are muted. This is a ghost side chain. So let's say this whole drum hit here is a little too much, and we actually want to side chain to this second thing I just created, which is only the kick drum, but it's turned off. You can see it's still giving a signal. But we're not hearing it in the mix, so we're just hearing the ghost of that kick drum, giving the side chain something to do. We can use this in faster music, or slower music. And it's really that pumping sound. I hope you can see how you can use this in very creative ways. You could create different patterns, different rhythmic patterns here, and it doesn't have to be a regular pumping sound. Maybe you want some sort of irregular pattern, you know? That's kind of got a more glitchy sound. Maybe you want that, but at a really slow tempo. That's got some more groove to it. So you can start seeing how this ghost side chain can get some really interesting sounds. Last, I want to talk about limitters. So Limiters are basically a super extreme form of a compressor. They do the same thing, but they have a hard cap. Nothing is getting past the limitor. So if there's any dynamics that are really shooting above the limitor, it's getting squashed down in a big way. So limiters don't mess around. A limitter is usually used for the master bus for mastering. Maybe you'll limit if you have some sort of really dynamics thing and you need to, like, really contain the dynamics, and nothing you're doing is containing it. And it's like this live recording that needs a lot of help. You can use a limitter. Or sometimes you can do some gentle limiting on your drums as a whole near the end of your production. To really just glue everything together. You can also use limiting as a parallel compressing tool. O So, there's our deep dive on compressors, side chain compression, parallel compression, and limiters. There's a lot to the world of compression, but since we use them so frequently, you just get more and more comfortable, and they will become second nature as you keep producing. And remember how we went over how to compress the base, your drums, your harmony, your leads, your vocals. Every time you're working on a song, you'll grab your compressor and tweak it a little bit, and you'll skip better and better at hearing it, and I urge you to just keep using the compressor. If you can't really hear what it's doing, just use it lightly. But usually, things sound good and a little more professional when they're compressed. So I urge you to go through the process of learning how to hear them so you can best shape your sound and your music exactly how you want to. 83. Sidechain: Create Dynamic Interactions: Let's talk about side chains. So side chain compression is the most common form of side chain, but there are other kinds of side chains. So let's dive right in. First of all, we're going to talk about what is it? Then we're going to talk about when do you want to use it? How do you use it and compressors and gates. So we're going to dive right into side chains. As I have explained before, you can use something called side chain compression. So if we go ahead and grab our compressor and put it on our piano, we can actually open up this toggle window with this little triangle button and turn on the side chain button. Now, we need to select audio from. With the side chain button on, we need to decide where is the input coming from. So what I've done here is I have created a ghost track of just Kidro. I call it a ghost track because the track itself is off. This is not necessary for side chaining. You can side chain to tracks that are on. So the fact that the track is off is not important for the side chain. But what's interesting is that you can sidechain two rhythms that you're not hearing in the song if you wanted to, because you could turn those rhythms off, which gives you more flexibility. So I like with sidechain compression to turn the attack all the way to the left. Because I really want the compressor to kick in immediately when the sound is triggering. And then I want a pretty quick release, and we'll just have to tweak it to see what sounds good at this tempo. So let's go ahead and lower this threshold a lot, and we're going to listen to this piano being side chained by this kick, which is going at a four on the floor tempo. Let's turn this compressor off. So you can really hear what this is doing. The piano, every time this kick is hitting is ducking in volume. If you were to select the drums as the input, instead of just this kick, all of these drum hits would be ducking the piano in volume, which would be similar because the main hits are on the same places, but you do have these other little hits in here, which would also duck the volume a little bit. You can hear it mostly here. The reason why these aren't doing too much is because the amount visually, you can see how much quieter this is than that. So we would have to turn the threshold down even further for this to have a significant impact. So side chain compression can be used for groove. There's also something called a gate. Now, a noise gate works like this. You set a threshold, and then any noise that is below that threshold just gets cut off completely. Let me show you what I mean. Anything quieter than this volume, you don't hear at all. It's called a noise gate. So, oftentimes, if you have a singer with a little bit of a noisy room or a foot tap that's way quieter. You can use a gate, which will cut out all of the background noise. So basically, the singer, you'll just pick up them singing into the mic, and then all other noise will get shunted. So that's a common use case for a gate. But something else that you can do here is open this same little triangle which opens the same side chain window. So with the side chain window, it works the same. You can choose an input so you could choose drums, kick, also made a drum rack here because what you can do with the side chain gate, it works in the opposite way of a side chain compressor, where a compressor, every time the input volume hits, every time the source is present, the piano ducts. When the kick was in, the piano was lower in volume. Now the side chain gate works in the exact opposite way. Where every time the input hits the piano hits, every time the input's not there, the piano is gone, which allows you to create different kinds of rhythms. What's happening here is that I made this rhythm in this drum rack. The piano is now going to that rhythm. You could change the rhythm. And you can see how creative you can get with side chain gates. There's a lot of really interesting patterns that you can start making, and I often do the side chain gate with a pattern that I make that I turn off. So you're not hearing this in the song. You're just hearing the effect it's having on other instruments, which is really cool. Side chain gates and side chain compression can really open up a world of really creative production, so I highly recommend that you start experimenting with it. Think. 84. Phaser: Infuse Your Tracks with Swirling Motion: This lesson is all about pitch and modulation. And in the Ableton Pitch and modulation folder, you'll find your fasers, flangers, and your chorus. So let's dive right in. Fazer, flanger, and Chorus. Well, Chorus adds width. It's used very commonly on Indie songs, especially guitars. Fasers and flangers add movement. These are the trippy effects, and they can sound really out of this world. So let's experiment. So here in audio effects and pitch in modulation, we have our phaser flanger and our chorus ensemble. So let's go ahead and drag this chorus onto our piano. The chorus has a lot of great presets to start from. And let's try to get a sense of what does this sound like. Let's go ahead and dry. Let's go ahead and drag this preset on. So you can hear that it's making the sound wider. But it's also introducing some chains to the sound. So the chorus can be a really, really cool effect to use to add some width, to add just that little bit of a different quality, but sometimes you don't want to change your sound too. So, in that case, you can try using the chorus as a track, and you'll send this to the chorus. And then you can back it off. And then here you have a little bit of that width, and you still have the original sound of the piano, so you're not really losing the sound that you started with because sometimes you don't want the way that the chorus will change the sound. And that just has to be determined as a case by case basis depending on what song you're working on. This one sounds crazy. So the chorus has all sorts of different modes. It's very common on guitars, especially for indie music. So let's go ahead and drag this guitar in here and experiment with some chorus. Can you hear that quality to the sound? To me, it sounds almost like, like, candy. It's really hard to explain, but it has that indie sound where it's it has a little bit of, like a cheap quality to it, but also very colorful. It's just a really cool sound. And you can tell on these guitars how powerful this effect really is. On. The idea of this effect is that it gives your sound. It makes it sound wider, and ideally makes it sound more like a chorus of that same sound. So it's like one voice singing is one voice singing, and then with a chorus is multiple voices singing the same thing. So that's the intended effect that this usually has, but there's a lot of other cool ways to use this. Let's go ahead and pull up this phaser. Try this guitar pset. You see it sounds kind of trippy. It almost sounds like vocal. It sounds like it wants to, like, wow, like, a little bit. And that's what the phaser flanger sound does. It's adding some really cool movement to the sound. So, I love phasers because they add movement, and movement is cool. You can obviously switch between the different modes here. Fazer, flanger, and doubler. And they have their own different sounds. So when you're looking for a psychedelic, trippy kind of effect or a just other worldly of ever evolving kind of sound, I would go for a phaser and flanger. Even if you have something that's supposed to be more tangible in this world, but you want some subtle movement, you can have a phaser and turn down the dry wet. So you're barely hearing it, but it just has a little bit of movement in the background that can go a long way. 85. Distortion: Add Grit and Character: Everybody loves distortion. Well, at least some people love distortion, but distortion can be subtle, too. It doesn't always have to be a big bombastic change to your sound. So this lesson is all about distortion, and let's jump right in and explore what distortion means. Distortion adds texture to your sound. It adds an edge. You can use it as sound design to completely transform a sound. Or you can use some subtle saturation to just enhance an existing sound. Essentially what distortion does is it takes the sonic information that's already present in the sound, and it just stretches it a little further. It exaggerates it. It pulls out qualities that are already there and puts them into an extreme. So let's go ahead and listen to some distortion. So here we're going to go ahead and go to our drive and color. And there's a lot of different amazing sounding distortions here in Ableton. So we've gone through the saturator as a subtle type of distortion. I really like these warm up highs and lows. You can turn the drive. Which is essentially the amount of distortion. You can turn soft clip on, which usually sounds pretty good. You can change the kind of saturation here. Often do like the sale And I highly recommend you go through these different presets. Saturation can give that more distorted feel, but I often use saturation subtly. Dry Wet is your friend. So let's say you want some more heavy duty distortion. Well, overdrive might be a good place to start. Pk. This has more of a guitar distortion type of feel to it. Obviously, you can always pull down the dry wet there. We have erosion. That has almost a vocal quality to it when it's down here. We have the redux, which, to my ear, is similar to the erosion. It's called a bit crusher, which is essentially turning down the bits of the song. So essentially what we're doing is we're making this sound a little bit more lo fi. And in contrast to the rest of the music, it sounds pretty cool. We have our dynamic tube. This one is more discrete, as well. Well, sometimes. So, the dynamic tube, to me, I use, sometimes instead of the saturation as a more subtle type of distortion, but of course, you can get a lot of mileage out of it. There's a lot of different distortions available and a lot of different presets and places to start. Distortion usually sounds good. Even a subtle amount of distortion can go a long way. And at the end of a song, at the end of a mix, I often do have a little bit of distortion on a lot of the different elements. So I encourage as you're progressing through your productions, as you're getting to the finishing stages, to audition, putting a little bit of distortion on your elements, and try to put different distortion on different elements. You'll have like maybe some saturation on the drums, maybe some tube on the bass, maybe a little bit of overdrive on your synth, just adding some different saturations to the different parts of your song to layer the different textures together. And through adding a lot of sweetening up your sounds just a little bit, Over all the sounds in your song, that little bit starts to compound to create something that sounds truly great. 86. Tremolo: Pulsating Rhythms and Textures: Let's talk about tremolos. What are tremolos? Well, as you might notice, on a lot of keyboards, there's a knob, and sometimes when you move the knob, it starts to wiggle the sound. That is a tremolo, but tremolos can go way further and way deeper than just that. So let's dump into tremolos. Tremolos are the clouds effect. If you know that song by bunt, it can be used on vocals to really stutter the vocals. You can use tremolos on guitars like that song, bang bang, she shot me down. That's a tremolo guitar. Ableton does not have a traditional tremolo effect, but you can recreate that effect with a side chain gait. So let's jump into Ableton. Here I'm going to grab a third party tremolo effect just to really show you what this does. So here I have a tremolo, and I'm going to pull this onto our guitar. And this is what a tremolo does. It just kind of gives a waariness to the sound at a given rhythm. There's different qualities to the tremolo. You can use this on the piano. So, a tremolo just gives your sound a waviness. And if we go ahead and listen to a couple of examples, you'll see some really cool ways to use this effect. I was five, and he was six. We rode on horses made of sticks. He wore black and I wore white. He would always win the fight, bang, bang. He shut me down, bang, bang. This guitar has a tremo on it, which really gives it a lot of vibe. And the fact that this song just has a guitar and a vocal makes the tremolo stand out even more, and it's even cooler. Here is a more modern way to use this effect. You provide to There it's being used on the vocal. So like I said, Ableton does not have a tremolo effect. So what you can do is create a midi track and insert a midi clip, is do 2 bars for this example. And I already showed you how to do the side chain gate. So we'll just do this very, very quickly here. Pull up a drum rack. Drag it into your midi clip. Drag that into your midi clip. We'll take a high hat sample because you want something short, probably, but you should actually experiment with what sounds best to you. I'm choosing something that doesn't have that long of a signal so that it won't trigger anything for too long. But I highly encourage you to experiment and see, try different sounds and see if you can come up with some other really interesting way to use this. Git. So now, we'll pull this git onto our guitar. Open up our little window here, hit side chain, select our drum rack. And let's just do a basic eighth note pattern. Listen. So now we need to move this down. And you can't change these features here. P. P. You could even flip it. Which sort of flips the signal on its head. We experimented with changing the pattern and trying different things. So you can open up a gate and use this side chain method to recreate this tremolo sound. As with everything, depending on what exactly you're going for, you'll want to take the time to really dial it into perfection to make it sound seamless in your song. A 87. Arpeggios: Unleash the Power of Sequential Harmony: Let's explore our peggators. Our peggiators play your chords note by note. They can sound magical, fast, and high. They can do different patterns. Claire D Lune, that piano piece, if you're familiar, is all arpeggios, but it's an arpeggio played really on the piano, not using an arpegiator. And then there is the arpeggiator, which is Ableton's synthetic arpeggio maker. Let's go dive into what arpeggio sound like. So an arpeggio is essentially taking the notes of a chord and playing them sequentially. So instead of playing this, you're going to play this. This is an arpegio going up with those exact same notes. You could have an arpeggio going down. You could have an arpegio going in a non linear pattern. And everything in between. So arpeggios are essentially just playing the notes in your chord one by one in some kind of pattern, either linear, non linear, jumping around a little, walking to each other, whatever sounds good for your song in that moment. I've ei. I played this on the piano. Our whole chord sys up in some simple eighth notes. You can arpeggi at any rhythm. It could be eighth notes. You could do 16th notes. You could do even slower. You could do quarter notes. So, arpeggios can be virtually any order of the cord, and they can be any rhythm that you want. You can also use some in between notes that are not totally part of your cord if you want to. If you're walking from one note to the next, you could throw in an intermediary walking note. I would still consider this an arpeggio if you wanted to keep this pattern going. So sometimes you have your chord progression, and you want to just add some movement and add a different flare to this section. You could try having an arpeggio section. In the song, Clare Dune, going from a completely classical side of things, Debbie C goes from these big chords to this fast arpeggio, which has a really cool contrast sound. And it's a really, really cool arpeggio that just has a very magical sound to it. And going from block chords into arpeggios could be a really cool thing to try in a song, or you can have your whole song be in arpeggio. Maybe you find some chords that you like, and you think it's just a little bit boring. Having them just be block chords. You can try playing them or programming them out in an arpeggiated sequence. Maybe you don't want to play or program them, but you do want to try some arpeggios. You can go ahead and go to the midi effects and grab the arpeggiator. We showed you this on base, but now let's go look at what it does to some chords. Here we have eighth notes, and it's going up. The arpegiator takes into account exactly where notes are starting. So for the purposes of this, maybe let's have everything start on a nice quantized beat here. And this is playing the notes of our chord in sequence. What we can do here, we could go down. We can go up and down. We can do different patterns. O Again, a different pattern. So this starts to get you to see how you can really arpeggio in any kind of way that you want. You can also go faster. And you're not limited to just one octave. You can play these same notes up multiple octaves. Even faster. I love arpeggios. It's really some of my favorite sounds in music. And you can arpeggio by finger picking a guitar. That's playing note by note. That is inherently arpeggio. You can play it on the piano or any other instrument, and you can use block chords and the arpeggiator in Ableton. Obviously, since that Clare Delon song is my favorite song, clearly, I love arpeggios, but I play them all the time. And I always find a place in my music where I can find at least a little bit of that arpeggio magic because like I just said, it really sounds just magical. 88. Ableton 12: MIDI Tools: Scale awareness also gave a huge enhancement to the MIDI tools, which work a lot, how they have worked in previous versions of Ableton, but now with scale awareness, all of the notes that they generate can be generated in key. So let me show you. If we go over to MIDI effects, we have our arpeggiator, our ord function, and random. Now, starting with the arpeggiator, let's go ahead and make this in key. Now, the arpeggiator is our peggiating and key. We can turn on our note randomizer, which is just adding random notes that are all in the scale, so you can get some really kind of interesting musical sounds. So pairing these tools together really give some interesting creative options. The C chord function, when you turn the scale on, will now just generate alternative notes and additional notes to the chords or notes that you have that are in key. Now the different pitches that you add will always be in key. Of course, you could unclick this, and it will strictly create a fifth above, but here it will move these pitches up or down to fit the nearst note that's in key. We also have this function, which affects the attack of the sound, the beginning of the sound, which will make a chord sound more like a guitar, but in this specific instance, this sound is never really going to sound like a guitar. But it's affecting the first part of the sound. Instead of all the notes being hit at once, they're hit in sequence. You're going to mess around with the tension and the crescendo here. The scale awareness has opened up these midi tools to be even more powerful, especially if you start combining, for instance, the pagator, with the random note generator, you can get some really interesting, almost harmonic chaos into your songs, which is a lot of fun to experiment with. 89. Utilities: Your Production Tool Kit: Utilities might not be the most shiny and flashy audio effects, but they can be some of the most useful. So this lesson is all about utilities. There are different kinds of utilities. There's the utility, tuner spectrum, audio effect act, external audio effect, and a line delay. There's also utility for phasing and for volume automation. So let's go ahead in our audio effects. Let's go up to our utilities. So what are these different tools? If you are going to connect a electric guitar or a bass to a track to record. You might want to use this tuner. And what the tuner will do is act as a tuner. So if you need to tune your guitar, it'll tell you how close to being in tune, are you or how far? So this note is a little bit out of tune. So if this was a bass or a guitar, and I was trying to tune this, I want to tune it, so it's right in the center here. The spectrum shows you the frequency spectrum. So let's go ahead and listen to this. There are different views here if you want to view things in slightly different ways visually. And the spectrum is nice when you do want to get that visual read on what your sounds or your songs look like. I can help you find frequencies that are poking out, think that I need a little more love. We can see where most of the information is concentrated. So the spectrum is really useful to get a visual on your music. And last, but certainly not least, we have the utility. The utility, although it looks simple, has a lot of different functionality. One main thing it can do is control volume. So you can turn things up and down with the game. You can also pan things here. Obviously, you can also pan things here, so we can go 50 to the right, 50 to the left, 25 to the right, 25 to the left, or you could do that. In your utility, if for some reason, that made sense, I try to do most of my panning on the track here so that I remember what's being panned, because, like I've said before, you kind of want every element in your song to be in its unique place, even if it's just subtly, you generally want things to be all panned in a slightly different space because it gives them their own location sonic And I like to be able to remember where things are panned. So I don't tend to use this panning, but it's there for you, if you need to. We talked about phase inversion for low end and live drums. So you do that by clicking here, or you can use the phase invert preset, which already has those selected. You can also throw your sounds into mano. Now, this is very interesting because sometimes you have a stereo signal that you want to be mono, and this is the right way to do that. Let's listen to this piano and mono. This pano is very stereo. So when you put it in mono, it makes a big difference. And for those of you that need a quick recap on what stereo and Mano is, Stereo is left and right, being the signal coming into the left and coming into the right might be a little bit different. So you hear the sound as coming in left and right because of that difference. Mano means the same. So it's like Mano is one signal. Things that you want in Mano are your base, your kick drum, your vocal. These are things that you just want to be tight and in the middle somewhere. Even if you pan it, none of those elements I would recommend panning. But even if you did, it's not sounding like they're coming from different sides. If you want a stereo vocal, I would recommend having a double or something of two different mono tracks. So if you need to throw something into mono, you can use the utility. You can also widen things up even more or less this way. So pulling this down to zero would also throw something into mono, but moving this up to 400% will even make this sound wider. So, the utility has a lot of different use cases. You can do mid only, switching this to mid side mode. I use the utility quite a lot, and I know it's not a compressor or distortion or a reverb or something, but there's a lot of different times where I end up reaching for the utility, and I need to do those more technical fixes. So sometimes you need to do a huge creative fix to solve a problem, and sometimes you just need to throw something in mono. And when that's the case, utility is there for you. 90. Ableton 12: Meld: There is also a new synth in town called Meld, which is an amazing addition to the Ableton family. So under the Instruments tab, we have our new synth meld. Some awesome presets to choose from. And what's really interesting about meld is you can choose from different waves here, and they have a lot of options to choose from. Now, these swarm sounds do have a lot of emotion to me. Some of them are more musical than others. But if you threw that in a rever, if you can start getting some really interesting pads. We also have some cool FM sounds like crackle and rain to get some textures. Water sounds. And, of course, some bubbles. You can have layers of waves. And then clicking through these tabs here, obviously, A affects the top wave, and B affects the bottom wave. So if you want to change the envelope of the top wave, And maybe, now you want to change the envelope of the bottom wave. Here we can open up this giant matrix by clicking this triangle. The matrix here is massive, and you can really modulate whatever you want. You. So here, if we want to modulate the pitch, gets kind of comical now. In this really subtle place, it's sort of interesting. And it just starts adding some nice life to your track as you can just dive in to the full customization of your sound. So you can see we've really done a lot of pitch modulation throughout the first and second osculator, and in this cross modulation section, which means that the pitch is just having a ton of movement, which sounds really cool to my ear. And again, we have these really interesting textural sounds. I can explore how they are modulating with this rain wave here. And by studying how the presets modulate themselves will help you learn how to modulate your own sounds. At this stage, I'm having a lot of fun with Meld. I love just opening up the matrix and just trusting my ears and seeing what sounds good to me. There's really a wide world of possibilities here, and I encourage you just to explore and see what amazing sounds you can create with Meld. 91. Experiment! Unleash Your Creativity: There are a ton of audio effects out there. Ableton has a lot of versions of every category of audio effect. It has a lot of presets. And then there's, like, a whole world of third party audio effects out there. So, you don't need to know, and you don't need to be a master of every single plug in in the world. That's just not gonna happen. It's not even worth your time. So experimenting is so important. Ableton has tons of effects. So are more useful than others. But effects are good to just play around with. It's not important to know how all of them work. You just need to trust your ears and dive in. Presets are a great place to start. If you're working on a song, and it sounds pretty good, and you have a little bit more time, go in and play with the B repeat. Try this effect and just see what it sounds like. Just experiment with all of these different sounds. And maybe it's something that you'll just automate on here at the end. You know, maybe you want to go and experiment with different modulators or different reverbs, diff different phaser flangers. Besides the basics, where yes, a lot of different elements want to be eque and compressed and a little bit of distortion and a little bit of reverb or delay. Besides those essential moves, I do encourage you to experiment with audio effects. Go into a new folder, go into a new effect. Find some presets, tweak some things around, see, can you add a little bit of life or some unique moment to a part of your song? It doesn't have to be on the whole track for the whole song. Maybe have a drum f in the second verse, Can you put some effect that you haven't heard of yet on that drum field? Just to enhance it a little bit. Can you do these little moments to make your song stand out in a different kind of way? And this is how I am still learning what all these different audio effects do. Because when you get in the world of third party plugins, there are so many, and you just kind of have to trust your ears when you have a little bit of extra time, have fun with them, because Audio effects should be fun. They just do the craziest things to your sound. And the more fun you have making your music, the more fun people will have listening to your music. 92. Congratulations!: Congratulations on finishing this class. I am so proud of you, and I can't wait to listen to your class project. You can say hi to me on Instagram or Spotify at Benza Maman. And if you like this class, please check out my other music classes on Skillshare.