Ultimate Ableton Live 10, Part 1: The Interface & The Basics | J. Anthony Allen | Skillshare
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Ultimate Ableton Live 10, Part 1: The Interface & The Basics

teacher avatar J. Anthony Allen, Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:46

    • 2.

      The 2 Views

      11:51

    • 3.

      Arrangement View

      10:56

    • 4.

      Session View

      6:51

    • 5.

      New in 10

      2:15

    • 6.

      Navigation Overview

      2:33

    • 7.

      Info View

      2:26

    • 8.

      Help View

      2:39

    • 9.

      Navigation

      3:51

    • 10.

      The Main Sequencer

      6:17

    • 11.

      The Clip Slot Grid

      7:41

    • 12.

      Clip View

      8:41

    • 13.

      Adding Content Overview

      10:38

    • 14.

      The Preferences

      6:02

    • 15.

      The Browser

      11:06

    • 16.

      Signal Flow

      3:56

    • 17.

      Recording Audio

      5:38

    • 18.

      Record To Arrange

      5:06

    • 19.

      Capture

      2:56

    • 20.

      Session Deconstruction

      8:33

    • 21.

      Editing Overview

      0:48

    • 22.

      Timeline Functions And Looping

      5:06

    • 23.

      MIDI Editing And Quantizing

      3:44

    • 24.

      Automation

      7:02

    • 25.

      Groove Pool

      4:02

    • 26.

      Session Deconstruction

      8:02

    • 27.

      What Next?

      1:46

    • 28.

      Wrap Up

      0:26

    • 29.

      SkillshareFinalLectureV2 (2)

      0:36

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About This Class

** This is the new version of my Ableton Live 9 class that is a top-selling online course with thousands of 4+ reviews, and tens of thousands of students!

This class uses Ableton Live 10.

For years I've been teaching Ableton Live in the college classroom. As a University Professor, my classes are sought after, and, frankly, expensive. I believe Ableton Live can be learned by anyone, and cost shouldn't be a barrier. This class uses the same outline and syllabus I've used in my college classes for years, at a fraction of the cost.

This is Part 1: The Interface.

I will be making 6 (six!) complete classes in order to bring you the most comprehensive manual on Ableton Live production techniques ever created. Each class has Sets, sessions, and experiments for you to try on your own and follow along with.

In this course, we will cover: 

  • Navigating the 2 Views of Ableton Live
  • Arrangement View
  • Session View
  • What's New in Live 10
  • Info View, Help View, and "Learning how to Learn" Ableton Live
  • Using the Clip Slot Grid
  • Live's Signal Flow
  • Recording Audio
  • Recording MIDI
  • Recording to the Arrangement
  • Editing Audio and MIDI
  • Automation
  • The Groove Pool
  • Full Track Deconstructions
  • And Much, Much, More!

You will not have another opportunity to learn Ableton Live in a more comprehensive way than this. Start here.

J. Anthony Allen is an Ableton Certified Trainer and a Ph.D. in Music Composition and master of Electronic Sounds. His music has been heard internationally in film, radio, video games, and industrial sound, as well as the concert hall and theater.

He currently is a professor at Augsburg University and the CEO and co-founder of Slam Academy in Minneapolis.

Praise for classes by Dr. Jason Allen:

"Without a doubt the best explanation and east of use that one can get. It leaves you enough room to go explore. The classes go by quickly, so you can be on your way to being proficient. What are you waiting for!"

"Amazing - Seriously Loved It! I took all his courses and have to say I'm so happy! Learned loads! Jason is an awesome teacher!"

"I have never had any formal training in music at all. Trying to learn all the notes and how everything translated was a serious challenge. After going through this class, Dr. J has totally brought down the barriers. The content was very useful and was easy to grasp for me."

"I like these courses because you can get up and running quickly without having to spend hours of time wading through TMI (too much information!). Jason hits the high points but shows you what you need to know. Thanks!"

"I've watched many other videos on scales and chords before, however, this one has been the best. I now understand minor scales and chords and even how to analyze songs. It really gave me the confidence to start producing music because I feel like I have some structure and guidelines to follow. AWESOME!"

"Clear and Informative - Jason has a clear uncluttered style (with the important dashes of humor) of presentation that is focused on the important key aspects of this course. Recommended for those starting out!"

"Dr. Allen does it again with his music theory series. This course really opened up everything I learned from the 1st section, and now I understand more about the composition side of things for music. I highly highly recommend this course to anyone!!! Really opened my eyes to many things I wasn't aware of."

"The Best Teacher Ever, who makes you understand the ins & outs of Music Theory by all means without giving what you don't want to know."

Meet Your Teacher

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J. Anthony Allen

Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Teacher

Dr. J. Anthony Allen is a distinguished composer, producer, educator, and innovator whose multifaceted career spans various musical disciplines. Born in Michigan and based in Minneapolis, Dr. Allen has composed orchestral works, produced acclaimed dance music, and through his entrepreneurship projects, he has educated over a million students worldwide in music theory and electronic music production.

Dr. Allen's musical influence is global, with compositions performed across Europe, North America, and Asia. His versatility is evident in works ranging from Minnesota Orchestra performances to Netflix soundtracks. Beyond creation, Dr. Allen is committed to revolutionizing music education for the 21st century. In 2011, he founded Slam Academy, an electronic music school aimed... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: we've made for you. Here is the most comprehensive, able to live program we could imagine. It's designed to take you from novice to pro. It'll have project files, instrument downloads, special guests in a lot more. I've divided this class into six different sections so that you can focus on what you want to learn right away. However, to really take full advantage of the program, start at the beginning and go to the end, or at least make sure you take all the sections. At some point in this first class, we're gonna try to dive in quick. We're gonna work on the interface and just generally, how to get you up and running, making some music with live quickly. We'll focus on the two views of live how to navigate in live recording both audio and Midian live general signal flow and editing tricks you can do in life many editing automation. Groupe Bull and we'll take a part of a couple tracks just to see how they're working in a full session. Now the biggest thing that gets people hung up on live when they're first getting started, especially if they worked in another audio program before. Is this two views of live thing? Okay, so think about it. Like this Live has with do another session deconstruction like we did before. This is another track of mine that I thought We just take a look at amount that. Okay, what I have here is the first part of that same track laid out into session. So let me show you how that would work. So you can see my tracks is able to in lives big engine for keeping sound in time with each other. Which is why DJs like this program. So we've talked about editing a little bit so far. Have talked about moving clips around, talk about shortening clips, lengthening clips. But let's get a little bit deeper into what we need to do to build a whole track out of these clips. 2. The 2 Views: All right. Welcome, Teoh. Able to live 10. Let's dive in. So one thing, I just want to point out, um, I'm gonna be talking a lot about able to live 10 throughout this entire course. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm only talking about live 10 if you're on live nine. Still, that's totally okay. Um, I'm gonna point out new things in live 10 as we get to them. But, um, this is really a general able to live class. Everyone's excited right now about the new live 10. So, um, you know, I'll point out some of those things as they come back, but, uh, if you're on any version of live, this class will be totally, uh, accessible to you. That stuff that is new to live 10. Ah, probably point out everything that's new to live 10. So that stuff you won't have if you're not in live 10. If you're in live nine, um, you'll need to upgrade, But you're gonna want to upgrade because you're gonna see all this cool stuff that's in live 10. So let's dive in. So when you open live for the first time, this is probably what you see, you might have a session in here. Um, but this is basically the outline of the program. Now, the biggest thing that gets people hung up on live when they're first getting started, especially if they worked in another audio program before is this two views of live thing. Okay, so think about it. Like this Live has two different views. And what that means is two different kind of ways you can work with sound. Um, it's kind of like two sides of the same coin, but there are some things that don't change. So when we're looking at the interface of live, we're really looking at a whole bunch of boxes here, like, here's a big box. Here's a little box here is a big box. I guess I should be saying rectangles. Um, here's one for all this stuff up at the top. And then there's a bunch of them inside here. So look at this. Take this big box in the middle. That's the one that changes. None of the other boxes change. Okay, We're gonna go over each of these boxes as they come up very shortly, but, um, the only stuff that changes is this big middle box. So what we're looking at here is session view. Okay, so the two views air called session view and arrangement. You session view looks like this. And this can kind of stumped people a lot of the time. So we have these boxes here, and if you're used to another, uh, audio program, you might think that these look like plug ins should go in them. That's what I hear students, students tell me a lot that's untrue. That is where a clip goes and a clip is any piece of audio or MIDI. Okay, so let's start something in there. Let's just find an audio clip or anything. Cool. Here's a little drum loop. I'll throw it right in there. Okay, So now you see these little squares turned to play, but right and I could stop it. So what happens here is I can play another drumbeat, put it underneath it. Another drumbeat put underneath. That's and let's do one more. Just for fun. Sure. Okay, so now you can imagine that we have basically four spinning records here. All four of these air playing are all four of these can be played just in sequence right now, particularly brilliant sounding. But I can play all I can play them all one by one going down now What I could also do is let's take something like this. Uh, here's a little guitar sample. Let's put that over here. Remember, the rule here is I can play as many of these as I want vertically, uh, one at a time on Lee. One of these vertically can play at a time, but horizontally, as many as I want complaint a time. I can add a bunch more tracks, and I could play as many as I want horizontally at the same time. And I can zigzag. So let's put two samples. That's a cool drumbeats. Let's put that in our drums track. Kind of a lot. Use the baseline. Cool. Let's throw that in. This is a mid eclipse, so I have to throw it on a mini track. That's okay. Let's say that there. Okay, so don't worry about the stuff that happened down here for now. We'll come back to that. I just want to focus on up here so I can start a drumbeat playing OK, school. Now let's throw in this guitar, - The guitar out And this one. Here we go. Right. So basically, we have all these clips in different spots, and we can choose what we want to start at every different whenever they, uh whenever we feel like launching them. That's the benefit of session view. Now, the other secret sauce here is that all the clips are Kwan ties to launch at the same time . What that means is they're gonna launch on every downbeat. It was hard to hear in this example weeks. I'm going kind of fast. But if I slow it down, Okay, let's stop that. Okay, here comes down to see what it's looking that way. I caught it right on the downbeat. There. This is gonna go on and go back here way. So everything waits for the next downbeat so that everything stays in sync. It's great. So that's why we love this for performing, but also for producing. So that is the very basics of session view. Now let's look at arrangement view. Now, This whole box here, remember, is going to change. Okay, so but not anything on the perimeter out here. So to get to arrangement view. I'm gonna hit tab. Okay, now I'm in a range with you. Cool. Right. So here's the thing. Um, all my content is gone. Right? But it's not necessarily if I hit play. We're still going to hear the session. If I click this little button up here that I'm going to tell it, I only want to hear the arrangement view. That button can be kind of complicated, so we're gonna come back to that in just a minute. Um, but I can throw new content in here, and it looks a little bit different. All the samples I'm using here, by the way, are just, um, built in live clips. So you should have access to all of these. Let's throw there. You're way have here now. An arrangement view is we have a more traditional timeline. You're familiar with any other kind of audio program or even notated music Like sheet music . This will be pretty familiar to you, right? We have tracks. Ah, and we have bits of audio. We can put more stuff on audio, um, and build our track this way. If we want. I'm just just converted that to a midi track. and that's totally okay. Okay. So we can set up loops to keep going if we want. This is the traditional way that you do music. But when we go over to session view, what we have here is the absence of a timeline. Right? So we're just gonna play stuff as we want, and then we can record it to the session to the arrangement view, but they're kind of independent. So one last thing about this, uh, the thing that can get a little confusing to people is that session view and arrangement view share a mixer. So, like, down here, check this out. Here's my first track called Kelly Town. I'm gonna turn the volume almost all the way down. Okay, Now, if I go over to arrangement, view and look at the volume, this is the volume. It's almost all the way down, right? I can have totally separate. Ah, sounds on it, but the mixer stays the same. So session view an arrangement view are separate, content wise, but they share a mixer. That's the thing to remember. Okay, so this is kind of a big overview, right? Of the two different views of live because that's where I see most people when they open it for the first time. They're like, What the heck is this? Um so let's dive in to each of those and the next few videos and dig a little bit deeper into how they work. Let's start with arrangement view. 3. Arrangement View: Okay. I have a session open here. This is a track of mind. Um, I haven't opened here in arrangement view. Let's just take a little listen to get started. - Okay ? Um, just a little Just the intro that let's look at for a minute. So Ah, what's going on here? Let's just walk through. So what we're gonna do in this video is ah, kind of brief overview of arrangement view, and then we'll go into a lot more detail later. Don't worry. This is just to kind of get us comfortable with, um, the main stuff in arrangement view. So, uh, all these blue segments are clips. These are all mid eclipse. The ones down here, these are audio clips. I know the difference. Because mid eclipse have lines going through them. Those air midi notes and audio clips have wave forms. They look like that. So all of these are wave forms, these airwave forms. So these air audio clips, these are these are those noise swooshes? Right? Okay. Uh, there's no reason that all the mid eclipse air blue here other than I made one blue, and then I copied it out and started changing it you can change the color of stuff. Um, if you do a control click on any thing do you get this new window that pops up this little window is going to be important as you learn live so get used to If you're looking for something, get used to checking out this little this little window. So I press down control on my keyboard, and then I click in the clip. So here you can see I can change the color of it to whatever I want. It looks like just the header of it is changed. What if I click out of it? You'll see the whole thing had changed. That goes true with the tracks over here. Um, I can change the color of tracks. And why would you want to do that? Well, there's actually a really good reason. Um, tell if you keep organized. This track isn't that big, but it's kind of big. But if I had, you know, maybe a ton of tracks, let's just say I don't know what the number would be. A ton of tracks I might want organized by color, say, like all my midi tracks are on my drum tracks or on my synth tracks or something like that , so that they they were all the same color so that I could keep track of them better. Uh, it's a handy way to do some stuff. There are other ways of keeping track of things to that. We'll look at shortly, but, um, so a couple key things to know get used to naming your tracks? Um, that's important. Appear you can see Piano Main, right? That's my main piano riff that goes throughout this track. If you want to change the name of this, you can click on it, command are and type in whatever you wanna call it. Let's call it piano mean, because that's what I want to call it over here. For each track, we have our mixer functions. So our volumes here, this to the numbers, show us what tracked in where it is. But that's also a mute button, kind of. I can click on it and turn that totally off. This track is not going to play now kind of quiet at that particular moment, but it's there s is so low that means play on Lee that track, all right, So now everything else is immune. It so mute and solo. Um, this button is our record track will be looking at that in just a minute. We turn that on, we're gonna arm this track to record onto it. Don't want to do that right at the moment. Volume we talked about the CIA's panning. Panning is the left and right balance of our signal. So if I say let's solo this track and it's set to see right now seeming center, that means it's equally panned in both speakers for wearing headphones. You should hear this piano Onley in the right side when I hit play. Oh, okay. This is the right find. Move it away to the left. All right. I put it back in the center. Now you should hear it in both ears. Right? So we use that when were mixing a lot, we use panning, which means the left and right balance of the signal to help us kind of place sound so that it feels like it's all around you. Um I didn't do very much panning in this track, at least in this version of the track. Um, one other little ah thing about live is that when you do something like this, let's say I was doing that. Okay? Now I want to take it back to its default position. Really? Handy trick. Uh, just be sure you click in the box and then press the delete key. Delete key. When you're in one of these boxes will always take it back to its default. Okay. These to negative infinity, which is a little ominous buttons. These are not buttons. These air dials. Also, I can turn them up and down. These are our sends. They send the signal down to these two tracks we'll talk about sends in the very near future. So hold on to those for now. Okay? Another thing I want to point out here is the zoom in and out mechanism in live because it's kind of weird. Okay, so let's say I want to zoom in on what's happening here. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put my cursor up here on the timeline where we see the numbers scrolling by at the top. Put my cursor until you get this symbol. What this is is a little hand with the magnifying glass in it. Okay, Now you're gonna click and hold down that click. Do not let go. Okay? There's this one kind of fancy motion that live uses for everything. So without letting go of that clique, I'm still click down. I can scroll down to zoom in. I'm not letting go of that clique yet. I can scroll up to zoom out and without letting go I'm still got that click down, Aiken. Slide left in. Right. Okay, so the reason this is useful is let's say I want to zoom in right here, but my cursor is over here. I could go like this and get there pretty quick with one click, right? It's a little hard to do at this exact moment cause my screen capture software, but youth work, um, zooming in and out. Uh, it's a weird gesture at first, it takes a little getting used to, but once you get used to it, you'll be like, Wow, that was I can, like, really cruise through this track, right? So it takes some practice. It might be a tad bit frustrating at first, but you'll be fine. Door, um no. In arrangement, view each clip whether it's audio or MIDI. We can move around just by dragging it. You have to drag on the top half of it. And that's something that's kind of new. And live nine are sorry. Live 10 in the live nine. And earlier you had to drag on this top color. Depart, um, up here. But in live 10 you can drag anywhere in the top half. Okay, If you cook on the bottom half, you're gonna highlight something. If you highlight something, then click and drag it. You're gonna just click and drag that part. And I can always undo command Z the undue. Um, I can also use copy paste all that stuff so I can highlight something, and then copy over here and paste it, paste it, paste it. So that's command. See for a copy. Command V for paste. Um, I can click on the header to select the whole thing. This is the header apart, and I can copy that and click somewhere else and paste one last thing I want to point out in this quick overview of arrangement view is our clip window that's down here. So let me double click on an audio file by double clicking on that. Let's open this up a little bit. I open it up by putting my cursor right in between the two windows so that I get this symbol when I click and drag up. So now I see some, Ah, higher level detail about this audio clip. I can see the wave form. There's a certain amount of functions I could do here. I can transpose it. Aiken. Boost the volume. I can take away the volume. Um, there's better ways to deal with the volume, though, that we'll talk about soon. But I have some control over it there. If I do the same thing on a mini clip, I get the individual meeting notes, and here I can change them. I can move them around. I can change what notes play and Aiken generally have fun with it. I can add some new notes and say, Let's make this some big dissident court happen. That's what that would be. All right. So that's where we get into the detail of where we're putting in our notes is down there. We'll talk a lot more about that shortly. Okay? Okay with that, let's do a quick overview of everything you need to hurt. Let's do a quick overview of the session view, uh, and how that works in a little more detail. 4. Session View: Okay. What I have here is the first part of that same track laid out into session view. So let me show you how that would work. So you can see my tracks up here are the same. They're just going down now instead of going across. Right? So I have kick piano roads, synth soft science, and are absent, etcetera. So those were on the right side before we saw those titles. And now they're up here, going down. But there's the same basic thing. And my mixer is basically has the same settings as they had over there. Here's my clips. Right, Member, add a piano main clip. So that was my main piano riff. I could start playing it. There it is. Cool. Now this is gonna play in a loop. Now, this is gonna look forever. If I double click on it. I can still see the midi info, just like I could in the other view, but its cycle and actually don't have this one set toe loop, so I'm gonna turn on loop by hitting this button. Zoom out. It was a really, really, really long track, so it's gonna go on for some time, but let's have it, Luke. Just the beginning there. Okay? This is gonna live forever now, right? I took the whole long track, distilled it just to this four bars. Okay? So while that plays, let's go over to my drum. Be okay. Here's my main drumbeat. Set that toe loop and let's kick it in whenever I feel like it whenever I'm ready. Right. So now I've got this going. This is going to go forever until I tell it to do something different. This is just gonna keep going. Let's add another percussion element like, I've got another percussion in here way. Just volume of these now I can add. So here's all my sister stuff. Let's try throwing some of that in What happens? I love that beginning here. Lupus. Okay, now here I have strings. Right. So what? That in that and again, this is gonna go on forever until I tell it to do something different. This is my crack. More since more since you know what, but let's give this string section a chance to shine. And I just got strings and percussion. Let's pull out the main beat. I think this stop button underneath and just let it be strings and percussions. Right? That's kind of cool. Now check this out. I'm gonna let this rule for just a second while I explain this next thing. So what if I wanted to kick the whole beat in or the whole track? I can't click. Like here. Here, Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, All at once. Right. That's not gonna work. What I'm gonna dio is I'm just gonna go over here and click this. This is gonna launch everything in this line, and this line is called a scene. Okay, so each one of these is called a clip and each one of these little spots it's called a clip slop. If I click over here, it's gonna launch the whole scene, which is all the clips. Lots in that road. So we can see here. It's not gonna relaunch my piano pianos up there, so I'm gonna copy this copy and paste that down there so that it does re launch it when I hit this three. Okay, So as soon as we're ready, I'm gonna launch into the whole thing. Good. Everything's in, right? Totally rockets. So That's the essentials of how session view works. Um, you can record in session. You can edit in session, you can perform in session. You can do everything that you can do in arrangement, view in session view. It's just a whole different way of working. So I know some people that work exclusively in session view, and I know some people that work exclusively an arrangement view, um, they're both great for working. And to be totally honest, I do most of my work in arrangement view. Um, jumping over dissection of you on occasion. I recommend when you're working on a track to stick to one or the other, um, not have a track that's going back and forth because you get some confusion between what's playing when if you're bouncing back and forth. But I think I do it when I'm almost done with the track and I'm getting ready to prep it for some kind of performance. Then I'll move it over to ah, session view. So we're gonna look at how to do all of this. How to record producer at it, uh, mix in both views as we progress through this class guy. So have no fear. We will be learning both sides of this program. It's kind of two programs in one. That's crazy. Uh, okay, let's move on now. And let's do a little quick thing that to talk about some of the new stuff in live 10 so that if you are on live nine you know what I'm gonna what you're going to see on my screen that you're not gonna see on your screen. 5. New in 10: Okay, I want to point out just a couple things really quick that are new and live 10 that you might. If you're on an older version alive, you might be confused by or something. Uh, the first thing is that colors are a lot more, uh, active, Let's say, in live 10 so the colors are a bit more bold, and they're a lot more places. Probably the remain reason for that is because of over here, which we'll talk about in a minute. But this collections thing lets you kind of group sounds, clips, effects plug ins altogether by a color. So it's really kind of handy, and we'll talk about that when we talk about the browser. Um, other things that are new are there's a new instrument. There's one new instrument called the wave Table. When we get in instruments, which will be a little ways yet you won't have access to that. There's a few new audio effects that you won't have access to. And then there's some general look and feel things that will look different. This capture button Ah, you don't have, and that's going to be something that I really talk a lot about, uh, soon. Um, in the next probably 10 videos, I'm going to be talking about this capture button because I love it. It is so cool. But I'm sorry to say, if you're not in live 10 you don't have it. Um, there's a lot of other kind of behind the scenes stuff, but those are kind of the main things. The main look and layout is largely the same. You know, there's more colors. Um, there's a couple more buttons up here, and there's some or effects. But, ah, until you get into the really advanced stuff, you probably won't notice. Ah, whole lot of difference. So I just wanted to point out those couple things. Um, and I'll be pointing out more as they come, but don't worry about it. Okay, so, um, let's move on and start talking about the main kind of navigation stuff in live and look at all the different sections 6. Navigation Overview: All right, everyone, Um, up next, let's talk about the main navigation of live. So what that means is we're going to look through all the different areas of the program in this section and kind of show you how to get around what's what and why you need each of those things. Um, there's not a lot that changes in live over the years. It's actually really kind of fascinating. Um, there are very few windows that have come up that have been added to live since they first launched it. The live version one looks pretty similar to this. Well, to this, because arrangement view didn't get added until later. But, um, in terms of, you know, the browser window, the clip window, all this stuff looked pretty similar. They don't change it very often. Um, I don't know if that's bad or good, but I think it's kind of good. I think it means that everything that's here really needs to be here. And nothing that isn't here doesn't need to be here. So there are kind of seven main areas that we're going to see here. Um, we have our main content area. I'm gonna call this the content area for now, we have our transport area up here. We have our browser area over here. We have our info view down here. We have our clip view down here. Also down here, kind of hidden away is our effects view. So instruments and effects. So this is a clip view. And if I hit this little tab over here, then this is our instruments and effects. So this area fills to things. Okay, right there. And I'll show you a trick for getting through those really quickly. We have our mixer view up here. This is really part of our content area, but it is worth a little extra pointing out. And then we have something called the help view. Uh, which is hidden right now. Help you. It's this over here, so we'll talk about that in just a minute. So let's dive in and let's start with info. View this little box down here because it is a lifesaver. 7. Info View: Okay, let's talk about this info view box down here. You know, first of all, if you don't have it, then go up to view in the menu up here and be sure info view is turned on check box means it's turned on. Should show up in this bottom left corner. And it's just text box. Doesn't do a whole lot. Actually, it doesn't do anything. What info view does is it shows you anything. It's the answer to anything. So if I put my mouse over a clip right here, Okay, so I have my mouse up here on this midi clip, and I looked down info view. It says, this is a midi clip, right? Cool. And it tells me a little bit about the mini clip. That's neat. Um, you may have already figured out what many clips are, but what about something like this button? We haven't talked about that button yet. Maybe, you know, I don't know what that button does, and you want to know what that button does? Put your mouse over it, look down on info view and you see Oh, that's the Metrodome. I can click it. You know, meat right. Uh, What's something else? Literally anything? What about this set button right here? We haven't talked about that. Put my mouse over that go down there. That's where I can set a locator. So this info view is super handy. Um, when you're learning live especially, you can just put your mouth over anything, and it'll tell you what it does. Like literally anything. I mean, you can really get into, like, find my new show here, and it'll be able to tell you what it is, so you can always hide it. You can get rid of it. If you want this little, you can go up to the view menu and turn it off. Or you could hit this little triangle down here, and you can get rid of it, but, um, keep it open. Just keep it open for a little while until you get really comfortable with what everything is. I like to have it open. I'm gonna try to leave it open throughout this whole class just so that you can look down at it when you want. When I'm doing something and see a little more info. If I forget to mention something so keep that open. It's a great way to help you learn right. Speaking of great ways to help you learn, let's check out the help view. 8. Help View: Okay, so for help view, what we're going to do is go to view and say show help. You Okay, now I have it over here. No one little exception. The help view and live 10 isn't quite in live 10 yet. They're still putting that in, so Ah, I'm looking at live nine now. So the live 10 help view is probably gonna look exactly like this one. Except it's gonna say what's new and live 10 instead of nine. What we have here and the reason I want to point it out even though it's not totally in the program. Yeah, but by the time you get the program, it will be in there. Trust me. And it'll look more or less like this. What we have here is little lessons. These are great to do, even though you're taking a class with me. Um, and my class is also great. These are really handy. Because check this out. Let's say, like creating beats when you click on that. And these are all little lessons. And they say, you know, here's this thing and what to look for, and I can go down to the bottom here and click next page. And then it says what? These are talks about instrument racks. Let's go to playing software instruments. Here we go. Lives. Documents are known as live sets. Okay, I'm not sure I said that yet, but ah, a a session in live is called a set, so live sets. This lesson is accompanied by a live set which will be interacting with as you follow the lesson. Whenever you're ready, click here to loathe live set case. I'm gonna click it. They don't save to the one I had open. Okay, This is what they wanted me to look. Some of these have content in them, and some of them don't. So what you're going to do here now is follow through what it says to do, right? It's gonna walk you through everything and what it does. I'm gonna walk you through this, too, so don't worry. But if you want a little bit extra practice, you could go back to this help view and walk through these lessons. They're great, they're interactive, they'll walk you through different elements of the program, and it's really useful tohave when you're done with those, you can hide it with this little X up here and get rid of that. You don't need it open all the time. But while you're learning, it's great to have that open. I'll be keeping it closed for most of the time. But please do check those out. They're gonna help you with, um, learning live more thoroughly and a little bit faster than just my classes alone. So don't forget to check those out. 9. Navigation: Okay, let's talk about just general getting around inside live. We've already talked about this, uh, interesting little zoom in, zoom out technique, right? We got to get our mouths right in the right spot, and then we can zoom in, zoom out. We've talked about being able to click and drag clips. Ah, and how you have to grab the top half lower half will highlight. Okay, Do multiple things by clicking something and then shift clicking to highlight everything in between. And that can go between tracks. So I just hold down, shift and click, and then I can copy paste or whatever. Um, another really handy function that I want you to keep in mind is holding down option while you click and drag. If you're on a PC, I'm not sure what the equivalent. Um, he is. It might also be option. Not sure, but, um, dual experimenting, and you'll find it really quick. What we're gonna do is hold down option, and then click and drag, and that will make a duplicate. So I didn't just click and drag it. I left it where it was and made another one. Ah, and put it somewhere different. That's a handy thing to do. Another thing I want to point out is that, um, key commands are all over alive. Everything. Nearly everything can be controlled with a key command like Aiken duplicate stuff. I can move stuff around. Um, almost every function, everything you can click on in live you can do without a mouse by using key commands. So, uh, I'll mention key commands as they come up. Don't worry about memorizing every key command that's going to drive you insane. Um, later in the course, I'll give you a document that outlines all the key commands. But for now, uh, try to latch on to some of the bigger ones, and I'll point out when they're bigger ones like, you know, like play, play and stop is the space bar. You always want to be able to play and stop quickly. That's the space bar. But, um, for as you work more with live and you're producing big tracks and you want to work efficiently, key commands will help you work more efficiently. So it's important to be able to navigate through live with some of these key commands. So we will talk about them as they come up. But I'm not a big fan of being, like you must memorize, you know, 50 key commands in order to use this program properly. That's kind of not really worth it. I know some people like that, Um, but some of them can be useful. One last thing I want to point out here is that when we were in looking at MIDI information and this is true in a wave form, also, the same zoom function appears. Right. So if you want a zoom in or out, we can do it by clicking right up here on the timeline and pulling down or up and sliding left or Right. Okay. So be sure you have that, um, that motion down because it's everywhere. It also happens. Let me go to a piano thing here where we have the piano keyboard also having the left side here, we can zoom in and out vertically with the same motion. I just put it over here where the keys are. Okay. So get comfortable with that gesture, because we're gonna be seeing it all over the place. Okay, Now, let's focus on some navigation stuff specific to, uh, the arrangement view window 10. The Main Sequencer: Okay, let's talk about some main navigation things in arrangement view. We've already talked about moving clips around and all that good stuff, right? Um, a couple more things that we need to cover here. Let's zoom in a little bit on a clip that one ought to do. Okay, so this is a MIDI clip. So if we want to make it longer, we can put our mouths right over the end of it and drag it forward. Okay, we can see what's happening down here, and we'll talk about that in just a second. Um, well, actually, let's talk about that now. What's happening is the length of this is just getting longer. Um, nothing inside the clip. The notes aren't changing. However, If I did the same thing with an audio clip, let's do this. There's content when I pull it out. Why is there stuff in there when I open it up? Ah, very good reason, because loop is turned on. Okay, What that means is, since this is looped when I pull it forward, it's just restarting the loop. It's showing me the same thing again and again and again, and you can kind of see where the loop starts over with this little vertical tick. That's right there. It's really small. It's really hard to see, but it's in there. So there's the beginning of the loop, okay, that would happen on MIDI files as well, if they were set toe loop like Let's look at this one. This one's not set to loop, but let's set it to loop. So if I turn loop on here and I drag it out, you know, we get that same pattern again and again and again. Okay, so when you extend a clip and looping is turned on, you will see the content in it that is looped, right? So that's different than doing this. I could duplicate this. I'm doing command D. I could duplicate this out, and I'm gonna get the clip five times here. Or I could do this, said it toe loop and drag it out five times, right? So what? What's the advantage of one over the other? Uh, the main advantages. This if I wanted to do it exactly like this, either way is just a good, but let's say I wanted to do this. Now I've got a bit more of a problem, right? Because I've got a hole in the middle. If I want that hole in the middle, then I don't want to have a five. Have it loop five times, right? Because I can't just shut it off for that one. I could have a look two times if that works out to be right and then duplicate that here. That works. But, um, it's just two ways of doing it. If you want to break in it, then you should just duplicate it. Another thing you can do with audio clips. And this is another new live 10 thing is fades usable boxes that are popping up on the corners. I can draw in a quick fade just by clicking and pulling those in. So if I want this to fade in quickly, I can do that. If I wanted to fade in slowly, I could do that. This is here. What that did something is solo this right? So it just slowly faded the volume in to be really quick fade right. If you don't want it anymore, just smash it all the way to the to the sides. Okay? One other thing that is, Ah, not necessarily unique to arrangement. View what I want to point it out now while we're looking right at it is you have to put audio clips on audio tracks and mid eclipse on Midi tracks. If you don't, this is what happens. Let's take this audio clip. Let's drag it into a MIDI track. Okay, this window pops up and it says, I'm going to convert that audio to MIDI. How do you want me to do it? And we want to tell it Harmony, meaning it's cords. Melody, meaning it's a single note line or drums meeting its drums. This is drums, so let's try it now. It's going toe. Use the sounds that were already on this track to play that. So this is gonna be a synthesizer playing drums. It's gonna be weird way. It's the strings. So I put it on the strings. That's kind of weird, but I could do it, I guess so. You don't want to do that most of the time cause it's gonna convert the track to audio or midi to midi if you drag it under a mini track. If you drag a midi track onto an audio track. It's just not gonna let you do it, okay? It's just going to say Nuke and bounce right back. If there's no content on the track already, like if I make a totally new track, here's a new audio track and that was command T. I just did command t as making new track audio track shift Command. T is make a new MIDI track. So if I take a new audio track and I drag a MIDI file on it, since there's nothing else on this audio track yet, it's just going to convert it to a MIDI track because there's nothing on it. But if there was some audio on it already and then I drag it down there now it's going to say no, because now it's going to say it's firmly an audio track because there's audio on it. It can't change it, right? Okay, so just a couple extra things about navigating in, um arrangement view. Now let's jump over to the clips lot grid and talk about, uh, session view 11. The Clip Slot Grid: Okay, um, so back to session view and a couple of navigation things about here. So the same deal applies with audio and mid eclipse, right? So I have midi tracks and audio tracks. One question I get a lot is how do you tell what's amidi track in? What's an audio track? Ah, the easy way is if you click on the track and you see some stuff down here on, make sure you're looking at the instrument tab. Ah, then it's a meaty track. Okay, we have MIDI tracks here. Let's keep going. That is something that says it can't find the thing that I used to make it, But that's OK. Let's get to an audio track. Here we go audio track here. It's looking for an audio effect, So if we don't have any audio effects here, doesn't really matter. It's still an audio track, so it's kind of hard to tell what's Amidi track and what's an audio track once you have an instrument on it, Um, but we'll talk more about that soon, So if you have a mini track like here's my piano track, let's solo it. I can make a new Midi clip by just double clicking in the box in the clip slot. And then I could make new notes just by double clicking on them in their spot. Let's take those notes to pull him over here if I want to hear them while I'm clicking them in Hit this little headphone button right there. Now we can hear what I'm doing, and I can launch the clip by hitting the little play button up here. That was kind of cool. I'm gonna copy all of that. Go out here and paste it in again. Now, I have our loop of this goofy, dissonant piano sound neat, right? I could make another clip underneath it by doing the same thing. Now, if I want to make this clip longer, I can't just drag the corner right the way I did with the other one. Ah, what I have to do to make this clip longer is go down here. Loop length. Change this. Move this up. So now let's make it a four bar loop now. So now it's a four bar, and now we're gonna be waiting for it to cycle around again. And now we have it. Okay? um, I can move clips around quite easily. I can copy and paste. I can move clips between Midi tracks. Same thing applies. If I put it on audio track, it's gonna try to convert it Are the other way around. I should say, Put an audio track on a MIDI clip. It's gonna try to convert it. I can delete a clip just by clicking on it and hitting the delete key. I can do the option click and drag thing to your duplicated clip. And because this clip is looking a little bare, let's give it a name. So command are rename it. Let's call it piano Dissonance spelled that wrong? That's okay. This is not a spelling class, okay? And I can read duplicate this just so that all has the name. One important thing is I've duplicated these, but I could set them to be different lengths because they're totally separate clips. So I could say this one is only a two bar clip, and this one is a one. Barkley. So what now? When I scroll between these, which I can do with the arrow keys, you can see that they're totally separate. I could do different things with them. Right? So let's take this and let's put this clip some other places. Let's everything over here we have the stop everything button so we can stop all the clips playing in a specific track by the stop button underneath it or the stop button Right underneath. Whatever clip is playing, that'll stop everything in that track. But if everything is just going haywire and just want to stop everything you hit this one over here just shoots a stop command to all of them way. Ah, start position. This little flag is the start position of the loop. The loop is still the same length. Except instead of going from here to here, it's going to go from here to hear again, right? It's still the same number of beats. But if I want to offset this one from that one, Okay, that's pretty weird, right? Um, this one is real. Alright, let's stop all of them. Let's hear. This one is really low, so let's move this up, Inductive. So I'm going to select all with command a. Then I'm gonna shift up arrow. It's gonna move everything up, right? So just changes the register of it. All the notes. Let's make a smooth. Okay, So some basic navigation stuff about working with the clip slot grid, which is what we call this whole area. Remember, vocabulary. Just one more time. These air tracks going across. These are clips. These are called clips. Lots. The whole thing is the clip slot grid, and one of these all the way across is called a scene. Over here, we have the scene launch, um, where we can launch everything in here. We have our stop everything button. Cool. Awesome. Okay, let's go a little bit deeper into this window down here and look at what's in there. 12. Clip View: okay up next. I want to look at our clip view window. OK, so that's this area down here. And I remember there's two different areas that we could be looking at Could be looking at , uh, the clip view window, and we could be looking at our instruments and effects window. I want to be looking at the clip view window. So that's this one. And by the way, I can toggle between the two of them with shift tab if you're keeping track, Um, of that of all the key commands that I'm throwing out, even though I just said you don't really need to But, um, I'm gonna throw out a bunch of them anyway. Okay? So remember that the clip view window does not change whether or not we're in session View our arrangement view. Okay, so let's look at a clip of you a clip here in arrangement, view and in session view, the clip view window is the same. I have different content right now between the two of them, but, um, how it works and what's in it is the same. So what we have here is separate things for a foreign. A midi track earn audio track. It's different. So it's looking a midi track first. So we've looked at how to make notes. All right. We can move notes around copy notes and put things on the grid just fine. Then we have this stuff over here. This gives us a little more information about our midi clip that we're working with. Okay, so we've looked at the loop length that we can adjust here. We can also adjust that by dragging this box out here if we have the room to do it. This position is where the loop starts. So does it start on? Ah, bar one bar to etcetera. And what's important here is these numbers that we see here. What we're seeing is bar beat and 16th note. So right here we see bar one because it just hasn't won. So that means the first bar, the first beat the 1st 16th note. Here we see far one beat too. And then the assumed 1st 16th note. Ah, for right here. 143 What we're seeing is bar one beat for the 3rd 16th note. Okay, so it sometimes can get a little tricky to keep track of your grid and where you are. We'll talk more about those soon, but that's what those numbers are telling us. So we just see to That means the second bar. Okay, we also have our loop settings here and then a couple of kind of composition tools. That can be really fun. Let's let's make this do something useful here. Uh, let's just do that. Actually, uh, let's set this to be a one bar loop and that's just here. Put my start flying back in beginning. OK, that's neat. I can reverse it with this button. That's neat. If I want to take it back, I can either hit, undo or I can hit reverse again. I can invert it. All right. That's still a bit different than reversing it right meat. I can duplicate the loop llegado isa setting. That basically means that it will play longer. Really be able to hear it. In this context, we'll discuss llegado more when we start talking about instruments and the llegado setting . Okay, so just some general things. Now let's look at an audio clip. Here's an audio track. Okay, so this is what this sounds like way turn off that money clip. Super weird. But it serves my point. So a lot of this stuff works the same loop, position, length. Um, we have we can reverse it. Let's reverse it. Okay. And now we have warp settings here as well. So we're gonna talk about warp settings a little bit more when we get into recording. But what warping does is it keeps everything in time. That's how we know what the tempo is. This one is hard to tell because it doesn't have ah, rhythm to it. But if we were looking at a drumbeat, we would want to make sure our warp settings were correct so that it knew that it was in the right tempo. That can be a little confusing. So let's save it for a later section where we really dive in deep tow warping For now. Just remember, warping is a thing. We can transpose it, which means move the pitch up or down, such with it way down. That's gonna fund and weaken boost the volume or cut the volume a bit. This is not a great way to deal with the volume. Um, the better way to deal with volume is with your mixer over here. So this is where that track is. I can turn that whole track up or down, but in some cases, you might want to boost the volume down here. Don't ever do this, though. If you boost it to where it goes off the radar up here, you're gonna have problems. So don't do that. That's the most. I could boost it right there. Okay. A couple other things that are in this window. There's a couple little hidden buttons down here. This l is for the launch mode. We're gonna talk about launch modes more later. But what that means is what happens when I click on it? Does it start playing? Doesn't wait a second. Um, does it play until I click it again? Does it loop automatically? There are some settings weaken. Do that will tell it how, exactly? We wanted to behave when we launch it. And then our last one here is envelopes. Weaken. Draw an envelope. We can draw on envelope on this and you'll see a lot of envelopes later. Um, as we get deeper into the actual production side and like producing tracks, envelopes, become a big deal. But basically what an envelope is is something that opens and closes. So in this case, I have the volume. And I just clicked on the little pink line here and made a point. Now I'm gonna make another one. So now the volume is going to go up over the length of the loop would be hard to hear. So as it loops, the volume goes up and down. There's more we can do with that. There's a lot more if you hit this unlinked button, things get really weird and interesting. Um, again, that's gonna come soon. I I No, I'm saying a lot of stuff is gonna come soon, but it's just because I don't want to overwhelm you with stuff quite yet. There's a lot of interesting stuff coming on coming up, and, um, I don't want to give you too much. We're gonna We're kind of slowly getting into the deep stuff, Okay? So just just keep rolling with me for a little bit and you we'll all be okay. Don't worry. Um, that being said, let's talk about recording. Um, so let's do some quick recording experiments in live and talk about how we set up doing actual audio recording and samedi recording in life 13. Adding Content Overview: Okay, let's talk about adding content to our session and by adding content, talking about a couple different ways that this can happen so we can get content. And by content, I'm saying audio or midi stuff music. Basically, we can get that into able to in a couple different ways. We can record sound. We can record MIDI data, um, or weaken drag in sound or many did it. Um, And if we drag in MIDI data, we need to or record it, we need to apply and instrument. So in this first video in this section, I want to go over that specific idea. So I have a new session here, and let's just work on a little track throughout this section. So I have too many tracks in two audio tracks. Right? Um, if I want to do a midi track, if I want to make a MIDI track, I can double click to make a MIDI clip of that is new in live 10. If you're in live nine, select something and then go to create insert midi clip right there. But if you're in live 10 you could just double click. Um, then I can look at that and I can draw in some notes. So let's do Let's do a little core progression here. So let's dio c major chord And then I'm going to say Command D and let's go to an F major chord. But let's move those down, inactive, down, inactive. And then let's make this a little longer so we know how to do that. Now let's make this a two bar loop. They could see up there. Updated is showing the loops. We see the same thing over and over. Let's duplicate this and let's take it, Teoh um, started in C major What on a minor cord that almost is. If these cords air are tripping you and you don't understand what I'm doing here, that's OK. I'm just building some chords that I think will sound nice for the sake of example. Um, I have ah, separate class on how to deal with cords. Um, and you can check that out as well. It's called music theory for electronic musicians about music theory stuff. Okay, so I have a little core progression here. It's looping up here, Uh, and I can hit play and we will hear nothing, right? Because this is a midi clip. This is a MIDI track. Ah, it's not gonna make any sound until I put an instrument on it. So I'm gonna go to this instruments tab and these are all my available instruments. Now, if you have live nine, you won't see this wave Table one. If you don't have lives Sweet. You won't see a lot of these. So there are. There are three different versions of live. There's live intro live standard in life. Sweet life. Sweet is the one that has everything live standard. You'll see less things here in life intro. You'll see less things yet so hopefully you have life Sweet. That's what we want to be working on. If you don't have live sweet, that's okay There's still a lot you can do with standard and even intro. But, uh, we could open up any of these like, let's go to I don't know, Let's go toe operator. And if I click on the little arrow, I can open it up and these are a whole bunch of presets, right? So let's look at I don't know strengths. And here's us string sound kind of sounds like a weird keyboard. Um, and it's gonna audition it for us so I can drag that right onto that track. And now I have that instrument down here. Okay? No important concept here is that that instrument is on the track, not the clip. And the other mid eclipse I put on this track are going to have to use the same instrument . If I want another instrument, put it on a different track. Okay? There can only be one instrument on a track at a time unless you do some fancy stuff that we'll get to later. But for the most part, only one instrument on a track at a time. So now that we have an instrument I can hit play you on that sounds terrible. The reason that must sound terrible. Is there some extra notes in this, um, instrument happening? Can open it up with these buttons over here and see what's happening somewhere were tuning things bizarrely. So let's try a different Ah, let's try a more simple since, like this one way pretty right. That's what I was expecting to hear. Have put in a really pretty core progression. And I heard a really ugly court progression. Um, So what was happening there was a synth can add notes Some sense can, um, have multiple notes for every note you give it. So there was one. There was some extra notes happening by that synth. That didn't sound very good. So now I have another synth on here and I can hear I can see more parameters of my sent here and adjust them. We're going to go into how all of this stuff works, How to get into every aspect of our synthesizer. We will get to over the course of this, a built in Siris of classes. So let's not worry about the details in there quite yet. The the key point to remember here is that nothing happens on this midi track until I put an instrument on it. Audio tracks can. You don't need to put anything extra on the audio track. I can find an audio clip, and I can throw that right on an audio track on. It'll work. Okay, so what I could do now zoom in? Since I am going to try to make this sound somewhat interesting. Oops. Assuming a little farther here Let's put this on. Beats two and four, everyone kind of fast here, but Okay. So what I'm seeing is remember how we read this timeline up here says this one says bar one beat one bar, one B to borrow one beat, three bar, one beat for So I want this clap toe happen on two and four. Okay, now that I've got this silence back here, so I'm gonna clip that off and then, Ah, I'm gonna just duplicate both of these. Actually, there's an easier way I could do this. Let's do it. I'm gonna highlight this whole bar just on this track, and I'm gonna turn this into one clip, okay? I'm gonna do it with Command. J is called Consolidate. It's gonna turn that into one clip, including the empty space. The reason I would do that. It's so that I can turn loop on, and then just drag it out. Now that's gonna go every two and four. So now I can zoom back out and pull that out for the duration of what I've got here. Go go back to the beginning. Okay. We're starting to get something. Um, one last thing I want to point out in this first video is first video on this topic is where sound and when sound is generated on a midi cliff. So let's look at the instrument again. And the way I just got that back, by the way, we were here and I went over to this tab down here and I did it with shift tab key. But you can also click on these two tabs down here, so check this out. What? Do you see these dots here? That means midi data. Okay, when you see these lines here, that means audio signal. That's what those two symbols mean. So we can see here waken see midi data coming in here. And then it flows through the instrument. And now it's audio signal way. Look at are audio clip. We just see audio signal right away. Okay. Midi needs to be turned in tow audio. Okay, now what that means is that we can put we can do anything we want to do to the audio after its converted to audio, like audio effects, like a delay or a reverb or something like that. And we'll start doing that soon. When we talk about effects, but for now, just remember that. Go okay. Before we get started with actually recording some stuff, we need to take a quick look at our preferences and make sure everything is set up correctly. So let's do that next. 14. The Preferences: Okay, so let's go into our preferences and make sure we've got things set up the way we wanted. Um, some of these things are going to be important for recording, and a couple of things will talk about just because we're gonna be there now. The Preferences window is one of the hidden windows. That's kind of rare. It's not already on the screen. There are not many windows like that, but this is one we can get there in two ways. We can go to the live menu at the top and say preferences, or we compress command comma and bring up the preferences with. So let's look through what's here. First we have look, feel. This is just general layout things. Whether you want to restore labels, do the don't show again. Stuff. Um, the color, the default track color. I haven't said Gray. Um, the theme. You can change themes. I actually like to have mine on the dark theme. Um, I think it it looks kind of cool, and I'm working at night. However, it doesn't look very good for screen captures, so I've set it back to the default, um, which is mid light um, brightness, color, hue, all that good stuff. Nothing critical here. Just the way things look and feel audio. This is important. Okay, So, uh, driver type if you're on a Mac, you want this to be core audio? If it says no audio, you need to change it to whatever your audio system is. The more important one is going to be audio input and audio output devices. So this is gonna be what you're using, too. Record and playback. So input is what we're using to record. So I have two possible recording things connected to my computer. I have a thing called Quartet. This is an apogee quartet. This is, Ah, audio interface that lets me plug a microphone into it. So it is a separate box that I have that lets me plug in a microphone. Um, you would not have one of these. That's okay. Uh, you should probably see here like internal microphone or something like that. I also have my webcam. That's recording this. Ah, that I could use. It has a built in microphone that I could use. I don't have a built in microphone. Someone cause I'm on a desktop computer So what I want to set is Quartet. Now, this might get a little hairy because my screen capture software is using the quartet as an input device also, So we'll see what happens. Um, output device, audio output device. That just means you're speakers. So we could say here whatever our speaker is, I have a lot of possible output device is hooked in here. You might want your built in output. That's like your headphone jack or the speakers that air in it. I again have quartet because that's what my speakers are plugged into. This is, ah, audio interface that, um, I plug microphones and speakers into for high quality audio. You should consider getting one of these if you're going to do any kind of real recording. Um, there's a bunch of different brands and types. This one, um, Apple G. That's a p o g e in the model is quartet. I like it. I'm really happy with it. Um, I also like the stuff by the company called Motew Motu. If you want to look up the stuff that they make anyway, so we have that set, we have our in out sample rate set this to 44,100 will explain what that means. Later, when we talk in more detail about recording and your buffer size, you might have to play with this a little bit. If you're on a slower computer, you might want to try to move this up. Um, if you're getting glitchy and things like that, like little glitches and weird sounds, try moving it down. Experiment with it. It can solve some problems to change that on. Then this test tone is just gonna let you hear some stuff. It's gonna hear a sine wave way. So you can tell if you've got a clean audio signal or not. Okay, Midi stuff. This is going to show us what MIDI devices are connected. So I have a push to these things are great out because they're not currently connected. Um, this is my quartet, which also has midi functionality. It is connected. So whenever you connect a new MIDI device, you want to come here and be sure you see it and turn it on here. They'll be like a midi keyboard filing folder settings. Nothing out of the ordinary here. You should be able to leave this with unmodified unless you're doing something strange. This is where your library is again. You shouldn't need to modify this record warp and launch. Um, I wouldn't worry about modifying any of this stuff until you get into some more advanced recording and editing. But you have some settings for recording the count in settings, file types, things like that, um Warp, which will talk about soon and launch settings which will be talking about soon as well and then license and maintenance. That's just your live license. And that's all fine. The main things to look at here is your audio devices and make sure your inputs and outputs are correct. Okay, with that, let's go back to the main window and talk about the browser a little bit. 15. The Browser: okay, I said a minute ago. If there's a few different ways that we can get sound into the session or arrangement view , it doesn't really matter which one we're looking at in this case, whether it's session or arrangement. But, um, one of those ways is just to pull it in, So I want to talk about the browser really briefly. It doesn't need to be a big, a big hoopla. It's not rocket science, but the browser is important. So if you don't see the browser, you can get it from this little triangle up here. And what we have here on the Left column are kind of three big areas we have. First, let's look at this categories. So this is kind of able 10 provided stuff. Mostly so sounds these air just like a whole bunch of clips, many of which, if not all of which come with live. Now. This is the live library. Drums is the same instruments would be the different instruments that you have access to these air midi instruments, right? Like what? We just looked at eso the different many instruments that come with live, and we'll look at working with each and every one of these in the coming courses. Audio effects. These will be effects that come with live. And if you don't have live sweet, you'll see a lot less than I have here. But these are all the ones that come with live sweet, and each of these is is in effect. You can put on, um, some audio. So just like if you're a guitar player and you plug into a distortion pedal basically the same thing many effects are things you can put on a midi track Now it's important to note here that remember when we looked at this earlier, a MIDI signal comes in here and that's data. That's midi signal, and it comes out as audio effects as audio here. So that means you can put an audio effect on a MIDI track. It just has to be after the signal has converted it to, um, the instrument has converted it to an audio signal so you can put a media or an audio effect out here. You can put a MIDI effect before it gets converted to audio, so you can put a MIDI effect over here. There are not many MIDI effects and there are not. They're less likely that you'll use them, but we'll go over each of them when we talk about effects. Max, for live is separate thing in the last class. On this, Siri's talks exclusively about Max for live natural lives, kind of like a programming language that lives in live that you can design your own plug ins and effects with its I'm Not Gonna lie. It's a little tricky to use, but it's one of my favorite things about life. I'm really into Max. So, um, look forward to that. You can literally make the program do anything you can imagine with with Max. No plug ins, plug ins, arm or effects, mostly audio effects. But these are different than the audio effects in that these air from anywhere else. Audio effects are what a Bolton gives you with the program. Plug ins are from anywhere else, so you can go online and look for, you know, cool plug ins. You confined plug ins that are cheap. You confined plug ins that are expensive, and you can find a lot of plug ins that are just free. Somebody made a cool plug in and they're putting it out for free. You can download those and install those on your computer, and they should come up here. There are two different kinds. Audio units and V S. T. If I open these up, you can see some that I have installed. You won't have these on your computer Thes air, separate things that I've installed. So these have nothing to do with live other than they run in life as plug ins. But they'll run inside any audio program. Here are a bunch of different plug ins that I have clips is just a whole bunch of clips that come with live and samples a whole bunch of samples that come with live. Now let's go to this place is column. This is actually pretty cool. This was This is not new and live 10 but it was new in live nine, I believe, Um, these air just folders on my computer and I can add or take away from them. Pax is where all my packs go. Now you can download packs from the able to website or from other people. Packs are basically a big bunch of a bilton stuff, so it might be plug ins. It might be samples. It might be clips. It might be a session. There's a lot of stuff that can be within a pack, but these are packs I've installed on my computer. You probably don't have very many installed on yours already. User library is just your standard able to newser library. Current project is the current project I'm looking at and all of the samples in it these slam academy and sample library. You probably don't have a slam Academy folder in your browser, although if you dio you're awesome. But you really don't. I've added those. And so what you can do is click on this ad folder and let's just say I want to put in, Uh, I don't know. Let's go to one of my hard drives and say, um, this battery folder. Sure, so I can add that battery folder here just so I could get access to it really quick. That's the only reason you would do that. I can control, click and get rid of it if I don't really want it there. So I have a folder on my computer called Sample Library, which is just a ton of samples I've collected over the years. Ah, and I have one called slam Academy, which is Ah, a bunch of samples that I use for slam academy stuff. Um, so you can add tons of stuff here. You can take up all this space and add more stuff if you want. It's really great. Uh, two more things, actually. Three more things. I want to point out really quick his collections. This is actually really cool. And this is new and live 10. What this is is we can add You condemn fine these to be whatever you want. So here I've said beats and I can go into, you know, samples and say, like, Let's find a beach. Uh, that's going to sounds, maybe drums. Okay, let's say I really like this deep. What I could do is control click on it and say, Now it shows up here. So what that means is I can tag things with beats, whether it's a mini clip, an audio clip in effect, a max for live thing, a plug in kind of anything I can put as beats and it will come up here. So what? I have been using these four and people are using these for different things. I've been using him to keep track of, ah, few different things like effects that I'm really into lately plug ins that I'm really into lately beats. Um But you could use these however you want, and you can change the name of them. If you just command are you can do whatever you want with them. So they're really fun. They're really good for organizing kind of plug ins that your into, especially once you get a lot of plug ins, they're great. Okay, uh, next to last thing I want to show you is up here. There's a search function, so don't forget about this. So if you're looking for if you're like, I need a snare hit search for snare Ah, and then be sure you click on all results down here If you do want to search all results. Otherwise I could go into drums, sounds, uh, or samples, maybe, or clips. But I don't want to search plug ins or something like that. Then you could click this individual category otherwise all results works quite well. So here I've pulled up everything that was called that every file called sneer that Live knows about E. I can use the arrow keys and scroll through them real fast. That's kind of cool. I'll throw that into this session so I can grab it right out of the browser and throw it into this session. Let's hear what that I love that. So I'm gonna delete that out of the session and let's do Let's do that. There's an individual snare I can throw in there somewhere. In fact, since I've already got this, that's not really what I want. What I'm missing here is a kick. Let's find a good kick. That's good kick. Let's throw that there. Let's put that on every downbeat and let's do that consolidate thing that we did before. That was Command J. And now I can pull that out Once I turned the loop on and there we have it. Let's hear that from the time. The last thing I want to point out about the browser is this little part down here. This is the audition, so if you click on some stuff, let's take let's go back to our kicks. If you click on one and you don't hear it. Be sure you hit this little blue thing so that you can hear it. Ah, you won't be able to hear everything like these. NK l files won't play. Some of the MIDI file types won't play, but most of them will. This one didn't play automatically, but if I click it start to play. If I turn this off, it's not going to audition them. It'll show me the way form, but it's not gonna play them automatically. So if you want to scroll through them, be sure that little headphone icon is clicked blue. Cool. Okay, so that gets us through the browser. Next, let's talk about general signal flow. 16. Signal Flow: Okay, um, a little bit more about signal flow. Now, signal flow is about how audio flows through the program. And this is important to get your head around. Um, early on. So let's start by looking at Amidi track, and then we'll look at an audio track afterwards. So we've already looked at a little bit of the signal flow for a midi track. So I have a MIDI track here, right? And when the sound is created, it goes Teoh here, right? Uh, sorry. I just misspoke. The Midi information goes to here. So it goes from here to here. Then it goes to here and it's converted toe audio through this instrument. And then it goes to the mixer here, or we can turn it up or down. And then it goes to the master, which is here. I can open this up more here if I want. There's not much to see here in the master and this is our master volume. Okay, If we jump over to session view nearly the same thing happens. I don't have a midi clip. Well, okay, here we go. Here's a midi clip. Now I have a video clip So I have my money clip. I can go to the instrument and see data audio. And then it goes to my mixer here and then my master here. So these look different, but they're the same. Okay, in an audio track, it's almost exactly the same. Except we don't have the instrument. So we have audio signal here. There are currently no effects. But if we did have effects, they would flow from left to right. So if there was in effect here, the signal will go through it and then to the next one and then to the next one at the end of the chain, it would go Teoh are ah, mixer for the channel, for the track and then to our master. Okay, so remember that that that is how the signal is flowing through the program. In particular, the most important thing to remember is that down here in the effects window, it's going from left to right. Let me just to, um, emphasize that. Let me just throw a couple of fax. I'm gonna go to audio effects and let's throw just kind of randomly a couple of things out here. Okay? So I have four effects down here now. So the signal is going to come here from the audio track that's going to go through this AMP effect, and then we'll see it here. And then it's gonna go through the beat. Repeat and then we'll see it here. Then it's gonna go through the Cabinet and we'll see it here. Then it's gonna go through the compressor and we'll see it here. There's nothing else. So it gets sent to the level. And then the master Good. Um, no. I threw those on their these effects on here without thinking about it too hard. Eso let's let's see what I did. So most of what you're hearing is this beat. Repeat, ah, effect, which can do kind of Gucci stuttering things really well. So it's repeating that for 7/16 notes for every other hit, every downbeat hit basically. Okay, I'm gonna get rid of that. And these other things. We'll talk more about effects soon. For now, let's do some recording 17. Recording Audio: Okay, let's record something. And, um, now, just one quick reminder that the next ah class in this Siri's eyes all about recording and warping. So we're just gonna touch on recording here and then in the next class, we're going to focus almost entirely on recording. So in order, record something, I need a new audio track. I could use one of these ones already have. But it's nicer to do an audio track. Our new track, Let's name it so command are vocals, cause I'm just gonna talk now. What I need to do is see where my mike is coming in. I can see my Mike is coming into all these tracks as one. So if I click here, external end in this case means an external microphone, which is what I have, right? It's a microphone coming in from somewhere else. I can also record from another track, which there are reasons you would want to do that. But that's not what we want to do right now. So external in. And then this particular unit I have set up to have two microphones come in, this unit could have four, but I only have to turn down at this moment. This 1st 1 is for a stereo signal. That would be like if you're recording like something where you put two microphones out, you would want to set it to that. But I only have one microphone plugged in, so I'm gonna set it toe one. So there is my signal. You can see it coming in That right? It's pretty loud, so I should turn it down. Um, however, I kind of can't turn it down because it's the same microphone that my screen capture software is using. So I'll just try not to get too loud when we record. We don't want that to turn red, Uh, because that means it's too loud. But let's try it anyway. So I'm gonna set my This is our monitor settings. That means is it gonna play through the speakers at the same time as it's recording? Basically, I'm gonna set that off, because if I have it on, it's gonna feedback. So now I'm gonna arm this track to record by clicking here. Now you can see a signal coming in here, and it's great out. That's because my, uh, monitor is off. So this is showing up gray to tell us that it's not playing through. The speakers were not gonna hear that sound, but it is getting into the track. Cool. So everything is all set to go. I just need Teoh hit record. So I'm gonna put my cursor where I want to record. This is called our cursor. I'm gonna hit this red button up here and off we go. Okay, Now we're recording. You can see the wave form coming in. Mm Ah. I just coughed. I cleared my throat. But that's OK. I should probably again. Um, that signal is quite loud. Um, but that's OK. Okay, so I stopped recording. Um, that and now we can hear it back by going to it. Okay, now we're recording. You can see the wave form coming in. I just coughed. I cleared my throat, but that's OK. I should probably again. Um, that signal is quite loud. Um, but that's OK. Okay. So we could hear on some of that that it was getting too loud, and we can kind of tell in cases like right here, where the way form gets flat like that at the top. That means I went too loud. We'll talk more about that shortly. Um, in the next class, when we talk about microphones and ah, head room and all that good stuff. But for now, I haven't. Okay, recording. Um, when I'm done recording, be sure and turn this off. We wanted set that to not arm to record just because you're kind of in danger of causing some feedback. Um, if we turned off our monitor and you just don't want to create feedback, feedback means that the speaker is playing sound and the microphone is picking up the same sound. And then the speakers playing that sound again and microphones picking up again and it goes in a loop and it gets louder and louder and louder every time until it just gets screaming loud and creates a terrible tone. And then, ah, you're you can break your speakers that way and you can break your ears also. OK, but now that I have this, I can edit it and do whatever I want to it. So let's take just this little chunk. Not sure what I say there and let's put it in my track right there. Wait for him coming in. Let's put it again and again. Wait for him coming. Wait for him coming in. Wait for him coming in. This is turning into the most boring track I've ever made, ever. But that's okay because it's hopefully teaching you something. Uh, OK, so that's the basics of recording audio. Um, I want to talk about recording from the session view into the arrangement view next. So let's go to a new video and let's do that. 18. Record To Arrange: Okay, lets convert this to working in the session view. Now, this isn't something I would normally do. Um, if I'm in the arrangement view, I would work on the track in arrangement view, but for the purposes of, um, demonstration, let me show you how I would do it. So there's a cool trick you can dio where I can grab this clip like I'm gonna move it. So I'm gonna click and hold down and just keep holding it, But at the same time, I'm gonna while I'm holding it, I'm gonna press the tab key Now, I've still got that clip. Right? So I'm gonna put that you have to put it back in the same track. Hey, this was just a scooping around. So this is that track I just made, right? So, um, I pulled it over to session view. I can do the same thing with this snare hit or this clap, I guess. Crunch, whatever it is, put that an audio track, grab my kick, put that in there, and I guess this vocal thing if I want it, I only have to do this once because, look, this is just one loop through and it's gonna go on forever. So if I stop everything and let's turn, let's be sure all of this is off. Looks like it is because it's great out. Okay, so now this is gonna go on forever, remember? That's how session view works. Let's turn in my kick. Right. This is four bars or one bar, I should say before hits. It's just gonna go have my clap and I can have my local things way for coming in. Wait for him coming in, right? That's not set toe loop. And I wouldn't want to lose because that would be annoying. Now let's say let's stop it and let's stop everything. And let's say I have something that I really like. Okay, I'm gonna go back over to arrangement view, and you see how all this stuff is great out. What that means is live is saying you've got something going on in session view and you've got something going on arrangement view. I don't know what you want me to dio. So I'm gonna choose session view, and so it's gonna gray this out to say I'm not gonna play this right now. A new play session view. If you want to say no arrangement, you take over. You hit this button up here. And the reason I'm gonna do that I want to delete all of this. I just wanna clear the canvas, so to speak. Okay, Now I'm gonna go back to session view. Now that this is empty, what I want to do is record my session that I'm gonna play. So what I'm gonna do is hit record. Okay, so now we're recording. I'm gonna start my MIDI clip school. Let's enter the kick next time around here. Clap my vocal way for coming in. Wait for coming in. Okay, Now, let's do a graceful exit here. Let's dio let's take out the keyboard first and on my kick and then my stare That's near clap. I guess not gonna hit Stop. So I recorded all of that. Where did it go? It went to arrangement View. This is what I did. And this records every time you started in stopped stuff. So this is exactly how I did it just now. So let's take back over for arrangement view. Um and so we basically documented that whole performance. I just did of the pieces of the song, and this is what a lot of DJs do. So when someone performs like a four hour set or whatever, they'll be working mostly in session view are all in session view. But they might record the whole thing to arrangement view so they can go back and touch it up if they want to. Or they can export it as a track and posted to Soundcloud or do whatever they want to do. So I recorded everything that I did, every motion that I made. Every time I click start the track starts and I click. Stop the track stopped. I can adjust it if I didn't If I did something wrong and said at least should have ended at the same time Maybe this was dumb. I could get rid of him so I can modify the performance. It's kind of cool. So this is called recording to arrange record to arrange. I was in session view and I hit record, and that recorded it to the arrange view. Pretty cool, right? Okay, let's talk about the newest kind of recording, which is called capture. I'm really excited about this one 19. Capture: Okay, let's make use of this other MIDI track we've got here. Let's put an instrument on it. Let's say something. Maybe something rhythmic. That's cool. So I have a midi keyboard connected Teoh live, so I could just play some keys. Now, what happens often, Um is your recording something? And ah, is your playing something and you liked it, and then you go back to record it, and you can't quite find the same thing again, right? Okay. So let's see if we can find something interesting to play over top of would have got already with, um, my midi keyboard. Okay, that was cool. Um, I was pretty happy with that. However, I wasn't recording. I was just goofing around, but it was good. Ah, and now I have totally forgotten it. So it's gone forever. Or is it? Check this out. This button right here is called capture. I'm gonna click it. Boom. There's what I just played. This capture thing is new and live 10. If you're not in live 10 you don't have this, but what it is is it's kind of like the, um The Midi keyboard is kind of always recording and it will kind of spit back whatever you're doing and just kind of remember what you just played, Theo. So it's really a lifesaver for when you're working on a track, you can just be good noodling around on your keyboard. Hit that capture button as soon as you find something you like and it's there, you don't have to always be recording to find it. It's just one of the coolest new things. Um, like I could even be out here and just be noodling around. That was neat. And let's throw that into the session What I just did, right? It's totally wild. Um, such a futuristic idea. So that's the capture. Um, it's this little box button up here, and, ah, you can use it to save your butt when you come up with a good idea and then immediately forget it. Hit that capture button and see if it's there. 20. Session Deconstruction: Okay, Now that we know a little bit more about how able to works, I thought we would do a little session deconstruction. We'll do a few of these throughout of these classes. Um, but for now, let's go back to this track that we were looking at earlier. This is a track of mine. It looks like there's a lot going on, but we can kind of sift through it a little more comfortably now because we know quite a bit about how this program works. So let me just play the beginning of it, um, and walk you through the session after we hear a little touch of it. Okay, that's enough of that. Um, let's walk through it. So as you can see, this is almost all midi tracks. The only thing that's audio is this beat and the kind of frantic Drummond basically kind of stuff down here. All right, The rest is all midi. So let's look at what instruments I have. So here I have a kick, and this is using what's called a sampler or a simpler instrument. Um, and it's just playing a kick sound over and over. Just doing that. Nothing fancy. Uh, here is a track labeled piano, which doesn't actually have anything on it throughout the whole song. So I must have had a piano part and then got rid of it. That's cool. Here's the main bell rift that we hear over and over. Here's another, since that is empty. So and that's totally okay. Toe. Have you know, here I had some based since that I was working with and then throughout the production process decided I didn't like it and got rid of it. Um, there's nothing wrong with that. Here's another bell sound. There's another bell. There's a lot of bells at the beginning of this, another kind of bell. So this whole intro is this layering of atonal bells that gets slightly off from each other . You can kind of see here. That's kind of what I was going for. There's another sense that doesn't have anything on it at the moment. I think this is our kind of Maine sent or is this another bell? No, this is another belt. Let's see what this one is. This is probably strings. Oh, this is the piano. And here we have that really dirty synth that came in. So what's happening down here is I have a sense playing, uh, that sound, and then I'm running it through a distortion. Uh, effect. I can turn off that distortion effect by clicking right here. It's a little cleaner right back on that gets us to sound. We were using, um, down here we have. Let's see what we have here. Okay, that repeating bass again. Just a sense playing over and over here we have our string section. So it's a really nice sounding string section. I just use the cello section here. And then I used the violin section here they fade in and in Oregon to double the strings because I like the way that sound. So these are all these air, mostly stock stuff stuff that comes with a built in There's the organ. See, we've got here something that's fading in, I think. Or maybe it's muted altogether. That could be more strings and more strings. Yet a lot of strings in that build up there. Here, we've got just a little would block and this is just a sampler of a little would block sample. I'm just hitting it. A couple times in different pitches, and that's pretty much it, um, a lot of many stuff happening here, going through some effects, but not too many effects, Uh, and then layering it all together. So a relatively simple track. We'll look at more complicated ones later. Don't worry. For now, let's move on it. Let's talk about editing and putting together your whole track. 21. Editing Overview: Okay, let's go back to this project. This goofy little happy thing. Um, for our section on editing because we want toe turn this into something. Maybe I don't know if I'm setting myself up for failure here or not, but probably, but that's OK. Um, so we've talked about editing a little bit. So far, we've talked about moving clips around, talk about shortening clips, lengthening clips, duplicating, looping. Um, but let's get a little bit deeper into what we need to do to, um, build a whole track out of these clips. So let's start with a little more detail on timeline functions and looping. 22. Timeline Functions And Looping: Okay, A couple of things we can do up here in the timeline. Uh, the first and probably most important to me as we can put a marker down. If we control click in this light gray area, we can do add locator. And with this, this is just a little flag that gives us some text so we can say bridge starts here. We can say whatever you want. Um, and then appear I can add another one and say, Ah, of course, whatever. Now each of these flags works like a play head so I can click here. If I'm playing, I can click there and start, and then I can go to here and the next downbeat It'll go there. I could shift and start. I can shift this by clicking and dragging. Maybe you saw a few of these that I had set up in, um, the previous track. I like to use these when I'm writing to keep track of the sections. Another thing we can do in this area up here is at a meter change. So our meter is here. We're in 44 times. That's four beats per bar. If we wanted to change it. We could change it here. We could say 74 like that last piece was in and that adjust the grid to show us 74 But if we wanted to change it at a specific spot in the track, we can do it up here. So now I'm back in 44 I can say at a time, signature change and say seven slash four. And now from here forward is in 74 So if I'm playing from here, you can look up here and see what it hits that spot that's gonna change to 74 like that now , interesting to note. Also, he also see this little tiny red dot up there, right? What? That means we're going to see a lot more of those pretty soon and actually just a couple of videos. But that means that something is automated on that track, and automation means something else is controlling it. So as soon as we put this 74 marker in here, that little light popped up just so that we know when we look at our meter, something else is telling it how to behave. OK, we call that automation We're gonna look at more automation in just a few minutes. So some of the important functions that are here, let's go back into this loop. And I just want to point out one other thing here. What we have here is in this particular case is this kick right and it's hitting on every other beat. Now this audio file has four kicks in it, and then we're looping that over and over. What we could do and is sometimes more efficient is just loop one. If you look up here, it's effectively doing the same thing, right, but it gives me a little more flexibility. Sometimes I just want to point that out and keep in mind that there's no real need to loop all four. I could I could loop three, although doing an odd number sometimes causes some confusion, Uh, two. Is Justus well, but you might as well just do one, so there's no need to loop all four of those if they're all the same just to point that out . Now, If I was gonna do that up here with the clap, it's a little trickier, right? Because I can't loop just one cause if I look just one that happens, right? But if I loop the space before it, it does work. So you have to loop the empty space before it. And there's some other tricks around that too. But essentially, that will work to create this whole beat just to individual hits with the loop set up correctly. Okay, Um, so just a couple little things on that. 01 other thing I want to point out is that when you're working with clips, you can always move things with the arrow keys. And if you hold down shift with the arrow keys, you can extend things out. Your selection out anyway. And you could move up or down with the arrow keys as well. For what you're selecting. Okay, let's talk about midi editing, editing and quanta izing. 23. MIDI Editing And Quantizing: Okay, so we've talked about midi editing before, when we talked about many editing were largely talking about working in this piano grid. Okay, this is called the piano roll editor or sometimes called the Mini Grid. There's a couple different names for it. Um, I want to talk a couple tricks for navigating in here Now, just like clips above We can click on a note and we can use the arrow keys to go up or down . We can use the arrow keys to go left or right. We can use shift right to extend the note shift left to make it smaller. We can use shift up to jump up in active shift down to jump down an octave. You could just keep hitting those all day long if you want. Now, one of the most important things about editing Midi is something called Quanta izing. And for that, let's soon right in here. So this is the little rhythmic since that we capture. Okay, so let's zoom in to right here. So what I wanted to do was play this note right on the downbeat of the third bar and I didn't do it. I played it sloppy because I'm not that great of a keyboard player, and that's just fine. So let's fix it. There's a couple different ways I can fix it. I can drag it over and get it right on there. Or I can use the arrow key and nudge it over to get it right on the line. Yeah, I can do all of the fixes at once. Command A to select all. Or I can drag a box around everything. So I highlight all the notes. Then I'm going to control Click to get this menu. This is called the Contextual Menu, by the way, Um, and I'm gonna say quantities now look what happens when I did that, it landed right on that line. What quantities does is just tighten up your rhythms and get them to the nearest, uh, vertical point. So this one, for example, I might have wanted this note to be right here, and it got it too, right here is where it moved it to. So I might look at my quant ties settings to see it's going to adjust it to the current grid. So that means as much as we're zoomed in at that moment that we quantifies it. That's where it's gonna contacts it, too. File said, uh, eighth notes. And I said OK, so now it moved it to the nearest eighth note, which was in the opposite direction of where I wanted it to go. That's where I wanted it to be. But that's what quantity easing. Does it really? It tightens up all your notes so that they're in the right spot. This mini clip up here are are little synth riff does not need to be qualifies at all because I just clicked in those notes. I didn't play them in, so they're already totally on the grid and locked in, so I don't need to. Kwan ties those. So don't forget, after you record something on Amidi instrument, you can always Kwan ties it just to really tighten it up and make yourself sound like a genius pianist. Uh, even when you're not 24. Automation: all right. Up next is automation Now. We mentioned automation a little bit when we did this tempo change up here. Our Sorry, the meter change up here, but what automation is is controlling something over time. So let's say our since here, for example, let's say we want this to fade in slowly. We want the volume to turn up over may be the 1st 3 or four strikes of the cord. There's really easy way to do that. What we do is first we have to press a the letter A will move us into the automation area. Now this is a little bit different in live nine, So live nine. You kind of always have the automation area open. But in live Tim, you press a Now I get this line right here, right and I can go over here to see what that line is controlling. And it's controlling the track volume, so that's what I want. So I just click on the line to make a dot and then I click on the line to make another dot . Let's go back to the 1st 1 pull it down. So that's the volume. So now when I hit play, it fades in. I could make it even fade up louder if I want right, and if I wanted to fade out at the end, I could do the same thing. Just make two points and I could have it get quieter over a long period of time like that. That a lot you can do with it Now there's more things you can automate, and in fact you can automate just about nearly everything. Okay, almost everything could be automated. Let's take, for example, are panning right here. As soon as I click on this on our panning amount right here, our automation line changed from Volume two panning so we can see that volume is still being automated because it's got that little orange square right there in that corner or red or whatever color you want to call that, so it's still being automated. We've just have that hidden so that we can see the panning. Let's move our panning around. Let's do that and then let's go move it around kind of a lot so that we really feel it. Remember, this is where our the sound is left to, right, right, so center means we hear it in both speakers left means we hear it on the left speaker. Right. Means we hear it all the way and the right speaker. So if you're wearing headphones or you have a good speakers handy, you should hear the sound moving around back and forth now. Okay, so that's a little goofy, but you get the point. Um, we can automate that. So the way automation works over here is this shows us our device, and this shows us the parameter. So mixer is going to be anything that is over here, which is in our mixer, right? So whether the speaker on is what it calls this, um, this button. So it's basically just a on off track. Panting you can see is automated track of Valium is automated excavator, Cross Vader assign and our send our two sends, which will talk about, uh, soon. If we had more things on this track, we could automate more stuff. And in fact, we do because we have an instrument on this track. Let's go look at the instrument. Any parameter we see down here, we can automate just by clicking on it. So let's say filter, resonance. This will make an interesting sound. So as soon as I clicked on it, my automation line turned to that. Okay, so I'm just gonna turn it up over time right here, and it's probably gonna be a little obnoxious sounding so it gets gets a lot brighter with that particular parameter. Let's move this filter cut off up also around here now will really get weird. It's now we're automating both those things and you can see it down here, right? So you can automate just about anything. All you have to do is first press A to make sure that you're seeing the automation stuff and then click on a parameter, and that's what you've got. Now we can also go over here and show automation in a new lane. So this is called a new lane where we have a duplicate of the clip and we see just the automation for that thing. We can go to our mixer now and say Track panning, Show that in a new lane track volume show that in the new lane so we can see all our automation in separate lanes If you want that gets a little cumbersome. So I'm gonna close those with this little minus sign because I don't like to do that. Um, I like to just go through here and see what I'm automating and then select the parameter. So if I want to go back to my volume, I just select the volume. Now I can see that automation again, and I can adjust it. Everything I've just said goes true for midi tracks and audio tracks. So with audio tracks, I control the volume, the panning, any effects that are on it, anything. So automation will be your best friend. I would say that a very, very large portion of music production comes down to automation, so get used to getting into those weird little pink lines and working with them to really craft your sound. 25. Groove Pool: There's one window that we haven't looked at yet and it's something that can really change the way your music sounds. Let's throw another beat on here. Let's do like you. No. One trick I do is I like to search all results just for BPM. That'll pull up just a ton of beats. Weird ones. Beats calls base. Okay, let's use this. So this is a really goofy beat. Wants to focus in on those high hats. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna look at this new area that we haven't looked at yet and this is called the Groove Pool, and that is round here in these little area that looks like two little waves, right? Like groove pool, water. Things got a sense of humor so I can click on that. This is the group full. OK, what we can do here is apply what able 10 calls a groove to sound either a mini clip or an audio clip. So here I have two loaded up. This is 1/16 notes swing, and this is an eighth note or a 16 note. I'm not sure what this oneness see. If I could look a little closer. Double up 60 swing. I know this is not a swing. This is a swing. So this lets solo this Listen to those high hat there quite straight. And if you don't know what I mean when I say straight, listen to the difference When I throw this groove on it got a little more of Ah, shuffle Teoh. Right, So that's the groove pool. There are these files called grooves and we can put them on ah, clips to change the rhythm that's happening in them Another thing you can do So I'm gonna take that groove off they show up when there's a groove on it it will show up right here So I've taken that groove off. Now one thing I can do is you can also extract grooves so they get out of automation mode by pressing a again, and I'm gonna drag my clip right into the groove full. And now it's gonna figure out the kind of general feel of this groove and make it its own thing. And now I can apply that to something else. You're not really gonna hear it on any of these? Well, maybe you'll hear it a little bit here because this one's really straight and this is really straight, so you're not really gonna feel it, but so that in that particular case, it won't matter. Here's a good example of doing this, though. Let's say you've got an acoustic drum loop and you really like it and you're trying to replicate it with Elektronik sounds. Drag that acoustic one in here, extract the groove and put that on your electronic loop, and you'll have this really natural human feel to your loop that you can't otherwise get just by nudging the mini notes around. There's a lot to be said for that feel of just the way like a human plays stuff that computers just are never gonna be very good at replicating. So that's what the groove pool is good for. 26. Session Deconstruction: Okay, let's do another session deconstruction like we did before. This is another track of mine. Um, that I thought we just take a look at, um Not that I'm like, I have such a big ego that I insist on only showing you my own tracks. What? These air sessions that I happen to have laying around. Um, so let's just hear a little bit of it, and then we'll walk through it. Okay? That's enough of that. You can hear the whole track. Ah, and a bunch of other tracks of mine if you search for me on, like, iTunes or Spotify or Amazon or whatever. Uh, I'm there. Let's take a look at what's happening here. Um, we have at the top here. We have a kick again. And we saw this in the last track, didn't we? You know, that's that's a habit I've gotten into of just putting a kick, like, all the way through a track on the top track while I'm writing, I put it all the way through, and then I take it out at times where I don't want it. But, um, when I was working on this particular project like all of these, um, songs that we're looking at right now. Ah, I was trying to write in the certain style of which there is often a kick just happening on every down meat. So I just put one in their right away. It's also useful for side chaining, which is something we'll talk about soon. Um, in the second track, I have this piano thing, just this repeating note, and that's really what was going on when I wrote this track. The idea was, I'm just gonna play this piano note over and over and see how long I can keep it going without stopping and have it be interesting. So it just continues unaltered all the way to hear it changes lightly, and then it goes back and then it changes a little bit. Um, but I was just trying to play with it and see how long I could make it go. There's a weird little melodic things here, some strings stuff down here than all this percussion stuff. Um, over here we have just this weird group of samples I made so you can hear those air slowly getting louder, right? So there's probably some automation on it. Let's look at press A and I go look at my volume parameter. Yeah, you can see it's fading in all through that intro section. Then it gets nice and out here. Then it jumps down and stays there. Right? Also here, um, this little swoosh. I call these a sushi. Not a technical term. Ah, these are just samples of noise. Just raw noise. And then I just faded them in really quickly. We could hear those by themselves. Right? Um just adds a nice little push to the next section and then the beats here. You can see all the automation happening here. Like this track got louder, a little bit right there and dropped out completely after the swoosh. What other automation parameters? Very subtle changes here. You see a lot of this in tracks where it kind of goes down. Just a touch up. Just a touch for this particular patch. I wanted things just come down a hair than come up throughout the whole track. Very slight modifications here and there. Another big swoosh going into the next section. But no, nothing too crazy in terms of automation. Here. Let's hear just the drums. I click the record button rather than the solo button. 53 drum loops happening here. This is one. This is another one 3rd 1/3 1 just straight up. So those three put together make kind of a nice, dense groove, which is the kind of stuff that I like. That's my style of stuff. I like layering drumbeats on top of each other and then all this kind of dense harmony stuff. You can probably hear some similarities between this track in the last track. Um, that's kind of my style. I like to do this kind of pseudo orchestral stuff with beets and things like that and it. Great. Okay, so just a quick walk through. I really wanted to point out just the automation for how it looks in, like a full track, even though this one doesn't have as much automation as, ah, lot of other tracks have. OK, uh, let's move on with a little wrap up of part one and then we'll be on to part two 27. What Next?: all right, You have made it to the end of also unable to live 10 class one just going over the interface and the basic workflow of able to live. We'll be going over a lot more as we continue through these classes. This is a long Siris of classes, and I've had the Siris of classes for a long time now, Um, but I'm remaking all of it using live tent so that it's all up to date and super accurate to what you see when you're using live. So coming up next, the next classes class too. And it's called recording and warping. This class is going to talk about, uh, our hardware set up in more detail, um, using microphones, types of microphones, microphone placement, uh, and recording sounds. We're also gonna be talking about midi setups, midi recording and what kind of gear you should have for MIDI production and for recording , and also in the next class will be working a lot on warping. Warping is able to in lives big engine for, uh, keeping sound in time with each other, Which is why DJs like this program so much because things stay in sync. because of warping. That was, Ah, very, very, very small explanation of what warping is. But it's really powerful tool. And we're going to get into it a lot in the next class. So, uh, I hope you decide to continue with these classes. And, uh, if so, I will see you in the next one. Ultimate able in alive to recording and warping. 28. Wrap Up: All right, That's the end of part one. Thanks for hanging out. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did like it, please leave me a good review and tell your friends I love making these classes because I love hearing from students. So please post a question. Um, respond to other questions. Let's make this a real community of people learning. I'll keep making these classes as long as people keep taking them. So thanks for all your support. Thanks for taking this class, and I'll see you in the next one. 29. SkillshareFinalLectureV2 (2): Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.