Ultimate Ableton Live 11, Part 2: Recording & Warping | J. Anthony Allen | Skillshare
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Ultimate Ableton Live 11, Part 2: Recording & Warping

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

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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

      2:23

    • 2.

      Intro to Audio Recording Fundamentals

      3:01

    • 3.

      Hardware Needs

      7:14

    • 4.

      Audio Interface Shopping

      2:43

    • 5.

      Microphones

      3:57

    • 6.

      Microphone Shopping

      3:26

    • 7.

      Hardware Setup

      5:20

    • 8.

      Latency

      4:56

    • 9.

      Microphone Placement

      4:05

    • 10.

      Monitor Modes

      3:15

    • 11.

      Tracking in Arrangement View

      1:17

    • 12.

      Multitracking in Arrangement View

      3:37

    • 13.

      Mono and Stereo Tracks

      3:12

    • 14.

      Comping

      5:07

    • 15.

      Tracking & Multitracking in Session View

      3:56

    • 16.

      Overdubbing and "Punching In"

      3:47

    • 17.

      Effects

      1:48

    • 18.

      MIDI Recording Fundamentals

      5:09

    • 19.

      Hardware Needs for MIDI

      5:03

    • 20.

      MIDI Controller Shopping

      6:19

    • 21.

      Hardware Setup

      8:00

    • 22.

      MIDI Signal Flow

      1:33

    • 23.

      Recording MIDI in Arrangement View

      2:12

    • 24.

      Recording MIDI in Session view

      1:05

    • 25.

      Velocity

      2:49

    • 26.

      MPE Editing

      3:03

    • 27.

      Intro to Warping

      1:48

    • 28.

      What is Warping

      6:31

    • 29.

      Warping Beats

      8:05

    • 30.

      Warping Tracks, Method 1

      6:13

    • 31.

      Warping Tracks, Method 2

      1:36

    • 32.

      Warping for Editing

      2:04

    • 33.

      Warping Multiple Tracks at Once

      3:02

    • 34.

      Warp Modes

      6:45

    • 35.

      Granulation Techniques

      2:19

    • 36.

      Grouping Tracks

      3:59

    • 37.

      Linked Tracks

      3:29

    • 38.

      What Comes Next?

      0:55

    • 39.

      Bonus Lecture

      0:36

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About This Class

This course is "5-Star Certified" by the International Association of Online Music Educators and Institutions (IAOMEI). This course has been independently reviewed by a panel of experts and has received a stellar 5-star rating.

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Every single question posted to this class is answered within 24 hours by the instructor.

Welcome to ULTIMATE ABLETON LIVE 11, PART 2: Recording & Warping!

In this course, we will use the real-world experiences of the award-winning instructor and university music production professor Dr. Jason Allen. But don't be worried - Dr. Allen is best known around campus for keeping things simple, accessible, useful, and fun.

Dr. Allen is a professional musician, top-rated online instructor, and university professor. In 2017 the Star Tribune featured him as a "Mover and a Shaker," and he is recognized by the Grammy Foundation for his music education classes.

He is also an ABLETON LIVE CERTIFIED TRAINER.

In this class, we are going to learn Ableton Live 11, and every aspect of the program. We will focus on how to do everything possible in Ableton Live, and you will finish this course as an expert in Ableton Live 11. Whether you have experience in music production already or not, this is the ultimate class to learn how to use the Ableton Live 11 software for any genre of music.


ULTIMATE ABLETON LIVE 11, PART 2 is everything you need to start making great tracks!

This is a really deep class - tons of content, tricks, and tips. Throughout the different "parts" of this class (there are six total) I'll go through literally everything I know about Ableton Live 11, and everything it took for me to become a Certified Trainer. I'll share some of my own tracks, and give you some full sessions from my library to play around with and get you started.

In this part of the class, we are going to cover how to use the Live 11 software for recording and warping. Including:

  • Audio Recording Fundamentals

  • Microphone Selection and Microphone Placement

  • MIDI Controller Shopping

  • Multitrack Recording

  • Overdubbing, or "Punching in"

  • Recording Multiple Takes and "Comping"

  • Working with Effects

  • Recording MIDI

  • Velocity Mapping

  • Warping for Editing

  • Warping Beats

  • Warping Whole Tracks for Remixing

  • Full Track Deconstructions

  • And Much, Much, More!

I will be making 6 (six!) complete "parts" 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.

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

The course is a roadmap to MAKING STUNNING TRACKS with Ableton Live 11.

All the tools you need to produce great tracks are included in this course and the entire course is based on real-life experiences - not just academic theory.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

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: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to Ableton Live 11. In this class we're going to cover all aspects of Ableton Live, from just learning the program to recording, to producing, two DJ's, mixing, mastering. Everything is going to be included in this huge multi-part class. All right, This is part 2. In this part we're going to focus on recording and warping. I'm going to show you how to use Live to do professional recording. How you can run a recording studio with live. How you can use live to a more recordings you've already made. That means stretch audio to fill and take the shape of a new track. For example, getting a drumbeat to sit into a new tempo. And warping has a lot of cool sound design tricks also. And we'll look at those in this part 2 of Ableton Live 11. So what actually is in Ableton Certified Trainer, people who have that credential, I have gone through a fairly rigorous process with be able to accompany to prove that not only you're an expert at the program, but also you know how to teach it. So the actual process of getting the Certified Trainer stamp of approval is a two-part process. One, you have to prove that you're a super ninja and the program and to have to be really skilled teacher or else they're not going to give it to you. And you see somebody that says they aren't able to Certified Trainer name, you should know that that's someone who Ableton itself has given their stamp of approval after a very rigorous process. It's not just buying a certificate. I had to do a two or three-day line exam that included a lot of teaching demos. And in addition to that, I've been out to their international conference in Berlin to present unable to topics to the entire international live community. So it wasn't easy to get. I'm pretty proud of it and I'm hoping to bring the benefit of it to you up. 2. Intro to Audio Recording Fundamentals: All right, so in this first section of the class, we're going to talk about audio recording. And we're going to start with how to get everything set up. So there's a lot of setup things that you're going to want to do, make sure you have configured right. Some of them we touched on and kind of looked at the kinda quick version in the first class and the first live 11 class earlier. We're gonna go into more detail now and make sure we have everything really configured right. We're going to talk about additional hardware that's outside of live that you're going to need. Like an audio interface. Talk about microphones, like placement, dealing with Latency, Monitoring, and then actually tracking in live both in Session View and Arrangement View. So this first section is going to be a lot of stuff from hardware setup all the way down to recording a good signal. So let's start with hardware needs. Before we jump into this first video on what you want to get for hardware, let me just say that in my opinion, a lot of this hardware that we're going to talk about when we talked about something like an audio interface that we'll get to in just a second. An audio interface can run you anywhere from a 100 bucks to get a good audio interface. Well, that would be achieved audio interface all the way to $20 thousand to get a high-end audio interface. Unless you're recording like an orchestra, it you don't need a 20000 dollar audio interface. Don't think you need to get the best hardware for this stuff. And if you can afford it, get something nice, but you can get a really nice audio interface for a $1000 or less. For $500, you can get a pretty nice one. But what's the difference in sound quality between a 500.1100.1? Not a lot. I mean, it's really small. I would say probably. So. Keep that in mind as we go over these options that you can really get by with are pretty low entry point for some of this hardware. And then work your way up, you know, as you, Babies start getting some gigs, doing recording, you can increase your get a better interface, get some better microphones, stuff like that. So with that disclaimer, Let's get into the hardware that you're going to want to have in order to do good audio recording. 3. Hardware Needs: Okay, Let's say you're recording on your laptop. Now, your laptop has a built-in microphone, but it actually has a built-in other thing too. And that thing is called a digital to analog converter. Okay? So the microphone in your laptop is going to take an analog sound of your voice or any sound, anything that's waves floating through the air is analog sound. So when we're recording, the trick we need to do is convert analog sound to digital sound. Digital sound is stuff that computer needs. Analog sound is stuff that humans need. Okay? So there's a chip, there's a microchip in your computer that converts analog signal to digital signal. Now here's the thing. Both the microphone just built into your laptop and that converter are fairly cheap. Even if you have a really nice laptop. It's pretty utilitarian. What's in there? It's just designed to get the job done. Now, when something, when we convert an analog signal to a digital signal, there are varying degrees of success that can have. We can do it cheaply importantly, in which case we're going to lose some of the analog sound, right? We might lose some of the high frequencies, we might lose some of the low frequencies. The frequencies that do come through might be a little distorted or corrupt in some way. That's going to be a cheap analog to digital converter. But that's what's built into our laptops. Any computer, that's what's built into it. So in the professional audio world, what we do is we don't use that microphone built into your laptop, and we don't use that converter built into your laptop either. We use a separate box to do that converting for us. Because we can get higher end conversion. If we buy a separate piece of hardware that just does conversion from analog to digital, okay, now it does a couple of other things too. Usually those boxes. So this is what they look like. This is a relatively inexpensive ones as an M Audio profiler 6 ten. So what this allows me to do is plug a microphone in, give it some juice. And it's got, this one has, this is an old one. So this one has a firewire output that I would connect to my computer and then it can go right into Ableton. So this is what we commonly call an audio interface and its job is to do that conversion. Now another thing it does is it lets me plug a microphone in, right? Like look around your laptop, find a spot where you can plug one of these microphones into your laptop. You can't, you could get a microphone with a USB output. Those exist now. But let's think about what those really are. What those are is a microphone and a converter built into one, which means it probably doesn't have that great of a converter in it, right? Because it's going to be really small and not very well thought out. Now that used to be my lecture was those microphones with the USB outputs are not high-quality. However, I'm jumping back on that a little bit lately because I've heard some like the Blue Yeti, these is a model and there's another blue microphone. Blue is the company that I've heard that our USB outputs, that sounds pretty darn good actually. So maybe those are okay. But I'm still a loyalists to separate audio interface and microphone. So in our audio interface, things we're looking for. The first question you want to ask yourself is, how many microphones do I need to plug in at once? If you're running a big recording studio and you're going to record a full orchestra. You need to plug in a lot of microphones all at same time. That means you're going to need 60 inputs, okay, that's, that's a big box. We don't need that here. In my little room here. I have the need for two inputs at once. That means I can record a voice and a guitar at same time, or I can record a violin and a cello at the same time, whatever, two instruments at the same time. This particular box, let me plug in 4. It has two in the front and then two lines in the back. So this'll let me plug in four different things at the same time. Now that doesn't mean my track can only have four tracks, just means I can only record for things at the same time. So think about how many things you're going to need to record at the same time, the answer might be what? You might just need to record one thing at a time. So you're going to look at how many inputs you need, and that's going to decide what kind of a audio interface you get. The other thing to look for is how it connects to your computer. Whether it has a USB out, firewire out, lightening, whatever we're calling those now. Just make sure it can get out to your computer. Virtually any connection is fine. Aside from old-school USB one, that's probably not fast enough. But if it's USB 3 or virtually any other connector, it's just fine. Just make sure you have one on your computer. Now the other thing that these boxes do is they do the opposite conversion. Okay, so the main reason we wanted them is for the analog to digital conversion, but they also go the other way, digital to analog. Which means we can play our sound out from the computer to this box and then plug our speakers into this box. Also, it's gonna give us a higher end audio output as well, right? So this particular box has eight outputs. I can plug eight speakers into this thing. And there's a reason you might want to do that. We're not gonna go into that at the moment. But typically I'm going to plug two speakers into it. Or I can plug headphones into it. I had headphone outputs right here. Okay, So that's gonna give me a better quality audio output as well so I can hear the sound more accurately. So with one of these boxes, the sound going into the computer from the microphone is more accurate. The sound coming out of the computer to my speakers is more accurate. That's why we use one of these boxes. 4. Audio Interface Shopping: Okay, So if you're looking around for one of these that you're going to buy, you can look around on different websites. There's a lot of different companies that make these. This might be a somewhat controversial statement, but not really. I'm going to say M audio brand, relatively cheap. They're on the inexpensive side. And I don't love them. There's a reason I'm holding up this one because I used it briefly and then didn't like it. So this is not the one I regularly use, but it's handy in case everything else breaks down. Other companies are motu, um, oh, TU is a good company. I like there's, there's kind of a good middle end. They make some good products right in the mid range. And then you can get into the higher range, the more expensive ones that are a bit higher-quality. And like I said, that's like very small amount better than the low end. But if you're really doing professional work, you know that that little bit matters. On the high end, we have things like apogee. The interface that I'm using now is an apogee quartet. It's called, I'm really happy with it. I really like it. The apogee products are really good. Other companies like metric, halo and things like that are really good as well. So those are the high-end motu on the middle end. I'm audio on the low end. There's a lot of different companies that are making these, you know, one of the really good low end ones lately. I'm nice and say low and inexpensive ones. That had been really great. We use them all around the studio. Is is focus, right? Is the company focused, right. Skyler, it it's about the same size as as this one, but it's red. Really inexpensive, like a 150 bucks or so. But they've been, they've been really good quality for us in the studio, so we've been pretty happy with them. So lot of options for these. Look for how many inputs you need, what the connection is like, and then what your price ranges like. 5. Microphones: Okay, Let's talk about microphones. The other piece of hardware you're going to need. Now, just like audio interfaces, you can spend anywhere between 50 bucks and $10 thousand on my microphone. On a single microphone, they make really expensive microphone's. Basically what you're looking for is there are kind of three different kinds of microphones that we use in audio recording. There are condenser microphones, there are dynamic microphones, and there are ribbon microphones, okay. They each do slightly different things. But in kind of a simplified thing, kind of a simplified explanation of all those microphones. Dynamic microphones are microphones that you can, that can really take a beating and you can really scream into him. But they're less sensitive. Okay? So dynamic microphones are going to be they're really good for live, right? Like when you see a band live, pretty much all of those microphones on stage are going to be dynamic microphones. But when it comes to recording, dynamic microphones are good for there's sometimes good for drums. I use them on kick drums. Good for vocals. Sometimes. More aggressive vocals, like, like a rock vocalist or a rapper, something like that. Dynamic microphones can be good for their good for brass instruments. I like them for that. Anything that's just pushing a lot of air right into the microphone. That's a dynamic microphone. Condenser microphones are bit more sensitive. So there you don't want to throw a ton of air at them. But they're better for picking up a whole wide spectrum of sound. Okay? And so anything that's a little more sensitive, strings, I'm going to use a condenser microphone. A singer, if it's like a more delicate style of singing, I'm going to use condenser microphones, possibly other instruments. I'm going to use condenser microphones in the studio. Most of the time in the studio I'm using condenser microphones, but with the exception of drums and certain kinds of vocalist, I like to use condenser microphones as much as possible. Then the third kind is ribbon microphones. Ribbon mike from kinda sit between those two. They're more finicky. They can take a good amount of air. And they're going to be really why they're always bidirectional. So they're picking up the sound in front of them and behind them. So they're good at picking up. They're good for instruments that push out a lot of sound all around, like even a, a room Mike. And they can be good for that, just getting the whole room. That can be good for overhead mikes on drums. I like him for that. I use one on a flute lately and rather liked it. So they're a little more finicky to deal with. So those are the basic three different kinds of microphones that we use. So let's go to a new video and I'm going to tell you kind of if you're just getting started, what I think you should get. 6. Microphone Shopping: Okay, So let's say you've got a couple of 100 bucks to buy microphones. You don't have any microphones and you want to get a professional sound. Here's, I'm going to recommend these to. First, get yourself at least one good dynamic microphone. So when it comes to dynamic microphones, there's one brand in model that is just the standard. It's everybody has a drawer full of these. If you go into any studio, you're going to find a drawer full of the Shure SM 57 or 58. They look slightly different. This is a 58. Um, it's made by the company Shure as AQR E SM 58. That's this one. It's a dynamic microphone, can take a beating, you can scream into it. You can put it on drums. You can put it on pretty much anything. It's just a great all around microphone as 57 looks a tiny bit different, but those are great as well. So the relatively cheap, I think about a 150 bucks. So I would get yourself one of these. It's just kind of a standard go to you. Mike, to have. The other thing I will get is a condenser mike. There isn't like a go-to standard for condensers, like there is for the dynamic mix. With the 57. For condenser mics, you have millions of options. So you might experiment around, read some reviews, see what you think. But if you're impatient and you just want me to tell you what to buy. I like this one. Is a relatively new Mike. This is by audio technical. This is an 80 2020. The reason I like it is that, first of all, it's really inexpensive. It's like a 120 bucks, I think for one. And they really do some great. I mean, it really sounds like a higher end microphone. I've been using them on a lot of stuff. And inexpensive, great sound. Just an all around really good condenser mike. So it's definitely worth every penny and then some. So I've been impressed with this mic, so I would recommend it. So if you just have a couple of 100 bucks, get one of each of these. If you have 400 bucks or so, get two of each of these. Okay, that would be a great way to start building a studio. Two of these, you'll never go wrong. You'll be able to do everything you wanna do. If even if you just have one of each of these, you'll be in a great situation. After that, after you have two dynamic mics and to condenser mics that you like. Then as you get more money, build up your library of condenser microphones. I'd say you don't really need a ribbon mike for awhile. That's kind of a specialized thing. I would get a nice little arsenal of condenser mics if you're doing studio work. So that's my recommendation for you. Just have a little bit of money. By those. 7. Hardware Setup: Okay, hardware setup. So we've got an interface now and we've got some mikes now. So all we're gonna do is we need some XLR cables. Those are these three pin cables. So using those cables, we're going to plug a microphone into our interface. Then we're going to plug our interface into our computer. And then if you're using your interface to play back sound, which I recommend you do. I'm going to plug my speakers into my interface as well. Okay? So my speakers are plugged into the outputs. On the interface, outputs 12. My microphone is plugged into inputs one or inputs 12, depending on how many microphones and reuse it. So then I have to make sure able to knows what we're doing. So I'm gonna go to preferences in live, and I'm gonna go to the Audio tab. So audio input device, you're going to pick your device here. Here it's going to list everything plugged into your computer. That is an audio interface. So for me it says the quartet. That's my apogee quartet audio interface. It's also showing me my webcam that I'm using to film this, which has a little microphone in it. So it's showing up here. I definitely don't want to use that to do high-end audio recording. And then my output device. So in most cases, if you plugged in your speakers to your audio interface, you're going to select the same thing again here, quartet. Now, all the time, when I'm actually doing anything in this room, that is how it's set up. The only time it changes is when I'm actually filming a video. So right now, I need my audio output to go to the teller stream audio capture so that you can hear Ableton. It gets recorded in this video. But in most cases, you want these two things to be the same. Your input and output device. Cool. Then let's go to Input configuration and turn on the channels that you're going to need to use. If your device has, one, has two inputs turned on 12 and turn it on for both mono inputs and stereo inputs. If you have eight inputs, you can do that. Okay? So just turn on the ones that you're going to use. Turned on. It doesn't mean you're going to use them right now. It just means that that's what your device is capable of using. So turn them all on, that you have the option to turn on. And then this driver type is the system driver. If you're on a Mac, it's almost always going to be core audio unless you're doing something really strange. If you're on a PC, I think you'd get more options here and I don't remember what the right option is, but it's whatever option displays your audio interface in the second dropdown. So you select something here. And then if your audio interface doesn't show up, select something else to find the right thing. I don't remember what the PC settings are and it depends on the type of PC, I believe. But on a Mac it's always core audio. Okay, that takes us down to our other issues here. Let's talk about sampling rate really quick. And then we'll do a separate video for latency sampling rate. What sampling rate do you want to record Act? The standard for digital audio is 44,100. That means 44100 samples per second. A sample, in this case is like a tiny snapshot of the sound. If you listen to a CD, it's 44 one, 44100 samples per second, you can go higher than that. And that does some different stuff to your audio. It basically makes it higher-quality. It's a little more complicated than that, but for lack of a deeper explanation, the higher the sampling rate, the higher the quality. So 48 thousand recording it, 48000 is becoming pretty standard. So that's where I set my sampling rate and it's where I like it. So it's really that you can go all the way up to 88,200. But that's going to make huge files all the time. And it's a bit unnecessary. Unless you're recording something like a full orchestra, then you want real high-fidelity. You might record it up that high. But for general, day-to-day stuff, rock stuff, pop stuff, anything other than classical music? I like 4,848 thousand. Okay, let's go to a new video and let's talk about this latency issue because this is a big issue. 8. Latency: Okay, Let's talk about latency. I get a lot of questions about this. So what latency is, is it's a delay in between the sound going into your microphone and the sound coming out of your speakers. You can hear latency in something like, let's say you were singing and then listening to headphones coming out of your computer. Okay. You might hear that the sound coming out of your computer gets to you a little bit late. Then when you sing in, if you're trying to record, this is maddening, right? This will screw up your whole performance so you want to get rid of that latency. Now, latency comes from all the processing that has to happen, right? Your microphone is going to take your analog sound. It's going to run it down the cable. So that takes time. It's going to go into your audio interface, which then has to do a lot of really complicated math to it. That takes time, then send that down the USB or whatever it happens to be cable, which takes time into your computer, which then has to process it, which takes time, then into live, which then has to process it. That takes time. Then it has to send it back out to your audio interface, again, down a wire that takes time. Your audio interface has to convert it to an analog signal, which takes time and then send it through another cable. If you take time to your speakers, which then had to play it. So all of that adds up to a couple of milliseconds. This all happens very, very fast, but it takes time. So we need to make that amount of time as small as possible. So in our preferences for able to and we have some settings for latency that will let you deal with it. Okay? The biggest one is buffer size. So without getting too technical, the buffer size is kind of the chunk that live is going to use to process the sound. How big of a chunk is it going to use? In terms of audio quality? You want this to be kind of big, as big as possible. But in terms of recording, the bigger it is, the more time it takes for it to process. So for latency, you want it to be as small as possible. Okay? So I could just set it to 32 samples. However, that can compromise the quality of my playback. I don't think it compromises the quality of my recording, actually, just what I'm hearing back from it. So I could record it at 32 samples of a buffer size. But then when I'm playing back and editing, change it to a higher sample rate. I think I can do that, and it would help. But what you really want to do is play around with these settings and find the sweet spot. 512 for me is pretty good. I'm very fast computer. So I can record this and essentially here, very, very little latency in doing this. So you're going to play around with this when you're recording. Lower sample is going to be faster. However, you're going to start to hear it. Driver compensation is like if your audio interface, it has a certain amount of latency built into it, you can basically dial it in here and it'll it doesn't change anything is my understanding. But it will just tell live how much latency is happening. So if I say there's 10 milliseconds latency, or more likely, four milliseconds latency built into my audio interface. And I know that by just looking up the documentation, then I can report it here so that able to knows that our overall latency right now is a 103 milliseconds. Well, in the playback end, it's not really bothering me. So whatever's going on here, I'm not really hearing it. And it's input latency is the one I really care about. That's the one that's gonna get you that effect of hearing something that's not a recording, something at a different and not hearing it back instantly. So play around with this. Lower is better for recording, higher is better for playback. 9. Microphone Placement: Okay, like I said at the beginning, we don't want to spend a ton of time on all of the intricacies of recording in this class. But I do want you to be able to get a good sound out of live. So just a couple quick little tips about microphone placement. The biggest thing to think about is how much air is going straight into your microphone. Okay? With any instrument, if you keep that in mind. You should be, you should be able to get in the ballpark of a good sound pretty fast. For example. Um, let's use my voice, for example. So here I have my Shure SM58. So let's say I'm going to sing directly into it along with my voice. There's going to be a lot of air, right? That sound. If you've ever blown straight into a microphone, is a sound we don't like. So whenever I do like a sound, that's not a sound we want on our microphone right? Now. Dynamic microphones can handle that much, much, much better than condenser microphones. If I do that right into a condenser microphone and go, It's going to make a very loud sound. Even with dynamic, dynamic microphones though, we don't love that sound. So if I am going to use this on my voice and I'm going to do a lot of T's and H's and sounds like that. I do want to try to limit the amount of air going directly into it. And the easiest way to do that is with some kind of windscreen or pop filter like this. Still a little kind of piece of foam thing goes over the microphone. It's going to grab some of that air before it gets to the microphone. Can see the microphone that I'm actually using to record my voice right now has one built-in. So if I go, it doesn't make them might go super crazy. But let's say I'm recording a trumpet. Okay, trumpets got a big bell and all the sound comes out of that bell. Do I want to put this microphone directly in front of that bell where all the sound and all the air comes out. Well, if I'm using a dynamic microphone, then the answer is maybe, that's probably okay. But if I want to use a more sensitive microphone, like a condenser microphone, I might not want it directly in front of all of that air, right? So what I might do is move it off to the side a little bit so that the microphone is like this. So the bell of the trumpet is going here, but the microphone is off to the side. Or I might put the microphone right in front but turn it. You probably can't see. But if you look really close on this microphone, there is a diaphragm right in the center and it's flat. So this microphone, although it's circular, does have a front and a back. Okay. So if I took that flat diaphragm which is like a, it's like a coin, right? Like think of it like a quarter. And I turned it to be off-center. Now, the air isn't going to go directly into the diaphragm, but it's gonna go, a lot of the sound is gonna go in, but the air is going to go for the most part, past it. Some of the air is going to hit the microphone and that's fine. This has kind of its own wind screen with this metal thing that helps a little bit, but not a ton. So whenever you are making something, think about where all the air is going and what kind of microphone you are using. And thinking about possibly getting a little off center so that you're not going to get all that air or using some kind of a windscreen to protect the microphone from getting all that air. And if you just can't avoid it, uses dynamic mike and pop filter. 10. Monitor Modes: Okay, Let's talk about monitor modes. This is something important to understand because it will keep you from creating terrible, terrible feedback. Monitor modes are these three buttons down here in auto and off. So let's make a new audio track. And let's set this to be this microphone that I'm talking into now. So okay. So now it's listening, it's seeing the microphone come in here. Okay. Now my monitor mode is set to off. That means that this microphone that's coming into this channel is not going to the monitors. Okay. That means it's not going to play through it's not going to play through the speakers. Which is what I want right now. Because if it does play through the speakers, the speakers are going to play the sound that's gonna go into my microphone, which is going to play through the speakers. And it's going to create a feedback loop. Okay, and that's going to sound very, very bad. So that's what I want. I can do in, which means if I click in, that means it's going to play the microphone through the speakers. That can be good. If I was wearing headphones, that'll be okay. But right now, that's going to cause feedback. The third option is auto. And I can turn on Auto right now because autos going to work correctly right now. Auto means when I'm not recording, it's not going to play through. But when I am recording, it is going to play through. So if I was to record, it's going to start playing through. And now we're in danger of feeding back. Oh no. Okay. So auto means play through the speakers when we're recording, but don't play through speakers when we're not recording an enormous studio setup, you can leave it on auto all the time. That's probably fine. Um, but for what I'm doing in here because I'm not wearing headphones. I want to be sure that it's always off. But that also means I can't hear what's being recorded. So finally playing my guitar into Ableton, and I'm playing it through some effects or something like that. All I'm going to hear is like the twang of my guitar. But the guitar isn't gonna make feedback, right? So I can set it to auto because then I'll hear it through the speakers. But those speakers aren't gonna go in through my guitar because the pickup isn't going to pick that up. So it's okay in that sense. I hope that made sense. If you want to hear the sound It's being recorded. You need monitoring on, within or in auto mode. If you don't want to hear the sound that's being recorded, leave it on off. If you set it to auto, you're going to hear it while it's being recorded, but not while it's not being recorded. Makes sense. Cool. 11. Tracking in Arrangement View: Okay, so now that everything is all set up and configured, let's actually record something. So in order to record very simply, I'm just gonna kinda put my cursor where I want it on the track that's set up to go. And I'm going to press Record now, just like we talked about, you probably don't need to do this, but I'm going to turn my monitoring to off so that I don't create feedback. Now, I'm going to arm this track record. So now we've see my signal coming in right there. And it's gray because my monitoring is off. If it was on auto or in, that would be the normal kind of green color. I mean, signals still coming in but I'm not hearing it. And then I just before. Now I'm going to hear all of these other tracks play while I record whatever I'm recording. Okay, So we're just recording my voice. And we get this bad spanned by inviting me. Okay, pretty simple to stop. I can press Stop button or I can just hit the space bar. So there's the recording I just made. All right. 12. Multitracking in Arrangement View: Okay, Let's talk about multi tracking now. So multi tracking the mean, we want to record multiple tracks I want. So let me, I'm gonna delete this. So I've got attract set up here to record on. I'm going to make another track. And another track. Okay, so I've got three tracks. Let's say this is vocals, guitar, and bass. Okay, so let's say I have an audio interface that has three inputs. You'll never find that because audio interfaces always have an even number. So let's say it has four inputs, but I'm using the first three. And in the first track, I've got plugged in my vocal mic, a second track, I've got a guitar plugged in. The third track, gotta base, plugged in or miked up or whatever. So everything looks the same. I just want to set my inputs to be the right thing. So in this one, I'm going to say external n. That means it's coming in from external source. And I'm going to set that to two. And this one I would set to three. Now I don't have a third track enabled. So let's set this to one. What the heck? I can actually record the same info on multiple tracks in this way if you want to, I don't know why you would want to do that, but you could. So let's say I had a set to 123. So after that, I just arm the three tracks to record. Now, there's a problem here. And this has stumped many people. If you want to do this, live, is set up to only really want you to record on one track at a time. So if I arm this track record, it's going to disable the one above it to record, right? So how actually do we record it on three tracks at once? Well, hold down Command and then click Record. That's going to let you select a multiple tracks to record. Okay, write that one down because I get asked this all the time. How do I record on multiple tracks? It's only letting me record on one. That's a solution. Hold down command and our multiple tracks to record. Once your arm to record, just hit record. And now we're recording on all three. And you'll note that it looks like 13 are the same, right? Because they are, they're both looking at the first input. So I'm recording that travel to places. Nothing's coming in on track to because I don't have anything. But I am recording onto it. Okay. And you can see that's what I did up here. When I recorded this in the studio. This was the brass section. So trumpet one was coming in on the first track. Trumpet to what's coming in on the second input. Trombone one was coming in on the third input. Which right now it's not showing anything and it's actually, it's hard to tell. But that three is a little greyed out. The reason that's grayed out is because it's saying in it saying previously you had selected track three, but no track 3 exit or input three, but no input three exists right now. So that's why it's grayed out. Same thing with this one input for then I had an overhead stereo tracks, so 56. Let's talk about the difference between mono and stereo tracks for just a second. 13. Mono and Stereo Tracks: Okay, We can record a track as mono or stereo. Mono means one signal, stereo means two. Okay, So why would I want to do that? And what exactly does that mean? In this case right here, I have a microphone plugged in. It's just one signal. Okay, so I'm going to want to record that as mono. So I'm going to select channel one. But let's say I had something plugged into 12. Okay. So I had a microphone plugged into one and a microphone plugged into channel 2. And let's say those were making the same thing like drums, for example. I take two microphones and I put them over top of the drums. Okay. If I was going to do that, I could record them as drums one and drums to or I could record them as a single stereo track. That will be both microphones put together into one track. Okay? So you would only want to do that if you're recording two microphones that you're going to never want a separate. Okay? There are ways to separate them if you really have to. But in general, you want to record stereo track if you're never planning on separating them. So let me just show you. If I record a stereo track here, this would be 12. Okay. Now I record on this track 1 and 2, something bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, look at it. I have one track with my signal and then one track here with nothing empty. So that's kind of annoying to deal with. So we don't wanna do that. What happened down here is better. It's one track without an empty amount of information. Right? So record as a stereo track. If you're using two microphones and you're never going to want to separate that signal. You want them to stay together. Record is a mono track if you're just recording one thing at a time. Okay. Everything in this session is mono tracks, I believe. Well, probably in the drums, there's an overhead. Let's look at the drum tracks. Here's the overhead for the drum, so it's called overhead and then the name of the mike I used. I did record these not as a stereo track, but two separate mono tracks. And that's fine. You can do it that way. But I could have, in this case, recorded them as a single stereo track if I wanted to. But I chose not to. I'm not sure why. Doesn't really matter. I'm getting all the information. So it's fine. But that's a difference between mono and stereo tracks. 14. Comping: Okay, so let's talk about comping. Now. Comping is what we call the ability to record a whole bunch of different takes and then put together the best take. Okay, so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna try to sing this trombone part. A fair warning. I'm a terrible singer. So I'm going to solo this trombone part. Okay, It sounds like this. Okay. Then I'm going to record onto this track here. Okay, So I'm just gonna try it. Here we go. Okay, missed the first few notes. Let's go back a little ways so I can try to get those first few notes. Okay. Better. One more time. I'm still not getting us for a few minutes. Last try. Okay. Not bad. I got the first few notes, but then I kinda fell out of tune in the end. Cool. So I just did four takes of that little riff. So it looks like each one recorded over the previous one, but it actually didn't. But I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go here to my track. I'm going to control-click or right-click. And I'm going to say Show take lanes. Okay, here are all my Takes. Now you're like, Hey, there's more than the four you just made your right. You know why? Because I made this video ones already and I didn't like how it turned out. So I deleted it and then I did it again. And now it's showing before I did for the first time I felt this video. That's how long its memory is. So I'm going to get rid of those. But I can't do now if I really wanted to is move these up. Okay. Now what you're seeing is the last one is what is showing up top here because it's read, these ones aren't showing. Okay, but let's say, let's zoom in. Let's say, I want, I want to use this take for that part, but then I want to use this take for the rest of it. Okay? I'm going to select what I want to use. I'm going to press Return. Okay, now this went up there. So this at the top is our composite take put together of everything. Now let's say the very end of it. This was better. Yeah, let's use that. Press Return. Okay, so you can see what takes I'm using. I'm using this, this, and this. Okay. So let's here. Oops. Turn off record. Turn back on monitoring so I can hear it. And it's super quiet. Oh, I'm soloed on the trombone. Okay, let's solo this. So we're just going to hear my awesome vocal recording, baba, baba. Okay? So you can see it like really seamlessly puts them together. It actually does a tiny little crossfade here. That's what this means to get us between these two so that it makes it smooth. So you don't hear any clicking when it jumps between the two takes baba. Okay, and you maybe can hear a tiny bit so you can adjust this crossfade. Actually. If you want to, you can adjust where it comes in by clicking on this little handle, find a better spot. Or can adjust the way that crossfade is working, make it a little bit bigger if you want. Bob has gone by pretty fast because we're zoomed in baba, baba. Okay, So if I was going to keep this, I might finesse that a little bit more to make that last note smooth. The first one is super smooth, but pretty happy with it as is. So that's how take lands work. Once I'm happy with it, I can fold these up if you want. So I don't have to see the takeaway ends anymore. And then I just have my track there. Cool. So this is new and live 11. It's a great feature. If you're doing any real recording, you'll be able to do as many takes as you want. And then be able to piece together the best take. Really, really happy that this exists in live now. 15. Tracking & Multitracking in Session View: Okay, I've been neglecting session view a little bit here. So let's go over to Session view by pressing tab. And let's find the tracks we were working on. Here they are. Here's my vocal track. And you can see everything setup, right? Let's just go over how to do recording and multi-track recording in Session View. So here I'm soloed, so let's take that off. Here, our monitor modes, okay, same stuff here. Here's our input settings where we're going to say input 1, 2, and 3 or whatever. We can also select a four stereo or mono there. And here's our arm to record. So I'm going to turn my monitor to off arm to record. And then everything basically works the same. I can record to a clip right here. That mood about, about, about, about cool to know what I did there. I was at a loss for something to record. Okay. Now we don't see it in a timeline. It's just a clip. But if I double-click on it, I get it in clip view and I can see what it is right there. If I want to record on multiple tracks, same thing, hold down Command and select multiple tracks like that. Now, this is slightly different because if I just press record now, I'm only going to record on the clip that I select, right? Even though I'm armed to record on all three of these, I just said record a clip on vocals, this track. So if I want to record on all three, there's not a really easy way to do it. I can arm all three to be ready to record, but I can't record on all three at once without doing something weird that we're necessarily, but something a little fancier. We'll talk more about this when we get to key commands. But the way I would do it if I wanted to record on all three of these at once, is I would set a key command by pressing this key button and click the record button. And I'm going to map that to the F key. I'm going to map that one to the F key and that one to the f key. Okay? What I'm doing here basically is creating my own function key to record onto all three of these tracks at the same time. So now if I press the F key, I'm going to start recording on all three of them at once. The F key again, I'm going to start, we're going to say about once. The F key again is going to start playing them back, I'm going to start recording on all three of them at once. Okay, So you can do that by making your own kind of key commands using this key mapping functionality, we'll talk more about key mapping and midi mapping soon. But just know that in session view, it really wants you to rerecord one clip at a time. And that's usually how you're going to want to use Session view when you are using Session view anyway. Typically, if you want to be doing multi-track recording, you're going to be over here in arrangement view. And just a reminder. The reason that arrangement view looks like this is that it saying, hey, you're using Session View right now. If I want arrangement of you to take back over, I press the Back to Arrangement button right here. Now, Arrangement View has taken back over. 16. Overdubbing and "Punching In": Okay, Let's talk about punching in. This is a term that goes way back to analog tape. And what it basically means is you're going to set, well, where it comes from, I think is imagine old-school recording. We had a big old tape machine. And let's say we wanted to read you a section of a tune. What we would do is play along with what we recorded. And then at some point, we would press record, record over something we already recorded and then press Record again to get out. So that was punched in, record something punch out, leave what was already there. Right. It's to rerecord a little section. I basically still works that way and we can do it. Let's take this trumpet one part. And let's go right here and let's listen to what this trumpet one part sounds like. That's so low it may turn it way up. Okay. Let's say I want to rerecord my voice over just this note. Okay. Here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to set a punch in point right here and a punch out point right there are actually right there. Okay, so let's highlight that. Now the quickest way to do this actually is to set a loop. So I'm going to press Command L to set a loop right there. Okay, Now we're not actually looping, but we're going to use our loop brace. So to set a loop like that is just a quick way to find our loop braces and get it to the right spot. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn off looping because we don't really need that, but we need these two buttons on either side of the loop. This is our punch endpoint and this is our punch out point. Okay, so now I have this section set to punch in and punch out because it's using this brace, okay. To punch in and punch out. So let's actually go all the way to here. Okay, So now if I start recording on this track, It's not going to record. And it's going to start recording right here. It's gonna stop recording right there. And then we're going to be out. So I have to arm this track record, turn Monitoring off and my case. Okay, Now I'm going to start playing all the way back here. Oh, baba, baba, baba, baba, baba, baba. See what just happened there. When we were right there, we recorded my voice over top of that little bit. Okay. So we just rerecorded that little spot. If we hear it now, it's going to sound goofy. Neat. If we don't like it, we can always undo. So if I show take lanes, the previous trumpet part isn't gonna show up because it's only going to show what I did here. But if I really want to get rid of it and go back to the trumpet, I can delete my take here. Delete that, and then I can just drag this back open and get it back. What was originally there? Cool. So I haven't deleted what was in here. I just kind of cut it out. You can drag it back open to get it back. So that's punching in and punching out using the loop race, but turning off loop and using these two points to punch in and punch out. 17. Effects: Just a quick note now about effects. If we put effects on something we're recording, like Let's put distortion on my vocal mic here. Okay? And now I've got a distortion on it. Pretty hardcore distortion. Now let's record something. 12345678910. Okay, so now I've recorded something. Now remember our signal flow here. What I want to point out is that what we recorded is clean. It doesn't have the effect on it. The effect is coming after the recording. So if I hear it back now, we will in fact here that effect, 12345678910. Okay? The effect is clearly on it, but the recording is cleaned. The effect comes later. So I can turn off the effect or delete the whole effect, and we're back to clean 123456789, 10. So just remember that if you add effects to the track, they're coming after the recording. Okay? So you can still adjust your effects after you've made the recording. They're not written into the recording. But if you use any analogue effects that come before your microphone gets to your audio interface, like let's say I ran this microphone through a guitar pedal, then into the audio interface. Those are going to be recorded into the audio and I can't take him out there in there. But digital effects within Ableton are going to come after the recording. So you can still adjust them after you make the recording, which is good. 18. MIDI Recording Fundamentals: Okay, let's move on to midi recording. Now. First things first, I'm going to answer the question that I get more than any other question when it comes to midi recording, midi playback, and really anything Midea, okay, so engrave this in your brain. And the most important thing about Midea is that Midea is just messages. There's no sound in Midea. It's just a series of ons and offs, and there's other data in there too, but it's mostly ons and offs. So let me show you something. I'm going to record some midi notes. Okay? I just recorded submitted notes. What did you hear? Nothing. There's no sound in those midi notes. If I play these midi notes back, we will hear nothing. Because each of these little notes, if I double-click and look at them, they are definitely there. They are my notes, but they are just messages that say turn this note on, turn this note on, turn this note on, and at the end of the message it says turn that note off. There's no sound. And that's by design. It's supposed to be that way. Because the idea behind midi is that we can record all these messages and then apply sound to it later. Okay, so let's make this, make some sound. In order for this to make sound, I have to put an instrument on it. Okay, so I'm gonna go to my instruments and let me close up my groove pool here. So we're not going to need that for awhile. Okay, so here's the instruments I have installed. Now I do have more instruments that I can get under plugins, right? That's where I can get some external stuff. But these are the able to inbuilt in instruments. Let's go to our don't know, a wavetable. Open that up, look at some of the presets. Let's say mallets, audition some stuff that's nice and clean. Let's grab that. It, double-click on it, and it's going to load that onto this track. I can tell that this track now has an instrument on it. Because when I click on this track, anywhere on this track, I go down here and I see an instrument, basic bells. Now the instrument could look like a bunch of different things, but the main thing we're looking for that tells us it's an instrument, is that on the left side here, we have little dots that says there's Midea coming in, not sound midi. And on the right side of it, we have sound audio. That tells us this is an instrument because it's turning middy into sound. See the sound, midi, sound. Cool. So whenever you're doing something with Midea, if you don't hear it, then check to make sure that you have installed an instrument on that track. And it's not muted and that you do actually see sound coming out of the instrument. Okay, That is the biggest question I get when it comes to midi stuff with live people saying, I played so midi notes but I can't hear them. Or I recorded some video or imported some Midea, but I don't hear anything. Because you just imported on-off messages and they're they're saying turn on and turn off, but they have no sound associated with them. So you have to put an instrument on the midi track if you want to hear it. Now again, by design, right? Because check it out. If I don't like this sound, I can switch it. Here's a different sound. So that one needs, right? This is what's great about Midea, is that you can keep assigning different sounds to it. And you're not wrapped into any particular sound. Versus when you record audio, what you record the sound you record you're stuck with. You can do some effects to change it. But the bulk of the sound is the bulk of the sound. With Midea, it's really just messages and you can apply different sounds. You can actually do a lot with Midea as well. So that's the number one rule about midi. You can record stuff, but you, but you have to have an instrument on it to hear it. Rule number one. 19. Hardware Needs for MIDI: Alright, let's talk about hardware needs for Midea. There's a couple of different ways to look at this. Really. The hardware needs for recording midi can be 0, can be nothing. Because we can just click in Midea, right? Because it's just that data, it's just on-off messages. So if I just make a midi clip here by double-clicking, then I go to my midi grid and just click in some notes. I can do that. And you might be thinking, Hey, why are we hearing it? We're hearing it because if I go over to my instruments tab here, I left that instrument on it, right? So it already has an instrument on it. So that's what we're hearing. We can change it and that's just fine. So we can just click in notes. We don't need any extra hardware to do midi recording. However, you can have some. So it's sometimes good to have a nice little keyboard. There are millions of different kinds of keyboards you can get. But what you want to look for is you want a midi keyboard. Okay, so, um, here's an example of one. This is just a little like to octave keyboard. This is an old one. I have oxygen eight. These are actually really old at this point. But what you're looking for is that it has some kind of data output like USB. Usb is the most common. So this has a USB output. So that means I can plug it directly into my computer and I don't need any other kind of interface or anything. Okay. Anything modern that you buy should have a USB output. Okay? Now, these are fairly inexpensive. They're plastic keys and they don't have any sounds in them. They're just going to record the midi notes and then you're going to apply sound to them later. Now you might have a bigger keyboard that has sound built-in. Hey, if it makes sound on its own, that would be called the synthesizer. Synthesizer is something that's going to be making sounds on its own. That you could either plug in to your audio interface as an audio instrument if you want to record the sounds in it. But if you don't want to record the sounds in it and you just want to use it as a midi controller, okay, So something that lets you play in midi notes. Then you would record it. You would plug it in as Midea. So if it has a USB out or anything like that, that's the way to go. If it doesn't have a USB out, it might have a midi out. Now a midi out is an older way to connect these keyboards and things to a computer. It will look like a circle with five pins. Okay, so here's an image of one. If it has an output that looks like that, then you need two things. You need a midi cable, okay, which looks exactly like how you would imagine. It's got that five pin connection on both sides. And then you need a box that will convert that to a USB signal. Now, you can get a separate box to do that. However, you might already have one because a lot of audio interfaces have a midi port in them. Here's the audio interface I showed you a minute ago. If I flip to the back, it actually does have two midi inputs, sorry, one midi input, N1 midi output. Okay? It's unlikely that you're going to need a midi output. That'll be for like if you wanted to send information from your computer back to the keyboard to control the sound in it, which you can do. But most of the time, we don't need to do that. So this can serve as my midi interface as well as by audio interface. Okay? Again, if your keyboard has a USB output, you don't need a midi interface. And any new midi controller is going to have a USB output. That so only in the case of having a fairly old midi controller, are you going to need to use that five pin midi cable? So in most cases, you can get yourself a nice midi keyboard for not very expensive, and plug it directly into your computer with USB. 20. MIDI Controller Shopping: Okay, If you're shopping around for a midi keyboard, what should you get? This is another question I get a lot. So aside from making sure it has USB functionality, that's the main thing you're looking for. The next thing I would look for is, what kind of what do you already play? Like? Do you already play an instrument? And if so, you might consider getting a midi controller that is more like that kind of instrument. Now, notice my language there. I'm saying midi controller rather than midi keyboard, because midi keyboards are the most common thing. But there's really no reason that your midi instrument needs to look like a keyboard, right? It can look like anything, any instrument. There are a lot of different midi devices out there. So sometimes we just say midi controller to mean the thing that's providing the midi. So let me give you an example. This is a midi controller that is a keyboard, but it also has some extra knobs and dials up here, right? We can map those to things and that lets us get our hands on stuff. So it's good to have some of these. If you want to be able to control some parameters of Ableton with your hands, it's sometimes just feels better than just clicking on the mouse. So you might want some extra knobs. You might even want some pads to do drum stuff, to play drum stuff in. This doesn't have any pads like that, but this one is nothing but pads. So this has a bunch of pads here, a bunch of knobs, some faders, and some more buttons. So this has no keyboard on it, but it's USB. And it's just a good old midi controller. This one's kinda old too. Innovation. Remote 0 as l. There's also a version of this that does have a keyboard. But I used to use this for performing, so I wouldn't map a lot of stuff to it so that I could turn different things up, place and drum hits and then control my mix. From here. It's cool, I wouldn't use this to work on a track to actually record with. But it just shows you some of the range of midi devices that are out there. I could record these. I can record anything. I can record these fader positions and do whatever I want. But there's no keyboard on it. That's my point. Um, if you're a guitar player, I'm really into this instrument lately, this is made by a company called artifacts known throughout, uh, Nashville. They call this the instrument one. It's basically a guitar, but it's just a midi instrument, uses USB actually this, I think can be wireless as well. But you know, he's play it like a guitar and it knows what you're doing. It's just got pad sensitive things in here to know where your fingers are. So I'm a guitar player, so I like using this to play in some stuff. It's a bit pricey. I think if I remember right, it was maybe 500 bucks or so. But it's really quite fun. If you're a guitar player and you want it to actually feel like a guitar. This is a product called the jam stick. These are quite popular right now. This is actually made by a local company. Local to me in Minneapolis here. This is an early model of it. They make a full size one now called the jam stick studio, which is almost a full size guitar. And it's, the main difference here is it's got real strings. Okay, so you can play it like a guitar. It doesn't really make any sound, but you plug it in, again, USB or wireless, I think with this. And you can just load up any instrument. You load up a piano and play it with us. It's rather fun to do. Two. These are pretty cool. I like it. Again, I think there are a bit pricier probably on the 500 to $600 range for something like this. But if you want to be a guitar player and make it feel like a guitar, but control in orchestra or a synth, or a piano or anything, you can do it with one of these. Now last thing I'll say is, if you're thinking, Oh my God, too many options, what do I do? Here's what I suggest. If you just want me to tell you go by this, I'm going to set you don't need to spend a lot of money on a midi controller. I would start with something that has a keyboard in it. Even if you don't play the keyboard, it's just easier to control sounds that way. So get one that has probably three or four octaves of keys. So it'll be about this long. And then a couple of knobs and some pads for doing drum stuff. You can get something good for a 150 bucks will get you everything you need. And my favorite one right now in that price range is the novation launch key K. There's a series of innovation launch keys that are basically various sizes. So get one that will fit on your desk and sit right. But I really do like the Innovation launched keys. I don't use one anymore because I switched to this fancier keyboard, but I used to use one exclusively. I took the one I had up to my recording studio, but very reliable, very affordable, solid little piece of gear. I liked it. So check out the novation launch key. If you just want me to tell you something to buy, it's solid. It works great. 21. Hardware Setup: Okay, so let's talk through setting up an instrument in Ableton Live. So I'm going to set up this instrument one, because I don't think I've set it up yet on this computer actually, I know I haven't. So all of this is going to happen in the preferences window. So we need to go to Preferences. And then we're gonna go to this link tempo, midi tab. Okay, so this down here is really what we're concerned about when it comes to midi controllers. This up here is really what we're looking at here is control surfaces. A control surface is something that basically is going to be able to run most elements of the program. It is a midi controller, but kind of a more robust midi controller. Something like the push two. That means that the push two is a controller that is designed to, that is kind of built into live. So live knows what it is and when you plug it in, all kinds of mapping happens to it automatically. There are others that you can get that our control surfaces. So I do have a push to plugged in to this computer. So it comes up here, it just automatically sees it. And it says my input. And it doesn't need an output because I'm not sending anything from live back to the push two. So what I'm mostly concerned with is our midi ports down here. So this is telling me anything that's plugged into my computer that live sees and it should see everything that's plugged into your computer. If it doesn't, if you plug in a keyboard that doesn't know what it is, then you might need to download some software for that individual thing. It's unlikely that you would need to do that, but you might. If it's something really weird. If you're using just a midi input, you'll see it come up here as USB midi interface. That's the thing you're looking for. So I have currently plugged in as my main keyboard, this one called a seaboard rise 49. Okay, So it sees it here. Now you'll always see it show up twice in this list, as in and then again as out. Okay, so seaboard rise in is my keyboard. I can open it up here and I can see some other settings. There's really hardly any need to ever go into these settings. So I wouldn't worry about those at all. For output on this keyboard, I have nothing turned on because I don't have any need to send anything back to that keyboard. There's just no need for it. So I didn't turn any of those own. Okay, so let's plug in my instrument one. Now this first of all, I have power plugged into this only because I haven't used it in a while. The battery is dead. So we've got power plugged in and I'm going to plug in a USB and I do believe this has wireless and won't work over Bluetooth if I want. But that's a bit more complicated, so let's just keep it simple. So as soon as I plug it in, it should show up in that list. So we go. And there it is, like no editing there it showed up that fast. So input instrument one track. Okay, so track means I'm going to be able to input notes. So sinc means that it has some kind of timing mechanism in it. And we're going to be able to manipulate the tempo and some other things like that. This doesn't have anything like that in it. So I'm going to leave Sync off. And remote means that it's going to be able to control things like like the transport bar, play pause, stop. It is not able to do that. So I'm going to leave that off. Even if it was able to do it, I might consider leaving that off just because maybe you don't want to turn that up. That's totally okay. Okay, so this showed up automatically. Track is on. Now if I go down to my output, I don't need anything. There's no reason to send me back to this device. So, you know, the output off. That should be all I need to do. Okay, so I'm going to close this window and I'm going to go to live now the first thing I'm going to do. And so I'm going to look at our little magic midi square up in this corner. Okay, so I'm going to play some notes and see if that lights up. There it is. Okay. I don't hear anything. Don't need to. All that little square is telling me is that yes, Live is getting midi information from this device. Great. So now if I go to my any midi track and I arm it to record, I should hear Midea through it. Pretty gnarly. Let me change my settings here. This has different settings, different instruments can now want to guitar setting. And that's better. So now I can play any instruments in live with my insert one controller. Let's just for fun. I'm going to load up a plugin that's got a nice piano sound on it. I'm going to use contact. This is a plug-in, so it's external and contact is a plug-in that is going to house a lot of different instrument libraries. So these are Instrument libraries that I've purchased that are higher end libraries. So I have these nice pianos that I've bought. Okay, so let's hear one play. So it's a little tricky. This thing, it doesn't behave perfectly like a guitar. But it's kinda fun and I kinda like the glutinous of it gives you some fun, maybe unexpected results that can make some cool things. So there you go. That's really all it took to set up a new midi device. It really just kind of popped up and I, and I just need to assign it to a track and now I can record with it. So if I wanted to record, I'm on this track now, the second track, so open it up. Press Record. Were armed to record. So here we go. And there we are. Accorded a bunch of money. 22. MIDI Signal Flow: Okay, Let's talk a little bit about signal flow on a midi track, right? We talked about this with audio. It's important to understand it from any tool and it's slightly different. So It's, so where does our signal path go? We go from the clip or the instrument, or, sorry, we go from the clip or the controller into the track, then we immediately go to the instrument. Okay, so down here we're going into the instrument. Remember we see midi data here and audio data coming out the other side. So we go through the instrument and then we're audio. Then we can add any kind of effects we want. Let's say we'll distortion. A little. Oops. You can add anything we want. And then at the end of this chain of effects, no matter how long it is, we go back up to the mixer and then to the master output. Okay, so everything is going to go from left to right. Down here. 23. Recording MIDI in Arrangement View: All right, let's record some midi. So I already did this, but I just kinda wanna explicitly do it again. So I've got a track, I've got midi coming into it. I'm going to arm this to record. Up here. I've got an instrument. Now. I don't need an instrument, but if I want to be able to hear what I'm doing, then I need an instrument. So I've got an instrument, I've even got an effect on it. That's cool. Now I'm going to put my cursor somewhere. Let's put it out here and hit record. Okay. Now remember, that sounds bad. I don't like that sound at all. But that's okay because the midi data is there and the midi data is unaffected by the sounds we put on it. So I can delete this distortion and play it again, right? So now I just have the instrument. I can even put this in a different instrument. Let's delete that instrument. Let's go to something. I don't know, simpler, like some kinda pad. Sure. Throw that on there. Now here it's got a phone. I can even take this Miniclip and throw it into a different midi Track 2. And now it's going to play through whatever instrument is already on this track. Meet fairly simple. 24. Recording MIDI in Session view: Okay, let's go to session view and do the same thing. So recording in Session View works pretty much the same as audio. I'm armed to record. I've got my clip slots here. I'm going to start recording on one of them. And now I've done it. I can double-click on it to see my clip. Can edit my notes if I want. I can play it back by clicking on here. That's it. Pretty simple. I can keep recording and more Eclipse if I want. But otherwise, a work sort of the, the same cut into the sound. 25. Velocity: Okay, so we have control over quite a few parameters of a midi recording other than just notes. If we go into the midi clip, we can see here the notes are recorded. Now first, I can zoom into them if I go over here on the left side, click and drag and pushing right, I can open this up a little bit more so I can see the notes a little bit better. Now I can adjust the start of each node. Let's say I wanted it to start right on the downbeat. It's going to zoom in, line that up. One inch, all of these up. You have to do this. But let's say I want to get rid of that strumming. Oops, Undo. And there we go. Now everything starts right at the same time. Cool, kinda miss that little strumming effect. Here's a little stray. No, it's just highlight that press Delete. Now in Midea lingo, volume is velocity, okay, So whenever you see velocity, that means the volume of the note. And we have control of that down here. So I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger by grabbing this little bar and click and drag. Okay? Now in velocity, our highest velocity, little loudest weekend B is a 127. And the quietest we can be a 0. So and each node has its own velocity. So if I click on it, I can bring it down. Now this is only one note. I'm bringing down, right? And you can tell the velocity is lower because the brightness of the color dims a bit, right? This is a little faded from this yellow. I can select a whole bunch of notes at the same time, drag their velocity down as well. Now this one's still out. I've got one more somewhere there it is. Okay. So each note can have its own velocity. And you can even randomize the velocity if you want by hitting this little button here and just saying, well, I can select a single note and randomize the velocity, just keep hitting it. And that's going to go all over the place. Or let me close this up a little bit so we can see all our notes. I could select all the notes and then randomize their velocity. And if I just keep hitting it, It's got some different. 26. MPE Editing: Now there are more things you can edit, more parameters in Midea depending on what you recorded and what instrument you're using. So if I go up to these tabs over here, here I can draw some envelopes. And remember, an envelope is just a parameter changing over time. So I can determine what parameter by this double drop-down here. So mixer, speaker on, that's going to be basically a mute. But I can go to the Duetto is the name of this device. And I've got control over every element of it here. So I can do like the filter frequency. I can make a point, make another point. Now I'm going to close that filter over time, muted that track. So we have a lot of things we can edit there. If we go over here to this third tab, we see a bunch more things that we can edit on a per note level. Those previous things, we couldn't add it on a per note level, like we could turn that EQ down, but it was just for the overall sound coming out. These things we can edit for each note. Velocity we've already done. Release philosophy is going to be like what happens when you let go of the note at the end of the note? Pressure slide. And depending on the instrument, they're going to be more things. These are our MP controls or the start of our MP controls. That's that high resolution Midea. Now I didn't record any high resolution Midea because that instrument one isn't capable of it. But that doesn't mean I can't play around with it. If I go over to our instrument, we have here an empty tab and we'll get more into our instruments later. So I don't wanna get too deep into this. But this shows the different MPI parameters that we do have access to. And we'll dive a lot more into this when we talk about the different synthesisers later. We can also go to our midi effects and throw this MAPE control before our instrument. And this will give us access to a lot more of the MPs settings that we didn't record. So pressure, slide and pitch. We can play around with a little bit from this MVE control setting. Again more on that when we talk about media effects. 27. Intro to Warping: Okay, For our next section, we're gonna talk about warping. So warping is one of the big elements in live and it's probably like one of the oldest elements in live that's been around for a long time. And it's constantly getting better. So there's a lot of different ways to use it. At its core. What warping does is It's the thing that lets all our clips play at the same tempo. That's really what it is. So when I have, if I just drag a clip into the session and it knows how to make it the right tempo to fit. That's warping. It. It's doing a lot of warping behind the scenes, but there are things we can do with warping to take control of it so that we can adjust it when it guesses wrong because it's got a guest, the tempo of every clip that we pull in. And sometimes it guesses wrong. Sometimes it guesses right, but we wanted to do something different. And it's also really useful for just editing. Like let's say somebody, you know, I've got two trumpets and one of them played a note ahead. They played a note late. So we can just grab that note and warp it, slide it right over into place. So that's what warping does. It gives us. It's an editing tool, but it's also like a mixing tool and a production tool. So let's dive in and talk about how we use it. 28. What is Warping: Okay, Let's go back to this kinda pop track that I'm working on. And let's just look at these drums. Okay, so lets just grab this last clip. So if we go down to our clip view, we can see that warp is turned on because right here. Okay. Now let's say I wanted to play around with this a little bit. Let's loop just this spot. Okay, So I'm just looking at the kick here, but I want to hear it in context of everything. So, so arrow right here, that arrow isn't actually doing anything at the moment. It's just a suggestion. So it's saying We think there's a significant moment here, what it calls a transient. Transient is like a, some kind of attack. So what I can do is put my mouse right over that and it's going to make a point, okay, This is called an anchor. If I double-click right there, the anchor turns yellow. Now it's locked down. Okay? So and you can see there's one over here at the beginning of the clip. Okay? There's an anchor there. And now I've put an anchor here on the start of my second kick. What that means is that I can move it around if I click and drag on this anchor, buh buh buh buh buh buh. I can put this kick wherever I want. Maybe I want it to be on beat four, right? So now it's ahead. I didn't love that, so let's put that back on beat 2. I could put it on this beat. I could put it on beat 2. But let's leave it on beat 1 of the second measure. Now, just because, and I put a warp marker where it was suggesting one with that little gray arrow. Doesn't mean I can't put more warp markers. I can put whatever I want if I just double-click in the dark gray bar here, can make another warp marker. Now why would I wanna do this? Maybe I want this kick to get all stretched out in weird. Okay, now that's going to sound very strange. Yeah, let's solo that. Okay, pretty weird. Don't actually like that. What it's doing is it's trying to stretch that kick out over onto threefold beats. So let's say I regret that decision and I want to get rid of it. I can pull this back to where it was. Get rid of that warp marker, and now we're back to where we were before. Cool. Okay, so that's just shows you kind of a overview of how warping works. Really what it's doing is it's really time stretching stuff. So it's stretching things out and smashing it together. But it doesn't really smart ways. And ways that and a lot of them are automatic. So let me show you how an automatic one would work. Let's duplicate this out another 2 times. Okay, so we're getting into this part of the track. But I haven't actually done anything with yet. Let's move my loop over two right there. I just selected that area and then said command L to make that loop. Now let's add a new audio track. So I can go insert audio track. And now I'm just going to throw a drum and bass be right in there. I'm just going to drag one over from the Finder. Put it right there. Okay. So actually want it right there and zoom in on it. And actually let's loop just that one bar. Okay? So now I'm looping just right here. Now let's see if magically that beat fits. Oops, and so soloed, turn that off. Let's just see if it fits. It. Does k, so it's in time. It's like right on B. Now how did that happen? We can go down to the clip and we can see that it says BPM 87. That means that lived in an analysis of it when I drag it in. And it determined that this beat by itself, this clip is 87 BPM. So if that's right, then it knows that all it has to do is play it at the tempo of the track, which happens to be only 88 BPM. And everything will stay in sync. So this is the BPM of the clip, and this is the BPM of this session. Okay? Guesses this right? And if it says usually 87-zero, that usually means it's right. If it says like a number point 32 or any point something, then it's usually wrong. So if it guesses this right, then it's going to be able to play it at the correct tempo no matter what the tempo is. Let's say I want to play this at 125. It's still going to be in time. It's going to be really fast. Because it knows how to do the math to get 87 up to 125. Make sense. So it automatically worked, guessed correctly. Let's take this back down to 88. Cool. Now let's look at what happens when it doesn't do it correctly. 29. Warping Beats: Okay, so now I have that same loop and it is now warped incorrectly. So let's say live tried to figure out the tempo and it figured out that it's 98 0, 5. Now in order to get this incorrect, all I really did was type in BPM here, by the way. But that's okay. So it thinks it's 98, 0, 5. Now that's wrong. So how do we know it's wrong? There's a couple of quick ways to tell that it's wrong. First, just listen to it. Let's listen to it against this other beat. See, it's not really lining up, right? But another way we can tell, this was a loop. This was a one-bar loop that I pulled in. So if it's worked correctly, it should seamlessly loop around. Now not everything you pull in is going to be a seamless one bar loop, but this happens to be. So let's just listen to a by itself and see if it seamlessly loops around. Dozens weird at the end there, right? That's another good clue that it's now worked correctly. But the best way to tell is to turn the metronome on. Okay, so I'm gonna go up here and turn the metronome on. What that's going to tell me is I'm going to listen to where the metronome falls and it should fall right on the beat of our loop. If it doesn't, then it's not worked correctly. It's not it's not on there, right? It's weird. So this is now works correctly. Okay, so how do we fix it? You can just go to the BPM box and type in the correct BPM if you know it, but let's assume you don't know it. Let's assume this is just a something you throw it in there. You don't know what it is. The easiest way to line up your downbeats. Okay, so I'm going to turn the metronome off for just a second. And I'm going to go in here and we'll zoom in a little bit too much. And we're gonna find the downbeats and I'm going to line them up. So let's hear. For one, this one. This is, this sounded to me like the downbeat of beat three. So I'm going to push that back to there. Okay, a 100. I know that was the downbeat of beat three. Let me do that again. I'm going to slow the tempo down. So if I slow the global tempo down, that's going to slow everything down. Okay? So I'm just going to go this way down. Okay. It's going to sound a little funny, but I'll still be able to hear the beats. Okay, So 2341. Okay, so I'm just going to count the pulse, 12341. Okay? So we're going really slow here, so I'm going to count. 12 and so 121234 and see it loops around weird. So I'm not quite getting to the end, so I'm just going to count to two k, so 12, and then I'm going to line up to 12. So two I think is great here. But that's hard to see because we don't have a kick or a snare there. So let's try to go to beat 323. Okay, so this is in fact our beat three. So I want to line this up with the grid and the right spot. So 1.3 means bar one beat three. And this sounds like beat 3. So I'm going to push that over two right there. Okay, Now let's hear it. 1234 and k. So the first part of that bar seems right, right, 1, 2, and 3. That feels right. Something's wrong with the second part of the bar. And three and or 34. Okay? So something is still wrong here. And the reason it's wrong is that there's a warp marker way out here. Okay, so let's get rid of that warp marker by double-clicking on it. Okay. Now that's gone. So now that that's gone, Let's find another spot that we can be sure we're right about. Doesn't really matter where, as long as we're right about where it goes. So here's beat 3. If I could find beat 4, that would be great. I think this is before, but let's just hear it again. 234123. I think this is before, so I'm going to push that over there. And then this is probably the last 16th note of before. And it sounds pretty good. Okay, Let's turn the metronome on and see how it lines up. That's pretty good. Okay, So it feels like it lines up with the metronome. Now let's look at what it thinks maybe PM is now 86.99. So that means that we probably have some little mathematical error somewhere. But it's not going to really cause us any damage. So we could just say, okay, yeah, this is 87 and just type in 87 there. And now we're going to be spot on. So if I go back to my original tempo, it's going to be right on. So really what you have to do here is listen for the beats in the clip and line them up with the grid. The more you do it, the more it'll adjust and try to figure out what's right. Now. Always less is more, the less warp markers you can use, the less kind of mangling of the sound you'll be doing. So that's why I usually try to go for beats, just line up the downbeats for the middle of the beat or something like that. If I could have gotten it just off this 13, that would have been better. But I added before and then I added the last 16th note of before just to get that final thing in line, and then it worked. So but if I still need to do adjustments, I would, I would keep adding beats just to get him right on. Like I could add B2 here. It's already in the right spot, so it doesn't really matter. But that would have added more to it to make it even more accurate if I needed it, but I didn't need it because it ended up lining up. 30. Warping Tracks, Method 1: Okay, so let's look what happens when you pour whole completed track into live. Most of the time it's not going to automatically warp this correctly. So I'm going to double-click on it. And let's just see how it did. It said 61.5 as the BPM. Unlikely. Um, so let's just turn the metronome on and listen to it. Okay, so first of all, I can tell because I know this track, while this is a track of mine, that it's playing it like really, really fast. So if I want to hear it at the tempo that it thinks it's at, what I'm gonna do is set my master tempo to the same as what it is down here. So 61.5. So let's set our master tempo at 61.5. Okay, so now it's going to play at its original tempo, we think. Okay, Let's actually pretty good. I'm surprised. But here's how I would make sure. What I want to show you here is that a lot of the time when you're warping full tracks, There's an intro that is going to really skew everything weird. So it might be like really out of time. But then once the beat comes in, it's easy to lock onto. So what you can do there is if I go to this tune, this is C, this is something where a little bit scary in the beginning, but eventually kick is going to come out. It's going to be really strange. Okay, So that kit came in right here. What I can do if you're in a situation where the intro has made able to guess really strange. Go to right where it gets straight and obvious, right where the beat comes in or something like that. Put a warp marker down. I'm going to Control click on that warp marker. I'm going to say Set 11 here. That means treat this as the beginning. I didn't get rid of this older stuff. But then once you do that, you can say warp from here. And now it's basically going to say, I'm not going to worry about the intro stuff. Probably going to be right on from there. Okay, so we have an interesting case here. So 61.5 doesn't seem right. And if I listened to my metronome, there's a subtle thing that's wrong, right? My metronome is actually in half-time. So what I'm hearing as the beat is 2, 3, 4. But if we look at and our metronome, or look at our time up here, what live thinks our Betas is. Halftime. So that might be fine. Maybe that's okay. But what we can do is we can just double our tempo here. So I'm gonna hit this x2. Now it says 123, even. That's more likely. Because again, this is my track. I wrote track and I know I didn't do like a 0.5 BPM. Okay, so now let's set this to 123 and we should hear it again. So keep an eye on this double time and this is halftime thing. Now when you're warping stuff, there are two different ways to work things. We don't need to do it here, but I want to show you anyway. Let's say this was in the wrong spot. I can make a warp marker. And what I might do is make anchors on either side of that warp marker. That's going to preserve everything on the outsides, right? So if I just move this, it's going to move everything before it back to this anchor, but nothing before that anchor. Because this is just kind of an anchor, right? It's not going to let anything prior to it get moved around. But anything in front of this is going to get moved around, right? See how that one right here just kinda holds everything down. Okay. So if I said, okay, we're right before here and maybe we're right after here. I put an anchor down there. That's going to make it so we're only moving stuff around between these two anchor points. Okay? That can be a useful trick. So watch out for that. Now there is another way to do warping where we're not actually moving around the waveform, but we're more moving around the timeline kind of. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. 31. Warping Tracks, Method 2: Okay, so there's another way you can warp stuff. This is sometimes called the old style of warping because this is how able to did warping for a long time up until I think Version 8 is when it change to the way it is now. So the weight is now. We grab an anchor and we move that anchor around. But you can also make an anchor and then kind of move time around that anchor. It's a little weirder for those of us that came to live later. But people that have been using live for a long time swear by this way of doing it. All you're gonna do is the same method as before, except hold down Shift while you do it. So shift, click on your anchor and move it. So now we're not moving the anchor, but we're moving. We're kind of adjusting the way time flows in-between these two anchor points. Okay, So this is better, I think, for more subtle warping, things that don't have a beat to them. Where you just want to like get the kick on the downbeat. But you want to do some more, kinda more flexible editing where things are maybe with a synth sound or a pad sound, things that don't have a pulse to them. This can be a good way to do very subtle adjustments within that. Personally, I use this way, the modern way. 95% of the time. 32. Warping for Editing: Okay, let me show you a way that you can use warping in your editing. And back to this big recording session here that I did with a jazz band. And I'm going to zoom down to the saxophones. We're going to look right here. So we have this riff that all three saxophone players are doing. And you can hear the tenor kinda actually it's the alto. Kinda jumped the gun, comes a little early. One more time. Okay, So here this top part comes into the hair early so we can use warping to polish that up. Now I could just move this clip over. However, they're actually in the right spot for the rest of the clip, just as first note that comes early. So I really need to do is tighten that up. So let's go in, zoom in on that spot. And it's right here. Okay, It's right here. So I'm just going to slide this over a little bit. So I need you to do. You can see I've already warped the rest of this to be in line with the others because I wanted to tighten up this riff quite a bit. But one way I might do it is go in here and say, okay, where does this riff start? Starts roughly on 61.36.1.3. So then I might go here back and look at it. Is 60.1.3. That's where we want it to start. So I've already adjusted it to that. So it's great for moving around individual notes like this. You can see it updating in the window above and in the window here. So just a good example of how you can use warping to clean up in the editing process. 33. Warping Multiple Tracks at Once: Now a lot of people have asked me if there's a way to warp multiple tracks at once. And there is. And I did it in this session. Actually. Let me take just the drums here. I'm going to solo all my drum tracks. So with these drums are recorded them with many different mix. And what I wanted to do was warped them to the beat so that I had my metronome in time. We did not record this to a click. So this is just the drummer playing. Okay, now he's dead on the tempo. But it was not recorded that way. What I did is I went through and I linked all of these tracks. And this is something that we're gonna talk more about in just a second. But select all of the drum tracks. And then I'm going to right-click or control-click, click link tracks. Ok. So now you see this little chain link next to them. This is nu, by the way, in live 11 that you could do this. So with them all linked, I can warp them all at once. And all I did was look at the KYC part because in this he happens to just ride on the kick on the quarter notes. So I lined all of those kicks up. Right. So that every downbeat was right on where it needed to be. As able to do that without warping every single quarter note. But instead just every downbeat that got everything pretty much lined up. And it's okay to have a little bit of flexibility, especially in a track like this, because it's jazz and you wanted to sound like a human and not a drum machine. So by warping all of them that put warp markers in all of the parts. So if I go down to look at, Let's look at the snare top, for example. Right? Like it's got warp markers on all the down beats. And so everything basically works together the same amount so that it stayed together but conformed to the beat. So now I've got everything on the grid on the beat so that I can warp everything else and start working on tightening up all of the horns. So you do this with links tracks, and we'll talk more about linking tracks in just a minute. 34. Warp Modes: Okay, there are some more settings involved in warping that can make it sound better. So let's go back to this beat here. Okay, so we have warped, turned on, we know with tempo is we've warped it a little bit. Now. If I go to this right here where it says beats, this is our warp mode. What this is, is you're going to have slightly different algorithms based on what your warping. Okay? So here it's saying we're warping and beat. What it's going to try to do in a beat is preserve the transients. That's the attacks of notes. And when it has to do something weird, It's going to try to do it in between the transients, meaning there's not a lot of sustained sounds, right? So it's going to sacrifice sustained sounds for the beats, the transients. When it has two. If we wanted to say No, this is not a beat, this is a long-held tone. Then we would change this to tones, right? So I'm actually going to leave this on beats. But let's go to something like It's actually go to this vocal part right here. And I said I wasn't going to play much of this vocal, but I am. Let's go to, Yeah, what the heck? Let's just do this. So let's go to this part right here. Let's loop that is zoom out here a little bit. Do you need to? You need to. It's not very much. Let's do two more. Let's look that you need them to be. Do you need them to be? Okay. So let's say right here at the end of this phrase, I want this last note to sustain all through this part. So I'm gonna put a warp marker here to lock it down. And then I'm going to put a warp marker somewhere in the middle and you're get out. Okay? So now I want this to sustain, OK. Now I can see by the way, that waveform kind of broke apart that this is going to sound a little glitchy. Do you need them to be? Do you need them to be? Okay, cool. It actually didn't get very glitchy. It sounds weird, but it's not very good tea. But let's go back to that. Let's look at the war being that we're doing. If I put it on beats, let's hear what it sounds like. Do you need them to be right now? Good, stout, pretty bad. Because it's trying to preserve accents. It's just the wrong warp mode for this kind of thing. If I put it on tones, probably work pretty well. Do you need them to be? So now it's sounding pretty good because it's tones. I could also say texture. Texture is good for like a pad or something like that. I don't think it's going to be great for this. Do you need them to be? Yeah, I got a little bit glitchy. Rate pitch is kind of a fun one. Repo, which basically means we're going to treat this like a vinyl record, right? So as we stretch things apart, we're going to slow down the record. And that means that the pitch is gonna go down with it, right? So everything in live is designed to prevent this from happening, right? Normally, when you slow something down, the pitch goes down. When you speed it up, the pitch goes up, like the chipmunks. Live is designed to not do that, right? It's not going to adjust the pitch when it slows things down or speed things up. But this one way is a way that you can say now actually do that. So if you want to do that, this is how you would do it. Do you need them to EGN? Not very useful for us in this case. Okay, then Complex and Complex Pro are the real meaty ones that's kind of saying everything. If you're warping like a whole track, like a whole mixed track like we did a minute ago. You would want to put it on complex or Complex Pro. The main difference here is that Complex Pro is going to use a ton of your CPU, okay? It's going to be crunching. It's going to be crunching a lot of numbers really fast. So if you're doing like 50 tracks, don't put them all on Complex Pro because you're going to crash able to okay. And use Complex Pro if you've got one or two tracks going. And you wanna, you wanna warp them as best as possible. So if I put it on complex pro, do you need them to be? It's going to sound pretty good. But I probably shouldn't leave this on Complex Pro, because it's unnecessary. Tones is going to get about the same sound. Do you need them to be? So that's just fine. Now, if I actually was going to do this, I do it a little bit differently. Pull that back and let's actually per warp marker right there and there. And then put this one maybe right in the middle. So I want to get that pitch throught out of there. Do you need them to be? Okay, That's better. Let's maybe split the difference here a little bit. Do you need them to be you need them to be have a little swoop in pitch and his voice, do you need them to be? That's better. What we're doing here is really kind of inhumane the way that we're stretching his voice in a way that a voice wouldn't do, but it can work. If we wanted to put this into a whole mix, we might be able to hide the kinda glitchy stuff. But those are your warp modes. So be sure and set when you're doing warping, especially when you're doing something kind of extreme, like pulling something really far apart. And be sure you're using the right warp mode, it'll sound much, much better. 35. Granulation Techniques: While we're talking about warp modes, it's worth noting that warp modes can be used as an effect. If you use the wrong warp mode intentionally. You can get some cool stuff happening. For example, let's use the same thing that we're working on here. But let's, let's get really weird with it. Let's take out these. I'll leave that one. And then this, I'm just going to stretch way out. It's gonna get ridiculous with that, right? Let's change my loop to be a little bit longer. So I get to the end of that. And now let's set it on like beets. Okay, So this is a vocal. Take a single tone, sustaining beats as the wrong thing to use. This is going to make a glitch out pretty bad. But what's going to happen is we're going to get what we call granulation. Here. We're going to get these little grains, so to speak, of sound that are right. And then there's stuff in between them that are wrong. It's like little pockets. And that's going to glitch basically. But you can do it sometimes and get these really cool effects if you like the sound or have a need for this sound, do you need them to be? That's kinda fun. Let's try it on texture. Do you need them to be? Right? So you've probably heard like DJ mixers that use that kind of a sound in them. That's how you can do it. Just put on the wrong warp mode. Do you need them to be e? E? Do you need them to be e? E. E. Do you need them to be e? Do you need them to be? And you can get some really kind of fun granular effects. 36. Grouping Tracks: Okay, I want to talk about organizing your session a little bit. And one really great way to do that is with groups. So what we have in groups is you can kinda see this little line right here. This tells us that we're in a group. So I have this group called rhythm section in this particular track. And if I close it, it's going to hide everything that I've called rhythm section from this talk track all the way up to the drums. Okay, so boom, there's all my rhythm section just kinda tucked away, right? So groups are really great for just organizing things. I also have a saxes group here. I can hide that way. I have a brass group, can hide that away. And then I had this all midi everything. One thing worth noting here is that groups can be within groups. So in the rhythm section I have a group called drums. And here's all the drum tracks, right? So this drums group is within rhythm section group. Some people have done some really kind of hilarious examples to try to figure out how many groups can go in groups. So you have groups within groups within groups within groups. I don't think anyone's found the upper limit yet, so it can go on forever. You can have groups within groups, within groups within groups, and keep going and going and going. So in order to do this, let me just do it. I'm just going to make a couple of new tracks and these can be audio or midi doesn't really matter. So I'm just going to make a couple of audio tracks at the bottom here. All I would do is select the tracks that I want. So let's say this 5352. So I'm just going to click on one and then Shift-click on the last one. And that will put them that will select all in between. And then I'm just going to press Command G. And that's going to put them in a group. I can go click on the group name and Command R to rename. And I can call this, let's call this percussion, I guess. And now these three are in this group of called percussion. Now let's say this one should go in the group as well. I determined later after I've already made the group easy enough to do is just click and drag and plop it right in there. And now it's in the group as well. This one, Let's put it in there also. Okay, So now all five of those are in the group. We can hide that group by just clicking right here. And now that group is out of my way. Now there are a couple things you can do with a group other than just organizing. You'll see that the group itself has some controls, right? It's got a activator so you can mute it solo. It, it's got its own volumes. You can adjust the volume of the whole group. You can also do things like put effects on the whole group. So if I go to like a distortion here, Here's an overdrive. I can put that on the group. And now everything in that group has distortion on it. So you can put affects on a whole group. You can adjust, you know, do a little bit of mixing work from the group if you want to. You don't have to. And I don't often like putting effects on whole groups in most cases just because they lose track of where it affects our, I prefer to work on trucks or buses, which we'll talk more about mixing with buses later. So organize your stuff into groups. You'll save yourself a headache in, especially if you're working on a big session. Putting things into groups can be really valuable. 37. Linked Tracks: Okay, Next let's talk about linked tracks. These are, this is different than grouped tracks. Links tracks means we're going to attach two or more tracks together and make any editing we do to one of them apply to the other one. Okay, let's take this kick and snare thing for example. If I select both of these and right-click and say link tracks, okay, these two tracks are now linked. This is what we looked at a little bit a minute ago when we looked at warping multiple tracks. But now if I go to my kicks track and I, let's say I select this little bit right here. It's going to select it in the second one also. Okay, So if I delete this a little bit, it's going to delete it in both tracks. Okay? If I adjust this clip, it's going to adjust it for both tracks. If I move this clip around, I'm going to grab this clip and move it over here. It's going to take that one with it. Okay, and these don't need to be sequential. For example, let me unlink these, so I'm going to select those to right-click again and go to unlink tracks. Okay, now they're on their own. But now let's go out to here and say maybe this one, this track. And then I'm going to command click. Because I don't want the one in between. I can command click on as many individual tracks that I want. So let's say these three. And I'm going to right-click and say link tracks. So now these three tracks are linked. Okay, so now if I select something in this track, It's just that track. And if I select this track, it's going to be all three of those. So you can really make a mess doing this, so be careful with it. But it can be really valuable if you have two tracks that are really similar. For example, let's say, let's say these three things. So let's say these three things. I'm always going to use together in this track. I'm never going to want one without the other, so I might link them all together and then copy, copy a section and say I'm going to want those three over here again and paste them in over there. That can be useful. So and I showed you already though, warping linked tracks, that the trick to that is that all the clips that you're warping at same time have to be the exact same length. So you might have to trim the ends of them to get them to be the exact same length or else it won't let you warp all of them at once. So link tracks is new in live 11. It's a great feature for doing a lot of editing really fast. I've been finding it really valuable, so check it out. Before I forget though, I'm going to unlink these, select them and collect unlink. Now they're back to where they were. 38. What Comes Next?: All right, that's the end of part 2, recording and warping with live 11. What comes next, part 3, we're going to really dive into editing and producing. So we're going to start working with, since we're going to start working on building drum tracks, we're going to look at drum groups, some sound design elements, and really getting into the weeds on editing audio and composition, working on creating new music we know enough now to start building our own tracks in live. So I'm looking forward to filming that class immediately after this one. So please look for that class and jump into it because we're going to really start making some music in that class. 39. Bonus Lecture: Hey everyone, want to learn more about what I'm up to you. You can sign up for my e-mail 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 are or both? And we'll see you there.