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, to DJ's mixing, mastering. Everything is going to be included in this huge multi-part class. This is Part 3, editing and producing. In this class, we're going to start off talking about all of them being, as being tools that you're going to need in order to really produce music in Ableton Live and let it. After that, the rubber hits the road and we're going to start making tracks. So we'll work with the different synthesisers included in live, where might introduce some plug-ins and other things that you might have seen in other programs. And we'll dive into making our first professional tracks in Ableton Live a left. 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 a program. And two, you have to be really skilled teacher or else they're not going to give it to you. You see somebody that says they aren't able to Certified Trainer, like me, 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 lives 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 all.
2. Intro to Arrangement View Editing: Okay, so in this part of the class we're going to talk about editing in arrangement view. So what we're really talking about here is constructing our song. So in this section, I want to talk about editing clips, arranging clips, and we're really just kinda, kinda build a whole track here. I loaded up this. This is an abandoned track that, that I had and I figured we'd work on this. Maybe we'll make progress on it. We'll see. So let me just play what I got for you. I have this little orchestral intro, little synth here doing the same kind of a chord progression, but faster. And then I just throw a little loop on it just for fun. So here's what we've got. Okay, then it just repeats that. So there's maybe something here. I can already hear a few things I want to do it. So let's dive in and focus on editing to see if we can make something happen with this track.
3. Timeline Commands: looping, locators, and key commands: Okay, let's start by focusing on a couple of quick little things, a couple of key commands that are gonna save you a bunch of time. The first is looping. We've talked about looping and the other classes, but it becomes really important when you're working on the timeline. So I want to emphasize it. So you can go to any section and you can highlight something. It doesn't matter what track you're on, whether you're inside a clip or spanning multiple clips. Audio track, midi track. Whether it's blank space, doesn't matter. Just highlight the area that you want to loop. Then press Command L. That's going to put a loop over right there. Now even though I highlighted this and said Command L, It's not going to loop just this. It's going to loop all my tracks for the whole session for that section. So that's going to move our loop brace over to that spot. And it's also going to turn looping on when you press Command L. If you want to stop looping, you can just press this and it'll turn off looping. Your loop brace is going to stay right where it is, but it's not gonna do anything. You can also press Command L to turn it off. And that'll turn it off as well. What I like to do is select a whole clip and then press Command L. It's just kind of a quick way to loop a group of stuff. We can manually move around our loop race so we can just kind of grab it right in the middle and move it over to the next chunk and actually do this a lot like when I'm working on something I might say, Okay, I'm going to, let me zoom in here. You might say I'm going to work on this one bar, okay? Okay, I'm gonna work on that a whole bunch. And we say cool down with that, and go on to the next bar. And I'm going to go into the next part. You can do that. You just drag the loop brace right in the middle. Now if you grab the loop race on the sides of it. On the left side, you're going to extend it back. And on the right side you're going to extend it forward. Okay, pretty obvious. Cool. So that's your loop brace. You can drag it around wherever you want. Another thing I want to point out here is locators. Locators are super useful when you're working on the arrangement of a track. I think there were one of the thing that people never really talk about because they're not very fancy. But I use them all the time. A locators basically just like a bookmark. So I might go here, like let me get this out of the way. I might go right here. And I'm going to go up to the top bar here. And now I'm going to right-click or control-click will say add locator case. It's going to put a little flag there. And I'm going to say drums enter. Okay, Now this little flag is not just a flag, it's actually a little play head, right? So if I want to play right from here, I can just say boom. And just double-click right on it. And I'm going to play on it. I can go here and add a locator and just say needs something here, because it does. And I can do that. So locators are super useful when you're working in Arrangement View. You can mark your, the sections of your song, verse, chorus, bridge, break, whatever. You can use them to start from different sections if you want. And you can use them to plan out your track. Like I might go here and say, okay, this needs something. And then that's going to happen for a little while. And I'm gonna go forward and say, Okay Right here. Say big section. And I'm gonna go forward some more and say, turn to intro and just kinda planning out my tune. This can be useful when you have an idea and you just want to get it down like what the shape of the song is. So I like to do that with locators. If I zoom out, you can see them all go out. So just a couple of housekeeping things that will make this whole process a lot easier.
4. Clips: Moving, copying, reversing: All right, Let's talk about moving around clips. And I know you're thinking, Wait, we did this in an earlier thing. We talked about cut, copy, paste, all that stuff. There's one thing we didn't do before that I'm going to show you in this video. So let's say we have a clip. Here's little drum loop clip. We can move it around by grabbing the top bar and just plopping it down where we want it to go. Okay, if we drag inside of it, we're going to select some material, some part of it, right? Which you can then once you've selected that, grab the top bar and move just that part if you want. So if you don't want to move the whole clip, he's wanting to move like an inner part of it. You can do that. Don't forget my favorite of all time editing moves and that's holding down Option and then click and dragging. That's going to duplicate the eclipse. What's going to leave the original where it was and give you a new one. You can always press Delete when you have the whole clip selected. And then you can use all your standard cut copy paste stuff. So I'm going to select it. I'm going to press command C for copy, command V for paste. And you can also go up to the menu under the Edit menu and find, cut, copy, paste, duplicate, and delete duplicates. Good one too. Like if I go to the end of this loop and I said, You know, I just want to keep this loop going for awhile. I can just do Command D, command D, command D command the lung. Of course I could also loop the loop, loop the loop, which would make more sense in this case. But sometimes duplicating it is just easier. Now the one thing I haven't showed you is there are some little tricks built into our clip view for each clip. And it comes to this kind of stuff. So if I click on this clip and I go down and look at our clip view. I can actually very easily reversed this clip just with this button right here. Reverse. Suppress it. And now this clip is reverse. Kinda fun. If I wanted. If I reverse it again, we get back to where we work. You can also just press R and get that same thing, no modifier key, just press the letter R When you have a clip selected and it's going to reverse the clip. So you can toggle a clip forward or backwards that way. And also if you want to just go inside Eclipse, like let's say we just want like these two notes to be reversed. You can just press R and it's going to turn those into a new clip. But that's okay. Kinda neat. I'm going to undo that Command Z. And the last thing on this, when we're down here, if I click this Edit button, it's going to tell it to open it in an external audio editor. Okay, so I could select another program that does some fancier audio editing. Um, this is kind of, I think, a relic to back when we used to use programs to do single clip editing. There was a program called peak. Still we have one called Audacity that does some of this kind of work. But these are programs that are specialized in just like getting down to the waveform of a single file and letting you do really precise work. I don't have it set up here. And that's what this error is telling me. It's saying you haven't chosen what you want your external audio editor to be. Because I've never really found in need for one. So I'm going to say Cancel because I've been able to do everything I need to do in live. So there's not really a need to do that, although you can if you want. So basic editing stuff. Now let's talk about clip fades.
5. Clip Fades: Okay, Let's talk about clip fades. Now we've talked about automation already, right? So automation is the way that we can make any parameter change over time. And we could do automation. Let's say. Let's move this clip out to here, so it's by itself. And let's say we wanted this clip to fade in. Okay, over the course of the whole clip, there's really two ways we can do this. One is with automation, okay, So in order to get automation, I'm going to press the letter a to turn on automation. And then I'm going to click on my volume so that my little double drop-down menu here says mixer and then track volume. Remember I get that to change based on just clicking on a parameter. So I click on volume and it says mixer track volume. Now I can go to this line, make a starting position, 0, make an end position. All the way up. Now this clip is going to fade in. Okay, that's cool. But using automation is, is kind of like using a jackhammer to do the job that you can do with a screwdriver. There's an easier way to do this. If so, let me get rid of this automation. I'm gonna go to my volume knob here. I'm going to Control click on it and say Delete automation. So I'm gonna get rid of all my automation that way you can do that. I'm just about any parameter. And I'm going to get out of automation mode by pressing a again. Okay, now I'm just going to use the built-in clip fades. Any clip has fades built into it. If I put my mouse over a clip, you see these little two dots that pop up at the beginning of it, and it happens at the end of it to those two dots. Those are built-in little fade. So if I want to fade this in, what I'm gonna do is grab the top one. Because the top one is our fade-in point. And the bottom one, or sorry, the top one is the end of our fade in. The bottom one is the start of our faded. So I could drag this all the way across. And now it's going to fade in. It's going to do the exact same thing. Right? And you can see it's got a little bit better curve to it. And I can actually have some control over that curve and make it a little bit more parabolic if I want or however I want to do it. Okay, so let's get rid of that. And that's kind of an extreme use of this more. So what we do this with is, let's say this fade. Let's say this clip needs a tiny, tiny fade in. We might zoom way in and just say loop. There we have a tiny fade in. We would do that if like the loop has the gut click in it or something like that at the beginning of the end. I do that at the very end as well. Sometimes you do this if you don't have a very good loop and you, it doesn't circle back around correctly. So you can do that. And if you do it really, really small, it can make a seamless loop better. Basically. Now we can't using this put fades in the middle of the track. We can't have it go up and then down and then up within the clip. For that we would need automation. But if you just have a clip and you want to do a little fade in and fade out, you can do it. You could also use this for cross fading. Let's say I wanted to cross-fade these two clips. So I'm going to overlap them by a bit. And now if I grab the left clip, if I grab this clip handle and move it over to the right, it becomes a cross fade amount. All right, so I can do that and then I can kind of fine tune it if I want to make that sound a little bit better. Okay, so these little clip fades are really good for like vocal editing. And anything that requires like a razor blade to really get in there and make sure that you've got everything moving just right. So clip fades are a really great tool to help you move fast when you don't need to use like full automation.
6. Split and Join: Okay, Let's talk about breaking a clip apart into multiple clips and then joining multiple clips together into one big clip. So I'm gonna make a new beat here. So I'm going to make a new audio track with Command T. And we have a blank audio track. I'm going to go into this drum loop and then zoom in a little bit. And then I'm going to split this clip right at some of the key transient points, right? And transients are like the attacks. So I'm gonna put my cursor right here, and now I'm going to split the clip. Can do this in two ways. I can use Command E or I can control, click on it and go to Split. Okay? It doesn't look like much happened, but now I have two different clips. Okay, let's go right here. I'm going to press Command E. Guard here, Command E or Command E and Command E. Okay, so now I have a bunch of little clips. Okay, now let's just for fun, take these onto my new track. And because I sliced everything on the beat, this is pretty much going to work just fine. I'm going to option click and drag this one. Maybe twice. And put that one there. Okay. Oops, I have too many things, so on to fill up one bar. So 41 to 42, I do need one more. Okay, well, let's split that one. Command E and delete that last part. Okay, Now let's just hear my new beat. So I'm going to solo this track. And I'm going to select this whole thing. And I'm just going to press L, Command L to loop. Okay, let's loop our new beat and here. And then getting snares in there. Let's put a snare in here. I'm going to do this one a little bit different way. I'm going to select this narrowing and we're press command C for copy. And let's figure out where I want us to go to. Doo, doo, doo. Right here. I think. There's this mice near. This must be my snare. Okay, let's grab that and put that there. So I'm gonna highlight that and Command V to paste my snare in their core. Great. Kind of a weird meat, but whatever, we'll roll with it. Okay, so now let's just get this out of the way. So I'm gonna select it and press Delete, select that and press Delete. Okay, so now I have this, but I have it in a bunch of little eclipse, right? If I'm going to move this around and copy and paste it, it would be a lot easier if it was just one clip, right? You don't have to convert it into one clip, but sometimes it's just easier if you have something, how you want it, convert it to one clip and then you're not going to have to worry about moving each individual piece of it around. So I'm going to select all the clips on the track. This only works across a single track, okay, You can't do this through multiple tracks. So I couldn't include this clip. Like this isn't gonna work. So I'm going to select these clips. And then I'm going to press Command J. Command J is called consolidate. Why would they use a J for consolidate? Who knows? Probably because Command C is already copy. So Command J is consolidated. Again, you can get it from here. If you go to consolidate J, or you can just press Command J. It's going to think for a little bit of time. And then it's going to be done. So that had to think for like a couple of milliseconds. If you do this on like a long track, it's going to have to stop and think. Cool. And all of this works on midi tracks as well. So here's two clips. If I wanted to make these one clip, I can say command J. And now they're all one clip. Okay? So that's how you combine clips and breakups apart. Command E to split, command J to consolidate or join.
7. Drag and Drop: Okay, So now I'm thinking about this track and I'm thinking, didn't really love the drum and bass thing that we've got going on here. So let's grab something else. Now, a couple things about drag and drop. Drag and drop means we can just drag something from our computer and drop it right into our session. Now you can do that. You can drag right from the Finder or from the desktop or wood or an external hard drive. Whatever you're doing. And you can drag it right into your session. Or you can use the browser right in your, right in Ableton. And that's what I'm gonna do here. So I'm gonna go to sample library. This is just a katana samples that I've accumulated. And you go to drum loops and go to J loops. These are just little loops that I've made in the past that I haven't had to use for yet. So I'm going to grab this one. And you can see right when I drag it out, it gives me kind of a look at what it is. So I need to put this on an audio track because this is an audio file. These are midi tracks. So I'm gonna go down here. Here's an audio track. I'm just going to drop it right where I want it. You don't have to worry about dropping it in the perfect spot because you move it around after it's over, after you've put it down. Okay. So I'm gonna put it right there. And now maybe I'm going to mute this. I could just mute that track, have that one soloed by turning it off. And then we'll just listen to it. That's cool. You can see that just by dropping it in there, live, warped it. It guessed the tempo. It sounds like it guessed it correctly. And it's playing it at the tempo of my session, which is 160. Now, one thing I could do is what if I wanted this halftime? We looked at this before, but I could go into my loop settings here and just say times two and have this do it. Just this loop. Halftime. Can't tell if I like that. I do like glitchy stuff. That might be a little too glitchy for my tastes, could adjust the warp mode and clean it up. I mean, if I did Complex Pro, still getting a pretty good She beats, It's probably fine for that. So I'm going to take it back to the original tempo, dividing that. And now I've got it. One other thing about drag and drop, I want to point out here is that if you use something like splice, splice is a program, let's look at it. Or a website or whatever that will let you. You can buy a subscription and then you can have access to millions and millions of samples. One thing that a lot of people don't know is that you can drag right from Splice directly into your session if you use displace app, let me show you. Let me just go to things I've downloaded. So I bought these, I downloaded it. It's just a little click. If I go to this little icon right here, I can copy it to the clipboard. But if I just drag it, if I just click and drag, you can actually plop it right into my session. Right there it is. So I can drag stuff right out of splice in, into live. It's got weird little trick that not a lot of people know about. But I found that to be really useful because Splice can work so fast. If you have an account, you just say, you auditioned a bunch of stuff. You say I want that. You click on it. You say, use my one credit or whatever, and then you drag it right over in your session. Done. Cool. So this question I get asked a lot is, what about tempo? Can we automate our tempo? Let's look at that in the next video.
8. Automating Tempo and Time Signature Changes: All right, so let's say over the course of this chunk, we want our track to slow down, let's say. So it's going to happen. Maybe just over those four bars. We want it to slow down, okay. Now when you press automation, you might say, I don't see a way to automate the tempo, but there is, there is a way to automate the tempo when you're in arrangement view. What we're gonna do is go to our master track. That's where the tempo automation is going to come up. So let's click on the little handle at the top and just make our master track a little bit bigger. Okay, Now I'm going to press a to go into automation. Now I'm going to click the tempo. And now you can see in our double drop-down we have mixer song tempo. Okay, So now where the little dotted line is, is going to be our current tempo. So I'm going to click a dot to make an anchor point there. And then I'm gonna go here and put it to the tempo that we actually want. You can see the timeline adjusting as I do that. Let's say we want to get this down to 112. Sure. Okay, That's it. Now our tempo is going to adjust along that line. Let's hear it. Cool. I thought maybe I would like that groove at that slower tempo, but I doubt. So we might have to find a different group for that. Now, another thing you can do while you're doing this is put in meter changes. Another question I get asked a lot is how do I change the time signature and go out of automation mode? Because if you want to change the time signature, we see the time right here. It's 44. If you don't know what that means. That means basically four beats per bar. For further explanation on there, check out some of my music theory classes. But if you do want to change it, you would do that up here in the top bar. In the same way I did a locator. So let's say right here at 37, I want to add a meter change. We don't automate meter changes. That's kind of a different thing. We just kind of insert them. So we're going to right-click and say Insert Time signature change. And then it says 44 is what we currently are. We can change it by just typing in numbers slash a number so I can change it to 34. My typing three slash four, press Return. And now we're in 34. Going forward. Can add another one, get us back to 44, or do something weird like 168. And Live is perfectly happy to have us be in 1608. Now, last thing I'll point out about this, you'll see up here, we have these two little red squares, are pink, salmon, whatever color we want to call that squares. Remember that whenever you see those squares, that means the thing is automated. So tempo, it's showing us a little dot there to say like, Hey, your tempo is, you set automation for your tempo. So if I change this, it's going to say something's weird because you set automation but then you changed it. And this little light is going to go off. This light is our re-enable automation. So if this is orange, it means you have conflicting information. You've automated something and then you changed it with by, not by changing the automation, but just by changing the parameter. And what it's telling you is that it's going to use the new information and ignore the automation. So if I click on this, that's going to say, okay, we're going to use the automation and ignore the new information, which I'm going to, which is generally what you want. Time signature is well, this has a little automation thing on it, even though it's not really automated, you know, we've written it in, but we have changed the time signature over time, and that is the definition of automation. So that is a kind of automation. If you want to get rid of everything, you can always control click and say Delete automation. Okay, now let's just gonna play our tempo at 133 or wherever I said it. 160 is where I originally once. And I can do that with time signatures as well. Returned to default. Return to default.
9. Downloading and Uploading a Session: I know that a lot of people ask like how do I just get started with something? Because you're telling me all these key commands and these things to do and I just don't have a session to play around on. So I'm going to give you this session. It's just a kind of a nothing track right now anyway. Maybe you can make something with it. One thing about key commands is that I'm not like a key command wizard. And I don't advocate sitting around in memorizing key commands. That's not a great way to interact with the program I don't think is by just forcing yourself to memorize these. I think you will memorize a lot of these key commands. The more you use the software, because you're gonna do something a 100 times and then say, it's going to be a faster way to do that. And then you're going to remember the key command. But don't worry about them for now. And you can always google and find a list of all the key commands. In fact, I'm going to give you one sooner or later. Learn how to do what you need to do. And the key commands will come along with experience with doing it. So don't stress out about memorizing key commands. Now, I want to point out one other thing. I'm going to give you this session, but there's a special trick to giving someone an Ableton session that I want to go over because I'm about to do it well, I might as well do it right now for this track. When I drag this file end, just for example, when I drag this file and this file is somewhere else on my hard drive, and I drag it into this session. Now what able to knows is it knows that whenever I'm interacting with that file in my session, to go back to that spot on my hard drive and play around with that file. It essentially remembers the location, the path it needs to go to get to that file. But if I just took this, if I just took this session D and B12 ALS and sent that to you, you're not gonna get that fat, that file because you're going to open that file and you're able to session is going to say, okay, I need to go to TJ is hard drive to find this file and you don't have j's hard drive, so I can't get that file. So there's a way around this. What we have to do is if you're going to share a file, you have to tell Live, take all your external files, every file that you only know the location of, but don't actually have a copy of. Make a copy and put it all together so that I can send this to someone. And here's how we do that. So we go to file and then we go to collect all and save That's going to collect all of the external files that it's using, put them into one session folder, collect all and save. Now it's going to say what all do you want to collect? Files from elsewhere? That's a definite yes. Files from other project? I'd say yes. Files from user library. You can usually say no to that. Assuming somebody, the person I'm setting it to has a normal user, User Library. They don't need that. But it's not going to hurt. So I'm gonna say yes. Files from Factory Packs. I tend to leave that off because it generally is going to make your session huge. And if it's a factory pack than they have it, anyone who has the same version as live that you do is going to have that pack already. So I'm going to leave that off. So now I'm going to say OK. Ok, So now if I go to my session, I see the file. Now you'll only see one of these. I had to save it as a new version because it's the first time I've worked in this file with live 11. So I made a live 11 version. That's the one that you want. But you'll also see that now it has a samples file folder and it's got all the audio samples that I used and audio samples that we made. And it's also got important info about the session. So now what you're going to want to actually share is not this file, because that's not all the material you need the samples file to you. So we're going to back out one level and go to the project folder. That's what you're going to share. Because if somebody has this folder, now they have everything that they need. Okay? So you're going to do collect all and save and then you're going to share the whole folder. So I'm going to do is compress this there. Now it's a zip file. When you open that zip file, you're gonna get this and then open this live 11 version of it. And as long as you have lived 11, You're fine. If you don't have live 11, open this version. Cool. Okay, So in the next session or the next little thing, I'll give you the session. Feel free to play around with it, chop things up, do whatever you want. You will get an error when you open it because I am using some higher end sample libraries on these. And you don't have those. You can see I'm using the contact plugin on these strings settings. So just grab any instrument you have and throw that on these midi clips and you'll get some sounds happening. But you're going to need to put something else on these midi clips. Unless you happen to have contact and this cello true legato sample library, then, then it should open up just fine. But I doubt you have that. But throw any old instrument on there and start playing around.
10. Intro to Session View Editing: Okay, next let's pop over to Session View and start playing around with our editing controls there. Now, like I've said before, remember that arrangement view and Session view are kind of two different content areas that share a mixer. Okay? So if I go over to Session View in my same session, we're not going to see the content that we have from our Arrangement View, right? It doesn't automatically come over. Now there are some easy ways to bounce things between the two and we'll talk about those in just a second. But for the most part, you can work with Session View in many of the same ways that you can work with Arrangement View. And there's just a slightly different workflow because we don't have a timeline. So we have to think about how we're arranging things in time a little bit differently. But when it comes to editing clips and working with clips, things more or less work the same. And the biggest difference is that we're really designed to be working with looping material here in Session View versus arrangement view. That doesn't mean everything has to loop, but it means that that's kind of the default way to interact with Session View. Now, also, once we make something in session view, we can bounce it over to Arrangement View and record our arrangement. We'll talk about how to do that in this section as well. So let's dive in and talk about setting up loops in session view.
11. Setting up loops: Okay, so I have this loop here. And it's a bunch of kx, like eight kicks. Now, this is a concept that I'll confess that I never really understood Session View until someone did this. And it's a simple thing. But when they did it, I was like, oh, now I see the power of Session View. So check it out. I'm going to pop this loop into one of my audio tracks right here. Okay? Now, I can loop this. In fact, by default it looks like live warped it correctly. Everything down in our clip view is going to be the same as Session view are the same as Arrangement view. So it looks like it's warped correctly. Looping is turned on by default, I can hit play and it's going to loop. Except his tracks muted. Okay, It's conforming to my tempo of 160, which I guess is fine. Now. Now here's what's interesting. I have eight identical kicks here. So why am I looping all eight of them? I could do that, I could leave it that way, but it's going to be just as good to loop, just one of them. Right? So let me take my loop brace and just turn this into a one B-H loop. That's going to be the same as this two bar loop. Okay? This is looping to bars. And I know that because we see here 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 4, that's bar one, b1, b2, b1, b2, b3 bar one before. And here we have B2, B1, B2, B2, B2, B3, B2, B4. Okay, so that's two full bars. But I could loop just this one beat and it's basically going to sound exactly the same. Right? Now I have this short little loop. It's like I took a record that was that was eight beats long, but it was the same eight beads. And I just shrunk it down and said, okay, I'm just gonna, instead of looping those eight beats, I'm going to do just as one beat. Because here's the trick. Not your loops don't need to all be the same length, right? Your loops can be all different lengths. So I can make this an eighth note loop if I wanted to. So now it's gonna go twice as fast. Right? So if I want this to happen on the downbeat and just thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. I could do it as a one-bar loop and it's just going to go on forever. It's a simple thing, but it makes you think about the clip a little bit differently, right? When we're over here in Session View. Because now I just have this one beat loop. So what if I wanted to do that with a snare, but I wanted to snare to hit on beat 2. Let's try that.
12. Looping on Beat 2: Okay, So I have a snare here. And unlike our kick, this snare sample is just one hit. That's all we got. So I'm going to drag that into another audio track. I'm not gonna put it under here because I'm going to want to hear these both at the same time and I'm not going to be able to do that if I put it here. So I'm gonna put it on a different track. Okay, now we're going to look at it. Now the first thing we see is that this isn't, this loop isn't good. This isn't really set up to be a loop. This is set up to be a one-shot. So if I'm going to set it to be a loop, I want this to be right on the one. Okay, so I'm gonna put a warp marker right there, right where the snare hits. And then I'm going to Control click and say Set 11 here. Okay. Now you can see what my loop race did. My loop braces still over there, but my starting point is right on that. Okay? This little flag means where it's going to start from when I press play. But this flag is going to, or this brace is what's gonna loop. So it's going to start from here. It's gonna go all the way till the end. And then it's going to jump back to here. And it's going to be weird. So let's put this right up on the one. Okay, so now it's going to loop for a full bar. And you can hear it starting to get off. I think it's not quite perfectly one bar, so it's getting a little off. But that doesn't matter. What we wanted to do is be a two-bar loop, or sorry, a two beat loop and happen on beat two. Okay, so first let's make it a two beat loop. Okay? So now when I press Play, it's going to hit and then do nothing and B2 because there's silence here, hit to, hit to k, So it's going to hit on every other of the kicks. Got. Now what if I want the opposite of that? What if I wanted to go boom hit, boom, hit, boom, hit, boom, hit. Okay. So what I need to do is start the loop. One beat back. So let's just adjust our loop. So we're gonna go to position. So negative one for one. So that means the pre, the bar before the loop starts, negative one beat for the last quarter note of that bar, and then the first 16th note. Okay, and then we're going to loop it all the way to 0 bars because it's not going to do a whole bar. Remember this, this parameter isn't the spot at which the loop brace ends. It's how long the loop loop race is. If it was the spot, we would say 1.2. That's not what we want. Well, we want a 0.2 because we're saying basically it's just two beats long. So now what we have here is it starts on a bar before, which is empty, and then it plays for a bar. This is going to put it on beat two. Okay? I'm gonna get rid of that warp markers. It doesn't need to be there. The last thing I need to do is set our starting position to be back at the same spot as our loop start. Okay, cool. So now what's going to happen is we're going to have basically the world's most simple beat would have kick, snare kick, snare kick, snare kick, snare. At when I start both of these clips at the same time, which I'll do from our scene lodge. Let me show you what's happening. Right? So let me summarize what we're doing here. Are kick is a one beat loop. And it's going to happen every beat. Don't, don't, don't, don't thump, thump. Our snare is a two beat loop, and it starts with a beat of silence. So silence hit, silence, hit two beats long. Okay, now together, look at the little spinning records here. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. You can see the snare hits at the bottom of this one. Now you don't have to set up beats this way. You can just set everything to how to be a four-bar loop and then loop it. That's easy, but doing it this way, let's you really kind of see how Session View is arranged and working, right? So I think it's a good exercise to think about things this way when working with Session View.
13. Clip Envelopes: Okay, Let's talk about automation because automation is tricky, trickier in session view. Because if you remember, when we looked at automation and arrangement view, we needed the timeline, right? We turn down automation and then we got the big line going all the way across the timeline. And then we could change something over time. Session view, no timeline. So how do we do automation? You still can't. Let's look at our say, well let's do, let's take a bigger clip. Let's just say, let's just look for audio loop of a synth writhes. Okay, That's cool. Let's put this on a new audio clip or a new audio tracks. I'm just going to drag it over to an empty area. Put it right there. It's gonna make a new audio track for us. Okay, So this is cool. Let's just hear it with our kicking our snare. Okay, so what if I want this to fade in? I've got two things I got to think about. One is, do I want, what do I want that fade to do when it comes to the loop? That's the big question. Do I want the fade to loop? And then I want the fade to start over at the beginning of every loop. If so, that's easy. We don't call it automation in session view, we call it an envelope. So I'm gonna go here to this tab in my clip view. And I'm going to say, It says envelopes clip gain, that's what I want. So now we see this is the volume of our clip. It's all the way up. Okay, let's take it down to 0. And let's have this clip fade in 0 for the first half. So about halfway, I'm going to make a point, I'm going to fade it in. Now, important here is we're looking at the clip gain K. There's multiple things we could do. And this is the same as our automation parameters, right? It's the double drop-down menu. We've seen this before, except now it's side to side. Okay, So now what we've done here is we're going to ramp up the volume of this clip. But the envelope is attached to the clip, not the timeline. There's no timeline. So that means that when we get to the end of the clip and we circle around the volumes going to jump back down to 0 and then fade up again. Let me show you. Okay, so that might be what you want. If that's what you want, then you're golden, you're done. But if that's not what you want, if you want to say, I want this clip to fade up and then stay up. And just keep looping. What you would then want is to go here where it says a linked loop, okay? This means the automation is linked to the loop. That's what we're doing now. If we turn that off, now the automation is not linked to the loop. So when I press Play now, the envelope is going to play. And then it's just going to keep going. The loop will continue to happen. And this automation is essentially its own loop. Okay, so if I press Play now, going to fade it. Ok, and it's going to loop because the automation is set to loop. Let's turn that off. Okay, now the automation isn't looping anymore. Okay. So I keep saying automation when I should be saying envelope. So keep in mind we're really dealing with envelopes here. Now there's another thing you can do here is you can loop this. You can loop your envelope, but set it to a different length of time. This is actually really fun. So if I say length, let's say 16 bars. Okay, So if we're gonna have to do a little bit of math here really quick. If this loop, How long is this loop? This loop is four bars long, right? There's bar 4. So this loop is four bars long. So if our envelope is 16 bars long, 48, 12, 16 means four passes through the loop. So what I could do is just for fun, this, what's going to happen now is that this autumn, this envelope is going to make the volume of the clip fade up, okay, over four bars. So that's the first entire pass of the clip. Okay, at the end of the first pass of the clip, the clip is going to loop around, but the automation is going to keep going. The automation has a much longer clip, right? So this is going to keep going. So the second pass of the loop is going to be two here. And the volume is going to be up. The third pass is going to be here, and the volume is going to be up. The fourth path is going to be here, and the volume is going to be up. The fifth pass, the envelope is going to loop and the volumes going to jump down. Okay? And then it's going to ramp up again. Let's do it. Okay? So really what we're doing is when we have unlinked to loop selected, we're thinking about the envelope as its own clip is really what's happening. It's got its own loop length and it can have its own parameters, and it can have multiple parameters. By the way, we could go mixer and panning. We could set the padding to be linked or unlinked. Let's say unlinked. And let's say we want to go. Let's set a length of 16 also, it can be as long as you want. So let's say the panning goes all over the place and ends up back center. Okay? So now the panning is going to move all the way around over the course of four cycles through the loop. So let's go back to the clip gain. Now if I wanted to make this smooth, what I might do is take the last cycle and bring it down to 0. Right? Because now it's going to start the, when the loop cycles back again of the envelope, it's going to end up the same spot. So let's hear it once. Remember now we're going to hear panning going crazy. And you may or may not hear the panning depending on the video settings that you're listening on. And the volume is going to fade up. And then at the end it's going to fade down and start over and fade up. We're ready to go. All right, so that's kind of how we deal with automation in session view when we don't have a timeline.
14. Tempo Changes in Session View: Okay, So this is something that's new in live 11. Tempo changes in Session View used to be this kind of secret code thing. The way we did tempo changes in session view prior to live 11. If you're in Live 10 or nine or eight or whatever. The way you did, a tempo change is you wrote it into the scene launch, the master scene launch. For example. You would say, you would go Command R to rename the scene. And you would type like 120, and then the letters BPM and you press Return. And that would magically tell alive that it needs to change the tempo to 120 BPM. When you launch that scene, that was like the magic code, you just rename the scene. So that's gone, that's gone in live 11. And in fact, that little secret code doesn't work anymore. If I launch this, like it didn't change our tempo. So that doesn't work. Here's how we do it now. It's actually like a much better way. So I'm gonna go to my first scene. Okay, So I launch this and we're at 106 BPM. Okay, what we have now is on each master scene, when we click on this, we get a little something extra here. And this is our kind of scene launch info thing. So I can rename my session or rename my scene. I can say this is the intro. Okay, so when I do that, now I can go down here and I can see intro, and I can set my tempo here so I can say, well, let's say 160 BPM. Okay, I have a couple other things I can do here too. We'll talk more about those later. So now we see that there's a tempo that's been written into the scene. And so I get a little teal looking Play button to set my tempo and 16. So if I duplicate all my content, just so I have something there. And now I'm going to say verse. And let's say at the verse, I want the tempo to go down to 120. Okay, so I'm gonna type in 120 there. Now I get a little Teal thing here. And so when I launched that tempo is going to jump to 120. So about 160 here, I launched my verse. I'm down to 120. Cool. So no longer do we write the tempo into the name of the scene launch. It goes down here. And that's how we change tempo in different scenes.
15. Meter Changes in Session View: Okay, meter changes in Session View work basically the same. The old way we did meter changes was again with that kinda secret code where we go in and change the name of the scene to like three slash four. Whenever live saw number slash another number, it would interpret it as a meter change. So again, if I do this, it doesn't work anymore. That's an I launch this. We're still in 404, not going to work. So I'm going to change this to chorus. Just give it a name. Let's put some content there and maybe let's leave off our synth. So I'm just going to copy those down. So I'm gonna go chorus. And I'm going to go down here again and here I can change my time signature in the same spot. Okay, So now switch to 34 and you can see my master page to 34 as well. Now remember this, how live interprets meter signatures. It's not going to actually change our clips at all. But it's really just going to change the way that live is counting. So it works the same as Session View. So you can see here it's only going to count to three. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. But are basically our beat is still playing and fluorophore kinda 24. One last thing about tempo and meter changes. If you do this, just know that you're kind of going. My general rule of thumb with putting meter changes into and tempo changes into your scene launch. Here is that if you start doing it, you should do it on all of them. For example, let's say I want to start at the intro. Okay, we're at 16. Now I say tool, just for whatever reason I'm in the zone, I feel like we're jumping to the course. Now my chorus is 163 for it didn't change to 120 because the chorus doesn't have anything written in for the tempo. The tempo change happens in the verse at 120, right? So if I skip over the verse, I skipped over the meter change. So I ought to write 120 in here as well, just so that I'm sure that it gets it every time. If you start writing in tempo into the scene launch, I would do it on all of them. Just get a get in the habit of putting in the tempo into every scene launch, pro tip.
16. Moving Clips to Between the Views: Okay, Let's talk about moving content between the Session View and Arrangement View. There's a few ways to do it. Three come to mind. There might be more, but there's three ways that I do it. So let's start with the fastest. The fastest is this. This is like the super secret technique. Let's say I want to get this synth over to my arrangement view. Okay, watch this. I'm going to click and hold down on it like I'm going to move it somewhere, right? I'm not going to let go. But what I'm gonna do is then while holding it, I'm going to press the Tab key. And I still have it, right? So I still have it and I can drop it somewhere. I have to drop it in an audio track. So let's go down here and put it, right. That's where I said needs something here. So let's drop it right there. Okay. So now we dropped it there. And we can see that oh, it's not looped. Automatic. It's not looping. There was something else here. Let me put it in a different clip. Are different track. And then I'll bring back what I already had there. Cool. So there it is. And my envelope came with it. Which is interesting. Now it's only showing you this much of it because now I have a timeline. So if I open this up longer, it should show me more of this loop. There it is. So now it's showing me that whole linked envelope. Because those envelopes still work in arrangement view. It's just that I have the also have the option to do automation. Get rid of that if I want. By just control clicking on it and say clear envelope, and then it goes away. If I don't want it, but if I wanted at once, I might still want it in arrangement view. Okay, so that's one way. Now you might be asking yourself, why is everything all grayed out? We'll get to that in a second. Just file that away for a second. Another way is you can copy and paste between the two. So I could do the same thing if I just clicked on a clip command C to copy, go over to my arrangement view, put the cursor where I want it. It's gotta be on an audio track. If it's audio, audio or midi data, midi track and Command V to paste. And now I move that clip over. Those are the two fastest ways. There's another way where we can record it from one side to the other. Oh, and I should mention, the opposite of what I just did is true as well. I can click on a clip, hold down the tab key, and drop it into session, right? So you can go both ways with both those two techniques. So we can record from Session View over to Arrangement View. Typically we don't do that for a single clip, although you can. We do that to move a whole arrangement over from session view to Arrangement view. So let's go to a new video and walk through how to do that. But before we do that, let's talk about why everything's grayed out here.
17. The Back to Arrangement Button: Okay, I talked about this a little bit in the previous class, but it's a really important concept. So I want to go over it again in a little more detail here. Why is everything all grayed out? Here's the reason. So remember our fundamental principle about the two views to content areas. They share a mixer, okay? So live can only play one of those content areas at a time. It's, it, it isn't going to play both of them at the same time. Okay. So when everything's grayed out like this, typically that happens when you're in session view and you move back over to Arrangement view. And what live is saying to you here by everything being gray is it's saying, Hey, are we play in session view and arrangement view because I'm all queued up to play session view. That's, that's exactly what live is saying to you right now. It's saying I'm ready to play session view. That's what I'm doing. So if I play this right here, what are we hearing? We're hearing session view. We're not hearing this. Where's this clip? Where's all this other stuff? If I go over here to my big string thing. Here. Because we're planning session view, we're now playing arrangement view, range of views all grayed out. So if we want to hear arrangement view, what we need to do is tell Live, Hey, done with section view for now. Let's focus on Arrangement View. So the way we do that is with this orange button right here. This is called the Back to Arrangement button. This is a button that has perplexed the live users for decades. But simply put, the only thing that's button does is say, hey, live demo session view. Let's go back to the arrangement view. That's it. That's what it does. Okay? So if I click this, everything, the kind of grayed out goes away. And now we're going to hear review. Right? If I go over to Session View and I've just press the space bar or I just press the Play button. What are we hearing is where hearing arrangement view. We're not hearing any of this. There's no clips playing. Now these clips aren't all grayed out. But if I play one, and then I go back. Now what it's saying is this track is playing on Session View. Everything else is playing on Arrangement View. So again, I need to click Back to Arrangement so that it knows. Bring this track back over. Jewelry interview. That's what we're working on. So you can have some tracks playing in Session View and Arrangement View. Generally speaking, that's frustrating for me anyway, and it's really easy to lose track of what you're doing. So basically whenever I see that Back to Arrangement, button light up, I hit it because I'm only going to see it if I'm back in Arrangement View, trying to do something in arrangement view. Okay. So when everything turns gray and you don't hear what you expect to hear, it's probably because you're hearing session view and you're looking at Arrangement View. Let's press that Back to Arrangement button. It'll snap you back to the arrangement view. And that's what you'll be working on. Cool, cool.
18. Record to Arrangement View: Okay, now there's another way to get sound from Session View over to Arrangement View. And this, this way we call it recording to arrange. So we want to record Session View over to Arrangement view. The common way this is used is, let's say you've set up a whole bunch of clips and you're launching clips as a performance, right? So let's say like, let's just do this. Let's stop everything. Let's say this is our track. I'm going to improvise a trach out of this. So I'm gonna start with this kick. It's cool. I'm going to bring in my snare. Awesome. And I'm going to bring in my synth, faded in it. I'm going to pull up the snare. I gotta bring it back. Good. Now I'm going to stop my synth and my snare, and then eventually my kick. Cool, lovely. Okay, So that's my cue. Now, what happened to that tune? It's gone, right? Like I just did it. But I improvised in arrangement is what I did right. Because I've as queuing things as I went. So if I want to record that arrangement, I can do that, but it's going to record it to the Arrangement View. So here's what we're gonna do and put my cursor somewhere. Let me go back over and I'm going to hit Record. Okay, now I'm gonna do my little performance again. Let's start my kick. Awesome. Bringing my snare. Bringing our synth is dropping their offer. Sacrifice. Your imaginary racket. Count. My synth. Kill my stared, and kill my kid. Okay, there we go. I'm going to press stop. So what I just did is I recorded that performance to the Arrangement view. So let's go over and look at what we just did. Okay, now I've integrated out, so I need to hit My Back to Arrangement View to hear it now and you'll see where I recorded that. There it is. So you can see here, I didn't just record the audio. What I recorded was my actual launching of stuff. So here's where I launched my kick. Here's where I stopped my click. Here's where I launched my snare. Here's where I stopped the snare and here's where I launch it again and eventually stopped it. Here's where I launched my synth. Okay, so what's cool about this is when you see like a DJ doing a performance with live there probably recording their arrangement so that they might play like a two hour set and then record the whole arrangement to Arrangement view. So that after the show, they can go in and they can say, I didn't really like dropping that snare out right there. So let's just fix that. And they can tighten it up and then they can export it. And then as an audio file and they can throw it on SoundCloud and say, Hey, if you were at the show, take out the whole set here it is. Because we can now render this out. Pretty cool. Ha, so you wouldn't use record to arrange if you just want to get a clip from Session View over to Arrangement View, just copy and paste it. But if you want to get a whole performance from Session View to Arrangement View, Record to arrange, all you have to do is press the record button. Do your little performance arrangement, whatever in session view. And it'll show up here in Arrangement view.
19. Beats!: Okay, next we're going to talk about making beats. So we're going to use making beats here as kinda just a way to learn Ableton. So it's kinda one project that we're going to do together. Now when I'm talking about beats here, I'm talking about drums. That's what we're going to focus on in this section. We'll get more into working with since and other stuff shortly. But for now we're just talking about making drums. And I'm not going to go into a ton of the music theory stuff about like meter and like drum placement. However, I do want to power through it a little bit of it just to get us all on the same page. So in the next video, we're gonna go over terms and definitions and talk about the downbeat and the upbeat. And kinda where you're kicked goes and where your snare goes. Now. But remember, those terms are just kind of general things and you can put the kick and snare wherever you want. So we're going to, in this section, we're going to look at making drum beats in a few different ways. I'm going to start with just audio samples and we'll go into using some Midea, and then we'll go into chopping up loops, writing and recording our own beats with a midi controller and things like that. So without further ado, let's go into that terms and definitions thing just so that we can get on the same page with a couple of definitions.
20. Terms and Definitions: Okay, three terms that I want you to have in your mind when you are making drum beats. Those returns are the downbeat, the upbeat, and the backbeat. Okay, three different kinds of beat that, Let's start with the downbeat. The downbeat is the first one in the bar. Okay, so let's look at that. Let's zoom in a little bit. Right here. Okay, so here we're looking at one bar. Let's loop that. Okay? So we have one. So bar 1, b1, b2, b1, b2, b3 bar one beat for k. So the downbeat is every bar 1 beat 1. Okay? So in most music, we, beats happened in groups of four, okay, they don't have to, we can change that. But in most music and especially in dance music, things like that, we're usually going 123412341234, et cetera. So we're usually on a count of four. So artists have played around with that and made some really fun music, but that's the most typical thing that you'll find. So the downbeat is the one, okay, and the most typical thing in the world, the most common thing, we're going to put our kick right on the downbeat. Okay, so I have three tracks here, kick, hats and snare. Okay, so right now, everything's on the downbeat. That's not going to be very interesting. It's going to sound like That's not very interesting. But I do want my kick there. Click on the downbeat. Okay, second term, upbeat. Upi is the nodes in-between, are the rhythms, I should say, in-between the one in the two and in between the two and the three, and in-between 34 and in between the four and the next one. So if you think about this as like a pendulum, right? There's downbeat, upbeat, downbeat, upbeat. So every beat has an upbeat, but not every beat. The downbeat, the downbeat is only the one, but these are beats. Okay, so 1.2 is a beat. 1.3 is 8.41 is a beat, but the upbeat is halfway between them. Okay? So I'm going to put my hi-hats on all my upbeats. Okay? Now the third thing is backbeat. Backbeat is where you clap. If you know how to clap to music. You typically clap on 24. That is our backbeat. Okay, so I've got my kick on my downbeat, I've got my snare on my backbeat. There's, there are two of them, 24 in this case. And I've got my hi-hats on the upbeat, and that's going to sound like this. Oops, let's start at the beginning. Go. Now if I want to give that a little bit more life, I can put my kick also on B3. That'll sound like this goal. And if I want to give it more life yet, I could put my hi-hat on the downbeats, on all the beats and all the upbeats. Okay, so I'm going to copy this and just shift it over. So now I have my hi-hat on all the beats, including the downbeat and all the upbeats. Leave my snare alone. And now we have this. Okay? So I think, you know, all the tricks I was doing there was just copying pasting. Did my little option click and drag thing to make a copy. Zooming in, zooming out. I don't think I used any new tricks there. So we just made the world's most basic and boring drum loop go. It's not going to win any Grammys, but it's just fine. Now, let's go in and do a little bit more interesting things.
21. Working with Loops: Okay, So if you want to do something a little more lively, one thing you can do is just grab a premade loop. Now what we're gonna do here is we're going to grab a premade loop that somebody else has made. And then we're going to chop it up and kind of make it our own. So if you're looking for loops on your computer, Here's a quick little pro tip. Go to samples. If we are looking for an audio loop, you could do this on clips as well. And then instead of searching for drum loop, because that's gonna find you a lot of stuff that might just be drum one hits or something like that. What I like to do is search for BPM. Because most professionally produced drum loops are going to be called some abstract name of the loop. And then underscore 87 BPM, right? They're gonna put the BPM in the name of the file. So if you just search for BPM, me find a lot of drum loops. Right? Let's go. So let's find one that we're feeling at school, kind of AD's mood. So I like this one. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag it into my session and I'm going to drag it down here. I can see that it's an audio loop because it's called wave, right? I mean, that's an audio file. So I'm going to drag it down here so that I get a new clip. Okay, I'm going to push it right up so that it's on the one. It starts on the one which is really important. Start your eclipse on a downbeat. Ok, and now we see that it is two bars long, because it's going all the way to bar 2 or it's going to bar 3. So it's completing. To complete bars. Now, it appears to be exactly two bars, which means live has warped it. And I can double-click on it and see that live has warping is on automatically. And it says that it's 90 BPM, but my session is 81, so it's warped it to fill exactly two beats. Now one thing that I see is that it has automatically worked at, in pitch mode. Why would it do that? Let's hear it. So if you remember, we pitch mode is the one that kind of treat it like a record. So if it's playing it a little slower, the pitch is gonna go down. I've never seen live automatically choose Read pitch. Let's go to beats. So I'm not sure why I did that. Perhaps it did it because I've already worked with this at some point, I used this loop and I set it to read pitch and it's finding that analysis file. I don't think so though. So that's curious. And any rate, you can put it in repeat mode if you want. But normally it comes up as beats mode. If it's a drum loop, live will try to guess what the best mode is. Okay, so let's meet these other Lu, this other world's most basic drumbeat and just listen to my eighties be here. Okay, now you'll notice I'm only listening to the first bar. I'm only looping the first part and that's just fine. Okay, so we've drug in a loop. We've got it thanks to our tempo, meaning that it's warped and it's warped correctly. I can tell that it's warped correctly because it's exactly it ends on a downbeat. Basically. I can confirm that it was warped correctly by turning on my metronome and just listening. Right? It's right on the click. So that means everything's great. Now let's see if we can play around with this and maybe combine it with my world's most basic drumbeat to make something new.
22. Chopping Up Loops: Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna chop this up. Okay, So remember that our key command to split a clip is E. Command E. We can also control click and go into the contextual menu here and select split. So I'm gonna put my cursor on a few different spots. Really wherever I have a sound, start, right? So right here is a good spot. So I'm going to press Command E. They're, they're, they're basically going to give me quarter notes, it looks like. So let's just chop that up and then I'll put one here. And I'm just gonna get rid of the second half of the B. Okay, so now I've chopped it up. So now let's see if we can play around with it a little bit. Let's keep this SMS going to drag this down to a new track. And let's maybe go like that. And like that, I'm just kind of randomly grabbing stuff. Let me repeat that. That big hit right there. Some of these are the same sounds. Put that there. There, there, there maybe another one of those there. Okay, so now let's solo that loop. Which and do what I got. Okay, And let's turn my metronome off. Go bad. It's kinda got like almost a Latin flavor to it, mixed with like eighties giant snare sound. It's kinda wild. So what I might do actually, and I'm just kind of thinking out loud here is, what if I got rid of this snare? Just do it? Those two are my snare. And I brought in this snare, which is not 80 sounding. Can just do that. That was just my Option. Click and drag. Let's hear it now. I need something here, I want that bad. I'm kinda missing the old one. I don't like this particular snare sound, but I like the idea of putting a snare sound. And so I might explore different snare sounds here and just plop them in and see what I can get. In the meantime, let's leave it like it is for now. And let's turn this into our own loop. Next. We already have in terms of the content, but let's do some technical stuff to kinda tighten this up.
23. Consolidating: Okay, next thing I wanna do is to show you another way to do that. Same thing we just did, okay? Now the reason that we are going to do it a different way is because this other way has some advantages that the first way does it. Okay, so just keep in mind that we're doing the same thing again, but in a different way. So here's I'm gonna do, I'm gonna hold onto this clip because I actually legitimately like that groove that we made. But I'm going to make a new audio track with that same the original loop on it again. Okay, so let's solo that. So here's our original and 80s riff. Got. Okay, so let's get rid of the second half of it because I'm not going to need it. You can leave it on there. It doesn't really matter. Okay, So here's what I'm gonna do now. What I'm gonna do now is slice this to a new midi track. Okay, what that's gonna do is basically live is going to automatically chop it apart, put it in, put each part, which it will call a slice into a sampler. And then let me play this with Midea. Okay, let's walk through it. So first I'm going to Control click on it. And I'm gonna go to slice to new midi track. Okay, Now, first thing it's asking me is, how do you want me to decide what a slice is? Transient is going to mean every attack, which is going to be pretty good in this case, if the attacks weren't so clear as they are this time, I might say every eighth note, which in this case it's going to give me the same result. Quarter note would give me the same result. You might want to play around with this depending on what you're slicing. Warp marker might work if I had to manually warping, but transient is going to work pretty well. Okay, and then it's got some presets for how you want it to slice. I've always just use the built-in and it's worked just fine. Preserve warp timing. Generally speaking, yes, we want that on. Okay. So I'm gonna say, okay, now what's going to happen? It's going to think for a second, just a quick second. And it's going to make me midi track. And that mini track is going to look like this. Okay? Now it actually did do the full clip all the way to there even though I deleted that, it went to the original length of the clip. And that's just fun. Okay, So what we see here is a midi clip that's just going up, right? That seems weird. But here's why it's doing that. What we have here is all of our slices. Oops, let me solo this clip. Okay, So look 12341, right? This is our next one and that's where our big snare is. So if I go to my Miniclip, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, one, right? So there's our big head. So what this Miniclip is doing is it's just stepping through every slice that Live found. So if I play this Miniclip soloed, it's going to sound exactly the same as the audio. But look at how it's triggering samples down here. Look for this little yellow Play button. Okay, so it's just triggering samples. If I look at the actual Miniclip, look at my notes are called Slice 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. It can rename those if I want. But what I could also do is move these around. Let's zoom in a little bit here so I can see what I'm doing. And right here's all the notes that it found. So let's just change them. Normally, I'd want to think this through a little bit more, but okay, so now I have a whole new drum loop. Now that no go. So now I have, in a way, a lot more flexibility over the notes because each audio sample is now just one of these little tics, right? And I can move these around all day long. And I can do all kinds of crazy stuff with them. So it can be easier to move stuff around after you've converted it into a midi clip. Now another thing I can do is I can go to my drum rack. So I'm gonna hit Shift Tab to see the settings in my drum rack. And there's some control I have over the sound of each individual drum hit here right from the rack. So let's go to a new video and talk about that.
24. Working with Drum Racks: Okay, So in the last video, we were introduced for the first time she had drum rack. So what AraC is and there are multiple kinds of racks. There are audio effects racks, drum racks, and Instrument Racks. We'll spend a lot of time on racks shortly, but while we're here, let's dive into them just a little bit. So a drum rack is a group, okay, It's a group of samplers basically. So when I said earlier that when we slice to a new midi track, I said it somewhat incorrectly because what I said was, we're going to dump all of these samples that live fines into a sampler. But that's not really what we did. What we really did was dump each of these samples into its own sampler. Okay? Each one of these slices is its own little sampler. Okay? So let's get into the weeds with this thing. So if I click this button right here, this means show me all the samplers, basically show me all the devices. So let's look at our first little kick. I can hear it. There it is. And I can make some adjustments to it. Now we'll get into detail on how to use this sampler soon. This is called the simpler. But let's say I don't want this extra little thing here. I can just tighten that up. Okay. I can read pitch it, I can stretch it, I can loop it. I can add some filters to it. If I want to adjust. Maybe I want the frequency of the filter to be on that I'll cut out some of the high frequencies, make it a little darker. You can turn that off. I can add an envelope to it. We'll go over all this stuff later. I can even change the sample that's in it if I wanted to. So there's a lot we can do here and each one of these slices has its own sampler. Okay? So let's see this one. Okay, so this one's got some extra sound here. So maybe I want to tighten this up to be right there. Let's hear that. That's our big, huge snare, isn't it? Yeah, we want that to go all the way. Okay. And if I hold it down, it's going to lose, which I can turn off if I want. So another thing that's cool about these though, in addition to each of the sounds, each of the little slices being its own sampler, we can add effects to it. So if I go over here to my audio effects and I say, oh, let's just add like an ACO delay to our high hats. Okay, so Slice Seven, That's a good high hat. Okay, so I'm gonna go to slice seven. I'm going to go to echo. And I'm going to throw an echo. Now this echo is only going to apply to that high hat. Right? Super cool. Okay, here. So I could adjust my settings for this. But if I then go to my kids or my snare, no echo. In fact, if I click away from Slice Seven, click on slice eight, echoes gone. That echo is only hi hat. So if you want to apply effects to each individual sound, this is a really good way to do it. The way we did it up here. Even before I consolidate it. You can't add effects to each individual sound unless I put the sounds on different tracks. So this is the better way to do that. There's a lot of stuff we can do with drum rack. We're going to go into detail on racks shortly. But just know that it's a group of samplers is what's in the drum rack.
25. Creating Your Own Drum Racks: Okay, let's make a new drum rack from scratch. So I'm gonna go to instruments, and then we're gonna go to drum rack. And let's drop this right on a new and make a new track with it. Okay, So here's my drum rack, and now you can see here it's empty. There's nothing there. I can't play any of these pads because I haven't given it a sample yet. Remember that? When we made this one or when we made this one, I should say, we did it by slicing up a file and having it be made from that file. This one we just threw a blank drum rack on there. But not to worry, we can fill it with whatever samples we want. So I can go through my browser and find individual samples, audio files, and throw them right on there. Or I could actually throw them right from the session. So let's use these samples. Okay, So I'm going to grab this kick and throw it right there on C1. Oops, I got solo this. There it is. Let's grab my snare and throw it on E1. And you can see when I do that, it makes this little sampler for me. Okay? And let's grab a high hat, doesn't matter which one. Throw it on D1. Great. Okay, now I can recreate this beat using these samples. All I have to do is make a new drum clip, or may make a new midi clip, I should say. Make it that long. And here I see only my samples. Okay, So kick, kicks gonna go on the downbeat, right? And eventually we put it on beat three as well. 13. So we're gonna go 13. Hi-hat is gonna go on 1234. And so here's my hi-hat, 1234. And so when I say, and I'm saying halfway between the two beats, b1, b2, that's actually 113123133143. And then my snare is gonna go on 2 and 4. Okay, so now this midi clip should sound the same as these three audio clips. So let's hear this midi clip. Okay, Now let's hear these three audio clips. Okay, sounds the same. It's a touchy louder up there, but that's easy to adjust. So now what I can do here is I can go back to my drum rack, Shift Tab, add anything I want here. I can swap out samples. I could add effects. I can do a lot of different stuff with my drum rack. Okay? So I'm not going to lie. I'm gonna say I'm gonna tell you that a lot of the time when I'm programming beets, I like to do it this way. I like to work with the audio files and just get in there and get really precise and move things around. I think most people probably do it with a drum rack and midi files. Both are great. But there's one thing that you can't do with just audio files that you can do with the drum rack. And that is play the beat in with a midi controller. So let's go to a new video and walk through that.
26. Recording/Writing Drum Racks: Okay, So we haven't drum rack was sampled in it. It's Midea, so there's no reason we can't just play it. Okay, so what's this? I'm going to go to this drum rack. Let's solo it. And it's armed to record so it's getting midi. What I'm gonna do is each of these pads is assigned to a note. You can see it here. C-sharp, D-sharp one. If I go to my midi clip, It's hard to tell what note we're on here. But if I but if I click a note and then look up here, it says C1, D1, this is going to be E1. Okay? So I have to find those on my keyboard. Now one of the trickiest things here is actually to find those notes. So look at this right here. That's kind of telling us they are a full keyboard range. Not necessarily your keyboard, but the full range of our any keyboard. These little white dots are telling us where our notes are. That's these three notes, k. So if I play this note on my keyboard, see where it's blinking yellow. That just to showing me I'm an octave too high and too high. So go down, right? Sometimes you might be like, Where am I? You don't even need to be able to read notes to do this because you can see, see where I'm playing, the little yellow boxes. So let's go down. There we go. Found the notes. Right. So you might just have to hunt around for a minute. Once you find them, they're not going to move. Okay, so let's get rid of this midi clip. And let's record ourselves playing these notes. So here's my kick is my hi-hat, and here's my son. Okay, this is going to be a little tricky on this keyboard, but let's just try it. Let's get a metronome and it's give me a one-bar count in. I did that by just clicking this little arrow and counting one bar. Okay, here we go. Okay, now I have this weird midi keyboard that's like rubbery, so it's really hard to play notes on the beat. But that's okay. Because I can just go into this Miniclip and Command a to select all command you to quantize. Okay, and that puts everything right on the grid. Now it didn't exactly put it where I wanted on the grid. So I'm just going to slide it back. A 16th note, and now I'm right where I need to be. Cool. So I could go through and record in my hi-hats as well, or I could just put those in. I'm pressing D Now I've got a crazy fast I had, maybe I like that. Get rid of some of these. Go. I can play around with that. I could just record the high hat N on my keyboard doing something fast. It's going to be kind of a mess, but it can work. Cool so you can record in stuff. Now, let's take that one step further. Let's take this original drumbeat that we had here. Right? All those cool sounds. And since we sliced this to immediate midi track, that means we can play those sounds. Now I'm just playing my midi keyboard, like a piano, right? So you can have some fun doing this. Take any drum loop that you like, size it to him and midi track, and then just play that drum loop. And it's like you can take a drum loop and get it into your own fingers and just plate. It's kind of amazing, right? I find it amazing.
27. Using Take Lanes: Okay, one other thing I wanted to point out while we're doing this, you saw that when I was recording just the kick and the snare, that I did a couple passes through the loop, right? Some of them were better than others. And you'll notice that every time it did pass through the loop, the previous take was recorded over, right? Not necessarily. I can get those back. I can get old takes back by using our take lanes. So check it out if I go to the track and I control-click, say Show take lanes, I can see all the passes through the loop that I did. Right. And then I can decide which one I want, right? So I could say, I want this kick and snare, right? So I just hit return, this kick and hit Return. And then maybe see which kick is closest to here, this one, I want that kick and snare. Okay? Now I've put that together. Now it is going to overwrite the high hats that I put in there. So I wanna do this before I added those hi-hats. But if I wanted to go back and look at all of my takes, I can do that.
28. Fast Hi Hats: Okay, I want to talk about rhythm just a little bit more and show you how to get some of those fast, frantic high hats that are kind of a popular sound right now. So what I did here is I took my most basic drumbeat and I added hi-hats on the 16th note. Now the 16th note means that there are going to be four of them for every beat. That's how we know we're on a 16th note. So if I look here, this is B1, this is B2. There are 44 hits I can do. So if there's four for every beat, that means 16th note. I can also tell I'm looking at 16th notes. Because if I go down here and see 1 16th, that means my grid is looking at 1 16th notes as looking at 16th notes. Okay? So with my hi-hat just as 16th notes, it sounds like this. Okay, so if I want to get that kind of frantic, really fast hi-hat sound that's popular right now, I need to zoom in a little bit more on my grid. So one way to do it is going to be to control-click and see that I'm looking at 16th notes now. Let's go to 30 second notes. Okay? Now a 30-second nodes. I have eight spots per beat. And I can see down here and that 30-second nodes. So with this, I can cut these in half and double them. Right? That's going to make this more frantic sound. And what's popular is to not do it everywhere, but like playing out on B2. And then I'll sure. Let's do that and that. Okay, so now I'm gonna have these really fast. I had mixed in with some of these slower hi-hat gay. Now, I could even go faster if I really wanted to. I could say go in, I can't go any higher than 30 second notes this way. But I could switch my grid to an adaptive grid and was gonna say narrow. And now I can just manually zoom in more. Okay, now you see it's split again. So now I'm on 64th notes. So if I want to make these really fast and select a bunch of them, cut them in half. Option click and drag and make them faster. Okay, let's hear that. Okay, so that's how you can do that. Now there's one other thing you can do and that is to change the feel of the whole thing by going in on the triplet. Let's go to a new video for that.
29. The Triplet Grid: Okay, so we've been looking at symmetrical divisions of the beat where we have multiples of four, basically, right? Like quarter notes, eighth notes, 16th notes, and 30-second. Now it's 64th nodes, a 128th notes. You can go higher. But what if we dealt with multiples of three? We can do that. I'm going to delete all of my hi-hats here. Now when you work in this way with groups of three, we call these triplets. A lot of time we might do this to change the whole feel of the track so dim or at least the beat. To give it more of like a. It can help you get a swing feel, it can help you get a shuffle feel. But and we can do that just using the groove pool. But sometimes this is a good trick for just making a really kind of strange field. So let me show you how to do it. What we're gonna do is first we're going to go to the resolution that we want. So I'm going to go to sixteenths. So I'm going to backup to sixteenths here. Okay? Now I'm going to add hi-hats to as sixteenths in this first bar k. Now I'm going to go into my menu again and change it to triplet grid. You can also do this with Command 3. Okay, Now you'll see that I have six bars on my grid for every beat. 123456. Okay? So what I'm looking at here is a triplet grid. And I would be playing triplets if I used every other one, because then I'd have three per beat, right? If I do six per beat, I'm still on a triplet grid, but now I have what's called Six tablets. Doesn't really matter. Still going to be a triplet. Okay. Let me just fill this with six tuplets so you can get a feel for what that's going to sound like. Right? Okay, Now let's do the same thing we did before. Let me just take some of these and make them really fast. And maybe I'll put that again over here. Okay? Okay, That's cool. Now I'm gonna go out of a triplet grid. Now note that when you go out of a triplet grid, your triplets will not move. They will stay on the triplet grid. So these are still in the triplet grid, right? Like, look, this looks like it's off the grid, but it's actually on the triplet grid. So I'm going to leave those alone, but conform other parts of the bee to my more straight grid. Right? I'll leave those as triplets. Maybe. Put these as quarter notes, leave those as triplets. Okay? So now I've got eight nodes, triplets, six tablets. I'll happening in seeing group. Right? So it really changes the feel. It's, it's both subtle and not subtle when you're working with triplets. So keep that in mind. It works on more than just high hats. But right now, I had a really good way to demonstrate it.
30. Intro to the Live Synths: Okay, next, let's move on and talk about the synthesisers built into live. Okay, So these are all the things we find under Instruments tab are actually not all of them. There are few things in the instrument tab that we wouldn't really call synthesisers. We would call them samplers. So the instruments tab in the browser is all our synths and samplers. It gets probably everything. Instrument Racks a little bit different. Talk about that shortly. Another way to think about it is instruments in live lingo is everything that can generate sound. So synthesisers, anything like that, that we can queue up with midi. So in this section, we're just gonna do a couple of videos on walking through kind of how to use these in general. In the next class, we're going to go through the nitty-gritty of every single one of these. But I just want to get us making some sound first. So we've already gone over kind of the basics of how they work. Let me make something new here. So I'm going to make a new midi track, command shift T. So I have a new midi track here. Let's make a midi clip here. Let's just take this midi clip. And I'm going to option click and drag it down to right here where it says big section of their big section. I'm going to take this and we're going to look at my midi clip. And I do something different with it. Let's, let's just double all the lengths of this. So I'm going to select all times to boom. Now I'm going to open up that clip a little bit more. So we see the whole thing. Okay, so now this clip is moving half speed of the original clip. That's cool. I did that just because I want to create some variation in this here. Now let's loop this section. So I'm going to select this area, and it's Command L because we're going to work on this for a few minutes. Okay? Now, as you know, if I hit Play, I'm not going to hear this, right because there's no instrument on it. We can look right here and see it's only got midi notes happening. So let's throw a little sound on it. I could use any of these and I can either just throw the instrument default on to that patch or of course I can just hit Return or I can open it up and look at some of the presets. Okay, so let's look at, well, we're looking at the analog instrument here. So let's go to pad. A pad sound is like a kinda slowly evolving sound. It's like the opposite of a percussion sound. Let's do that one. So I'm going to drag that preset right on to my track. And now I have that instrument with that preset loaded up. And now I'll be able to hear it. Interesting thing to note, you can only have one instrument on track. Okay, So that's why I made a new track when I did this, because I have instruments on these tracks already. If I wanted to use those same instruments, I could just put the midi clip on it. But if I want to load a new instrument, it's gotta be on a new track. And there is an exception to that. You can group instruments together using an instrument rack. More on that later. But if you're not doing that, just remember that in almost all cases, you can only have one instrument per track. Okay, So let's talk about some quick ways to make an interesting sound using layering. And, and we'll talk about kinda doing a quick conversion of this to an audio file.
31. Layering Synths: Okay, So what we have here is the analog instrument. This is two oscillators to Filters. Kind of meant to emulate like a analog synthesizer. And mostly now I'm not gonna go into an insane amount of detail on programming this until we get to the sound design section of this class, which will be in another section or two, I can't remember. But I do have a whole separate series of classes on sound design. If you want to get really deep into how any of these instruments work, check that out. In the meantime, we will go into some detail on how all of these work. But in the meantime, a quick way to get a more interesting sound and just some of these defaults is just to layer them. So you can hear this one I have, right? Right. So one thing that I like to do sometimes is just take this track. I'm going to duplicate it. Okay, now I have same clip, the same instruments, everything. And that was just control click, Duplicate. And you have to do that on the name of the track. If you do it on the clip, It's just going to duplicate that clip. But if you do it on the track, it's gonna take all your settings and everything and put it down to the next one. So now I'm going to go down in my duplicate and I'm going to switch the instruments. Let's go to something a little weirder, like a wave table. And let's do like a rhythmic center. Let's do that on there. Let's hit that by itself. Okay, So this is a mono synth, meaning it can only play one note at a time. But let's make sure it plays the note. I wanted to play our bass note. So let's be sure we're only giving it one node. Okay, So some sense are mono and some are polyphonic, meaning they can play more than one note at a time. I still want more than that though. So I'm going to, I'm gonna go back up here and duplicate this one again. And let's still stick to our rhythmic sense. So that on there. So this has an arpeggiator on it. So that means it's going to play only one note at a time, but it's going to play all the notes we give it just in in order, going up and down. Okay, so let's hear all three of our sense now. Let's hear everything. And I kinda like that. Let's emphasize that base a little bit more and then duplicate this one more time. And let's use a good bass sound. So I'm gonna go to, I don't know. Operator is a good all around sin. Going to go to its base presets. Sudden nice and clean like that. And now I'm going to go into this clip and I select all the notes. And I want to move these notes down an octave to make them real Basie. So I'm going to, now that I have all the notes selected and do shift and then down arrow, that's going to drop everything down an octave. Here we go. So let's hear just that base. Nice, good media base to everything now. I rather like that. What if we did this? Just out of curiosity? What if we took all this string stuff from the intro that's entrepreneurship? What if we took that and layer that on top of that? Will that work? I don't know if harmonically that's going to work. Meaning like, are the notes going to line up? I runs carrier. That's extended out another time. So I'm gonna select these four clips and duplicate them so that they pop over to the right. Let's see what happens here. I rather like that. So layering sense is a good way to get a kind of original Sam just out of some of the presets that are built in there.
32. Freezing and Flattening: Now one thing I didn't point out that I should point out is that all of these instruments are what come with Ableton Live sweet. If you see less instruments here, it means that you are on a lighter version of live. You might be on live standard or live light, I think it's called. This is really the biggest difference in those different versions of live. Standard gives you all the instruments. The other ones give you a glass. I think the same is true with audio effects. You might have less Audio Effects if you're on a smaller version. Um, but this is why I think live suite is really important, is because it gives us access to all of these instruments, which are really quite powerful instruments. Okay, That being said, I want to talk about this idea of freezing and flattening. When we talk about freezing and flattening a track, what we're talking about is, in this case, converting a midi track to an audio track, which is to say to take the instrument and the midi clip and print it or write it as an audio track, right? So right now as a midi track, we can move notes around. We can do whatever we want, but once we convert it to an audio track, can't do that. So I could take a track like this. Let's just look at and I could print this as an audio track. Why would I want to do that if it's working perfectly fine as a midi track, why convert it to an audio track? There's a couple of reasons why you might wanna do this. One is if you have hundreds of midi tracks going and hundreds of instruments and not a super fast computer. Your computer can start bog and down, right? And can start really having a hard time playing all of those instruments. They take up a lot of your computer processing. So if you want to lighten the load and you're happy with one and you know you're not going to change any notes. You can convert it to an audio track and that can free up resources. That's one reason. Another reason is, let's say that this instrument, Let's go to this one. Okay? Let's say this instrument is using the wavetable instrument. That's this one. Now, someone who has live light or live standard probably doesn't have the wavetable instrument. I think it's true. So if I'm sending this track to somebody who's using that version of the software. They're not going to have the instrument to play this, so they're not going to hear that track. Okay? There are at least they're not going to hear it the way that I'm hearing it, right? They might be able to put a different instrument on that track and hear it. That's different. I want them to hear exactly what I'm hearing. So if I want them to hear it the way I'm hearing it, I need to convert this to an audio track or else they're not going to be able to hear it, right? So that's another reason. And a third reason is that it's eat if you like, like kind of glitchy effects. Those are sometimes easier to do in an audio file, then to a midi file. Things like chopping it up by like the millisecond and reordering it and things like that. So here's how you do it. Now, we can do this to an audio file as well. And when we do it to an audio file, this idea of freezing and flattening, what we're basically going to do is take all the effects that are on it and print them into the audio file. Okay, So this isn't just for midi files. A really good reason for that is just a free APP processing power. But this is something that we end up doing every now and then is freezing and flattening a track. So here's how you do it. Let's take my a, this midi track for example. Okay, so I'm gonna go over here to the track name. I'm going to Control click on it and I'm going to select Freeze track. Okay, So there are two steps to this. What Freeze track we'll do is kind of temporarily disable everything and just make an audio track out of it. But I still have access to the midi info because I can unfreeze this. Okay, So when it's frozen, it means I can't edit these notes. Right? Like it's not going to let me edit these notes. I'm clicking and dragging. Can't do anything. I can still hear it just fine. But it's not using up any processing power and it's essentially an audio track. The good thing about freezing a track is that it frees up processing power and we can unfreeze it. So I can do that same thing again and say unfreeze the track, right? If I do that, then we're gonna go back to using the instrument. We can around notes, you can do whatever we want. But if I'm super sure that I'm done editing stuff, I can freeze the track. Then after it's frozen, I can do that again and say flat and track, you have to freeze it, burst. In order to flatten it. Flatten it is going to permanently convert the track to an audio file, okay? And not just these clips, everything on that track. Okay, so let's do it. Flattened track. Now we have an audio file. Okay, it'll sound the same, right? But it's an audio file now. So if we go look at where our instrument was, it's empty because we don't have instruments on audio tracks. So freezing and in flattening a files or useful or a track is a useful thing that we have to do. On occasion. There are some musical reasons to do it like that glitching kinda stuff. But most of the time when I'm doing it, it's to be able to share it with somebody who doesn't have a particular plugin I have or something like that.
33. Applying Effects: Okay, let's move on to Effects and let's talk about some basics about effects. So I'm talking about the Audio Effects tab here in our browser. Now in live 11, this looks a lot different than it looked in previous versions of live. So now our effects are all organized. There are a few new ones, but the main thing that looks different is that we have them all in folders. In the past, you just saw a long list of all your effects. So those are all still here. So there, sorted by Dr. dynamics, EQ, modulators, performance, pitch, time and space, and utilities. So if you are on an older version of live, you might say, Wow, this looks hugely different. And it, and it does, but it's just because everything's categorized into a folder. As far as I know, you can't change these folders. This is just how live 11 does it. But I mean, I kinda like how they have sorted things here. Apparently, I heard that this was a bit controversial when they put how they chose these categories. Because some things can do multiple things. You could argue that in each you can be, you know, does influence dynamics and things like that. So unlike instruments, when we put audio effects on a track, we are, we can put as many as we want. On a track with an instrument, you can only have one unless you're using an instrument rack. With audio effects. You can have as many as you want. You can also though have an audio effects rack. So what would the difference between having just a bunch of audio effects and using an audio effects rack to have a bunch of effects be, hold on to that. We'll get detail about audio effects and other effects racks soon. In Part 5 of this class, I believe we're gonna go through the details of every single audio effect, how to use it, and what it does. So just hold on for that. But for now, let's just apply some effects and get a basic workflow going. So let's go to a new video for that.
34. Basic Audio Effects: Okay, Let's put affects on something. Now remember that even though these are called audio effects, they can go on midi tracks as well as audio tracks. Just fine. For example, let's do something really obvious. Like and I go, okay, an echo is What able to cause kind of a big delay. It's a specialized delay, but it's a big delay. So let's put that on here. Okay, So I'm just going to drag the effect right over. And just like instruments, I could open this up and get some presets which are also sorted. Or I could just drag the default on there or hit Return. And it will go right on this selected track. So now you'll see here how my signal flow is working. My midi information is coming in here. It's going to contact, which is my instrument in this case. Okay, So it's kind of a bad track to put this on. But that's okay. So this is my instrument. And this is converting it to an audio signals. So we see the audio signal here. And now the audio signal is going into the effects. If I want to move this effect to be before the instrument, and I go, let me do it. It can only go after the instrument because audio effects and they do affect audio. So I would call them audio effects. So it has to be after the instrument because the instrument is converting midi to audio. Okay, so now we have our effect. We can play around with it. And then we're going out here. If I want to add more effects, Let's do like a distortion. Big noisy distortion can put another one. And it goes in this sequence of effects at the end. Now, the order of your Effects does matter. So in this case, what's going to happen is our signal is going to go through the delay and then through the distortion. Okay? It might be that we want to change the sound to have it go through the distortion first, then the delay. In this case, that's not going to be a huge difference. But sometimes the order of effects will make a huge amount of difference. So let's say I want it to go through the distortion first. I have to do is take the distortion and move it over there. Okay? Now the signal is going to go through the distortion than through the ACA. Let's solo this big noisy. Let's try an even more extreme distortion. Okay, what's going to happen here is we're gonna go through this distortion, through this echo, and then through another distortion area. Cool. Now, what happens if I want to use the same effect? Again? Totally can. Now I have, we're going through this distortion and then we're going through that distortion again. So super-duper distortion, kinda like that too, that in context. Gnarly, but I kinda dig it. Okay, you can bypass and effect easy with this little yellow circle right here. Clicking on it will just turn that effect off and pass the signal right through it. Okay, so in this case, this distortion is off. So the signal is going to go from here. It's going to pass straight through it without doing the effect to there. So we're still okay. So that's the basics of how effects work. If I want to get rid of effect completely, just click on the top bar and press the Delete key. It's going to get rid of it. And it works exactly the same on audio tracks, except we don't have the instrument in our way. Here. I've already put a channel EQ on this track, but I've turned it off. So I can turn it back on here. Here it is on here. Does it off right? Now, what we probably want to do is be able to automate this, right? So let's talk about automating our effects a little bit more. We've already automated volume, but let's automate effects now.
35. Automating Effects: Okay, so let's do two things with this channel EQ. First of all, let's turn it on at a specific time and bypass it at a different time. And let's also adjust the amount of the high so that this turns up and down. Okay? Now to automate effects, we do the same thing we did with automating volume. We're just automating a different thing. So the first thing we're gonna do is press a to get our automation controls. K. Now we see where an automation mode. So this effect is on this track. So we're gonna go to our little double drop-down menu and we can dig through here and find what we want. For example, Channel EQ is the name of this effect, and then the parameter that we want to do that we want to automate. We can dig through that menu or we can just click on the thing that we want. So first let's deal with moving this parameter up and down. Hey, so I click on it when I have automation mode enabled. And my little pink line here is going to automatically turn into that thing. Okay, So let's put it where we want to start. And let's do it like this. And then let's have it open all the way up to about there. Over the course of this intro. Actually, let's make it a little bit faster like that. Okay, so now this is going to open up right there. Let's just hear that. Good. Now, let's turn this. Let's let's automate the bypass, right, which is this button right here is our bypass, right? So if I click on it, that works too, right? Now this automation, you can see here is called device on. And I can't draw a ramp like I could with the other ones because this one only has two states on and off. So now it's off. If I make a point, and if I make another point and move it up, it just snaps to there. That's all I can do. Right? So let's say it's on. And then right here, after the filter opens up, we want to flip that to off, okay? And we just want to bypass that EQ. Okay, now you'll see when I play it, if I go back here, it's on. And remember that little pink square means that that's automated. And we see it there too. So what we're going to see is our automation turn are the highs on our EQ up and then bypass our EQ go, and then that gives us our low-end back. Now if I want to see all my parameters, I can go here and say Show automated parameters only. And now it's going to only show in my list the things that I've already automated. If you want to do that. That way you can toggle between the two. Or you can say show all parameters and then click this little plus down here. And you can see the different things. So, so now I'm looking at my device on. I can also look at my gain and show that in a new lane by clicking it here. Okay, so now I have these separate little lanes. That's what that plug-in did. Automation lanes. So this one is showing the high gain EQ automation. This one is showing the device on automation. You don't have to do that. And frankly, I don't use automation lanes a whole bunch. But if you're automating a bunch of parameters on, in effect, then it can be handy to do this automation lane thing. And so you can see multiple parameters at once.
36. Introduction to Production Techniques: Okay, In this next section, let's take a quick look at some more advanced production techniques. These are things that I get asked how to do just about every day. So I thought we'd just dive into them. All right. Now, these things are to side chaining, routing and busing, and resampling. Those are the three things that people asked me how to do all the time. So put a little bookmark down on, on these next videos because you're gonna wanna do these a whole bunch of probably, if you are like most students. So all three of these things really easy to do in live. If you understand the concept and why you want, why you might want to use that concept. So let's just dive in and go into how to set up side chaining and a little bit on what side tuning is. If you're not familiar with what side chaining is.
37. Side Chaining: Okay, So the best way to explain side chaining is it just means when two sounds happen at the same time. And you want to prioritize one or the other. Side. Chaining tells which one will win, right? So if we say, I have a kick and a synth, both happening. And when they happen at the same time, I want the kick to win. In other words, I want the synth to get out of the way of the kick. Okay? But when there's no kick, I want the synth to come forward. Okay, this is a trick we call ducking. It means that if this is the synth and this is the kick, when the kick hits the synth, scoops underneath it, it ducks, right? It ducks it. And then when the kick goes away, the synth comes back up. So it's doing that. But it's triggered by the kick in this case. So the kid says, Get out of my way to the set. You can do this for a whole bunch of reasons. One is for mixing. If you've got a lot of low-end stuff, then it's really handy to set up a side chain and just say what wins when they all hit at the same time so that you don't have a muddy mess and the bottom of your mix. Another reason to do it is just as an effect. It's kind of a cool effect in popular right now to have a synth that's kind of ducking the kick all the time. So let's set that up. Okay, so for this we want something with quite a bit of sustained. So I'm going to use this. And then I added a new kick here that was just straight up four on the floor. Right. Okay. Now, in order for us to really hear this well, I'm going to slow it down. It's going to slow my tempo down to about 100. Okay, we'll speed it back up later, but I just want you to really be able to hear this effect. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is in order to set this up, I need an effect, an audio effect. And it is a compressor. This is what I need. We'll talk about how compressors work more later. But for now I'm just going to grab a compressor. And out of our Dynamics category, I'm going to put it on the thing that is going to do the ducking. Ok, so the thing that's going to stay out of the way of the other thing. Okay? So the compressor is going to look at the signal for the kick. And it's going to say when their signal lower volume. Okay, so here's my compressor. I'm going to click this little arrow up here. And that's going to get into my side chain controls. So I'm going to turn on side chains. Side chain. And then it's saying, what do you want me to listen for? Okay, so I'm gonna go down here and the track I'm looking for is 12 E KYC to, okay, so I'm gonna say audio from 12 E KYC to k. And I can choose Poster factor prefect. Not going to worry about that for now. Okay, now, just out of the box, Let's hear it. So I'm going to solo these two tracks or just going to hear this kick and a synth. So here's my check coming in is my synth time. Now it's important to remember that what I'm hearing our kid through this channel. And if I solo, just the sin the KYC isn't coming through here. We're only monitoring the kick here or compressor, the cake, but it's not playing the kit for this chapter. There's no audio console, but I want to hear that. So I'm going to solo the kick channels that I get. So now I'm going to lower my threshold. This GR is gain reduction. That's how much the synth is ducking to stay out of the way. Okay? So if I want that really kinda cool scooped, I'm going to pull my threshold array. Okay, Now you can really hear it read. Every time the kick hits, the sensor, goes away, it goes down and then switch back up. Now, I can control the speed at which it gets out of the way and the speed at which it goes back up, the speed at which it gets out of the way is here. And this attack. And the speed at which it goes back up is this release parameter k. I can control how aggressive it is through this ratio. I'll talk more about these factors at once. We talk about how compressors work. But that's basically yet I now have a very aggressive side. And one thing that's kinda cool about this is that you can even mute the kick. So I don't need to hear that kick to use it to create that effect in my set. Right? So now my kick is muted, but the compressor and start monitoring it to get the side chain of myosin in contexts of our whole track. So I kinda like it. Maybe I'll leave it in. Okay. So there you go. That side chaining.
38. Routing & Bussing: Alright, let's talk about routing and busing. And this is something we do that affects our signal flow, right? We're gonna kinda mess around with our signal flow a little bit. The main reason to do this is for effects. So let me take another delay effect. Let's do something kind of extreme. Let's use this hybrid reverb. Sure. I'm going to put it on this track. So I have a big delay on this track is my arpeggiator. I actually don't want a reverb. I want like a weird delay. So let's do this instead. So I'm going to use it relates to delay. So here's what's happening. I've put this delay on this effect. And I have some control over the dry and the wet in the effect. So the dry means and how much of the signal we hear without the effect. And then the wet is how much of the signal we here with the effect. So right now it's set to about 50 percent, set it to exactly 50 percent. And it's I like this. Okay. If we go all the way dry, we don't hear any of your facts. We go all the way wet. We're here, nothing but the effect. Okay? So with certain effects, especially things like delay, we like to have a little bit more control and we can get a little bit crisper sound, a little bit better sound out of it if we don't put the effect on the track, but instead we use a bus. So here's how you would do that. So our buses are these down here. So I already have one setup that has a delay on it, but I'm going to get rid of it. So this b return, Let's rename that and let's call that delay. Okay? Now I'm going to take my delay and I'm actually going to put it on there. I'm just going to drag it from that track right onto that delay track. Okay? Now it's on delight. You can't drag effects between tracks by the way. Okay, so now it's not on this track similar, but it's on this bus. Now what I have to do is send some of this signal to that bus. And I do that with these, okay? These are going to always be in order. So this is going to be a, which is this one called reverb. And this is going to be the one called delay. So I'm going to send a bunch of our signal to that delay. Now you'll see it showing up here. Okay? Next, I'm going to be sure that my dry wet amount is set to all the way wet on this delay because on this bus, I want to hear nothing but the delay. Okay? What that does is that gives me a volume control for the delay, right? This volume is only controlling the delay, right? And it separates the two signals between the original and the delay. This is a, generally speaking, a better way to deal with things like delay and reverb is to use a bus for them. Another advantage of this, by the way, is that if I want to use this same reverb on multiple things, I can send multiple things to that reverb, right? Let's say I wanted to put, I don't know, these drums through that reverb. I can just go there and say send some of them, a lot of them in this case to that reverb. Okay, Let's hear those drums also through our reverb. So I don't have to worry about making sure I have a delay effect on the drums and the synth. And they're set to the same delay amount so that things just don't turn into mud. In this way. I just have to set the delay amount once and then I can send as much stuff as I want to it. So my delays are always perfect, LY in sync. So there's a lot of advantages to doing it this way. You can put whatever affects you want on returns on buses. And you can make as many buses as you want. Just go anywhere around here and control-click and say Insert, return track. Now, third one here, and a third one here. A third return. And we can dump a bunch of effects on that. And you can create a fourth, fifth, sixth, as many as you want. And it'll keep adding them. Okay. Let me get rid of that one so I don't need it. Cool. So routing and busing, there's a lot of good reasons to do that. We'll talk more about reasons why you might want to. Once we get into effects. But the biggest reason is to keep our delays and reverb nice and clean.
39. Resampling: Okay, one more trick here, and that is re-sampling. So what resampling is, is it's basically like taking parts of our track and kind of putting them into a single track. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take the parts that we want and we're going to record them as a single track. And that lets us do some fun editing things. Let me show you how it works in it'll make more sense. So let's say I want to take all of these since together and possibly do something with them. So I'm gonna go to the bottom of our list of sense. Here. I'm going to make a new audio track command T. Now I'm just going to solo these. I could also just mute my other stuff. So to solo multiple things, I'm pressing Command while I click S. Okay, so those are the things I want to hear. Now for input on this audio track, I'm going to go to re-sampling. That's going to take my master output and just record this section. Okay, so I'm going to arm this to record. And I'm going to hit Record here. Okay, cool. So now if I solo this, I have all of those sense in one. Right? Now, what I could do is I could use that to perhaps do a little weird with it. Let's take something like this beat repeat effect and throw it on there. Okay. So here's a weird beat repeat effect being applied to the whole time. So that completely destroys it, right? But check this out. Let's hear everything and contacts and let's mix this downward. Right? So It's kinda cool effect. You can do a lot with this resampling technique. It can be really fun.
40. What Next?: All right. That gets us to the end of part 3 of live IL-17, producing an editing. Up. Next, we're going to do Part 4 and we're going to focus on, since samplers sound design, that is going to be how to use all of our instruments in live 11. So we're going to talk about principles of sound design just in general. How to work with oscillators, filters, envelopes, and other elements of a synthesizer. And we're going to apply those to the sense that we have. We're going to build some of Ireland sounds from scratch and really learn how to use the Ableton Live 11 instruments. So I hope you'll join us for that. It's going to be really fun. I'm excited to start filming it immediately after hitting Stop on the next few lectures. But stick around because I have two more things for you left in this video, in this class.
41. 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.