Ultimate Ableton Live 11, Part 4: Synthesis and Sound Design

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to Ableton Live 11. In this class we're going to cover all aspects of Ableton Live, from just learning the program to recording, to producing, two deejaying, mixing, mastering. Everything is going to be included in this huge multi-part class. All right, Part 4. In part 4, we're going to focus on, since samplers and sound design, we're going to look at all of the instruments that come with live, every single one of them, and all the samplers that come with live. I'll tell you how to design your own sounds using those synthesisers and those samplers. We'll look at some of the built-in presets that comes in with slides. And then we'll build some of our own from scratch. So if you're ready to make some noise, because this is where we really start making our own sounds and creating our own voice. So what actually is ableton Certified Trainer, people who have that credential, I have gone through a fairly rigorous process with the able to accompany to prove that not only you're an expert at the program, but also you know how to teach it. So the actual process of getting the Certified Trainer stamp of approval is a two-part process. One, you have to prove that you're a super ninja and the program and to have to be really skilled teacher or else they're not going to give it to you. And you see somebody that says there 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 exams that included a lot of teaching demos. And in addition to that, I've been out to their international conference in Berlin to present on Ableton topics to the entire international live community. So it wasn't easy to get. I'm pretty proud of it and I'm hoping to bring the benefit of it to you up. 2. Workflow: Working with Live’s Instruments: All right, part four. Here we go, working with lives, instruments. So first things first, let's talk about the difference between instruments and plugins. What live calls instruments. This is live terminology. Stuff is the stuff that's built into live. So if I go to the instruments tab here, these are our synthesisers and our samplers. Okay, those are primarily what we're going to be working with in this class. Now if you want a broad definition of what these things do, they make sound? These are things in life that makes sound on their own. These are really the only things in life that makes sound on their own. Everything else is effects or already made sound like samples, things like that. These are our synthesisers, are samplers, anything that makes sound on its own. Now, you might be thinking, well, what about something like serum? That's a popular plugin right now. Serum is a synthesizer. It makes sound, you play it, you give it midi notes and it makes sounds. It's true. So that is not going to be an instruments because that's not made by Ableton. Everything in our instruments tab is just the stuff that comes with Ableton Live, Sweet. Okay, your list might be smaller than this if you're not on live, sweet. If you're on a different version of live, your list is going to be smaller. But back to serum. So serum is going to live in plugins. Plugins are all our effects and instruments, synthesisers, things like that, that are not made by Ableton. So if I just type serum here, I opened up my VST. There is serum. Serum is an instrument the way that live defines it. It's an, it's a synthesizer, but it's not made by able to. So it's a very separate thing, right? But it does really kind of work in a very similar way as some of the live instruments in particular. Wave table is kind of lives answered serum more on that later. So the big difference between the synthesisers that live has and the synthesisers that you might install as a plug-in are just who made it, right? If able to animate it, It's going to be here and instruments. If anybody else made it, it's going to be in plugins. Cool. Okay, So we're primarily going to focus on the instruments stuff here in this class. 3. Quick MIDI Refresher: Okay, super quick little mini refresher. Just because this question comes up more than anything else in the world when I'm teaching able to. So we have a midi clip. Midea is just instructions. That's all it is. This Miniclip says, play the note a2 for this long and at this volume. Okay, that's all midi says. It doesn't say what sound to play, what the timbre of that sound is. Talk more about that word in a minute. What the filter settings are, what? How many oscillators to use? Talk more about that in a minute too. Doesn't say anything about what it actually sounds like. It only says what note to play, how long and how loud. So that's what's in our midi clip. So if I have a midi clip and I tell it to play a midi clip, live is going to play nothing. It's not gonna make any sound that's going to play the midi clip, but it's just going to say play this note, play that note, play that note. We have to assign it, an instrument, a synthesizer, something that makes sound in order for it to make any sound with that clip, right? Because the clip, the midi clip, It's just instructions telling the synthesizer what notes to play. Okay, so let me just demonstrate that really quick. Let me make a new midi track. There's new midi track. I'm going to drag, I'm going to copy this Miniclip. So I press Command C, going to put right here command V, to paste it in. Now I have a midi clip. This track, let's solo this, so we only hear this track. Let's put our cursor right there, and let's press Play. We hear nothing, right? Because there is no instrument here. If I look down here, I see my midi clip. If I go over to this tab right here, I would see my instrument. And we can see it says Drop an instrument here or a sample here. These are my instruments. So if I take an instrument and I drag an instrument right there, Now we will hear it go. So we heard this out. So the most important thing to remember about working with synthesisers is that if you have a clip, a Miniclip makes no sound on its own. You have to assign it an instrument to make sound width. Now what we're going to be doing going forward is really diving into what all of these dials mean for all of our instruments. So we can really kind of get in the weeds and program this sound to sound exactly how we want and do some good sound design. But before we do that, let's talk real quick about our midi clip and what goes into this window and some quick editing tricks that we can do to kind of speed up our workflow. 4. MIDI Clips: Okay, let's look at a midi clip. And I'm going to make our piano grid here a little bit bigger so that we can work within this a little bit. So I just want to show you some tricks to navigate this thing. So first, delete all our notes. Now I haven't instrument this clip, right? I just put one on there. So we will hear sound. When I double-click anywhere to make a note, right? If you don't hear sound, make sure you've got this little headphone icon here, clicked. This is your preview button. If it's off, you're not going to hear it while you're working. But if you turn it on, you will hear what you're doing while you're working. So I leave that on always. Okay. So I want to show you just a few things here. So when you're working with midi notes, here are some handy key commands. Now if you've watched my other videos, you know that I'm not crazy about memorizing hundreds of key commands. But as I am, you know, programming harmonies and melodies and stuff. These are things that I use all day long. And they can save you a lot of time. You can just click and drag to move notes around. You can click right side of a note to make it longer. And click on the left side of the note to move the start of it forward. All of that stuff works just fine. You can command C to copy, command V to copy paste. All of that stuff works just fine. You can Option click and drag to duplicate nodes. If I hold down option while I'm clicking and dragging. But you can also do some magical key things. First is hold down Shift and then try your left and right arrow keys. Shift right is going to make your note longer. Right? Shift left is going to make your note shorter. And it's always going to stick to the grid that you're looking at. Okay, So we are looking at quarter notes here, can tell because of that. So I'm moving it by quarter notes. If I wanted something finer, I would just zoom in more. Now I can move by 16th notes. That note hold down shift and arrow keys. Shift up and down, are going to move me by an octave. So I'm on S3 now. That's the node I'm on. If I do Shift Up, Now I'm an S4, you shift up again. And I might see five for you shift down. That's C4 back to S3. So that is probably the one key command that I used more than anything. I might make something and then listen to it and say that how would sound better in octave up, select everything, shifts up. Now or an octave up. It's great, It's great. Tool. Command in arrow keys is going to know urge your clip off the grid. So command, and then right and left is going to move my note, but not on the grid. So very fine adjustments there. And then just the arrow keys without any modifier key, up and down are going to move your note. And left and right are gonna move, you know, by the grid. And I'm going to give you a list of these key commands in just a second, but I want to show you one more thing. It's a new thing and live 11 and that is, and to show just the scale. So let's go to a new video for that. 5. Fold To Scale: Okay, when new thing in live 11, That's super, super handy. This is something that we saw on the push to the hardware device that live makes with the push two has the ability to do is dial in a certain scale or key and highlight all the nodes in that key. So that while you're playing, you don't have to think about what notes are going to work and what nodes aren't going to work. So that is now built into live 11. I can turn it on by going to the scale over here. So I click that. Now I set my scale c major or whatever. So let's say I want to play in C phrygian. Okay, that's one of the modes. It's pretty cool sounding. So now you can see all the yellow notes are in key. Okay? If it's not yellow, it's not in key. I can note they're just fine. But the kinda yellow shading is telling me that. This is telling me what nodes are in the scale of C phrygian. Okay, So if I just want to run up to scale, there it is. There's my scale. Meet C Phrygian scale. Now, there's another thing you can do here. You can fold the notes or fold to scale. Now folding of the notes is not new. What folding means in this case is it means hide all the notes I'm not using. Okay? So if I say so, let me do one thing here. Let me put some notes. Okay, so now I've got some notes that are in C phrygian on the yellow spots and some notes that aren't right like this, D, E, and F sharp. Okay? So now I'm going to say fold, that's going to hide all the notes are not using and just show me the notes I am using. And you can see that It's got these two notes that are in the key. These ones are not in the key and these ones are in the key. This is most useful for drums, right? Because with drums, what you might see if I turn fold off is this huge amount of possible notes, but you might only have a kick snare and a high hat in your sampler, right? So you don't need to see every note in the world, you just need to see those three. So that's where it's most useful. But this full scale thing, super cool. Okay, so let me get rid of most of my notes. I could leave them on there. It doesn't really matter if I press the scale button, but that's going to say is full to the scale, which means hide all the notes, not in this key. Which is basically going to show all my yellow nodes and none of by kind of gray notes, gray spots here. Okay, So now if I wanted to, I could just start building stuff in the sea and not worry about anything because every note is in. Go. Let's hear that. Neat. It's all in the key. So this is really cool if you don't know music theory all that well and you just want it, he just know like I want something in C minor or I want something in a minor key, set this to minor, and then rock out, and we'll see you when I change it to minor. Something weird happened. What happened was it converted my fold to scale to C minor. So it hit all the notes not in C minor. Now I already had some C sharp, and C sharp is not in C minor. So it kept that one because there was no time it right. So it's cool. If I want to get any notes that are not in the key, I just have to undo full to scale. Okay, and now it shows me all my notes in the key. I'm back there. So really cool feature just for helping you organize your thoughts. Put things down, doesn't really change the way anything sounds. It's just helpful if you're trying to stay within a key or a scale. 6. Sound Design Basics: Okay, so let's talk about some sound design basics. Okay? So when we're working with a synthesizer and we're trying to create a sound that we'd like. There are really three ways that we can craft a sound. Now there's a lot more than three if I'm thinking big categories here, okay? Like within each of these categories, There's a lot of things we can do, but the three main things we can do to a sound is we can ingest the timber. Hold onto that for a minute. The shape and the motion of the sound. Okay, so let's go through those 3. First, the timbre. Timbre is word that we've been using in music for centuries. It literally means color. And when we talk about timbre, we're talking about the color of the sound. So here's a good way to think about what timber is. Imagine a flute playing a note. Just imagine that in your head, a flute. Now imagine a bagpipe playing that exact same pitch. Okay? Those two sounds are very different, right there playing the exact same note. But there are very different in quality, right? The flute is going to be maybe smoother, silk easier. But the bagpipe is going to be brighter, more abrasive. Maybe buzzy here, these are all words that are describing the timbre of the sound. Okay? Things sound different regardless of what note they're playing. You can have a whole orchestra play middle C, right? And it's going to be a conglomeration of a lot of different sounds. And that's because of the timbre of each instrument. So when we're talking about the timbre of a synthesizer, we're talking about coloring the sound, making it brighter or darker. Buzzy here, we use all these words like that. So that's the timber. The second thing is the shape. The shape has to do with how it, how the note begins, and how it ends, and what it's doing. Well, it's sustaining. Okay, so you might have something like well, let's look at the sound that we have pulled up here. Let me just make one longish note. Okay. Here's a note. Let's just hear that note. Okay? So this note has a pretty boxy shape. It starts pretty much right on, like when the, when the midi note says play, it goes boom and it's on, right? And while it's sustaining, it's pretty flat. It's just on and going. When we get to the end of the note, it stops. Go. Nothing fancy. Now what if I go into the synthesizer and don't worry about what I'm doing here. We're going to go over the details of this very soon. But what if I go in here and did something like this and this and this. Okay. Now let's go back to that same note. I just changed the shape of it. Okay. So let's hear that note now. Okay. What did we hear when the notes started? It ramped up and then it came back down really suddenly. And then it stayed at a pretty low level for most of it. And then we got to the end of the note. It didn't just stop. It very slowly faded out over a long time. It would be more of a sound we would use for like a pad. That's the boots I started with. So that's the shape of the sound. And the third thing is the motion in the sound. This particular sound, while it's sustaining, is just flat. Not much motion in there. But what if it went what if it had some wobble to it, right? Or like a pulse in it, or it went up and down in pitch and it was moving around or there was like a filter opening. There can be a lot of motion inside of a sound. That's third thing. So those are the three things that we're really focusing on when we're doing sound design. And each of those things have their own tool to achieve depending on what type of synthesis we're doing. Right? So let's talk next about the different types of synthesis. 7. Synthesis Types: Okay, different types of synthesis. You can think of a synthesizer as a big math equation. Okay? So the result of the equation is generating sound. How the equation works is the type of synthesis, okay? So there's a number of different types and number of different ways to get the solution. That is the sound, right? And depending on what type of equation you do, you will get different kinds of sounds. Now, don't worry, you don't have to do any math here. The software does all the math for you. You just get to twiddle knobs. But underneath all of that is basically complicated math doing different things. So there's a few different types of synthesis and we have a good representation of several types built into live the most common types. In fact, almost all of them I think. So we have something like analog, which looks like this. This is what we would call a subtractive synthesizer. That means that it generates sound, a complicated sound. And then we use some things to chip away at that sound to leave us what we want, right? So we make a complicated sound and then we pull layers away. We subtract them. And that results in the sound that we want. Another type that we have a lot of in Live is a physical model. Physical model is like trying to emulate something in the physical world, like like a xylophone, right? So on a xylophone we hit Littlewood bars with a hard malate. That's how, that's how a xylophone works. So we have basically that whole instrument wrapped up into this giant equation and that lets us control different elements of it. Physical models are going to get you fairly realistic sounding sounds are going to sound like real instruments in the real-world. Unless you do weird things with physical models, then you can make very unreal sounding sounds, which is where they get really fun. Another one is fm. If we look at our operator synthesizer, this is this inside, there actually can be a few different types of synthesis depending on how we set it up and how we use it. But the most common use of it to me is as an FM synthesizer. Fm is where you have something that makes sound, something else that makes sound, and you use that other thing to mess with the first thing. And you might have a third thing and you use that to mess with the second thing, which is messing with the third thing, it gets kinda weird. But FM synthesis is a sound that will be really familiar to you once we start working with it. It's been very popular, basically, built the 80s and, and is still cool. My opinion. The last kind of big kind of synthesizer that we have here is the new one, and that's wavetable. This isn't new. And live 11, it was new in Live 10. Wavetable synthesis is a bit more complicated and it's where you get those really gritty sounds like if you want that kind of gnarly dubstep sound, that's like wave table stuff. Serum, which is very popular plugin right now, is a wavetable synthesiser. So we'll go over how wave table. So this is works and how to make those big gnarly sounds with it later. It's capable of a lot more than that. And then we have samplers. We have a few built into live, and they are synthesisers, strictly speaking, they have a sound generating component. And then the other components that we need, they're just kind of a different kind of synthesis. So samplers take an audio sample to generate sound, but then we have a lot of controls over that sound once it's in there so we can still do things like we were just talking about shaping the timber, the shape, and the motion of the sound. So samplers are a different type of synthesis kinda. So those are the different types of synthesisers we'll be working with. Those are the ones built into live. We'll be going through each one shortly. 8. Synthesis Elements: Okay, So if we go back to this idea of timbre, shape, and motion, and we actually look at a synthesizer. There is kind of a tool in just about all synthesizer to do those three things. One tool for each thing. So we're speaking broadly here about almost all synthesizers, and they almost all work this way. Okay? Now, all of them are unique. So there are extra little things in each one of them that make them unique. But if you look at any synthesizer that you've never touched before, and you remember this general rule of thumb, you'll be able to make some sound with it pretty fast. Okay, so here is the general rule of thumb. Every synthesizer is made of three things and kind of a fourth. The three things are oscillators, filters, an amplifier, and the kinda fourth is envelopes. Okay, so let's look at our analog synthesizer here in live. Let's simplify it and just look at this top bit right in it, right here. Okay? The bottom part is the same thing again. Okay. There's some other stuff in here, but let's not worry about that for now. So if we just look at this top part, what we have here in this first rectangle is says OSC one, that's oscillator 1. Okay, so that's our oscillator. The oscillator of a synthesizer is the thing that makes sound. It's actually the only thing that makes sound in most cases. So the oscillator is usually in simple synthesis. It's just a, a circuit in old analogue synthesisers, that oscillator just went back and forth and that made a waveform 11, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah. But it did that really, really fast. And that makes a pitch, okay? So oscillators can be a certain shape and that changes the pitch or that changes the timbre. They can be in tune or out of tune. And the shapes that they are can get more and more complicated. In this one, we just have four shapes that it can do. But in something like a sampler, the oscillator is the thing that makes sounds. So in a sampler, that's the thing that's playing the sample, right? Everything else in a sampler is pretty much the same as what I'm about to say. So the oscillator in any synthesizer is the thing that makes them. And there's some adjustments you can do with that. A lot of adjustments you can do with that. Okay, the second thing is the filter. Filter is here. It says fill one Filter1. So the filter is what shapes the timbre of the sound even more. So in this kind of a synthesizer, what we have is a filter that's going to pull away sound. It's going to filter some frequencies out. So this is subtractive synthesis that we're looking at here. So this is going to generate a very rich waveforms, something with a lot of fuzziness to it. And then this is going to, we're going to say, okay, go to 1.6 K and start pulling some frequencies out around there or something like that. So the filter is going to chip away at our sound a little bit. All synthesizers have a filter in them and they are very important role. Okay, the third thing is the amplifier. The amplifier is going to give our sound shape. Okay, with the amplifier, we can say not only is the sound louder quiet, but how does it get loud, and how does it get quiet? What is the shape of it, right? So that really kind of figures out the shape element. The timber element is really decided, is really built in these two things. It's the oscillator and the filter that determines the timbre of the sound, the envelope, or sorry, the amplifier determines the shape of the sound. And then every synthesizer then has a bunch of extra things that do some different kinds of modulation to the sound. And LFO is probably one of the most common. Not all synthesizers have an LFO, but I would venture to say 99% of them do. And an LFO, which we'll talk about how that works later. That's going to change the motion of our sound. So I will put this in kind of a category of not one of the main three things, but something that we just call modulators that affects the motion of the sound. Okay, so I haven't talked about our fourth thing yet, envelopes, right? So let me review from jumping around a little bit here. So oscillators and filters, those are responsible for the timbre of the sound amplifier, that's responsible for the motion of the sound. Lfos and other modulation. Things that are unique to each synthesizer is responsible for the motion of the sound. Amplifiers, responsible for the shape of the sound. If I said that wrong. Now the kind of third thing I said is an envelope. Envelopes are just kinda all over the place. And synthesisers. If I click on AMP, this is an envelope. It lets us change a parameter kinda over time. So this, in this case, is adjusting the way that the amplifier opens and closes. That's going to change the shape of the sound. If I click on filter, this is an envelope. And it's going to change the way the filter opens and closes over time, right? So envelopes are a concept that you'll see all over synthesisers. We'll spend some time on how they work later. Most important thing for you to remember though, is that any synthesizer, if you want to make sound, first, find the oscillators, dial and something that you like. Second, find the filters. Set those how you want. Third, find the envelope. Or finally amplifier. Dial that in how you want, then you're making music. If you wanna get fancier, find envelopes for each of those parameters and start playing around. 9. Live’s Analog Synth: All right, so let's get started applying those concepts we just learned. And let's look at first lives analog sin. Now we're going to look at all of the Ableton instruments, but we're going to start with analog case. So if we go here to instruments and analog, so I just put the plane default patch onto, onto an empty midi track. And I threw in a little drum loop here just to give us something fun to play with, to play against. Now what I wanna do is I want to just kinda go through the elements that we just learned in the analog synthesizer. And then we'll take a step back and talk broadly about all of the live instruments. But I want us to see how those things we just talked about plant. So the analogue synth is a subtractive synth. And a subtractive synth is a great place to start with synthesis because it's fairly simple. Still. All sins are fairly complex, but subtractive synthesis is a fairly simple concept. The idea is, you use your oscillators to make a very rich sound. And what that generally means is a buzzy sound like this is the default patch, right? There's a lot of buzz and things there. Then we're going to take filters and we're going to kind of carve some of that sound. Right now we have a little bit simpler sound. And that's gonna get us the tone that we want. Then we're going to use our amplifier to shape that sound. Maybe we'll use an LFO on that sound as well. So without further ado, let's go into the analogue synth and let's put something together by walking through those elements that I just talked about. So here we go. 10. Basic Outline: Okay, so let's zoom in on this sucker. So what we have in analog is two oscillators and then a noise generator. So we have three sound generating things, three oscillators. And they are right here. So you'll notice as I pointed out before, in analog, we have oscillator filter amplifier twice oscillator filter amplifier. But let's just focus on the oscillators for a second here. So we have oscillator 1 and oscillator 2. We can turn them off by just clicking this OSC. Okay, so now we have no oscillators on, which means we're going to hear nothing. Okay, So I can turn one oscillator on and we're getting here. That's how let me turn this filter off just so that we hear in the back we have is. Now noise is a sound generating thing that we'll see in a lot of synthesisers. Sometimes it's great to put in noise. It can really be shaped to give you a real percussive attack. We see noise when we're programming drum sounds like if you wanted to make a synthesized snare hit, might be a lot of noise, right? So you're here and you're like, Wow, that's really noisy. Sounds like I'm layering noise over it. Well, we are, but what if we did this? See now we have a nice percussive attack to it, but let's not do that right now. So let's leave noise off and just one oscillator case. So we always want to look at the signal flow when we're looking at a any synthesizer. Okay? So the signal flow here is fairly simple, but it can be diverted in interesting ways. So oscillator 1, this is going to tell us where oscillator 1 is going. In general, things are gonna go from left to right. Oscillator 1 is going to go to Filter 1, which is going to go to AMP 1, okay? And oscillator 2 is going to go to Filter 2, which is going to go to AMP to hover. We can kind of mix things around. See oscillator 1, Where's it going to go? Filter 1 or Filter 2 can say all filter one can drag this down. All filter to, or I can say, we know, goes 60% to filter one and 40 percent of filter 2. So that's going to send this signal 60% of it to 50 filter one, and 40 percent of it to filter 2. Okay? So you can play around with the routing here, okay, I can say all of it to filter 2 if I want. So let's send it all to filter 1. So now it's going here. Okay, so we turn on Filter 1. We can set our type of filter, which we'll talk more about shortly. And then we can say, where does this filter go? Right now it's going a 100 percent to filter 2. So I'm going to apply to filters to it. Okay, so let's turn on filter two and set something there. Do that kind of thing, give it a lot of resonance. Talk more about that later. And then AMP 2. Okay, so now we're going from here to here, to here, to here. Okay, so our level is here. Okay, so here's a little laser gun. That's this resonance right here. Resonance gives you that kind of laser gun sound. We'll talk more about how that works later. Okay, so now we're going to M2. Now I believe what's happening here in analog is that filter one always goes to AMP 1. So filter one is going to AMP 1, but it's also being duplicated here and sent to filter 2. So we have, we're duplicating our signal. So both amp one and amp two are getting the signal. Okay? Then from AMP 1 and 2, it goes to the LFO section, which is currently off. So it's passing right through there and then going to our master volume. Right? So the signal flow is in general from left to right oscillator filter amplifier to the output. But we can mix it around a little bit and play with it through this kind of simple routing in here. 11. Programming Analog: Okay, so let's just make a nice simple sound with analog. So if any of the terms I'm using here are unclear, you might want to check out some lessons on sound design. I have a whole big class on sound design if you want to check that out as well, that'll go into a lot more detail on all of these things. For now, for this class, we're kinda cruising over the details of the conceptual stuff in sound design and focusing on how to use these tools. But we will go into it a little bit. Okay, so let's start with our oscillator. So I've turned everything off except for oscillator 1. Now I've done this to kind of illustrate a little problem we have when you're designing a sound. I'm not going to hear anything while I'm doing this. So I need to at least turn on this amp so that I hear it. Okay, Let's do a nice low sound. Okay, There's my sound. Now one thing I'm gonna do here is I'm going to make a little midi clip. Let's make something nice and dark. Okay, so here's some notes. Let's do this. This is just kind of a little like massive attack riff. Okay, Now let's do, let's add all the 16th notes. And let's pull that one down and go it there. Now, let's do that. Changed my mind. Let's go back to this, but let's stretch all of these out to be a little bit longer cap. So now we have this. Now I want to go for a bass sound. So let's select all shift down arrow, drop that down an octave. One more octave, shift down. Go. Okay, now let's solo it. So we're just hearing that. Okay, so I'm gonna stop it for a second. Let's go into our oscillator. Okay, so oscillator 1, we can send everything to filter one. I don't need to detune this at all. Okay, that's cool. Pretty happy with that. And adjust the volume of this oscillator, the shape, I could make it a square that's going to make it even fuzzier. Let's leave it on a square. I rather like that. Okay, Now let's turn on Filter 1. Okay? So let's turn our resonance all the way down just for a second. Now if we open our filter where it says frequency, we're going to open it all the way up. That means we're not filtering out any sound. Now what we're gonna do, because we're in a low-pass mode. That's what that LP stands for. That means low stuff is going to filter through and we're going to start. Pulling away hi stuff. They were going to let low stuff passed. And as we turn up this frequency, high stuff is going to start filtering out. It's basically going to be that they were, this is high step. So let's filter out some of the highest step. Buzzy stuff, It's hot stuff. It's pretty good. Now a resonance is going to put a little spike, right where we're pulling frequencies out. In other words, it's going to emphasize our highest frequency. That isn't pulled up. Generally makes that kind of laser gun sound cool. Okay, Now let's go to our amplifier. You can turn the sound up. Didn't just some panning if we want, move it left or right, Let's cell and leave it right where it is. Now also on our amplifier here we can adjust the envelope. And this is the envelope. If I click on amplifier, I see the envelope. This is an amplitude envelope, meaning this is the shape of the volume of the sound. So it's going to start right away. And then it's gonna go down to this level. If I wants us to be more percussive, pull this back and to the left. I want a little bit of sound. There we go. That's pretty good. Cool. Now if I want to make this even like kinda beefier, let's turn on our second oscillator. Okay, let's also use a square wave. And let's detune this one just a little bit. To look at that. We had that like weird phase happening. Can take this one down an octave. Who crumbly? Now? That might be too much. Then I'm kinda good. This one is going all to filter one, but let's send it all the filter 2. Okay, Let's open this all the way up. Now, filter 2 is going to AMP 2, which is off, which is why we stopped hearing it. And that's a little bit I really wanted to pull out all of this. This give us a really smooth low end here. Yeah, That's rough. Day. We panning the way it is, we could change and below. Okay, Pretty cool. All right, so now we have a pretty basic instrument. Let's hear this against this drum loop I've put in here. Go. Okay, so now I'm pretty happy with the sound. Let's take a look at the LFO and what that's gonna do for us next. 12. LFO: Okay, LFO stands for low frequency oscillator. What it is, is it's another oscillator, right? Remember oscillators just go back and forth. These oscillators go back and forth in such a fast way that they generate a frequency. Low frequency oscillators, go back and forth very slow, too slow to make a frequency. But still there are a thing that's just going back and forth like this. That's literally all they do. They just go back and forth, right? They oscillate back and forth and back and forth. Now, they become useful when we apply that back and forth motion to other parameters. So first, we need to turn on our back and forth motion. So let's turn on LFO 1. Now we can set the speed of that back and forth either by Hertz. So 0.9 hertz, that's way too low for you to hear. Okay? We can hear down to about 20 hertz. This is less than one hertz. Okay. So you're not going to hear that or we could just set it to division of the beat. So quarter note, half note, something like that. Let's go with hertz just to keep it. Well, now let's go to a division of the beat. That's generally easier. So let's go to a quarter note. So in case you're wondering, like the T means triplet. So one-quarter triplet and D means dotted quarter note. So dotted eighth note here. So let's just go to a good old-fashioned quarter note. Okay, so I have two LFOs here. So LFO 1 is at a quarter note. I'm not going to use my LFO 2, although I could. So LFO one's at a quarter note. Now it's not gonna sound any different. Sounds the same because I haven't told that LFO to do anything yet. I've just turned it on. So now there's this LFO moving at a quarter note over here and it's just hanging out. Okay? What I need to do is go into some other parameter and say latch to this parameter onto that LFO. So let's go to our amplifier. Okay, let's say are the level of our amplifier. Let's attach that to LFO 1. Okay, so right here it's saying 0. Let's take that all the way up to one. Okay? Now, one is a 100 percent. So now it's saying the volume here is going to be a 100 percent modulated by that LFO. It's kinda cool groove. You would hear this more obviously on a sustained note. So let's do this. Let's make another Note that's not loop it. Let's just make a long sustained note to demonstrate this. And we're going to have to area okay. I'm going to turn our envelope up just a little bit so that we have more sustain. Okay, so with the LFO off, we now have this. Okay? Now, LFO is modulating the volume in the amplifier right here. So now we hear this. I don't have to do it so extreme, if I take this down to about 50 percent, so 0.5, I can just type that in by the way. Now, it's going to be like instead of our volume going like this with the LFO, it's gonna go like this with the LFO, right? It's only going to go about halfway down and halfway up. I could change the speed of my LFO. Make it faster to an eighth note, right? I can change the shape of the LFO. Because remember the LFO is just a oscillator like any other ones. So right now it's a sine wave. If I change it to a rectangle wave, it's going to be basically on and off and on and off. Typically we leave LFO's on a sine wave, but you can do them however you want. Now I can apply the LFO, other places as well. If I just go to my amplifier, I could also apply it to panning. Okay, so now the panning is going to move back and forth and slow this back down to a quarter note. Cool, so now you can hear it moving left and right. And depending on how you're watching this video, you may or may not be experiencing the panning correctly. I can go to my filter and I can say the frequency is being controlled by the LFO and this one goes all the way up to four. I'm not really sure why that is. Now that frequency, this knob is being opened and closed by the LFO. Now it's important that in all instruments, I believe with the exception of wavetable, you're not going to see this parameter moving up and down by the LFO. It just doesn't update that way. But that is what's happening is this is moving up and down with the LFO. We can turn the resonance up and down by the LFO. That's gonna make that laser gun effect. So let's take this down to 0 and just do the resonance c. Now you're starting to get that raunchy kind of dubstep bass. If that is the sound you want, this isn't the best way to get it, but kind of in the ballpark of getting it. We'll talk more about that later. We can even go to our oscillator and we can control the pitch with LFO. We can control the pulse width of a square wave with LFO. And those are our options. Let's control the pitch with LFO. That's muddy, but we can do it. So that's what an LFO does. It goes back and forth, and then we just assign different parameters to latch on to that back and forth motion. 13. Saving and Loading Patches: Okay, so let me get us back to something less goofy. I'm going to turn that LFO off. And let's get back to this riff. I think I wanted a little more of that loan. So I think we screwed up our filter here and little bit area. Okay, now I gotta how I like it. Now, throughout the next several parts of this class, I'm going to, we're going to be programming different sense. And then I want to give you those patches so that you can start playing around with them. So a word about saving and loading presets. If you click on this little triangle here, you have tons and tons and tons and tons of presets for every individual instrument. However, you can save your own patches. If you make something really cool, it will save with your session. So if I save and close this session and reopen it, this since it's going to pop right back up. But if I really like this synth that I made, this sound, I could save it and add it to my library of sounds. Here's how I would do that. So I click this little disk icon right here. And now under instrument presets, so user library presets instruments. It has called it analog ADV, k dot ADV is able to devise. I don't want to call it analog that EDV. I want to call it massive bass synth. Give it a colorful and unique name. Cool. So now it's there. So now I can always grab it from there. And if I go into Instruments, analog, it shows up here. These are things that I've made. They're not sorted in these, in the presets. So it just shows up as an analog patch. Okay, so I can drag that on an empty spot and it's going to load up that specific sound. Cool. So I'm going to give you this file. This is a teeny tiny little file. You can download it. What you're gonna do is just drag it into live and load it once. And then it should stay in your presets just like this. You might have to, once you have it loaded here, you might have to save it like that again by hitting that little save icon. Don't wanna do that. And then Control click and delete. So I don't need it twice. You may have to hit the Save icon in order to save that file if you want to. But you should just be able to download it, drag it into your session, loaded up once, and then it's there forever. If you don't see it in the list under Instruments, analog. Hit the Save on the file. Cool. Okay, let me give you this patch. And then we're gonna talk about all the instruments a little bit before going into the details of how to use each and every one of them. 14. All Ableton Instruments Overview: Okay, a few things in general about all the instruments. So first of all, let's look at our list of instruments here. Now reminder that if you're not using live suite, you're going to see are smaller list than this in live sweet. These are everything that we get. So there are really three kinds of instruments, right? There are instruments, your normal synthesisers. There are racks, and there are a few different racks, drum racks and instrument rack. I mentioned rax before in this, in the previous class. We're going to spend a lot of time on racks after we go through all the other instruments. So hold off on racks for a few minutes. Racks are basically instruments in a group, like multiple instruments in a group, but they have some special properties and they're kind of one of the most powerful things about Live is the instrument rack. So it's very important concept. So we're going to separate those out and talk about those separately after we get through all the other instruments. And the third kind of instrument that we have in this list is the kind of oddity. That is the external instrument. We will talk about how to use that one and what it does. You'll notice that it's a little bit different because if you open it up, There's just kinda know presets there. And that's by design. So we'll spend some time talking about that one after we get through all the other ones as well. Now there is a fourth thing going on here, and that is this drum synth 12. Notice how that folder looks a little different than the rest of the folders. That's because that is a Max for Live instrument. So let's go to a new video and talk about what Max for Live instruments are. 15. M4L Instruments: Okay, So Max for Live is its own little programming language that lives within Ableton. Now in previous versions of live, in order to get to any device made with Max for Live, you had to go to the Max for Live tab here and you had a bunch of stuff you can play with. But now in live 11, Max for Live stuff is kinda integrated all throughout browser. So you'll find audio effects that are Max for Live devices. You'll find midi effects that are Max for Live devices. You can kinda tell if you look real close, see this chord one that's not a Max for Live device, but look right below it. Envelope Midea, see little lines coming off it. The icon is slightly different. That's a Max for Live device. So an instruments, this drum synth folder. If we open it up, these are a bunch of little Max for Live devices and these are fun little things. This one is just a though cowbell. A little sound. This one, Here's another little sound. A little clap. These don't do much of anything but give you single hits. And they're cool. But these are very simple little Max for Live objects devices. We will go into the nitty-gritty of how Max for Live devices are built and the whole language. It's super fun if you want to go down that rabbit hole. That'll be like after this whole class is over, I'm going to do a separate section on how to program Max for Live devices. They're really fun. So just know that these are a couple of simple little things that are included in here. Max for Live devices are not all simple little things. Some of them are extremely complicated. But you might see when you're working with live Max for Live devices kind of filtered throughout the program. And you can always tell the icons. It's got these little things coming off of it That's kind of emulating what the, how you program it. You see these kind of blocks with things coming off of them. We'll get into that later. But the drum synth is a Max for Live, a series of small Max for Live devices that do single sound. So you might want to play with that. 16. Common Principals: Okay. I wanted to just focus in on a couple of things that all of the instruments have in common. There are not a lot because all of these devices work differently. But there are some common things that are just live, things that we've, that are kind of in the workflow that you'll find and would be interested and I think will be useful to point out. So first, all these instruments have an on-off button up here in the upper right corner and you can turn it on and off. If you turn it off, you're going to get no sound. If you turn it on, you will be working. This isn't really going to come in useful to us until we work on racks. But it's useful to note that they all have an on-off button. We've already talked about saving and loading that are coupled different ways to load a preset. You can do it just with this little, you can do it with this hotspot button here. If I just hit this hop swap. And then I go to my instruments and see I'm on an analog base. And I scroll through and hit Return. It's going to load things, whatever I want really fast. So that swapped button is a handy way to just swap out the, what you're doing with something else. However, another way to load presets that or your own saved sounds that can be really efficient is if you already have an instrument on there, you can take any preset and just drag it right on top of it. That's going to effectively just swap it out with the new sound. Okay, so now this only works if you're doing it with the same instrument, right? We have an analog instrument here. I'm dropping an analog preset onto it and scarce going to flip over to the new one. If I do it with a different instrument, it'll still work, but it's going to switch me over to the different instrument, right? So I'm going to Command Z to undo that. But you can just drag preserves right on there, and we'll just switch right over to the new thing. Handy little trick. Another thing that all parameters will do, an all synth if you adjust something and want to take it back to the preset, click on it and press Delete. That'll take you back to where you were. See this volume is set to negative one. If I change it and say, oh, I want to go back to where it was, but I forgot where it was. Just press Delete key that works on things that are bars like this. Works on any parameter. If you changed it. Just click on it once so that you see that it's in these little brackets. That means that's the last thing you've clicked down. And then press delete. That'll take it back to its default. And that's about it. The last thing I'll say that as a very general rule, your signal flows from left to right. Now, like we saw in analog, that can be disrupted and a whole bunch of ways. So it's not true once you start messing with stuff, but, but if you approach each instrument with that idea in the back of your head, that we're gonna go, we're going to have our oscillators over here in our output over here. You're generally going to find your way around fairly quick. So keep that in mind. That being said, let's dive in and look at each of our instruments and how to use them. Now I should warn you, we're not going to go into every single button and dial in every single instrument. We are going to go into every single instrument, but we're going to focus on how to make some music with those instruments rather than every single button and dial. If you want to learn every single button and dial, please check out some sound design courses, especially perhaps my sound design courses. So let's start with collision. 17. Live’s Collision Synth: Okay, So next let's look at collision. So collision is one of the three physical modeling since in live. So a physical model means that we basically have this huge algorithm and there's tons of parameters in that algorithm for things that replicate the physical world. Now, this physical model is designed to focus on malate instruments. And afterwards, you're hitting a thing with another thing, like a marimba, right? You're going to hit a piece of wood with a malate. That's what this is designed to do. So if you want to do like Marimba type sounds, xylophone type sounds, things like that. This is a good instrument for it. So our flow works a little bit different when it comes to physical models than it did with something like analog. That was a subtractive synthesizer. But the same principles in general still apply. We just have to remember that with every little piece of it, we're adjusting something that has a corollary to the physical world. For example, we have the malate. So how hard is this malate, right? Is this a mallet made of yarn or malate? Malate made of brass. Now, this interface does look quite a bit different in live 11. They haven't changed a whole lot about the instrument, but they have made the interface a little bit easier to use. So if you're on an older version, you're not gonna see this big box area here with this kind of representation of what we're hitting in it. This is a live 11 thing. It makes it a little easier to dial in the material and the location of where we're hitting it. So let's go to a new video and let's make ourselves a sound with collision. 18. Programming Collision: Okay, So I've loaded up the default patch here. So it sounds like this. Okay, so first, let's look at our malate. So we have our malate, we have volume is essentially going to be how hard we're going to hit. And stiffness. Right now we're hitting it with something metal. Now it's something soft. Let's go a little hard. Okay, it's cool. I can add noise if I wanted to, but we'll leave that off for now so that we can get to the resonator. And the resonator is the thing I'm hitting K. So that's the thing that's going to resonate to create the majority of our sound. So I can adjust what I'm hitting here. And my hitting a beam marimba, a string, membrane, plate, pipe or tube, or a pipe. And then for some things you can change the size. This one, it's not gonna let me change this side. So only one side of the pipe. And I can adjust essentially where I'm hitting it. Right? And you want to think of this as a, as an x-y grid, right? This is your area. It's not really like where on the pipe here I'm hitting. It kinda works out to be that way. But you can go all the way out. Right. So I'm going to hit it just kinda right in the middle. Now I have some controls down here. Now in this particular one, I can't control the brightness, the opening. And these are going to change depending on the shape that you're using. If I say marimba, for example, right now I have bright and harmonic and ratios are no. Let's leave it on Marimba, and I like that a little better. Although I want something a little brighter. There we go. So the enharmonic is going to be like how many extra sounds come out of this thing. If you think about like hitting a really big bell, there's like a ton of tones in that bell. Those are enharmonic tones. So if we crank this opera gonna get a bunch of weird tones mixed in, lots of weird stuff. So let's just go back to default. So it's pretty cool. I can add a second resonator on here. If I want to hit another thing, it's had another marimba really adds a lot. So I'm going to turn off my second resonator. I can add an LFO if I want. And I can route my midi in some interesting ways. So I can say, whenever you see this key Velocity thing and you'll see this in a lot of instruments. K-means what percentage of the range of keys is going to affect that parameter. In other words, if I play a low note versus when I play a high note. This is a way to kind of even things out. If you have a sound that's like really, really bright and the high end, so it sounds really loud. You can turn on key tracking so that it adjusts the volume dependent on what note you play. And velocity tracking is a similar thing. It'll adjust that parameter based on how hard you play the note. And these can go negative to flip it upside down. Okay, so key tracking and velocity tracking. And you can do it for different elements here. Okay, I'm gonna keep this pretty simple. And I could go back to this structure if I wanted to. This structure is the way the two resonators are going to work together. And this way resonator one is affecting resonator to, to. I don't know how that works with the physical world analogy. It's like what if I'm hitting a marimba key, which is then hitting another thing, maybe. Or I could switch it to this structure which is just going to play the two kind of in tandem. So now it'll be a little less intense versus like this. Right? But I'm just going to leave that off. Okay, so I have a cool little marimba note. Now I've added a little midi rhythm here. Let's just few that. Nothing fancy. Let's hear my little groove so far. Okay, Now bad, It's a start. Let's go on and O. So if you want a place to start, I will give you this patch. I'm going to save this as, let's call it marimba tin, because it's kind of a tin marimba sound. So I'll give you this patch to play with. If you want. Somebody get you started. Okay, and then let's move on to electric. 19. Live’s Electric Synth: Okay, Next we have electric. And electric isn't what you might think it is. It sounds like electric might be some cool like synth. It's actually not. It is another physical model. And it's designed to emulate an electric piano. Or you might think of it as erodes, Oregon. If you know what a Rhodes organ is, it's got that kind of sound. It's especially good at. But any kind of electric piano wallets are some organs, roads, that kind of thing. That's what it's really designed to do. So similar to collision, we have kind of a graphic of what's happening here. And again, this is a new thing on live 11. We didn't have this graphic on Live 10. So this graphic really helps us because what this thing is here, that's kind of the mechanism for an electric piano. We have is a hammer that hits a little piece of metal here called a time. And the time is kind of like the bar on a xylophone. That's the thing that resonates. But it also has a resonator that in a small metal resonator. But in an electric piano, it's this other metal piece above it and it's called a tone. So the time and the tone or the things that make up the sound, and collectively, they're called the fork. I didn't mean to give you a lesson on how electric pianos work, but there you go. And then we have a damper over here. So this is kind of a drawing of the mechanism. And as we click on the different areas, we see the right thing. Highlight. So we have the damper here. Here's the fork, and then some parameters for the time. And the tone. And then the hammer, the thing that actually hits it. So this little drawing, it looks like gobbledygook right at first, but it's actually really useful to show us how these parameters are affecting the sound. So let's make something with electric. 20. Programming Electric: Okay, So if I just play a note, this is what we have right out of the band, deform. It sounds a lot like a Rhodes, Oregon. So let's play around with it and try to make something even. So let's start with our hammer and we'll go stiffness, right? Super soft. We're going to lose a lot of volume, but really hard, we're gonna get a lot of brightness. Right? So correct there. Noise gets us a lot of kind of would sound, kind of helps the attack. And let's go to the fork. So the time in the tone, tone. Okay, we can get back kind of driven down with them. I generally like. Then the damper kind of has to do with how it's turned off. But also this is where we would select some controls for our pickup. So we can just the input output volume, but also the distance like where the pickup is sitting. This type is two different types of pickups. The R is a electrodynamic pickup in the WWE is an electrostatic model. I get a little more warmth of the electrodynamic pick up. So that's the one I usually put it on. The W is a little thinner. I don't know the mechanics, the mechanisms behind those two types of pickups, but generally leave it on art because I get a little warmer sound out of it. And that's it. So there's not a ton of things to play around with here. But simple physical model that gets you a nice warm organ sound, Rhodes organ sound and electric pianos out. 21. Electric Presets: Okay, Let's think that's I would just made an edit to this little tune we're making. I just add a little Miniclip here with a cord on it. Let's hear it by itself. Let's hear it in our little track so far. I don't want that. So I wasn't really intending on building a track with all the instruments put together, but I think I'm going to do it anyway. So I don't really have a preset to share with you because we didn't do a lot on there, but I'm going to encourage you to check out the presets that are in electric. There's a lot of different types of pianos. You know, there's not millions of presets here. Just piano and keys. And we have some organs. Some basic electric pianos. Wallets are worldly means, well, it's her. So here's some more westerlies vibes. So play around with those. 22. Live’s Impulse Synth: Okay, next let's look at impulse. Now. Impulse is for drums it, well, but you can use it for a lot of different things. It is almost a sampler, but I like to think of it as a synthesiser. So check it out. I'm going to put our basic impulse here. Okay, So what we have here is kind of 8 pads, sort of, and then a lot of different things for each. Each pad has all of these parameters are unique to each pad except for these three over here. So these pads right now are not gonna do anything. I need to put something on them. So what I'm going to want to do is throw some samples on each one of these pads. So instead of doing that, I'm gonna go to impulse and load this 800 eight. Kept. So I just loaded sounds onto this. So now I have a classic 80, a drum machine. Cool. For each sound I can control all these parameters, right? Start, position, stop, stretch, volume, pan decay. This is its own little envelope in here, this decay. Frequency resonance. There's a lot I can do with each one of these. So this is like a drum sampler in many ways, but it's kind of laid out like an old school. Like 800, eight bucks. Basically, even even if you're using it for different sounds, It's CAN has a little bit of a retro feel to the interface. To be honest, I'm, don't use impulse very often. I'd rather use a drum rack, which does give you less control over the sounds in some ways. But it's just easier to use to me. But if you want to use this one, Here's I do it. So we have sounds in each of these blocks. So now we're going to make a midi file. And you can see here, here are my sounds. So I can go, I can Let's take that kick out. Just double-clicking. I'm just going to Command D. Let's do that and let's pull our clap and snare. Sure. Okay, let's see how that fits into the groove. I've got going here. Okay, if we go back and look at our instrument, we can see what it's doing, right? Cool. So we essentially have a drum triggering. Cynthia. We have a lot of parameters that we can play around with. But like I said, I'm not a huge fan of using impulse. I'd rather use drum rack, which we'll get to you shortly. 23. Live’s Tension Synth: Okay, let's move on to tension. So I'm going to throw the default on here. Now tension is another physical modelling synth. So this one is designed to be a string and in particular a plucked string. And the plucked string physical model was really kind of our first physical model. And there's actually some interesting history to it. If you're interested in that. Google Karplus with a K, K RPL us hyphen strong Karplus, Strong algorithm. It's kinda where physical modelling synthesis began was these two to dude's who kinda figured out this actually very simple algorithm to emulate a plucked strings out. Anyway, this is way beyond that, but still kinda based on the same thing. I'm hesitant to call this particular device a plucked string because we can do a few different kinds of attack to the string with this physical model. So let's look at this one and think about the kind of four principles from before, right? Oscillators, filters, amplifiers, and envelopes, right? So where are those here? There are little trickier to find when you're looking at a physical model in this case. So the oscillator section, I'm going to, I would probably say the exciter section and the body section are what I would consider to be the oscillator. The amplifier. I would consider to be the damper section and the termination section. And the reason is that's going to shape the sound quite a bit. Those also could be considered sort of a filter section as well, but they are going to give the sound a lot of shape. For the filter section, we have another tab over here with just a straight-up filter. And we also have a filter envelope. So we have some envelopes here and an LFO. Neat. So the way this works is we, let's think about a guitar, okay? Because a guitar is how most people, most people know how a guitar works, right? So in the exciter section we have, what are we hitting the string with? Plectrum, which is a fancy way to say a pic. So we can hit the string with the PEC. Let's make some noise here. So we can pick that string. Or we could bow the string. Just kinda weird sound. We can hit it with a hammer or we could bounce a hammer on it. This is actually a really cool sound, the hammer bouncing. If you've ever like bounced a pencil on a guitar string. That's the kinda sound we're getting here. Okay, I'm gonna go back to a picture. And then we can kind of adjust a bunch of things about the pig. Protrusion stiffness, velocity, position, damping. So stiffness might be like, how thick is the pick and what's it made out of velocities, how hard we're hitting the peak position is, probably where we're holding the pick right up towards the tip, makes a little stiffer sound. Towards the back is going to be the PEC is going to have some give. Actually that might be where we're picking the string more towards the bridge or up by the neck. By the neck, back by the bridge. And sounds more likely, damping could be our hand position. Protrusion is probably what I was just talking about. How far out the pick is in our grip. And all of these, we've got that velocity mapping and key mapping if we want them to change based on what key we're playing or how hard we're playing. Okay, let's go over to the body. Body is off, but we can turn it on. And this is like the shape of our guitar. So do we want it to be the shape of a piano? Shape of a guitar? And then do we want it to be small, medium, large, extra large, let's say extra large guitar sounds about the same. Let's switch it to piano, extra-large Vienna. Not much different there. We might need to go to a bowed setting to really kinda hear those sizes. Okay, then damper. This would be on a guitar, be like your palm meetings stuff, right? Right. So now I'm on heavy. So the position of my hand on Apollo muting thing, how much damping can move up and down the string? Stiffness mass would probably be like the size of, of what's doing the muting. And leave that off. And termination would be like the other end of the string, right? Like the nut or your finger. So how thick is your finger? How stiff is your finger? How stiff is the fret? Okay, then we can also adjust where our pickup is. Right? It's kind of a neck pickup sound. Cool and we can play around with filter if we want. But I'm okay with that just the way it is. So plucked string. But it can also be bowed or hit with the hammer. Like the hammer sound here. It's a very kind of mellow sound. It's not what I expected out of a hammer, but it works. So I've added in a little rhythmic thing to contribute to our tune. That's it. Let's hear it in context of our whole little multi-sensory. You go take the volume down on that a little bit and you know, it might sound good on that. Just for fun, is little delay effect. Let's use a filter delay. A little much heat. I just thought I'd be fine. We'll talk more about effects later. 24. Tension Preset Deconstruction: So sometimes it's fun just to look at a preset and kind of pick it apart and see what they're doing. So let's take attention preset. Let's take, Let's go mallets, big Columba. Cool. So I'm going to load that right onto my tension instrument and turn off this delay for a minute so we just hear what it's getting. Let's hear it. Okay, this has an extra little harmony in it. So let's look at what they're doing. So they're hitting it with a pick. Fairly tight position, a lot of dampening all the damping. Now they have velocity tracking on. So, so with this velocity tracking, these things are going to adjust a little bit depending on how hard I hit the note. The same thing with key a little bit here, and this is a negative number, so this protrusion is gonna go down. The higher note that I play. Okay? They have a termination set so they want the finger mass to be huge and the fret stiffness to be as stiff as possible. Let's try turning that off. And here what we have turned back on softens it a little bit, not very much though. Again, a little bit of velocity tracking their pickup position is all the way on the neck and nothing on the body or the damper. Okay, they do have a filter envelope, so this filter is kinda swooping in. Let's turn that off. And I hearing that much there, detuning it a little bit and they have it set to two voices. So that's probably where we're getting that harmony. This error parameter is going to give us a kind of random detuning amount. For each note. It's just going to make it so each note sound a little different. It's pretty slight, but that can make it sound a little more real. To voices. Lot of detuning here on the unison. So unison basically doubling the voice is what we're doing here. So bye. Doubling the voice than detuning one that must be where our harmony is coming from. Let's turn that off. Yeah, now we only hear one note. So we create the unison, so it doubles it to make it sound bigger. But then we detune one of those. And that gets us that harmony. Interesting sound. Now that's not going to work very well in our tune here, because I don't think I want that harmony. Let's try it anyway. Yeah, it's a little weird. So I'm going to go back to the sound that we had. It's by doing undo. There we go. And I also undo back through turning my filter back on. Go. So a handy little thing to do is if you're trying to learn an instrument, grab one of the presets and then just kinda walk through it, turns some stuff on and off, adjust knobs that'll help you understand it a little bit better. 25. Live’s Operator Synth Interface: Okay, next, let's deal with operator. Now, operator is one of my favorite sense in live, and it's very powerful little synth. So I'm just going to drag our default patch onto a new track. And this is what operator looks like. Now. Operator is an FM synth, okay? Actually, operators capable of doing a few different kinds of synthesis, but we could do subtractive with it. We could do a kind of synthesis called additive synthesis with it. Or we could do FM synthesis, or we could actually do kind of a combination of several of those. So what we have an operator is for oscillators, okay? Each of these four things as an oscillator. Now note this, yellow, a, TLB, purple, sea, and read d. Cool. Those color combinations are going to be important. Because we can set these four oscillators up to be routed in several different ways. If you look down here, you see those four colored squares stacked on top of each other, right? That means this is an FM synth. If I click on this, you can go up here and see that there's a whole bunch of different ways these can be routed. In this way. Dee is routed into C, which is routed into B, which is rather than to a, right? They're all in a line. That's fm will get back to that in a second. But if I did this way, write, in this way, they're all horizontal. That means a is going to the output, so is B, so as C, so is D, they're all going out. That's additive or subtractive. Right? And then we've got combinations here. Like in this one for example, it looks like D is going into C, which is going into B, which is going to the output. And a by itself is going to the output. So these can be routed in a bunch of different ways. Okay, so let's talk about FN real quick. So if I set this to the FM mode, what FM means is that FM stands for frequency modulation. So what we're going to hear if all of these are routed into each other, is a K, a is the one we're hearing. It's the only one we're hearing right. Because it's at the bottom and it's going out. But what's going to happen here is B is going to modulate a. Okay, So how does that happen? I can click on these colors and turn off that oscillator. So let's just do a and B, okay? Okay, so here's a note. A is the only thing we're hearing here. If I turn the volume down, it's gotten. So we're hearing a. Now. B is modulating a, but the volumes all the way down. So if I turn the volume up, it sounds like it gave it. Shape and more kind of harmonics. Almost sounds like it changed the waveform. It kind of did. Because the waveform of B is going into a and it's basically working like an LFO, right? Because it's something that's moving back and forth. That's what oscillators do. And it's controlling the frequency of a. But it's not an LFO because it's not low frequency. It's way up here, it's way up high. So it's going very, very, very, very fast. That's what makes frequency modulation. So that makes it more complex waveform when something, when a frequency is modulating another oscillator. Now we can get even weirder with it by adding C and using C to modulate B, which is then modulating a, Let's turn up that volume. Right now it's getting weird. Let's add d k even weirder. Now if I want to go even farther, start messing around with the tuning. What's this? Right? Now I'm getting a very complex sound. This is the essence of FM. Multiple oscillators modulating each other. Now just to point out my routing here, if I take all of this and switch it over to to a routing scheme where we're hearing all the individual oscillators, wherein here's something very different, right? Because now we're hearing the output of each oscillator, FM, something in the middle. So each way we can route it has a big effect on the output of the sound. Okay, so that's what FM is, that's the basics of how operator works. Now in addition, we have these global parameters here we have an LFO, we have a filter. We have an envelope that we can put on that filter. We have a pitch envelope and we have an amplitude envelope for each individual oscillator, right? Okay, so let's make something with operator. 26. Operator Programming: Okay, So I think the type of sound that I'm in the mood for to add to this tracks can be some short and a little bit buzzy. So I'm gonna go to FM to get that kind of buzzy sound. So I'm going to be sure this is set up an FM. Now I'm going to go to my first oscillator and change that waveform envelope. Be fairly short. I can change the waveform to be. Let's just do a simple square wave. Okay, that's good. And what's cool about this is that we can actually make custom waveforms here by just doing stuff like that. That's nice. Let's leave it like that. Okay, Now let's add oscillator B. So we got a little bit and let's take oscillator B up an octave. Okay, Now let's take us later. See, up two octaves. Oops, that needs to be a three. That's pretty interesting sounds. Let's check my envelope. So I'm going to click on the envelope tab here and open this up just a little bit more at both of these. And let's leave oscillator D off. Okay, I could do a little bit of pitch envelope that's gonna make my pitch kind of swoop a little bit. Okay, if I give it an amount here, right, That's a little ridiculous. So let's do just a teeny tiny bit. Here we go. Okay, this filter, to get rid of a little bit of that buzzing this residents I kinda like where that is. Cool. It's a very kind of FM kind of sound. All right, cool. Now I've added a little thing here. So just a little rhythm. That pitch envelope, so intense on internet off. Okay, lets you in context. Okay, Let's try dropping that note down an octave. Let's try dropping or another octave. Okay? So now we have a very kind of FM sounding sound in our little tune of all the sense. I'll give you this preset that we just made. Let's call its FM. Clunky. Neat. So you can download that and play with it if you want. 27. What is a Wavetable Synth?: All right, let's look at wave table next. So let's drag and default one over there and make a new midi track. Okay, so here's what a wave tables in this, basically what we have Is a difference to the way the oscillator functions, okay, the oscillators, the main thing that's different here. Now instead of choosing a single wave form for the oscillator to use in order to make a sound. We're gonna give it a list of waveforms, okay? And we're going to get the ability to rapidly switch those waveforms. Okay? So the list of wave forms is called the wave table, right? Like it's a table of waves and we can scrub through them really fast if we want to. We can also just use it as a single waveform. So that's what wave tables and this is now doing that like kinda scrubbing through them gives it, gives you the ability to make really complex sounds. So wavetable synthesisers are something like serum. Serum is the most popular one around right now. It's a very popular plugin. So it's made by a different company who are thinking about buying serum. But you have live sweet. Don't buy serum. Because you can really make almost all the same sounds in wave table. That being said, you might want to follow along with some serum tutorials or something like that. So you can still get serum if you want. But if you're crafty, you can do everything in wavetable that you could do in serum. So let's take a look. Let's take a look specifically at the wave table. So here we have our wave table. This is a fairly simple one. It has four waves in it. This is the one that's called basic shapes. So right now, we're just on a normal old sinewave. If I move up here. Now we're on a triangle wave. We go here. We're on a sawtooth wave. I go up here, a square wave. Okay, but here's what's cool. I can scrub between them within a single node. Right? Pretty cool. Let me show you doing that with a much bigger wave table. Okay, so now I have loaded up a preset here called battery acid. So, whoops. So when I play a note, you'll see these are all our waveforms, right? There's a ton of them. The yellow one is the one we are presently hearing. Okay? But the waveform switching between the wave form is being automated, okay? Or actually it's being modulated is a better way to say it in this case. So when I play a single note, this is what happens. Cool. So we're modulating the waveform and just kind of scrubbing through it. And that's generating these really rich tones and a tone with a lot of motion to it, right? Because that modulating waveform is, is moving, right? It's, it's alive. So that is the essence of a wavetable. Now outside of that, we have a lot of the same stuff, right? We have filters, envelopes, and the amplifier, the things you would typically expect. But the real power is the wave table and the ability to modulate the wave table. 28. The Wavetable: Okay, so in order to get something interesting out of the wave table, we need to start with an interesting table, like a table of waves. So this one that isn't the default is called basic shapes. Now there's a few different ways to get a new table in here. The first is the wave table comes with a bunch of lists of tables. So you can just click here and say, cool, let's try sink additive. Okay, that just loaded a long list of tables. Now you generally don't want random waves in here. You want things that are going to sound good together. And generally speaking, that means kinda slowly evolving. Yeah, you can kinda see that this starts off like this waveform and ends like that one and kind of moves between them. So let's hear what this sounds like, right? Kind of interesting. So there's a bunch of different ones you can play with FM fold, Ooh, that looks fun. And actually there are a ton more than this. Because we're just looking at what's considered the basic waves. If we go here and say collection, and now we have more, right? So there's a lot of different things to choose from. So you can go here and then here, and you're going to get tons and tons of wave tables. But we can go to user and make our own waveform if we want to. So the way we would do this is we just drag a sample and it's going to generate a wave table. So I don't know, Let's grab a piece of our drum loop and see what happens. Let's drop that right there. Cool. This is a bunch of waveforms that are found in that drum loop. All right, not extremely interesting. Drum loop probably isn't the best way to go. Let me go to samples and just try to find something interesting here. I love that. Okay, let's go back to our wave table and drop that. They're okay. Here are some ways that it found in that. That's pretty interesting. Could be a little more diverse. Let's try that down. It's pretty interesting. Now as far as I know, we don't have a way to do deeper detailed editing of our waveforms in the wavetable synth, however, you can do a few things if you want to really get in there and just draw waveforms. The first thing you can do is there are a few different programs out there that will let you draw and generate wave forms that then live can open. The second way is if you use something, if you use something like serum or one of the other wavetable synthesisers, they can export. I believe they're wave tables and you have a little bit more control to make your own wave tables in those programs, export them and then import them into live. So that's how you can generate wave tables on your own. And play around with a lot of the wave tables that are already in live. There are tons of them that are really interesting. 29. The Matrix And Modulation: The next thing we need to do once we get a wavetable that we like is set up the modulation. So let me load. Let's get something really wild here. Sure, let's do that. Now. Let's get something a little weirder. I like that. Okay, so let's set this up to modulate as I play a note. Now there's two ways we could do it. And we're gonna go over here, mod sources, modulations, sources. Here are our options for modulation. We have an envelope, another envelope, an LFO, and another LFO. Okay? Now remember, an envelope is going to go in this ADSR, shape, attack, decay, sustain, release, that's the ADSR. Okay? You have a lot of control over this shape, but it's generally a one time thing. It's going to happen once when the note is triggered. We can sometimes loop it. Here we go. So we can loop it to keep happening. But we're still kind of in this ADSR shape even if it loops. So we can, so if that's the kind of shape we want for our modulation, we would use an envelope. If we want something that's just going back and forth or in this case, up and down and up and down in a fairly consistent way, then we want an LFO because that's what LFOs do, right? They go up and down and up and down. So I'm going to say I want it to go up and down and up and down. Okay, so I'm going to use an LFO. So I'm gonna use LFO 1. Now in order to apply this, I have a little bit different mechanism to do that. That we have in some of the other lives sense. What we have is this thing called matrix. Okay? So I'm gonna go to the matrix and then go to oscillator 1 position. That's this guy. You can see it going up and down. Okay? So I don't want to do is go to that parameter oscillator 1 position. And then I want to go over to the column that I want to use to modulate it. In this case, LFO 1. Crank that up. Let's go to a 100 percent for now. Okay? Now, LFO 1 is now modulating oscillator 1 position. Let's go back to mod sources and look at LFO 1 when I play a note now. Okay, in the ballpark, let's adjust that a little bit. So let's take the amount down a little bit. Okay, Let's change the speed of it. The speed is going to be the rate. Or I could change it to divisions of the beat. And I can change the shape of it too, if I wanted to be more triangular. Or sawtooth. Squares can be pretty boring in this case, or kind of a random. Random what's best for the bass? The last collect sine, sine wave or a cane. And I can kinda ask that if I want to adjust where it starts, I can modify the shape of the lens. Okay, so now I get something pretty cool sounding. Names. 30. Preset Study: Okay, let's go to, let's do another little preset studies. So let's look at movies since keys and okay, here we go. Okay, Interesting. So let's take a look at what's happening here. So we have a wavetable from the collections tab and an sapphire. So one of the built-in wave tables in our first oscillator, and we have a second oscillator on as well from the digital piano so we can add to. And now it's doing something as well. All right, we have our sub-section on which is going to add a lower octave, in this case k. Now before we look at our modulation sources, let's look at what the modulators are doing. K. So the pitch, the pitch that we're playing is being modulated by Envelope 2. Okay, so let's look at Envelope 2. So here's the pitch. So it's giving us a spike and then coming right back down. Okay, oscillator 1 position is being modulated by the amp envelope and LFA-1 and LFO R2. Interesting. Okay, so we have an ADSR here and we have LFO 1 and LFO to all modulating the position here. That all combined is what's probably making that kind of graceful fall. Oops. Oscillator 2 position. I was looking at Oscillator 1. Yeah, that's making that kind of graceful fall. All of those things combined, oscillator 2 is being modulated by envelopes and LFOs L2. So if we look at envelope three, doing something similar and LFO 2. So again, making that grace fall, fall by combining those together. Now the filter frequency here is being modulated by envelope 2 and envelope three. But note the amounts here all the way on envelope to you and all the way. And just a little bit on envelope three, you can note those amounts up here too. These are all very small. So Envelope 2 and 3 are modulating this filter, right? So sharp. So that's kinda quick in and out and then much more graceful. That's making it jam to the top and then slowly decay. It's a lot of interesting stuff here. I also have this Midea matrix that I can use to adjust for velocity. Note pitch bend, pressure. You're not really sure what pressure is, in this case, modulation and randomness. So I have a lot of different controls happening based on velocity you can see here. So I play a really soft and modulation is a lot quicker. Our modulation is a lot slower. And I even had some np control setup here too. I think we talked about NPV at the very beginning of this class. And B is kinda the new kinda high res midi control. If you have a keyboard and a device that supports and PE, you can do some special things with N PE. This device does support and PE. So, so you can do things like note, pitch bend, pitch bend by the note, not just for all the notes. So pretty cool sound here. Lots of intricate mappings in the various matrices. Makes for a really close out. I'll try to add this into our track. I don't know if I can do anything interesting, but I'll give it a shot. Okay, I got something that sort of works. I just added a little a minor chord. Now it's not like this. 31. The Simpler and the Sampler: Okay, Let's talk samplers built into live. We have two main audio samplers. They are called the simpler and the sampler. Okay? Now the simpler is obviously a play on words and it's like a sampler, but it's more simple. When should you use the simpler versus the sampler? Well, let's look at them real quick. So here is the sampler and here is the simpler. Okay? The simpler is kinda of our go to, I want to trigger an audio file thing, right? So the real difference between the two is how many samples do you have that you want to be able to trigger? If it's just one, you want a simpler, most of the time. If it's more than one, You want a sampler. In other words, if you have a big sample library where you have a file that is going to trigger different samples based on what note you play, or it's going to trigger different samples based on how hard you play the note. Like a higher-end sample library. If that's true, then you want the sampler, right? If you have just a single sound, that's an audio file that you want to trigger when you play a note and have it transpose and do all of those things. You can do all of that just with a simpler. So if I just take like a midi track here and I just throw an audio sample down here. It's just going to make a simpler, simpler, pop up all over the place. But don't let the name fool you. There's a lot we can do with the simpler. So I want to focus on that for the next couple of videos. We're going to talk about how to trigger sounds with the simpler and what these three different modes are doing for us here. One key thing to remember about any sampler, both the simpler and the sampler, is that the rules that we've been talking about of synthesis still apply. Remember we still have the oscillator, filter, amplifier and envelopes, right? That's kinda what we're looking for. All of that is still true in a sampler. The only thing that's different is the oscillator is a sample, right? So it's not really an oscillator anymore, but it is the sound generating thing. After you get past the sample, the sound generating thing. There were other things are still pretty much the same. We still have a filter in there. We still have an amplifier that we can shape the sound with. And we still have envelopes that we can use all over the place. So a lot of the concepts still apply. It's just the oscillator that's changed into a sample now. 32. Using Simpler (in Classic Mode): Okay, So I have a sample loaded up, loaded up in simpler. So let's talk about, generally speaking, how to use simpler. And we're going to focus on classic mode first. Okay, so I loaded a little keyboard sample here. Okay, that's neat, but I actually only want that first chord. So first thing I'm gonna do is change my start and end position. Actually I'm going to leave my start position right where it is, but I'm going to change the length right there. Even a little bit more. That sounds good. That looks good. Okay. If I wanted to, I could adjust the start position and move it all over the place. Actually, what happens if I put it right there? Let's kinda neat, but I'm gonna go back to the beginning. Okay, so now I just have that one. No. Cool. So I am triggering this with my keyboard. I'm playing him any note. Now on the simpler sampler, just remember that Want to play the sample at the pitch that it is, play middle C on your keyboard. You play any other note, it's going to transpose it, right? So middle C is the note that it is currently at k. Now I could set this to loop if I wanted it to. If I do, I can make a little fade. And I can set the loop length to be different, which is probably what I want here so that it doesn't look all the way back to the beginning because it's so much louder at the beginning. This will make for a slightly smoother loop. Although it's still not going to be incredibly smooth. It could be worse. So now I have something set up, nice. I can apply a filter to it. I've got filter here that I can play around with. I've got an envelope here, attack, decay, sustain, release. It looks a little bit different, but that's our same envelope parameters. I've got an LFO here I can play with. So when we're in classic mode, that means that we can play how we've set up. We can play polyphonic, meaning we can play more than one note at a time. Which is going to sound weird because this is a chord. So it's going to transpose it all strange. We can set things up to loop. And if we go over to the controls tab, we have a little bit more controls. We have another filter. We have a pitch envelope we can play around with, and more on our LFO settings. But that's pretty much it in classic mode. You're going to be able to play a sound and you can play it as many notes as you want. If we wanted to go on the midi keyboard, we would trigger this just like any other sound. So C3 is our unaltered pitch. It's going to loop so I can extend it out if I want. Let's make this midi clip longer. Tell it not to loop, but be longer. And there we go. There. And I can trigger more notes if I want. I could do this. I could even trigger some things really fast if I wanted. Which can be kinda fun to actually meet. All right, Now we turned our groove into from a slow sexy jam into this weird Frank Zappa thing. But sure why not? Okay, let's go on to this one-shot mode and talk about that. 33. Simpler in 1-Shot Mode: Okay, if we switch over to one-shot mode, this works a little bit different. The way that this is gonna go is that when I tell it to play this sample, it's going to play the whole sample. No matter when I let go of the key. It's just designed to get a trigger and say, start playing that sample and then it plays that sample. It's like you say, go play your sample. This is best used in like drum sounds, like a snare. You might just want to hit that snare and let it go and not worry about the length of it. It's not ideal for this, right? So I'm just going to say play that note. So I just hit the note and I let go. And it's just gonna go, right? So what I can do is first shorten the sample, same way I did before. So this will also only let one note played at a time. So this is not Polyphonic like we just talked about it. This is monophonic. So if I tried to play three notes in quick succession or dot-dot-dot, here's what happens. And only place the last one. Well, it started all three, right. But then the last one kept playing. The other ones cut off the previous one. Now if you do want it to stop playing when you lift up the note, you can set that up with this gate control. Okay, now it's playing when I had my finger down and stops when I lift my finger up. Right. So that's what gate does. Trigger means. Fire and play the whole thing. Gate means when I put my finger down, play the note until I lift it up, then I close the gate. And that's true with midi notes as well. So in this case, the gate is open, the gate is closed. Otherwise it's going to play the whole sample. Now these are going to sound like they're gated because it's not going to get through the sample. And then this is going to cut the previous one off. So this will sound pretty much the same as the classics. But one-shot best for drum sounds. 34. Simpler in Slice Mode: Okay, now let's go over to slice mode. So in slice mode, we're going to get multiple samples generated from this single sample. Okay? Let me say that a little bit better. What we're gonna do is we're going to have multiple start points to the sample that's more accurate. So let me explain. Right now. If I play a note even in slice mode, we're just going to hear this note, okay? But actually, we're only going to hear this node if I play the right pitch. So if I play C, it says it's playing that slice. Okay, I don't see any more slices because I have my endpoint set so close. If I open this back up, we see all these slices. So this is what live said are the different slices. And I can play each one by playing the right note. Finding the right, you can make some cool effects that way. If I go into my midi clip now, it still looks the same, so this can be hard to follow. Let's make a new midi clip. And we're going to have to find our notes in the right spot. Now, why would you want to use this? The reason you might want to use this is if you're doing something like a drum loop, check this out. Let's grab a bar of this drum loop. Okay? And then let's just paste it out somewhere. And then let's throw it in here. Okay, now, now we have our individual drums from that loop that we can just play, right? So check it out. So I'm on my mini grid or I'm on my keyboard now. So let's say you had a drum loop and you really liked it, but you wanted to modify it, throw it into here, put it on slice mode. And now you've got all the individual hits lined up so you can just play them in or control them with midi. So I'm gonna go to S3. That should be our kick. So here's all the sounds from our jumps out. Solo after go down to C1 to get these. Right. So I could just say, maybe I want to just play around with this snare a little bit. Let's take that out and do that. Cool. Now I have the snare hit from that loop. Let's put that there as a little rough at the end. Got. So slice mode is gonna give us individual access to different points in the sample. We can control where those points are. By here where it says slice by transient, It's going to be the attack. Beat is going to be the pulse that it finds, which in this case, it's going to be the same region, not really sure what region does. And manual is going to let us create points by double-clicking on the waveform. And then we can move things around how we want and do it that way. Cool. Slice mode is super fun. 35. Using Sampler: Okay, next let's look at sampler. So sampler is a little more, we have a little bit more control over our sound. So I've loaded up one here that it's just a, a preset called classic keys k, So we can see where our start position is and where our loop is. There's a little crossfade to get us cross there. It's going to sound pretty good. Okay, So that note can sustain for a really long time because of that. So we have a sustain mode where it can go left to right. It can go from beginning to end and stop left and right and then loop or this boomerang mode, which I find generally if I'm trying to make a seamless loop like this, works a little bit better. The boomerang mode, it's going to go into the loop section. And then instead of the end of it jumping back to the beginning and going forward, it's going to go to the end and then it's going to play backwards and then forwards and then backwards. Sometimes I can make a more seamless loop. Let's try it. Yeah, not so perfect here, but I've had good results doing that. Loop start loop n, we can detune it. Panning our root note. We don't have access to the root note in simpler, but we do and sampler. The root node is just what note we play to play the e1 transposed original sound. So here it's C2. So that's going to play the original sample without any transposition on it. So you always want to set the root note to the note of the sample if it's a pitched sample, right? So if you've recorded like a piano, record the note middle C, and then set that to be middle C, S3, or four, depending on what brand of keyboard you're working on. That's a long story. Okay, So on its surface, so far, it looks like sampler is just simpler but with more detail, right? And that is true so far. But the big difference is in this thing called zones. So let's go to a new video and look at zones. 36. Multi-Samples and Zones: Okay, So if in the sound I click on zones, I'm going to get a magical new window coming up. Bloop, new area, right? There's only a few things that have access to this little area. And simpler or sampler is one of them. Okay. So what I have here is a single zone. Okay, I have first one, that's the name of the audio file that we're using. And in this sampler there's only one audio file. Okay? So what this is telling me is that this audio file, it gets triggered when I play any key k. So that green bar means any key. And I can also say velocity. So quietest note to loudest note, any velocity. And I can say on any selection, the selection is just where this teal bar is and I can control that using kinda anything I want. If I control-click or right-click on it, I can go edit midi map or you can just press Command M. And I can map this to some parameter. If I have a midi controller or a knob or something like that, I can map it to that. I'll show you why you'd want to do that in a minute. But let's go back to C0. So this sample is going to play what I trigger any key from low to high. But what if I wanted a different sample to trigger when I was in a higher notes, That's easy. I just do this and I get that back. Okay? Now I'd add another sample and say only trigger the other sample on the high notes, right? So that way I can have two samples triggered on the same sampler, one for the low notes and one for the high notes, right? Let me show you what that would look like. I have another preset here called chill outs. Okay, It sounds like this much more complicated sample. So let's look at the zones for this one. Okay? This one has five different zones. Okay, so it's going to play this audio file, this high vowel or F1. When I play low notes all the way up to looks like B1. Then it's going to play this audio file when I play anything in the C2 to be two range here. And then this audio file, when I play anything in this range, this one on this range and this one on this range. Cool. So it's going to trigger different audio sample based on what note I play. Now I can look at the velocity and see if they've set up anything for velocity mappings, they have not. So what this means is that all of these key, all of these samples happen at all velocities. We just cool. That means that it's just not velocity sensitive. That's okay. And the selection probably isn't configured in any special way either. No matter where this is. All the notes play. So only key mapping is set up here. So I could change it so that, you know, let's say when I play c3, we want multiple nodes to happen. Just drag this bigger, I guess do that. Now, all of these are going to get two notes because this one is going to trigger all the time. Let's go up here. Right? So now I'm getting multiple notes. And I could swap these out. This little thing I just did is a note crossfade. If you grab this little tiny bar up here, you can cross-fade. So now it's going to cross-fade these two samples. In these keys. I can set up some really nice sample libraries. So point is, if you have a big sample library, it has a lot of samples in it. That's what makes them big and that's what makes the kinda more expensive ones. So it's not just one sample that you're going to transpose all over the place. Because the more you transpose a sample, the less real It sounds. So you're going to have different samples triggered. If you buy like a really high-end like piano library, you're going to have a sample for every single note. And you might have multiple samples for every single note. You might have a different sample triggered for each note. And four, maybe five samples based on how hard you hit that note, right? The more samples in it, the more accurate it is when it comes to creating real sounds, recreating real sounds. So let me show you an example of that. 37. Sampler Orchestra Library Example: Okay, so here I have a higher end orchestra library. Sound. Hear it. So pretty good sounding orchestra library. This is, this is actually the Ableton orchestral instruments library. Let's look at it. So if we go here and open zones, what do we have here? String ensemble, legato. Look at this. So this note, this sample gets triggered when you play a single note. And there are 123456 of them. So six different samples get triggered for this single note. Now why is that? The reason is for that same note, there's probably six different samples for velocity. So when you play it light, it plays this sample and you play it harder, plays this sample, sample. Harder, harder, harder and hardest. So every note has six samples. So how many possible notes times 6? That's what we got here. And if we scroll down, look at key, we can see each sound has all, each note has all of these samples, right? So it goes all the way from c 0, all the way up to C6. So lots of samples, right? And we can get into each one if we want flood stuff. But that's how you set up a real big orchestral library, right? Each note has all these different velocity ranges and all these different samples. So not something you can do with simpler. 38. Overview to Instrument Racks: Alright, let's talk about rax. Now. Like I said before, a rack is a way to kind of group instruments, but there's a lot more you can do with it than just grouping instruments. So I'm going to drag just as instrument rack onto a new track. Okay, it's gonna make a midi track with an instrument rack in it. Now this is an empty rack, okay? And that means basically exactly what it sounds like. It's like you've got a rack of stuff and you've got a rack of gear, but there's nothing in it, right? It's just a holder for it. So let's throw some other stuff in there. Let's go with presets. So let's go with an analog. Let's make a really crazy pad sound. So I'm going to go with the path. Let's go with that one. So I'm going to drag that right into my rack. Okay, now, what we have is what looks like just the instrument, right? This is the analog instrument. Nothing fancy. We've got this extra little bar on the left and extra little bar on the right, but otherwise, everything's the same. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on this button right here. This is going to show my chains. Okay? This is what's called a chain. Okay, So now that I can see the chain, I'm going to drag another instrument right to this chain area. Okay, Now we have another chain. Okay, so here's our analog, and here's our wave table, k. Now if I don't do anything else, if I don't do anything else, then when I play my keyboard, both instruments are going to play, right? And I could add more. I could go to, let's say, let's grab an operator and let's go to more pad stuff. Cool. Let's drag that in there. Let's grab another operator and drag that in there. Okay, Now I've got four chains. And I play a note. I'm hearing all for. Cool, pretty dense sound. Now, I've got some controls I can do right here for them. I can adjust the volume of each one. Right. So I can say I want to hear this one louder than the other ones and that's just fine. I can control the panning. I can say I want this one to be on the left, to be center's going to be right in this one to be centered. Sure, Let's bump those all the way. Just for fun. I can mute any channel and I can solo and each channel. Now we're only here in the top. Right. Cool. So what I've done is I've essentially grouped instruments because we're working on an instrument rack. This works with effects, also. More on that in a minute. So this is cool. I've made an instrument that is a whole bunch of different instruments together. But we haven't really hit on the real power, The chain of the, of the instrument rack yet. And for that, let's go to a new video because the real magic of AraC comes in the chain selector. Let's go to that now. 39. Chains and the Chain Selector: Okay, so remember when we looked at the zones in our sampler, we had an area where we could decide what sample gets triggered depending on what key we played or the velocity of the key, or even the little kind of salmon colored marker thing, right? So we had some control over deciding what sample gets played, where what we have in RAX is the same kind of mechanism that'll tell us when to play which instrument. This is really cool. Okay, so let's start with key. So I'm in the chain area here. I'm going to press a key. Now what I see here is this should look familiar. It's the same basic idea as the sampler, but I can say when to play which chain. So I'm going to say when I play a low note up to C2, Let's say, I want you to play only the first synth. Okay, this is going to tell it to only play that first synth when we're in this area. And I'm in a second. When I'm in, I don't know, this octave only play that one. The second one when I'm in this octave only play the third one. And everything above C4 play just the top one. Now if you look at these little volumes here, you'll see, okay, now I'm just playing the first one. I'm displaying the second one. All right, so I can control which synth plays. Now I can get a little fancier with this, because you don't need to have just one could do this. So now it's happening in this range of notes. Both these $0.02 are going to play. And in this range, both these two are going to play. And this range, both of these two are going to play. That's cool, overlapped sense. But it goes one step cooler because I have this little tiny bar on the top. If I put my mouse over that little tiny bar, I can cross-fade between synths. Oops, I get right on that sucker to get it. A little hard to grab. Okay, now I'm making really elaborate sounding patches here, right? Because in this area I've got these since kind of cross fading together. So let's try this again. So here's the low note. Okay, Here's a little higher. Now in the crossfade area. Now are mostly on the second one. Now we're only on the second one's jump up to the third one. The fourth one. And going into the third one. So really cool stuff you can do with this. Okay, now, that's just the key control. We can do the same with velocity. We can say, when I play a quiet note, trigger that sample when I play, or that instrument, when I play a loud note, play that instrument. When I play a really loud note, play that instrument, and always play the fourth instrument. I don't know, just for fun. So now you've got controls based on the volume of the note that you play, which is really fun. Okay? And we can go to the chain selector. This one is really useful if you're setting up a chain for like a live show. And let me show you how you might do that. Let's say these are four different, since that you're going to need on four different tracks. And what you've got as a keyboard on stage, and you've got that connected to a laptop. And you want to have, you don't want to be switching sessions and switching tracks during your show. You just want to be able to take a dial and switch the synth patch using right? Here's how you can do that really easily. Set up all the patches you need into one big instrument rack k. So these are all the sounds you need in that keyboard for the entire show. Okay? Then we're going to use this chain selector. And let's just leave it all the way down here. Okay, I'm going to well, actually let's keep this simple. Let's open that to their open that to their open that to there and open that. They're okay. And let's move this one here, this one here, and this one here. Okay. It's not let them overlap. They can. But just for what I'm going to show you here, I don't want it to overlap. Okay. Now wherever this little knob is, is going to be which Cynthia here. Right? So how do I control this knob? Well, easily, that gets us to a thing called macros. Now I can just do midi mapping, which I would do with Command M or the subtle midi button up here. And just click it. And then click this blue area and then wiggle something, any midi thing that you've got. And now it's going to be controlled by that midi thing. Okay, so you could say, so you've got an extra little mini switch or maybe dial on your keyboard, map that to the chain selector. And then you just know that when it's all the way down and on the synth when it's all the way up, I'm in this sense, then somewhere in between I've got these other sense. You might want to mark it on your keyboard where each synth is. So that's a good way to do it. But another way is to take advantage of the macros that are built into the rack. So let's go to a new video and talk about macros. 40. Macros: So if you look at just about any piece of hardware that's designed to be used with able to like an APC 4D or any of the other boxes. What you'll often see is a little grouping of eight knobs. Those eight knobs, usually it's laid out in a four by two grid, so there's a row of four and another row of four. The reason we always see that is because of this thing called macros that appear on Instrument Racks to get them, click this little button right here. Okay? Macros. These are assignable nubs, okay? We can assign these nouns to do whatever we want. And it doesn't matter which chain you're in. So first, let's, let's assign our chain selector here are little teal knob to macro one. So all we're gonna do is control, click on it and say mapped to macro one. But now whenever I move this group, we switch which instrument where hearing. Okay, Cool, right, easy enough. But here's where things get really fun. Let's say we have this like fairly complicated synth going here, right? We have four different instruments. So if I want to adjust any of these things on the fly, I don't want to dig through all of this, right? I gotta go here and then find my filter, and then find my frequency cutoff, right? That's a lot to look through. So what you can do is just say this, this filter cutoff. I'm going to Control click and say map to macro too. Okay. Now I see here it's called filter frequency. Cool. So now when i just this, it's going to just that in a little green.me that it's mapped to a macro. But what if I wanted this to affect the filter cutoff on all my instruments? Well, let's do it. Let's go to this instrument. And let's find our filter cutoff. It's right there. And we can say mapped to filter cutoff. We can map multiple things to the same knob. Okay, I've already done, No, I didn't do this one. So here, let's go to, there's our filter cutoff. Let's map that to macro to. Now you'll see now it changed back to just the name macro too, because there's multiple things assigned to it. But I can click on it, command R and say freak cutoff and call it whatever I want. Okay, This one map to freak cutoff. And this one we've already done. So now our cut-off frequency for all since is right here. Okay? What if we wanted to get this nob even weirder? What if we wanted to have it also control a delay amount? Well, let's go to this chain and let's throw an effect in there. So I can go to audio effects. Grab a big delay, and let's put it on that chain. Okay, So chains can have more than just instruments. So now this chain, this glass one low, has an analog instrument and a delay, right? So let's set the dry wet amount also to be our freak cutoff. This is gonna make it crazy effect. Okay, now let's go to this pad which does not have a delay on it. And let's add a hybrid reverb. Okay, and let's do our dry wet amount also. So what we basically made here is an awesome knob. Let's call it supernode. So you can build your best sound, make all of the effects and the parameters of the sound, put them all on one knob and then just go nuts with it. I can go all the way up here to where it says map all the way over here. And I can control how these are behaving. So I can say this dry wet amount, I want to be inverse. So when I turn it up, I want the dry wet amount to go down. Well, that's easy enough. Just flip that and that. Okay, now it's backwards. I can say this dry wet, I'm out, I never want to get to a 100 percent or 0%. So now all the way down is going to be 34 percent, all the way up is going to be 44%. So you can really craft the way that these knobs are behaving by doing this, by going into this map mode. Okay, to get rid of that, I'm going to click the map button down here again. Rid of it. So now I made a supernode. One other thing about macros is that we do have this group of eight knobs new in live 11 is that we can have more than eight knots. It always has been that there are just eight macros for you to play around with. But if you want more now you just hit this little plus and you can get more knobs up to 16 to play around with. So that's fun. You can also get a less, if you just want to keep things simple. Just take this. There you go. Chains electron supernovae, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and boom a movement. But remember, Awesome. So that gives you an idea of how powerful Instrument Racks can be by using the chain selector, you can also hide everything, by the way, by doing this. Now, I've got this awesome sound into knobs. 41. Some Rack Presets: Okay, it's worth looking at some of the instrument rack presets because there's actually a ton of them. And some of these are mixed in kind of all throughout things like if I go and look at, I don't know, Operator. See the icon here. That icon means it's an operator. If I drag that on something that's going to make an operator. But if you see an icon, Legos that slightly different, right? It's got that little line in the middle. That means you're making a rack of which an operator is in. Let's make that. So I'm going to drag that onto an empty spot. And look, it doesn't look like an operator, right? It looks like a bunch of macros. Now, this is another difference between live suite and the smaller versions of live. You might be able to open this up and see what's in the rack. If you have live sweet, you can, if you don't have live sweet, you won't be able to go in and adjust the contents of this rack. But I have lived sweet, so I can click here on the devices and see what's in this rack. Okay, so I can see it's got an operator and some effects. And those effects are currently off, but they are mapped to a macro. So if I turn something on, you'll probably see those turn-on. There. There are other on it's just that their maps, so it's white instead of yellow. Okay, I can look at the chains here. We only have one chain and that's okay. You only need one chain if you're only going to have one instrument and then some effects attached to it. So a rack is a good way to save a preset that is an instrument with some effects attached to it. Right? So let's look at another one of these CV and find one with multiple chains. This one only has one chain, but it has a lot of stuff on it. It's an operator with a delay and amplifier, a compressor, and a reverb built in, all with a bunch of macro mappings. Let's try another one. Okay, here we have a pad that has four different chains on it. They've named these part 1, 2, 3, and 4. Let's look inside of them. So I'm going to show the devices. So here we have a sampler and an EQ on channel 1 or chain one unchanged two, we have a sampler at an EQ. Three we have sampler in EQ and a delay. Part 4, we have a sampler in an EQ and a delay. Let's see how it's deciding what chain to play. Let's look at key k. It's always playing all keys. It's like a velocity. It's always playing all velocity. Let's look at chain. So it's always playing all chains now it's only because all chains are on in this 0 position right here. And this isn't maps to anywhere. So all the chains are always on. Now we do have this volume automated though, see a little green knob. So if we look at our volume and let's just all mapped there. So all of them are always on. So we could look at the sample and see what it's doing. In order to see the sample when it says multi-sample mode, we just need to go to Manage sample here. Doing that will show us all the contents of that sample up here if we want to replace it. But this is an example of an instrument rack where we've got four chains and all four of them are on all the time. Which is totally okay. So play around with some of the instruments racks that are in here. And also note that in any of these presets, you're going to find Instrument Racks like that. 42. Drum Racks: Okay, Let's move over and talk about drum racks for a minute. Drum racks are mostly the same. And we've talked a little bit about drum racks, I think already. But I want to go into some detail, especially on some special powers that drawn rocks, have that Instrument Racks dumped. So I'm going to throw a drum rack onto this midi track. Okay, here's our empty drum rack. So first we're going to see pads. So we have these pads here and we need to put something on them. We could put a drum sample. If we put an audio sample there, it's going to load it into a simpler, okay, there's a sound so that right there, It's going to drag it right onto that Pat. There it goes. And it put it into assembler, right? Cool. I can trigger that. It's assigned to that midi note. I can do whatever I like to it there. But here's a special little trick of a drum rack. You can put anything you want on drum racks, including just samplers. Sure. Put that one right there that just loaded up that preset onto that note. Now there is a way to choose what note I'm playing, right? Because I no longer have the, the way I no longer have control over what note, because this is a trigger. It's only looking for what midi note I play to trigger this sound. In order to control what note I'm actually playing, you need to go look at the chain. And then I need to look at this IO section. This will tell us what note to play. So I say receive, so note a sharp one is going to play that. Pad. The node it's going to play. I can change it to G sharp four. Right? So you only need to do this if you're dropping some whole synthesisers on one of these pads, if it's just a sample, you can leave it at C3, although you could change it if you want to make it deeper. You can do that as well. We'll come back to this choke setting in a minute. Okay. Another thing you can put on these pads is whole other racks. Like take it out. Let me go to instrument rack. Let's go to, I don't know, mallets. That's cool. Okay, so now this rack has a whole rag on it. It's crazy, right? And if I wanted to in this rack, I could put a rack. And inside that rack I can put another rack and it can go on with RAC inception for as long as you want. So you can have racks within racks within racks within racks. It can happen. You'll lose your mind though. So watch out for that. But let's do something a little more as we would expect. So let me find a sample and let me just do hi-hat. Okay. To hi-hat sounds. I'm going to drag them both on to there. What I did is I just held that I just shift clicking to get both of them, drag them down here and I put them both on us. Okay, So now I have these two sounds. But I have a problem here. If I want this to sound real, I have an open hi-hat and a closed hi-hat, right? In the real-world, you can't hit those at the same time because it's the same instrument in two different states, right? One is a high hat that's open and the other is high hat that's closed. We don't have to hi-hat. You might have to hi-hat. So if we want this to behave like the real-world, we need the open hi-hat to close when we hit it. When we hit a closed hi-hat. Right? So it's another words. If the two happened at once, we need the more recent one. We need the closed hi-hat to shut off the open hi-hat. And that actually makes a lot of cool effects, right? Because you can do cool things where you hit the open and then close hi-hat and get that type sound. So how do we do that? Is there a way to make it so that these can't both sound at once. There is. Let's go to a new video and talk about the choke setting. 43. The Choke Setting: Okay, If you want to do this where we've got this, these two hi-hats, and we want one to win over the other. Well, we're going to need is this choke setting. Now, if you've lost track of this, what you need in order to get here, you need to have your chains open. And then once you open chains, need to open this IO section. Okay? So choke. Here's our open hi-hat and here's our closed hi-hat. So it's these top two. So I need to do is say open hi-hat is going to be choked by chain to, okay, this is chain 12345, et cetera. Okay. So now I can hit open hi-hat. Everything is fine. I can hit closed hi-hat. Everything's fine. But if I hit these are the same. If I hit these, if I hit the close one while the open one is still happening, you can stop it. So I can't do that with a mouse. So let me find these notes. Okay. So here's my hi-hat. If I had them at same time. Right? So the closed one is going to shut off the open one. And then it's going to behave like a real drum kit. And you can't do this with Instrument Racks. You can only do this with drum racks. And you don't, there are more uses for this then just the hi hat thing. It could also be that you have to, to sounds that you just don't want to happen at the same time. Like maybe you've got to kick sounds or too low sounds. You can set up a choke so that one cuts off the other one. And then that will keep your mics for being super muddy. From low sounds. Just another idea for use of this choke parameter. So keep in mind that, that is there. 44. Effects in Drum Racks: Now there's another little trick built into drum racks that'll let us add effects to individual drums. This is something that a lot of people ask me how to do. You've got a drum kit and you want to put a Reverb on the snare only. Okay. Here's how we would do that. Let's do exactly that. Let me just grab a snare. Cool. Okay, let's put a snare right there. Okay, Now you see this little extra area here, drop devices here. That's going to make more chains. But if we go to this little S and R here, these are some sends and receives. So let's open receives and says Drag Audio Effects here. Okay? So let's go to Audio Effects. And let's go to a big reverb. And let's throw that out there. Okay, now we have a reverb as kind of an internal receive to our Rack. Okay, our drum rack. So I can go to my snare and say audio to rack output or drum rack. So drum rack reverb. Okay, so now the sound for this is going to go through this reverb. And this reverb is going to go to rack output, or I can send it to one of my session buses if I want to get even fancier, but let's just leave it as rack output. So now the snare and only this snare chain is going to go through this reverb. So my hi-hats still no reverb. Snare. Big river. Okay. Let's say I want to put a big delay on the closed hi-hat. Okay, make a delay here and I'm going to say closed hi-hat. This one. We're going to send to the delay. And that's it. Right? And if I want to adjust my settings, obviously I just click on the chain. And it's going to bring up my settings here. If you don't see it right away, just make sure you've got your devices selected here. Cool. So drum racks have some extra little bells and whistles, routing and the choke setting especially, but also this receive in place setting. And the ability to put, do some routing with the effects only. So some fun stuff. 45. External Instrument: Okay, there's one more instrument that we haven't looked at yet, and that is this one called external instrument. External instrument. So let's throw that on a track and let me show you what it does. Okay. It doesn't look like much, but it's actually really powerful. And this doesn't make really any sound on its own. What this does is give you a special way to route something. Okay, so let's say I have a synthesizer. I have a cool analog synthesizer or something that can take Midea. Okay? What this is going to do is it's going to let me send midi to it and then get audio back from it. Okay, So here I'm gonna say send midi 2 and I would have to configure my midi device. I don't have any midi outputs set up. I only have midi input setup. So it set up that devices and midi output. So I'd send midi to that device. And then I would say audio from. So now my audio from, I would select here and audio input channel that I'm going to listen for that device from. So on my audio interface, I would plug the audio output of my synthesizer into my audio interface on my channel, I don't know four. And then I would say here, Channel 4. Okay, Now this is going to route midi out of Ableton into that device and then route audio back from that device. You could do this without external instrument by just routing Midea from, from here and send it out here. And then using another track and pulling it back in as an audio track. But that would basically do the same thing as external instrument. But in a little bit more of a clunky way. This keeps everything in one track and just sends out Midea and returns audio basically. So it's kinda of a utility that lets us get in and out on a single track. So that's what external instrument does. It's for if you have an external keyboard or something that you want to pull in in a fairly easy way. 46. What Comes Next?: All right, That is the end of Part 4. On all of the instruments in live 11. Up next, part 5, we're going to deal with the effects. I'm going to talk about all of the effects in live 11, of course, but I'm also going to talk about some general uses for effect, best ways to apply certain effects, whether it be through a bus or just putting them directly on a track or dealing with the master track. And we'll be looking at all of the effects here, every one of these. And also we'll be looking at midi effects and maybe even a little bit of extra lab. We'll also be talking about the extremely powerful effects rack. And you can imagine how cool That's going to be, because we can cross-fade between effects and do all kinds of crazy things. So you can make your own super effect in one knob if you want, or 16 nubs if you want that too. So stick around for that. Part 5 of x. 47. 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.