Ultimate Ableton Live 12, Part 2: Recording Music and MIDI

1. Introduction: Hey everybody. Welcome to Ableton Live 12 part two recording. Music in Live 12. In this class, we're going to talk about what it's like to use Ableton Live as your primary recording. We're going to dive in by talking about fundamentals of recording. We'll talk about what it means to have an audio interface. We'll talk about different microphone choices, microphone types, then setting up live to work with all of those microphones and interfaces. Then we'll move on to Midi recording. We'll talk about what it means to do Midi recording either through a keyboard like this or a Midi guitar like that, or a few other things. We'll talk about the various ways that live is set up to help you with creating ideas while you're recording. Then the last big topic of this class is to deal with warping. Warping is the superpower engine behind live that makes it so all of your clips play together by analyzing the tempo and rhythm of your eclipse. But it doesn't always get it right. So we have to learn how it works so that we can adjust things and get everything just how we wanted. This class, like all of my classes, was a lot of fun to make. I had a good time. I think you will too. Let's dive in. In short, there are three different types of microphones. There are dynamic microphones, condenser microphones, and ribbon micro. I'm just going to start right at the same spot and record that same thing again, if I can remember what I did. If you're going to buy a Midi controller, the things you need to think about a vocals by themselves are really hard to work because you really need a pulse to know where you want that to sit. Here's my drums, for example. Okay, my drum group has all of these different drum tracks in it. 2. Introduction to Audio Recording Fundamentals: Okay, so recording now, as some of you may know who have taken some of my other classes, I run a recording studio that it's an Ableton based recording studio that's part of my university position. This is especially up my alley now. We're not going to go into all of the really fine details of recording, like how to mica cello and all of those things. I do have other content that focuses on that, but in this class I really want us to focus on Ableton. However, in order to make the most of it, we do have to step outside of Ableton for a little bit first to get comfortable with some of the hardware that we're going to need to connect to Ableton. We will talk about microphones. I will do a little shopping guide on a few different things, telling you what I would recommend you buy for the different situations you're in and what you need to buy and what you don't need to buy. First we're going to go into some of that hardware stuff and then we'll circle back to connecting it all to lives. Let's start with the thing that most people don't realize is something that they're going to need, and that is the audio interface. Let's talk about that first. 3. Hardware Needs: Okay, what is an audio interface? I can explain this a few different ways. First, if we look at live and say audio input device and audio output device, it's looking for our audio interface here. Now your computer has a built in audio interface. That's why we can select there, like your headphone out or whatever. What is an audio interface? This is the converter. Okay. Another name for it is a converter. Your computer makes digital sound. Okay? So it does everything in the digital round. Okay. That's great. Everything we're doing here is digital, digital ones and zeros. Okay. Now that's great. Computers can hear ones and zeros really well. The problem is our ears need to hear analog sound as a human being. Presuming you are a human, AI has not taken over the world yet. You cannot hear digital sound. You need to hear analog sound. Your ears can only hear analog sound. We need something that can convert digital sound to analog sound so that you can hear it. The opposite is also true if I'm going to sing into this microphone. If I'm just even going to talk into this microphone, I can only produce analog sound. I cannot produce digital sound. But the computer needs sound. Right? It needs something digital. I'm going to talk into this microphone. This microphone is going to go through this cable here, and this cable can only carry analog sound. It's going to go down this wire it somewhere to be converted to digital sound so that the computer can deal with it. Okay. So an audio interface is something that does that conversion for us. It converts analog sound to digital and digital sound to analog. Okay. Going back and forth so that we can hear what the computer is doing. Now, it would be nice if it was as simple as that, but to make things a little more complicated, that conversion can be done really well. And it can be done really poorly. That's why we have different audio interfaces. Some of them are really expensive and they do it really well. Some of them are really cheap. And they don't do it really well, and the sound suffers because of it. There is an audio interface built into your computer already. If it makes sound that you can hear, there's one in there. Your phone has one in it, because it produces sounds that you can hear. But the one in there is a little tiny microchip and it's not the highest quality. If we want to do something with higher quality, we need a dedicated box that looks like this. This is an audio interface. Okay, more on that in a second. Now there's another reason we might want to have a dedicated box, and that's so that we can plug things into it. For example, here is a microphone, okay? This is a standard microphone. The output of it looks like that. It's got three pins, okay? Now look at your computer. Look all over your computer. Do you have an input that has three pins like that? You don't have an analog microphone input on your computer no matter what kind of computer you're using. I guarantee you don't have one. We take a box like this, it has a whole bunch of inputs for a microphone, and then it has an output to go into a computer, USBC, whatever, right? So this can do the conversion for us. We can plug in a whole bunch of microphones and it can do the conversion and send that digital signal to the computer. Okay? So that's why we need one of these boxes. Now, there are USB microphones that exist where it's a microphone and then it goes, it has a USB output and then you can plug that directly into a computer. Those exists, I used to make fun of them and say that they're garbage, but I've listened and played around with a few of them in the last couple of years. Some of them are actually really good. I'm not going to, some of them are good. What that means though is that they have the converter built into the microphone. Okay. Which means it's a tiny little converter, it's not going to be that great. But again, I've heard some really good ones, if you want to do that, that's okay. That is a cheap way around buying an audio interface. That's what an audio interface is. Now let's talk about if you need one or not. 4. Do you need an interface?: Okay, do you need an interface? Maybe not. There's a possibility that you don't need one. If you're planning on running a recording studio where you're going to record a whole bunch of instruments, yes, you definitely need an interface. But if you are in a home studio, if you're in a home setting where you're on a laptop, you're on a desktop, whatever, you don't plan on recording a whole bunch of instruments, then you might not need one. Okay, so let's separate this into two different issues. The first is for recording. Do we need an audio interface? And the second is for playback. Do we need an audio interface? Okay, because an audio interface handles both. Let's talk about recording. If you're going to record a microphone, a single microphone one at a time, like you're a singer and you want to just be able to lay down some vocals, you might not need an audio interface, you could get a good USB microphone, You might be fine with that. That's actually fine. Let's say you're a guitar player and you want to record some guitars from time to time, You probably do need an audio interface because you need to be able to plug your guitar into it or mike up and guitar amp or something like that. That's really going to require an interface of some sort. However, you could get a really small and cheap one and be just fine. Let's say you are a producer and you have no desire to record anything. In that case, you could be just fine without one. You might still want one for playback. We'll get to that in a minute. But when it comes to record, other than the guitar stuff that I do, I probably almost don't even need one because I have a studio. If I'm really going to record like a string quartet, I'm going to go to my university studio, do it, bring the files back here and primarily edit in my home studio here. I'm primarily editing, I might lay down a guitar track or a violin, there's my violin on occasion. But most of my recording I'm going to do at the studio and then just edit. But okay, let's talk about for playback, you can probably plug headphones into your computer if you're going to be working on headphones and you just want to plug right into your computer, that's pretty fine. There's really nothing wrong with that. You can get by without an audio interface just fine. Let's say maybe you have a nicer pair of speakers and you want to plug your computer into those nice speakers, you could get one of those funny cables that is a little headphone jack, we call it an eighth inch jack, or we call it a mini jack or there's a couple of different names for it. But little headphone jack on one end and on the other end it splits is either a four inch XLR or whatever you need to plug into your speakers. You could do that. The quality of sound you're going to get is going to be lower than if you had an audio interface. But how much lower? Like a really small amount. Let's be like super honest here. A really small amount. Really nice speakers in this room. I have, I can't remember the model number, but these focal speakers there right here, they're just out of frame. If I just plug the headphone jack of my computer into them, they're still going to sound really good, but not as good as if I go through an audio interface because the conversion of the digital signal to analog before it goes to those, it's going to be better. The way I have it set up is I have an audio interface here. The one that I'm actually using is Universal Audio is the name of the company and the model is Apollo Twin. It's a small one. I can only plug in two instruments at a time for recording. That's fine. That's all I need here. Then my speakers are plugged into that. When I go to live and I say audio input device thing, I'm using to record, it's Universal Audio thunderbolt. That's box, that's my Apollo Twin. When I say audio output, that's the thing I'm listening for. It is also that box. Okay. Because my speakers are plugged into it. It does all my conversion. For me, that's typical. This one is the one I used to use here, but I switched it out for the universal audio because I just like it better. But this is an Applegquartet is the model number here. This is a great one. This is a really nice box, I really liked it. It has a bunch of inputs and outputs and it works really the same. Do you need an audio interface? You probably don't need one, like italicized need, but it will make things sound better very slightly. If you're recording, you probably do need one unless you're just recording one microphone. If money is no object, get an audio interface. If money is an object, get a cheap audio interface. You can't afford to buy anything extra. That's just fine. Don't use an audio interface. You'll be just fine. Now assuming you do want to buy an audio interface, let's talk about what you should look for and how much you should plan on spending. 5. Audio Interface Buyers Guide: Okay, if you are going to buy an audio interface, here's a couple things to keep in mind. First, in general, I find that with audio interfaces, you get what you pay for. In other words, the more expensive ones are generally worth it. The cheap ones are generally fine, but they're not as good as the expensive ones. Here's what you should look for first, make sure that it has what you need to connect to your computer. It has USBC, USB, whatever, whatever ports your computer have. This is probably more of an issue for us Mac people because our ports keep changing. Second, make sure it has enough inputs, okay. Think about the biggest thing you plan to record in like a home studio or your setting, okay? If you want to record a rock band, you need to be able to plug in a bunch of microphones for the drums. And then, let's say, I don't know, five microphones for your drums and the guitar, bass, and vocals. If you want to do everything all at once, it is very common to have an interface that has eight inputs and then multiples of 88.16, and 32. If you want to record a whole band get one that has at least eight inputs. But if you want to a bunch of vocal tracks, you really only need one input. When we talk about number of inputs, we're thinking about how many things we want to record at the same time. Okay, If I want to lay down a vocal track, a violin track, and a guitar track, but it's all me. I really only need one input, because I'm only going to do one of those at a time. I can layer as much stuff as I want, but the number of inputs means how many things we're going to record At the same time, if you go into a big studio, they're going to have 64 or 128 inputs available. But here what I use, I have two inputs available. This unit, this is the one that I have here. This is the back of it. I have two lines input. That's all I need for what I'm doing here. I can record a mic and a guitar at the same time. It's great. Or two microphones at the same time. Okay? Think about how many inputs you need. Think about how many outputs you need. In most cases, you only need two outputs. You need a left and a right for your two speakers. Maybe you need a headphone output also. This has four outputs. I've got two line outs and two monitor out. My speakers are connected to monitor outs. If I look at the front of this, I also have a headphone out right here. There's another input that is guitar specific here or it's just really an instrument input any instrument would do. If you wanted to plug directly into the interface, you could do that. Then the thing I have on top. Another thing to consider is just if this thing is going to sit on your desk, what controls you have? I have a big, giant volume knob. It can either be my input if I hit this preempt button, or my output meaning like the volume of music I'm hearing, If I hit this monitor button, Sandy, I just need one big volume knob is all I really need, okay? This Universal Audio is really nice one, okay? This is a high end but small unit. It's about 100 bucks, okay? You can get much more expensive ones and much cheaper ones, okay? If you want to go, if you want a really nice one that's not so expensive but has a lot of inputs, check out the company mark of the unicorn or Moto MOTU. I really like their stuff. They're less expensive but still really quite nice things. Now I will also tell you the number one unit that people are buying right now that I see students buying and they're loving, they're really affordable and they're really reliable and they sound great. Is this one the focus, right? Scarlet 22. Now this 22 is almost standard Normenclature. Now two inputs. Two outputs is what that's really saying. Here's the unit. It's got two inputs. It's probably a Pre on the back. Let's look at the back. Yeah, it's got two mice inputs on the back and two line inputs on the front. That means just like a guitar cable. It's got a big volume knob and some settings for your inputs. It's, let's look at the back. It's got two outputs. It's pretty simple. It's got, looks like USBC power, no thrills, but this one sounds good. It's reliable and it's 200 bucks. These are really popular everywhere. I see them all over the place right now because they have these red casing. I see students carrying these around. We've bought some of these for some of the smaller rooms at the studio that students are using. So these are great. You're not really going to find anything cheaper than this. There are bigger versions of this, like there's a 44 or 42. I can't remember. Something to consider. If you want to buy one, the max you can afford is 200 bucks. This is a great option for you. Now I'll just add here the website on is Sweetwater.com I do not have any affiliation with Sweetwater and get no kickbacks from what you buy from them. Just saying, I'll remind you, you may not need an interface. 6. Hardware Setup: Okay, really quickly. Let's talk about how you set this up. Let's assume you've got an interface and you want to set up a microphone to go to it and speakers to go out of it. Here's how you're going to set that up. You've got your computer. Let's say you've got a speaker here and a speaker here. Okay? So these are your speakers. Let's just put, whoops, speaker, bring to front. Okay, speak. Okay? We always want two speakers. Just don't look lined up. They should be the same size. I don't know why one is bigger than the other. That's weird, it doesn't matter. Okay, I'm not a graphics person, I'm really like a sound person. Okay, now let's go to our interface interface. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect our interface to our computer with whatever it needs. Probably USBC. I wouldn't at this point buy anything that's not using USBC or faster if anything is old school USB one, you might find some used gear that's using USB one that can be okay, that's pretty dicey. It's just not quite fast enough. But if you only have one input and two outputs, meaning like one microphone and two speakers, you could probably be okay with an old school USB, one connection. As long as you're not doing like a whole bunch of tracks at once, USB two and anything faster than that is just fine. Okay, so now we're going to go to audio output. This may also be called Monitor Out or something like that. Usually be labeled left and right. I'm going to make this smaller just to make it easier to fit. Okay, you'll see two outputs named Audio output left and right. We just need to connect our speakers to that, the input on your speakers. Remember, whenever you're connecting cables out, goes in and goes to out. This says out this. This will need to say some input, some input and some input. Okay, Now our speakers are connected. Now you will have a mic. Or line in a mic is going to be that three prong thing. A line is going to look like a guitar cable. Like a single cable. If it's a mic, you can plug a microphone right into it. Let's say this is our, okay, we can plug a mic right into that right on the same box. If it's a line input a guitar cable, you can also plug that right in. You might want to go for both of these. You might want to go through a preamp or something first. If you want a better sound, you don't have to, but you can for my microphones, if I'm just talking like this, this microphone is going directly into my audio interface. My guitar goes through a preempt, though. We can talk about preempts later. It's like a extra thing that makes the sound just like a little bit better. Okay, that's really all we need then in Ableton, we would just need to make sure that in our settings, our input and our output device is set to whatever our audio interface is. Because here it is, acting as both our input and our output. Okay, then you should be good to go. That's everything you need. 7. Microphones: Okay, let's talk about microphones. Again, I could talk for hours and hours about different types of microphones and what you might want to get and might not want to get. But we don't have time for that in this class. Instead, I'm going to go through the super basics about microphones. In the next video, we'll talk about for your situation, what you might consider buying. In short, there are three different types of microphones. There are dynamic microphones, condenser microphones, and ribbon microphones. Ribbon microphones are a pretty specialized thing. Unless you're building a whole recording studio, I would not worry about getting one of those. They're fragile. They probably don't do anything you can't do with the other two in a very basic way. Worry about ribbon microphones for now. Dynamic microphones look like this. If you asked a five year old to draw a picture of a microphone, they're probably going to draw this microphone. This is a dynamic microphone. What a dynamic microphone is good at is just screaming and do it. It's good. A loud stuff, quiet stuff. It's very versatile. They are not very fragile. You can drop this in a bunch of, in a cup of beer and it'll be just fine. This microphone is called an SM seven, and this is actually a fancy dynamic microphone, but this microphone is called an SM 58. This is actually a different version of it called Beta 58. But basically an SM 58 is the most standard microphone anyone has that exists anywhere. These are great live microphones for if you're recording vocals, especially if it's like a rock vocal, a rap or anything that's not like a super delicate like maybe an opera vocal. I wouldn't record with one of these most pop music creat. They're great for drums. Put this on your snare drum, on high hat on your kick drum is great. But when it comes to a very delicate sound, you might want something that is a condenser microphone. This is an example of one. There are 1 million different kinds. This is one that I like because it's rather affordable. This is Audio Technica AT 20:20 It sounds great. It's relatively cheap. These are like, I don't know, maybe 100 bucks. But it is a condenser microphone. It's going to be more sensitive. It's going to pick up more things. I used to use this as my vocal microphone for recording these lessons, but I stopped because it's too sensitive. I live near the airport and you would be able to hear planes flying overhead all the time, whereas this one is less sensitive to sounds around me. It doesn't pick up as much. But if I'm recording like a cello or any stringed instrument, really, I'm going to use this, a microphone. This is another example of a condenser microphone. This is what we would call a small diaphragm microphone because the part that actually picks up the sound is small. And that's going to make it good at higher frequencies, more delicate sounds. This is actually a super expensive microphone. These are, I think, maybe $1,000 apiece or so. This is $100 apiece. And this one, I think these are like $150 a piece right now, maybe 120. Somewhere in that range. Dynamic and condenser microphones are the two main kinds of microphones, like acoustic guitar, that doesn't plug in using this microphone. Maybe two of these microphones, If I'm recording like an opera singer, I'm probably using a condenser microphone. If I'm recording a rock singer, 58 all the way. 8. Microphone Buyers Guide: Okay, I'm going to give you a couple scenarios and then I'll tell you about what kind of mic I would buy in that case. First, you have $150 you can spend on microphones and that's it. That's the absolute top then, hands down, no question. By an SM 58, you can use it on a ton of stuff. It will go out of style. Probably never break. You could have that laying around for the rest of your life. It'll be a good investment, okay? Option two. You have about $300 to spend on microphones. I would get one SM 58.1 of these Audio Technica AT 2020s. Like I said, this gets you a condenser microphone that sounds good and is at a great price. Okay? There are way more expensive and fancier condenser microphones, but this one is just a weird little model that is cheap and sounds great. I love these things. I have like four of them that I use on stuff all the time. So that's what I would recommend if you have like 300 bucks and you want to start building a little arsenal of microphones, okay, Let's say you want to be able to record vocals at your house, in your home studio, you have unlimited money. The same advice, one of each of these. This for your more aggressive vocals. Then if we're going to do something really delicate, maybe have one of these. But if you want to record vocals and you only have 150 bucks, this is really all you need. This is it. Let's say you want to record vocals and maybe you want to do like podcast stuff. Podcast stuff, voice over work, anything like that. The hip thing to do right now for a good reason. If you watch video of people talking on a podcast, they're using one of these a lot. This is the very fashionable microphone to use. This is an M seven, like I said, I think this is an SM seven B. I don't remember the price point on these right now. I think it's around $200 So it's not crazy. They're a great microphone for dialogue, the great vocal microphone for singing in general, the filter out background noise a lot. If you want to do podcast stuff and have 200 bucks, this is a great one to get. Now if you're not going to get an audio interface, your only option is a microphone, that is a USB microphone. Then I have a hard time with recommendations because I don't have a lot of experience with USB microphones, but I do have experience with this one. This is the blue Yeti microphone. The thing I really liked about this one and the reason I bought it is because it does have a analog output. So I could use my audio interface if I wanted to. It's got this special five pin thing, but it comes with an adapter cable to get it into a normal XLR three pin cable. But it also has a USB. It sounds pretty darn good. This is a condenser microphone, It's very sensitive. It's going to pick up a lot of stuff. It's a great room mic If you just want to record everything that's happening in a room, like a band rehearsal or something, this is a really good one for that. The Blue company actually makes really great mics. They have a really cheap version of this called like the snowball or something like that. I think I have one somewhere. Actually, those are not so good, but this one's great. Okay, so that's why Mike buying advice, something like this one that I held up. Don't buy one of these. The only reason you should buy one of these is if you have a recording studio and money to burn. I'm sorry to say, they're great and they sound great. But if you've got a home studio and you're recording a few instruments here and there, you don't need something like that. You need 150 bucks for an SN 58 and you're going to be up and running and doing just great. Okay, let's get back to live and talk about how we record stuff in live. 9. Setting Up Tracks to Record: Okay, back to a live. Let's set up a track to record. I think first I'm going to go to a new session. Let's not save that one, okay? Now we could do this in session view or arrangement view, and in fact, we're going to do it in both in a minute. But just to keep things simple, I'm going to start with arrangement view. The first thing we need to do is find our audio track. Remember we have two Midi tracks here and two audio tracks here. If you want to make more tracks, remember that command to make a new audio track. And shift command to make a new Midi track. But what I'm going to do here is just for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to delete my track. So I'm going to delete this Midi track. I'm just going to click on the header over here. Delete and delete. I have one audio track. That's all I want for right now. You don't have to do that, It's just cleaner. Now, we have to go to our inputs and output section. Okay? Inputs, I need external in. Because I have a microphone from outside of live that is external to live. And it's coming in. Okay, I could configure that if I need to, but I don't. Now it says from external in, meaning that it's looking at my audio interface because that's what I told it in the settings was my input interface. It's looking at the settings and it sees three possible things that I could do. I could use the first input on it, I could use the second input on it. Or I could do a stereo track where I use both inputs, 1.2 Let's talk about stereo track really quick. A stereo track is going to record two things at once, basically, one for each speaker. I might want to do a stereo track. If I was setting up two microphones like this, and I was talking into it and wanted to record both microphones, that wouldn't be a great idea, but I could record them as one track, two microphones as one track. Maybe I'm recording drums and I'm putting two microphones over the top of the drums just to get the ambience of the drums. That could be a good stereo track. But if I'm recording a single sound source, something that is just one thing, like one microphone, or one guitar, or one banjo, then I probably almost always want to record it. Mono, meaning not stereo. Mono means just the one input. Okay? If I record myself right now, stereo, what it's going to do is it's going to record this mic on channel one, then channel two is just going to be empty. You're only going to hear my voice on one side. And it's annoying to deal with that. Don't do that. One microphone means just one channel. I could use channel one or two. We can see here that my microphone, this microphone is coming in on channel one. Let's select channel one, Okay? Now we see it coming in there. Now that little level meter is just impossible to read, right? It's just so tiny, there's nothing there. Think of that as just like a signal indicator. Just to showing you that like yes, there is a signal coming into that. My input is set up. I'm listening to the right input of my interface and it is this microphone. Now let's look at our outputs. At the bottom here, this track, I want to come out main. That's going to send it to my main mix down here. Okay, and that's great. We'll leave that just how it is. Almost always, you want your output to say main, unless you're doing something with groups or something like that. We'll talk about that later. Now, before I record Pro tip, rename your track, I'm going to just click on it and press command R. That's going to say rename. And I'm going to rename it what it is. The reason for that is that once I record it, it's going to make a clip. And it's going to name that clip like Vox. If I set it upright, if I don't rename this track, it's going to record that clip and it's going to call it audio one. And I'm going to record another thing, and it's going to call it audio 11, then gets confusing. If I rename the track first, it's going to more accurately name the clip. Okay, next thing to deal with is monitor modes. This can be a little bit of a head scratcher. I think we talked about monitor modes in the first class, but let's devote a whole video to it here because it can be a dangerous thing. Let's go a new video and work through that. 10. Monitor Modes: Okay, monitor modes. So here's what these say. Basically what these are controlling is routing your microphone or whatever your input is that you're recording, routing it through live and to your speakers, Okay? So what we're saying here is, do you want to hear that microphone through the speakers? If I say off, I'm saying no, I do not want you to play this microphone through those speakers, okay? If I say in, I'm saying yes, route that all the way through the speakers. Here I go. Now I'm doing it and I'm going to turn it back off. The reason I only did that for a split second was because that's how you make feedback, okay? And feedback can be really bad. It can hurt your ears, it can actually damage your ears, it can damage your speakers, it can damage your microphone. What feedback is in this case is the speakers are playing what's going through the microphone. The speakers make sound. The microphone picks up that sound. The speakers play that sound. The microphone picks it up and it goes in a loop, and it gets a little louder every time, and it just goes. That's feedback. If always makes feedback, why would anyone do that? Well, there's a very good reason if I put on headphones, it wouldn't do that. It wouldn't make feedback. If I put on headphones, there's a lot of time where you need to hear what you're doing. If I was singing along with the track, I might want to hear this vocal through my headphones. If I could do that, that would be great. But since I don't have headphones on, I'm definitely not going to click that in. You can think of this in, in the input monitoring as your headphones button. If you're wearing headphones, turn that on. It'll be great. If you're not wearing headphones, don't turn that on. Now that leaves us with auto. Auto means that it is going to route our microphone through our speakers when we are recording or when we're armed to record. But it's not going to do it when we're playing back. Like right now our track is not armed to record. It's not playing through. If I turned it on, if I armed it to record, now it's playing through and now we're in danger of feeding back. So we're going to stop that for a second. If I just want to record my voice here in my home studio, and I don't want to put on headphones, I'm going to leave this off that, I'm going to arm it to record. Now you can see I've got signal here. It's coming up, but it's all grade out. That tells us that this track is seeing my signal. That's good, but it's grade out, which is telling me that I can't hear it because monitoring is off. But it is going in there and it's not playing through my speakers in most studio settings. Leaving it on auto all the time is great. But for me, I'm going to leave it off while I'm recording For now, so that I don't have to put headphones on, that's what your monitor modes do. 11. Latency: Okay, one last thing before we get into actual hitting the record button. I know I'm talking too much like just let's make some music Jay, that's cool. Okay, but there's one last thing that I want to tell you about, that's latency. What latency is, is if I set this to auto so that it's playing through, I'm in danger of feeding back right now. But I just want to do one thing. I'm going to clap my hands then I want to see if I can tell the difference between when I actually clap and when I hear it through the speakers. Okay, So I couldn't hear it. You probably could, because the screen capture software adds like a lot of delay, a lot of latency. But this is what I'm testing for is latency. Latency basically means how long does it take for something to get through my microphone, down the cable, into my audio interface, converted, sent to live live, deals with it. Sends it back to the audio interface, converts it again, and sends it to my speakers. That takes a bit of time. Actually, if it's much more than 15 to 20 milliseconds, you're going to hear it technically. I think we can hear things that are anything longer than ten milliseconds you can hear, but you can live with it for ten to 20 milliseconds. More than that, it's really frustrating to work with if you have that problem. If there is a lot of latency that delay happening, it doesn't matter too much for just recording. Because if your recording is 20 milliseconds behind, that's fine. That doesn't really matter if you're trying to play along with something that's already in the track. It can matter if you need to hear yourself while you're playing. It can matter a lot because you're going to hear yourself delayed by 20 milliseconds, which is going to make you slow down and it does weird things to your brain. Here's how to fix it. First we're going to go to our preferences, okay. You can go to audio and we have this whole latency setting here. Okay. Basically what this tells me is that my overall latency is 26.5 milliseconds. Means my input latency live thinks it's about 14 milliseconds and output is about 11 milliseconds. You can do some messing around here. This buffer size is our big tool. If we make it smaller, the latency will go down. Now it's down to seven milliseconds, but it's much more taxing on our computer. Our computer may slow down as well. We have to find a balance between how much of our computer we can monopolize with this, how much latency we can live with. You're going to have to experiment with this to get it just right. This driver era compensation doesn't really do anything. What this does is it just adjusts these numbers to be more accurate. If you do some tests and you know that your interface actually only has two milliseconds of latency on the output. Then you can put that in there and it'll adjust it. But it's not really changing latency at all, is my understanding. It's just changing the number here. I'm going to take it down to 32 samples of a buffer size. That's going to drag on my computer just sitting here. It's at 5% right? If I take it back up to this many 1024 samples of a buffer size, just sitting here, my computer is at 0% right? The smaller this is, the less latency you will have, but the harder your computer is going to be working. What you're going to need to do is the first time you do this, if you feel latency is an issue, it might not be an issue for you at all. But if it is, come here and play around with this buffer size thing. See if you can get it tolerable by playing with the buffer size. If you can't, then you might just need a faster computer. But probably not, you can probably make it work. Don't worry, you don't need to buy a new computer. Okay, let's record some stuff. 12. Tracking in Arrangement View: Okay, let's record something. I'm all set up to record my voice here on this track. Okay, I'm arms to record. My monitoring is off. I can see my signal here, but I can't hear it. Perfect. Let's record something. I'm going to put my cursor where I want the recording to start, then I'm going to record now, here we go. You can see my signal coming in here. Nice and healthy. You can see the track I'm recording on. Everything is good now I've recorded a little snippet. I can go back and hear it by just putting the cursor at the beginning and pressing Play Record. Now, here we go. So you can see my signal coming in. Here, there it is. Everything looks great. If I want to continue recording, I can set another point and just hit record. And now I'm going to pick up right where I left off. Hurray. Now let's say that this was good, but now I want to record another track. Okay, easy enough. Let's make a new track command. And this one we're going to say, listen to input one. I can rename this, let's call this Vocals Two Arm. This to record it automatically. Unarmed. That one. I can do it again. Now if I hit record here, I'm going to hear this while I'm recording. Record. Here we go. Here is my track two. This is vocal track to track. I'm recording. Okay. We heard this one while we recorded this one. Now if I didn't want to hear that, I could easily just mute that track while I'm recording this one. That would be fine. I could also deactivate that clip with the zero key. But easier is just to mute what you don't want to hear. Now you might be wondering if that causes any bleed issue. Bleed would be the playback sound coming in through my microphone. Yes, that would create a bleed issue and it is not the best way to do it, the way I just did it where I recorded this while listening to this. I would really need to be wearing headphones to do that correctly so that there would be no bleed because then this would be in my headphones and not get picked up in this recording. If we just listen to this recording, we might be able to hear this track. Let's find out here. Yeah, it's there. It's really quiet, but it's there. Okay, let's talk about click tracks and then multi track recording. 13. Click Tracks & Metronome: Okay, let's spend a minute and talk about the metronome. Metronome is up here is these two little dots. If I click on it, it's going to turn it on. Now when I press play, we're going to hear a metronome going at our session tempo, which is 120 beats per minute. Okay, that's what our metronome sounds like. If I click on the little arrow next to the metronome, I've got some options. I can do a count in where, meaning if I hit record on something, it's going to do 1 bar before it starts recording, or 2 bars or 4 bars. I can change the sound to these three things. They're all fine. I can change the rhythm a little bit. I can give it like a triplet feel, a half time feel. A few other things I can say turn it on only when we're recording whatever. If I did like a 1 bar count in, it's going to look like this. I'm going to hit record and record on this vocal two track. Ready Go now we're see it counted for and then it started recording. This can be really useful especially like when I'm recording my guitar or something, I might set that to 2 bars so that I can hit record, grab my guitar, get all comfy and then hit the downbeat right where I want it. Now, if you want to adjust the volume of the metronome, this is something that is surprisingly tricky to find. It's buried in a really weird place. So let me show you where it is first. You can only get to it in session view. We go over to session view. We go all the way down to our master channel down here and what looks like the Solo button. This is actually going to be our metronome output volume. Okay? If you want to do something weird with the outputs, it's this que out here. You can say, I want that just to go to my left speaker or my right speaker or something like that. Okay. But you can only get it in session view as far as I know. Anyway, that will now go to our headphones. If I turn on headphones and record, I'm going to hear the metronome in my ears and it'll work just like a click track. The metronome will follow. Any time changes, meter changes, tempo changes, anything like that, it's very easy to work with. That's where your metronome is super important for when you're recording. Trying to stay on a beat. 14. Multitracking in Arrangement View: Okay, let's talk about multi tracking in arrangement view. Multi tracking means we're going to record multiple things at a time. Now, I only have two inputs on my audio interface. I can only record two things at a time. If you have more, you can record as many things at a time as you have inputs. Okay, let's do it. I'm going to make a new audio, I'm going to make two new audio tracks. This one will be J vocals, that's me, this one will be guitar. Okay? So I'm going to set this one to be my microphone, which it already is. I'm going to set this one to be my guitar, which is plugged into channel two. Now I have this track, so load. So you need to turn that off. Now here's the trick. You'll notice if you just click on Arm to record, you can only click on one at a time. The default here is that you can only record one track at a time. However, there's a quick way around it. I'm going to hold down command and click Record on a second. I believe it's Alt, I think on a PC. Now I'm set up to record vocals on one track and my guitar on another track through a different input input two. Let's try it. Okay, little, check up my guitar, it's there. It's a little loud. Remember, you don't want those meters to turn red. That means you're getting too loud. I want to stay right in that range. We got a nice good signal. Okay, so let's record. I'm the world's worst singer, so I'm not gonna sing anything. I'm just gonna talk yo now I'm talking. Okay, that's enough of that. Neat, we did it. Okay. So we can hear that back. I'm going to turn off arm to record here so that we can hear what we're doing. The world's worst singer, I'm not going to sing anything, just going to talk, Now I'm talking. So we Okay, but it worked, so that's how we multitrack record. Okay, next let's go into how comping works. 15. Comping: Okay, let's talk about commpingmping is the term we use to mean like doing multiple takes. Sometimes this is called like punching in, although that's slightly different. But really what comping is, it's recording a bunch of takes and then editing together a perfect take. Let's do that. It's really easy to do. Let's go out here, maybe just so that we don't have to hear my voice anymore, I'll do this on guitar. Okay, so I'm going to record a little progression and then screw it up. Let's turn on the metronome. I'll go out to here. Arm, this one to record. Go. I should probably figure out what I'm going to play. Okay, here we go. Okay, so I can see that that recording was quite quiet and I could feel that it was all over the beat. Right. So let's do it again. Okay. I'm just going to start right at the same spot and record that same thing again, if I can remember what I did. Okay, That's pretty good, except I kind of flubbed the ending. So let's go right around. Well, let's do one more take. Oh, just that last chord. Okay, let's get just that last chord. So I'm gonna jump in right near the end. Okay, that's time I played the totally wrong chord. So let's do it again. Okay, so now I have a bunch of takes and it looks like I was recording over each take, but I actually wasn't. All the takes have been kept and I just have to sift through them. Okay. So in order to sift through them, I'm going to go to the track header here. I'm going to control click, right click. And I'm going to say takes down here. Okay, now we see all the times I played through it. Now if I remember right, my second take was good for about the first half, so I'm going to highlight that and press return. Okay, then my third take was good for the rest of it, except for press return, that very last chord which is going to be that one. Okay, now what we have up here is the composite Take all of these put together. If you want to take just like one beat of something, just highlight it and press return and it's going to sneak it into that composite take. Okay, I'm just going to hit undo to get rid of that. It does a pretty good job at cross fading to make this sound smooth. I don't know, but you can always tweak it. Let's hear what it put together, okay? Pretty good I can turn off that metronome. Here it again, just these changes, okay? Probably adjust that entrance with the volume a little bit, but more or less it's pretty good. This is really smooth. If we're happy with this, we can go back here and just say turn off lanes there, we have our track. Or if we're not happy with it, we can keep layering and more and more we can have an infinite number of takes. I think it's a really great tool now, this tool was new in Live 11. It's not new to live 12, but if you have something older than 11, you won't be able to do this. It's very smooth, it works great. 16. Overdubbing / Punching In/Out: Now, I mentioned a minute ago that this is like punching in, if you're familiar with that term, but comping is a little bit different. Let's actually look at how you would punch in. It's pretty easy to do. Here's what I'm going to do just for demonstration purposes. I'm going to combine this into one track. I'm going to highlight it and press command J. What that means is render this as a new clip. Okay, this is just going to make a new clip. It's going to merge all of the different segments together. You don't have to do this, I'm just going to do it to make things clean so I can see. Okay. Now let's say right here I screwed up. Okay? And I want to punch in now if you don't know what this term means, in the old days we had when you were recording, you might do a take of something and then if you screwed up like one note, you could do a take again and there was a little controller and you would hit record right when you got to the spot and then you hit it again to stop recording. Because sometimes it was just a really short amount of time, people got really tense this machine and they called it punching in and out. You might do this whole thing again and then we're only going to record for this little bit and then we're going to get out again. Here's how you do it. These are punch in markers. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my loop bracket here. I'm going to put it around what I want up here. Instead of saying loop, I'm going to say punch in and punch out. I can have it loop also, but I don't need it to when I hit record now. It's not going to record through this. It is going to record right here, and then it's going to stop recording when we get past it. Okay, let's do something just completely weird. Okay, here we go. So I'm playing. It's not recording now. It's recording. All right. Now it's out. Okay. So I just recorded that one spot. I didn't hit anything. I just set up the bracket, told it to punch in and out, then I record right here, and it starts recording right on that spot only. Now, why would you use this over the comping method? To be honest, I would really only use the comping method at this point. I haven't used this punch in, punch out thing in a while because camping is just so much better. I can just play and then pick my favorite stuff. There's not a huge need for this anymore. This is how you want to do it, then that's totally fine. It's still possible to you if we want to hear the ugly thing I just created. Brilliant. Okay, so that's punching in. Punching out. 17. Tracking & Multitracking in Session View: Okay, let's do tracking and multi tracking in session view. When it comes to recording, session view works a little bit differently. You'll notice that in our clip slot grid, we have a little square next to all of our slots. Square means stop. Just like up here. Stop. Okay. Now, I don't need to stop anything at the moment, but you'll notice that my guitar track only has circles. That's because it's armed to record and it is all set up to record my guitar because that's what we were just doing with this track. If I click one of these circles, it's going to start recording and then I will hit Stop. Okay. It's as easy as that. I just recorded this. If I double click on this clip, you can see there's that strum. Okay. So I could record more. I could record another thing. Sure. And another thing and another thing. I don't even have to stop one and I can keep going all day long. Okay, cool. Right, so I've got all these clips now. Let's unarm that and we can launch them. Okay, we can obviously tidy them up if we want. We can say you start right there or so. We can tell this one to start up there. We can do all kinds of funny stuff with them. We'll get into that more when we start talking about really producing stuff. But, but recording and session view is actually really easy. Multitrack recording works the same. We can record there, I can command click and record here. Also, just keep in mind your monitor settings are up here. You may have asked yourself earlier and I didn't address it. Does the monitoring matter on my guitar? Not really. I could leave it on. I'm not going to create feedback because it's not a microphone. I could leave it on if I wanted and hear things through my speaker as I'm playing, that would be fine. Anyway, mind your monitor settings. Once I'm all set up here, I'm just going to hit record on both of these. Then they're going to start on the next downbeat. This is how session view works in that there's a global clip launch, it's this button right here. So that means that new clips are only going to launch on a bar. Okay, if I click Record, it's going to wait till the next bar to actually start recording. Even though my metronome is making us do that too, this is what's actually going to do it. If I wanted to start recording like right away, I can set that to none. But having it set to 1 bar is actually really good because that gives me time to click both of these before the end of the bar so that they launch at the same time and start recording at the same time. Otherwise, recording in session view is virtually the same as arrangement view. In some ways it's actually easier and more efficient because we can just keep hitting these buttons all day long. 18. Effects: Okay, a quick word about effects. Let's go back to arrangement view now. You'll see everything is grayed out because that's how arrangement view works. It says you are working in session view right now, not arrangement view where everything is grayed out. And I need to say I would like to take back over arrangement view, and I do that with this little button. Okay, now we're saying we are in arrangement view, and session view is effectively muted effects. If I want to put effects on this track, the way that signal flows in live is that the effects always come after the recording. If I was to put effects on this track before I recorded, those effects would not be in the audio. I can add effects later. Okay, let me explain that a little bit better. Let's say let's do it. Let's go to audio effects and echo. Let's put it on this track even better. Let's put it on this track. Okay. Now we're going to hear my voice through a bunch of delay. Okay? So I'm going to record it and you'll see, check one to you here is my voice. Through a whole bunch of delay and blah, blah, blah. Okay. So I accidentally left that one recorded arm to record. That's fine. I'll just delete that. Okay. So here's what I just did. Check check on ice. Here is my voice through bunch neat, huh? Okay. So the question is, is that delay in this audio, right? The answer is no because this recording happened and then it went down here and added the effects and then to the output. In other words, I can turn off that delay and we won't hear it. Check one to you here is my voice through a whole bunch of. Okay, the reason I'm pointing this out is to tell you that you can add effects later. If you add effects to a track that you're recording on, that's great. You can totally do that. But just know that you can modify those effects later. They're not printed into the audio. I can take my guitar here, which has the blandest of tones, and put on a guitar amp emulator. This is a plug in called guitar rig that just has amp emulators. Let's do styles. Here's a Prince tone. Okay. I will put Prince's tone on this guitar track. The world's worst singer. I'm not anything. I've still got that big delay on it too, now I'm talking. It's like the purple rain tone anyway, so I can add that after the fact. The effects do not need to be on the track before I record it. They can always be added after. Okay, let's move on. 19. A Big Recording Session: Okay. Before we move on from audio recording, I thought I'd show you a project. Recent Dish project that I did. This was a project I did not here but in my university studio. What I have here is a jazz band. Like a big band. One thing I've set up here that we haven't talked about is groups. I have a rhythm section group. The advantage of there being this big group here is that I can close it and just tuck away all those tracks. Right? Here's saxes, here's brass, here's a bunch of miti stuff. If I look at the rhythm section to put something in groups, you can just actually select by using shift click to select a bunch of things and command G like group that'll put it into groups. You can see this drums as another group. You can have groups within groups. Here are all the drum mikes. This was a big project because we had to record the rhythm section and then the saxes, and then the brass. Then I imported all this Midi stuff just to reference, so I could go through and clean up the pitches like a lot. I just got the score as a Midi file. Those Midi tracks aren't doing anything, they're just there. So I can see what node is supposed to be playing and then I can help tune it. This was a big project to get it sounding really good. So here's a little taste, this is a really early version of this before I really got in the weeds to edit it. But you can see what I'm doing here with comparing the Midi to the recorded notes to help me adjust them. This was a big project and a big recording session. This is what a big recording session can look like sometimes. 20. MIDI Recording Fundamentals: Okay, let's transition over to talking about Midi. Now. Midi works a lot different than audio recording, primarily because when we're recording Midi, the thing we need to remember is that Midi is data. It's ones and zeros, right? We don't really need to go through an audio interface for Midi because it's already digital. If I press a note here, it sends a message to the computer that just says note number 60 was pressed and how hard I pressed it, that's all it says. My computer then has to take that information and say, okay, note number 60 was pressed. What do we do with that? If we're connected to an instrument, then we know, okay, make that note Sound And that's easy enough to do. It's analog. Anything. If I look at a Midi controller like this, there is no audio going down this wire. Okay? This wire is USB wire. There's no sound in that. This keyboard can make zero sounds, okay? This does not make any sound at all, except for the plastic hitting together does not transmit any sound, I should say, to the computer. Okay, all of the sounds are in the computer. Midi keyboards just send note on and note off messages. And they can send a few other things too, but primarily that's all they send. Okay, this section, we're going to go over everything you need to get set up to be able to input Midi stuff. To record it, we'll look at a bunch of different Midi controllers. Midi instruments, setting everything up. And then a couple tricks that are built into live for having a really efficient workflow, including automatically recording everything you do all the time. It's a little freaky, but I'll show you, trust me. Okay, let's dive in and talk about our hardware needs for Midi recording. 21. Hardware Needs for MIDI: Okay, so when we talk about recording and Midi hardware, what we're really talking about is some kind of Midi keyboard. Right Now, here's the thing. When we think about Midi keyboards, we tend to think about things like this. Okay? Now there's a lot going on here. What we have here is a piano like keyboard. It's got the piano keys that you're familiar with. It also has some pads and some dials. Okay? These can be mapped to do a whole bunch of different stuff. We'll come back and talk about those later. The keyboard part is what's going to play in notes. Now what's interesting about this is that most Midi controllers look like a piano keyboard. And the reason they do is because most people know what a piano keyboard does, right? But other than kind of tradition, there's no real reason that your Midi device needs to be a piano shaped one. They have Midi devices for virtually everything. If you want, you can find Mitty guitars, you can find Miti saxophones, Midi violins, Midi cellos. A keyboard is probably the most versatile thing because we can just flop our hands on it and do whatever we want. But if you are skilled with another instrument, you should totally get a Midi controller that is that instrument, like do what's comfortable. I'll show you a Midi guitar in a couple videos from now, but back to hardware needs, you need a Midi controller of some kind if you want to do any Midi recording and playing. This is one. The good thing about these Midi controllers is that they are made of plastic. They're relatively cheap. Like this one is, this is innovation launch key mini. I don't remember exactly but it's probably about 100 bucks or less. These are not designed to go on tour and be on stage, really. They're cheap plastic things and they don't need to be anything bigger than that. I showed you earlier the role in seaboard that I have connected to this computer. That's a fancy one. That's like a really fancy one. This is the cheaper one. Don't get anything fancy. If you want a piano like one, all you really need is some keys. Then you can decide if you want the keys to be full size piano keys. Do you want them to be weighted keys so they feel like a piano? Most of these are not going to feel like a piano. They're going to feel like pieces of plastic. That's what they're designed to do. If you want one that feels like a real piano, then you're going to be spending a little bit more. But when you're like programming drums, you don't care if it feels like a real piano or not. This is really our only piece of hardware that we need is some Midi keyboard. We don't need an audio interface, although an audio interface may help you. I'll explain that in just a second. Actually, I'll explain that right now when we plug in one of these to our computer. Here's how we're going to do it. If you have one like this or anything that's new Ish in the last like five or so years, it's going to have a USB output on it. This one. Where did it go? Right here. Usb. I can plug this in just with USB, That's all I need to do. A lot of audio interfaces have a USB port for this reason you can plug it into the USB port on the audio interface, but you don't need to. You can put it in any USB ports, just fun. But if you have anything older, like a bigger keyboard or something, it might have actual Midi outputs on it. I was looking around my studio for something that has old school Midi outputs. The only device I could find quickly accessible was this. This is a innovation. Remote zero. This has no keyboard, although they do make a version with a keyboard, just controllers. So it's, you can map this to the faders on the screen, it's got some drum pads and some dials that you can map to do different things. I used to use this as a live performance tool, but on the back you can see that it has where are they here? These are Miti outputs and inputs. Okay. They have this five pin connection. I can't easily plug this into my computer if I really wanted to use this with the Midi ports. I need to get a Midi cable. I need to have a box that converts a Mi signal to a USB signal. Okay. I can get a cheap little box that does that, or a lot of audio interfaces have that built in as well. Something to consider when you're buying an audio interface. If you want to use an older keyboard like that, you're going to need one that has Midi ports. Now luckily this one has both. It has Midi ports and a USB right there. I can just plug this in with USB, which is how I used to use it. We really just got to plug this into our computer and then we're good to go. There's some set up stuff we need to do in live. We'll do that in just a second. But I want to go into another buyer's guide thing and also show you how Midi guitars work while we're on the topic, because I happen to have one right here. 22. MIDI Guitars: Okay, I'm going to talk to the guitar nerds for a minute here. I say guitar nerds affectionately because I am obviously one of them. But if you're not a guitar nerd, this should be useful to you. Also just to know that the vast different kinds of Midi controllers that are out there, they don't all have to look like pianos. When it comes to Mitty Guitars, there are really three products on the market right now that are interesting to me. There's a ton of products on the market, but these are the ones that have caught my attention. The Wackiest one is this one. This is made by a company out of Nashville called Artiphone. They call this the instrument one. This is weird because if you can see it, it's got no strings but just a rubber fret board and string feeling thing. It's pressure sensitive. You can play it like a guitar, you can play it like a drum. You can even use an app like a phone and bow it virtually and treat it like a violin. It's quite versatile, it's weird and quirky. I've goofed around with it, but I've never really recorded anything with it. It's not quite as responsive as I would love, but I dig the design of it. It's cool. It's got a little speaker built in so you can do some stuff with it if you connect it to a phone. Another one is made by a company called Zivix, which is actually here in Minnesota. I think this is called the jam stick you can get, these are all over the place right now. This is, this is actually like an early prototype. Don't tell them, I still have it. I did some work for them in the early days of this product. The thing that's cool about this is that it has real strings and they're just muted. You don't really hear those pitches, then you just play like normal. All the sensors and everything that it needs to make the Midi data are in the fret board. I think they're infrared actually. It's really responsive. It's really accurate. And they have a full size version of it now. They have a full guitar version that I haven't played around with yet. But that looks really cool because it gives you the real feel of a guitar. It's real strings. But at the moment, my favorite Midi guitar device is this. This is a normal guitar, is just any electric guitar, you can put this on it. This is a Midi pick up. What's super cool about this is that this is a wireless Midi pick up. This is the Fishman Triple Play, which is the best one that I found. What happens? This is the brains of it right here. And it goes through this wire and then there's a little pick up right there. That's the actual Midi pickup. What that pick up has to do is figure out what node I'm playing, so it has to do a lot of computation, convert it to a Midi signal and send it over Bluetooth to my computer. It's weird, but it works really well. So I have it connected right now and I have it set to a piano. So you can see in live, it's coming in here and there's a piano sound on it. This is the benefit of like Midi recording, right? Like if I want to play piano, I could just play guitar. You can hear it kind of stutter a little bit. Sometimes you can clean that up in the Midi, but it's actually, it's pretty responsive and pretty fast. I can just map my guitar to a piano if I want to do something different. Let's say I want to to strings. Let's go to Orchestra Strings. Let's say cello. Okay. I want to play the cello. Sure. See, it's like really responsive and really nice. I can play chords, it's great. I'm better at this than I am at piano. Sometimes I enter notes this way. Most of the time I use a piano because I can't play piano enough to do what I need to do. There's a ton of different Midi controllers out there. There's literally tons of them. Okay, let's do another little buyer's guide segment, and I'll show you what I would buy, depending on what you're interested in doing. 23. MIDI Controller Buyers Guide: All right, let's talk about what you should get here. If you're going to buy a Midi controller, the things you need to think about are how big you want it to be and how many extra buttons and things you want on it. This is the one I was just holding up. It's two octaves of notes and maybe 16 pads and eight knobs. A couple other things that's small, you're never going to play piano on that, right? But you can put in a melody, you can put in a drum beat, you can put in bass lines. It's perfect for a small studio. There's a bunch of different companies that I find to be really reliable, really solid, and very affordable. I've just been a fan of their my controllers for a while. I like this one for just small little stuff. This is great. It's 100 bucks, that's great. You don't need to spend more than 100 bucks on this. They also have bigger ones. Here's a 37 key one, it's exactly the same except it's got more keys. This one's 200 bucks, 41, 49. Okay. So this is the Novation launch key line. All of these are great. This is a different line. I have one of these and I took it to the studio, but I've been kicking around one of these for years. I think this is also a launch key. This is a launch key, 49 with weighted keys, so it's a little bit fancier. But seriously, I've had this exact keyboard for probably five years and it's gotten thrown around and all kinds of weird stuff. It's super solid. These innovation ones are great. That's what I'd recommend you go to this one and just say like, do you want a little tiny one that you can just play in some notes or something fancier? Now if you want to look at different kinds of Midi controllers, could look around Amazon, but you might want to look around some other music specific websites to find some of the custom controllers here. Is that Midi pick up that I like the Fishman Triple Play, it's a bit expensive, 430, but the best Mi pick up for a guitar that I've ever used. It's really, so it works great, highly recommend that. Those are my recommendations. If you're going to buy something, buy one of those. There's really no reason that you need to spend much more than 100 bucks on a good midi keyboard that you can do everything you need on. 24. Hardware Setup: Okay, let's get our Midi controller to talk to live. This is super easy. We do need to go to settings or our preferences. What's cool about this is that if everything works right, you should only have to do this one time. Once you set up a keyboard, it's set up for good, even if you unplug it and replug it in later. We're going to go to Preferences, That's up in your live menu and then Settings, or you can press Command, or I think Alt on a PC. Okay, We're going to go to this link Tempo and Midi tab. Okay? And then we're going to go down here. We have two different chunks of stuff here. We have this Midi, where we see all these drop down menus, and then we have inputs and outputs. Okay? In Midi, what we're really looking for here is any control surface, okay, Like the push is a control surface. I don't know why it doesn't see my push three right now, but it still sees my push two which is not plugged in, which is why it's grade out here. Here it sees the launch key mini. Let me define Control Surface. Control Surface is something like this that has a bunch of controllers on it. It's a little different than a Midi keyboard. However, a Midi keyboard could be both like this one. This one has Mitty keys, but it also has some controller things, knobs, faders, and things like that. It can be both. If I just want to play notes, then I'm going to go down to this input section. If you're setting up a control surface, you need to make sure it shows up here. It might require you to install some drivers or something like that on your computer. Any software that came with it, you're going to look for it here and set up input and output to select the same thing all the way across but for your average run of the mill Midi keyboard. Okay, here's where you see my push three, My Fishman Triple Play. That's my Midi guitar. Some other USB Midi interface that it doesn't know about. And my two Seaboard controllers. You don't see this one because it's not plugged in right now. I'm going to plug it in and you'll see what happens. This is how easy this can be. I'm going to plug this in with the USB cable to my computer. If we look down here, there it is. No edits there just popped up. Okay, here it is. It shows up twice, and a lot of keyboards and things will show up twice. We can open it and see some settings, but we shouldn't need to go into there at all once it shows up. And again, it should show up automatically. Really, any keyboard that's USB, should show up automatically if it doesn't check to see if there's any drivers or any software that needs to be installed for that keyboard, but most of them won't need anything at this point. Okay, now we're going to go over to all these little checkboxes. First thing you want to do is make sure the first check box under track is turned on. Okay. Turn those on. The rest of these you don't have to turn on. What the track setting is going to do is say this can put things into a track. In other words, this thing can play notes. That's what it's allowed to do. If we go to sync, we can say this thing can control the tempo. If we turn on remote, we're going to say this thing can control the transport of live. Essentially like if your keyboard has a play stop pause button on it, you can turn this on and it'll be able to control live. This keyboard Novation Launch key doesn't have a play stop pause, so I'm just going to leave it off. Pe MPE is a high resolution mitte. Some keyboards can do it and some can, these Eboard ones can do it. It's turned on. The able to push three can do it. It's turned on. This launch key cannot do it. It's not turned on. If your keyboard is capable of it, turn it on. We're going to talk more about NPE in just a few videos. Just hold on to that for a minute and I'll show you what MPE looks like. Now, whatever settings you do there, you might as well do the same settings for the outputs. Launch key, turn on track. I probably don't need these other ones, I'm not sure why they're on. That's it now if I unplug this keyboard and then plug it back in later, the same information is going to come back up. Then. Also, remember I think we talked about this in the first class. We have in the live interface this special little tiny square right up there. That little square has one function and one function only. It's going to light up when it sees any Midi information at all. When in doubt, plug in your keyboard, smash your fingers on the keyboard. There we go. There is that light. Okay? Always, just look for that. It's a really quick way to say, is Midi working? Yep, Midi is working. That's your set up. It's actually really, quite simple. 25. Chase MIDI Notes: Okay, there's a weird little problem in Midi. Sometimes that can come up from time to time. There's a strange setting to fix it. In this video, I just want to tell you what that weird problem is, so that you know how to spot it and then how to fix it. If I make a Midi clip, I'm not even going to record something. No, I'm just going to put it in. Okay. Here's a Midi note. Okay. And I think I still have a piano loaded up. Nope, I'm chelling, but that's great. Okay, let's not loop it, and let's just hear it. Okay? What a Midi note is, it's really two like messages from the keyboard. It, when I play a note, it says a note has been pressed. And then the velocity at which it has been pressed, the volume. Okay? It doesn't say anything else until I lift up my finger. And then it says that note has been lift up. Nothing's happening in this area. It's just waiting for the note of message. If this was to happen, watch closely what I'm about to do here. Here's the beginning of the note. That's where that message is that says I played a note. If that goes back, okay, now I'm going to start playing from right here. And stop playing there. What's going to happen? Nothing. We're not going to hear that note because we didn't get the note on message. We didn't get the part of the message that says a note has been played. This used to be a really big problem. It still is a problem If you're using a dow that doesn't know how to compensate for that, what we need to do is get the start of the message over the start of the clip. Now you might think, well that's really obvious, but watch this. What if I was to do this? Boom, That's all it takes. Now, I'm not going to hear that note. All right? It looks perfect. But I'm not going to hear it because the start of that note is just the hair off. Okay. So the solution is go up to Options and then Chase Midi notes. What that means is that Live is going to figure out what notes are happening and make their sound. Anyway, now we'll be able to hear this note. Fairness. Just be sure that Chase Midi note option is on. Once you get into doing more complex Midi sequences, that will be something that drives you nuts. If you don't have that Chase Midi note setting on. Leave that on. 26. MIDI Signal Flow: Okay, next I want to talk a little bit about Midi signal flow. How Midi travels around within live. Once it gets there, this is important, especially when it comes to effects. Okay? I have a Midi channel here. When I play my little Novation launch key mini here, it's going to come into this track. And the reason it's going to come into this track is because here on my inputs it says all ends. That means it's listening to all Midi devices that I have connected to this computer. Any of them are going to come in on this track right now, but they're also going to come into this track. Right? The reason that I know they're going to route to this track only is because this one is armed to record. Okay? That means that this is the only one that is going to accept the Midi data coming in. And it's got cellos on it right now, which is great. Okay. The Midi notes come in, and they go into whichever track is armed to record. Whichever Midi track is armed to record. Now let's look down at device view. I have an instrument here, okay? This whole thing is this particular instrument, it's a long one. We can see over here the dots, right? I think I've talked about these before. These dots mean it's data, it's just numbers going in, right? But on the other side of the instrument, we see an audio signal, right? That is audio data. This instrument is converting Midi data, the dots, to audio data, the sound levels. Okay? From here, our audio signal now goes out and then over to the main audio track here. You can see it coming in right there. And there it is. Okay. Now let's go back here, because I want to point out two more things. If we go to Midi effects, and we put a Midi effect on this track, let's say our pegator, okay, I dropped that on the track. You can see here, here's our Midi dots. And here's our Midi dots. Meaning the arpetiator needs to deal with Midi information. It can't deal with audio. We can put as many Midi effects as we want on this track, but they must come before the instrument is going to do that automatically. If I try to drag this out over here, it's just going to say no and put it back over there. Midi effects need to come before the instrument, because they deal with Midi data, audio effects. If I put an audio effect on this track, it has come after the instrument, right? Because audio needs to come in and audio comes out. Audio effects can go after the instrument because we have essentially an audio signal after that. It's a cool sound. Okay. Media effects before the instrument, audio effects after the instrument. But either way, at the end of this chain of stuff, no matter how many things are in here, this signal goes up to our main, or our master fader, sometimes referred to as the two track. I like to call it the master fader. That's just what I learned, but all of the above are true. Okay, now let's start recording some stuff. 27. Recording MIDI in Arrangement View: Okay, let's record some stuff. So here's what we're going to do. We've got this one track set up with my novation. It's got cello sounds on it. Let's delete this echo and this arpegiator. Okay, perfect. Okay, I'm going to go up to this fifth bar here. Just for fun. I have an idea what I'm going to do with these first few bars, but I'm going to put my cursor here. I'm going to start my metronome. I'm going to give myself a 1 bar lead in with the metronome. I'm going to turn the metronome on now. I'm just going to play some fun. I'm just going to noodle around in C major for a minute, I think, and play some celloE stuff. And then I want to try to add some drums to it and we'll see what happens. Okay? I don't have to worry about my monitoring really at all here because there's no microphones that are recording into live. And the Midi signal that's being sent is just mid, there's no danger of it feeding back. That is super easy. I've got this armed to record and now I'm going to go to my big record button and hit it. Okay. Neat, that was cute. Let's go do another track here and let's put a drum machine on it. So I'm going to hide my filters here and let's see what we can do here. Now, I'm going to play in drums, so when I'm auditioning drums right now, I'm really just listening for the sounds, not the pattern that it's playing. Well, let's go down on the ways. That's cool, we'll do that. So I'm going to throw that on this keyboard or on this track. Now I have a drum kit. So now I'm going to play some notes. I'm going to find my drums. So you see if you look down here, you can see what notes I'm playing. Like there's no drum sound there. If I play a lower, lower, lower. Now I'm getting into the drums on my keyboard. If I want to get to the majority of the drums, I need to go down an octave with the octave button on this keyboard, All right? Okay, so let's try to record some drums. This is going to be a little sloppy, but because I'm going to try to hold the keyboard up so you can see what I'm doing. Okay, so I found that my main kick and snare I want is here and here. Okay, so let's try to record a beat with just those. So I'm on the next track it's to record. Let's try it. Okay? It's Space Bar to stop. Not bad. Wasn't perfect, but not bad. Okay. I sure wish I had some high hats in there, so let's find some high hats. Okay, There's my best high hat. So I could overdub on this track. The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to record right on top of this track. But if I just hit record again a second time, it's going to overwrite what I have, okay? And I don't want to do that. Instead, I'm going to click this little plus sign, that means Midi overdub. Now that means that we're going to keep what's there and I'm going to add more to it. Let's try recording now. I'm just going to play in a high hat and all the way through this basically actually maybe I'll have it enter right here with the rest of this. Okay, a little sloppy. So let's go in there and let's just select all of those and command for quanti. Okay, I should make it a little tighter and maybe I actually quantize everything. Okay, now let's hear that. We'll turn off the metronome. Let's turn our high hats down a little bit. I'm going to select them and then just grab the high hat velocity and pull it down a little bit. That was a weird quantas error there. Okay, neat. So I recorded cello pad thing and some drums. Great, so let's move on. 28. MIDI Takes and Comping: Okay, let's talk about coping and take lanes in the Midi world. What you just saw me do is use the overdub functionality to be able to play more Midi notes and add onto a Midi clip I had already made. It's like recording two things, but keeping both of them compiling. Both of them. Now that's not overdubbing. Let's do a comping experiment here. Let's take my drums, and let's just try to do something really simple. But I'm going to screw it up and then we're going to overdub it. In fact, let's do this. Let's take 2 bars. Let's loop it. Let me hit command L. So I'm just going to record these 2 bars over and over, and over and over and over. Okay, and then we'll see if we can piece together a good take. This is going to work basically the same as it works with audio. Here we go. Okay, let's keep that last one. All right, so I'm going to go here and I'm going to select show take lanes. And here's all my takes at that, right? So let's zoom in. Okay, The last one was the best, but let's say I liked this and this, okay. There's my composite all put together is going to be weird. Okay. I just grabbed random stuff, but really what I liked was this one all the way through. So let's get returned on that, and now I have the best take. Cool. What we have here is essentially the same thing as in the audio realm. Right? We could just record, and record, and record, and go through and splice together the best take by showing the take lanes. You can see that it showed the take lanes for the couple times I did this, but it's not showing them separately of overdubbing. Here's one with the overdub and here's one without. It's just showing my two takes. Great. I'm going to hide those. Take lanes. Show take lanes. Cover them up and move on. Okay, next let's talk about capture. That's the spooky thing where it just kind of tells you what you were just doing. 29. Capture: Okay, has this ever happened to you? You're playing around on your Midi keyboard or your guitar or whatever, and you find something that's cool. Look where was that clap? There it is. And you're like cool. That was great. But I got distracted and I lost it. I forgot what I was doing now. Or you figure out some harmony and you're like, oh, I got it. And then you can't find those notes again. Watch this. This is going to blow your mind. See this little square up here? This is called capture. If I just click on it, it's going to say, hey, here's the last couple things you were doing. Here's that beat. All right? It's just like magic. It's like, it's always recording di behind the scenes and just not telling you. So if I went up here and I said, that's cool. Sound I liked it. Oh shoot. I wasn't recording. What am I going to do? Oh, hit Capture. Boom. There's what I just played. It's like magical and awesome. So don't forget about that. There's nothing to set up or nothing to do. Just remember that if you're noodling around on a mitty keyboard and you aren't recording, you can always hit that capture button and get the last chunk of stuff that you were playing. It's almost creepy, but there it is. 30. Recording MIDI in Session view: Okay, let's go over to Session View and see if we can do the same types of things. Remember we have basically the same mixer here. We have the same cello section is loaded up, the same drums are loaded here. If I want to record in session view, I'm just going to hit one of these record buttons and start playing Gorgeous. We're running to record another one. Just hit another button, hit another button, we can go on all day. Really simple works, just like audio recording. If I want to switch over to this one, we're going to switch over our arm to record is going to come with us in this case. And I can just play some drums. Okay, but you get the point. Okay. So super easy, everything comes right with us. We just sit record and on a Midi track, and we're often running. 31. Velocity: Okay, let's talk about velocity and editing our velocity. Now I know that we looked at this a little bit already in the first class in this series, but I want to go into a little bit more detail here. While it's in context of media recording, remember the velocity is the volume. If I play a note really soft on my keyboard, it's going to send a low velocity and therefore play a quiet note. If I play a note really hard, it's going to play a loud note using a loud velocity. But I can change it. Let's go to this one. Let's look at one of these clips. If I go down here, I'm going to grab this little bar and make this bigger. This is my velocity, okay? Why are they set the way they are? Because this is how I played it in. It recorded the pressure of me pushing every key. This is how I did it. Okay. I can do a few things with this. First I could level them out. If I wanted to just flatten this, what I could do is select them all. I'm just going to click in this area and then select command A. They're all highlighted now. I can grab one of them, It doesn't matter which one and pull them down or pull them up and move them around. But if I want to just flatten them out, the fastest way to do it is just to smash them all up to the top and then pull them back down. That's going to set them all to the top, top, top. And then you can pull them down, and now they're all even, there's not a great reason to, to flatten them off like this, especially if you want them to sound natural and human. This is going to not do that. It'll be subtle though. I'm going to say undo, go back to the way I naturally played it in. Now another thing I could do here is give them a variation amount. If we go to this deviation, I'm going to select all again in this deviation I'm going to turn up a little bit here. What that's going to do is each one of these is going to play within this range now. Okay, It adds a little bit of randomness that can add a little bit of humanization and natural sound to it. I've been having a lot of fun with this deviation thing lately so that it gives it a little more expressivity. Again, very subtle. But it's rather nice. I can use this ramp feature just to say here I'm going to turn off deviation for the moment. With this ramp, I can say start low and go high, or the opposite. High, Start high, low. I can do just ramps with it, give it direction. Then of course, if I really just want to annihilate the stuff I played in, I can just hit Randomize here. And I can keep hitting it over and over and it's going to send a random velocity to all the notes. This can be fun if you're just trying to switch things up and come up with some new ideas. Something to play with? No, I should have said earlier, if you don't see your velocity window here, the place to get it is down here, okay? This tiny little arrow click and then say show velocity lane. Okay. Now that we've done that, let's go to the Chance lane and play around with that for a minute. 32. Chance: Okay, let's look at the chance settings. This is really fun. Okay, for this one, let's go over to that drum track I made. I'm going to go back over to arrangement view. I'm going to click my back to arrangement button. Let's go here to this one. Okay, here's that beat. I made this very boring, uninteresting drum beat. Okay, let's start it up here. Okay, I'm going to take just my high hats. I'm going to highlight them all up here. That's going to also highlight them down here. We can see the velocity where I played them. They're all over the place, which is fine, because that's how I played them. But now let's go to Chance. Let's take those ones that are from the high hat, only the high hat notes, and pull chance down to around 50% There we go. Now what this means is that for those high hat notes that are now down to 50% you can see everything else is at 100% down in chance. What that means, this has nothing to do with velocity. This means that there's a 50% chance that those notes are going to play at all. Okay? Imagine that every time one of those high hat notes comes up, okay, the computer is basically rolling a two sided dice. And it either says play or don't play. Okay? And it's just going to do that. It's going to be different every single time. Okay, let's hear what it did. Okay. That's cool. If I want a little bit more, let's raise the chance I like it more sparse, okay, so there's holes in it. And that's kind of cool. Once you start programming more stuff and recording more stuff and building up whole tracks, you're going to find this to be really useful. That you can create kind of a system almost where there's a clip that has some notes that happen sometimes, but not always. It's really fun to play around with explore that chance showing lane here. Of course, with chance you can also randomize it. Just set everything to a single value. If you want, you can group things together, which would be the usefulness of that. Let's say for this bar, let me give you a more useful one. Let's say I'm going to zoom out. And let's just say that all of these snare drums, okay, I want live to decide whether or not to play that snare or not. But if it decides to not play the snare, I want to not play any snares. I want to leave off the snare track. Okay, I could do that. What I do is I'm going to go into the Chance lane. I'm going to highlight those snares. I'm going to say play all to group them together. Now I have one chance thing for all of the snares, and if I want to undo this, I can just hit ungroup. But now it's going to decide to play the snares or not decided to that time, let's try again. Okay, this time I decided not to play this, sir. So that's how you can use grouped notes together. Okay, let's move on and talk briefly about MPE stuff. 33. MPE Editing: Okay, MPE is a really interesting thing. It got added to live in Live 11. It's in its second big generation of it now with Live 12. Earlier I said it's like a high resolution Miti. That's basically true. Now not everything can use MPE right now on some Midi controllers are capable of MPE. Only some instruments can do anything with it. If we want to take a look at what we've got, we can go up here and we can go over to the MPE. To before you ask me, what does NPE even stand for, I don't remember. I'm not actually sure and I think that there's actually even some debate about what it stands for. I like to think of it as like Super Midi, that's what it stands for. It gives us a couple new controls. In the MPE tab, we have these two new lanes, like velocity and chance that we saw before. This one is called slide and this one is called pressure. I can see more if I go here, I can also see velocity which we've already messed around with. So we know that it has velocity and release velocity. Now, all of these things are only relevant to some instruments. I can't make anything in the slide lane because this instrument doesn't support anything in the slide lane. If you go to an instrument like wave table, you'll see that it has a lot of controls that say MPE on them. Those are going to give you some of these extra controls that you can play with. Some of them will add nice versatile effects to what you're playing in. It can make it much more expressive. I don't know if that's the whole point of NPE, but that's the most interesting thing about NPE to me is that there's a lot more expressiveness in the keyboard when you're playing through something that supports NPE. That's why I like these Roland Board keyboards because they do support NPE, play around with it. I don't want to spend too much time on it right now. We'll look at it again once we start deep diving into the instruments. But if you want to poke around, this is where you would find it in the Midi settings. 34. Recording Automation: One last thing about Midi recording before we move on. We can record automation with a Midi device. Check it out. What if I wanted to use one of these knobs to record automation? I can totally do that. Here's how I'm going to do it. Let's say this track, this little drum thing right there. Let's get rid of this. And just do that. What I'm going to do is turn on this button. This is automation. This basically means I'm about to record some automation. If we're going to do it over top of a clip that already exists, we should turn on overdub as well. Okay. Now I'm going to go into the automation mode so I can see what I'm doing. So I'm going to press the letter A or go to view automation, so I can see all this automation stuff right now. Let's decide what we want to move around here. How about just this drum bus amount? We're probably not going to hear anything, but that's okay. With all of these things turned on, I'm going to hit record and watch what happens as I turn this knob. I am recording automation, Okay. Now I can play it back and it's there. You can see that automation moving down here. Now you may wonder, how did I get that knob on that keyboard to control this? What's happening here is that this group of eight knobs, you'll see this all over live, this like eight knobs in a little four by two grid. You'll see that everywhere and you'll see on all kinds of devices a set of eight knobs. What happens is if you have eight knobs on your device and one of these eight knob things show up most of the time. They're going to at, they call it automap the thing on the screen. I can just turn these and they're automatically configured to control that set of eight knobs. That's how I just grab something and it turned something and it worked for that instrument because of that auto map feature. Now you can change that mapping and we'll talk a lot about that later. File that away for the moment. Okay, let's move on. 35. MIDI Generators: Okay, before we move on to the next section, I want to point out one cool new thing that's here that we haven't talked too much about, that is in a Midi clip, you've got these transform and generate buttons. If you open these up, there's all these tools. This is all new in Live 12. You won't see this if you're in a 1110 whatever. There's all these tools that are effectively helping live, create things for you with the transform tools. If you've made something, you can go to these transform tools and say make something different, mess it up, transform it. Or if you don't have anything, you can go here and just say make a core progression for me, You know, like randomize something and it's going to stick to the key and make you a core progression, right? It's pretty wild. These generate things are just going to generate music for you. I've had some really good experience with them just using them as a way to create something random and then sculpt it and play with it and make it my own. They're really great. There's a bunch of different options here. And I just want to point out that we will go through how to use all of this, all of the transform options and all of the generate options in the next class, in this series, in part three, we get into a bunch of Midi tools where we will go over how to use every single one of these. I'm thinking about making a whole class just based on like, let's have live create something for us. But I don't know if I'm actually going to do that more details on these in depth in the next series. For now, I want to move on and talk about tuning systems. 36. Why We Care About Tuning Systems: Okay, in the previous class I talked about this tunings bit here. I want to go into that a little bit more now. How does that fit into recording? It doesn't a ton. It's just that there's no great place to put this. In my whole scheme of all of these classes, I wanted to put it here just to get it into your head while you're starting to think about producing music with live. Just a few videos on this. I'm not going to go into insane amount of detail on it. But first, why do we have this? Why would you want to retune your whole system? Let me explain what this is one more time. If you look at a piano, you don't need to know how to play piano to make sense. We have 12 notes to the octave, it goes here. And then the next black note, and then white note, and then black, white, black, black ops backwards. A black note, white, black note, white note, and then white note again. These are the, this is hard to do in or these are the same note, but an octave higher, okay? All you really need to know is this one is called C, and this one is called C. Okay? These are both C's. There are 12 notes per octave. We take the span of an octave and we chop it into 12 equal notes. This is a system that we've used for the last several hundred years called Equal Temperament. And the system we used before that was pretty close to it, almost identical. But if you listen to people who perform music in a period way, meaning they perform music exactly like Vivaldi would have heard it, it's going to sound a little bit different because the tuning system was very slightly different back then. But anyway, our system of doing it equal temperament is not universal. Not everywhere in the world uses equal temperament. This idea that we can change our tuning is something that is really exciting. If you make music in a culture that doesn't use the same equal temperament system that we have. This really opens up the use of live to people from all over the world who may not have had an interest in producing electronic music before. Because there was no way for them to do it without doing really weird stuff or making music that was in a system that was very foreign to them. But also people are, that have grown up hearing the equal temperament system, like most of us have. A lot of those people have been experimenting with alternate tunings for a long time. Someone like Apex Twin for years has done things where he's re, some of his synthesizers to get different notes. That's why when you listen to some of his music, some of those keyboards just sound off in a weird, disturbing way. And that's because he's tuned to a whole different tuning system. It's really cool that we can just change it. It's wild and it's going to do amazing things for music. Let's talk about how you would change it if you wanted to do it. 37. Changing Your Tuning System: Okay, so here's this little midi clip that I just made in the, when I was talking about mini generation. Here's what it sounds like, let's slow it down a little bit, okay? Yeah. Pretty. But let's go to tunings and let's say one of these ones, how about this 14343 notes per octave? We normally split it by 12 notes per octave. This tuning has 43 notes per octave. That's a lot. I'm going to double click on it. Now you can see everything spread out. Black and white keys are gone because none of them are black or white keys. The names of my notes are all my chords are going to sound completely dissonant because now I'm in a whole different tuning system. Let's hear it, see it like instantly. Sounds like Apex Twin. To me, it sounds like the selected Ambient Works album of Apex Twin. There you go. If you want to do that, you're more than welcome to how I did it was I just double click on one of these. Okay. Now there's a lot of information that's in the names of these. If you want to get deeper into it, I don't understand where these names come from. They seem to be naming these by the number as being number of notes per octave. 12 is normal, but there's a whole bunch of different ways you can divvy up those 12 mean tone quint. Wt probably means whole tone. Then you get into some of the bigger ones, some of these down here. I don't know what all these mean, but if you like exploring this stuff, you're welcome to do it. Down here is where I have a little bit more information on it. If you don't see this lowest note, highest note, you can open it with this little arrow. It's pretty wild. If we want to get rid of it and just go back to normal, we can just go to this tunings window and press delete. Now we're back to where we were. And after I do that, it's not like my chords go right back to where they were. They're kind of forever altered, right? So now they sound very strange, but at least they're tuned normally, right? So I'm going to have to rebuild that Midi clip. If you change the tuning system with this method, it is global, It is changing it for your whole track. Okay, So that's what you need to keep in mind. Now you might be thinking, can I make my own tuning system? Can I like invent a tuning system and be like Richard D. James? You can. Let's talk about it. 38. Making Your Own Tuning System: Okay, if you want to find out more about each of these tunings, you can load one up and then click on this button here. This will take you to an Ableton website that will explain a little bit more about those tunings. Now after you do that, when you're on that site, there is a link that'll take you to a place where you can make your own tunings. Each of these tunings, you'll see that these are ASCL files. This is Ableton's version of a standard that has been created a long time ago called Scala files, C A, L, this is like Ableton Scala files. Follow this link and then it'll say, give you the option to make your own using an online tool. Here is Ableton Online Scala Preset. With this, you can design your own pitches. We can hear them. I think this tool is still being developed a little bit. But if we go to code, you can see that each note is represented here and you can start playing with it. This is equal temperament, There are 12 notes per octave. You can get those here, but you can change them and then you can export this and bring it into live. It's pretty cool. All you have to do is start monkeying around with these. Let's say like D sharp, I didn't want to be 300 anymore, I wanted it to be 322. Okay? Okay. It still sounds pretty normal, but if we monkeyed with this enough, it'll start to sound really quite different. Play around with that if you are interested in building your own tuning systems. 39. Intro to Warping: Okay, it is time to talk about warping. This is one of the biggest capabilities of live. And in fact, I think it's probably the thing that put live on the map. Like if you asked me to list the five most important things live could do, Warping would be one of them. What is warping? Warping is the process that we use and the tool that live has that lets all of the clips that we put into a session play at the same tempo. Okay, let me demonstrate. I have here a bunch of drum loops. Let's see, actually, let's grab that one. Okay, well, let's grab this one first. Let's find something a lot of like that. Okay, sure, Let's use both of these. Okay? So here's this one. Okay? That's going to loop forever, right? That's cool, that's great. Okay, let's stop that one. Let's hear this one, okay? Super fast. That's okay. All right, let's leave it as super fast. The idea here is that I could pull in two drum loops that are at different tempos live. Is going to do the math and say whatever tempo these things are, I'm going to play them both at my session tempo, which is this tempo of 95. Which means that no matter what I pull in to live, assuming it has figured out the tempo correctly, it is going to play them in a way that, that they can blend together. Let's hear them at the same time. Here we go. This one is frantic. This one is frantic. But they're blending together just fine, right? Like they're both playing perfectly fine. This one is double time of this one. Now this is a great example because what this is showing us is that life has to figure out the tempo of the clip. In this case it figure it out at double time. That's fine. But I can go into the warp settings and tell it you're doing it in double time. So I'm just going to hit this x two and say it's actually double that. Okay, now it's at a better time. Okay, so now it's less frantic, it's more in time, but what it's doing is live saying, okay, the BPM of this clip live thinks it's 14,080.85 Okay? But if that's correct, it knows how to do the math to get it to play at our session tempo, which is 90 05:00 P.M. Okay, Same thing with this one. It says this one is 120 BPM, but it knows how to do the math to get it to play at 95. Both of these are going to play at 95 and that makes them gel, okay? That also makes for an awful lot of bass, but let's find something melodic and see if we can get it to work in there too. Let's say guitar riff, let's find some. Sure, let's put that right there. Okay, let's see if it warped this correctly. If it did, then it's going to fit right into this groove just fine. Okay, so it warped it correctly. It fits. It's cool. That is what warping is. Warping the way that live knows how to make everything play in time. Now the trick to warping is that live isn't always right. So it gets pretty complicated when we try to help live and get it to warp something correctly. And that's what we need to learn how to do. In this section, there's a bunch of settings that we can do to help live, learn how to warp. There's some techniques that I'm going to go over on making sure something is warped, right? And then there's some really fun things we can do by warping something incorrectly and making some crazy sounds. Let's get into it. 40. Transients: Okay, so when we pull a clip into our session, whether we like it or not, Live is going to try to figure out a tempo for that clip. Okay, there's no way to stop it. Live is going to say that clip looks like it's about 75.88 that's what it thinks the beat is. Now how does live figure that out? What it's going to do is it's really going to look for transience. Transients are like the attacks of notes. If you just look at the waveform here, you can see this is obviously a transient of some sort. This probably, this probably, this probably is, this probably is. And it's going to try to figure out if that each of the transients that it sees is a kick or a snare or something that belongs on a downbeat. And it does this for more than just drums. I'm just thinking out loud, but it's going to do all kinds of complicated analysis based on where the transients are and where it thinks they go. You can see the things that it thinks are important in these little gray little arrows, right? That's where it says, hey, that's something, now there's a way to say that's not quite right and we can change it. We'll get to that in a minute. Transience, things that have definitive transience live is going to get more often. In other words, let's look at this one, Okay, this is nothing but transience. You see it's an attack and another attack, and another attack and another attack live is going to see this and say, okay, these are quarter notes, they're dead on. It's going to get this perfectly right. Every time, anything that just has something where we just see these attack points. You saw a few other attacks here, but that's okay. It's not enough to mess around with it. You can see this one, it thinks the BPM is 120.00 If you see a clip BPM, that's a number 0.00 It's probably perfectly right if Live comes back with a BPM that's like 140.85, it's probably a little off because no one made a beat at 01:40 85. Unless you're analyzing like an acoustic drummer. Acoustic drummers, real humans, do play at fractions of beats. But this one is probably a tad wrong. This 12 it says is 75.88 That's probably 76. If you have something that is made up primarily of transience, like a drum beat or something like that, it's going to be easier for alive to guess the right tempo. 41. Session Tempo and Clip Tempo: Okay, this works in both session view and arrangement view. By the way, I'm just using session view right now to have a little bit fun with session view. However, I'll switch over to arrangement view in a minute. But this warping works completely the same both in session view and arrangement view. Okay, so we have our clip tempo here, this BPM, okay, we can divide it in half to half time it or x two to double time it a clip. Like let's go to the guitar one, Okay? If I hit X two, it's gonna sound like it's going half time. And you can hear how it starts to get a little glitchy when you do that, right? The reason is, the farther away this tempo is from your session tempo up here, the more kind of glitchy it's going to get, the more it has to stretch it out, the more artifacts that are going to get introduced artifacts are basically when your computer is like guessing because there's not enough information. So when we really stretch it out, we start to get artifacts like that. Okay. So let's go back to go half again. And similarly, we start to get something that sounds unnatural. Some of those artifacts that has to do with the same reason, 37.9 is quite far away from 95 either direction. The farther away we get from our session tempo, the more unnatural it's going to sound. Now, if you want to change the tempo of something here, what you want to do is not change it here. Okay? This is not a good place to change the tempo because it's going to mess up all your warping. You want to change it up here? If you want to say, I just want this track to go faster, you just change it here. And then the beauty of live is that it knows how to do the math. If I say one oh 03:00 P.M. it's going to play all my clips, my whole track at one oh 03:00 P.M. Okay? And it's going to adjust everything for me. If you're in a situation where you're saying, I don't want live to play it at the session tempo, I want live just to play that audio file. How I brought it in, it was perfect where it was. This happens to me like a lot, right? Let's say this guitar thing was exactly where I wanted it. And I don't want this warping to happen for this clip, but I want warping to happen for these other clips. Okay, then I'm going to leave these two alone. And this one I'm going to turn warping off. If I turn warping off, that means ignore what live thinks it's BPM is and ignore my session tempo. And just play that clip. When I tell it to play that clip, that's all it does to recap. The farther away your clip tempo is from your session tempo, the more distorted and glitchy it's going to be. However, I will talk about something called warp modes in just a video or two that'll help with that thing too that we learned in this video is if you don't want Live to do that. If you don't want Live to warp your clip, you just want that clip to play exactly how you have it. You can turn off warping here. 42. What is something warped wrong?: Okay, here I have a beat that I've just imported. This is an audio file I imported from my library. It's just a rock groove loop. And let's hear it, okay? This is not warped correctly, this is wrong, and we need to fix it. Okay, so let's do that first. How do we know it's wrong? There are three things I'm going to look for to tell me that it's wrong. First I'm going to look at what live thinks it's BPM is a whole number or really close to a whole number like 88.99, I'm going to assume it's probably off at least by a little bit. Now this is pretty, might be 89 or so, but I don't think so. I think it's more off than that. That's thing one thing two is I'm going to count it, this like almost all beats is in 444 times. I'm going to find what feels like the downbeat and I'm going to make sure it lines up on a downbeat. Remember down beat, these numbers? 1234. Okay. What feels like a downbeat would be? Boom. Okay? And they're not there. So like this transient right here is, feels like a downbeat. Like that's a downbeat and this I think is a downbeat. 12341, I think it's actually this. That's the downbeat. Those are not on the numbers that I would expect them to be. That's probably not right. The third thing is we can turn on the metronome. The metronome is always going to play at our session tempo. If this is warped correctly, the metronome will be like right in line with it. Let's listen to this with the metronome and it should be just rock solid, tight. It's, you can hear the metronome, right? The metronome is not lined up with this. That's probably the best indication that this is all worked wrong. Now, there's a fourth thing, and that's the name of this file, is actually 90 05:00 P.M. We know that tempo, the clip tempo is 95 BPM and Live thinks it's 88. We know Live is wrong. Cool. Now that we firmly believe that Live is wrong, let's fix it. 43. Warp Markers: Okay, so we're going to look at our warp markers, okay? These little gray lines up here, these little gray arrows up here are like suggested warp markers. These are the transients that live thinks are important, okay? They're not really doing anything yet. They're just there for live to say, hey, this is probably a transient. If we want to turn it into an actual wart marker, we're going to double click on it. So let's go to this one. Okay, I think this sounds like it should be on this three. Okay, I'm going to double click on this suggested wart marker. Now it is a wart marker. Now that it's yellow, it's real. You can see I already have one other wart marker. There's one right at the beginning, over here, it's tucked away, but it's there. Now that I have this wart marker, I can click and drag it and watch what happens. Everything slides around on the grid. Okay. This was right here. I think this goes right there. Now, everything before that has slid around. Everything after that has slid around too. Maybe that fixed the whole problem. Maybe we got lucky. Let's hear it against the Metronrome and see if that fixed it. No, we still have more work to do next. Let's look at the beginning. I know something's wrong with the beginning because we have this little gap at the beginning. A lot of the time if you import a file to live as a clip and it has some gap at the beginning of it, even a fill or silence like this, that's going to throw off the warping. It's a very, very common thing, but luckily there's a very easy fix for it. This is my downbeat. This is a little fill leading into it. I'm going to double click to make that warp marker. Now I'm going to do a very special thing that you can only do at the beginning of the clip. I'm going to control click or right click on it. I'm going to go down to my Warp Settings. Down here I can say Set 111 here. That means this is the first beat of this clip. First beat of the first measure. Okay, I'm, I'm going to click that set 111 here. Okay? Now, it says this is the beginning, okay? Now, this little arrow up here, this is our play start marker. When I start this clip, it is going to start from there, but this is our loop brace most of the time. You want these to be the same. I'm going to tighten up our loop brace here so that it also goes to the beginning. Okay, now let's see how that sounds against the metronome now that we fix the beginning. Okay, it felt like it started good and then it drifted away. That's how this works a lot of the time. The next thing I'm going to try is I can see that this I had put on beat three. But now it moved forward when I adjusted this. Let's get rid of this war marker and see if live kind of figures it out from there. So I'm just going to double click on that warp marker to get rid of it. Okay, Now let's listen. Okay, we're still wrong, but let's recap what we did first. I found like just a big significant beat somewhere. And I tried to line that up, and that didn't solve our problem. Okay, so then we went to the beginning and trimmed out the silence at the beginning by saying set 11 here. That helped a good bit. Now in reality, that's what I would do first is go and make sure the beginning starts right on a downbeat. Then we got rid of this warp marker to see if that tighten things up and it did not. Now we need to go through and create more anchor points for our Warp markers. Let's go to a new video and start doing that. 44. Locking In Beats: Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through and I'm going to try to latch onto any significant beats. And then I'm going to adjust them with warp markers to make sure they're on the beat correctly. Every time I do that live is going to renegotiate what it thinks different things are and it'll get closer and closer every time. The key to this is to remember that the more warp markers you use, the more you are degrading the sound. Okay, every time we put a warp marker, it's asking live to like shift time around. In this clip, the more you have, the more likely you're going to get artifacts and weird sounds. Okay. If you want things to sound realistic, you want as few warp markers as you need. Let's see if we can find the moment that is this beat three. Okay, here we go. I'm going to turn off the metronome and listen. Yeah, I still believe it is this kick right there. Okay. So I'm going to take that, I'm going to make my work marker on it and I'm going to push it forward. Okay. Now, let's hear it again, okay? What did you hear? You heard this sounded slower. And this sounded faster because it's trying to smoosh all of that into that beat. It might be that our first half is right and our second half is not. Let's find another point in the second half that we can do. Let's try to find what goes on beat. See if we can find that. Okay, I think it's this high hat hit right here. Now the way I'm figuring this out as I'm just counting it, I'm counting 123-41-2341 and I see that this high hat is happening right here. If that's too hard, remember you can slow it down. You can just use the session tempo. Slow the whole thing down like a lot, and it's going to sound kind of weird, but it might help you locate what's supposed to go where I'm looking for the start of the fourth measure here. 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay. So I think it's this. Now, there's not an automatic warp marker here. Oh, there is. There is an automatic warp marker here. If there wasn't, it doesn't really matter. You can make warp markers anywhere you want. Just double click and you'll make one. There doesn't need to be one of these gray warp markers here for you to make a warp marker. You can do whatever you want. Okay, So I'm going to pull that forward to where I think it goes, which is the start of beat four. Okay, Now what I think we're going to hear, I'm going to speed back up my tempo a little bit. What I think we're going to hear is that it's going to sound good all the way to this beat four. And then it's going to get really fast and strange at the end here, let's find out. Yeah, it got a little strange here. I think that we have to find the downbeat of the fifth bar, which I think is early. And that's why let's try it again. 123-412-3123 Okay. I think this is the downbeat of the fifth bar. I'm going to push that over to the fifth bar. Okay. Now let's listen to this with the metronome and see if we got it. Here's our metrodome. Good. Now that is all correct. We used 123. Technically four, because that very first one, warp markers. That's good. That's not bad. We just did the downbeats. Now, if this didn't fix it, I would go in more. I would say, okay, let's try to find this one. Or let's try to find at two and 3.4 I've worked on tracks before where in order to get something to warp perfectly, I had to go down to the eighth note or even the 16th note and lock every single one of those in. You don't want to do that. You want to use as few as possible. This is great. Now we could go in here and we could see that like this, measure two, if I zoom way in, that's not on. I could double click, nudge that over and get it on if I wanted to, but I don't need to do that. It's close enough for my ear. And again, the fewer warp markers, the better. So I'm going to double click that one to get rid of it. Cool. Before we go, let's take a peek at what our clip tempo is, according to Live 94.9 Okay, we could safely round that up to 95 and say like we're basically 95 here. If we go back to our name, it says 95, we're right in the ballpark. It's a little off, I think, probably from some of these very fine things, but those won't matter very much at all. This clip is good to go. 45. ASD Files: Okay, I have a little experiment I want you to do to understand the next concept. Take a file, any file, but take it right from your desktop, or a folder, not from the Ableton browser, and drop it into live. Here's a guitar take I did for somebody else's project the other day. I'm going to bring it into Live. What's going to happen right away is that Live is going to generate in the same folder that that was in this thing called an ASD file, a version of that file that is an SD. What is that? In fact, I could go to this clip if I find it in my browser, and then I say show and finder. It takes me to here, here's all my groove files. Here's that file and right underneath it, ASD file of the same file. What are those weird ASD files? After you do this for a little while, you're going to find ASD files floating all over your hard drive. Asd files are where live stores all of this warping data. Okay, if I brought this file back into live now it should remember how to warp it, because that ASD file is floating around and it can find that if I went through and deleted the ASD file for this, it's going to reset my warping to what live initially thought it was. Those files can be important if you have manually warped a file and you want to retain that warping information, don't delete those. It's important to know that you need both the original audio file and that ASD file for a live To remember the warping, that ASD file is a very small file. It just, it just has a little bit of code in it. It does not have audio in it. It's not an audio file. It is not a version of your clip. It is just a file with some numbers in it that says where things are. In fact, also be careful when you're moving those files around. It can be annoying to have those little ASD files all over the place, but just remember that if you move them, then Live will probably lose track of them. That's why it helps to keep your samples organized before you load them into live so that these ASD files stick with their original one. In the browser, you won't really see them very much popping up, but throughout your system, you may see these ASD files all over the place, just something to keep track of. 46. Warp Modes: Okay, there's one other piece to the puzzle here. We've looked at warping these and how the more warping we do of a track, the more glitchy it can get, the more degraded the audio can get. There are some things you can do to help with that. And the biggest thing is called Warp modes. Let's look at them. If I click on this, I can go over here and I can see Warp is on. Now here it says Beats. There's a couple different options here. This list is our Warp modes. The way to think about this list is what do we want to preserve? What is the most important thing about this clip? Now in this case, Beats is set by default. I believe all of live Beats is going to be default. When you pull in a clip, it's going to say bets. It's not going to try to figure out what it is. Beats basically means that if it's going to glitch out on something, it's going to try really hard to preserve the transience these attacks because that's the most important thing in a beat sustained tones, the area in between the attacks, it's going to, the degrading stuff happen there. If it has to happen, okay, On any sustained sounds, that's where it might get glitchy. Okay, So I'm going to try. Let's see, let's take this down to half time, okay? If I listen to it at half time, we're really warping it a lot now, okay? You can hear in these sections like this one where it's not a transient, it's really glitching a little bit, right? It's like, it's like, I'm trying to stretch things here but that's cool because it's keeping our transient beat. It's keeping that going. Okay, so let's say we were working on something where we did want to preserve the ambient sections more than the rhythmic sections, the transients, right? So we're going to sacrifice the transients in order to keep some of the sustained content. That's going to be the tones warp mode. If I play this through this one, you're going to hear these might sound okay. But the attacks here, the transients are going to get a little funky. It sounds a little funny in this example, but if this was like somebody singing or something like that, this would sound way better. Okay, let's go to the next one, texture. This is for like if something is a pad or an atmosphere or something like that, it's going to do what's best to preserve it. What you're really doing with these different warp modes is giving live a clue and just saying, here's what this is, try to help me out here. This probably isn't in this context going to sound wildly different than the tones. One, yeah, that's not going to sound great. Beats is going to sound the best probably here. Texture can also be good for if you have a whole track, but it's not the best option for a whole track, there's a better one, I'll tell you that in a second. Re pitch is a different animal. It almost doesn't belong in this list but it's here. I'm going to tell you what it is. Rep classic, the old school way that we changed the speed of something was by slowing it down. And speeding it up. And when we did that, the pitch would go down and up with it, right? Imagine you've got a record, right? You want that record to play slower. You're going to put your finger on the record, right? And the pitch is going to go down. As you slow it down, re pitch basically is going back to that. It's saying like adjust the pitch the same way you adjust the tempo, okay? If you warp something a lot, the pitch is going to go all over the place. This is really more of an effect than anything. I haven't found very few times have I found a really practical use for this. But it's fun. Sometimes it's going to be really low because we're slowing it way down, right so it can be funny. Okay, then we get to the last two, complex and complex pro. These are best for full tracks. If a track, if you pull in like a whole song that's already mixed complex or complex pro, here's the difference without getting too much in the weeds on these. Complex is good for whole tracks or complicated things. Complex is better for everything, but it's going to eat up a lot of your processor speed. I could select Complex Pro here, but if I had like 20 tracks and I was, I was doing Complex Pro on all of them, I'm going to crash my computer, probably not. But I'm going to slow my computer down. A Because complex Pro requires a lot of juice. It's going to sound the best, right? It's pretty accurate, but I can only have a handful of tracks doing that at a given time. If you need to use complex on a lot of tracks, use complex, if you've only got it on a few tracks, use complex, okay? Always start with these top three and see if you can get away with using those. If it can sound really good with any of those, then you're in good shape. If you need something extra, go down to Complex Pro. I hardly ever use Complex and I hardly ever use Re Pitch. Those are the four that I go to to use all the time. 47. "Printing" Warp Settings: Okay, so that usually leads to the next question. And that is what if I set this to Pro to complex Pro. I had a lot of warping in it and slowing down my computer. Is there any way to just write the warping into the audio file so that I can turn warping off, And my warp settings are just in that file. That file is just no longer warped at all because it doesn't need it. Yes, there is a way to do exactly that. Okay, It's actually super crazy easy. What we're going to do is we're going to click on that clip. We're going to press command J. What it's going to do is basically like print that clip. It's going to make that clip with all its effects, all its warping. Everything is going to be written into that file. Now you can see the warping on this clip turned off. It's still warped, but I don't have any warp markers. My warp setting went back to beats if I had any effects or anything on it. Those are going to be now written into the audio file. Okay, but now it's going to sound great. Let's go back up to a non ridiculous tempo. Let's go back to our actual double time. So it sounds pretty good and now it's written in there. The only real reason to do that when you're working on a track is if your computer is getting bogged down. If your computer is getting bogged down by stuff, you can totally do that. Do that. Command J, it's called consolidate. If you go to the edit menu, you'll find it in there. But it's a way to basically take all your, its everything and just say, okay, new clip with all this information just put it in there. It's a handy trick. 48. Warping Beats: Okay, so warping can be hard, it can be tricky thing to figure out, it's not the easiest part about using live. I want to do it a little bit more. Let's do a couple more. I'll just walk you through my process on what I'm going to do now. Before we do these, I want to point out one thing is that a lot of the time live is going to warp things correctly. Probably I'd venture to say the majority of the time, It's not like 99% of the time though. It's probably like 80% of the time, depending on what you're doing. I'm going to pull in clips that are intentionally warped wrong or I'm pretty sure are warped wrong. But just know that the majority of the time things actually go pretty well with this. But I'm going to create some problems for us just to learning opportunity stuff. You know how it works. Okay, let's do another beat. This one I think is going to cause us problems. It's Warp was turned off by default, which is surprising. Let's turn that on. Okay, we'll take a look at it, and let's loop it and turn on the metronome. Okay, so what I see here, first of all, I see a weird amount of time. This should be two beats long, okay? And it's more than two beats long, it's hanging over by a little bit, that's a problem. Let's tighten our loop to two beats. And then here, okay, obviously that's wrong. Let's see if we can figure this out. I'm going to slow down my tempo a little bit. We don't have very many transients here because it's so short. Let's see if we can figure out where this big one right here goes. This is going to be a tricky one. I always make these examples like really hard for myself. But okay, let's double time this so that it's a full bar then this will be easier to deal with. And then I'll undo it at the end. Okay, crack, crack. That's what I want. This crack should go on beat two. Boom, crack. Okay, so I'm going to make this warp marker and tuck this back on beat two, okay? And then I think should go on beat four. Okay, boom crack. That means this kick should go right on beat three. And this kick should go right on the end of three, which is right in the middle of beat three. Okay, That makes some extra space at the end here, but that's okay. Let's hear it, okay. Now let's get it back to the tempo we thought we were at, and loop just two beats and see if we got it. Okay, that's our metronome. Okay, great. So with this one, I worked all the transiens because there was only five of them. In order to really wrap my head around what's happening here, I slowed it down to half time and then locked everything in based on where I think it goes. Now what can be fun about this is that there is some subjective work here. Like it could be that this kick goes on the eighth note. If I want that kick on the last eighth note, sure, put it on the last eighth note. Stretch it out, go there. This area might sound funky, but at this tempo maybe not. Right? You can make some cool patterns this way. Maybe we want this kick to be like really fast. See, this is where the compositional arrangement comes in. We'll do more of that in a few minutes, but for now I think we got this one. It really takes an ear and it takes some practice to get these, but that's how we do it. Okay, let's go on and do something that's a little more abstract. This is where things get really hard. 49. Warping Abstract Clips: Okay, let's try warping, something a little more abstract. I grabbed this little organ rift here. Let's turn off the metronome. Okay, Where do these last two hits go? Do they go right on the beat? This one's a little late and this one's a little early? Or do they go on the 16th note? What about this? Is this early, should that go on beat two? I don't know. There's really no way to know in a clip like this. You can feel it. Where this is landing right now is actually probably pretty good. But you really need some context for where you want to put any of these notes. Because warping is, is not only about finding what's right, it's also about finding where you want the thing to go. If I want these to be in a weird place, I can put them wherever I want. In order to really feel where these go, I need context. I'm going to put some beat on this. Let's just go to, okay, this is a Midi clip with drums sounds like this, Okay? Now let's hear that with our keyboard riff and see how it sounds right away, Okay, now in this context, I want to change this quite a bit. I want this, I want a second chord to be right on the second beat. Now this gives me the opportunity to point something else out. I'm going to undo what I just did with and Z. I, D over to beat two. Here, watch what happens to all of this whole that's in beat one, it gets stretched out. If I don't want that to get stretched out, what I can do is put another anchor there. Consider with that marker. What I'm doing is just saying this part is fixed. Everything prior to this I don't want to mess with. Now. If I drag this marker out, I'm not going to affect what comes before it. Okay, so there's that. Now this one I think I want right on beat three. So I'm going to do the same thing because I don't want to mess with what's before that. Okay, This one. Let's try putting this one on the end of three. Okay, so let's hear it now. Okay, I actually want this on beat four. I changed my mind. Okay, that's a cool groove, I could get into that. Let's say I don't want this gap. I could pull this over here and see how I can get that to Sound. It's a little glitched out, maybe not so far. Well, let's try to tones, see if I can get that a little smoother by changing to tones. It smoothed this little gap. There was a little tiny glitch there. We got rid of it with tones. If that didn't get rid of it, you can juice up tones with some of the settings. Grain size is going to make it sound better, but also it's going to eat up A lot of your computer processing, you can mess with grain size if you like, on tones. Okay, now let's talk about warping the whole tracks. 50. Warping Tracks: Okay, I'm going to pull in a whole finished track. Okay? This is a, this is a student of mine, his track. I don't think he'll mind me using it. Okay. So I'm just going to drop this right into my session solo this track. Now you see how it took a second before it was enabled, that was live doing its analysis. You can see this is a full track and all of these little tiny ticks here, those are the warp markers where it says something's going on. This is going to be a tricky one. Now, the first thing that I want to tell you about warping hole tracks is that there is a setting in live. If we go to our preferences and we go to record Warp and launch Warp settings, there is auto Warp long samples on. You can turn that off. You would turn this off if you're constantly loading in whole tracks or long things tracks and you don't want to warp them, you can turn that off. And then it's just going to open a track like this and it's not going to warp it for you. That's actually beneficial sometimes because most of the time if I'm loading in a whole track, it's to do a mastering project or something like that where I don't want warping on, but I'm going to leave it on for now. You can also do this, or you can say Warp Short Samples. And I always leave that set to auto. But there are some controls for that. You can say default Warp mode Beats. You can adjust that here too. But let's go back. It warped this automatically. Now is this, did it warp it correctly without even listening to it? I'm going to take a guess and say that surprisingly, I think it did. Here's my clue. My clue is that there's no silence at the beginning. I see a new section here like the waveform changes here. It's pretty much right on, same thing here and same thing here. I see things happening right where they're supposed to happen, like sections are lining up. I think this actually warped pretty well. I'm going to turn on the metronome and listen to the beginning of it. Okay, so, so far it sounds right on. Whenever that happens, I'm always tempted to jump to the end and see if it's still right on. If something is off by just a little, it can slowly drift further and further away by the end of the track, it's going to be way off. Let's go out here. Still sounds pretty good. This is actually pretty great. It's right on. Let's assume that it's because I want to show you a few things. Let me go to like this point right here. If this was warped, then one thing I could do would be to in this intro, get it perfect. Then you can see like, okay, now it's 68.49 right here. It's 69.56 If I think this is perfect, then I can click on a warp marker and go back to these settings and say from here that'll say redo it. Rethink your way through this now that I've warped a little bit of it for you, sometimes you can get closer there. You can say Warp from here, starting at 90, 04:00 P.M. That's what our session tempo is, 94 BPM from here, straight 90, 04:00 P.M. from here. I don't really know what the difference between these two are, to be perfectly honest with you. What I almost always do when I come here is just say warp from here I say redo it and warp it from there. You can see now it added all kinds of warp markers based on what I did back here. In this case, I think I actually may have like screwed it up, but in most cases that will really help and keep you from having to go through the whole track. Warp a little bit in the beginning and then say Warp from here after you're pretty sure you've got the tempo really locked in. 51. Warping Vocals: Okay, next let's talk about warping a vocal sample. This can get tricky because just like the keyboard one we did, vocals by themselves are really hard to warp, because you really need a pulse to know where you want that to sit. Here's a vocal riff, let's turn the metronome off. Okay, let's loop that whole thing and let's put it against this drumbeat that we pulled in a minute ago. Okay? So that, you know, that works. Or we could change it. I could say, you know, I want that to fall right there and then give me a little more on the beat if I wanted to. Okay, we've got a little kind of glitchiness in this area, so let's go to our warp mode and change it to tones x. Oh, okay, that's cool. Now, two things to point out here. One is that now that I've warped this to our tempo, it'll fit with anything else that's warped to our tempo, right? Which is everything in our track. Meaning that if I wanted to put this vocal on this soul survivor track, I super, let's see. I don't know what's going on in this particular moment, but let's find out that's part of my dad. All right, cool. Which brings me to 0.2 that I wanted to make. That is that while warping will make all of your clips play nicely together in terms of tempo, it will automatically make them play nice together in terms of pitch. If I wanted this clip to be in the key of this clip, then I need to adjust of this and play around with that a little bit more than what I'm doing now. It's not quite in the right key right now. Warping will do nothing to help you get in the right key, it's only going to help you get in the right tempo, okay? In order to get in the right key, you got to use your ear, figure things out, and adjust your pitch down here. Okay, let's move on and talk about how we can use warping as a tool to generate ideas and generate like musically interesting new material. 52. Warping for Editing: Okay, let's do something fun with this vocal thing. So, like I said before, we don't need to warp something correctly, right? The way we pulled this clip in, it was pretty fine like that. It was a little melismatic thing. And we could line it up to fall on a downbeat and that would be great. But we can also make it our own by playing with it a bit. Notes fall in different spots and making it something different and unique. Okay, so here is a totally different clip. This will fit more or less into our groove. Let's hear it. It sounds a little sickly because it's like drifting between notes a whole lot, but it works. Let's take that same idea and go back to this drumbeat. Okay, So let's say in this clip I wanted it to go halftime. Okay. I want to re, arrange the beat a little bit. I want that to go there. Let's say this goes on beat two, but let's say I want it way back here. And then we'll put nothing on beat two. Beat there. I can create a whole new beat this way. Let's just listen to this, okay? You hear those like glitchy things? I kind of like them, but if I didn't, let's go to complex Pro and see what that does to this. That's cool. I mean, we're stretching this out so much and we're messing with this so much, it's going to be very glitchy. Let's go back to Beats. I kind of like you, but you know, design your own beats by using warping. Design your own melodies, rhythms, whatever you want. It's cool, so don't be afraid to just kind of go nuts with your warping. If you want to make something that is your own move transience around, find your own sound within there, it can be really fun to do like watch this. I'll take a piece of this track. Let's, let's take the two beats. Okay, cool. Let's see if we can find something in here and that's really fun. Let's take this, make a war point, stretch that out. There's not much here, but maybe I can make something glitchy happen here. Cool. What happens if I put that on complex? So you know, you can really have fun compositionally with this as well. 53. Warping for Sound Design: Okay, so if we take that same idea and go to extremes, you can get some really cool sound design effects. Let's go, let's go back to this vocal thing. What I'm going to do is let's do this. I'm going to consolidate it, command J. Now some fun stuff here. Now I'm going to take it and just see if I can get something really glitchy in it. I'm just going to stretch this way out here. Okay, let's open that up. Okay, cool. All right, so now this is crazy glitched out. Okay, let's hear it give us your note. Okay, cool. Now, let's take that to texture. Oh, lower the grain size. Lower the grain size, the more glitchy it's gonna get. Okay, great, I'm into that. So let's consolidate it again. Okay. Now, all that glitchy stuff is here, right? Like that's printed into this file. So let's take it and let's glitch it even more. Oh, let's try texture. Oh, oh, oh, see that's a weird freaky sound. Okay, so let's consolidate that again, let's chop off the beginning of it and just deal with this middle part. Okay, so now we have this clip that is just this. Okay, that's a pretty useful sound to me. Next time I'm working on this podcast that I've been working on, this could be a good effect for me to use. I just turn that vocal into something totally different. Using warping, I made a sound design effect by stretching it out. Consolidating it. Stretching it out. Consolidating it. Stretching it out some more. Whenever you stretch sound out far enough, you always get weird glitch things. There's just lots of amazing stuff buried into a sound file if you pull it apart enough to find it a weird technique. But it's really fun and I do it all the time. Have fun with that. 54. Grouping Tracks: Okay, I want to circle back around to this big recording session here because I just want to talk about organizing your session just a little bit, particularly how we do these groups. You may have seen this when I opened this before. Basically you can select any tracks that you want by clicking on one and then shift clicking another one. Then command G, that's going to turn them into a group. Here's the group I just made. Then I can go command R on the group and rename them. What do we have here? Bass, guitar and guitar. I'll say bass and guitar. Okay. There's a couple advantages to doing this. One is just to organize your session so you can see what's, what, you can see how I did it here. I've got rhythm section, saxes, brass, a whole ton of mitty stuff, and then more mitty stuff that I didn't put in the group yet. But if I wanted to, I could easily take this track. Let's open this mite. I could take this track and drag it up into Almii. And now it's in there. I could do that with all of these if I wanted to. Fact, let's do it. I should be able to go down to the bottom and shift click to select all of those. Click and drag to move them up there. Now they're all in this all mitty tab. Now here's my whole session, right? I have this big, huge session just narrowed down to four things. When I'm ready to work on the saxes, I can open up the saxes and get to work on them. When I'm ready to work on the brass, I can get in there this way. The rhythm section, I can get in this way. Within the rhythm section, I have more groups like drums, bass, and guitar, et cetera. You can have groups within groups. In fact, you can have groups within groups, within groups. Someone in one of the Ableton Trainer forums tried to figure out how many groups you could go deep on. Groups within groups within groups. I think they got to like 1,000 and and it still works just fine. So you can make groups within groups until your heart's content. If you want to ungroup something, I think it's shift command G or you can just control click and go to, yeah, shift command G. Grouping tracks is super helpful when you've got a big session going. Even when I'm producing something not recording, but I'm just working on building electronic track. I'll group my drum stuff, my synth stuff, my bass stuff, and then my live stuff like guitars or whatever, into different groups so that I can focus in on them as I like. 55. Audio Effects in Groups: One more thing about groups is that actually once you create a group, you can put effects on that group. Here's my drums, for example. My drum group has all of these different drum tracks in it, but when I make the group, I get an activator for that group. I can turn off all the drums if I want. I have a volume for that group, which if I want the drums to all be louder, I can mix it there. That's not a great idea, but you can do it that way. I've got different sends I can use. But most importantly, I can put effects on all the tracks in that group by just putting them here effectively. This is like routing another bus. You can see in my drum track, I put the glue compressor on that track, so that there's some compression happening on all of these files. In fact, I did that on all of these. If I go to the saxes, they have a compressor, Brass has a compressor that can be really handy to do when you're working on a session, putting your effects on a group rather than on individual tracks. Depending on what you're doing, that might be useful, it might not. In recording these, I wanted the same compressor on, like all my saxes. I did a bunch of effects to each track as needed, but the compression is all being handled on the outside in the group. So something to keep in mind while you're working. 56. Linked Tracks: Okay, one last organizing thing is linked tracks. If you're working on something and you say, for example this trumpet one and trumpet two, I want to make sure that those don't fall out of sync. And when I edit one of them, I want to edit the other one of them. Okay, I'm going to move these right next to each other for the moment so we can look at them. Trumpet one, trumpet two. Okay, I'm going to do is I'm going to select both. Then I'm going to go down here and I'm going to select link tracks. Okay, now they get a little thing there. Okay. Now watch what happens if I move these tracks. If I move this one, I move in the other one, right? If I select something in one of those tracks, it's selecting it in both. If I cut something, it's in both. If I draw a fade in one of them, it gets drawn in both. These are linked. You can link like tons of tracks together to do stuff. You can even warp this way, which is sometimes really useful. It says two audio class with different Warp markers are selected in two tracks. If I hit reset Warp markers, it's going to get rid of them, but then it's going to let me warp these together, which can be really useful now. I don't want to do that now because I've already warped these a whole bunch. I can change some settings around it. I can change the volume of both of them at the same time. The pitch, anything I need to linking things together that you need to stay together is a really important tool to unlink them. I'm going to select the same two tracks and just go to unlink tracks, now they're separated. All right, explore linked tracks if you ever need to keep a bunch of stuff together. 57. What's Next?: Okay, we've reached the end of part two of this class. Up next in part three, we're going to go into producing, producing music with live. We're going to go way deeper on everything that we've already talked about. We're going to talk about writing whole tunes with arrangement view. Doing the same with session view. We're going to drill down deep into just making beats. We'll really focus on that in that section. Working with synthesizers, all those cool new Midi tools, the generative stuff that I mentioned get into working on effects, and then some advanced production techniques like side chaining and all that good stuff. I'm really excited to start working on that, which I'm probably going to do in the next hour or so. Dive in, hopefully it's already out. But that is what comes next in this giant Ableton Live 12 sequence. 58. Bonus Lecture: Hey everyone, want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here. 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. Please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.