Ultimate Ableton Live 12, Part 3: Producing Music with Live

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to producing music with Ableton Live. This is the third class in my big giant Ableton Live 12 series. You don't need to have taken the first two. However, I'm going to assume you know your way around live a little bit. At this point in this class, we're going to focus on just making stuff. Start by getting comfortable with the arrangement view and then we'll work on making attract together. Then we'll move on to session view, and then we'll work on making it attract together. We'll focus on beats and what goes into making a beat, and what I look for in Beats. We'll talk about the Ableton synths that are built in, and then all these new Midi tools that are in Live 12. There's all these new tools that will let you just generate things. You can come up with a core progression and maybe you don't really like it all that much, you can click a couple of buttons and have lives say, let me see what I can do with that and have it generate more material for you. It's hugely valuable and really cool. Then we'll close out with some extra techniques like side chaining, routing, bussing, resampling, things like that. Before we wrap up, I'll leave you with a bunch of different sessions in this class so that you can have something to get started with and play with that are completely yours to use however you like. So let's dive in. I can't tell you how many times I've been like in the weeds working on something and I like programmed like this complicated beat. Only to realize I was like thinking of working on quarter view and arrangement view have different content areas but they share a mixer. Okay. Really make these groove a little bit better and make them feel a little more natural. Two of them you already know. I remember back when I was learning how to use session view and somebody showed me this thing that I'm about to show you. And it just went click and everything made sense about session view. So let's do it first all day. 2. Introduction to Arrangement View Editing: All right, here we are in part three of my giant Ableton Live 12 core series. This section is all about making tracks, so we're going to focus on producing music with Live 12. We're going to start in the arrangement view timeline. Now if you've seen some of my other sections of this series, then you know that I lean towards the arrangement view. But session view is just as good for producing music. One is not better than the other. In fact, I use arrangement view most of the time, but sometimes I'll make a track in session view just because it makes my brain work a little differently. I know a lot of people who work exclusively in session view. If you're more comfortable in session view, don't worry, we're going to work in both in this class because it's important to know how to use both. But we're going to start in arrangement view. This first chunk of stuff will be a little bit of review if you took one of my of this series, but I want to make sure we're all on the same page with our general editing functions and then we'll start talking about building tracks from there. Okay, so let's dive in. 3. Timeline Commands: looping, locators, and key commands: Okay, let's talk about our general timeline commands now. I'm not a big proponent of memorizing 1,000 key commands. You can navigate live almost entirely through key commands now. But I really don't like spending time memorizing key commands. I try not to give you too many of them, but there are a few that are super helpful for navigating live very quickly. Let's go over a few of those as it relates to the arrangement, view, and editing. The first is just what I call our Microsoft Word key commands, right? If I click on a clip, we can do copy command C, command V to paste. And if you're on a PC, it's what, is it alt or control? I can't remember to copy command V to paste option, click and drag is my all time favorite thing. That means leave a copy where it was and make a new one. It's like pulling a clone out. I use that all the time. Copy paste option, click and drag. Let's talk about loop. If we want to loop a part of the arrangement, we just highlight something. Doesn't matter if it's got a clip on it or not, but whatever we highlight is going to get loop. Command L is going to turn on looping. No matter what I highlighted, all tracks are going to play in this loop. Okay, this is our loop brace. We can move that around wherever we want. Lastly, let's do locators. These are little locators. You can see they're tiny little play commands because you can click on them, and if I double click on them, it'll start playing from there. But they're great for just leaving yourself little notes while you're working. I use them all the time. As you can see in this track that I just started, I put maybe a violin solo here and bring that thing back here to make one of these locators. We're just going to control. Click up here in the timeline and ad locator, then say whatever you want to say. This part, whatever. If you want to get rid of it, control, click on that locator again and delete. Or you can just hit Delete. Locators are super cool. You can move them around by clicking and dragging on the flag, and you can double click on them to start playing from that spot. Remember that if we select a section of a clip, we can copy from within it and paste. Same thing with audio clips, As long as we paste onto the same clip. If you're copying from Midi clip, you need to paste onto a Midi track. If you're copying from an audio clip, you need to paste on a audio track unless you want to do the conversion thing which we went through a bit on the first class in the series. Okay, those are our main big picture commands. I just want to get in our head right away. Next let's talk about some things we can do to an audio clip, in particular reversing in a couple other ways. We can modify clips. 4. Modifying Clips: Reversing, Warping, and more: Okay, we have a couple tools to modify clips. Let's take a look at some of those. If I click on this clip, let's solo this and just hear what it is. Okay, neat. Now, if I go to the clip view here, let's loop just this. If I go to the clip view here, there's a couple of things I can do that are just fun creative tools. The first down here is reverse. There's just a big old reverse button sitting right there. That can be really interesting. If we're trying to modify a clip, come up with some new ideas, do something interesting with it. I use that a lot. This edit button is interesting. If you click on it, it's going to say no Sample editor application has been selected. This is for if we really want to get down in the weeds and do some very fine tune editing to that clip, we could open a sample editor. It used to be really common that you would have a separate program that was like your like scalpel type tool to really get into in a way. Form. There was one called Peak, there was one called Sample Editor. There are a bunch of different ones but it's really fallen out of fashion now. Like I don't even have one set up, I never used that. I never really find a need to. There's a lot that we can do right in live. That's a legacy thing that I don't think is around anymore. Another cool thing we can do is with the BPM here. Now this is a warping trick. And we talked a whole bunch about warping in the last class. But I won't go into all the details about warping here. But if you want to do a quick crazy warping thing, you can divide the speed by half or double it. This is going to make strange things happen. Let's pull this out here and then double it. We're still backwards, which is actually cool. But let's reverse it so that we're going forwards again. Now we're going to half speed, go back up to normal speed, and then double speed. Okay, there's some fun things we can do. I like to play with these. There we go. Lastly, while we're in this area gain, we can just crank up the gain of a clip right here. But please don't do that. This is not a good way to do it. You could do it here. If you just need to add a quick boost to a whole thing. Look at this little minor Arpeggio clip I have here, Okay, sure. In this one I could go in and just give it a little, that's probably fine. But the majority of your volume, you should try to use either your track audio or the clip fades or automation for them. There's a couple other ways and we'll talk about that when we get into mixing. But this tool down here, this gain is, I think of this as a last resort when we just need another big boost. Try to avoid using that at all costs. The reason is you're very likely to clip by doing this, which is what this is doing now, it's going to be all distorted and nasty. It's also just easy to lose track of your boosting here. It's just not a great idea. This pitch control down here, however, is fine. Go nuts with it. You can see I've already done some pitch control because I wanted to play around with this sample. And it was not in the right key, but it was close. I just used the pitch here, but this pitch is very responsive. That's a fun tool to mess around with. Let's get back in the right key. Okay, just some ways to get us started with some quick modifying of clips. All right, let's talk about clip fades. 5. Clip Fades: All right, I like to think of clips as having six corners. You've maybe heard me say this before, but let's go down to this clip here. We have these four corners, and then we have two corners at the top of the head part of the clip. They all do different things. The header part of the clip, if I put my mouse over it, I can click and drag to pull out more of the clip. Now this is either going to just expose more of the clip that I've hidden or it's going to continue to loop the clip if it is set to loop. Okay, let's go back. The same thing is going to happen on the left side, where if I pull back, it's going to expose more of the clip or loop it if it's set to loop. Now the corners here are going to trigger a fade. I can fade that way. Now I get this point in the middle where I can craft that fade a little bit. This point at the end where I can control the fade a little bit too. Same thing on the right. I can do a big long fade craft that fade with this extra point and adjust it with this point on the right. All right, always remember of course and undo command Z is going to be your best friend as we start making tracks, which we're going to do in just a few minutes. Okay, a few more editing tools. I just want to get us really comfortable. Throwing clips around, flipping them backwards, moving them around, chopping them up. And then we're going to dive into working on a track. Next, let's talk about split and join. 6. Split and Join: Okay, another often overlooked thing is how to split up a clip. I end up spending a lot of time doing this because I like little glitchy things. There's a few ways we can do this. One is that we can just highlight something by our grid resolution, which in this case is a quarter note. I can grab a quarter note, copy it, go to a new track and paste it, right? I can grab little things here and there. If I want to do more, I can zoom in deeper. Now I'm looking at 64th notes. That's much finer. That's one way, is you can just highlight little bits and do it that way. But if you want to split a track, you have two options. Like if I want to cut a little piece of this out, I could put my cursor somewhere and press command E. That's going to just slice it. Right. Now these are separate and if I want to do it again, then I just cut out this little piece and I can move it around or I'm going to undo that. One thing that I do, which is actually faster in a weird way is just delete something. If I want to cut these two apart, just highlight something, delete it then if I just drag this back out, you won't hear that. It'll go right through it. But they've been cut into two command E or just delete something from within it and you'll get a slice. Okay, so I could just go Command command command. Just chop this up all over the place. Move these little slices around 64th notes. This will be frantic and neat, maybe. Let's hear it. I'm going to solo just this track. Here we go, ColeverI'ma. Undo all that. Now if you want to rejoin them here I have all these slices all over the place. Rejoining them is super easy. We looked at this key command earlier in the other class. What we're going to do is we're going to select the whole clip. Everything we want to be in one clip. This could even go farther. I could select both of these two clips. Okay, command J. Command J means consolidate. Now what this is going to do is it's going to rejoin everything together, but it's also going to print the track, if there's effects, if there's warping, anything like that, it's going to save it into the clip. Okay, command J. Now it's one clip. I often do this works on Midi tracks two Midi clips, two. If I have something like there's nothing really great here. But let's say, let's say this baseline, okay? This is a baseline. Let's say this base clip. I'm always going to do this twice. Okay? I don't want to have to copy this twice every time. I just want this to be one clip because that's the full statement of this riff. Okay, sure. I'm going to go through command J, Merge them into one clip. Okay, now I can just move this whole thing all over the place and it's nice and easy. Command J is consolidate, that means re, put it back together or put disparate things together. Command E is to break them apart. One more thing about consolidating, you can consolidate with empty space too. Like let's say these little swoosh things. I can consolidate this and it's going to make an audio file that fills up that space. I'm going to hit command J. Okay. There is my so bunch empty space and another swo, this could be useful if I want to put this somewhere else. And I don't want to have to really dive in there and figure out how to line up those swooshes. This will make it a lot easier to line them up because they're lined up correct here. If I copy and paste them somewhere else, it'll be fairly easy to do. Okay, let's talk about something that I haven't talked about yet and that is using the finder. 7. Drag and Drop: In part one of the series, I spent a lot of the time talking about the browser. And about how you can make your way through the browser and find everything you need. And that's true, the browser is the thing that's going to make you more efficient than most people if you really get good at using the browser. But one thing I didn't talk about is that you can just use the finder. You don't need to drag things in from samples. Like if you go down to samples and you say, okay, I want like, ya, sure I want that sample. I want that vocal sample in here. You can drag it in and that's awesome. But you can also just drag it right in from the finder. If you have like, here's some little buzz. Cool. If I want to use that, I can just drag that right in. Okay, we should probably drag it onto a new track. But it is right, there it is. Okay. Now this could cause problems. If you drag in a whole bunch of files from all over your hard drives, it's possible that live starts to lose track of them. So you're going to want to do a collect all and save fairly often. That's going here to file collect all and Save. That's going to wrap up all of those things and make a copy of all those clips that you've pulled into Live and put them into your session folder so that Live doesn't lose track of them. If you're pulling things in from the finder, get used to doing that. I'm going to talk a little bit more about collect all and save in just a minute. But I wanted to just get into your head that not everything has to be done with the browser. You can just drag stuff right in from anywhere on your computer into live if you want. So keep that in mind. Okay, a couple more things. 8. Automation: One of our most powerful tools for making interesting music is automation, okay? Let's look at automation again. Remember that automation is just changing a parameter over time, okay? We can set our volume. Let's do it with this track. Let's zoom way out. Here we go. We can set our volume of this track to be quiet or loud. If we want, we can look at our mixer by going down here. We can pull up a mixer. Let's make a little more room. Here's our mixer. This track is right here, so I can pull that volume down or up, That's all fine. But what if I wanted to start quiet and get louder even just a little. That is what we need automation for. In order to do automation, we need to go into automation mode. You can get that either by pressing just the letter A. That might not work. If you have this Midi keyboard on, it'll just cause problems. You can either turn that off and then just press A or you can go to View Automation mode. Okay? With automation, we get all of these lines in order to automate a parameter, anything, just click on it, okay? If I want to automate the volume, I can click here. Now that line is volume. I can also click down here. Okay? Let's say this is my volume. I'm going to make a point. And then at this point, I want my volume to be A. Now that volume is going to get louder over time. Maybe I don't want it to be so extreme. I can do that If I want it to be curved, put my mouse over it till it turns dark. Just like that, I hold down the option key and then click and drag, and I get nice curves. If I want that, virtually any parameter can be automated. I can my panning, I can any plug in. Let's go up to my instrument here. Here I have this instrument on it, this filter envelope. If I want to automate this filter envelope, I can do that. I just click on it once and then I do it like that. Now as I play it, you'll see it change over time. Anything that is automated gets a little pinkish dot that just tells us that parameter is being controlled by something else. Okay, let's look at what happens. Here it goes, okay? Not a dramatic effect there, but it works. Anything you want to automate, just go into automation mode and click on it. You should see it show up here. Once you click on it in automation mode, you'll get these double drop down menus. This one shows us the device. This one shows us the parameter dark poly pad has these parameters available to it. Okay. I can also just go to the mixer and then I get panning volume, cross fade, reverb and delay. There's a lot of different things you can get access to. Automation will be the thing that makes your tracks go from good to great, okay? If you get really good at automating and doing the fine detail work in your track, that's where things start to sound really good. So it's very important to get comfortable with automation, okay? There's a couple of things that are actually really hard to, that people ask me about all the time. One is the tempo and the other is like time signature changes and things. But if you want the tempo to go from a tempo to another tempo over an amount of time, that's actually tricky to do. It's actually easy. It's just really hard to find. Let's go to a new video and do that. 9. Tempo and Time Signature Changes: Okay, if you want to change the tempo of your track, our global tempo is up here. Everything is going to run on that tempo. You can automate the tempo. It's a little weird. You can either control click on the tempo and say show automation. But sometimes it's not clear where that comes up. The tempo automation is in our master track, our Main, right here. Okay. So if I go down to main and I select mixer, I can say song tempo. Okay. My range is 61. 2087 is my tempo. I can go up to 200. Yeah. That's how you do it. If you want to do a sudden change of tempo, this is how you do it. You just make a point and change it like that. You'll see our tempo jumping all over the place. It's not solo that, oh crazy. All right, let's chill that out now if you want to clear all automation like I kind of want to do here, I can control click on the parameter and say Delete automation. That works for basically any parameter, okay? Now time signatures, you cannot automate time signature changes. It's weird, but if you think about automating time signatures, that's a head scratcher anyway, you wouldn't really want to do that. Live deals with times time signatures in a weird way, like if I double click on a clip, you can see what the time signature is here. Live says it's 44. If I change this like okay, now it's 416. Sure it's going to sound the same live. Doesn't need time signatures to tell it how to play notes. All the time signature does is change our grid. Okay, now you can see we've got four quarter notes here. For some reason, let's go back to four and let's do like a 54. Okay. Now there's five quarter notes in the grid, but my notes are still in the same spot they didn't like adjust to a new time signature. All time signatures really do here is tell us is change the grid so that we can see where we are. That's really it. That being said, if you want to change the time signature, it's a little different than tempo. You're going to go up here to the same spot that we use to put locators in. You're going to write click or control. Click and say Insert Time Signature Change. Then you're going to type a number slash another number. They can be whatever you want, 16, 37 times. Okay. That's, that's the weirdest time signature that's ever existed. But there it is. I don't even know how you'd count that. But again, this time signature, it's not going to change any note. It's going to say it's going to sound the same. It's just going to change your grid all around. Okay, let's delete that, that we're back to where we are. Tempo automation and setting different time signatures. You can set as many time signatures as you want. You just can't create a time signature, another time signature and draw a line between them. It really wouldn't do anything anyway. 10. Downloading and uploading a session: Okay, Last thing in this section, I just want to remind you that the way we have to share sessions now, I'm going to be sharing a few sessions with you. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take the session that we're working on and go to file collect all and Save. Now like I just mentioned a minute ago, this is going to pack up all of our files from all over the place and make a folder. Okay, so when you do a collect all and save, you're going to want to do this whenever you're going to send a session to somebody. This is going to pack everything up and make sure that they can open it. It doesn't guarantee they have all the same plug ins or instruments or anything like that, but it does at least guarantee they have all the right files. I would recommend selecting these first three files from elsewhere, Files from other projects, files from your user library. Turn those on. Yes, files from factory packs. This is going to make your file really big if you turn it on. If you're using a lot of stuff. I usually leave that off assuming that everybody has the main factory packs. But you can turn it on if you want. If I click okay, which I'm going to do, it's going to save everything into a folder. That folder looks like this. When you save something, you're going to get all of these folders that have a bunch of stuff in it. Next, I'm going to turn this into a zip file for me. On a Mac, I can just control click and say Compress. Now I have that project. I should probably give it a better name than untitled project, but whatever you get the point, now I can send this to someone using Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever. It should open the same as I've been using it, but without that click all in Saves step, it won't. When I post projects in this class, they're going to look like this. They're going to be a zip file. When you get them, you're going to double click on that zip to open it. And then you're going to have all of this stuff and you're going to open that session. Okay enough. Let's make something. 11. The "Right way" to make a track in Live: Okay, in this section, let's make a track. But to be more honest about what we're actually going to do here, let's start a track. Let's make just the beginnings of something and I'll show you my process. What I like to do, how to take advantage of these things that we've just talked about. What we're going to do is we're going to put something together, play around, be creative, have a little fun. And we're just going to do that for a few videos. And then we're going to go back to learning how to do more stuff, and then we'll make another track. Okay. Sometimes in my university classes I get tired from talking about making music all day, and I just want to shut my mouth and make music. That's what we're going to do now, except I'm not going to shut my mouth, unfortunately. Because I'm going to talk you through what I'm doing first and foremost, what is the right way to make a track in life? I am intentionally baiting that question because the answer is that there is none. Anyone who says this is the correct way to do something in live is lying. There are 100 ways to do everything in live. It's a very versatile program. There is literally no wrong way to use it. I've seen students do things that to me are bizarre. Because they didn't know how to do the more complicated way they end up with amazing music. No matter how they got there, if they ended up with amazing music, they did it right. Don't let anyone ever tell you that there is a right way to use live or that there's a right way to make music at all. The way that you do it is the right way. I'm going to show you my way. I'm going to show you how I start to put something together. You're welcome to use that, but if you do something different, that's fine. Okay, let's dive it M. 12. Where to start?: Okay, where do we start? For me, the answer to that question depends on what I'm doing. I always think about like, who's boss. Like who's the boss of this track that we're about to make? If I'm working on a podcast, then the director is the boss, right? So I've got a structure to work with in that case. And I'm not just totally on my own to do whatever I want. If I'm working on a film or TV project, there's a boss and it's not me. My role in those cases is to start from not zero, right? Like I've got a script or I've got actors dialogue or a movie or something to work with. But in this case, I have a blank slate and I'm going to make music for me. Who's boss? This guy. Okay, I'm the boss so I can do whatever I want. What do I want to do? Well, I'll tell you what I want to do. I want to make synth wave music because that's what I'm super into right now. I'm about two thirds of the way done with a big synth wave project. I'm really into it, I'm really having fun with it if you're not familiar with synth wave, it's like really heavy and futuristic '80s vibes think like cyber punk, that kind of thing. So I think I know where I'm going to start. I'm going to search my browser for synth wave and because I know that there's this audio file of this drum loop, that's what I was looking for. There we go, very synth wave, drums. Okay, so I'm going to throw that drum loop on here. I'm just going to start with this. I'm going to put this on here. We might not even use it in the end, but we're going to start by playing with this a little bit. Probably from this I'm going to build some chords, a bassline, maybe some sound effects, Some other synths. Just seeing if I can make a groove out of it. I'm not going to worry about the arrangement, meaning like the structure of the song for now. I'm just going to try to get something going that feels like interesting. Music Now, do I always start with the beat? No, I don't. Actually, it's fun to start with the beat, but sometimes I just start with a sound, like a sample that's inspiring me to do something. Sometimes it's a synth, sometimes it's the beat, but not always. Okay, I think this beat needs a little bit of work before we dive into using it. Let's chop it up a little bit. 13. Chopping up a beat: Okay, let's listen to this loop and then I think you'll see what I want to get rid of. The end of it is a little wacky. Okay, so first I want to know if this is warped correctly. And I can tell that it is, because I can see things lining up on the beats that I expect them to. But if I want to be super sure, let's hit our metronome and just listen pretty good. Okay, now to get rid of this crazy fill at the end, I can do two things. I could just chop it out, select it, I'm going to press the delete key and then replace that with something. I could replace it with basically the last part of the first time through the loop. I could go there, stretch it back, see how that sounds. See, that works just fine. Another thing I could do would be to just smoosh this down to a four bar loop rather than an eight bar loop. This is going to be exactly what I want. I'm going to, let's loop it. Okay? The only thing I don't like about this is that there's all this rever ringing and then when it circles back around, it's just dry. That's kind of unfortunate. Maybe I will stretch it all the way out and see if I can go back to that first thing we tried and just paste in the end of the other loop. Oops, let's go there at that. Okay, let's loop this and see if, when it goes back to the beginning, if it still feels super dry, It does. I think that's just in there. Let's go with this. It works. One thing I'm going to do just to make my life a little bit easier is I'm going to recombine this into one file so that I can drag it around a little bit easier. But as I was saying that I had another idea. I wonder if I could replace this kick with one that's full of reverb. Let me try like this one, Could I put this? Because the deal is that this one has all the reverb on it. The silence here is what we would call wet, meaning there's still decay from that snare drum happening. But here it's just flat. Let's try taking this one, actually. This one might be better because it's got a little bit more time. Yeah, let's take that copy. I'm going to go here, V. Okay, So I took this kick drum and put it here so that it was more wet. Let's hear it, let's here, circle around again. See that works really well. Okay, so now I'm happy with that. Now let's combine it together. So I'm going to select everything here and I'm going to hit command J to consolidate it. All right, now I have my new loop. This is one clip and it is exactly how I want it. Great, let's try to add some harmony. 14. Harmony: Okay, let's see if we can find a harmony that works on this. Now, if you're not familiar with writing harmonies, we can't go into all of music theory in this one video. But I'll encourage you to check out some of my music theory classes or my book. Here's what I'm going to do. I have a habit of, I don't really want to deal with sound design while I'm working on the track. In other words, I'm going to throw a grand piano on this track. I'm going to work out my harmony with the piano Sound. Once I get it to where I want, then I'll start messing around with finding a good sound to go there. But I just like working with pianos. It's just easier. Okay, let's do a re progression, turnoff loop. Let's just start here. Okay, So I'm going to do a pretty simple harmony. Let's, let's do C minor. I'm going to make, let's hold each of these for a bar for now. Now I just need to make the chords. C, E flat, G is going to be a C minor chord. Let's maybe jazz this up a little bit by putting this note down an octave, okay? Okay, cool. Now maybe I'll shorten this clip. So this is just that C minor. I could even name it right now, minor. Okay, now let's make another clip. So I'm just going to copy that C minor. Okay, so let's make another chord. I think the chord I want here is going to be a major. Let's go up to a flat, which is G sharp. So we're going to go A flat. C, E flat, okay? And then let's drop this note down, just because I like the way that that sounds a little bit better. Okay, let's make another chord. Let's rename this one a flat shorthand here is that it's a minor chord. You put a lower case if it doesn't have any lower case M after it or anything else, it's just a major. Okay, now here, let's do an E flat major chord. You might be thinking, where am I getting, where am I getting these chords? I know the sound I want. Here is a progression that would be a 1637 in minor. If you know anything about music theory that might make some sense. It's just something I feel like trying out. I'm just playing around with chords and I'm going to keep them as separate clips so that I can move them around. If I don't like the order, let's make an flat flat. G. B flat. Okay, let's take this note up an octave. Maybe this note up an octave, two. All right? That looks good. We're going to call that E flat major. And then one more. We're going to call this one. This is going to be a B flat major chord. It's going to look like a sharp. Whoops. B, D and all right, now I'm looking up here and I just want these to work just to flow between each other. Well, let's see. I could move that note up, leave it down. But I will move this one down. Okay, let's hear it now. Remember, this is just piano. Okay? It's not bad. Let's loop just this first half so we can try to. Okay, I kind of like it. I like it in this order. And so I'm going to turn this into one clip. So I'm going to join this together with Consolidate Command J. Okay. Now we have one clip and now I can look at it a little closer. What I'm going to do now is called voicing. I'm going to stretch this one out. I'm just going to try to make the path of least resistance between all of these notes. Let's take this one and go down an octave that makes this to this nice. None of these connect super well. Now I'm going to add some notes in here that aren't really part of it, like this. I'm going to add this note. I'm just going to, maybe this note I'll stretch over to. You're not really going to hear that very much in the piano because the piano doesn't sustain a whole lot. But once we switch it to a synthesizer, you will. Okay, so I think I'm cool with this core progression for now. Let's go to find a synth to put on it. 15. Sound Design: Okay. I want to answer two questions. First one is that why didn't I start at the beginning of the track? Why didn't I start way back here? I don't know, actually. That's just a weird habit. You don't need to start at the beginning. Sometimes I just like to have some space to work. Since I don't think this is going to be the beginning of the track, I like to jump in in the middle and then pull it apart from that and work on the arrangement of the track later. I might go back to the beginning later, but even if your track doesn't end up starting at the beginning of the session, that's K, fine, you don't need it to. It's just a habit. You can start at the beginning if you want. The second question is, should we do more piano stuff before doing the sound design? Normally, I'd probably do a little bit more harmony work before I switch to sound design, But I just want to show you my process. We're going to go to the sound design step now. Sound design is just a fancy word for synthesis and playing around a synthesizers, that's all it really is. We're going to pick a synthesizer to go on this that fits the sound I want. Now, this can be a big problem for some people because there's so much stuff in live that you can just end up digging through synth patches all day long. And it can be, what's that word? There's a term for this, paralysis of ideas, right? You can have so many ideas. So many different things can sound cool that you're like, I don't know what to do. There's just too many options, right? That's where collections comes into play. All right. I can go here and go to, I can even close up my filters, say what's going to sound cool. I know this D seven library that I have sounds great for synth wave stuff. Now I don't want to use it because I should use some of the Ableton instruments because that's what we're doing in this class is learning how to use Ableton. Let's go to Drift. Drift is a new instrument. We'll go over like how this works in a lot of detail later. But let's just look at some of the presets for now. That's pretty cool. So if you find yourself in the position that I am in now, where you're just going through a whole bunch of presets and saying, what's going to work here? Instead of doing that, try putting into words the sound that you're looking for. I'm looking for a dark sound with some motion to it. Okay, I kind of like that. It's a dark sound, it's got some motion, some wobbliness. Let's try it. So I'm just going to drag that over to this track and let's hear it, okay? I like it, but this instrument is a slowly evolving one. My Midi clip is designed for piano where it's like right on, I need to slow down my chords, which is easy to do. If I double clip, click on the clip, select all and then X two, open it up, Okay. Now each chord takes twice as long. Okay. If you didn't see what I did there, I just went into the piano roll editor, command A to select all and then two. Just stretched it all out for me. Okay, let's open up my loop brace a little bit longer and now let's hear it. Okay? I kind of like that. It's still not letting the whole thing speak as much as I want. So let's try going up an octave. So I'm going to hit command in the piano roll editor, and then shift up arrow. Okay? Now let's hear it, okay? I kind of like it, but we need more, I need more definition on that. Harmony. It's a little too ambient. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to duplicate this track. I'm going to go over here. Control, right click or command click. Duplicate. Okay, now I have that same track. Now I'm going to put a different instrument on this one. Let's try to do that. I'm gonna solo this one, actually, no, I'm gonna mute our other one. That's a little bright, but I don't hate it. I'm going to keep that one and do one more. You know what I'm going to do? This is going to blow your mind. I'm going to go back to piano for this one, because here's my logic. What I'm thinking is this adds a cool texture. This adds a cool texture. And this is going to give some definition to our chords. So I'm going to take this one back down an octave, maybe even just one. All right? Now let's hear them all together and see what we've got. Okay? I really sort of don't like this middle one now, so let's try one other thing on that. Let's go back to instruments. I'm still looking at the new meld. Let's try that on this one. Inductive. Okay. It's getting somewhere. It's like a power ballad, but it's got potential. So the thing that I feel like this is missing right now is a baseline. So let's go to that. 16. Bassline: Okay, You want to know the easiest way to make a perfect baseline. Take your core progression. Duplicate it again, then we're going to go into it and we're going to get rid of everything but the bottom note, boom. There's your bass line. This is going to fit with those chords perfectly. It's not going to be the most dynamic and interesting thing in the world, but if we're just looking for bass notes to hold down the harmony, this will work great. Let's find a cool base. Okay, let's think about what do I want? Sound Do I want? Let's go to the meld instrument. I want something with some motion to it. I kind of like that for a synth. Let's maybe try that. All right, this one's good and got some matrix stuff going. Let's see what it sounds like. All right, this one clearly has some fun tuning things happening and that's not gonna work for me right now. It sounds like just really out of tune. Let's try that one. Okay, some of our tuning issues might be coming from our synthesizers, but let's try one more thing. Since we're just working with presets, I'm going to go down to wave table. This has some really good bases in it. I kind of dig this. Let's try that. Okay? This has got potential. I kind of like it. I like how kind of crazy and frantic it is. Let's try one more, okay? This is kind of cool. I like this. I'm going to go with this. So now I'm, let's do one more layer on this, and then we'll move on to other things, then we'll come back to this track again later. I think I still want this harmony to come out a little bit more, so I think let's just put some strings on it and see what happens. 17. Strings: Okay, so for strings, I'm going to take one of these and duplicate it again, but I'm going to pull it down here. Okay? I'm going to rename it Strings. Okay? Now let's find a good string library. If I go to pack, I have the Ableton one, which is called Orchestral strings, and they're pretty good. I have other string libraries too, but I'm going to try the Ableton string ensemble here. I want long slow notes, that's going to be a legato. Pizzicato is going to be plucked. Staccato is going to be short tremlos, we want legato, Okay? Now I might need to mess around with the octaves on this to really get this to speak. Well, I want a fairly tight ensemble, so I'm going to move these low notes up an octave. Now let's hear it. Let's just hear the strings, okay? I don't love that. Let's go down and knock it. Let's look that note right there, and let's hold off on that note. Just a gut feeling. Mm, My gut was wrong. Let's take out that note. Hey, that's nice. Let's hear it in context, okay? Now, I might not want all these things happening at the same time, but they all work. What I might do is put together an arrangement where maybe this starts and then that this comes in and then we go to this, and then that's where the baseline enters. May happen in the beginning in this part, and then we add that. Okay, now the start of a short arrangement. Let's hear what we've got, okay? So it's not the most brilliant thing I've ever written, but it's a start to something. Okay, let's move on to some more new stuff. 18. Introduction to Session View Editing: Okay, let's go over to Session View now and get a little bit more comfortable with producing music in session view. Okay, so I'm going to hit tab Key, and now we're over in session view. Now remember what I told you before about one of the most important concepts with session view, and that is that session view and arrangement view have different content areas, but they share a mixer, okay? That means that all of these tracks, the instruments on them. Like this one has the strings, right? And this one has this synthesizer and this one has the piano and the other synth. And the other synth, they don't have any of the clips, but they have all of the settings that we had over in arrangement view. Now just because they don't have the clips in session view doesn't mean that we can't get them. Okay. There's an easy way to go get them. And we'll do that in just a second. But I want to put this in your head first. As you're working in session view, I want you to be thinking about each one of these little clips slots. Okay? Imagine these are each a little spinning record, okay? You've got all these little spinning records going all over the place. Okay? Now you want to do two things with those. First is you want to craft what that spinning record is and making sure that it is exactly what you want. Then you're going to drop the needle on it. Whenever you're ready, we're going to have all these little spinning records and we're going to pull them in as we want them in. Okay, let's do it. 19. Moving Clips to Between the Views: Okay, so let's go get some clips from the arrangement view. Okay, there's a few different ways you can do this obviously we can just pull things in again. If we wanted to like that drum loop I could do search for synth wave and a sample piano keys and there it is, okay. But remember I cut it up and changed it so it would be easier just to go get it. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to hit Tab. Here's that loop now I could hit Copy, Command Copy. Go over to Arrangement View, go to the same track and type command V for paste. And then we're going to bring it over. Okay, that's one way. Another way is just to click and drag, like we're going to move it then while I'm holding it down, don't let go yet. Press Tab with your other hand. Now I still have it. Okay. And I can drop it in right there. Okay. It's all the same, same thing with Midi clips. I can grab this Midi clip, hold onto it, hit Tab, and I can put it on a Midi track. Now remember, your instruments are on these tracks. It's going to matter where you put it, But there it is. I can play it if I want to stop it. If I want to stop it, I'm going to hit the Stop at the bottom here. Okay, let's actually talk about the playing and stopping of clips for a minute. 20. Playing And Stopping Clips: Okay, this deserves special attention because it can be confusing and it can be a frustrating if I play a clip. Okay, I hit the little play button on a clip. Now to stop it, I can press Space Bar if I want. Now, this can actually be problematic because sometimes you might stop something and other things will keep going. I just started this clip and my drum clip just took out to stop the drum clip. I'm going to hit that, but now this one's still going. Okay. I'm going to go down here and hit Stop down there. Here's what you should keep in mind. Space bar will stop everything, okay? But when you rest, when you start up again, it's going to start all the clips that we're just playing. It's going to start those playing again too. If you want to a clip individually, you can hit the Stop button underneath it, or actually any Stop button in that track. Or if you don't see one, you always have one down here at the bottom. Or if you just want to stop everything, there is a master stop everything button and it's right here. Okay? That's just going to hit all your big Stop buttons. Stop all clips. Of course. You can always hit the big Stop button at the top two, but that will function the same way that your space bar functions. Just keep that in mind. Those are our main stop buttons. They are peppered all over the place in a way. It's strange, but you'll get used to it, trust me. Okay, next let's talk about the behavior of the clip. So grid here. 21. Clip Slots and Scenes: Okay, here's how the Clip Slot Grid works. Okay, this whole thing is called the Clip Slot Grid. We can play one file at a time vertically. Okay. Only one file per track can be playing. Let me demonstrate by loading up a few different drum loops. Sure, sure. Maybe one more. Sure. Okay, so if I want to play this drum loop, I can play, and that's great. If I want to play another one, I'm going to play right underneath it. Okay. Now it's going to have warped all of these, so they're all going to be in time. That one was like double time. But whatever, they're always going to launch on the downbeat or on the Global Launch setting, That means that there is a setting called Global Launch where you can say only on a downbeat every bar. Okay, If I click this one, and then I click another one, you see it blink for just a second. It's waiting for the next downbeat. And it's only going to launch on a downbeat. That makes it so you can kind of navigate through the clip slot grid all you want. And it's going to keep you from like launching in a weird spot and losing the beat. It's always going to launch on the downbeat. It's going to keep you tight in the groove. Now if you want to change that, this little setting right here, this 1 bar, that is your global launch setting. Okay, we can say only launch something new every 8 bars. If you're doing like a really long set and it's complicated and you're launching clips all over the place. Maybe you just want to chill for a part of it and say every 8 bars is when something new is going to happen. Keep it easy. Or you can say none and then things will launch right when you click them. Dangerous, or you can say every quarter note. Every eighth note, Whatever you want. Okay? I'm going to leave it on 1 bar. Okay? So only one of these can happen at a time. I can't launch, I can't play two at once in the same track. Okay, that's true for all tracks, but I can play as many as I want horizontally. Okay, so let's say I want to play this clip, this drum groove and core progression. It's cool, Now I want to switch to a different drum groove. That, and let's say there's more stuff here. Here's our strings. Okay, maybe now I want to add in this clip the synth. Maybe the strings mark, this is our baseline. I put the core progression in it so I can move and as many as I want horizontally, but only one at a time vertically. Okay? Now on top of that, if I want to launch a whole bunch of stuff all at once, let's say I want to launch everything in this row, okay? The row is called a scene. Okay? And I can launch the whole row all at once by going right here. Okay? Go to a different scene. Okay? Now, notice that when I launch the first scene, and then I go to the second one, it's going to launch the stop button, right? It's going to stop anything that doesn't have a clip going in it. It's going to hit the stop button if you want it to, not do that. You can select some stuff and say command E. That's going to hide the stop button. So that this one will now continue playing as see how this one just keeps going because there's no stop button. No one told it to stop, so it's going to keep going. Now this is how people very often navigate session view. They go to the scene and they change the name. It's command R and say intro command, verse, chorus. First two, whatever. Okay, now we go to the S. We launch the verse right there. First two, launching by scene, which is the row is how it's often done. But again, don't forget, you can do things however you want. Okay, let's move on. 22. Setting up loops: Okay, let's talk about setting up one of these clips so that it is exactly how we want it for our imaginary little spinning record. Okay, let's go back to this clip. So it's going to stop everything and hit play here. Okay, this is familiar to us, we've already messed with this. Okay, so first let's make sure this loops a lot of things. In session view, by default will loop, but because we pulled this over and it wasn't set up to loop in arrangement view, it's not set up to loop here. In order to get up to loop, all we have to do is turn on loop down here. Now it's going to loop, I'm going to turn it down a little bit so I can talk over it. We have some of our same settings here. We have Warp Settings, Pitch Volume. This should be familiar to us by now. We also have these launch settings. We can do some special things with how we launch this clip. We can say our global launch setting. That's what this global thing means here. Legato means that if we launch another clip, it's going to pick up where this one left off. You can adjust the velocity, We can set a different type of launch method. Trigger means we're going to hit it and it's going to start going. Gait means while I'm holding the play button down, it's going to play. But as soon as I let go, it's going to stop playing. Toggle means I'm going to press at once to start it playing. And again, to stop it playing, I'm not sure how repeat is different than trigger just with a general loop, but okay, so what if I wanted this to loop only half as long? Okay, what if I wanted this to be just a four bar loop? Okay? All I have to do is find my loop brace, which is this, and pull it in to be half as long, okay? Okay, Now what if I want this to have a little fill? When I launch this, I want it to go Tom ba, boom. And then start on the dump beat. Right? Here's what I can do, this little arrow right here. This means where is this going to start from, when I. Okay, 99% of the time. We leave that at the beginning, but it doesn't have to be at the beginning. I could put it right here. Let's put it right here. Now I take that back. Let's put it right here. Now, when I launch this, we're going to hear beat four and then beat one, or we're going to hear the fourth measure, and then it's going to go back to the first measure, and then it's going to loop throughout the whole thing. Okay? So when I launch it, watch what happens, right? So that's a way to get a little fill in the beginning of it. Okay, I'm going to move this back to the beginning. I can make my loop as short as I want. Here's just 1 bar. Sure, extend it open. One thing you'll notice in session view is that we have this little pi right here. That's just a visual cue to tell us when the beginning of the loop is coming around again, If I make it longer now you can see it when you're performing and you're doing a bunch of stuff all at once onstage. These little pies are handy to tell you when the ending of the loop is going to come and so that you're ready to do the next thing that you plan on doing. Okay, let's talk about setting up some strange loops, like a loop on beat two. This is a good way to understand how session view actually works. 23. One-Shot Looping: I remember when I was learning how to use session view and somebody showed me this thing that I'm about to show you and it just went click and everything made sense about session view. Let's do it first. I'm going to find a kick sample. Sample. One shot I just want to thump. Okay, not bad. Let's do this one. Okay, I'm going to throw that somewhere. How about right there? Okay, here's my kick. Okay, now that is a very short sample. If loop that sample, that is basically useless. Okay. No, I can't loop it right now, because that sample isn't warped. I have to turn warping on to loop it. If I loop, it's just going to do this watch. That's not very useful to me. Okay, I want that to be in time. Okay, So I want that to be on a quarter note. Okay? Now, in order for that to be a perfect quarter note, I have to make sure that the length of this loop is a perfect quarter note. It's not. Let's make this loop longer. I can loop the empty space here. Now I can get here. Now this is a quarter note. One to 1.2 That is a first be. Now if I launch this, now it's a quarter note. Okay, Now this might be all you need. That's what's cool about this, is that like if I have this clip going and I just want a pattern that is just like a solid kick, I see one kip and set it to look on the right. I don't need a whole loop here if it's just one note, Okay, So let me set this to loop, okay? Now. But what if I want it on every other note? Okay, That's easy enough. All I have to do is stretch this out, right? Because now it's going to go kick, kick, nothing. And that kick, because the loop length is two beats. It is going to be perfectly on forever. I could let this play for 20 years and that is never going to fall off the beat. It's just going to be perfect. Okay, Now what if I want to do the same thing, but I want the kick to be on beat two instead of beat one. How do I do think about it for a minute? To do this, I put silence on the back. If I want this to be on beat two, I need silence at the front. Watch this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my loop position. I'm going to type in negative one. Now I'm at a whole bar in the negative. That's not what I want, I just want these two beats. Okay, here's one and here's negative one. We're going to move our start position back, okay? And our end position forward position isn't really going to matter here. But I'd like to move it out of the loop race just to be safe. Okay, now we're going to start here at negative 1.4 and play one. Now it's going to be on B two, okay? So you can go negative. All right, so hopefully that opened your mind as to what we can do here in session view. 24. Clip Envelopes: So what about automation? You remember that in arrangement view, we could draw a line. We could say, I want this to get louder over time, right? And we would say start here and here, and draw a little line using automation mode. We don't have automation mode here on session view, we don't need it. Here's how we do automation and session view. Let's go to a clip. Okay, we have two tabs up at the top of our clip view. We have sample and envelopes. Now we're going to go to envelopes here and we see automation and modulation. Here we see automation. Now envelopes in this setting, envelope means repeating automation like automation that comes back around over and over and over, which is what our automation will do here. If, because it's looping. You'll see the term envelopes used a lot more in synthesis. When we get into the heavier synthesis stuff, which we will be doing soon, that term will make more sense for now, let's just think of it as a looping automation Here we can automate something. We can say mixer, track, volume. Sure. We can say this is going to start really quiet and get really loud if I make another point. Now if I play this clip. Okay, cool. Now we'll come back to this modulation setting later. We don't need it right now. Just remember that anything you can automate is going to show up here. And remember that you can switch to a different automated parameter just by clicking on it. So here's our panning in our mixer. If I click on that, our automation goes to panning, okay? So I can pan things around all I want. Now what's tricky about this is that we have to remember that our automation is going to loop back. In this case, what's going to happen is my panning is going to be right here and then it's going to loop back and it's going to jump to down here. It's going to be like really strange. Well, we're not going to hear it because of the volume automation, but the volume automation has the same problem. We ramp up and then we jump back down to nothing because it's looping. We could avoid that by just making sure we start an end in the same place like that. Now it won't be so jerky, but it's not very interesting musically. But there is one other way we can play with this idea, and it is through this button here, linked and unlinked. Let's go to a new video and talk about unlinked automation. 25. Linked and Unlinked Automation: Okay, this concept can be a little bit quantum physics in the way that it can mess with your head a little bit. But basically, here's the deal. What you've probably heard this before, where there's like a pattern that's happening in a track. There's a filter on it. And that filter slowly opens up over a long period of time, and it gives us this big energetic moment. Let's do that. Here's what I mean by filter. If I go to effects, we'll do this more later. I'm going to go, I'm going to go eight on this track. I'm going to turn off everything except one band. Give it some resonance, and we'll do that. Okay? What I want to automate here is this frequency. Okay? I'm going to click on it, then I'm going to go over to our clip view and make sure eight frequency A is selected. Okay. Now what I can do is say it's closed and it's open. Okay, Here's what that's going to do, okay? We'll talk about how to use EQs and what they're actually doing later. But what I want you to understand is that right now, this is cool, that this is happening over the course of a loop of 4 bars. That's cool. But what if I wanted to happen over the course of 8 bars or 16 bars, or 32 bars, right? I can't do that because, because my loop is only 4 bars. That's where this unlinked setting comes in. I'm going to click this linked, say unlinked. Now we see this is the length of our loop. That's cool. But I can also, I can say length and make this way longer. Basically, you can imagine that that clip is looping 1234567 times. Let's make it eight for a good measure. Now I can say that parameter is going to go over eight measures. The clip is going to loop. This automation is going to start going, then the clip is going to loop again. The automation is going to continue and it's going to continue over many cycles of the loop before it starts over again. Okay, let's check it out. Let's go look at now. It's going very slow, so we're like halfway now. Maybe I shouldn't have made this so long. My panning automation is still there, still jumping around because the panning automation is still linked, right? So it's still a 1 bar loop of automation. So not everything has to be linked or unlinked. Okay? And then it closes up again. This parameter is unlinked, but if I go back to mixer and my panning, this one is still linked. So it's going to repeat every cycle of the loop. Okay, so let me say this one more time. When we're unlinked, we are not bound to the length of the loop. With our automation, our automation can be as long as we want, but when we're linked, our automation can only span the length of one cycle of the loop. Let's look at that on our kick here. This is, I'm going to switch this back to being every two beats on the beat. Okay, now let's go here. Now our automation is gone. Now I'm going to say the length of this will say, I don't know long now. I can change this over time. These automation settings stay with the clip. If I go to a new clip, even if it's on the same track, it doesn't have that automation. The automation, whether it's linked or unlinked, stays with the clip, not just on the track. Okay, let's move on. 26. Tempo and Meter Changes: Okay, a couple more utility things in session view. What if we want to change the time and meter in session view? We're going to do that in the scene launch. Okay, we can say when I launch this scene, I want to change the tempo. I want to launch this scene, I want to change that tempo. Here's how we do it. If you're in a clip, we're going to go over to these scene launches. When I click on one, you might see different things, but what we want to see is this. If you don't see that, click the main heading in your main track here and then go click on one of your scene launch buttons. And it should come up. There we go. Okay. We can say the tempo here is, let's say we want to go down to one oh eight. Okay. Now you can see that this clip, the play button on this scene launch turned this teal color. That means that there's tempo automation information in it. This one, let's say, goes down to one oh four. Sure. Let's say this one is going to change our meter to 34. Now, again, that's just going to change the grid, but it can be valuable depending on what you're doing. You definitely want to do it. If your music is actually in 34 and you want to launch on downbeats, you need to make sure that live knows that. Now you can see if you look at our global tempo Pi launch intro, it goes to one oh eight Pi launch verse, it goes back to stays at one oh eight because it doesn't have any info there. This one drops down to one oh four, stays at one oh four, but switches to 34. What we realized is that this one doesn't do anything. It doesn't have any tempo information in it. If you start putting tempo and meter changes in one scene launch, you should get in the habit of putting it in all of them. Just so that if you jump into one, it is set to the right tempo and meter. Because if we don't give it any information, it's just going to keep doing what the previous one was. It's a good habit of, if you're going to change the tempo or meter in these scene launches, do it for all of them. Cool. Okay, a couple more quick things. 27. The Back to Arrangement Button: Okay, you may remember we've looked at this before. Where if I've been playing around in session view and I go back to arrangement view, this is all grade out, right? That's intentional, that's by design. I want to go over this one more time while we're here. What this means is that live is saying, hey, I can only play session View or arrangement view at a time. And if you tell me to play something, I'm going to play Session View, that's what it's saying. So it's given me this orange button here. This orange button here is called back to arrangement. That means, hey, I'm done with session view. Let's listen to Arrangement view. So if I click on it, everything comes back okay until I go over here again and then I can take control of stuff all over again. Now if I go back, these two tracks are great out because they're the only ones I touched. These two tracks are not going to play from arrangement view, they're going to play from session view. If I want to take those tracks back to arrangement view, I can do two things. I can hit back to Arrangement and that's going to bring everything back. Or I can just click these little arrows here and that's going to bring them back. Now our back to Arrangement button goes away because we're firmly in arrangement. Don't forget about that back to arrangement button. I can't tell you how many questions I get from people who are saying everything in my arrangement view is grade out and I can't hear it. What's going on, what did I do wrong? And they start digging through their settings and trying to figure out what's going on. That's not the problem, it's just that orange button click that. Go back to arrangement. View Live. Just wants to know what you want to listen to. That's all that's happening. Okay, now let's talk about recording to arrangement. 28. Record to Arrangement View: Okay, let's say I'm working on session view. I've made something cool, but now I want to capture it, right? I want to capture my performance of it in a way because I'm going to go through, I'm going to launch some scenes, I'm going to do some stuff. And I want everything I click to be recorded. What you're going to do, what you're actually asking to do with that is can I record what I do into the arrangement? Right. And super can let's do it. I'm going to go over to the arrangement view and I'm going to start way out here because I don't want to record over that. Okay. So I'm going to put my cursor right there now. I'm going to go back over to session of you. I don't have to arm anything to record, I'm just going to hit record. Okay. Now I'm going to start playing. Okay, well that's ramping in. Let's hear that. Okay, maybe let's launch our reverse scene. I have this track solo that's on solo that that launch next? Yeah, I like this one T. Now maybe let's just launch this kick and stop that launch that, let's adjust the volume for this a little bit, then let's stop. Okay, let's just say I just recorded like a whole 20 minute jam. Now I can go over to Arrangement View and see I just recorded everything I did. I'm going to hit back to Arrangement View. This is everything that launched and when it launched, we can even look at when I started messing around with the volume back then. If I go to automation mode, there it is. That was me messing around with the volume, everything recorded when I launched it. If I hit play on this, it's going to sound exactly like it's going to exactly like it did when I was just playing it in session view, this is called Record to arrange. You don't have to do anything special. All you have to do is in session view, hit your Global Record button and then start going, It's going to record it to arrange view. This is actually really fashionable to do lately because what we see a lot happening is Big name Jays going onstage playing like a two hour set using session view and recording it to arrangement. Right. And then they get offstage, they might go back to their hotel. They're going to tidy it up a little bit. Maybe they'll be like, oh, whoops, I accidentally started something there before I was ready. This is a little early, let's stretch that out. Let's make sure this comes in right where I want it to maybe put a gap here because it sounds cool. Just maybe fix it a little bit and then export this post it the sound cloud, literally an hour after their whole set. That's how you do that. It's a pretty cool trick. Okay, that's enough. Session view for now, keep playing with it. Session view is like an instrument. It really requires practice. Keep it going, keep working with it and practicing with it if you're interested in working that way. Now if you want just something to practice with, I'll give you this session. There's nothing particularly brilliant in it, but you can have it. Maybe it'll be a starting point for you to do something. 29. Beats!: All right, let's make some beats. Now in a way, the section is a little strange because everything that we're doing is about making beats. In a way, it's about making music. This is just another term for music. Everything that we're doing in all of these classes should be contributing to your ability to make great music and make great beats, or soundtracks, or whatever it is you make. But in this section I want to focus on drums. The modern term of a beat means drums with basically an instrumental track or a short loopable instrumental track. But what I'm really going to focus on here is drum programming. And then in the next section, we're going to focus on synthes and adding more layers to it, we will make a traditional beat, but we're going to focus on drums here. We're going to go through some techniques for drum programming here. Remember, you can do whatever you want. There's no wrong way to make stuff with live. I'm just going to show you some techniques here. Some techniques that I use, some techniques that other people use that have showed me different tools that live has that make drum programming a little bit easier. Okay, let's dive in and talk about techniques for making killer drums. 30. Terms and Definitions: Okay, before we dive into beats, I want to get us a little more comfortable with the grid and revisit this one more time because it's going to get really important. What you need to be able to do is look on my screen here. What am I looking at here? What do each one of these numbers represent? You think, you know, if you said a measure, then you're correct. Each number here is one measure or 1 bar. Okay. What do each of these blocks represent? What is this in relation to that bar? If you said one beat, you're correct. If you didn't say one beat, then I'm going to explain it again. Okay. So let's look at why. Remember that the whole number 17. 18, 19. That is the first digit in this three digit number. 17 means 1711 bars, beats 16th notes. Okay. We are on bar 17, the beginning of it, 11, if I go here we're at 01:17, 31, that means the 17th bar, the third beat, and the first 16th note. We're not seeing the 16th notes here because we're not zoomed in enough. Let's go in deeper. Now we're seeing the 16th notes, okay? 1234, okay? And then it starts over 1234, okay? These are going to be important because we're going to be making a pattern in four bar chunks, usually sometimes two bar chunks, sometimes 1 bar chunks. But we're going to need to go through here and say, okay, what's happening on beat four? What's happening on beat three? What's happening on three? Getting comfortable with the grid and what you're looking at is going to be really important. Don't forget about this little clue down here. This shows that my grid is showing me quarter notes. That is the quarter notes. I can't tell you how many times I've been like in the weeds working on something and I like programmed like this complicated beat. Only to realize I was thinking of working on quarter notes. But I'm really looking at 1024th notes because I wasn't paying attention to the grid. And then I hit play and just go and it's just isn't possibly fast. Okay, So pay attention to where you are on the grid, otherwise you're going to have to remake everything. Cool. Time saving tip. Okay, let's go into some techniques. 31. Working with Loops: Okay, so we're going to start by using existing loops and chopping them up. Okay, here's a fun little time saving tip. If you want to find a whole bunch of loops on your system, you could search through here and find drum loops. Like we could go drums and then go sample. These are going to be some drum hits, some fills, some single hits, whole tracks. But if you want to quickly find just like drum loops, here's something that I always do most of the time. If a drum loop has been professionally made and found its way onto your system, it's going to be called some creative title for that loop. And then it's going to say the BPM in the title. It's going to say Burnt Cookies loop 110 BPM. If you just search for BPM, you're going to find a whole bunch of drum loops and some other stuff, but okay, so let's just find something interesting here. Okay, so I'm gonna drag this one in here. I'm just going to work with audio loops for now. What do we remember about working with loops? If I drag it in and it perfectly fills some amount of measures, in this case two measures and it goes right up to the end, right? It's like perfectly in a two measure box. Then we can guess that it's warped correctly. When you see something that looks like that, it's more than two solid measures, then it's probably not warped, right? But this one is probably warped, right? Let's turn on our metronome and double check. Cool, that sounded pretty good to me. All right, so we got a loop. What can we do with this? The most fun thing to me about this is chopping this up and trying to make it our own. In some way, we could just use this, assuming this is a royalty free loop, or a loop I paid for, or I could just use it as it is. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you've purchased it and it's cleared. But sometimes it's nice to make things your own. Let's see how we can turn this into something that is unique to us. The first way we're going to do that is by chopping it up and putting it back together. 32. Chopping up loops: Okay, So what I want to do here is chop this up by transient, okay? That means every attack I'm going to make into its own clip. Now, there's a few ways to do this. There's a manual way and an automatic way. I want to show you the manual way first, just so that you understand what we're doing. Then I'll show you another way to do this. In order to chop this up, I just need to get the cursor as close as I can to every attack, every transient. Now this one, it looks like I'm not going to be able to get right on there. But what I actually want is not that quiet part but that loud part. I'm going to go right there and command E to cut. Okay, here's a little transient. Let's grab that. It's a big one. That might be one. Why not? That might be one that looks like one. That looks like one. I'm just eyeballing it, putting little slices. I could go right there, but same thing there. All right. That's all of them. Okay, cool. Now I feel like this is one. Let's grab that one. There's another one over here. That one, good enough. Okay, so now just using command E, I've chopped this all up now. It's still going to sound the same. I haven't made any changes to it yet. Okay, cool. Let's loop these 2 bars. Okay, so I'm just going to select that whole area, both those bars, command L to loop. Okay, cool. Now, let's piece this together our own way. Let's say I'm going to move this onto a new track, just another audio track. But I'm going to shuffle things up. What do I want? Let's take these small, little quiet things and put them, let's zoom out so we know what we're looking at. Okay, I'm looking at quarter notes, where the numbers are, okay? This is a note, this is a quarter note. But I'm actually going to put this maybe halfway through the previous quarter note. Let's grab this. I'm going to do this times on the three 16th. Okay, so this is the first 16th, 16th, third 16th might be kind of cool. And then let's grab this on beat four. Maybe this on the second half of beat four. And then that maybe just randomly placing stuff. If it doesn't work, I'll adjust it. Copy that one over there. I put that there, sure. Okay, now let's solo this second track and listen to what we just made by not totally random because I can see where the big beats are. But I'm really just moving stuff around. Here's our first shot at it and we'll see where we landed. Okay, I don't think I like this beat here, so I'm going to copy this because I liked this thing. Let's put this right there. Let's take that out and put that right there. Sure, That's not bad. Works. There we go. Okay, that went pretty well. I'm liking what I have here. Okay, let's go back up to this track and delete that extra stuff that I didn't use. Let's say this is my new track, that's great. Now I've made this drum loop my own in some ways. Now there's a funny little trick that'll work a lot of the time to super charge this. Let me show you how that works. 33. Consolidating & Doubling: Okay, so I'm going to do two things. The first thing I'm going to do is consolidate this which is going to turn it back into one loop. Okay? So I'm going to select what I want, Command J. All right. Now we have our loop. What I could do now is export this and give it a name like my loop. Right? And add this to my arsenal of loops that I've made, drum loops that I've made. That's cool, I can do that. The second trick I want to do is I'm going to take the original loop back in. Okay, now I'm going to play these at the same time I'm going to combine these together and layer them. The only thing I'm going to do that's different is let's solo this one. And where that kick hits, I'm going to cut it out. Okay, I think that's a kick. This might be a kick too. Let's see. Okay, I'm going to cut out that kick. Okay, I'm going to cut out this kick and cut out this kick. Okay? Now, let me explain what I'm doing here. This is our loop that we just made. This is the original loop. I'm going, I'm going to play them both at the same time, but they both have that big kick Sound. It's just going to be too much kick. I'm going to get rid of that kick and now I'm going to play them both at the same time and see what I have. I'm going to turn the original one down quite a bit so that it feels like an echo. Like it. Okay. Now let's consolidate this top one. But I need to consolidate this as a two measure loop. This isn't going to do it. Okay? I want this to be a full two measure loop so that I can easily move it around and play with it. If I just do this, it's going to be, I don't know, eight beats or so, but that's not what I want. I need this whole two bar loop, so I'm going to highlight this whole 2 bars and now I'm going to hit command J. Now it is a full two bar loop. I can play these at the same time. Okay, now you might say to yourself, could I consolidate these two things together? You can't do that. Consolidating only works for on a single track. I could export these as one thing or render them or record them onto a new track and make a single clip that is the two of them together. However, I don't want to do that right now. If I'm making a, I might want the ability to do something like this, have this one come in and out. I want to keep them separate so that I can play around with the density of the beat. It being more dense when they're both in and less dense when just one of them is in. I might even want just this beat by itself. Right now, I have the possibility of three beats. This one solo, this one solo, and then the two of them together. They're subtly different, especially these two. But they're giving me more material to work with, experiment with this. This is a technique that I use a lot. It's just a fun way to get some new ideas going. Like I said, this method of cutting them up using command on the transients is one way to do it. There is another way to do a similar thing. Let's learn that now. 34. Slice to New MIDI Track: Okay, let's do this again using some Midi magic. Okay? I'm going to actually leave this alone because I like it, but I'm going to take our original loop again. Okay? So I'm going to take our original loop again and go out here, here it is again. What I'm going to do with this is a technique called Slice to New Midi Track. Basically what we're going to do is we're going to ask Live to chop this up and there's a few different ways it could do that, and I'll show you that in a second. And then put it into a Midi instrument. And let us use it that way. Okay, here we go. In order to it, we're going to click on that clip or right click and going to go down to Slice to new Midi track. Okay. Now it's going to say how do you want to slice it by transient? That would be what we just did automatic or manually. If we say slice by transient, it's going to take every attack point and turn that into a new clip, just like what we did, that might be best for this particular clip, But we have a few more options, we could say by warp marker. If we did a lot of warping to it, which we didn't, that's not a good option here. Every bar, that's just going to give us two samples, that's not very good. Or we could say every half quarter eighth note, 16th note, quarter note would be the best one here because that's where I see the beat lining up the. But that's not great for this. I'm going to go transient. Then there are these slicing presets. I always just use the built in. Okay. And let's say the current clip region is eight beats long. This will result in 21 slices. Cool. Let's say. Okay. Okay, now here's what is going to happen. It made a new Midi track. It's right here. We can open that up with this arrow. Now it looks like it's just playing through a bunch of notes. But let's examine what this is a little bit more. Let's double click on this, open up this Midi clip. Here's what happened. You can see here it says slice one slice two, slice three, slice four. What this is doing, it looks like it's just going up and playing like a big weird scale or something. But it's actually playing through the whole beat, one slice at a time. And the slices are different lengths. This shows where they are. We can see, we can line up, We can say like this one is probably that big hit right there, right? This one is that first kick. Sound. If I solo this Midi clip and play it, it's going to sound more or less the same, right? Flu bit, okay? But this means more than that because there's a few different things I could do here. First, I could just very easily re, arrange this by saying, okay, I want this there and just start playing around with moving things to different spots. I can literally move anything anywhere. I could put this here if I wanted. Okay, let's, I'm just randomly shuffling things around, but okay, now this is what we have, okay? It's like super frantic. Whatever one thing we could do is move around the Midi notes and create our own that way. That's pretty similar to what we were doing before when we just manually chopped up things here the first time. But another thing we could do is just play this in with our Midi keyboard. Now I'm using my Midi keyboard to play this in. If we look at the instrument, this is what's called a drum rack instrument. Each of these little dots is a slice of that clip. I could find tune, right? If I double click on this, I can see what it found. I could adjust it and change it and do things if I wanted to. Just the volume, whatever. We'll go more into how this works shortly. Actually, I think in the next video, this is a Midi instrument. I can play it with my keyboard, I could just play. But there's yet a third thing I can do. Let's go to drums. Clear out our search, let's just find a clip that is a drum pattern. Okay, now we remember how Midi works, right? Like these Midi clips are going to be drums, but they're just Midi notes, right? Okay, this one's cool. Let's take it. If we put this clip on this track, it's going to do this drum pattern through these sounds. In other words, we're going to play this pop rock straight pattern using these crazy sounds. So here's what that sounds like. Okay, not very interesting. Let's find another one. Let's try this one. I kind of like that actually. If we put that over top of this beat, which was the one we sliced up, we get some kind of cool results. I kind of like that. I kind of like that a lot. That's lupus, Okay. Now that's a far cry from our original loop, which was this, right? By doing that slice to new Midi track, we've really changed it up and created something completely different. Okay, let's go back into this drum rack and let's explore how drum racks work a little bit. 35. Working with Drum Racks: A drum rack is a Midi instrument. It's designed for drums, but it doesn't have to be. You can do anything you want with it, but we get these pads that show us what's happening. In a case like this, we made one by doing the sliced to new Midi track. But we can just make one from scratch. And we'll do that in just a second in the next video. For now, I just want to explore what's here. What we're seeing is a few different things all at once here. All of these boxes is where our samples are stored. We can play them by hitting this play button. It's a quiet one. Or am I muted? Yes. Okay. We can mute it. So this one never plays, or we can solo, only this one plays. It's cool. If we double click on the slice, we can see effectively. What we have here is another Midi instrument. This is a Midi instrument called a simpler, it's basically just a tiny sampler. Live has loaded this simpler instrument onto every one of these slices. Okay, They all have a simpler instrument on them and they, they all contain a little piece of that drum loop. There's a lot of things I can do is simpler. We'll go into the deep dive into the simpler. And like what every dial means soon, don't worry about that. But I also have these dials out here. These are called macros. And we're going to see these all over the place once we start getting into instruments. But some controls are going to affect all the samples. Loop length, start, offset, I can squeeze forward where the sample starts and stops. This set of four, we're going to see a lot. Attack, decay, sustained release. This is a very common thing that you'll see everywhere. This has to do with the shape of the sound, how long it sustains, whether it fades out or comes to an end. Does it fade in or just start right on it? We can sculpt the sound a little bit more there. Again, we'll do a ton of this when we get into sound design. One tricky thing is that if you want to play this with the Midi keyboard, you have to look here. This is basically the range of your whole Midi keyboard as if it was all done in these little blocks. If I did this, okay, I'm playing a Midi note, but I'm not hearing it. Here's why. I'm playing a Midi note down here. It's too low. These ones, The lighter gray color, that's where there's a sample. Okay, I need to go up higher. There we go, to get to where my samples are. Similarly, you might play some notes and be like way too high. Okay. If you're playing notes and you're not hearing them, make sure that you're playing in the right range. Look at this little grid to see where you are and then you can go down. Now here's a pro tip, if you're working with a drum rack, rename your slices. Okay? And this is why watch this. Okay, This is some kick. I'm going to go here, I'm going to do command R and I'm going to say kick. This is nothing. When you do this slice to new Midi clip, you're going to get some of these Nothing samples. I'm going to rename these and just call this one. That's neat, let's call this quiet kick. Okay? And this is bright kick, This is like almost like a finger snap. Sound Let's call that snap. Okay, There's our sneer. It's kind of neat. It's almost like a gunshot. Let's call it a gunshot. That's kind of nothing. Okay. Let's just go with those for now. Normally, I would go through all of them. If you have more, you can scroll up and down to this, which is what I was just doing here. Okay, I've renamed these bottom eight. If I go into a Midi clip and look at the notes here, they all just say Slice 21, Slice 15. Whatever the ones I renamed show up correctly here. That means if I'm going to make a clip up here, I'm going to double click, I'm going to make a new clip. Let's make it a little longer. Now I can see what I'm doing now. I see kick, snare. Do this gunshot thing, maybe? Gunshot. Quiet kick snap. That's bright. Kick snap, maybe I want to do that whole thing twice. Command D, slide it over. Okay, let's see what I made there. This might be nothing. That's neat. Actually, let's loop that. That's a little happy, but it works. Now I'm just making more stuff with this same crazy clip. You can see why renaming those slices is valuable. Like, I know, I don't want to use this one or that one. Now let's talk about making a new C. Let's say you just want to make your own drum rack from scratch. You can totally do that. Let's go and talk about how to do that. 36. Creating your own Drum Racks: All right, let's start from scratch with a drum rack. Let's go, let's go down to a new track. Let's just make a new Midi track. Command shift, new Midi track. Okay? Instruments, Drum rack. Just going to drag an empty one onto this track. Okay? Empty drum rack. Now we just see all of our blocks, but there's nothing on them. Okay. What we can do is we can drag a sample just right onto these spots. Let's say I want to go kick. Okay, let's clear our search. Go to all and then say kick. Let's find an audio sample. One shot kick. Okay, let's find the kick we want. Let's build a drum kit. Let's use this '90s kick. I'm going to put that here, okay. Now it automatically loaded that simpler device that I was talking about before and put that sample in it. Okay, here's what it sounds like. Let's find a snare. That's cool. Put that one right there, just because let's maybe do another snare snare grit. Sure, put that one right there. Let's find a few different high hats. That's cool. That's, that's cool. That's cool. Okay. I just made a drum rack. I could save this drum rack as like my cool drum rack if I hit this little save button right here. But now we can make something with it by programming on this track. Or we could actually just grab this Midi clip and say, now let's hear this beat through it, okay? Why does that sound so random? Look at these pads up here. There's all kinds of things that we don't have. We're not lining upright. Let's see here. We've got kick, we're using the C sharp. Let's move that up. Anything we're not using, I'm just going to move up to a note that we are using or down to a note that we are using. Okay, let's take all of these and just move them. Sure. Okay, it looks like I missed some. There we go. So these notes aren't sounding because we haven't put a sample there yet. So I'm just going to move them down to where we have samples. Okay, now let's hear it. Okay, that's a mess. Let's quantize that command you, I didn't help. We might have to make our own for this. Let's make a new mite clip. Let's take it out to be 2 bars long. Okay, let's put our kicks on our downbeats. Let's just do a four on the floor thing here. That means a kick on every downbeat. Let's do our snare here. We'll do almost a techno thing here. Then I'm just going to randomly do a whole bunch of these high hats. I like little tick sounds happening all over the place. Okay, I'm just going to copy this. I'll do it again there. Maybe adjust it like that, like that. Okay, let's hear that. Okay. Well, that's not bad. I kind of accidentally made some weird syncopation with one of these high hats, which is cool. I like it. Okay. So making a drum rack from scratch is super easy. You can drag whatever you want on it. Watch this. We could even go back up to our original drum clip. Let's say I want to add this snare drum. I'm going to copy that and paste it out here. Let's hear that, make sure I got it. Yeah, I want that snare. Okay, cool. I just copied it and pasted it out here. Now let's go down to that drum rack so I can see this grid. And I'm just going to grab this beat and plop it right there. Not this beat, but that snare hit. Now I have it in my drum rack. You can take anything from anywhere and put it inside that drum rack. Now you can get even more complicated with drum rack by adding more things to this, but let's leave it there for now. We're going to go deeper into the drum rack once we get into instruments and sound design in, I think part five of this series of classes. Hold on to that. But now you know everything you need to know about the drum rack in order to start making really cool drum patterns play around with it. Have some fun. 37. Recording/Writing Drum Racks: All right, let's reinforce what we already know about recording it and apply that to our cool new drum rack that we just made. Okay, Let's say I want to play something on my keyboard and record it, okay? First I'm going to fiddle around to find my notes. Okay? So I can see I'm too high. I'm going to hit my octave down button on my Midi keyboard. Still too high octave. Still too high octave down. There we are. Let's see. Okay, so first pass through, I'm just going to do kick and snare. Okay, so let's go out here. I'm going to record on this track. Do I have my Metrodome set up to give me 1 bar count in? Let's turn that on. Okay, here we go. Whoa, let's slow down. I'm about to play keyboard here. Let's go. Actually, let's go down to really slow. Let's go down to 82, okay? Because one of the awesome things about Midi is I can record as slow as I want and then speed it up and make it really cool. So here we go. Okay. It turned into a weird, like old timy waltz thing, but that's okay. Now let's overdub on it some of those high hats. Okay, if I click this plus, now I can overdub on top of this. What I want to find is all of these high hats. Let's see. Okay, so I'm going to use these three notes. I'm going to do something weird here. I'm just going to kind of hit these notes as fast as I can. And then we'll quantize them to make them sound good. Here we go. Okay, that looks like a mess, but let's see if we can fix it. So I'm just going to go to these high hats and I'm going to command you to quantize them. And then let's turn, and then let's hear what we got. Okay, something went weird there with my kicks. Okay, let's take all my velocities. I think my velocities are just really strange. Let's crank those up. Okay, let's tighten up this one, okay? Yeah, not bad, but Recording, overdubbing the Midi overdub here. All of that works great with drum Cks. Okay. Let's move on. 38. Using Take Lanes: One last thing about recording drum racks. Don't forget that you still have take lanes when you're recording Midi or any drum track. I can go to show take lanes and I can see the different passes I made of this loop. I can go back and say like this one was the best, but I'm going to get rid of my overdubs there. I have to keep my overdubs on there if I want them. But if I don't want them, I could easily just go here and say I want that and use this like a rewind button. I want that, and then lay my overdubs down in a separate track. This can be handy sometimes if I duplicate this track and I just delete this other stuff. Then in this one I just focus on those high hats and I do copy, paste, paste, paste. Now I have the high hats as their own clip and I can control them a little bit better. This is sometimes better. Not always, but sometimes because I could maybe put delay on this or something like that. It'll probably sound a little bit better. Okay, this needs some work, but it gets you the right idea. Explore what you have in your take lanes if you're not happy with it. And separating elements into separate tracks can be good. You don't have to do that. But sometimes it can be good for putting effects and things on parts of your beat. 39. Hi-Hat Variations: All right, while we're here, I want to get a little more life out of all of these high hats. There's three things that we can do to make these groove a little bit better and make them feel a little more natural. Two of them you already know, one of them is new. Let's do the two that you already know right now. The first is play around with our velocity, okay? Let's go here and select all, here's our velocity. Let's just randomize it. I'm going to randomize now let's hear these high hats, okay, while we're at it, let's tighten up this. Let's get rid of that snare, snare. Maybe we'll do a little extra kick here and then here, cool. Okay, now back down to our high hats. Just by randomizing our velocity, it's actually giving them quite a bit more life. I have some that are kind of sticking out, this one. All right, so let's just pull that one down, maybe a few of these higher ones, all right? Now it's like suddenly you just has so much more life. So I'm going to leave that. Just like that, I like it. Okay, so that's thing one, thing two that you already know is chance. Let's take our chance parameter. Let's select all and then let's move our chance. I don't want it to be 50, that means there's a 50% chance that any note is going to play or not play. Let's move it back up to, I don't know, 77, 75. That's good. That means that basically there's a three out of four chance that every note is going to play. Actually, that seems a bit high. Let's go down to 60. Okay? So, roughly 1.3 chance. Okay, let's hear that, okay? Mm, that's a little thin. Let's turn that back up to 70, okay? I really want to crank up my tempo now. It's cool, we're developing a good group here. Okay? It's going somewhere. It's interesting if you don't like that chance thing, you can turn it off just by smashing these back up to the top and then it's effectively off. I'm going to take it and pull them down to just maybe, let's go back to our 80% 79 enough. Okay, cool. Now, now that I hear these high hats, this isn't the third thing that I want to talk about. But I'm just feeling that these could use a little bit of delay. I'm going to put an echo effect on them. I'm really going to turn it down. I don't want very much here, especially not in the feedback. Okay, yeah, that's feeling pretty good now, especially when you've got this chance stuff happening. A little delay, I don't know, It just feels really, really warm and nice to me. Okay, now let's go on to the third thing, and that is the triplet grid. 40. The Triplet Grid: Okay, we're going to talk about doing something kind of strange to our grid here. And it's called a triplet. So if you know what triplets are, hang on for just a second. I'm going to explain what triplets are. So let's zoom in here. So what we have here is bar three, bar three beat two. Okay? So in beat one, there are four 16th notes. Okay? Four. All right, so that makes us sound like this. That's 1234, 1234, 1234, 1234. Every beat has four 16th notes in it. That's most of the time, what we want. But if you want to do something fast and rhythmic and a little bit different, you can switch that to having three notes per beat, okay? That makes 1234, or in other words, 12, 312-312-3123, Now, if you program a whole beat, that way you're going to end up in a waltz. 12 312-312-3123, That's neat, if you're like in old timey Vienna and you want to write waltzes, that's great. But if you're doing something like this with high hats or any rhythmic thing, switching over to triplets can be really cool. A triplet is when we have three beats in the space of four, there's normally four beats here. If we put three, it's rather nice. Let's do it, let's find a spot where we think it'll work. Maybe here. Okay, What I could do is get rid of one of these. Take this and space it evenly over three beats. I just have to eyeball it. Okay. That's looks right, but there's a better way. The better way is command three. Now we're looking at triplets. Okay. And you can see here, I was a little off with that second one. That's pretty right on with that third one though. Okay. Now you're thinking, I see more than three there. It's right because we're looking at 16th notes now, but we have 6123456. Okay. So this is still a triplet grid and it's a triplet grid for everything. Right? So I'm going to adjust these to be triplets and maybe I'll do it with the next bar, two. Do something a little different there. Okay, now if I get out of triplet mode, which I can do with command three again, you'll see that it looks like these ones are off the grid, right? Because they are off the grid. They're on a triplet grid, not an eighth note grid or a 16th note grid, which is what we're looking at here. Okay, but they're going to add some fun and different variations. They'll probably throw off our delay a little bit. We might have to turn off our delay for this to work well. But let's try it. Yeah, let's turn off that delay then. We'll be able to hear him a little bit better. Okay, let's try now. You hear that? 34 maybe? I'll increase the velocity of that first one. I like that. Okay, cool. Another thing we could do, I'm going to make a new version of this is to a Siple. Six couplet is going to be six notes in the space of four. Okay, that's going to be double a triplet. I'm going to go back to the triplet grid with command three. You can also get to the triplet grid by control clicking and going to triplet grid right here. If I want to do a six couplet, I can just each one of these little things. Get that one. Okay. That is going to be a six tuplet and it's going to sound like what do you do pro six? That sounds weird out of context. Let's hear it. Okay? These didn't work very well. Let's go up there. Uh, okay. These are a little bit harder to get them to work. Sometimes they work better if you're just doing the same sound. So it's going, What do you do? Pay? Yeah. What I could do here is take all of these, put them there, and then use this ramp tool to go like that with the velocity. Now the velocity, it's going to start quiet and then ramp up. That'll make a nice little riff. All right, so let's loop this and you'll feel that a little bit better. Oh, and we got to get our chance. I'm going to turn chance off for those. There we go. Cool. So to recap, what we did is we turned on the triplet grid with command three, and then we used 16th note triplets, which is effectively also called a sixth tuplet. We filled in the space on the triplet grid. If we go back to our normal grid, we can see these are all off the grid. But that's okay, because they're on a triplet grid. Then we highlighted these notes and then used the velocity ramp tool to create this arc so that they start quiet and then just ramp up in volume. It's a cool little subtle fill. If you're into like trap or anything like that, then these frantic high hats are going to be your best friend, learn a lot of tricks for doing different styles of things with your high hats. 41. Arrangement: Okay, now that we've made a few things, let's try to organize this into something. We're not going to get a full track out of this, but I want to make a few beats that you can use. Then I want to give you this session because maybe it's interesting to you, okay, there's nothing on this or this. I'm going to delete those. Let's see, I think we wanted there, let's take all this. And just so it over, this was nothing. I'm just moving stuff around so we can have sort of one long and frantically evolving beat. Now I'm going to make a few more variations on it. Let's take this and put it here. And let's double it with this first crazy one we made. That one I think is going to be my favorite. Then maybe we'll do our original beat. Okay, turn off loop. Let's just hear all these variations that we ended up with. Here we go. Oops. Still soloed. Okay, here we go. All right, pretty cool. This one right here though, that's the jam. I could listen to that all day. Cool. I'm just going to leave a little locator there and write This one is the jam, Okay? Now I'll give you this little track, maybe this is useful to you. You're welcome to chop this up and do whatever you want to it and play around. But let's take this, especially this beat, but maybe a few of the variations and keep developing it. And by adding some synth layers to it, I'll give you this and then we'll keep going and build on it even more. 42. Introduction to the Live Synths: Okay, in this section we're going to start looking at the different syn within live, that is to say instruments. These instruments are all the different synthesizers, samplers, sound making things of live. We are going to go really deep into using all of these when we get into the sound design class in this series. But for now, I just want to get as comfortable making some music with these sys without knowing what every single dial does. We already know the drum rack, so we're off to a good start. I think what I'll do is I'm going to take this clip or drum pattern, these three things. I'm just going to put them out here and then I'm going to paste them a whole bunch so I have some room to play. That was just command D for all of that. Okay now here's what we got. I love this groove. I'm like super into it. Okay, great. Let's for each of these synthes, they each do their own thing, you can ignore for the moment. These DS things, those are Max for live devices and they're a little different. We will look at those but hold off on those for now. Our main instruments are these other ones. Each one of these have their own thing that they do particularly well. However, they are also really versatile. I couldn't go through and say like this one is good for bass lines and this one is good for leads and this one is good for pads. I couldn't really say that because they're all good at everything, or at least most of them. But they do have different characteristics like collision is particularly good for percussiony things. Electric is particularly good at electric pianos, roads, organ that sound tension is good for string like things. Let's load one up. We've got two ways we can load up one of these sins. Let's go to wavetable Wave table is probably one of the most complex since we have, but that's okay. I can just drag a wave table right on a track, but I don't want to put this one here because I do have this percussion here. I'm just going to drag it down here. And it's going to make a new Midi track. There it is. Going to open it up right there. There's no Midi information on it, because I just dragged an instrument on it. I didn't do anything else. I didn't make any material for that instrument yet. Now remember the way Midi works, in that every track, every Midi track can have an instrument on it, only one instrument. If I was to put this instrument on this track, it's going to get rid of my drum rack. Okay. That's why I made a new track. The next thing I'm going to want to do is make a Midi clip. Just double click, make some notes. I can start experimenting with different settings in the instrument. In this case, wave table. Let's put something here, let's do a flat. I'm just going to make a little minor triad and we'll just hold it for this whole thing. Okay? Now let's play it, okay? That's really long. Let's cut that in half or more. Let's just go to there. And then maybe we'll do another chord. So I'm going to highlight those command D. And then let's go to F sharp sharp. Let's do that. It's, let's try that. That's a weird chord, okay? It's a start. Now let's maybe make another one, and we'll go G chord. I'm just kind of using music theory to decide what notes to pick here. Okay, let's try that. So here is my weird little progression. Let's loop what we're done. Okay, that's fine. We'll just play with that for now. But now let's experiment with different sounds. That one that we have is pretty bland. Let's see if we can find something with a little more rhythm to it and a little more excitement. Let's explore just the different presets that we can have. 43. Exploring Presets: Okay, we made some mitty notes. Let's look at what we have to play with. We can program wave table all we want. I'm going to hit Shift Tab and get me back over to wave table. This is a complicated instrument. I can build all kinds of crazy stuff here. But since we haven't really explored how it works yet, let's start by just playing around with some of our presets. If I go here to wave table and open this up, we have all of our different presets here. Okay, so I could say evolve organ here. A little preview of it. Let's try that one. Okay, I just drag that preset right on the track. We're good to go. Okay, this is interesting. This particular preset is monophonic, meaning it can only play one note at a time. That setting is right here. Let's turn that off so that it can play the full chord. Interestingly, the pattern that this one is set up to do is a triple. We just learned what triplets are. You can tell because it's going 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Actually, it's a little off of a triplet, but it's close to a triplet. Okay, I don't really like that synth anymore. Let's keep exploring. Remember that we have this up here, which I believe was called Sounds and I renamed mine synth presets. This is like all of our presets. Let's try searching for what we're really looking for. How about rhythmic? Let's just say rhythmic, rhythmic. Now I'm going to go here and say, so maybe a pad is the thing I want. Rhythmic pad. It gave me two. That's cool. That's cool too. Let's try that one now. What instrument are these? Before I drag this onto our track, let's explore this a little bit. Which instruments are these? We don't really know, just by looking at these presets, we don't know what instrument they are. Does it matter? No, it doesn't matter at all. I'm going to drag this preset over onto this track, and it's going to switch my instrument to whatever it needs to switch it to. In this case, it switched it to an operator. Okay, great. My wave table instrument is gone and now I'm on an operator. And that's fine when you're working with these presets Live Really doesn't care what instrument you have on the track. If you drag a preset for a different instrument onto that track, it's just going to switch. You do that other instrument, which is great, makes things easy. Let's hear what we got now. Kind of like this one. Okay? That's got potential. I want to leave this one on here, but I also want to keep experimenting. So what I'm going to do is duplicate this track. And then I'm going to take this and go over here. Move my loop brace over here. Okay, so now let's experiment with this one. Let's see, let's see if we like this rhythmic. One kind of kind of do like it. Let's do a third one. Move my loop bras over again. All right, let's try not pad but keys. Is that the same one we just used? How about ambience and effects? Not really wild about any of those. How about guitar and plucked? That's kind of interesting. Let's go back to piano. I kind of like that one. This one is monophonic also. This one's monophonic. It's not really getting what I want. Let's try, okay, let's try switching our word to piano. Find various pianos like that one. So we'll use this one just to accent it. I'm going to rearrange these notes a little bit, okay? I just want to spread the notes out a little bit to get a better voicing for the piano. They'll sound a little bit better. Okay, so I've experimented with presets, Found three things that I liked. What else can I do with this? Let's experiment with layering them. 44. Layering Synths: Layering synths is one of my favorite things to do. It's like quick and dirty sound design. In a way we can take multiple synths and layer them to make something new and unique. It's a very simple technique, right? So let's go back to this first one. Okay, that's cool. Let's check out what this one is, and let's check out what this one is. Okay? What if I did all three of these at the same time? I'm going to need to balance them a little bit. I want a little bit more on that, I think a little bit less on that. And let's try it. Let's loop this section. Okay, it's cool. I'm kinda into it, but you know what it's just missing is a bas. So let's find a cool bas. Sound We can try this. I don't think it's going to work, but we'll do it. Okay. I just made a new track with that bass sound on it. I'm going to take this, both these clips, copy and paste. Now, a good bass sound is going to be monophonic or at least a good bass line is going to be monophonic. In this case, I can just delete those two things. Take this down an octave, two octaves. Going to highlight these two press delete, Highlight these two shift arrow key down twice. Okay, let's hear it now. Okay, Yeah, that's a little too much for me, but I'm okay with it for now. Let's maybe arrange this a little bit because we could take this baseline, duplicate it, and then maybe in this next one we have just these three. Then maybe we want to make way for a verse. We're going to do just these two or something. When you're layering synth, there's just a lot of variation you can do because you've got all these different elements to the sound. Now listen to the start of an arrangement that we have. I guess maybe here the baseline should come out. Okay, so we've got some interesting things started right now. What I'm tempted to do is put in our pegiator on this or use some of our new Midi tools to transform and come up with some new creative ideas. Let's start fresh and go over to exploring those and generate tools. That's these down here where we can really have live, make some stuff for us. This is really fun. But before we do that, I want to give you this session again, but it's going to require us to freeze and flatten. Let's talk through why we need to do that right now. 45. Freezing and Flattening: Okay, we know now what freezing and flattening is. Here's why I'm going to do it, these synth patches, if I just send you this session, if you have the same version of live that I do with the same synth patches, this will sound great. But if you don't, this will sound probably like nothing. If live can't find this synth patch, it's going to just not play that clip. When you've got a lot of Midi clips and you want to make sure that it gets played correctly, you want to flatten them so that it sends it as a wave file. I'm going to give you this session as both with these flattened and with these out, with these just normal. Okay, let's flatten these. I'm going to go to this track control click, and go to freeze and flatten. That's going to turn this into an audio file. Okay? Same thing here, freeze and flatten. And you'll notice that like this one, it went longer than the Midi was. It's because the sound just trails off and it wants to capture that sound. Now you may notice that I have to freeze and flatten an entire track. I can't do this just for a segment. Like I can't just like say, I just want to flatten that it's going to be the whole track. Okay, let's do it with this also. Basically, I'm going to do it with all my mitty stuff. Okay. This one and this one. Okay. Now, if you don't have the right patches, anything like that, it doesn't really matter because we're just going to be playing audio files. So you just need to make sure that you get the right audio files. I'm going to save this one, then I'm going to make sure I do the collect all and save step so that you get all of these audio files with it, okay. Play around with this if you want, but this is a great case for doing the freeze and flattened process. 46. Transformations: Okay, up next I want to go through some of these new Midi tools that are here. There's a whole bunch of new things that are, that are designed to help you create new ways of generating Midi notes that will help you get around if you're not so savvy at music theory. Also, if you're looking for a new idea, say like generate a new idea and see what you think of it, they're really fun. Some of these tools we've seen before, if you've ever used like notation programs like Sebelius or something like that. Some of these types of things have been around in those for a little while. Things where you can say like here is a melody, shuffle the notes and come up with something new, a randomized type of a thing. They're not all entirely new to the world. Some of them have existed, but I've never really seen any in a dog before. And they're super fun and super handy. In order to get these things, we're going to look at some of these new windows in our clip view here. Okay, We have launch controls, this will be all pretty familiar. I don't think there's anything wildly new here, our follow actions and stuff like that. But here we have some pitch and time controls. Here we have transformations. Here we generate. Okay, We're going to look at all three of these in this section. Now let's dive in. Let's look at stretch and transpose first. 47. Stretch, Transpose: Okay, so let's start with a fresh midi clip here now for stretch and transpose, these are all pretty easy. So I'm just going to make a nice little major chord here. Sounds like this. Pretty. I'm going to go to this pitch and time window and open that up. Now there's a few things we can do here. We can fit it to scale if it's already. Now my scale, you can see right here is C major. And that's getting it from the global scale up here. I can fit it to scale if it's already in there. I can invert it, I can highlight some notes. And then I can actually just click and drag on this box to transpose it if I want. That's neat. This inversion tool, I'm not really sure what this is doing, it's not doing anything at the moment. Typically, what an inversion tool would do would be to take like the lowest note and put it at the top like that. I'm not really sure about that at the moment. Maybe that's still on its way. But if we want to do a little bit more mathematical transposition, okay? If I select this chord, and then I just start dragging this up, you can see what it's adding, right? It's adding a whole nother version of the cord on top of it. Okay? And then if I click out of it, we have it. Okay. I'm going to undo that. We have new ways of adding more notes to it. These are all going to fit within the scale. If we want it to, they're probably all going to sound pretty good. Now for stretching, we've got a couple new tools here, this just simply, we can just dial this up or down and make our notes really long. We can also x2x2 whatever we want. There's also this new feature, which we'll see in a second, but if I click and drag on the darker bar up here, this actually might not be new. I just never noticed it before. But what I can do is now I've got these two points that look like loop points, but they're not. I can click and drag on them and put them where I want them to go. It's going to extend everything in that bracket. Okay. Some handy tools for just transposing and adjusting the timing of our Midi notes. 48. Humanize: All right, up next is Humanize. Now this is almost funny because in the old days we had humanized. Humanize was a button that I don't know if it was in Ableton, but a long time ago I used to use Digital Performer as my main w, this is like forever ago. Digital Performer is a good program. It had humanize in it as a function. I don't know if it left, if there was a while where everything had humanize in it, I feel like. And then it went away. Went out of fashion, and now it's back. Which is great because I missed it. Here's what humanize does. Let's take something like this and let's make this just totally on the grid. Okay, now this is exactly on the grid. I'm going to select all of this. Now here's humanize, and I can give it a percentage. Let's move it around a little bit. You see what's happening here. Everything's sliding off the grid just a little bit as I move this humanized button around. Now, why is that? So let's put it at 12% and I turned it off. Humanized. There we go. Now if I zoom way in, you can see like this is early, this is late. Things are not exactly on the grid. They are, you might say, how a human would actually play it. Humans are not robots. When we play stuff, we're not perfectly on the grid. And that's what makes things sound natural and cool. This is very subtle, but it'll go a long way in certain situations. If you have like a piano line that you want to sound very realistic, then put a little bit of this. Humanize on it, not too much. Just a little bit. That'll make it feel much more natural. Drums. Oh man. Drums for sure. If you have a drum pattern that you've sequenced in the midi grid and you want to give it that natural feel, if it's feeling too robotic to you select all the notes, dial in a little bit of humanize and it'll give it a much more natural feel. Almost like you played it in on pads. So it's funny, right? Like we call it humanized. And what we do is we basically make it sloppy, but you only have to make it a little bit sloppy to make it sound like a human plated, very powerful tool. Use it on a lot of stuff just to touch and it'll sound much more natural. 49. Transform: Arpeggiate: All right, let's get to our Peggy eight now I'm going to close this little pitch and time window here and open transform. Now we've got a whole bunch of options here. I'm going to go through most of them right now. Let's start with our peggiate. Now you might be thinking, hey, we already have an our PeggyH thing. We have a midi effect called our Pegyate. What happened to that? It's still here. You still have it. And it still works the same, except it's got actually a couple new bells and whistles, but this is a little different. The main difference between the arpeggiate media effect and this arpeggiate is that the apegiate media effect, you can put it on something and it's going to arpeggiate it. Which maybe I should define what arpeggiate means, is if you give it a chord, it's going to play it one note at a time, okay? If I give it this, it's going to play, okay? That's urpegiating it, playing one note at a time with the midi effect. That's going to just happen, but with this, we're going to be able to write it into the Midi clip so we can see what's happening and have a little more control over what's happening. Okay, let's take a look at it. First of all, the style, now, this is actually the same as our Midi effect. We can say go up, go down, go up, then down, go down, then up, blah, blah, blah. Then some weirder ones con and diverge. Pinky up, pinky down, thumb up, thumb down. Play order, random, random, other random ones. Play around with these. There's some fun stuff here, you can find some fun patterns. Let's set it up and down. Okay? I don't know why it repeated well, okay, What it's doing here is it's going to go up and then down, and it's going to repeat the top note. The way this is going to work is it's going to arpegate for the duration of the notes that you gave it. Okay, I'm going to undo this, then I'm going to say I'm going to take these notes, I'm going to do this trick again. I'm going to stretch these out to be a full bar long. Okay, now I'm going to pate, let me talk about these transform controls here a little bit. They're a different than you might expect when this is yellow. And it says transform, that means it's doing it. And if I change anything, it's going to apply right away. But anything I change, like if I adjust any of these dials, it's going to snap into all of these settings. Right now, if I just want to do the settings that are on the screen again, the best way to do it is with this little button here. Okay, now it's doing it. All right, so I'm going to undo that because I want to walk you through some of these settings. Okay, let's do these two first because they're the easiest, right? What is each individual note going to be? A 16th note is what I have it set to here. I can make it longer or shorter, right? Cool. Not a 12th note. Let's go back to 16th notes. And then gait is going to be the length of the note. Basically, 100% is going to fill the whole duration of the 16th note. I can make it shorter if I just want short notes, or I can make them if I want longer notes. Okay? But I'm going to set that right to 100% okay? Now, steps and distance, this actually I had to work on this for a while to really understand what's going on with steps and distance because there's no manual yet. Here's what it is. Steps, this is both these two buttons are going to add notes to the chord K. They're going to transpose and add things. If I take steps down to zero, we're going to add no notes. It's just going to be the notes that I put in F and C, K. It's FAC. Fac, all the way up and down. Okay. The number shown here is how many notes are not in the how many notes do I want to add to it? Do I want Ableton to add? I have zero right now. Let's say one. Okay. I have one note now. There's going to be one note somewhere that's not in the red that it added. And it's going to be this, it added up at the top. Neat. How is it deciding what note that is? It's with this distance thing. This is determining the interval of the chord tones, or of the notes that it's going to add. Now again, it's going to stay in the key if I ask it to, which I have done by turning this on now I can add all kinds of extra notes. I can say make ten extra notes. Crank this up, let's take this up to something so we can see all of them. See, now it's adding all kind of extra notes. This actually makes a cool effect. All right, let's change our pattern. That's they give you less. Okay, so we went from that just an F major core, just three notes to this crazy thing. We can pay it a little bit more. All we get back up to zero notes. Okay, let's go random, and with this distance you can go negative and it'll add lower notes. Cool, So it's all over the place. That is what our new superchargedate option does. All right, let's look at another one. Let's look at connect. 50. Transform: Connect: Okay, let's talk about connect. This is actually a really fun one. If you've watched any of my music theory content, then this might be familiar to you. Because I talk about doing this thing all the time, where we might make a core progression, we want it to sound more natural and symphonic. In order to do that, we're going to like connect the dots a little bit. That's exactly what it is doing. Let me give you a simple tutorial here. Then I'll try that transform, select Connect, and then we've got some options here. I have almost just a scale here. Sounds like this. A little creepy little scale. And not really connect right now isn't going to do anything because it doesn't have room. What it's going to do is it's going to try to add a note between the notes that I select. I'm going to select all the notes, then I'm going to make them a little shorter. Now I've got a space in between each note. Now I can say add a note, put a note in between each note. Now I've got some controls to tell us where those go. Density, I'm going to say 100% because I want all of the gaps to be filled, spread. I can say how far away that note should be, that extra note that it's adding. Right? What note is it? I could make a shorter, not a longer note. I have 16th notes here. If I add a 16th note, it's just going to automatically do it then. I'm not exactly sure what tile does yet. I think if I make a short note, we'll be able to see it. Okay, So it's stacking the notes in different ways, but if I have this set to a 16th note, it has nothing to do so. Here's what I made Now, can we play with spread a little bit and the rate a little swing in there? Yeah, super weird stuff. I guess it's pretty cool. Let's go and try my little string thing. We'll see if it works. Okay. Let's give this a try. What I've done in the magic of editing there, I made a fairly simple little progression, 1625 in minor, if that means anything to you, If it doesn't, doesn't matter, then I loaded up my favorite string library at the moment, which is the sinis solo. This is not a big orchestra Sound This is a small chamber orchestra Sound But it's really quite nice. Here's what it sounds like. Okay, cool. Now let's try connect. Here's what I'm going to do. Let's take the top two voices. I guess just the top couple of notes, and let's make some room. Let's go like that. Okay, now let's say connect. Interesting. Let's go down to a half note. Now that's interesting, it's adding a few notes, but let's see what it did. A, it's not bad. Actually, let's give it a little more variation ability here, ain't that bad. It gives me something I can work with and I can play around with. Let's try taking all of these and making them smaller and just tell it, add another chord in between. Let's see what happens. All right, well, that was pretty impressive. Cool. So it just made a whole new core progression for us. That's wild. Let's change the spread a bit, let's see what happens now. I rather like that it's not perfect, you know, it needs some work. But okay, let's try one more thing just to push the extremes of this. Okay, here's my original one. I'm going to select, I'm going to go down to just a, set this to a quarter note. Tell it to fill that up. Oh, I want a whole bunch of cord. There we go. So this is what tile does, I suppose. Okay, So now I've got a whole bunch. I think I want the spread to be smaller so we stay within an octave. Okay. That's okay. All right. So now I gave it one cord per bar, and it's going to make three more cords per bar for this whole thing. Let's hear now pretty cool. Let's take all these super low notes that it made and just move them up an octave. Interesting. I feel conflicted about this because this is so cool that people are going to do this instead of learning how to do music theory. But probably not, It's cool, you should do it. Yeah, that's wild. That's the connect feature. 51. Transform: Ornament: Okay, the next one is a little more simple, this is ornament. If I select ornament down here gives me basically two big choices, a flam and a grace note. The main reason to use those two things, flam is going to be more conducive to doing with percussion stuff, primarily drums. And a grace note is the similar thing, but with pitches. A flam is like on a drum set, like let's say on a snare drum, you can hit the drum with a stick. That sounds cool. But if you hit it with two sticks at the same time, and one is just a little bit in front of the other one, it goes like that, but that was exaggerated. In real life, it would be like, that's a bit of a flam. A grace note is like an ornament, which is what these are called, which is what this transform effect is called. A grace note is when you've got a melodic thing, but you add a quick little note before the note that you're going to play here. It's saying, do you want the pitch to be higher, the same, or lower? And then you can say the number of pitches, the velocity, the position, and the chance that it plays. I'm going to go back to this little melody. Let's speed it back up a little bit. Okay, let's take this D and let's add an ornament. Let's add a grace note that's higher. Okay. You can see it's got a little dinner due before it. That's what we just added. The dinero, technical term for dinero is a grace note. Okay? Yeah, it's cool, it's Grace note. If you want to get really into the nitty gritty young grace notes, this is a type of ornament. There's names for all of this stuff. I think this one is this, A mordant. Close to a mordant. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Let's just call it Grace Note. 52. Transform: Quantize: Okay, let's talk about quanti. Maybe you already know what quantize is. That is, when we have notes that are not perfectly on the grid in the past, we could use command U to quantize. We can still do that, but if we want a little more control in our clip, we can go to transform and quantize our options. Here are the current grid, which is going to be what I'm looking at here. Or we can say quarter notes, eighth notes, 32nd notes, 16th notes. We can adjust things that way. We can add triplets, which can be, if you're programming delicate stuff, really complicated stuff like maybe some of those trap beat high hats or something like that, Flipping over to triplets really quickly is really handy. This is a good way to do it. Now you see we've got eighth note triplet, 16th note triplet. They're a little different now. I am, at the moment, adjusting the end notes, ends of the notes. I can do start, end, or both. If I do start notes and end notes, that's going to look like that, they're going to stay really uniform triplets. Then we can say the amount so we can have a little flexibility. This is in a way, quantizing is like the opposite of humanizing, right? Like it's undoing humanizing. Basically. It's going to make you more on the grid where humanizing is going to take you more off the grid. Okay, so you can think of humanize and quantas as two sides of the same coin. They're opposites in a way, but more or less it works the way that quantas works in the past. It just gives us a new interface and some easy control to see how it's going to work. Let's move on. 53. Transform: Recombine: Okay, let's go to recombine Now, This one is really interesting because this is a really powerful tool. And it took me a minute to figure out why we're calling it recombine. Just hold on to that for a second. I have a theory, but we'll get to it in a minute. Let me show you what it does first. First, we can choose which parameter we're going to affect, pitch length or velocity. Let's just look at pitch for the moment. Now imagine this little melodic thing on a scroll. We can scrub through its alignment with this rotate feature. You see this is the first note, if I go over by one. Now that is the second note. If I go over by two, the keeps moving over and what was the last note becomes the first note. I can really scrub through the orientation of this, the first and last note. Okay, that's cool. Now if I do it with length, it's going to keep the pitches in the same spot, but change the length. Now, right now, that's going to do nothing, because all the lengths of my pitches are the same. Let's take this last one, whoops, and make it a long note. Okay, now let's take length. Now you can see that long note scrubbing through there, that can show you what length is doing in a weird way. Now it's the D. If I go back one more, it's going to be the, it's applying the rhythm, the length of the note to a different note. And the same thing with velocity. All my velocities are the same right? Now, let's randomize them. Now if I scrub the velocity, they're all changing and the note length still, we can say the pitch. Let's do all at once right now, everything is just shuffling around. Now if I want to, I can also just hit shuffle. And just have it shuffle the notes and rhythms around velocities. Or I can say mirror. What's up? Go down, what's down? Go up, what's long, go short. Whatever. Mirror image of everything. Okay, now here's what I got. Something totally different. Cool. This is really cool. Okay, so why do we call it recombine? What I think the logic here is that we're going to take notes and rhythms, separate them, shuffle them around, and then put them back together and recombine them. I think that's why they're calling it that I may have called it actually would have been a good name for the whole thing. It's a feature here. It's also like what everything is doing. Let's recombine, another great tool to help you just generate new ideas. 54. Transform: Span: Okay up. Next is span. Now this one really has to do with the articulations of the note. It gives us three options here. Legato means connect notes together. Let one note drift right into the next note. Tenuto means let each individual note play for its full length. Staccato means cut things short. It's got a nice little graphic here showing you the actual musical symbol which I love. Let's go back to our orchestral sound to hear the difference between these, okay, So you can see when I crank this up, what's happening at the ends of the notes are drifting a little bit longer to connect. I wouldn't really want to do it that much, but I might want them to overlap. Just the hair variation is going to get you just a little bit extra little wiggle room here. If I go to Nudo, it's going to let me just control the ends of the notes up to the next note. And staccato obviously is going to make everything short and I can make it shorter or lower. And a little bit of wiggle room for variation. Okay, so three quick articulations, we would call that in the more performance world, handy for really crafting your mitty notes. 55. Transform: Strum: All right, next strum. Now, this is a handy little tool. It does one thing, and it's super obvious what it does. If I just do it, you'll get it. If I load up strum, we see this, Watch this. That's what it does, it strum, strumming a guitar. So here I've made a chord using our synth, but this is how a guitar would voice, like an E major chord. Okay? So it doesn't sound like a guitar, but these are the notes of a guitar. When a guitar plays in the major chord, let's strum it, let's put a little bit of flange on that there, put a little bit of angle to that, right? It's rips right up like a guitar would do. Hey, let's look at it. On our orchestra thing here, you can really see what it's doing when I do that. But let's just do it a little bit now. This isn't going to sound very good and this is something you have to consider when you're doing the strum. Because these notes with this kind of orchestra sound that we have here, these notes take a second to speak, so we're probably not really going to hear it all that much in this case. Let's find out. Yeah, let's do it a little bit more. You kind of hear it. Let's go back over to this one and do it as extreme as possible. Yeah, that's cool. Neat. You know, I've spent a lot of time just like nudging things around little by little to get it to make this sound. And this just gives us our nice really easy effect to do it. So it's going to save you a lot of time if you like, this kind of effect. 56. Transform: Time Warp: Okay, do more time warp. This one is this head scratcher. But the intent of this one, as you see how I have here, all notes are equal length. This is going to give us some flexibility to change that wildly with this little grid here. Think about, this is the beginning of this clip and this is the end of this clip, Okay, then her is faster. If I move this up, that means the durations of notes on this side are going to be faster than on this side. Okay, If I move this down, they're going to be faster over here and slower over there. But I can also add a third point now. They're going to be faster in the middle or slower in the middle, okay. It's like really wacky. Now you might think, well, isn't this just throwing everything way off the grid? It is, but I could also just turn on quanta and then now everything snaps to a grid. It's still there. Let's take a listen to this. I've made it basically start at the same speed and get faster rhythmically, not tempo. The rhythms are shorter. It's different than just speeding up the tempo. Let's see what happens. So we got down and then we're back to where we started. Sort, okay, Weird. So this really lets you treat time like a rubber band with your mitty notes. It's kind of wild. 57. Transform: Velocity Shaper: Okay, the last one in this whole big section of transformations is under its own little heading because it's actually a max for live device, but it all works the same. You don't need to worry about the max for live stuff at all. It's just here, this is a velocity shaper. Let me open our velocity a little bit more so we can see what's happening here. It's pretty obvious, right? You can see this arc and what the velocity is doing, right? We can move it around and just see what it's doing. We can really craft our velocity to do what we want here. We can make more points on this line by just clicking on it. It's a velocity shaper. It is exactly what it sounds like, but it's giving us a lot more control over our velocity than we've ever had, which is quite enjoyable. I like it. You can set a loop here that it's going to go through this a few times. In this case six times. It's hard to see what it's doing, but if I send it down to two, maybe we can tell, Let's go like this, Okay, So we can see the arch and it's going down there, and then it starts over again here. It's going through this pattern twice in this case. Pretty cool way to really sculpture velocities, a handy tool. All right, let's move on and talk about some of the Midi generators in Live 12. 58. Generate Ryhythm: Okay, let's move on to these Miti generators now. These get really exciting. To get to it, we're going to go down to this Generate tab and open that up. Okay, and now we've got a bunch of options here. I'm going to select Rhythm. The difference with these is with the transform objects, we're going to start with some music or some notes in our Midi grid, and then it's going to transform them with generators. We don't need anything, we can just say go. Here are some settings. I'm going to hit the regenerate button and there we go. We made a rhythm. Here's what our settings are, are the number of steps in the pattern. Now that may include empty steps, right? It's not going to put something on every step. In this case, there are six steps to the pattern. That means, in our case, 123456. This is where it starts over again. You can see that it goes, that's the pattern. There are six steps to it. I could make it, you know, longer if I wanted, you know, 16. It's cool, let's do that. Actually, let me make my loop a little bit longer here. Okay, so now in this clip, the pattern isn't going to repeat at all, because there are 16 steps, 123-48-1216 in this whole clip, okay? Density, how many notes are going to happen within that pattern? Okay? If we say 16 notes are going to happen, then they're all going to be on, because we have 16 steps and 16 notes. If I say eight, then about half of these are going to have a note in it. Okay? And then this pattern, this is, I believe, this crazy high number we're seeing now is the number of possible patterns that could happen, right? And it's like 6,000 and some. So we can just kind of dial through here until we land on a pattern that we like, Right, cool. So this is just generating a rhythm for us, right? So if you're like, oh, I need a rhythm, let's say you're working on like high hats and you're like, cool, I need some cool high hats and I want them fast and frantic. Let's set this to a 32nd note and, you know, crank up our density a bit. Cool, that'll be good. I'm going to go back to a 16th note. Here we go. All right, we can also do some stuff like splits. These are fun. Let's say, I don't know, 20% of the notes are going to split. That means they're going to be a doubled rhythm. You can see one just happen right here. It's split that into two notes. That's really going to add a lot more variation to it. Shift is going to rotate just like we saw earlier in one of the transformations. If I turn this up, we can see it's just rotating around. It's actually easier to see if you look at the tiny Midi grid down here. Keep your eye on that and you can see what shift is doing. It's just shifting it on the grid. Take that back down to zero. Then we've got some options here where with velocity and what frequency it's generating, it's pretty handy just for generating rhythms, right? Great for drums, great for anything, once you put some pitches to it. So you might say, cool, let's do some stuff like that, and now you're generating some cool melodies there. Let's hear it. Oops. Okay, nothing to write home about out of context, but a very handy tool if you're just looking to generate some stuff. 59. Generate: Seed: Okay, let's go down to seed. Now, seed is a weird word that they've used here. I think they're trying to avoid using the word melody because you could use this for so much more than a melody, but that's also what you can do with it. This is really actually quite simple. We've got three parameters, pitch, duration, and velocity. Let's say, let's go to three to four. I want this whole thing to stay within that octave, so I'm just going to set this to C. Three actually can just click and drag right here. There we go. Here I'm going to go to the three to four, okay? Just that octave, okay? And you can already see it generating some stuff. Let's say duration. I want 16th notes and up to eighth notes. Sure. Velocity, I want a stable velocity. Now, voices. Voices is an interesting term here. You can think of voices as like how many things are going to happen at the same time. If someone was going to sing this, how many people would it take to sing it? That's like an easy way to think about voices. One means there's going to be no overlapping notes. Let's go up to four just for fun, see what it generates then density at 62% that means we're going to have 62% of the area filled with notes. I want to actually fill that out quite a bit more. Let's go to 100% what the heck? All right, here's what we got. Now remember we're all within a scale here. We're all in C major because of this up here and up here looking at that first chord. And we'll see what it did here. Let's take a, Listen, that's weird, it's a bit. Let's make some longer notes. Let's go up to just 16th notes. And now, just out of curiosity, well, let's hear it one more time then. I'm going to try one more thing now. This is interesting because what I heard here, in addition to some other, some stuff I didn't like, I heard. Um, I think that's what I heard. The last two notes might be wrong, but that's a cool little melody that's buried in there. Did you hear that in there? Here it is again. That's pretty cool, you know? Let's take this entirely ableton created melody and let's put it in my strings. What do you think it's going to sound like if I put it in the strings? Listen. Pretty cool. We can do some interesting stuff with this generate. If you're working and you've got a deadline, this is a good way to get started with something. If I was working on this, what I might do is get, get rid of some of these other notes. Maybe extend that, make sure we really hear the things I want to hear. I lost that note. It's a great place to start for something really interesting. So seed. 60. Generate: Shape: All right, up next shape. This is another melodic idea right here, it's hard to see, but right here we've got some presets for directions. We can go flat, up, down, up, down. If we go flat, we're going to make just flat notes. But we can also says here, cool, obviously you can see exactly what this is doing. We make an arc, and it's going to make an arc, and it's going to conform this to our scale. That's going to be great. We can also just draw on this little window, just do this stuff thing, that's neat. We can define our pitch ranges here. So we can say, if we don't want to go so high, could do that. Now we can change the rate. This would be like our rhythm tie seems to mean that some notes will hook together and we'll get some longer rhythms. Like if I turn it up just a little bit, go to get this note connected together in making one longer note. I'm going to turn that up a little bit just to add some variation density, 100% There's going to be no gaps. We're going to have a note on everything, but if I turn that down, there'll be some gaps in it. It's cool. Jitter tends to mean, I think in this context, like glitches, like getting outside of the pattern. If I do this, let me just go to that flat thing, then I crank up jitter. We're going to get some notes that drift out of it. Think of it like a glitch thing. Randomness, Add something cool. Let's do that. Okay, let's hear where we got. There you go. Just completely randomly generated. Not a bad place to start for a little violin solo, I got to say. 61. Generate: Stacks: Okay, next we get to stack. Now, stacks means chords. Let's just generate some chords. Now, interestingly, I probably shouldn't say this, but in a very early version of the beta version of this, this was just called chords. But they must have had an internal discussion and they said, you know, technically what we're generating here is not it's stacks of notes. Because not all of these are functional harmonic ds, which is true. It's splitting hairs. They call it stacks. Let's call it stacks, but this is generating cords. Here's what we have. We have all these shapes. Now these shapes are really quite interesting. I haven't figured out yet the correlation between these diagrams and the actual shapes and what it's generating, But this is a major. Let's make it. Here we go. I said root inversion is zero. I'm going to make it now. We're going to have a major. All we need to do really is set a root and then a shape and maybe an inversion. I'll show you. Let's make a second chord here. Now I have two chords with this second one. Let's say the root E. Let's change the shape. Okay, that's a minor chord. I don't know why I don't get it. But then you've got these other ones that are getting interesting. They're going through different harmonies and they're fun. Okay, now you see how this is stacked really high. What an inversion means in music theory world is the order of the notes. It's not going to change any notes, it's just the order of the notes. This sounds like too big of a leap from this to, it's like way up high. Let's change the inversion. Okay, that stacks all the notes. Now let's move the root down an octave to there. Now it's right in the same thing, in the same range. The inversion just changes the order of the notes through octaves. That's all it does. Now we've got something cool. Let's add another cord. Let's add two more cords actually, with this one. Let's say the root is, and let's change the shape to, let's go here. This is rather nice. I'm going to adjust that inversion. That's nice. The fourth one, let's go. That's cool. Maybe I'll take that inversion down there. All right. Now we have a Ableton invented cogresion. Let's hear it, okay? Pretty cool. It's a nice core progression. All right. We can change the duration of the whole segment if we want, or each individual chord. Say this chord is short. Clicking on each one of these adjusts it so we can make them different lengths. And then offset is just going to push it to a new spot. Okay, Of course you can also just like click and drag and move stuff like the old fashioned way. That's just fine as well. So that's how Ableton can write chord progressions for you. Pretty cool. 62. Generate: Euclidean: Oka. Let's go to Euclidean again. This one is listed under Max for live within the generate menu. That means that it's design using Max for live. It also means it's probably going to be a little weirder and it definitely is. So far with this, I've only been able to generate like really dark and creepy things. But maybe that's great. What we can do is we've got these different patterns. We can click on this circle and make different things just in the center of the circle there, rotations around a circle. We can turn off voices here. We can go to these voices and specify what note they are. We can shift the whole thing up or down. We can give each note of velocity, okay? Basically, this is what it generates. It's weird. There's a new pattern, a lot of the same controls, just a different way of doing it. What's interesting is that I don't think this is just choosing notes for us. It's more than happy to go to ignore our scale because we can just set the notes that we want, but let's force it to be in a key. There we go. It's to full density 16th notes, 16 steps. Sure. You, we have three nodes. These are the same. I can see what this would be good for. This would be good for if you have one cord and you're going to sit on that cord for a while and you just want some rhythmic things you can do with that cord. You could dial in that here. Let's take that up a little bit thus, okay, E. Let's just make a minor chord here. E, G, B, And then another really simple, okay? I'm setting in an E minor chord. Oops, I want this B down in octave. Sure. Okay, Now I can go here and just generate patterns and ways to keep this interesting. It's kind of like our Peggy ad in that way, but just a little more dense and complicated. Interesting effect, I could see finding a use for this. 63. Basic Audio Effects: Okay, in this next section I want to start talking about effects. Because we are talking about producing music here. We need to deal with effects. We're going to go into a disgusting amount of detail on all of the live of audio effects here soon, I think. The fifth class in this series? Yes, the fifth class, but I want to introduce you to them now and give you a big view of what we have and how we typically apply them. All of the effects that we have, we can in group into three different categories. Okay? They are dynamic effects, that would be effects that mess with the volume in some way or another. The second is pitch effects, or frequency effects. Those would be things that mess with the frequency content of our sound. The third would be time effects. Effects that mess with time like delays, things that add time, things like that. There are a couple other effects that we have that don't really fall into any good category like some of these utility ones and things like that. But the majority of the effects that we have fit into one of those three buckets. Now, there's no right or wrong way to use effects, put them on as your heart is content to do. However, if you want a starting point, a very broad rule, and there's more exceptions to this rule, then there is the rule. But a good place to start would be to use them in that order. Okay, put your dynamic effects first, put your pitch effects second, and your time effects Third, if you're putting all three of those on a single track, that's a good order to start with. The order does matter. The order will change the sound. Let's mess around with some effects. I think I want to play around more with this high hat and some of this faster stuff and see what happens if we put a little delay on it. Let's look at some of the effects we have and how they fit into that. 64. Applying Audio Effects: Okay, let's just take a look at what we got here as a little reminder, going back to this loop that we created here. Okay, right. Okay, so here's the whole thing. Okay, I think I'll go here and see if I can live in this up a little bit. So let's see what's on this track. We have this drum machine that we made. Now what's interesting here is that we can route effects within our drum rack. If we go over here, click this and then say send in return. We can do some internal audio effect routing right in the drum rack. But that's not what I want to do right now. We'll do that later. But right now I just want to put effects on the whole track. What could I do to this this sound? First thing is that it's awfully quiet. I could just turn the volume up down here, but that's going to adjust the volume for just this slice of it. Let's try putting a dynamic effect on this whole thing. Our biggest dynamic effect is a compressor. Now if you don't know what a compressor does, it basically smoohes the sound, compresses it, and then boosts the whole thing. It takes away some of the quietest stuff and the loudest stuff and levels them out. But then it boosts the whole thing. It gives the perception that everything is louder. We'll go into a lot more detail on that soon, don't worry. But let's see what we got here. Turn on makeup gain, okay? Now we got a lot more volume out of it. That's cool. Okay, now I could do something like a delay delay would be a time effect. Let's do something simple like this. When I add effects, I'm just dragging them right onto the T. In this case, there are cases where we'll get into routing within the track using sends and returns. But for now I'm just going to put my effects right on the track. I'm going to adjust my settings here, that's a little more on my speed. Turn the wet up. Remember if you haven't encountered this before, dry, wet means that if we go all the way dry, we're going to hear all the signal without any effects on it at all. If we go all the way wet, we're going to hear nothing but the effects. Normally, we want that somewhere around in the middle. Okay, let's get that. Okay, so that's adding a nice little layer. I like it now. If you want to mess around with your audio effects, you can change the order easily just by click and drag and move them around. In this case, I don't think the order is going to have a big change on the sound, but there are cases where the order matters a lot. I just want to introduce effects right here, just to get them on your mind, in your head. Also to help us through the next section where we're going to talk about things like side chaining in just a second. But before we get over to that, let's talk about automation and how we can automate these effects. 65. Automating Effects: Okay, we've looked at automation a few different times. We know that in order to automate something, we need to go into automation mode and then just click on that parameter. And everything basically is the same when it comes to effects. Let's go into automation mode by pressing the letter A or you can go to view automation mode. Now on this track, I could go down here and say let's say this delay and the dry wet amount. I can just click on dry wet. Then you can see that it switched me over to that parameter. Now this is an interesting thing that can happen sometimes. If I just take this and pull it down so that I can ramp this up, that maybe that's what I want to do. But notice what happened. This was being affected by that delay. I'm undo. Okay. The delay was on for back here. Now if I wanted that on before I make this point and pull it down, I should make another point over here just so that I don't mess with anything prior to what I'm doing now. Okay, with that point there, I can smash this down and then build it up like I wanted to sometimes just to be a little extra. I like to do this. Just I don't know why, there's no good reason for that. It's just what I do sometimes. Okay, so now we're going to automate the dry, wet amount of our delay. Let's hear it then. It's gone. Cool. Note your little double drop down menu here. We always have device at the top and then parameter at the bottom. If mixers are device, these are available parameters in the mixer. Now I have a ton of devices here. And the reason is that every slice of my drum rack has all of these devices, right? Because it's a whole simpler instrument, I can go through and say, okay, slice 14. This is another good reason to name your slices. Let's say here's that slice one kick. If I want to automate any of those parameters, here's all the available parameters that I can automate on that device. But if I want to go to my delay, I'm going to go all the way down here. Eighth groove is the name of my delay preset. Now I can see that Dry Wet is automated because it's got the little pink ish. And I can automate anything else that I want that's here. Or you can do the much more same thing of just click on the parameter that you want to automate rather than digging through these lists, which can be a nightmare. Okay, great, let's move on and talk about some advanced production techniques. 66. Introduction to Production Techniques: Okay, up next we're going to talk about a few more techniques that we haven't been able to get into this class yet. There are things that people ask me to learn a whole bunch Now, all of these things are things you can do for different musical effects in the right context. They'll add a lot to your mix, but you don't need to use any of these. I see a lot of egotism going around, especially online, about effects like side chaining and things like that. Maybe you've heard of side chaining, but people always come to me and say, oh, it's just not right unless I set up a side chain on this track. I completely disagree it's right. If it sounds right, don't think you must use any of these no matter what anyone told you. If you've got your track sounding good, then you've got your track sounding good. And you don't need to do any of this fancy stuff, but if you find a good musical purpose to do these things, then you can do them. Let's go a new one. We're going to talk about side chaining, we're going to talk about routing, busing, and resampling. Okay, let's do it. 67. Side Chaining: Okay, so what is side chaining? Side chaining is basically using one track to affect another track. Okay? There's a lot of different ways you can do this and a lot of different effects you can use it on. But the most common way this is done is with a compressor. Let's go to one of our synthes here. Let's see that. Something with sustained to it. Maybe this one. Yeah, that'll work. I'm going to turn it up a little bit. Okay, We'll do it on this. So what I'm going to do is put a compressor on this track. Okay? Now, remember what I just said about what a compressor does. Compressor is going to squash or compress the signal and then boost it, but it's going to squash it based on some parameters that we tell it. What we're going to tell it here is squash the sound based on the volume of another track. Okay, first let's set up this just to do A. Okay. It all the way wet. Sure, that works, whatever. Now we need to set up what's going to control it. The way we do that is our side chaining settings are hidden in this little arrow right here. If I open that up, we can select what we're going to side chain it to. You can choose whatever you want here. You can choose a different track. One thing that I like to do is side chain like rhythmic things and you can actually add a lot of rhythm to this track. But the more common way to do it is to side chain to your kick. This is like side chain one oh one. This is what people do a lot of the time. Let's listen to this beat, okay? That's not what I want. Let's do this one, Okay? I want this kick, I want this four on the floor kick that we set up. But I don't want to side chain it to everything else here. I'm going to duplicate this track. I'm going to go in here and I'm going to get rid of everything. That's not the kick. Okay, now I'm going to delete all the rest of this. Just duplicate this out. Okay, now what we have on this track is just this. Let's delete this just so I don't screw that up. Okay, cool. Just a thump. All right, so now let's go back to where we're side chaining. All right? And we're going to select side chain input from what's the name of that track? Five drum rack. Okay, From five drum rack. All right. We can say post effects. We can say post mixer. Those are settings that will affect our volume, really. But in our case, they should be fine. Let's hit it. Now we see that line right there. That's our kick coming in. Let's pull this down. Okay, so now that kick is really affecting our volume, but we're not hearing it yet. Let's solo this too and listen to you feel that, that pulse in the Basically what's happening here is we're telling live that when these two sounds are happening at the same time, the kick wins, use the compressor and scoop out the volume. Every time the kick hits, the kick hits and synth goes down, and then it comes back up. And then the kick, it, s, goes down and it comes back up. That's what that offbeat feel. We can even mute the kick and not hear it, and we'll still get the effects of it. Do you feel that you've heard this 1,000 times in like tons of pieces of maybe primarily dance music, where it's just got that feel to it. And that is a really aggressive side chain. It has this effect of almost being nauseous in a way if you use it really aggressively, but you don't need to use it really aggressively, there are a lot of very subtle things you can do with a side chain that are really helpful to your mix. When we get into mixing, we might even hook up a side chain to help us get certain aspects of the mix under control. You don't have to do it as aggressively as I'm doing it here. Let's listen to this in the whole context. Let's need that kick. A lot of kick, you don't even need to hear the thing you're side chaining to if you don't want to. I just wanted us to have a four on the floor really straight kick to side chain. To to sum up, if you want to side chain something, take whatever you want to side chain, it should be something that's got some sustained to it. Put a compressor on it, open this little arrow, click side chain and select what you want to do. You can do a little adjustment to the signal here. There are other effects that will let you side chain when you see this little arrow, sometimes it's going to have side chain controls in it. Keep an eye out for those, but that's how you side chain. 68. Routing & Bussing: Routing, okay? So let's take a step back to where we talked about the signal flow of live. Let's use this track as an example, okay? Okay, This is an audio track. This track is going to play then it's going to go through any effects down here, then our volume here, and then it's sent to our main track, or our master. Now we can interrupt that flow with routing these little negative infinity things. Let's talk about how this works. By default set up into a default session, we have two return, those are these down here, okay? We can make as many of these as we want. We just have to go to Create and Insert Return track. Now I have three. Our new one is called Return. Now you'll notice when I made a third one, a third negative infinity popped up on all tracks. If I make another one insert return track, a fourth one pops up on all tracks and a fourth one down here. Okay? I can send this signal down to any of these if I want by just turning up some volume here. Okay? So let's say I want to send this to my A return track. Let's give it some volume. That's how much volume is going to get sent there. Okay? Now my volume is still going to go out normally to my master track, but it's also going to go to this return track. Okay, so why would I want to do that? The reason is I can put some effects on these return tracks. This one by default has reverb on it. This is a cool trick because let's say there's a bunch of different stuff that I want reverb on throughout my session. I can put a reverb effect on any track I want, but if I want the same reverb for all the instruments, I'm going to have to keep track of what my settings are, what my dial is on all the different tracks that I put that reverb. Or instead of putting a reverb on all these tracks, I could just send some of the signal for all the tracks that I want to have reverb. Let's say these top three down to this return. And then put my reverb there. Okay. Now this track has nothing but reverbedracks. That's solo. Just my reverb. Neat, This track is nothing but reverb. Now I can blend that in, it makes it a little easier to control the mix this way. For some things it makes my reverb really consistent times when you would want to your signal down to a return track. We also sometimes call these bus tracks, is primarily when you're doing a lot of time based effects. Time based effects are good on these return tracks. Reverb is a type of time based effect. Delay is a type of time based effect. But you can do whatever you want. If you want to take this delay one and put, I don't know, a bunch of delays. Amplifier, some dist, whatever you want, make a big crazy effect. And then say, okay, I'm going to send all of my synthes to that one, Okay? This one is return B. All I have to do is turn up the second one. Now all of these are going to go through this crazy chain of effects and it's going to sound crazy. I kind of like it actually. It's kind of a cool sound. So that's how we route to these return tracks. You can make as many of them as you want. These two new ones that I made are going to be empty, they're just sitting there called return tracks. I'm going to get out of automation mode here, but I can put whatever I want on them when we work with more effects. We'll find more uses for these, but we'll see these in action a little bit more if you want to experiment around with them. You send audio to them just with these little dials. Or if you want to pull up the mixer, they are these dials you send A, B, C, and D. If you're wondering how I just pulled up the mixer, it's down here. We can send whatever we want here is those four return tracks. They can be really handy for routing sound around your session. Okay, let's talk about resampling. 69. Resampling: Resampling. We've been doing resampling for a while throughout these courses because there's that command J thing that we've been doing where we consolidate something that's a way of resampling, but it's resampling just a single track. And on a single track, resampling basically means taking what we have, the sound of what we have, and processing it as its own thing. There's a few different ways we can do it. You could say like this beat, I want to capture this beat as a single clip. There's a few ways I could do it. First, I could flatten all of these, but that only gets me halfway there. I want them combined into one clip. I could export. I could solo these clips, these tracks, and then go to File Export, and export just these and then import it again, but that's a bit cumbersome, but it would do it all of those ways will work. But there's one other that's just easier. Let's make a, a new audio track. Because I want this to be an audio clip. Okay? I could go here to my new audio track and just say resampling. Now what that's going to do is it's going to grab hold of our main output and record it all into this. I only want to hear things that I want in that I'm going to solo this beat. I'm actually going to leave off this little kick. Then I'm going to go here and hit record. Oops, I forgot to arm this to record. Hey, so I'm going to arm this to record. Then I'm going to put my cursor where I want it and hit record. Okay, so now I got it. If I solo this, it's going to sound the same as if I had all of these three soloed. Now, why would you want to do that? Sometimes I find this to be a handy thing to do if I want to do quick gli stuff. And I just want to make this sound strange for a second and like chop it up, maybe you want to do that or whatever. Let's take that, and I don't know, duplicate it there. Sure. Then cut that out. Okay, For 1 bar. It's going to do this crazy thing. Maybe I want to take these out. Now If I play the whole thing through, it's going to sound like these are still in but all glitched out. So maybe I solo these so we don't hear our crazy synths. All right? So that's what you can do with resampling, smoosh everything down into an audio file and then play around with it that way. There are some times where that's really useful now you know how to do it. Okay. I guess I'll give you this session again if you want it. It still does have that side chain set up. If you want to pick apart how that was put together, this might be useful to you. I'll post this again and then we'll move on to wrapping up this section. 70. What's Next?: Okay, that brings us to just about the end of class three of the series. We're focusing on production techniques. Coming next is class four. In this next class, we're going to focus on sound design and synthesis. That means we're going to learn to use every single one of these instruments and how to make the sounds that you want to make with them. We'll also be learning some basics of sound design principles about how synthesizers work, so that you can apply what you learn about how to use these different synthesizers to any synthesizer that you see. Including a big old analog synthesizer like that one I have. Right. This is hard to do backwards there. I have a sound design curriculum that I've been working on for a long time and I'm really proud of. I think you're going to be a master of sound design by the end of that class. Please join me for part four, Sound design and synthesis. 71. 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.