Ultimate Ableton Live 12, Part 4: Sound Design & Synthesis

1. Introduction: Hey everyone. Welcome to Ableton Live 12. This is part four of my giant complete comprehensive. Everything that there is to know about Ableton Live 12. In this class, we're going to focus on sound design and instruments. This class is a little different because we're not just going to focus on how the instruments in live work, although that is something we are going to do. We're going to start by learning fundamental principles of sound design. What we're looking for in synthesis, how to analyze a synthesizer, find the key elements, and then produce cool sounds with them, and ultimately sounds that fit well with your music. We'll go through all of these sound design principles. I'm basically going to give my university sound class and then we're going to go through all of the Ableton live instruments and apply those things while we learn how to use all of the instruments in live. We'll even dive into some of the max for live stuff and some other tools as well. Please join me in this class. It was a lot of fun to make. So let's dive in and say, okay, you that are just doing this forever. I'm just going to connect you to my volume. And then you're going to go up and down like this forever. It makes sense. There are basically three elements that you can adjust on a sound that you can craft to make that sound unique and compelling. Okay, now let's take a quick look at our modulation matrix. Okay, this can hurt your brain a little bit. We have sources across the top and targets across the side. You've probably seen orchestra libraries that cost 100 bucks, and you've seen orchestra libraries maybe that cost 100 bucks. Maybe you've seen an orchestra library that cost $10 Why? What is the? Yeah, there it is. So this is where your webs live, if you're into that. 2. Workflow: Working with Live’s Instruments: Okay, so let's dive in to lives instruments. The goal of this class is to get comfy with all of these devices. Okay? It's a lot, there's a lot here. But actually we have one more goal too. And our bigger goal is to learn about sound design. A big picture view of how sound design works, so that we can apply it to all instruments. I have a way, I've been teaching sound design for years, where we're going to first talk about what goes into a synthesizer, what makes a synthesizer what it is. And then we'll use that concept to learn all of these different synthesizers. It'll make it ten times easier and you'll be able to apply it to any synthesizer, physical, virtual, whatever that you run into. First things first, what we're looking at here is instruments. This is different than plug ins. In plug ins, there are some instruments. There are a whole bunch of instruments here that you can use to generate sound and do synthesis with. However, all of these are outside of live, they are their own little programs. We're just going to focus on the instruments built in to live, not plug ins, although at the end we will look at some max for live things. We'll come back to that. Just hold onto that for a minute. Another thing just to point out before we get started is that your list might not look like mine. If you don't have the things that I have here, then it might very well be because you don't have the full version of live. This is one of those places where the full version really matters. I have live suite and that's what I'm working on. Live site has all of these instruments. If you have live standard or the smaller versions of live intro or live light, then you will have less things here. I'm going to be working off the sweet version. If you don't have sweet, if you have a lesser version, you can still follow along with everything we do here just fine. There's just going to be some instruments I have that you don't have, but the ones that you do have will work the same way that I'm going to talk through. You'll be just fine. Okay, so we're going to dive into the sound design stuff in just a second. First, I want to just do a little bit of a refresher on how Miti works, just so that we're on the same page about how to make content for these things. We all know what we're doing. Let's go into that first. 3. A Quick MIDI Refresher: Okay, so when it comes to our quick Midi refresher, there are two things that I just want to put into your head as a reminder. First, number one, do this with me. Go up to Options and go down to Chase Midi notes and be sure that is turned on. If it has a little check box it's on. That's what you want. If it doesn't have a check box, click it, it'll get a checkbox. We want that on because it corrects H problem with Midi. Sometimes we miss the note on message. It's complicated and weird, Don't worry about it. Just leave that setting on and it'll make your life a lot easier. Okay. Second thing, we can make Midi notes all we want, but we will not hear them until we put a Midi instrument on those notes. I'm just going to make some notes here, okay? That's cool. If I hit play, we will hear nothing. These dots right here means that live is playing Midi notes, but it has no instrument to play them through. If I hit Shift Tab, you will see this is where my instrument should be. It is not there. I need to put either an instrument or one of these presets for the instrument onto that track, and now we're going to hear those notes. She instantly the little dot turned into audio. I can't tell you how often I get a message from people saying, I'm making notes, everything is cool, but I can't hear my notes. Why? And it's because you need to put an instrument on that track. Also, if we want to hear this track, we want to play on our keyboard and we want to hear this. This has to be armed to record. So if you're hitting notes on a keyboard like I am right now, but you're not hearing anything, make sure you have an instrument and you have that instrument armed to record or that track armed to record, actually. So those are two important things to just keep in mind whenever you're dealing with it. Okay, now let's talk a little bit about how midi clips work. 4. MIDI Clips: Okay, if you've been following along with my other classes, you know by this point your way around session view and arrangement view, you probably know your way around clips. Let's do a little tiny review on Midi clips. We are here in session view. I made a Midi clip right here. I'm going to take it over to Arrangement View by clicking and hold down. I'm just holding it while I hit Tab and now I'm going to drop it into the same track. Okay, this track is grayed out because it is currently over in Session View Live is going to play Session View until I tell it no, I want you to play Arrangement View by clicking that button. Okay, now here we are in Arrangement View. If I double click on it, I get access to loop and all kinds of fun stuff. We'll come back and talk about our key aware stuff in just a minute. But I can change the length of it down here. I can open it up to get the full thing. You can see it looping here. We can move notes around the Midi grid with arrow keys, or by clicking and dragging. You can make more notes by double clicking. We can drag them out this way by grabbing the edge of them. Don't forget my favorite key command of the midi grid that is shift up or down. We'll shift you by an octave. That can be really important. Then just general Midi clip behavior. This is true of audio clips as well. We can copy with command C, put our cursor somewhere, and command V to paste. We can paste into different tracks. Watch out for audio tracks. If we paste into an audio track, it's going to convert it to a Midi track, unless there's something already on that Midi track or that audio track. In which case it's just going to say no. But then here in our timeline, we can move things around and do what we need to do. Okay, I think that's about everything about Midi clips. Let's talk about this key aware stuff because this is new and Live 12 and it's going to be really important as we get into building Midi tracks and Midi clips. 5. Key Aware Settings: Okay, let's talk about the key aware business, okay? First of all, the main control for it lives up here. Okay. Here we can set our key by default is always going to set to C major. That's like a weird like music theory thing. By default everything is major. It's really strange. But anyway, let's say we want the key of our tune to be minor. Sure. Okay, now if we turn this little purple button off, it's just going to not pay attention to this anymore. This is all new, so I'm still getting used to it, but I haven't found a good reason to just turn this off because you can always go outside of the key, so just leave this on all the time. But now if we go to a clip, we can see that this clip turned us back to major and we're in C Major up here. I think we need to redo this minor and say, now we're in minor each clip, because I made these clips before I changed the key. These might all go back to major. Yeah, they are. If I select them all and then switch this to minor, they should now all be in minor. Yes, they are. I selected all of them and then switched this to minor. Any new ones that I make are going to be in minor as they follow the key aware setting. What does it mean to be key aware? Well, if I make a new clip here, first thing is that it shows the key of minor with these purple things. Any of these purple notes are going to be in the key of minor. Okay. If I stay on those purple notes, I'll be pretty safe. Things will sound pretty good. But I can also go outside of the key by playing some of these purple notes. These gray notes, these are going to be outside of the key. They're going to probably be dissonant, as I've said many times when it comes to keys and scales and all this stuff. If you don't know my other work outside of Ableton, I've done a lot of content. I wrote a book about this. This is my jam is music theory for electronic music producers. That's actually the name of my book. You don't have to buy my book. I'm going to summarize the whole thing for you right now. It is that if you stay in the key all the time, we only do notes that are in the key. You are going to make a whole bunch of music. That sounds perfectly fine. Okay, if you sense my sarcasm. There you are, correct? The musical sound fine. It'll sound great. It's cool. But you're not going to find any brilliant, awesome moments without exploring the notes outside of the key. We could do something like this scale button here, where we hide all of the notes that are not in the key. Okay, you can do that now. We can only use notes that are in the key. We've hidden the ones that don't fit in the key. But again, you're going to make a whole bunch of boring but fine music That way, I would encourage you to stay in this mode, not this scale feature. This is called fold to scale, but keep it like this, so that you can see the notes that you're not using. You might hear this melody and think, oh, what if I go there, right? Go outside the key a little bit. Experiment, see if you like it Now, this is not going to be a music theory class. I'll have plenty of those. If you want to learn more about what makes the notes sound good and what notes you can experiment with outside of key that are likely to sound good. Have a whole bunch of content on that. Check that out for now, I'll leave it at that. Just knowing that how this key aware setting works and how to use it, if you want to just stay in the key, you can hit this fold to scale button and then not worry about anything, but let yourself experiment outside of the key. You'll find some great moments there. Okay, let's move on. 6. What is Sound Design?: What is sound design? Sound design is a weird term and it gets a weird wrap. People have used that term to mean a lot of different things over the years. It can just mean synthesis. That is primarily what it means. It means being able to dial in a synthesizer just right, so that you can make the sounds that you want it to make. But it can also mean layering sounds, putting together a non musical sound track for something. There are elements of sound design in all kinds of things. There's an industry called industrial sound design that would be like the beep that your microwave makes when it goes off. That's industrial sound design. I've been hired before to make little beeps and things for different apps, like zoom style apps. When you join a call it goes, I didn't make those sounds, but I've made similar sounds for other apps. There's a lot of sound design that goes into video games. I would actually define sound design broadly as creating unique sounds, whether it's for musical purposes or non musical purposes. What we're going to focus on here is talking primarily about synthesis, the synthesis element of sound design. However, I do have a sound design project here that it's really short and I thought it would be fun to walk you through. Maybe we'll do that and I think I can give you this session since it's all my material. Normally, when you're doing sound design, especially for sound design for a film, you can't really share those sessions because you don't own the film. But in this case I do, even though this is for a film thing, I'll explain it in a minute. Let's do that now. Let's walk through this session and I'll talk to you a little bit about how I think about sound design and then we'll go into talking about the elements of sound design. 7. A Film Session: Okay, this is a funny project because you've seen, you've already seen it. If you're in this class, this is actually like the for this class. Here's how this came about. I commissioned this artist to make this thing for me. Intro bit that you saw at the very beginning of this class. What he gave me was this video and it was great. I liked it, but it was totally silent. Which I also preferred because I wanted to do the sound design myself. I did the sound design here in live. A couple of things. First of all, in order to do this, you can a video file into live, and that's what I did here. It shows up like this. This will be the files audio which was blank when I got it. Then it pops open a new window that you can move around that shows the video. I'll just leave that video right there. And then I'll just play through this once and so you can see what I did. Let's do that. Okay, this is actually a quite simple. First, I put in this boom, swoosh sound. Okay? That's really it, It's very dry. But I doubled it with this sound. That's a sound that I had from another project where I added that low descending thing. That's a very fashionable, almost cinematic sound at this point. Then with the swoosh, I used the same sound again, but with some effects on it to get the back part of the explosion. It's the same as this. It's just got chorus on it, nothing fancy. This is ship noise. This is an audio file I took a long time ago when I was on a ship and just walking around the ship. It's just random sounds and there's a bunch of reverb on it. All right? And then there's also this big boom on that first one. But it's not on any of the others that's there. But it's quite quiet so you don't hear that and then it doesn't come back. That makes the second one a little bit different. These are different pads, just like synthesis that I've laid down onto these tracks. Then here's our only actual Midi and it's just this long bass note that happens right here. Just a big sound that gets added into everything else there. This big opening thing is just this sound but backwards. This sound, again, backwards, sounds like this. If I turn all the effects off, sounds like this, but with a delay and a whole bunch of reverb. It sounds like this. So pretty simple actually. Mostly audio. Just one video or just one Midi clip here. But this is how a sound design session works for a film. In order to make all of these sounds, you really need to know your way around synthesis. Even the audio file one, like these pads are just Midi. And then I rendered them as audio. Even these booms and swooshes and things to really understand what we're doing here. It starts with synthesis. Let's get into that. I'm going to give you this session. You can play around with it, I suppose it'll come with this video. Yeah, have fun with it. 8. The 3 Elements of Good Sound Design: When you are designing sounds, there are three things to keep in mind. There are basically three elements that you can adjust on a sound that you can craft to make that sound unique and compelling. Those three things are tamber, shape, and motion. Okay, remember those, Tamber shape and motion. Let's define them. The trickiest of those three things is tamber. Tamber is a weird word. We use tamber in music all the time. Timber literally translates as color. It means the color of the sound, which is even a more useless term. Here's what it really means. Imagine in your head a flute playing a note. Okay? Now a piano playing that same note. The same exact note. Now, what makes the flute sound different than the piano? They're playing the same note. The biggest thing that makes them sound different is the tamber. It is the quality of the sound. My voice sounds different than your voice. Why? Because of the tamber of my voice. There's a lot of things that go into the tamber of something when it comes to my voice. The things that go into it are the shape of my throat, the vocal chords, the shape of my mouth, the cold that I am still getting over, stuffing up my nose. All of these things contribute to the tamber, that is my voice. The actual technical things that change the sound when it comes to tamber are called overtones or harmonics. Okay, we're going to talk more about those in the next video. So hold on to that for just a second. But the tamber is the color of the sound, the thing that makes a sound unique. Okay? Now the other two are relatively simple shape and motion shape has to do with is the sound fast. Let's think about this sound. Okay, that has a very sharp attack. It's just on, it doesn't fade in. It's just on. It has a pretty quick decay. It ends when the sound ends. It doesn't sustain for a while. I don't know. Let's think about this sound. Okay, it's on. When I play the note, it's off, right? It's like the clap in that it has a similar shape, but a shape can slowly enter, it can move around while it's sustaining, and then it can fade out. There's a lot of different things that the shape of a sound can do. The third thing is motion. That just has to do with while a sound is happening. What is it doing? Is it just still, or is there some motion in it? Let's listen to this sound again now. There is motion here, you can hear that's going, there's something happen. It's not a lot other sounds we encounter will have a lot of motion to them. And they'll be moving around and doing all kinds of different things. Those are really the main three elements that we're always going to be working with, Tamber, shape, and motion. Okay, now let's move on and talk a little bit about overtones and harmonics. 9. Overtones and Harmonics: Okay, let's talk about overtones. Get ready to have your mind blown. Every sound is made up of a ton of other sounds, like an infinite number of other sounds. It's crazy if you think about color, like the color purple is made up of red and yellow, is that right? No, blue and red, right? God, I don't know anything about colors. Blue and red make purple. You could say like purple is the color. And then there's blue and red. Those together make purple. Overtones are like the blue and red here to the purple for every sound frequencies all above it and maybe even below it that contribute to the timber of the sound. I know it's crazy, I'm going to show you, but they're predictable. Let's look at this chart if you don't know how to read Music That's okay. Here's what you just need to understand. If I play this note, it's a very low note. That's like inside that note, that's the low. Inside that note there is a C, an octave higher, C, and then a G, and then another C, and then an E, then a G, then a B flat, that's a little out of tune. Then a C, then a D, then E, then an F sharp, that's also out of tune. Then a G, then A, then B flat, out of tune. Natural C and then it just goes chromatic up from there. There's a lot of notes inside every note, and each of these notes can have a certain volume. And how loud each of these overtones are determines the tamber. Okay, it's weird. Here's another way to look at it. Here is my voice. This is just me talking. This is actually also from the intro to this video. It's hugely valuable. Okay, The blue is the waveform. That's just the waveform that you're used to seeing. But the orange are all the frequencies that make up the tamber of my voice. You can see the moving around quite a bit, but the bigger, brighter ones are the more dominant ones. As they go higher, they get darker and darker, they disappear because we're showing volume in terms of brightness or orangeness. Here you can see the main tones that I'm speaking in. And then all these other orange bits are frequencies that are in my voice. Okay, What we need to do when we do sound design is we're really sculpting those overtones, All those notes above the note that we're actually trying to play, there's the sound, and then there's all of these notes above it that contribute to that sound. As we do sound design, we're sculpting the original sound, but also all of those overtones above it. Okay? If you keep that in mind, it will help as you learn how to do synthesis and sound design. Now, one last thing I'll say about overtones is that there, if you're into like mysticism and weird things, there's all kind of lore and mythology about overtones. I would recommend to you this book, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth. I find this to be a really fascinating book. This is not a science book, this is speculative stuff. But they have all things in this almost Pythagorean examples of overtones being used in different ways like that. It's a symbol. We see a lot overtone structures being used to like build pyramids and like weird stuff. It can get alot spiritual if you're into that. I found that to be a really fun book that talks about the mysticism of music. And especially there's a lot of talk about overtones, These theoretical undertones. It's a whole thing. You don't need to read that for this class. But if that interests you, that's a recommended book. 10. Synthesis Types: Okay, so let's get our head back on Earth for a minute here and get back to the practical, how do we do this? Let's start by talking about the different types of synthesis. Okay, and then we're going to go into the different elements of all synthesizers. But there's a whole bunch of different types of synthesis. Maybe like ten if you get into some of the weirder ones, but there's only five or so that we regularly deal with in live. Let me just explain the different ways that synthesis can work. When we talk about different types of synthesis, what we're talking about is different ways of combining sounds to make new sounds. First, we might have something called additive synthesis. Additive synthesis is quite simple. We take a sound, we take another sound, maybe a third sound, we add them together, and that makes a sound. We like in some of the other classes in the series, I was doing things like layering different sounds, Different synthesis. That's basically additive synthesis. It's very simple, relatively. Now, additive synthesis isn't something that we use a whole bunch. It's not a very popular kind of synthesis. Maybe because it's simple, maybe because it doesn't result in usually really compelling stuff. But subtractive synthesis is probably the most common type of synthesis that we use on an everyday basis. Debatably, subtractive synthesis means that you're going to start with a very complex waveform. Which when I say complex waveform, all that really means is that we've got something with a lot of overtones. It's very bright and buzzy, that means it's got a lot of crazy overtones. We're going to start with something like that, and then we're going to use something called filters to chip away at it and take away the sounds that we don't want, and then we're left with the sounds that we do want. That's called subtractive synthesis. There's another synthesis called FM synthesis is this has a distinctive sound, but FM is a different way of doing things. And one way I like to describe M, which is a vast oversimplification, but a simplified way of looking at it is instead of taking two sounds and adding them together, like we do with additive synthesis, it's more like taking two sounds and multiplying them together and getting a new sound. We end up with one sound, but it's based on several sounds. Multiplying or modulating is more accurate term to make something new. Physical modeling is another synthesis and that's a whole different animal. In physical modeling, what we have is this big, long, crazy math algorithm that tries to replicate the physical world. And we can get in on that and change different parameters. You might have an algorithm that says, here's a physical model of a violin. There's ways to control the pressure you're putting on the string. The pressure on the bow, how many hairs are on the bow? What the humidity is outside, everything that's going to affect the sound of that. Now, physical models can be really complex, but when we use them in something like live, we have fairly simple tools that deal with all that math. For us, it's not like we get this huge algorithm and we have to plug in numbers. It's not like that at all. We get a slick interface that lets us adjust things. Last one I'll talk about just as an introduction is wave table synthesis. This is probably the most complex sounding. What we basically have here is a whole bunch of different sounds. And then when we play one, the software scrubs through all these different sounds so that it makes a new sound by scrubbing through a whole bunch of other sounds. If you imagine those big gnarly bass sounds that you get in Dub step and things like that, They're like that stuff. That's Wave table, if you've used a very popular synthesizer called Serum, that's Wavetable Live, does have a built in wavetable synthesizer. It's called Wave Table. We will be looking at how to use that shortly. Just a quick overview of a couple different kinds of synthesis that we have access to. Now let's go in and talk about the different elements of all synthesizers. 11. The Oscillator Section: Here's what I have here. I have a T, a new Midi track. On that track, I put an analog instrument. Now I just drug the analog instrument onto here, which means we have the default patch. I didn't load any preset. This is just the default analog patch. It sounds like this. We're just going to work with that for a minute. I like talking about these different elements of the synthesizer with analog because it just kind of lays them out really easy. I'm going to use this as an example, but remember the point here is that after I point these out, we should be able to find these on any kind of synthesizer. Okay, We're not just going to learn analog, we're going to learn how to learn synthesis, if that makes sense. Okay? All right, so first the oscillator section. Every synthesizer has an oscillator section. They might not call it the oscillator section, but they have an oscillator section. Now, in analog it's this. We actually have two of them. You can see ask one and ask two, okay? There are these two things, okay? What is an oscillator section? Oscillators are the only part of a synthesizer that actually make sound. Everything else is about sculpting that sound. The oscillators are units that actually oscillate and they make sound, we can say, make a wave form that is a sine wave and it's going to oscillate and make a sine wave like this, because that's what sine waves do. Or you can say make a triangle wave. And it's going to go, that's what triangle waves do. We can tell it what wave to make and then it's going to just start going and generating that wave. Right now we have oscillator one is set up to make this shape of a wave that's called a saw tooth wave. An oscillator two is set up to make a saw tooth wave. They're both making a saw tooth wave also in the oscillator section, in addition to the wave type. And I'll talk more about wave types in a second. We have tuning. We can set the tuning to do different stuff. Octave, semi, and tune. Now, these won't look the same in all synthesizers, but you'll usually have some tuning parameters. Octave means like big jumps away from each other. Here's an octave, here's a, here's one octave up. Let me turn off oscillator two. Here's just oscillator one octave up. You can think about an octave as like the register that we're in, low or high, and a couple in between. Semi is semitone. That's every note on a piano, if you look at it. White notes and black notes. There are 12 of these for one octave, okay? If you go up 12, let's do it 12 and then I go down to zero. But 12 here, some same, okay? 12 semitones per octave. Tune is sense. This is like very fine amount of space. There are 100 of these per one of these, okay? With these, you're not even going to hear it at first. Okay? So the numbers here are a little confusing. I think what we're seeing is one would be 1 stone, so we're going up by percentages of a semitone. We can go all the way up to three. Okay, so that's our tuning. Now let's talk a little bit more about oscillator shapes. 12. Waveforms: Okay, because the oscillator is the only sound making thing, it's important to understand the different shapes that we have available. Now, not all instruments have the same shapes. There are four really standard ones that almost all instruments will have. Then some instruments have different and wacky ones. But let's look at those four. First, I'm going to switch over to a program called Audacity. Maybe you've heard of Audacity. This is a free program that you can find online if you just search for it. I like Audacity because it shows us we can zoom way, way, way in and see individual waveforms. What I did in audacity is I asked it to generate a sine wave for me, 30 seconds of a sine wave. It sounds like this. Okay, That's a sine wave. A sine wave is the most pure sound we can make. It has very few overtones, okay? It has the fundamental pitch that we ask it to make. And then above it, the overtones are almost none. That's what makes it so, just pure, Okay? If we zoom in and look at it, zoom way, way, we're looking at fractions of milliseconds now, okay? We see a sine wave. A sine wave is just a perfect flowing thing. Okay? It's the most simple sound we can create. However, it is super useful, we'll be using sine waves all the time. All right, let's go, let's select all and delete this. I'm going to tell it to generate a square wave. This is another one of the most common wave forms. Okay, Now a square wave has a lot of overtones. It's going to sound more buzzy. The more buzzy something sounds, the more overtones it has. This is what a square wave sounds like. Okay? Doesn't sound all that useful, but it is. Trust me, if we zoom way, way, way in and look at a square wave, we can see that it's like a square. It goes up, flat, down, flat, up, flat, down, flat. It's just a square. It makes these squares all over the place. Now the general rule is that the more right angles or the more sharp edges a sound has, the more overtones that it's going to create. It's just a weird thing, I don't know the math or physics behind why that happens, but it happens in this case. This has these flat sides to it, all over the place, which makes it very buzzy, which means it's going to have a lot of overtones. Just contrasting those, 21 is really smooth and simple with no overtones or very close to it. The other is buzzy and a lot of overtones. Just what those two. We can make a lot of sounds by just combining them and then using some other tools that we have in synthesis to shape them. But let's learn about a couple more. Let's go select all and delete and go to Generate Tone and saw tooth. Okay, a saw tooth, I think we just saw a saw tooth. Saw tooth looks like this. Zoom, it looks like the teeth of a saw, right? It goes up and then straight down almost, and then straight down. Now you can see this has some sharp angles in it and that means it's going to be a bit buzzy. But it's differently buzzy, right? You hear the difference between that and the square wave, that's Tamber, that's that buzziness. That's the overtones. They sound different. These have all been playing the same pitch. Okay? Sine waves, square waves, sawtooth waves. The thing that makes them sound different is the overtones generated above them. And the overtones are generated because of the shape of the wave form. Okay, now there's one more that for some reason just isn't built into audacity easily and that is the triangle wave. Triangle wave is a lot like a saw tooth wave except instead of a flat side, it has a side that comes down. Similarly if we go here, this one doesn't have a triangle wave either. Interesting the different shapes. In analog, I have sine wave, I saw tooth, I have square, I have this one which is noise. Right? We'll talk more about noise later. This one doesn't triangle. Audacity doesn't have triangle, but triangle wave is one of the, what I consider to be the forest standard forms. But not everything has all of them, Every synthesizer is unique in that way. But they're always going to let you dial up something. Triangle wave has a similar sound to a saw tooth wave. Okay? No matter what synthesizer you are working on, you will be able to find an oscillator section, you will be able to select some wave form. You're probably going to see sine wave, saw tooth wave, square wave, maybe triangle wave, and then maybe a handful of other unique things. Whenever you encounter a new synthesizer, just walk up to it. And your first questions would be, where's the oscillator section? 13. The Filter Section: Okay, the second big section of any synthesizer is going to be the filters. Okay. Find the filter section in our analog instrument, here it is. This right here, okay, this says filter one. There's also a filter two down here that's currently off filter one. Okay, we're always going to have to control. Well, not always, Not all synthesizers have two controls. But most of the time we should have two controls on our filter. One drop down menu with a few options. Okay, let's talk about these options first. What does a filter do? A filter is the main tool. We have to carve away sound. It's going to filter out certain sounds, okay? We have to tell it what kind of behavior we want it to have so that it can filter out the sounds that we don't want. Here we can see in this list several different kinds of filters that can be used. Low pass band pass notch, high pass informant. Okay, let's start with low pass Now, in order to show you what this filter does, I'm going to pull up something different. I'm going to pull up an audio effect that I can show a filter in, in a much easier to understand way. Here's EQ eight, okay? I'm going to make this nice and big for us. We'll talk about these filters later. I'm going to turn these off. We're just looking at one of them. Okay, let's set up a low pass filter. Okay? So here's what a low pass filter does. In order to read this grid, here's what you need to know. Low sounds are on this side, and high sounds are on this side. Low frequencies and high frequencies. Okay? Low stuff, high stuff. Then in the middle, we have zero, and then we have 612. And then under that negative six and negative 12, this blue line, when it's on zero, that means we are doing nothing to the volume. But when I go up, now we are boosting the volume. When I go under that zero, we are cutting that volume. Okay? If I do this, what it means is that we're not going to do anything to the volume on this low stuff. But once we get up to right around here, we're going to start decreasing the volume of the higher stuff. Here's one from a little before one K all the way to a little bit after one K. All right, so we're going to reduce the volume of those frequencies as they get louder then anything above this point, we're just going to mute out. We're not going to listen to it. This is called a low pass filter because it lets the low frequencies pass through it, not the high frequencies. If we want a high pass filter, we want this. It's going to let the high frequencies pass through it and get rid of the low frequencies. Okay, going back to our filter in analog, we have a few different choices here. Low pass 12 and low pass 24. Okay, let's go back to a low pass. Low pass 12 is going to look something like this. Oops, that's not a low pass. Here we go. Low pass 12 is something like this. The number has to do with how steep this line is. Okay. If that's 12, 24. Oops, 24 is going to look something like this. It's going to be steeper. Okay. The number technically is decibels prerogative, but you can just think of it as how steep this line is. Okay? That's low pass and high pass, band pass would be something like this, where we have just a single area that we're letting pass through. And then notch would be something like this, where we're notching out some area. In this case we're not going to hear these frequencies in here and these ones are going to be awfully quiet. Okay, let's go back to analog. If I say low pass 12, you have to imagine this filter shape in analog because analog doesn't show you what that filter is actually looking like. That's why I'm using this EQ out here so that you can help you visualize what this is doing. We don't need to use this for sound purposes, I'm just using it to show you what it looks like. Okay, then frequency. Okay? Frequency is going to be also known as the cutoff frequency. That means where does this start to slope down? Okay, We can adjust that. Then resonance, resonance means, give it a little kick at the top is the way I think about it. Resonance is going to be something like this. This means it's going to boost a little bit right at the top, right before it starts to cut away. It's going to boost it. It makes a laser gun effect. I'll show you in a second. Okay, so let's get rid of this EQ and then let's just hear this. Okay? Let's move around my frequency. Remember we have a low pass here, so as I move the frequency around, we're letting different amounts of high frequencies come through or get cut out. All right, so now the high frequencies are getting cut out and we're left just with the low stuff. Why? Okay, if I take resonance all the way down, we're letting more high frequencies come through. Okay, now let's give it some more resonance. You can hear what resonance does, give it that kind of leisure. I do that same thing without resonance. Okay? So resonance can be fun, it can be a sound, It's an effect that you may or may not use. Okay? Then the only other thing here in our filter section right now is this two filter two. This is unique to analog. It's going to let us send the signal after this filter down to our second filter so we can do a little bit of routing. We'll talk through that shortly. That's not something you'll always see in a filter section. We have the oscillator section, we have the filter section. Now, up next is the envelopes, and this one works a little bit different. 14. The Envelopes: Remember a little while ago I said the three main elements that we need to focus on to create sounds are tamber, shape and motion. Right, with Tamber, we're primarily talking about the oscillator section. Okay. That's what's really going to control our tamber. The filter section as well is going to contribute to our Tamber. The envelopes are what really controls the shape. Amongst other things, envelopes are not necessarily a section, but they are scattered throughout. Most synthesizers in various ways. You can see one right here. This is what they look like. Okay, if I click on the oscillator section, this is one as well. This is a little bit different looking one, but this is still an envelope filter. This is an envelope amplifier. This is an envelope. They are all over the place. This little graphic, the envelope, we can get access to its parameters over here, but you'll get really used to seeing the syllographic. In fact, Ableton likes to do it a little bit different. If you're looking at any other synth, you might see it looking more like this. This is the more traditional thing. If you told me, if you drew this little picture and said, what is that? Most experienced sound designers or producers are immediately going to say envelope. The other thing they might say is ADSR, which I'll talk about in just a second. What does an envelope do? Well, let's play with this one, for example. This is in our amplifier, so this is going to be a volume envelope. We can apply envelopes to do a whole bunch of different stuff. What they do is give us certain points that we can apply to different parameters. With the volume envelope, we can say, how fast does this sound? Does it start right away? In which case this line is going to be straight up and down. That starts right away. Do I not want it to start right away? Do I want to fade in? Then we do that. Now it fades in. So now we're already just giving this a lot of shape just by doing that one thing. Okay, how do we want this sound to end? Do we want it to fade out? In which case it is. I'll show you when I'm lifting up my finger right now. Right. It's got a quick fade to it. Let's make that fade longer. Here's our note now. I'm going to lift off my finger. Very slow. Fade out. Come on. Okay, long, fade out. What if I wanted to just stop the second I pull my finger up? Just stop. Okay. My finger just stops. There's some other points here, and I'll talk about those in just a second. With this, I can make a pad kind of sound. If I do a slow attack and a slow release, now I've got like a right, like more of a pad Sound. Or if I do it with a quick attack and quick release, I have more of a lead sound. Ignore the weird glistening, that's my weird Roy Seaboard keyboard. It's kind of strange sometimes, but let's go here. We can have a filter envelope, right? So with this envelope, we could say, I want my filter frequency to open over time and close over time. Right? Now, listen, you hear that go, boy, that filter opens up over a minute over, well, a half a second or so. In fact, 835 milliseconds, that's the actual amount. Ok, can make that go slower, slowly opening that filter, we're giving our sound even more shape. The two most common are amplitude, which is like the volume which really gives it shape, and filter, which contributes to motion in the sound. Okay, now let's talk about this graph a little bit more and talk specifically about this ADSR thing. 15. ADSR: Okay? This little graph is called ADSR envelope, okay? Adsr, those four letters match to the four points. This line is our A. This line is our D. This line is our, and this line is R. Okay? Here's what they stand for. Attack. Okay? The attack line. If that's straight up and down, then we have an instant attack. If it's on an angle, then we're going to have a slower attack, right? That can be straight up and down or varying degrees. Okay. We can also control the attack right here. We can say we want a very slow attack, 15 second long attack, that's insane, or a instant attack. Okay, The first parameter is the attack. Now the second parameter is the D DSR. The D stands for decay. How fast does that initial sound decay? Now in order to visualize this, think about hitting a symbol, like a crash symbol. Going on a crash symbol, you're going to hit that thing with a stick. The attack is going to be instant. As soon as you hit it, it's just bang loud. Okay. The actual hitting of the symbol with the stick is very loud. But once, once you're done with the actual contact of the wood to the symbol, then that symbol is going to ring at a volume that is lower than it was when you actually were hitting it, right? That's what this decay is. This is the amount of time and the amount of distance it takes to get down to that sustained level. Okay, let me show you a couple examples of this. If I do this, what's going to happen is we're going to get a sudden sound because of that attack. Then very quickly actually make that less quick. The sound is going to decay to almost nothing. Then it's going to sit here on the sustained part, you're going to hear the sound go up and down and then sit to where it's at, its sustained moment. Okay, let's do that a little bit faster. Actually, let's do the decay a little slower. Oops, We're still on filter envelope, okay? So we can hear the filter going open and closed kind of fast. Okay, let's go back to our volume envelope where it's a little easier to hear. Let's just open up our filter envelope and go to a volume. Okay? Now, here we're going to hear that sound go up and then down quickly. Okay? That blip you heard was this. Let's make that blip a little bit longer. Okay, let's make our sustain a little bit louder. Now you can hear the volume go up and then come down and then get to a sustained point. Now we're at the sustained point. That's our third thing, the S of ADSR sustain. The sustained one works a little bit different because it's not a matter of time where these other ones are about time. Attack is about how fast that sound gets in decay is about how fast that sound goes down to its sustained point. The, the sustain is at a level, this is about a level. How loud is it going to be while we're just sitting on the note? It's just going to be there forever. If I go like this, then we're going to have a initial decay. And then we're going to sit on a volume that's almost the same as where it was. In fact, we can get rid of the decay completely by just doing this. And now we're, that's not very interesting. Sound. Although it does have its uses, where this line is, this is going to be allowed sustain and no sustain, quiet sustain, medium, sustain. The S is the volume at which it's just going to sustain at forever. But the end of the sustain is this point right here. This point is created when I lift my finger off the note. Okay? This is letting go of the note. Is that point right there? We can't control that point here, because that point is controlled by when I lift up my finger or when I tell the Midi note to stop playing. But as soon as I do that, this happens. And this is the R, which stands for release. When I release the note, does it immediately stop or does it fade out slowly? Does it fade out really slowly? Okay, so now we can craft a sound with some shape to it in a way that we want. Okay? I let go and that's what happens, okay? That's how envelopes work. You'll see this ADSR stuff all over the place. Sometimes you'll just see four knobs and they'll just say ADS and R. And you'll just have to know how those work. We can just them here, S and R. We have this sustained time which doesn't really apply to us right now. Adsr envelopes are crucial part of synthesis. Get used to seeing them and understanding the four different points that they're dealing with. The. 16. The Amplifier: Okay. Last but not least, the fourth main element of any synthesizer is the amplifier. Okay? Amplifier is the simplest one. We will have an envelope in the amplifier to control the volume. We'll also have our main level, because we got to give it some juice probably panning is in there as well. Panning is your left and right balance. All the way left. All the way right. If that sounded the same to you, then this video might have had its panning removed, which happens on some platforms. It's weird, I don't know why they do that, but whatever. That's the amplifier section now, any synthesizer is going to have those four sections somewhere in it. And then probably some bells and whistles, things like LFO's unison glide. That's it for this one, we'll talk about those as they come up. But those are the four sections as we go on and start learning the different live instruments. I'm going to do it by saying, okay, let's look at a new instrument and say, okay, where is our oscillator section? And we're going to find it and we're going to learn how it works. Then we're going to say, where's our filters here? Where is our amplifier? Here it is. If you understand those four sections, learning any synthesizer is going to be 1,000 times easier, trust me. 17. Overview of the Ableton Live Instruments: Okay, so for the next big chunk of this class, actually the majority of the rest of it, we're going to go through each instrument, We're going to go through everything in this list. Not exactly in order though here. They're just an alphabetical order. And I want to do it a little bit more systematically. We are going to start with analog, which we've already been looking at, so it'll be familiar, but we're going to go into a little bit more detail. Then we're going to move into operator because it's similar to analog but souped up. And then we'll move through all of these eventually. Now the way we're going to do this is I may not explain every single button and knob. If there's a button and knob that you're dying to know what it does and I haven't talked about it, just remember to turn on that info view to get that little box down here. You can even just hit this little button, it's going to show you those things even if there's a parameter I don't talk about, it's there in that info view for you. However, I'm going to talk about most parameters. We're going to walk through looking for our four different areas. That's the oscillators, filters, envelopes and amplifier. Then we'll also dissect and look at some presets. Design some sounds of our own. I'll share some files with you and show you how you can u save your custom made patches and share them with people. There's also a few max for live devices hidden in here. You can tell by the icons, all these DS instruments max for live devices. We will be looking at those in this section. I just want to point out that these are max for live devices, but we'll talk about them. There's actually a few more max for live devices that are not in this list that are worth talking about as instruments. One in particular called the granulator, we'll talk about that near the end of this class tube. Okay, And then just last thing I'll say on this topic before we dive in is just remember the common things that all instruments do. If you want an instrument on a track, you load it in or load in a preset, You can put in audio effects after it, You can put media effects before it. Okay, so with that in mind, let's dive in a little bit deeper into analog. 18. Live’s Analog Synth: Okay, so let's start with a fresh analog. I'm just going to pull the default device over here onto this track, then let's take a look. Okay, so we know our way around a little bit, right? We already know our oscillator section, our filter section, and our amplifier section. But there's more here. Things we don't know are things like the LFO's. We'll talk about those also, How the different oscillators interact with each other. We have two oscillators, three actually, I don't know if I mentioned this, but the number of oscillators instrument has, or any synth has is one of the things that makes different synths unique to each other. Some synthesizers just have one oscillator in their oscillator section. Some have two. Like this one though. This has three. I'll talk about that in a minute. Four operator that we're going to look at soon. Some have 100, most of them have 2-4 but there are some that have just like insane numbers of oscillators. One other thing that is common in a lot of the Ableton instruments is that as you click on a section, you're going to get more controls down here. This whole black box is unique to whatever you just clicked on, right? If I click on oscillator section, this is all related to that oscillator section. If I go to filter section, this stuff is related to that filter amplifier LFO, even see it's all graded out here because that LFO is off. Okay, so let's walk through our signal flow of analog because it's a little complicated. Then we'll focus on these LFO's for a little bit and then we'll make some stuff. 19. Signal Flow: Okay, let's take a look at the signal flow within this synthesizer. This will help you understand how to use it by analyzing the signal flow. Now, most synthesizers give you some clue as to what the signal flow is. A lot of the time it's in the design. Especially when you get into analog synthesizers, some of the design elements will point you into how the signal is flowing like in this synth over here. It's got all these like design elements that are actually, once you stare at it for a while, seeing that they're like arrows that are showing you like this goes that way and this goes that way. But this one doesn't have that. Although things generally flow from left to right, however, they can take some turns along the way, okay? So if we turn everything off on the bottom row, what we have here is just our oscillator. Oscillator one is going to go to filter one, which is going to go to amplifier and then out. Okay? However, it's a little more complicated than that. There's a couple points where things can diverge. The first one is right here, filter one, filter two here. We're saying where do we want this oscillators Sound to go? Right now it's set to filter one, which is here easy enough. But I could change this to say like 50, 50. Now it's going to filter one and filter two. Half the signals going here and half the signals going there. Why would I want to do that? I could set two different filters that way. I could say this filter has a whole bunch of resonance and a pretty high cutoff frequency. Whereas this filter has a lower cutoff frequency and maybe less resonance. Maybe this is a different shape of filter. There's a lot of different things I can do with that here. We're just splitting the signal and sending it to two different places. Now if I do that though, I need to turn on amp two because otherwise the percentage, half the signal that's down here into filter two is just dying. When it gets to here, it's not going anywhere. I got to turn this on if I want to hear that. Filter one, filter two, I can do it on this oscillator two. I could say this one is going to go all to filter one or all to filter two. You might be thinking, could I just make this one filter one and this one filter two, so that they roll right across from left to right. You totally can do that, and that's a perfectly good way to use this instrument. But if I did this now, both oscillator 1.2 are going to filter one, and then to filter two, half of their signal each, you're going to get a slightly different sound that way. Let's keep it simple. Let's go filter one and filter two down here. Now there's another point where things can diverge if we want them to. That's right here. This says to filter two, what percentage do we want to go to filter two? That means that if I take this signal, this is all going to filter one. So it's all going here. After it goes to filter one, it's 100% being sent down to filter two anyway. But that's different, right? That's different than the signal going from here half to filter 1.5, to filter two. This says all of this signal is going to go to filter one and it's going to be filtered by filter on. All of these settings are going to apply to it. And then the result is going to go out and down to filter two. Makes sense. Then filter two is going to send it over to amp two. And then we'll hear it. We can't send filter two up to filter one. That's our signal flow. We've got these 123 points where we can interrupt the signal flow and send it around the synthesizer in different ways. All of that's going to change the sound. We'll look at some examples of that soon when we look at a few presets, or maybe design something of our own. After we get to the amplifier, we're going to go right out. We're going to hit this volume knob for one more main volume adjustment. And then send out, which out obviously means back to the track. It's going to hit this meter and then our main meter. That's our signal flow. 20. LFO: Okay, let's talk about this LFO. Lfo. I always debate whether or not I should include this in my four sections of the synthesizer, because just about every synthesizer I've ever seen has an LFO in it. But I usually leave it off just to keep things simple. But it is a common thing that you're going to find. Let's learn how to use it. Our LFO is right here. First of all, what does that stand for? Lfo is low frequency oscillator, okay? So let's analyze that. It is an oscillator, right? There's an in it that stands for oscillator. These are oscillators are only sound generating things. How can that be that these oscillators are sound generating things but these ones aren't. Well, these ones are low frequency oscillators. They are too low for us to hear. They're very low. Like under 20 hertz, we can hear down to 20 hertz is these are usually between zero and maybe ten hertz. You can see the typical rates here, they go up to 17 Hertz, I guess is the fastest that it goes. It's too low for you to hear, you're not going to hear them. So what's the point? We're not even going to route these to an audio output. We're not even going to try to hear them. There's no point in hearing them. What can they do? Well, remember what oscillators do. They oscillate, right? They go back and forth. Or if you're like a sine wave, they go like this. And they just do that forever. They're just like a fish swimming forever. It's never going to stop. It's just going to do this forever. Our idea here is, wouldn't it be cool if we could take this and assign it to something like, what if we wanted our volume, main volume, let's say our oscillator volume? What if we just wanted like our oscillator volume right here, just to constantly be going up and down, up and down and up and down to create motion. Motion is one of the main things we can control in a sound. If we could just have this go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down forever. That might give us some cool motion. We can use one of these low frequency oscillators and take that sine wave that's on it, or it can be any wave and say, okay, you that are just doing this forever. I'm just going to connect you to my volume. And then you're going to go up and down like this forever. Makes sense. Let's try it, basically. So I'm going to turn on this LFO. Okay? Now this LFO is on. We'll play with these settings in a minute. But let's go back over here. So I'm going to go over to the amplifier and control this volume instead of this one. This one. I'm going to go here. I'm going to go to level modulation is what mod stands for here. Lfo one. Let's crank that up. Okay, now when I play that note, there it is. There's our sign way of going. We're going a little faster than I can go, but that's what it's doing if I turn that down. Okay. You can think of this amount that I'm dialing in right here as if I'm telling the volume to go zero to 100, right? 222222. That would be this all the way up. It's going where it's actually going. But if I say 50, it's actually not going to go zero to 100. It's more going to go 25 to 75. It's a little narrower window, okay? It's not going all the way down or all the way up, it's just sitting more in the middle. And as I like pull that number down, it's going to move less and less and less. It does not have anything to do with the speed. If I want to adjust the speed, that is the rate out here. Okay. So in my LFO settings, I have these two little buttons here, Hertz and then what looks like a little note that is common, you'll see that in a lot of different settings. Hertz means I can dial this in based on the frequency 1.2 t. That is a certain speed of LFO. That's cool. If I don't want to deal with Hertz, I can deal with this, which is actually just division of the beat, okay? This is usually more useful, at least in the way that I work. So here I can say now it's at a quarter note. Okay, So let's crank this back up. So now the pulsing that I'm getting is a quarter note, because it says quarter there can switch it to an eighth note, this now it's an eighth note, we can control things that way. Now this normenclature here, quarter quarter, eighth, eighth note. When you see a D after the D means doted eighth note, that's going to be a little slower than an eighth note. Means eighth note or whatever you're looking at, here's eighth note, that's going to be a little faster than an eighth note. You might be thinking, oh, this sounds like a way to get those big web sounds by just going, like doing a really low sound like that. It is one way to get those big web sounds. There's other ways that we'll look at later. But yeah, this is one way that they get those. It's within LFO. In order to use an LFO, we have to turn on the LFO. We adjust the rate, which is the speed of it, and then we assign it to something. So far we've assigned it to an amplifier, but there's tons of other things we can assign it to. We can assign it to panning. Okay, now it's volume and panning. Let's turn off volume, okay, now it's panning. I could go into my oscillator and say, now the pitch is going to go up and down like crazy. And what's interesting is that you still hear a frequency right happening underneath that, a quiet frequency that's just staying said steady. Do you hear that? That's this other oscillator. I've only turned on the LFO for one oscillator. Okay, this is really annoying. So let's turn that off. I can do filter stuff, I can say frequency modulation with the filter. Crank that up, 99. Now my filters go on all up and down like crazy. So let's do that. Not crazy. Now we can hear the panning and the filter are both being affected by the LFO. Okay, Now if I want to make a more complex one, let's turn on a second LFO. Let's set it to dotted 16th note and put that one down here on pitch mod just a little bit, just to give us a little vibrato feel. We'll also put it on this filter a lot. Now we're going to have a pretty complex sound. Okay? We've got a ton of motion happening in this sound now, right? So we've really achieved that motion that I like in sounds. Not all sounds need to have motion, but it's a, it's a nice thing to add sometimes that is what the LFO does, okay? We can turn them back off like this, and now we're just back to where we were. Cool. 21. Programming Analog: All right, let's make a patch. In analog, typically when we put something together we call it a patch. I don't know why it has to do with probably like analog where you're like actually moving patch cables around but we still like to call it a patch even though we're just dialing something in. Let's go back to our default patch. I'm just going to load an analog back up onto the same track. You can drag it right on top of your existing analogy. That's going to take us back to our default patch. Now maybe I should point out here that you can change the default patch if you want. I wouldn't really recommend doing this, but if you really want to, if you dial in a patch and you're like, that's me, that's what I want my default patch to be going forward, all you have to do is save that patch with this little save button and then control click on the header of your analog and say Save as default preset. But we're not going to do that right now. I will talk about saving and sharing patches in just a minute, but okay, so we have a default patch. Sounds like this. Okay. What do we want, what do we want to make? Let's make a pad Sound. Okay, pad sounds. Are those slowly evolving sounds? They've got a lot of motion in them usually, but they're very delicate. They're not, they can be bright, but slow attack, slow release, all that stuff. Let's start there actually. Let's go to our amplitude amplifier and just say we want slow attack and a slow release. Let's hear that maybe a little slower on the attack, it's pretty good. I kind of like, you know, like in full honesty, you know, like a big kind of confession is that I really like the default analog sound, especially like in a fifth like that. I just really like that sound. I think it's just gritty and nice. But let's change it, let's go to our oscillator section. Okay, If we want a calmer sound, we could switch over to our sign wave. We could leave this one saw tooth feel like it's changing everything a whole bunch. Let's do both sign waves. That's not bad but it's a little too clean. Let's try, let's go back to this. I like that. Okay, let's set our filter up. Well, actually before we set up our filter, there is one thing we can do that'll make this sound a lot thicker. It already sounds pretty thick because of that saw tooth wave. But let's go to two sine waves. Right now, I have two sine waves doing the same thing. They can go to different filters, but the tuning is the same on them. One thing I could do here is maybe I'll take this one and tune it down by an octave. Now listen, now we have a whole different sound, right? It's almost like an organ. I can even do a little bit more if I changed the tuning of it. If you pull one oscillator out of tune just a little bit, you'll get this density to the sound. It makes it really thick. Now, it's not so obvious when we separate it by octaves, let's go up to the same octave. So now we have that, but watch this right at it creates its own little LFO just from the notes being lists, like a little out of tune. They're doing this, that can be a good sound, but I don't think I need it here because I liked the octave difference better. Okay, let's leave that out of tune. Just the hair, okay? Okay, so now what are we doing with our filters? This one's going over to filter one, this one's going over to filter one. Okay? And then we're going all to filter two afterwards. So let's tighten up our filter a little bit of resonance. Let's go up an octave here, there's that resonance. Okay, let's turn on this filter, add a little bit more resonance in a different spot. That's nice. I'm going to play with those filters with an envelope in just a second. Okay, let's go to amplifier two out and just leave our level just like that. Okay, so I'm getting a weird click there. I think it's from this other filter. We'll deal with that in a minute. Okay, let's add an LFO and just create a little bit of motion on this. Let's do it with our filter. Let's add some frequency modulation. This one too. A little bit from both of them on. I don't really care about the division of the beat right now. I just want a slow ambience here. Okay? Okay, here's where that click is coming from. I didn't set an envelope, an amplitude envelope for my second amplifier. It certainly is down a little bit. Okay, Now let's add a envelope to my filter. Okay, let's turn it down a little bit. All right, so it's actually not a bad pad. Sound No, let's try that again. Let's make a little itty clip so that we just have a, okay, I don't really love that LFO, but without it, we have a pretty good sound. It's quite simple and nice. 22. Saving And Loading Patches: Okay, throughout this course, I want to be able to give you these patches that we make. Let me just show you how you save and share a patch. This works the same. I believe for all instruments, what you need to find is this little disc icon right there. So I'm going to hit Save. As soon as I click that little disc icon, it jumps me in my browser over to user library. And then is prompting me to give this a name. Let's call this sign pad. Okay? And it's going to automatically attach ADV Ableton device to it. Okay. Now this is my patch forever. I can load this up as a patch that I made neat. Sometimes people do stuff like abbreviated with their name. I can click command R to rename this. And I could save like J sign pad if I wanted to, just to know that like this is what I made. But I don't actually really care about that. I'm going to get rid of that. Okay, great. Now, if I want to find where this is on my computer because this is an actual file now, this little sign pad ADV. If I want to find this and send it to you, I can control click and say, Show and Finder. Here it is. This appears to be another one I've made, massive base synth. Maybe we'll load that one up in a minute. I will post this in the class. You can download it once you get it on your computer. If you just drag it over into your It take it, you can see where it's willing to put it, any of my collections. And then my user library. If it's in my user library, it will show up in synth presets. Or at least it. Okay. I'll post that here. And then let's come back and do a little preset deconstruction. 23. Preset Deconstruction: Let's do a preset deconstruction. This is a great way to learn any synthesizer. I love doing this literally. This is how I learned all this stuff is by doing this over and over. Let's go to instruments analog. Open this up so we see all our presets. All I'm looking for is I don't want to look at a rack. You can see by the icon, this is an analog preset. It's got this icon and we're in the analog folder. This one is a rack, an instrument rack. We'll talk about instrument racks shortly, but I don't want to go there quite yet. I just want one that doesn't have this line in the middle like this. I'm just going to find like a random one. Okay, let's check that one out. I'm going to drag this one over on here. Let's take a look. Okay, so here's what it sounds like. Interesting. Okay, so oscillators, we have two square waves and they're both on. Everything's going to filter one completely. The volume is different. It's interesting that they took the oscillator two's volume down. It's quieter than oscillator one. That's interesting. We have no LFO's on. I'm not seeing any LFO's down here. That's just fine. Now, pitch wise, nothing adjusted here, but down here we're up $0.07 Now that's really prevalent because we can hear that we're playing like a harmony. The seven semitones is a fifth, right? So that means that we're hearing the interval of a fifth in every single note. Which is great to know, because if I go down here and say like I don't want that sound, like I want this sound. But I don't want to hear that harmony. Just take this back down to zero and now we don't have it. Or I could change it to a fourth or, you know, something else. Let's go back to where it was. Okay, cool. And then let's see what it's filter is doing. It's filter as just a wide open envelope, pretty low, no resonance, not doing a lot in the filter. Pretty simple amplifier. See this is really interesting. The envelope they've used here. Very fast attack, but not instant. It's like ramping up but really quick. Just but instantly off. Like no release at all. Just shutting off as soon as we stop, No LFO. A little bit of glide. That's interesting. That means that if I play a note and then another note before releasing that first note and the notes overlap, it's going to glide up to that note a little bit. There's just a little bit of glide there. That's cool. That's a cool trick. A really quite simple patch, but a cool sound. The thing that I like about these preset deconstructions I like to call them, is that I could look at something like this semitone thing. If I didn't know what that was. I can just play some notes and then turn that dial right and listen and see if you can figure out what it's doing. This is just a great way to explore any synth, load up some of its presets and then pick a dial, listen to it, and start turning that dial and see how it changes it. That'll tell you a lot about what it's doing. Okay, I did skip over this noise thing. Let's go back to this noise and just talk about that real quick, and then we're going to move on to another instrument. 24. Noise: Okay, I said a few times that in the analog synth we have two oscillators. Kind of a third. You could actually make an argument for four or maybe even five. Here's what that means. We have these two oscillators. These are two that we can hear. Here's our three. It's noise we can hear that. We will hear it. The four and kind of five would be our LFO. Those are oscillators. We can't hear them though, not really. But let's go back to noise. Why would we have noise? Noise is exactly what it sounds like. It is if I turn off the oscillators and just turn on noise Noise run through a filter you can actually do a lot of stuff with. You can add noise to a synth. Like if we take this sound and add noise to it, it changes the sound of it quite a bit, right? So there's a lot of reasons that we might use noise on something. Another good one would be just for percussive elements. I take this, take this, and I go like that, Okay, now I've got like a percussive element. If I put that into my sound right now, it helps with that percussiveness, noise can be really useful. We actually also have noise here in this shape. It is a cool sound, it's a useful thing, and you will see it in a lot of synthesizers to have noise as an option, either as a separate oscillator or a wave shape in the oscillator section, or both. As is the case here, it can be fun to add noise especially for percussive elements, but sometimes just for Tamber making a unique sound, we can change the color. This is basically a filter. Let's turn, let's go back to here. All right, so this is basically a low pass filter, but it does help change the sound a lot. All right, let's move on to operator where we are definitely going to see the option to use noise. 25. Live’s Operator Synth Interface: Okay, I'm going to try to make us a track using all of the synths I have here. Going back to that square sync lead preset that we made. I just put one note in here. I'm just going to let that drone through that whole section. So I'm going to rename this track command, call it analog. Okay, Now let's go to track two and make an operator. So if we go to instruments, close up analog. And let's go down to operator now. Operator is probably my favorite synth in live. If I'm working on a track and I'm just exploring, don't really have a clear idea of what I'm going to do yet. I'm just playing around with sounds. Usually I'll throw an operator on something. It's a great tool for just exploring. That's just a great tool all around. Let's throw an operator up here. Okay, This one looks a little different, but what do we need to do? Let's find our four sections. Okay, Well, comes first if you said oscillators, I'm going to assume you said oscillator, you said oscillator, okay? Whenever you're looking for the oscillator section, a clue can often be the tuning controls. If you see like coarse and fine, those are tuning controls. Here is an oscillator, okay, if I click on it, our contextual menu here, the stuff that changes as we click on different areas. That's this black box again. This is going to show us some more controls including our waveform. Okay, we have a lot of options for waveforms, we'll come back to that. Okay, that means we have 1234 different oscillators available to us. Great, okay, what's our second section that we're looking for? Filters, right? Do you see a filter section on the screen? Is right here, easily found by the word filter in this case. But if you don't see the word filter, you can usually find it by looking for frequency and resonance right there. Hey, look at that. We have an envelope in it. Oka. If we want to look around for more envelopes, we can find them all over the place. If we go to our oscillators, you see oscillator and envelope, click on that. There's an envelope, right? Familiar thing. We've oscillators, filters, envelopes and amplifier. Probably just right here. There's a big volume knob, last tone control, which is another type of filter. We've also got pitch envelope spread, transpose, some extra stuff and an LFO, right? We know how to use LFO's, there they are. General layout of the operator. Let's talk about signal flow. 26. Signal Flow in Operator: Okay, let's talk about signal flow in operator now. This is a little bit different. We don't have the same kind of routing that we have in analog, but there's a whole different routing scheme here. Let's start with our first oscillator. Note that our oscillators are labeled A, B, C and D. You can also take note of those colors. Okay, that's important. Oscillator A, we look at it, we look at our settings here. After our oscillator makes sound, it's basically going to flow into our filter. In this case, all four oscillators are going to go into that filter, okay? And then that filter, assuming we don't do anything else to it, is going to go out to our amplifier. So in a way simple, right, We don't have to deal with routing and things like we did in analog, because everything, all the oscillators go to the filter and then the filter goes to the output. Simple, right? Nothing fancy but wait, look at this right here. This is a little curious, isn't it? Let's click on this, okay? See all these dots up here. Analog had a simple version of this, but this is a much more complicated version. Okay, let's go over here. What we're seeing here is not only routing of our four oscillators, but actually different kinds of synthesis. This one has all four oscillators heading to the output. When there's a little line coming down off that box, that means heading to the filter and then to the output. In this case, we're going to hear all four oscillators, ABC and D are all going out and going to the filter. This is basically additive synthesis, we could say it's subtractive synthesis because we're still going to a filter and we're going to chip away at those sounds a little bit, But we're basically just piling on sounds from oscillators, adding them all together. That's great, you can get some really cool sounds that way. But what happens in a case like this right here, what we have is there's only one oscillator, the yellow one A, that's going to the output, the rest are going into each other. Okay? That's interesting, right? We have oscillator D at the top. D is going into, which is going into B, which is going into A. What does going into mean? That means that they are modulating each other. In other words, oscillator D is going to control oscillator C and oscillator C is going to control oscillator B and oscillator B is going to control oscillator A. This is FM synthesis. Okay, Now, in terms of routing our sound, what you need to know is that no matter which selection we have up here in the end, all our oscillators come out, go to our filter and then go to our amplifier. It's still relatively simple, but I want to spend a little bit more time on this routing because this is complicated and important. Let's take a minute and talk about what M is and how we're using it here, and also what all these other ones are. Let's do that now. 27. FM Synthesis: Okay, let's go back to talking about our LFO for a minute. Our LFO, if you remember, does this goofy thing, right? Like it just keeps moving. It's an oscillator that is too low for us to hear and we can assign it to do something for us, like control our volume, right? Now imagine that we take the pitch of that oscillator. Typically an LFO is under 20 hertz, so we can't hear it. But what if we took it up to where we could hear it and then assigned it to do something to our oscillator. Okay, if we did that, then that LFO would be modulating the other oscillator. Modulating just means controlling it. The LFO is now not an LFO, It's an audio rate thing that we're going to use to control another oscillator, that's FM synthesis. Okay, it's an LFO that's up in the audio range. We're not going to hear that LFO, we're not going to hear that oscillator, but we're going to use it to modulate the frequency of another oscillator. Okay, M stands for Frequency modulation, and that's what we're doing. We're using one oscillator to modulate another oscillator. When we have a set up like this, let me go back to that. We have modulating C, which is modulating B, which is modulating A. If we look at any of these other routing patterns, they are similar like, let's look at this one. In this one we have A and B are just coming out by themselves, but C is being modulated by D. We're going to hear three oscillators is going to be a modulated oscillator because D is modulating it. Let's go here. We're going to have B, C, and D all modulating A. We're only going to hear one oscillator, but it's going to be modulated by three other oscillators. Okay, let's go to this one. We're going to have D modulating C, then is going to be modulating B and A. Okay, all of these are going to sound a little different. Here's our default patch. Let me just turn up these, okay? Now I have volume on all of them. They're all just doing the sine wave. Okay, let's go to our modulation here. So now we're hearing four oscillators doing the exact same thing, okay, nothing fancy. Let's switch that over to FM, right? Very different. Now we're hearing all of these oscillators modulate each other, okay? Let's go to this one. Slightly different, very different and okay, so the modulation pattern or the routing matters quite a bit. That's what FM is. It's this, or actually really any of these are combinations of FM and additive, or maybe subtractive. This is pure M, where we've got a whole bunch of things modulating another one. All right, cool. All right, now let's try to make something with our operator. 28. Operator Programming: Okay, let's make something with operator. Let's go back to our default patch. I'm just going to drag operator right back on there and make sure I'm back to my default settings. Okay, so we have this, okay, let's take this Sound. Let's make something a little more lead, something that I'll give us a little bit of a, a little bit of a bite to it. First of all, that tells me I don't want to sine wave here. We have all of these different wave forms, but you can see they're quite similar. We have three different signs. We have a bunch of different saws, bunch of different squares, Triangle noise, looped noise white. And user, if I go to one of these saws, they're basically going to show you different amounts of overtones. This graph here is showing you partials. What's fun about operator is that you can just draw the partials you want and it's going to change the sound. So you're sort of drawing a wave form here. You're drawing the partials. But you can see down here what the resulting wave form is, so it's kind of fun. But let's go to one of these squares. Square with three partials is what that's telling you. Three overtones is not very buzzy. Square with 64 is going to be a lot more buzzy. Let's stick with that. Actually, I like it. Now, one thing I'll point out while we're here is noise and looped noise. White noise is pure noise. It has no pitch to it. If I select Noise, no matter what note I play, no matter what note I play, it's the same, right? Noise Doesn't matter what key you play, because noise doesn't have pitch. It's all pitches. But if you want Noise to have, you can do looped noise. What this is, it's basically a little sound file of noise that can be looped and that can have pitch. You can hear it looping here. That's the differences between that. But let's go back to squaare 64, Okay? All right, now let's go to our routing. Let's do M something. In this case we're going to do, let's do this. One is modulating. A and C is modulating. Okay, let's add some sound to B. Okay? We want to do something with those envelopes in a minute, but we'll leave them how they are for now. And then let's take C and go to a square wave also. Okay. I want to adjust my envelope for the swelling. Just give me a little sound. I turn the other two off now. I'm going to modulate with this. Hey, I'm going to detune this just a little bit and then we're gonna bring back in and B. Okay. Kind of cool. I don't think I need an LFO, My filter is pretty good. There's a little kind of frantic motion in there that I think is coming from this tuning. Okay, let's set our amplitude envelopes to be a little shorter or longer actually, is what I'm trying to say, so that we don't get that doing Sound but we get a tiny little faded. It's pretty good. What? I'm still getting a little of that. Let's take that down. That's where it was, I think. Okay, pretty happy with that. Let's add that to our clip here. I think what I'll do here is maybe some of our. Right, I think that was a C that I put over there do flat. Going out of the key G. Let's do a little bit more. Actually see a flat. Okay, that should make a spooky sound. Let's stretch those out to be, I don't know, long. Let's make that like a few bars and then maybe we'll change it to maybe some kind of a flat. Take that one down to F. Maybe we'll take that back up. C, E flat, take that to D. Sure, it's kind of weird. Let's see that E flat. Okay, Now let's go to our midi effects. Put a little arpegiator on it, just for fun. We'll solo that, the pattern. Okay, not bad. Now, just to jazz it up a little bit, jazz it up, but let's add adios, add an echo. I always like echoes on arpegiated stuff. It just feels rather nice Cut. Okay, I'm going to combine these two clips together with command J and then just duplicate them over and over and over. All right, let's hear what we have all together now. Cool. Next I think we need some kind of pad, but we'll get to that when we get to that. Let's keep playing around with the operator a little bit more and let's do a preset deconstruction. 29. Preset Deconstruction: Okay, let's go to our operator here. Let's look at some presets. Let's see here. How about distorted keys? Disto lead. How about that one? I'm just going to pop that right there. This is a rack and I don't want to do racks. Let's do that. That's close to what we had made in terms of a lead like sound. Okay, let's look at what they have. Oh, this is interesting right away. Okay, our first oscillator is up, it's a little out of tune. And they have this course setting set to seven. Now this works a little bit different than we saw in analog the setting. This is in a way a tuning like thing, but really what this is telling us is not octaves. This is telling us which partial you can hear. Like if I turn these off, let me cheer this echo off. And this arpegiator, we're stepping through overtones U, we're stepping through overtones. There are different partials rather than octaves, you can make some interesting effects that way. All right, let's certainly these back on and walk through them. Our envelopes all the way open and we have a sine wave, pretty simple. Our second oscillator. Our oscillator. This one's really interesting. It has this fixed mode set. Fixed mode means it's going to ignore what node I play on the keyboard. It's always going to play whatever the frequency says here. As soon as you turn something to fixed mode, the chorus dial turns into just frequency. This is always going to be 693 hertz, this one that's fixed. Now what's interesting here is look at our routing. That frequency is always going to be modulating the A oscillator. But even though this is at a single frequency and it's always going to play that frequency. It's not always going to play that frequency because this frequency is being modulated by both C and D, right? We can see that here is quieter than the others. The level here really has to do with how much modulation is going to happen. The more you push this volume, the more it's going to modulate. The next thing, listen. That has to do with the modulation. We're up to the seventh partial, also here we have a unique wave form here with just four partials, the same thing. Here we have a unique wave form that they just drew in with some partials and then pulled it out of tune quite a ways, about half a step, then all of those are feeding into each other. If we've got an LFO is on, let's see where we're using that LFO. Lfo would come in the LFO here, we can go here and see. Destination is just going to A. It's up pretty high, 100% but the amount here is pretty low. It's not doing a ton. It would be if we cranked it up, just giving it a little bit of motion. Then this filter envelope is cutting down. It's closing up a filter as it goes, going to warm like that. Then its volume low. Interesting. Let's try that on our little track here. I'm going to turn back echo and our pagatorack on. I like it, let's keep that. Okay. So cool things we can do with operator. Okay. Just for consistency sake, I'll give you this session again and then we'll go on to drift. 30. The Drift Interface: All right, let's move on to Drift. I'm going to make a new Midi track here with Command Shift. Maybe I'll get rid of these two audio tracks while we're here because we're not going to need those. Let's put Drift on it now. Drift is new to live, it's not new in Live 12. I think it actually snuck into a late version of live 11, like 11.5 or so. This is an instrument that it's a lot like analog in that we can use it. Similarly to how we use analog, it's got a couple more features to it, but it's also got capability to do some FAM stuff. So it's like operator two in a way. Okay, let's go through the basic layout o first the oscillator section. Pretty simple here we have oscillators, down here we have two oscillators and then Noise a lot like analog. We have different wave form. Let's see, we have sine triangle. This is actually, I've heard people referring to this as a shark wave. That's a new term to me, but it's there. I'm not sure what we call this one. So this is a pulse wave and a square wave. Let's go Hoops, a low drawing trek. Here's what we have right now. We can do some cool wave shaping with this. Let's turn off two. Here's just oscillator one and we can shape it and you can see what it's doing down there. This shows you we're basically taking this wave form and mangling it a little bit. Let's go to that cool shark thing. It's a cool sound. We can do some modulation right here, so we can say LFO. We'll see what the LFOs doing down here. If I go all the way out here and change the LFO, I can do it. But right here we have some modulation ability. Then this is activating our oscillator. And this is a little confusing, but this button right here is sending it to the filter, okay? If we turn it off, it's going to bypass the filter and go directly to, I believe, the envelopes. And then to the output. If we want to go to the filter, we're going to go there. We turn on our second oscillator. Let's, let's have a little more fun with that. Now. This one we can detune a little bit. That bigger sound just the volume of bit. Then we can do more modulation right down here. We can say, let's envelope two, which we haven't even set up yet. Phone. Oh a little silly. Give us just a touch. I kind of like that. Slow be, yeah, we could add in some noise if we wanted. All right. Our filter cutoff frequency, we're familiar with that. We get a nice cool graph here, resonance. We're familiar with that. This type, we have two different types of filters. You can see the shape. This just has to do with the algorithm in the background. You might like type one and you might like type two. Type two, as I understand it, type two is the more traditional Ableton filter and type one is a new thing. We haven't talked about key tracking at all yet. Maybe let's circle back to that. I'm going to talk about key track King in the next video. Residents this high pass here, HP high pass, we see this. In a lot of different places. Sometimes it basically is just a way to knock out any real low frequencies. Sometimes you see this on since where you might just not want anything low, there's just like a high pass, just sitting there ready to get rid of any low rumbly stuff. You don't have to use it more modulation, we can choose what we want to use to modulate and then what we wanted to modulate. More LFO stuff. More envelope stuff. Lots of opportunities to modulate. Then we get to envelopes, right here, we have traditional ADSR, nothing fancy there. Okay, there we go. I'm going to sharpen this a little bit more. Our second envelope has a cool little feature to it, so we can add a second envelope, and then there's this button which is going to cycle that envelope. Okay, What does that mean? An envelope that's crafting the shape of our sound, but is cycling over and over and over and over quite fast. That's basically an LFO. This turns this envelope into an LFO, and if we turn that on, we get some controls over the shape of it. Maybe we dial it in here, envelope two, cycling, there we go. This is where if we really set this to modulate our frequency, we get into some FM territory with this, it's more LFO setting. This basically is another LFO, if we consider that one the amount, what we wanted to modulate the mode. You see this in a lot of synthesizers. I think we saw this in some of the other ones. But poly means polyphonic. It can play a lot of different notes. Mono means monophonic. It can only play one note at a time. Stereo means it's going to have to notes that it can play at a time, or two different signals unison. It can only play one note at a time, but it's usually going to be doubled by some effect, making a stereo effect. Now this drift, I believe what this drift is doing is adding more harmonics and letting us move around with harmonics. It gets more interesting if you go into like stereo mode. Let's chill out that LFO, you can hear the modulation is just like getting more intense as you turn up that drift setting. We have more modulation here. We can basically choose what's doing the modulating and what is it modulating, and how much can select. Three more things up here. That's it. Pretty similar to analog, but with some cool new features. 31. Preset Study: Okay, let's look at a little preset. How about morning chorus pad? That sounds great. All right. That's at a very nice sound. Let's look at what they've got here. They've got this shark tooth wave and then a sawtooth wave. Envelope two is modulating just a little bit. This first one, envelope two, is down here. This one we've got the shape parameter is up. And it's making a goofy shape. That envelope, this envelope is changing the shape of it. Now remember, I can tell it's not an LFO that's changing the shape of it because it's just happening once and then stopping two. No Noise filter type two key tracking. I promise we'll get to key tracking in just filter resonance, Pretty low filter. Is that modulated? It doesn't look like the filter is being modulated right now. A little bit of frequency modulation, That's M, so a little bit of FM happening. Adsr, slow attack, slow attack on the second one as well. That looping envelope to turn it into an LFO is not on LF is very subtle. I don't think I pointed out here that you can change the shape of the LFO with these, they've got a couple of new ones here, like this wander, which is a more subtle sine wave. In a way a little bit of subtle mount is high heading to envelope two stereo. Good bit of drift on it. Yeah, pretty cool Sam. 32. Key Tracking: Okay, key tracking, I promised, and now we're back. Key tracking is this little job right here. Here's the purpose of key tracking. The reason is, let's say we've got a filter and it's right here. Okay, so our resonance is right there. That's right in the middle range. Okay, let's say that's right around this note, now, that's where our resonance is. Okay, that notes going to have a little spike right on top of it. Let's give it more resonance. Okay, cool. Now the problem is that notes going to stick out because it's going to have an extra amount of resonance. If I keep going up, my notes are going to start to sound different. They're going to get quieter as the filter, as they go past the filter. Right? What we actually want is for all the notes on my keyboard to be similar, right, flat in terms of their volume. But these notes right in the middle are going to be louder than the other notes because they're right under that resonance hump. They're going to get boosted. Okay, so that's not good. That's going to make a funny sounding synth. We use something called key tracking to avoid that very specific problem. What key tracking does is it's going to adjust your filter. In this case, it's usually used with the filter, but you can see a few other places as well. It's going to adjust your filter a little bit, 30% based on what key you play. It's tracking the key that you play and adjusting from there. If I play a high note, it's basically going to move my filter up to where I am. Right. It's not going to update and show us that. Maybe if I crank it up really high. No we can't see it but it's working promise that's what key tracking does. We often also see velocity tracking which does the same thing when I play a note hard things can if I set that up versus if I play a note really quiet, right, you can see velocity shows up Usually to key tracking, when key tracking is around, that's what key tracking is generally. It can just smooth out your sound if you find that you're playing and there's a weird volume bump somewhere because of the way your filter is set up, turn on key tracking and that can help resolve that. 33. Drift Programming: All right, let's add to our cool sound design experiment here. Let's make a sound, let's go back to our default drift. Okay, let's go to that shark tooth thing. Yeah, maybe that other weird one, active shape, okay? I want something bright here to tune this one just a little bit. There we go. I like that. That. Just like that. For now. I'm going to leave that alone. No noise frequency, pull it down, give myself a little resonance. I'm going to use that a little bit, beause. I'm going to do like a pad thing. I don't want any frequency modulation. I do want that to be a little slower. Here we go, we'll do this. Really need the second one. Let's take our rate up and let's go to that wander. Set it to division of the beat. An eighth note is probably okay, but let's go with quarter note. Now let's set this to modulate envelope one a little bit and then we'll go back over here and turn up our LFO down here. Just a little bit there like that. All right, let's go with that. Okay, And then for my track here, I think what I'll do is I'll just use these chords but without any pegiator. Let's do this then. Just duplicate those out. Let's hear that. Cool, Let's hear all my sense right now. I've got to label this one. This one is going to be operator operator and drift. All right. Pretty cool. Let's move on to talk about the actual newest one called Meld. 34. The Meld Interface: All right, let's talk about Meld. This is brand new one to Live 12. Let's make a new Midi track, and let's load in Meld. First thing we need to do with Meld is open this little dial right here, okay? Click on that, and now we see all of this, okay? There's a lot of stuff here, okay? So basically what we're seeing here is this is the instrument, this is what we're going to call a modulation matrix. Okay, hold on to that for a minute, we'll get there. Okay, first things first, our oscillator section. We're starting to drift away from traditional synthesis. And we're getting into some stuff that's a little different now, but it still has most of the same stuff. Our oscillator section looks a little different. What they have here is almost a wave table thing, but it's not, this is obviously the oscillator section, but it calls it engines. What we have here is a bunch of different shapes that are combinations of oscillators. They're more complex than your typical oscillators. We're not going to find just a square wave in here. Some of these are designed to take advantage of the key aware settings. When you see this, a little parentheses at the end there, that means they're going to be able to take advantage of key ware and conform to the key that you're in. Then when you see that little symbol, I'm hearing people in the Ableton community call that a hashtag symbol. No. Don't call it a B hashtag symbol. I do not approve of that. We're going to call it a flat sharp symbol or the key aware symbol. But the two symbols that are there are that one's called a flat and the second one is called a sharp. Let's call it flat, sharp. Okay. Anyway, let's pick one that is key aware. Okay. One is called swarm saw. Make sure we're on this one. Okay, there it is. You can add some motion, Right? It sounds like he's invading it. So this just became huge Sound Instantly. We can add a second oscillator here if we want. We already have one that's like a little too much. Okay, not bad so far we're just doing subtractive synthesis. That's more or less what we're going to get out of meld is subtractive synthesis, but with an insane amount of modulation parameters, it probably borders on FM. Okay, let's go to our envelope section. Here we have A and B. Okay, I believe these are lined up with engine and engine. For A, we have amplitude envelope and modulation envelope. Here we have our typical ADSR settings, but you're still hearing the other one go because you're hearing B. Let's go to B and do the same thing. Cool envelopes, we have LFO's over here that we can dial up. We can do more complicated LFO's now by changing the rate, number of steps in it, pulses. This makes some really interesting material. Once we use it, we have another LFO over here. Let's go back to envelopes. A couple other parameters settings, key tracking can turn that on over there. Okay, we go to our filters. We've got a whole bunch of filter settings. These are just different kinds of filters, okay? And a little mixer here. One thing that's cool about Meld is that we have a kind of built in limiter just to kind of keep it from getting out of control. A limiter kind of just stops it from getting too loud. It'll just kind of say, this is your limit. You cannot go higher than that, louder than that. Okay, now let's take a quick look at our modulation matrix. Okay, this can hurt your brain a little bit. We have sources across the top and targets across the side. Let's say I want to modulate my I, this tone knob. Okay? Now as soon as I click on it, we jumped to tone filter. Did you see that? It just jump to it. If I click on this one, it's going to jump to over here, that light gray one. Let's go back to where we were. It jumps there, that's great. Now I can modulate that with any of these things just by turning something. Let's say that to filter is going to be modulated by my LFO. Okay, here's LFO one now, I'm just going to click and drag to turn that up, okay? Okay, let's turn this up, okay? And you can kind of see where, what's moving around and at what speed, just by looking up here. Right? Maybe I'll try Lipo two on this. Also, I like that we set LF two and then we can modulate stuff. Once we look at a preset here, you're going to see some of these things get gnarly with just how much modulation they're doing. Actually, let's do that because we're done exploring this. Yeah, let's look at a preset. 35. Preset Study: Okay, let's try this preset. So I'm just gonna drag it on here. Here's what we got. There's like a lot going on here. Look at all the modulation happening. There's like all this stuff happening down here. So okay, let's see what else we have. Of course, we do have just a normal square wave here, even though I said you're not going to find a normal square wave, but there we have it. Yeah. Okay. There's a square but it's square fifth. I think there's probably a second frequency in there for our engine, so to speak. F filters pretty aggressive up there, but I bet those are being modulated. Let's look right here. Yeah, it's being modulated by LFO, and this one is also being modulated by LFO. It's almost like hard to trust what you see on the screen because there's so much modulation happening the envelopes. I bet they're being modulated by, let's see, filter frequency. It's actually being modulated by two things. Just so much modulation, this tone is not being modulated. That's cool. But so many other things just even like spacing macro two is what they call spacing here. I guess just an insane amount of modulation. But it makes for these really dynamic sounds, right? Like ten different times. Sounds like something that Ben Frost would put into the track. Look up Ben Frost. Okay, let's make something of our own and then see if we can add something to our funny little synth track here. 36. Meld Programming: All right, let's go back to our default meld patch, okay? Now I don't want something super complicated because I'm going to try to make something that's a lead for this. Let's just scroll through here. Sounds like an orchestra warming up all the overtones. Just adding, Okay, I do have tuning section down here so I can tune this. What I really want is just the second one, a little quieter, so that's going to be over here. Thicken that up just to touch. Then maybe with the spacing, I'll give it just a little bit with LFO one. Okay, Now I want to slow that down a little bit. So we need to find LFO one and turn the rate down. Maybe you go back to that wander shape. I turn the right back up. Can I give it a little bit more? There it is. Okay. It's not bad. Envelopes are pretty good, how they are filters. I want all that bright stuff in there, so I don't want to do very much with my filter drive. I, if I can modulate the drive with something, I cannot. Apparently. That's cool. Okay, now let's see if we can find something that goes onto this. What I'm thinking is some kind of melodic idea. Maybe we go and then, I don't know, we'll just do this. I think we're in like a C minor, maybe we stretch it out. Let's do like a really slow scale down. I should have dialed in the right scale. That would have made this a lot easier, but that's okay. Flat, flat to duplicate that. See what that sounds like? Ok, I don't mind this, but I need a little more modulation in that sound because it's just a little flat. Let's modulate our filter with LFO two and also this filter with LFO two. That's better. I want to modulate the just volume a little bit. Volume is being modulated by velocity because that's what you would do. But let's also say LFO one. Let's do it down here too. Volume L one, like, right? Cool. I like it. Okay. This is probably going to be my go to for like bright buzzins this since now. Okay, let me give you this session again. If you like it, you're welcome to around with it. And then let's move on to collision. 37. Live’s Collision Synth: All right, up next is collision. This is one of the older ones that's been around for a little while. This will be our first physical model. Remember I explained what physical models are. They are this big crazy algorithm that attempts to recreate the physical parameters of an instrument. Now remember I said, don't worry, you're not going to have to do all this math. That's true, this is what the interface looks like. Basically what we have here is a percussion physical model, but specifically like mallets, xylophones, vibes, things like that. You can also get it to do some other weirder things. But you can see here like there's this graphic of a beam. Basically we can say where we're going to be hitting it, how big it is, then what we're going to be hitting it with. Let's just walk through this. In a physical model, we don't really have an oscillator section. Instead we have a mallet and a resonator section. Those are the oscillator because they're both contributing to actually making the sound. Past that we can have a filter, although we do in this one. But we do have things like LFO's, a little bit of routing that we can do, and some envelopes all over the place. Okay, let's start off here in the mallet. The mallet is the thing we're going to use to hit something else. If you've ever played percussion or hit xylophone or whatever, you know that the mallet contributes a lot to the sound. It can be a soft mallet, it can be a hard mallet. All of these things will matter. We can say the volume is basically going to be how hard we hit the thing, Then we've got stiffness of the mallet, how much noise is in it? Color of the mallet could be the material, could be a few different things. Let's see what we've got. Okay, let's make it stiffer. That's like a brass mallet and then this is going to be like a very soft yarn mallet. Okay. I'm going to keep that down actually because I like this. Sound. What's color do here? Not a lot for us right now. Okay, we can add noise. This is going to work like a noise oscillator that we've seen. We see that this noise generator does have a filter built in. Here's our cutoff frequency and resonance. It even has an ADSR envelope built in. This is one that I was talking about earlier, where we don't get the graphic that shows us the ADSR. We just have to know what we're doing here. And we have an envelope amount on our noise. So here's turn it off. It's not doing very much right now. Okay, now, resonator, this is what are we hitting, right? So right now we're hitting some beam, medium sized. Okay? We could hit a marimba, a string, a membrane. That would be like a drumhead, a plate, a pipe, or a tube. Let's say Tua. That sounds like you would expect a tube to be, if I hit it right on the edge. More resonant if I hit it over here. By that probably what's being held onto doesn't resonate as much. Some things we can make big and little tubes we can't. Let's hit a string. If I hit it off to the side with strings, we can do low, medium, and high. See it's much brighter that way. Let's go back to, well let's try a membrane really quick that almost sounds like chimes maybe, Or a timpanyye something in there. Okay, anyway, let's go, let's go back to beam. I like that. Okay, so we've got some harmonics we can add. Harmonics are generally out of tune harmonics. So they're going to be noisier, there's none, they're not, noisier is the wrong term. They're, they're going to add notes up above the fundamental. So those harmonics. But they're going to be consonant harmonics or they're going to be out of key harmonics, okay? We can add another resonator if we want, that takes things out of control. Quick, We've got an LFO section we can add in. So we can say LFO one. Let's put that on, like the stiffness of the mallet. Okay? That's cool. I like this a thing because it means that it's going to be constantly changing a little bit, which is how a mallet would actually act in the real world. All of these here are that key mapping and velocity mapping that we talked about. We can say mallet volume depends on the key. If I put that 100% that means that as I go up, it's going to get louder, right? So the low notes are quieter than the higher notes. Okay, so that's our basic layout of collision. Let's play with it. 38. Programming Collision: Okay, let's make something quickly in collision. Actually, I'm into the thing that we started off with. Here, there's our mallet. I'm going to turn off. Noise Let's keep this right there, but let's add a second resonator that is a string like that. Sound This resonator is way louder than the other one. So I change the structure. I'm not positive what this structure does, but it's prioritizing the two resonators. If I go to 12, they're more even. Let's turn our enharmonics down. Brightness down. I want a really short sound. Maybe I'll go to high strings. I like that. Okay, so I've got this short, plunky sound. Let's add it to our track up here. My idea was to take this app, you put it down there. But I'm going to do something a little weirder. I'm going to join all these Midi clips together with command J. Now I'm going to go to this Midi clip and our transform arpeggiate styles here. And just make like kind of a longer shape to it. Oh, look at that. Let's solo this. I like that. That's weird. Okay, Separate from the synth settings, but we might as well do this while we're here. I really like this sound that we're getting and how it's coming in waves, but it's adding a low notes that I don't want. There's two ways I could deal with those. I could just go in here and delete them. Probably around there. Okay. Now to get that wave sound that we had back, I'm going to go to velocity and let's, let's make like a ramp here and then ramp here. And then I'm just going to do this to make just a wave effect. This has nothing to do with sound design, but I think it's maybe a neat lesson. I'll go in and delete those ones that I missed in a second. Okay, let's just delete those notes. We're not really going to matter. Okay, there we go. Let's hear this, okay? My velocity actually isn't doing anything. Let's go here and make sure that velocity is affecting volume 100% Noise. Volume. We're not using noise but resonant L, that should do it. There we go. The whole thing is a little hot, cool. I like it. Let's hear it in context of our whole crazy synth sound. That's a lot going on, but if we mix this a little bit, I think we'd have a nice sound. Maybe we'll mix it at the end. Let's move on. Why don't I give you this collision patch, but I'll wait on giving you this whole session again until we've added a little bit more to it. Okay, here's this patch. Let's call it Per. How about percussion wave? Sure. 39. Live’s Tension Synth: Okay, I want to do tension next because it is another physical model, let's throw tension on a track. Okay, so what we have here in tension is a string physical model. Okay? So think about tension as like a string pulled tight with like tension. I guess that's why they called it that they come up with such clever names over at Ableton headquarters. Okay, so this is a string physical model. Our oscillator filter section is going to be a little different. It's going to be different than the collision that we just looked at. Physical models are not as uniform as regular synthesis. I guess for lack of a better term is it's not that we're going to have the same parameters that we had back here where we had mallet and resonator for this string physical model. We have exit and damper, also termination and body. The parameters of a string instrument are different than the parameters of a percussion instrument. That's why the physical model attributes are different. You can look at this one in four chunks, right? You've got the excitor here, the terminator here, the damper up here, and the body down here. Okay, so this is a string. So the exciter, there's a couple of different things we could hit a string with, right? We could hit it with a pick or plectrum. We could bow it. Or we could hit it with a hammer, which is always fun. Or a bouncing hammer which is in the coolest sound. This is like for you're guitar player taking a pencil and bouncing it on the string like we've all done as guitar players. If we bow it, oh, that's not a particularly nice sound right now. We might need to dial that one in a little bit more, but let's just hit it with a pick. So the sound we've got now is kind of a nylon string guitar. Let's look at our settings for the pick. I have a pick right here. Protrusion is going to be like how much it comes out and that's going to contribute to how hard you're hitting it and how stiff the pick is. Here is just stiffness in general of the pick, velocity, how hard we're going to hit it. Position where we're going to hit the string damping, if we're going to do any right hand damping with it, mute the string a little bit. This would be like palm muting if you're a guitar player. All of these can have velocity and key control. Meaning the harder we press a note for velocity, we can change the stiffness of the pick if we want. Let's crank that up. If I play really soft, if I play really hard, it's a little stiffer. So I'm going to turn that back down. Okay, let's go on to the termination. You could think of this as like a puddal on a piano finger mass, finger stiffness and fret stiffness. These are basically things that are going to stop the sound from happening a little bit, okay? And those can be velocity and key controlled. Also damper. Now this is like the pedal on a piano, that's what I meant to say, the mass stiffness. This is just going to stop the sound body. This is fun to play with because you can do some inhuman things. Is that a piano body, a guitar body, a violin body, or a generic body? Let's say it's piano, extra small. Instead of saying a guitar, let's say an extra small piano that makes different sounds. We can set some parameters in terms of that. Now we've got a couple other things that are hidden in here, like our pick up position. Is it forward? Is it back? Where do we want it? We can also set some parameters about our string and any vibrato that we might want to put on it. Let's switch to bouncing hammer. I like that sound actually, it's just a little tick. It's neat. Pick we have stiffness on maximum turn off that damper. Now we've got like a Coto dial in dialed in. If you're familiar with a Coto instrument, they're really cool and they sound just like that. Cool. I'm rather happy with this sound. Let's play with it. 40. Tension Preset Deconstruction: All right, I'm going to save this as pluck. I think coto is K, Y OTO. Maybe because I like it. Then let's do a little preset exploration here. Let's go to instruments tension and see what we can do up right far. Wood, bad tuned. Noise Let's try string quartet. Now this is going to be interesting. We'll load up the string quartet patch, But I want to point out one thing about physical models. They can sound very realistic, but they're never going to sound as good as like a sampler that is actually using the instruments. When it comes to making a very realistic sound, samplers are still like the gold standard. And way to go. We'll talk about samplers shortly. This isn't going to sound like a perfect string quartet, let's see what we got. Yeah, Weird. I mean, it's cool, but it's not making like a real sound. There are some fun things we could do with it probably though, but let's see how they did it first. They're using a bow as an excitter. They have a lot of velocity controls set up and a little bit of key control terminator is on a normal finger. No pick up damper is pretty stiff, body is a small piano. Now that's interesting because they could have said violin, but they said small piano instead. Let's hear the difference in, huh? All right, so if we're going to add to our big synth composition here, I kind of want to go back to the sound that we made just a minute ago. So let's do that. 41. Tension Programming: Okay, I'm going back into my user library and pulling back out my pluck Kyoto. Sound Here, let's see what we can do with it. I want to do the similar approach that we did with this one, but not with the chord thing. Let's go here. Let's open this up, Join these together. Command J, Go to this clip. Select all. Let's go to our And not chord trigger this time, solo this. That's kind of nice. Let's try that. Let's see what that sounds like mixed in That's really intense. Now I have an idea, just a compositional idea, that maybe our old analog note, I want to take it and, oops, don't need that open. Change it. What if we did this analog note 4 bars or so? Then another note for 4 bars, but let's make this one, boom B flat, that'll make a big moment. It's cool. This is just like synthesis frenzy. It's almost like stranger things gone mad, if you're familiar with that show. Okay, let's move on. 42. Live’s Electric Synth: Okay, let's move on to electric. I believe this is our last physical model. An electric is a weird physical model because it's a physical model of a half electronic instrument. I guess like an electric guitar would be. But this is an electric piano physical model. Or if you want to think of it differently, you can think about an electric piano being like a Rhodes organ, a Worlizer organ, things like that. It's very specific. It's so specific. In fact, you can see like there's only like maybe 20 presets here versus some of these other ones that have 50 or 60 presets. But let's take a look at it. Like other physical models, it has a couple of different sections related to its sound making thing. We have a hammer, we have a fork, we have a damper and a pick up. Now, we also have this graphic here. This is showing us how something like a Rhodes organ works. You've got a hammer that hits a fork, You could imagine this is like a hammer hitting a tuning fork. It's like that, That's what we mean by fork. There's two parts to that fork. There's a part called a tie and a part called a tone, and we can get access to those there. And then we have the pick up, like where is the pick up? Is it forward, is it back? There's also a damper that we can get here too. Okay. So let's hear it, okay? So if you know Rhodes organ, that's what it sounds like. So stiffness of that hammer, you know, it's going to get you more of a metallic tone. If you go stiffer the fork, we have the tie in the tone, it gets much brighter up there. That's where you get some of that over driven sound up there. The damper the pick up, we can kind of say where it is, it gets a lot brighter as you go back. It's kind of like playing up or down on the neck of a guitar, where like if you go up it's more mellow 'cause you're farther away from the pick up or the bridge. I'm not sure what the symmetry does exactly, but it definitely gets more mellow as you go up there. So, you know, there's not a ton of control we have here. It's quite simple. So let's load up a preset and make something with it. 43. Preset Deconstruction: Worletzer soft piano vibes. Let's correct to Worletzre Soft. Okay, okay, now I got an idea. Well, let's look at what they're doing here first. Stiffness, No noise on the hammer fork is pretty much straight up tine and tone symmetry is way up high. That's going to make that mellower sound on volume all there is to it. Okay, let's go down here. I think I'm going to make a new Midi clip just for something fun. I'm going to do something that matches our analog up there, a little shorter than that. Okay, let's see. I think we have a C minor chord up there. Let's do eighth notes. Let's add a little bit more to this chord though. E, G, C, E flat. And let's do like A down at the bottom. Okay, let's out. So I can see all those notes at once. I'm going to duplicate it, but I want it right there, so I'm just going to go bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bump. Um, maybe one here too, but not that one. Okay, We got a little rhythm going here. Pretty simple rhythm, but now here where the base changes, I want to switch to like a B flat, but let's go B flat flat. Let's go up, then we'll do the same thing. All right? I think that's right on bar five. Yeah, that's right. So I just need a little bit more here. Okay? Okay, let's just hear that. Ah, okay, and then let's maybe jazz it up with a little echo. All right, let's hear that in context. I don't think this is gonna cut through cause we need to P, we need to like take a moment and do a mix on this crazy thing. But let's hear it go. Almost psychotic. Let's keep going. 44. Live’s Impulse Synth: All right. Up next is impulse. Impulse is a weird one. I don't use it very often. It's a sampler that we can load different samples into these boxes and play them. You might think this looks an awful lot like a drum machine because it is a drum machine. What's interesting though is that we also have a drum rack that we'll talk about soon. In a drum rack we can do the same thing, That we can do an impulse, but with a lot more control. You can think of this as a simple drum rack. Let's look at one of the presets just right away and walk through it. Let's go to this impulse eight oh eight. Actually this is like an eight oh eight drum machine. We can click here to play these cool each sample. We have some control over the transposition stretch, the start time decay of it, how it fades out at the end panning of it in volume. And you'll notice that these controls are all dependent on which of these that you click on. If I turn the stretch way up and then I go here, stretch, goes back down, because that's where it was. You don't have to put drums into this. You can put whatever you want into it. You can put sounds or anything, just drag a sound file right over onto it. If I go to samples and say, sure I can put that right there, there it is. I just need to adjust my length to hear the whole thing. I'm going to undo that to make a Midi clip. With this, we open our Midi clip and then we only have these notes. It's really quite easy to do. Let's maybe see if we can make something that fits in with our chaotic thing here. 45. Programming Impulse: Okay, I'm going to do something a little different with this one. Rather than clicking in all the notes to make some kind of pattern, I'm just going to try to record something in and add a bunch of layers and then quantize it. Okay, that's enough of that. Let's add another layer. So I'm going to put on my mitty overdub here and record. Just record a whole bunch of stuff. Okay, now let's take that, let's go to command A, and then let's go to command, let's hear what we got here. Okay, not bad, it's frantic, but I think we'll find a use for this later. So let's take this, let's do it all the way through and see if we can make sense of it later. It almost has like an ambient vibe to it, even though it's drums. It's very strange anyway, okay, let's move on to Wave table. 46. What is a Wavetable Synth?: All right, next up, wave table. You might even call this the main event. I don't know. Wave table is pretty cool though. Let's throw a wave table down here. What is wave table? I think I mentioned this earlier when I was talking about different kinds of synthesis. But wavetable uses wave table synthesis. This is a type of synthesis. The idea here is that the oscillator section is made up of a whole bunch of oscillators. The sound we're going to create is by by scrubbing through them. Okay, Check it out. Here's a sound. You can see the sound I'm actually making is in yellow. Okay? But if I scrub through these wave forms, we're going to kind of turn into each one of them. Okay? So this is my wave table. I have a sine wave, a triangle wave, a saw tooth wave, and a square wave, right? But we can get more complicated ones, let's do that. And it starts to get interesting. What if we did something like this? And it starts to get really interesting. Okay? So we have oscillator one, that is this string of this table of waves. We have oscillator two. We can turn on and add similar things. We check that one out, okay? We have a filter frequency and resonance. We have a second filter that we can turn on here. Okay? We have modulation. Now we have modulation all over the place here. Modulation is really important in wave table, especially because we want this to be moving as we play, we'll look at that in just a second. But we can modulate based on an amplitude envelope like this. Here's another envelope that we can assign to do different things. A third envelope, an LFO and an LFO two. How do we assign those things to do stuff? Well, just like we've seen before, we have a little modulation matrix. Okay, so let's say I want my amplitude envelope to modulate my wave table position, okay, amplitude envelope is here, whoops here. And oscillator one position is there. Now when I play this note, the amplitude envelope will be triggered. That is going to move around my modulation source, so oops, you can see it moving there. Let's go slower. Okay, you can see that this line is now controlling my position in the wave table. That's important. Now you're thinking, we haven't heard anything brilliant yet. Let's look at some of these presets and then you'll see how crazy this can get. 47. Preset Deconstruction: Okay, so if we look at some of these presets, there's like a lot of them here, like a lot. Because there's just so much cool stuff you can do with this. Okay, so here we go. You look at just how the waveform like morph over time. It's just so cool and so dynamic. We get all the elements of good sound design in one patch. We get shape motion, tamber, it's all there. How about wobble base? Let's go down an octave. There it is. This is where your web live, if you're into that. Okay, cool. So let's use that. You know, I'm just going to take this, our other baseline and just double it down here. Maybe we'll shift around octaves in a minute, but here's what that sounds like altogether. Super cool. Play around with wave table. There's so much fun stuff here. 48. MPE and Wavetable: One more thing about wavetable before we move on. We looked at this modulation matrix when wave table first came out. This was a little intimidating. All of the things that you can modulate with and buy. But with the modulation matrix in drift, this looks really small. It's actually not that bad. But keep in mind that it is one of the most powerful things in wave table. But also check out the MPE tab. Remember PE is like that higher resolution Mitt. This is a good example for you to be able to see what it's doing. There are some parameters that a lot of keyboards just don't have, but an MPE of enabled keyboard does the way wavetable uses. That is, if you're working on a keyboard that has these extra capabilities, you can use them as modulation sources. For example, Slide. This is an interesting one on my keyboard. This MPE, what I'm getting at is, I wonder if I can get, you can see it. Anyway, I'll use this pitch, Okay? Slide is going to be this. Keyboard has, it's going to be this. Okay? And then the last one press, I believe that's pressure, or after touch, sometimes it's called. So basically, if I touched the note, and then I'm just very delicately moving my pressure of my finger up and down, you probably can't see it, but I can control things that way. Now, we also have note, pitch bend. Pitch bend. A lot of keyboards have pitch bend. You have a little dial usually on the left side where you can adjust the pitch, but that's going to apply to all notes. Note pitch bend is for an individual note, which I can get a few different ways on my MPE keyboard here. This keyboard, by the way, is a Roy board. There's a bunch of extra parameters that having an NPE keyboard can get you, that you can use as modulation sources to make a more dynamic sound. This patch is taking advantage of those, which is really cool. You don't need to go out and buy an NPE keyboard, but if you have one, can be pretty fun to use for some of these wave table patches. 49. What are these?: Okay. Next, let's go through these DS things now. If you don't see these, it could be that you are in a sweet version. That sounded really funny but less than sweet, I guess of live. I believe these only show up in sweet. You may also have them in a folder on your system to, but for me they're right here all out in the open. Ds clang C symbol F M high hat. Kick sampler. Snaring Tom. Now these are max for live devices, you'll see that Live or Ableton, I should say, actually is really keen on peppering max for live devices all over. A lot of the time someone will build a max for live device and then they decide to include it in the release. I don't think that's what these are, but you'll see if you go to Max for Live that there are some devices in there. I'm going to do a whole class on Max for live in Live 12. So keep a lookout for that. And we'll talk about actually how to program stuff, but for now we're just talking about using stuff. We don't have to know how to program to use Max for live devices. We can tell there Max for live devices because they have a little different symbol here. But basically these are just really quick and simple drum sounds. Drum synths, they're not samplers except for this one. The classic drum sounds like eight oh 87 oh seven. Those types of classic drum machine type sounds. What I want to do in the next ten videos or so is just rip through all of these. I'm not going to make something with all of them because if you look inside the presets, this is a drum rack that's using all of the drum sets. And this is the same drum rack, and this is the same drum rack, and this is the same drum rack. You get it. Let's go through and look at all of these individually quick. And then we'll come back and make something with the actual drum rack. Okay, here we go. 50. DS: Clang: Okay. Ds clang, I'm going to throw that on a new track here. It is quite simple. It makes this sound. You've heard that sound before. If you've ever played around with the classic drum machine, we've got some controls over it that will get it away from that traditional drum machine can Sound we can change the pitch. Remember that if you ever change a parameter in live and want to go back to its default, just click that parameter and press Delete. That'll get us back to where it was. Decay. Just what you would think, just stretches it out volume. Then some tamber things, we can add this cloud Sound a percentage of it filters and Noise High pass filter, apparently add some noise to it. Tone A, B, you're just playing with tone. Probably another type of filter, really simple like all Max for live devices. If you really want to crack this open and reprogram it to do exactly what you want, you can hit this button right here and that'll open like the code editor type thing. We'll do that when we get deep into Max for live, near the end of this whole sequence. But for now there's no reason to do that. You can just play with it and have fun with it if you want this sound in your track, throw one of these on something and add some rhythms to it. 51. DS: Clap: Have you ever been working on a track and said, man, I wish I just had a, like, I just need a clap sample. Well, here's one better. Here's DS clap. That's what it sounds like. Now what's cool about this is that it does have some randomization built in. So that if I click it 1,000 times, you'll hear that it's changing slightly every time. Right? There's like a little bit of variation happening, which is good, because that's what would happen if we actually clapped. We've got this sloppy really tight. Something like a reverb tail spread a little brighter tuning. It's going to turn it into Noise and then volume. It's a clap. Sweet. 52. DS: Cymbal: All right, let's look at symbol next. Okay, a noisy little symbol, which is eight oh, 87 oh seven. Sound Just adjust little things, pitch, decay, volume. A little bit on the tone, probably emulating the make up and size of the symbol, but it's a symbol. 53. DS: FM: Okay, onto this FM one. This one slightly different, okay? We have a little tone, right? What's interesting about this, and I think this is true about all of these, is that when I play a Midi note on my keyboard, they're not responding to notes. I get the same thing no matter what note I play. It's really just clicking in a note. But here we can say what note we want by dialing up the pitch. That's decay. This might be cool for base stuff, maybe, possibly, but it's just a simple FM tone. 54. DS: HH: All right, let's go to the next one. H is high hat, cool. We have a couple of options here. We have white and pink, that has to do with the noise. We have white noise, we have pink noise, and a couple of other kinds of noises. But most of these percussion sounds are based on noise. That's just how they work. The noise in the filter is going to get you basically this type of sound, the type of noise you use will change the sound of it quite a bit. Can change tone, slope attack. I wonder if that has to do with whether you're hitting it with hitting the top of the stick or the edge of the stick. Oh, it's just literally the attack, ramping up the attack pitch, decay in volume. Nothing fancy. I'm surprised they don't give us an open hat here. But that's what the symbol one was here. We just get a closed high hat. 55. DS: Kick: Okay onto what might be the most useful one to me that is this kick. Sometimes you just need a clean kick. I don't want to dig through a bunch of samples. That's what I like this one for. Right? It's just perfect. That's a kick. I can change the pitch to get it out of the way of something else if I need to, I can overdrive it a little bit, adjust the attack of it a little bit. Decay envelope volume, to be honest. When I use this, I don't adjust anything. I just use it just as is and just lay it into a track. We'll do that in just a minute, but this one's really useful to me. 56. DS: Sampler: All right, sampler. This one is pretty simple and a little handy. We can throw that on there. We can drag any sample into it. Let's drag that to it. Okay. I can click on it and get it. I can play it, and it actually is responding to Miti notes. I can adjust the start point, adjust the length, which is effectively adjusting the endpoint, tune it, loop it, decay, add some decay to it. The shaper, adding a little more shape to it or an envelope. So just a really simple sampler, throw anything in there and just we it a whole bunch of times neat. 57. DS: Snare: All right, two more snare, again, just what you need. Now this is a very specific snare, this is that, like old classic drum machine snare sound we can adjust the color a little bit. High pass, there's a low pass we can put on it, it's going to make it a lot. Dark band pass can tune in a little bit, add some decay, and then you know, classic drum snare. Nothing fancy. 58. DS: Tom: All right. Last but not least, the Tom, it sounds like a floor tom. Can change the pitch. Sounds like a rototom color, tone band, decay and volume. Pretty simple honestly. I don't think I've ever used this one. But it's there. If you want it, there's a Tom. 59. Drum Synth Programming: All right, now that we've gone through all those, let's throw one of these DS drum racks onto this track. This is a drum rack. We've seen this before and it has all these sounds on it. Now for each of these, we can go through and adjust anything we want. We've got pitch control for this one, this one we've got tone control and anything in here, we can still adjust anything we want just by clicking on it. What I think I might do is go to Midilips. See if I can find a cool drumbeat that's kind of cool. So let's drag that onto there. Okay, And then we'll just loop that out. Open it up. Okay, so now I've got a cool drum pattern using these sounds. Let's solo it. That zero is funny. I don't know what that is. Okay, well let's hear this in context of our big, giant crazy thing. It's going somewhere. It could be something. Al right, now that we got through all that, let me give you this session one more time in case you want to play with any of these clips and we'll go from there. 60. Drum Rack Refresher: All right, up next, let's go through drum rack now. We've already looked at drum rack a little bit in the previous, I think class, I think class three in this series when we looked at sliced the new midi track, right? We took a drum beat and we control clicked on it. And the menu that came down, we said Slice the new mirack that beat and put each individual transient into a drum rack. Let's look at a drum rack from a different angle. This time if we go up here and select a drum rack, and we just make an empty one on a new Midi track. Let's open it up. This is what it looks like, a whole lot of nothing. If I play it, if I make some Midi notes for it, I get nothing. This is really just a container. It's just a container for things you want to hit, Right? We can put anything we want into these spots. Okay. If we want to take an audio file, let's go to samples and say, sure, let's say this whole loop I can put right there. If I want to put this tone right there, I can do that. If I want to put this finger right there, for some reason there's a clap. Okay? I can put these wherever I want. Okay. That's cool. Each one of these, every time I put something in here, I get a simpler device. And we're going to go through the simpler shortly. But that gets created in each spot when I pull an audio file on there. But I don't need to just pull audio files. Let's say I have this analogy patch that I really like, that one. Sure, I can put a whole analog device onto a drum rack pad. Okay, Now you're thinking, well, when I hit that, how do I control what note it plays? Well, we go over here, we open this up, then we open this up. Now we can see what's going on for this one. It's right here. It says receive one. When I play one on my keyboard, that's going to trigger this sound and it's going to play a C three. I can change that and say actually play a C sharp four, right? I can decide what note it plays. But it's going to ignore what I play on the Midi keyboard in terms of that synth. But I can control that right here. You can drag anything you want onto a drum rack. Any synth, any sample, you can't just drag Midi files that really wouldn't do anything. But virtually anything else can go onto a pad here. Okay. Just a quick reminder of what's going on with drum rack. Two things I want to talk about that we haven't addressed yet is some of the internal routing that we can create in drum rack and also this strange choke setting here. It's an important one if you're interested in making very real sounding drum racks. Let's go into those two things now. 61. MIDI Control of Drum Rack: Before we go into the routing and choke settings, I did want to talk just for a second about different ways you can control the drum rack. Because it has some cool options, you can play it just like any Midi keyboard. Remember that over here, we see where we are. If I play this note, see that yellow blinking dot That tells me in the range of all possible notes, where I am. And it's saying, yeah, you're too high. There's no note there. I got to get down to one of these light gray boxes. There it is. There's that analog option but also this four by four grid of notes is all over live. It's like that two by four grid that I talked about earlier for controls. This four by two grid is like a drum pad grid. You might be able to see that. It's up here. You can't see that. But it shows up on my push all the time. If you have a Midi device that is designed for drum triggers, any pads or anything like that, it's probably automap to hitting these. I have this special kind of like drum synth thing. It's a sort of set of rubber pads that you can play like a drum. And it's really fun to connect it to a drum rack. You just plug it in and it automatically knows what to do. Let's load, let's go to a drum rack, and let's just do like one of these preset ones. That's cool, let's load that one. Okay, here's my drum rack. So let me show you what I'm doing over here. This is my little drum sent, this is an Elisa strike pad. It's got a couple Rams. It's cool. I can just like play drums on it. Like with sticks, like you're playing a drum, it feels like a drum practice pad. It's fun, those pads automatically map to these. I've got a kick and woods and a star. I could just hit record and however I wanted to. It's actually tricky to play, but it's handy. I could do basically the same thing on the push, except I don't want to use sticks on the push because it's not designed for that. Although I would feel pretty good to do. But the pads are so small, I'm not a good enough drummer to hit them just right. I just wanted to point out that you can get these kind of drum synths that are designed really for drum racks and any kind of drum synth. And you can just play stuff, it's really fun. 62. Drum Rack Routing: Okay, Drum rack routing. Let's go to a fresh one here because we have a complicated something. Let's go. Sure. Okay. When you're working with a drum rack, pay attention to these buttons on the sides here. Okay. The main sections that we have here, a simpler instrument, our pads, and then a macro which are these dials. If you don't see the macros, believe they're right here, this dial. Those macros give us control of different things within the simpler over here. For example, if I wanted to map the resonance to something, I can control, click on it and say Map to macro nine. Then I can add a ninth macro here by taking this plus button. There's 9.10 but it likes to keep symmetrical. I can map that to this. Then I just have access to it more easily than going inside the instrument. That's what macros do, but I can also get access to a couple more things here. Here are my different chains. In this case, each sound is going to be on its own chain. Now we're going to look at instrument racks shortly this whole idea of chains will become much more important, I should say. Okay, now let's go to our O section down here. This is what we just looked at, where we see notes coming in and out. Then down here we send and return. Okay, this is where we can do some internal routing. Let's say we want this to have a delay on it, but just the, the whole drum kit. That's why we have this internal routing. If we want to delay on this drum kit, we just throw a delay on it, that's fine. But if you want delay on just one element of the drum kit, then you have to do some funny stuff. And that's what this is designed to do. We already have a delay loaded up here, but we could easily add any other effects here. If we just go to audio effects and say, let's create this echo. Let's just drag that down there. Now we've got a nice big echo. There's all our settings for it. Now let's go to this clap and say send C is right here. I'm just going to crank that up a whole bunch. Now when I hit that clap, it gets a big delay on it, but nothing else does, just that clop. That's the internal routing. You just have to go to this send and receive section, put an effect on the bottom part. See there's a bottom part here and a top part here. Put it on the bottom part. Then you'll have send a, send B and C here. And we just cranked that up on C right there. That's how you can route effects within a drum rack. Okay, Now let's go look at the choke setting. 63. Drum Rack "Choke": Okay, I'm going to hide this send and receive because I just want to see the O settings, here's choke. Okay, so imagine this, you're drummer, right? You're playing drums. And you have the best example that illustrates. What this does is the high hat. The high hat can do two things. The high hat can be open and it can be closed it, right? Two different sounds from the same thing. So if you were going to make a drum rack that was accurate. That sounded correct. You would make it. So those two sounds can't happen at the same time, Right? Because that's not possible in an acoustic drum kit. Like if you had an open high hat and it was going and it was ringing, and then you hit a closed high hat while it was ringing. Those two sounds can't happen at the same time, right? Because you'd have to re, hit it and it's the same drum. Now, in an electronic setting, we can't hit them both at the same time because they're just samples that were triggering in this case. But if you want your drum kit to be accurate, then we need to make sure that those can't happen at the same time. Let's go to a more traditional drum kit, kind of like an acoustic kit. Okay, Let's see. Do we have a high hat, open high hat? Do we have a closed high hat? There it is. Okay. Open high, closed high hat, great. What I need to do is say, go to my IO settings and it's already done for me. If I said this open high hat, this is set to one on the choke, setting this closed, ie hat is also set to one. By setting those to the same thing, that means only one of those two things can happen at a time. If I hit my open high hat and it's still ringing, and then I hit the closed ie. Hat, see if I can do it with my mouse. No, there did it. It's going to stop the open high hat from ringing because that's what would happen in the real world. You can think of these numbers as groups where it's going to sign 11. We could even do weirder stuff, like if we wanted this clap to not be able to happen at the same time as the high hat. For some reason we just set this to one also. Now, only one of those three things can happen at a time. But if we wanted the clap and the snare to not be able to happen, we could set them both to two. And now we've linked them together so that they can't happen at the same time. That's going to make things more realistic. It's subtle, but if you're setting up like a Midi drum machine and you give it to like a drummer and say play this, they'll be happy that it actually behaves correctly. That's what that choke setting does, okay? Maybe just for completeness, we shouldn't make our own drum kit. We should make our own drum rack from scratch. Let's make one and then see if we can add something to our kit here. 64. Building a Drum Rack: All right, let's start fresh with an empty drum rack, and let's make something. I'm just going to use samples for most of this. Let's do kick. I think I know what I want to do here. Actually, you know what we should use for our kick. Let's use our drum synth kick. Let's put one of those right there. Okay, that is just a great little to kick. Now let's go to samples. Let's find a clap. Let's do this. 88 clap. Yeah, I could use the drum synth clap. That would be fine too. Actually, let's use a few claps. Okay, I got three claps here. Now, that's all I want to use. Okay? I don't need routing in this case. Although I could get to it down here if I needed to sends and receives O's. I don't really need to mess with any of this stuff. I could set up some macros if I wanted, but I actually don't need to, but if I wanted to, I could say like volume of this. Let's set the volume of all of our claps to the same knob. Now, all three clap volumes are here. Okay? That's cool. That'll be handy. Okay. Now, let's go here and make something. Now, the reason I did just clap is because, because I just want to add claps. I don't want to add a whole bunch more percussion here because I already have an insane amount of percussion happening in this little track. What I was thinking I would do is just a really big clap. All three of those right there. Let's zoom in a little bit. See where I am. Copy pastels. Put that on 2.4 Just loop that out, it's awfully loud, so we'll take it down. Okay, and then we'll go to our master. Okay, Pretty good. So now I made a drum rack where I just have three claps. I thought maybe I'd use this kick, but I have enough kicks going and this other stuff. So maybe we'll come back to it. But I think I'm pretty happy with all these claps. All right, let's move on. 65. The Simpler and the Sampler: Okay, so up next we're going to talk about the samplers in live. Now remember, let's go way back to the beginning of this part of this class. We talked about our four main things, right? Oscillators, filters, envelopes, amplifier. Okay, now here's the cool thing about samplers, all that's the same. It's totally the same, except the only thing that's different is that our oscillator section can hold an actual audio file, rather than just giving us wave forms. It's going to give us an audio file, but the rest is the same. Filters, envelopes, amplifiers, all that stuff is the same. We have two main samplers in live. We have what's called the sampler, we have what's called the simpler. Okay. Now, if you said to yourself, well it sounds like the simpler is a simple version of the sampler. You would get a gold star for the day because that is correct. We're using simplers all over and we've seen simplers all over, all of these in drum racks. These are all simpler instruments. Okay, we'll go into how all this works in a second. Let's actually just load a simpler onto a new track right now. Okay, here we go. So here is an empty simpler. Our oscillator section is going to be this big sample area here. But then as you will be familiar with seeing, we have filter, here's frequency and resonance filter shapes. And even a filter button to turn on enough. We have an LFO. You know what that is. The four buttons right here, which are probably familiar to you by now. Attack, decay, sustained release. That's our ADSR envelope. Then we have a big old volume knob. Here we have some other controls that we can get at, more filters, a bigger LFO, and some more controls for our envelope. But all of that stuff should be pretty familiar to you by now. Let's dive into the simpler I want to, the simpler runs in three different modes. Let's talk about that in the next few videos, and then we'll go into sampler. 66. Using Simpler (Classic Mode): Okay, I have a simpler here, let's load a sample into it. We can load a sample into it from all over the place. If we have a sample that we like in our session, we can just click and drag it down there. Or we can go to our samples here. That's cool, let's drag that down there. And we're just going to pop it right on this dark area. All right, and there we have it, okay. The three different modes of simpler classic mode means that we now have a sample and we can trigger that sample. It's going to by default, not loop the sample, but we can loop it. This is quite a long sample. We can build a loop in this. We've got some warp controls here. We can fade this out, that's a little smoother and see how it. Oops, that's cool. Okay, if we play a note and just keep our finger down on the note, it's going to loop back. We can turn that off here. The note is also the note that we play on our Midi keyboard is going to transpose this sound. The default is always if I play middle C, which is not that, then it's going to go back to its original pitch. We can't easily change what that original pitch is simpler. You just have to remember that whatever pitch I put into that sample is not going to be the pitch that comes out when I play it on a keyboard. Okay, it's not really designed for that. With sampler we can do that, but with simpler we don't really do that. I'm playing a C here. I don't know what pitch this is. Actually I do it is also a C, but live doesn't know what pitch it is. If I play a whole step, it's just going to transpose it up a whole step, regardless of what the actual pitch is. Okay, So quite simple. If I want to adjust my frequency resonance, I can do that there my envelope, I can make the attack less forceful and have it fade in with that can adjust the volume. Pretty simple, right? It is pretty simple. It's going to play our file. That's really all it's going to do. Okay, let's go to one shot mode. 67. Simpler in 1-shot mode: Okay, When we switch over to one shot mode, we have a little bit fewer settings actually here, the main two we have is trigger and gait, okay? So if I'm on trigger, that means when I say play that note, it's going to play that note and it's not going to loop. Okay. I'm still holding my finger down, it just stops. That's cool. I can still use my ADSR, although it works a little bit differently. It's giving me a fade in and fade out point. I've got a transposition here that I can use. How much the velocity that I play is converted to volume, let's say a lot. That means that if I play my keyboard quietly, it's going to play the note quietly. If I play it hard, it's going to play it really hard. But you might not want that. You might just want it so that it always plays the same volume every time. Okay? It is still going to transpose based on what note I play, but back to this trigger in git. Git means it's going to play the note. As long as I'm holding the note down, it's going to play that sample. But as soon as I let go, it's going to stop playing that sample. In Trigger, I'm going to hit a note and that's just basically going to say play that sample. Play that sample no matter what in gate. It's going to say when I'm holding my finger down, the gate is open to play. But when I lift my finger up, the gate stops kept relatively simple, same filter settings, nothing too crazy. Okay, let's go to the more fun one, slice. 68. Simpler in Slice Mode: Okay, So in slice mode it's going to let us chop up this sample a little bit. Now this isn't a great one for this. Let's find a, let's actually uses banjo loop, okay? So in slice mode, you see that it automatically has grabbed all these different transients, okay? And when I play Midi notes, it's going to assign one Midi note per slice, Okay? Now this is like slice a new Midi track, except it's keeping everything in one simpler rather than divving it out to a whole bunch of simplersy. This is really fun for just finding new sounds. There's all kinds of fun stuff here. So we're ignoring the pitch that I play. It's not transposing this anymore, It's just using this to trigger all of these different points. You can set how it slices it. You can say slice by beat region or manual. But even if you set it to, which is usually the best way, you can't adjust the move them where you want them. We have warp settings still, and we have warp modes that we can activate here, fade in, fade out. I believe this will apply to each one filter frequency and resonance. Basically, this is most useful on like a beat if we take a beat, now I can find like this kick, there's a snare. All right, so now I can just take the beat and play it really simply. Okay? So that's what slice will let you do. It's just going to let you chop things up and trigger things by transient rather than the whole sample. 69. Using Sampler: Okay, let's switch over to the sampler and look at how it's different instruments. Sampler o sampler is a bit more complicated and really for one reason, it gives you more control over the samples, but it also lets you load multiple samples in. We'll look at how and why you would do that in just a minute. But first let's just look at the main interface. Let's take one of our presets here. Okay, here's what this sounds like. Terrifying. Okay, so we have this whole sample here, but we're looping just this section, we can do what's called a sustained mode here. This one means it's going to just play and then stop. This one means it's going to basically loop. This one is called a boomerang loop, where it's going to play forward and then backwards and forwards, and then backwards and forwards and backwards. That sometimes makes a more seamless loop. We do have more tuning controls of our sample. Here we can see like a list of the samples available to us here. We can reverse it, we can set here what the root of this sample is. Now that's important because that's something big that we can't do, and simpler, once we set the root note correctly, that means that everything will line up on your keyboard correctly. If I load in a sample that is a sound that's in a D sharp, sure. Then when I play a C on my keyboard, going to play it as a D sharp, that's going to be all weird. But if I change the root note here to say D sharp, then live knows how to transpose the thing correctly to play the right note at the right time. If you're dealing with pitched samples and building harmonies and things, then having the root note correct is important. Okay, look just here at like cross, fade and loop end. What we're seeing here is number of samples, right? Like this is very specific that we can do here. The cross fade settings, the loop length, all of these are unique per sample that we're looking at, right? They're going to reset for the different samples. We can detune it. All of these things are pretty familiar to us. If we go over here, we've got some ADSR controls over here. We've got a pitch envelope over here with another ADSR. We've got filters. These are global. These are going to affect everything. They're going to affect all the samples, not just the one we're using it. Some modulation settings, if we want to do some LFO's, we've got three of them available to us. And then we can do some more complicated Midi mapping if we really want to. But the star of the show is this Zones tab right here. Let's go to a new video and dive into what zones means in a sampler. 70. Samples and Zones: Okay, maybe you've seen before sample libraries that you can buy online. There's tons of them. You've seen like an orchestra library, like you want a good sounding orchestra that you can queue up and use. That's great. You've probably seen orchestra libraries that cost 100 bucks, and you've seen orchestra libraries that cost 100 bucks. Maybe you've seen an orchestra library that cost $10 What is the difference? There are a few things. There's the quality of the recordings, there's how the samples have been edited and put together. But one of the main things that separates those is how many samples there are, right? Because if I record a violin playing a note, a single note, and I put that into a sampler, and then I transpose it down four octaves. That's not going to sound like a bass, right? It's going to sound funny and weird. You've done this before. Take your voice, transpose it down an octave, and it doesn't sound like someone with a deeper voice than you. It sounds funny. Take your voice and go up an octave. Does it sound you up an octave? No. It sounds like Mickey Mouse. Right. So the way we avoid that is we have a sample, let's use the voice thing. Let's keep going with that. We have a sample of my voice, where it is, and then another sample of my voice of me talking up an octave. Then the computer knows when to switch. Each one is only transposed a little bit, and then it switches to the other sample. It might transpose up a couple steps, my original voice, but then it reaches a threshold where instead of transposing it more, it goes to the higher one and transposes that down because it can do that less steps of transposition. The more samples that are in it, the better. You can also have volume. You could say that if I, if I whisper really quiet, then it's a certain tamber, right? If I take that sound and just turn the volume way up on it, you're not going to get the tamber of me yelling. Right? You should have two separate sounds, two separate files. And the sampler that knows when to use the right one based on the velocity of the node. I press, that's what all this has to do with. Okay, If we go into zones, what we see in this particular instrument is five samples and you can see there are different octaves. F1f, 234.5 Okay, now this matrix type thing over here tells us when to use each sample. If I play a note that is two and under, it's going to use this sample. If I play a note 2-3 it's going to use this. 13.4 4.5 and then C five and up it's going to use this one. Each of these only have to transpose about an octave. We also have velocity controls here where we can set the same thing. Now this one hasn't set it. This one is not set velocity controls, all of the notes are going to be on the same velocity, but only one sample can play at a time, okay? So if I play, a note is right on the edge, huh? Okay, let's go there. This is playing that sample. You can see with red which note I'm playing. But if I go down, still the same sample, now we've switched to a different file. Okay, a good sample library is put together in this way with tons of files. The more files the big the sampler is, generally speaking, the better, more realistic it sounds if it's an acoustic instrument. Each of these is called a zone. There are different zones for each sample. You can set them up to trigger in different ways. We're going to see this very similar thing when we talk about instrument racks in just a minute. But before we do that, let's open an orchestra library. And let me show you what a big orchestra library looks like. 71. Sampler Orchestra Library Example: Okay. I'm going to close all of this by going to the Zones tab again. Now, let's look at the Ableton Orchestra. The quickest way to get to that is to go to packs. You have to have this one installed for it to work, but orchestra strings, let's go to string ensemble. Do this is a pretty nice sounding orchestra. Now, the real big orchestra libraries will not transpose your files at all. They will have a single file for every note and probably five or six different velocities of different volumes of that note. This one does transpose somewhat, it is in multi sample mode. This is a little bit of a weird live trick, but basically when you see this multi sample mode, if you want to get into it and really work with it control, click on the header part up here and go down to simpler to sampler. It's basically going to take it out of multi sample mode and switch it back over into a sampler. I'm not really sure why some things come up that way, but it basically turns it back into a sampler, which is what it needs to be. Okay, let's go on zones. You can see there's 300 samples in this instrument. If we go up to zones, we see all these files. Okay. Actually, yeah, this one has single files. If we go to you right in the middle, let's say this one, this file plays for note, what is that? C sharp five only, okay? This file doesn't transpose at all. If I play five, it triggers this file, okay? Now, you'll also see that it actually triggers it four times. Why would that be? I'll explain that to you. If I play C sharp five, these four notes are going to get triggered. However, the velocity setting is going to stop them. Here's that same note. If I play a low velocity, it's going to play this one. If I play a little bit higher velocity, it's going to play that one a little higher and a little higher for every single note in the range of the orchestra. We have an audio file of that note four times at four different volumes from quiet to loud. This set up is going to be able to tell live that when I play this note at a certain volume, which note to trigger you can build. You can build these very easily by just dragging sounds into a sampler and building up a whole library. This way you can buy some of these samplers. If you have something like contact, that's a sample player that does the same thing. It's able to handle a ton of different samples. And you can set up a system where it decides which one to play. That's where you get sample libraries. Contact is free, but the libraries that you will buy for it are decidedly not. Sometimes that's how zones works in a big orchestra library. This one sounds pretty good, it's a pretty decent selling library. 72. Adding Samplers to our Track: All right, let's add a sampler to our crazy track here. What I want is something keyboard like to help reinforce this sound. So let's go to sampler and look at some of the presets attack That's interesting, it might now work for us. No, there's a whole chords in there, so I don't want that. It's kind of fun. Let's try that. So we'll take all of this and put it down here to double it. Let's hear what that sounds like. I don't really love it. We try that too big. I kind of like it. Okay, cool, whatever. This thing's kind of ridiculous. But I'll give you this session again. I think we've added a few layers since we've last given it to you. So if it's fun for you, you can download it and play around with it if you like. And then let's move on to rocks. 73. Overview to Instrument Racks: All right. Let's talk about Racks. I think I said this once before in one of the earlier classes, but I'm going to say it again because it's important. When I was in the Certified trainer like exam thing, one of the Ableton folks, one of the people from Ableton Company described racks like this. He said if there were four things that make up live, like the most important things in live, they would be warping session view, arrangement, view and racks. I think that might have been before max for live exists. I would add a five max for live. But racks are the fourth one. We've already seen drum racks, but there are other kinds of racks. Two in particular, there are instrument racks and effect racks. We're going to talk about instrument racks and now we'll talk about effect racks in the next class. What you can do with an instrument rack is basically you can make super instruments, you can combine instruments together. You could also think about in the past, up till now, I've said several times that you can only put one instrument on a track. Every time I said that, I choked it back a little bit. And I think I probably said in most cases you can only put one instrument on a track, or most of the time you can only put one instrument on a track. This is the exception. If you use a rack, an instrument rack, you can, in a way, put more instrument than one on a track. Let's take a look. They are similar to drum racks in a way. Let's go instrument rack, and let's throw an empty one down here. Okay, there it is nothing to it, right? There's really nothing there. But now let's say I want this collision patch. Now this collision patch is a remember, but I just put a rack within Iraq, which you can totally do. Now let's say I want this wave table. Sure. I'm going to open this thing called chains, which I'll explain in a second and just go like that. Now let's see, how about a meld. Sure. Put that there, maybe another meld. Sure. Okay. Now I've built a sound. That's pretty crazy. But that's what you can do with racks. Let's dive in a little bit more and talk about how racks work and what you can do with them. We'll start with this bit about chains. 74. Chains and Selectors: Okay. So you can have one instrument per chain. Okay. So, let's start fresh. Let's get rid of that. Let's go back up to instrument rack. Put it down here. Okay. Now, let's pick a sound. Sure. We'll drag that down there. Okay. Now, as soon as I do that, I need to open chains over here. Okay. If I want another chain, I can do two things. I can control click somewhere in this area and say create chain. Now I have an empty chain which can be useful, actually, we'll get rid of that for now. Another thing you can do is just drag an instrument or a preset down to that area and make another chain. Every chain so far, every chain is going to get triggered at once when I play some Midi notes. Those Midi notes are going to come in here and go and get sent to all four chains and then sent out. I can adjust the volume of each chain here. If I want to blend these in a way, I can do some panning, I can turn one off, or one on can solo them, swap them out, do a few different things, but then here's where the real power comes in. I have these things up here, these four buttons. Hide is not really one of the key velocity and chain. This is going to, let me choose which chain I'm hearing when right now I'm going to hear all chains all the time. But what if we had an instrument that was set up by key? Okay, so watch this. I'm going to control, click on here in this area of the chains and say distribute ranges equally fun, little time saving hack. Okay, now what we have here is when I play a low note on my keyboard, there we go, I, it's going to play this instrument when I play a little bit higher note. Now we switch to this instrument. If I go higher still that instrument. Okay, now switched over to the other one. Let's go to the next one. It's too high for that one to handle it, that one's too high. That's okay. So you can see that now we've decided which instruments happen in which range. Okay? We can move them around, we can say this one happens there, they can overlap. Now, right here, I'm going to hear both of those instruments. We could say, we're always going to hear this instrument, but then we're also going to hear some other instruments along the way. Oh, it's a cool effect, but my favorite thing to do, Watch this. Okay, We can decide what instruments play when by using this big green bar. But do you see that smaller green bar above that? That smaller green bar is like a cross fade. Check this out. Now they're overlapping a little bit, but watch this. I'm going to grab that smaller bar like this and this. Whoops. Sometimes it's hard to grab it because it's small. But what do you think is happening now? We are cross fading instruments. As I go up in this range, I'm going to get a little bit of this instrument and a little bit of this instrument, until eventually this instrument takes over. And then it's going to fade between these two, right? So I'm going to get some of both and create this crazy instrument. It's crazy, that's with the key selector. I can do the same thing with velocity. Now you're seeing how this is familiar from the sampler, right? I can say, well, let's distribute the ranges. I can say when we're on this one, we're, when we play quiet notes, use this synth. We play loud notes, use this synth. Louder notes use this synth. And very loud notes use that synth. Now, I've created a little bit of a problem here, and it's something to watch out for. That's that we have two different kinds of selections going. That means if I play a low note quiet, I'm going to hear this. And this synth, just this top synth. But if I play a high note really quiet, it's not going to play anything. Because the quiet range is down here. But the high note range is up here. You should try to get in the habit of using one or the other of these. It's not great to use both because you can end up triggering nothing. I'm going to reopen all of these. Then there's one more thing to look at. Okay, I'm going to reopen these. And then we'll look at the chain selector in the next video. 75. The Chain Selector: Okay, so I've reset my velocity chain selector and my key selector. Now let's go to this chain selector here. Okay, so let's imagine another situation. Let's say you are in a band and you are the keyboard player for that band. You are going on tour with that band playing keyboards, and you want to bring a Midi keyboard. You don't want to bring your whole arsenal of 50 different keyboards. You're going to bring a Midi keyboard and a laptop. Okay, You're going to walk out onstage, you're going to plug in your keyboard to your laptop. And you're going to load up one Ableton patch. And it's going to have an instrument rack on it. Okay? You're going to set the instruments you need for every track. This is track one, Track two, Track three, Track four. Maybe this is an organ, maybe this is Rhodes piano, maybe this is a normal piano, maybe this is some pad for every song that you have in your set. You have a different chain. Okay? Then what you're going to do, so you're going to go to this chain, select this, going to move that 1/1 That 1/2 1/3 okay? You're going to map this to some dial on your keyboard, okay? By doing that, you can set a dial that controls this. You do that with Midi mapping. We'll talk about Midi mapping in the next class. Actually, I'll just show you how to do it really quick. Command M, click in this purple area and then wiggle some parameter on a Midi controller and you will then have control of it. Once you have control of it, then you're all set to play this show. And never having to touch your laptop. You've got your keyboard here, you say, cool. Next song, all you have to do is turn that, dial that over one notch. Now you're on your second synth. Next song, turn that, dial one, Not now you're on your third synth. Now you're on your fourth synth, your chain selector, then they want an encore. So you go back to your first synth, no problem. You turn that dial. That is what this chain selector is really good at. It's just saying I want to be on one of these synths and I'm just going to turn a dial and it's going to be this teal line. That's what I'm turning. I can just select whatever I want to do. You can also do the same stuff where you make a long area, maybe a fade in and then the opposite. You can still use it to just dial as like an effect, to cross between different sense and maybe have one that's always on like that. Now it's, now you got a pretty crazy sound. That's what the chain select does. It basically lets you just select for it. 76. Macros: Okay, next thing, let's go back to this little macro button that we saw earlier. We saw that we could assign some things to different macros, right? Let's explore that a little bit more because there's a lot of wild things we can do with this. The idea behind macros is that, let's go back to that example. You're in a band, you're on stage and you're just dialing through all of these different sense for different songs in your set. But let's say that in the second song you need access to your filter frequency, okay? The last thing you want to do is being open up your computer, dig around to try to find this dial in the middle of everything else Going on on stage, you're going to hit the wrong button and something strange is likely to happen. We want to keep you from having to dig around inside of an instrument when that happens, what we're going to do is we're just going to say frequency control. Click map to macro one. Now that's out here. Okay. When I move this, it moves that. Cool. That's it, right? Nothing fancy. It's just mapping some parameter so that we can get to keep us from having to go deep inside of our instrument and find it. Just give us access to some stuff really quick. However, while that is something important we can do, The macros are their own little synthesis engine by themselves, accidentally, because watch this. Let's say I wanted to do that filter, but I also want to do some crazy effect where my LFO rate is going to go down as my filter goes up. I can totally do that. Control click map, this also to macro one, okay? Now they're both going up at the same time. Then I'm going to go back over here, Right click on that again and hit Edit Macro Map. Now I have some controls over those things. My LFO rate is going 0-127 if I want to go opposite. Crank that up, crank that down. Now when I move this macro, one goes up and one goes down. Let's turn mapping off so we can see that a little easier. Okay, let's do something else. If at the same time that that happened, I wanted my oscillator two level to go up and down. Okay, now I'm creating this crazy effect. It doesn't need to be in this chain. On this chain is also happening. And I go into this device and say I want the pitch envelope to also move around for this completely other instrument. Now I've got this one dial that does this insane thing. I can change the color of it, rename it super dial. Sure. That's how macros work. You can do an insane amount of stuff with macros. We'll see this even more once we get into effect racks where we can start to build these really complex and customized effects. But that should give you a basic idea of what they're capable of. You can map as many things as you want to a macro. You can hit this Map button to get control over minimum and maximum values, which can let you customize it even more. There's a huge amount of potential just in macros. Okay, let's look at a few quick presets. 77. Some Rack Presets: Um, at, okay, I'm going to get rid of this crazy one that we made. Let's go to instrument rack. And let's look at these presets. Now, there's a lot of presets here. That's wild. Let's look at that. Okay, we open it up, we have just macros a lot of the time, that's what you want. Remember, the macros are designed to keep you from having to dig around in all of the instruments this has been built, so that just has the things that we need. Neat. Let's look inside it. So if I click on this button, I'm going to see the chains, there are two. Okay. If I double click here, I can expand that. There's a sampler in multi sample mode. There's a ring modulator, which is just another sampler in multi sample mode. So we just have two samplers here. Let's look at, let's look at this drum kit. Okay? So what do we have here? This is complicated because we have a drum rack here, but it's contained within an instrument rack. This is something you'll find. You can have racks within racks, within racks. It's crazy, they have just four macros for us. If we look at our chains, there's just one chain which is totally okay. And they've put some effects on this too, on this chain also. Which you can do by the way, put some effects at the end of the chain after the instrument. Sounds pretty simple. Let's look at one more. Let's try that one, okay? Just some macro one chain operator and then a ton of effects after it. You can see already all these green dots here are mapped to macro, there are parameters. In particular, the on off of this effect is mapped to a. Let's see if we can turn one on. See this amp here. It's going to be controlled by this bright, at some point it hits a value that turns it on. It's just anything greater than zero turns it on. With that, you can set that up in this mapping tab here. There's so many possibilities of just crazy things you can do with instrument racks. It's like just literally endless. Okay, we're almost done. We're almost done. There's just a couple little odds and ends that I want to go over and then we're going to wrap up this part of the class. So let's do that. 78. External Instrument: Okay, let's talk about this external instrument. One, this one is a little weird, we're in the odds and end section. Now, the purpose of this external instrument is this. Let's say I have that It synthesizer over there right there. Let's say I want to play that through live. I want to do some Midi sequencing. Send that Midi data over to that instrument and then get an audio signal back. Okay, that's what external instrument is. Technically, I could do all that without the external instrument. I could just do it with routing by making a new Midi track. Then say this Midi output goes to an external device over there. And then set up a new audio track that's going to record in the audio from that track. I could do that, It would take two tracks and a bunch of cabling and weirdness to do this makes it a little bit easier with this external instrument. All I have to say is my two. And then I can just select that. It's not plugged in at the moment, but I could select what I'm sending that mid to then I would say audio from that I got a little, again, some latency controls. Then basically on the same track, it's going to send Midi out to it and bring audio back in. At some point, I can just record that audio in and have it. It's a utility thing. It's just going to send Midi out of your computer to another thing and then bring audio back in. That's all. It's actually relatively simple. You would only really need this if you have some external Midi gear that you want the sounds from. Okay, that's the only real reason to use this at the moment. That's all I have to say about it. 79. Granulator III: Now I've talked about Max for Live here and there. We'll do a ton of Max for Live in the last part of this class. But there are some Max for live instruments hiding around on your computer. One super powerful one. In fact, I might even argue that this is one of the most powerful instruments that we have in live. It's hidden away. Granulator three. We had granulator, we had granulator two. And now new in Live 12 is granulator three. This thing is crazy, it's a max for live device supposedly made by Robert Hinky, the boss dude. In order to use it, I have to open up this folder and then get to the granulator three track, then I can load it. Remember max for live device just means that you can open it up and tweak it if you really want to. But this thing is like a drone machine. Let me show you. Let's go be sure, let's just drag a sound file in there. And now if you play it, so it does like tiny little looping things. Let's look at some of these presets. It's just like crazy. So you can drag any audio file into this and it's going to do crazy things to it. Maybe not a high hat, let's maybe go. Sure. Okay. And I haven't even like touched any of the controls yet. We have envelopes, we have filters, but effectively our oscillator is this sample. But it really just like picks apart the sample and does like crazy things to it. Granulator, The name granulator is a riff on the term granular, which is the type of synthesis, granular synthesis, where you take a sound and chop it up into tiny, tiny little pieces called grains, then sprinkle them around and do fun things with them. Check out this instrument, It's powerful, I believe it's free, sweet, and maybe with other versions if you have it, it's going to show up in packs. Granulator three pack. If you don't have it look on the Ableton site, go to pack and then go to free and see if it shows up for you as something that you have available. You could also probably just get it right from this window. It might show up right here for you, but play around with it, it's really fun. 80. Other M4L Devices: Of course, don't forget. If you go to the Max for live tab here, you should have several things here that are other instruments. Not all of these are instruments. You won't have all of these. A lot of these are just things that I've made or things I've played around with. But you can download instruments, go to Maxforlive.com if you're looking for these. There's tons of free things to play around with. Buffer Shuffler is great for doing glitchy stuff. Arp is cool. There's a lot of stuff that comes with live. And there's a lot of stuff that you can just download on your own. Don't forget about those if you're looking for more instrument ideas or effect ideas. 81. What Comes Next?: Okay, we have reached the end of part four, part four of this sequence on sound design and instruments. Up next part five is on audio and di, effects. In that section, we're going to live here, we're going to go through all of these effects. We'll talk about more sound design stuff, effect theory, composition, how to, and we'll get into a little bit of mixing and mastering as we get comfortable using some of these plug ins. We'll also learn what some of these are, not only how to use them, but like compressors, different filters, shifters, phasers, flangers, vocoders, all that good stuff. Please join me for that other class. It's probably out now and we'll continue on our journey to master every element of Ableton life. We'll see you there. 82. 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.