Ultimate Ableton Live 9: Part 1 - The Interface & The Basics

1. Overview: everybody welcome, Teoh This able to live course. So what we're gonna do in this courses this course is part of a A long program, of course, is that I'm trying to make. And this is the 1st 1 So what I'm really expecting you to do is take this course. This will be the kind of ultimate foundational course. And then after this, you will move into the recording course with able to live. And my goal here is just to make the most ultimate thorough able to live course available in this section today on Ultimate able to live but we're gonna be covering is the interface . So how to navigate our way through able to life. So what that means is that we're gonna look at everything from the clip slot grid, the browser, the groove pool, the clip, inspector session, new arrangement, view over here, all kinds of stuff, even our preferences window are set up window everything that we need to really get a thorough understanding of how to navigate able to live. We'll also be talking about a lot more than just navigating because we're talking about you know how a lot of different stuff works how to use it. It's not really like click here to do this. It's, You know, we're going to get into some of the detail. We're gonna talk about recording, talk about Midi, even though we'll be talking about those things in much more detail later. Uh, this will give us an overview of the whole program complete from beginning to end. So I hope you join in, Take this class, have fun with it on, then we'll move on to the next one. Now, at the end of this class, I'm going to give you, like, a big, huge promo code to get to the next class. And throughout this course, we're gonna be using this able to set quite a bit. Uh, this live set you already have. This is included with a built in live. So when we use this to walk through, I'll tell you in a very short time how to get into this set. It's already on your computer and will be walking through it and dissecting it. So we'll be playing along with this one, and we'll have a lot of fun that way. So have some fun and we'll see you on the inside 2. Session Vs Arrangement: So let's start with an overview of the two different views of a built in. So the way I like to think about this is that imagine a built in is, um, kind of like a cube. There's there's the front And then there's the back. Now what you call the front and what you call the back kind of depends on what kind of music you do. And it well, not what kind of music you do. But how you use a Bolton. So the two sides are called session view, an arrangement view and what we're really talking about when we talking about these two sides is this big box here. This stuff doesn't change, dependent on whether we're looking at session view or arrangement, you or this stuff up here. We'll talk about all these boxes later, but this seems to be one of the first things that really stumps people when they're learning able to. Is this session view an arrangement view thing, especially people that come to able to in already knowing one of the other Dawes like, you know, pro tools, you know, logics and like that, and you look at able to and you look at this, what we're looking at right now and the first thought that goes through your head is where is my timeline? Right? Like there's no timeline here. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do without you. So session view an arrangement view. Let's look out the differences between them. So what we're looking at right now a session view session view is kind of where Mableton started. It's one of the kind of war courses of a Bolton, and what it does is you know, it kind of looks like here that we're looking at a mixer and it looks like each one of these little blocks is where a plug in should go. If you're familiar with another dog, like pro tools, it might look like you should put a plug in and each one of these little rectangles. But that's not exactly true how this works. Um, and this is just gonna be like a quick overview of the two sides of it. But how this works is each one of these little rectangles is called a clip slot. This area is called the clip slot grid. Okay. And a clip is any piece of, let's say, music. Let's say any piece of music and what that means is that it could be audio. Or it could be midi. It could be a midi clip, or it could be an audio clip, depending on what kind of track we're on. So I have Midi tracks here in audio tracks here. So let me throw something in there. Okay, so now I've got in this little Congo riff in an audio track. So this is a piece of audio. If I double click on it, we'll see it, right? This is an audio file. It's just one little conga. No. And so when I hit the little play button, you'll notice that these little squares now turn to play buttons, right? And now these squares, it might be obvious that now these air stop buttons, actually, So when we have a longer groove going, we could hit that and and we can hit stop on anything. So each of these contains a clip and a clip is any piece of audio or MIDI, right? So what this lets us do is if we load a whole bunch of these, it was okay. So now I've got a whole bunch of little clips in here, and what I can do is I can launch one and it'll play right. And then when I want to launch another one, it waits for the next downbeat toe. Launched it right? So it's always gonna launch it on a downbeat, and it's gonna be sure that we stay in time. So when you see it blink, that's it, waiting for the next downbeat and we can adjust that we can adjust when it launches. Whether it launches every downbeat every quarter note every eighth note, every 16th note get pretty weird with it. The thing to remember here is that you can have one clip playing per track at a time. If I wanted to clips playing, I could do this. Let's just randomly put some stuff over there. So now I can have a clip here going, Let's get a groove going on. I can add in this one right now. I've got to going and they're looking that one up start this one is going to stop that one so you can imagine each clip like they're a tiny little record right, and we can have as many tracks as we want and as many clips is, we want ah, going all at once. Now there's a lot more to session view than just this, but this is the main meat and potatoes of it. This is kind of what stumbles. A lot of people is this idea of clips. So that session view now arrangement view will be much more familiar to you if you've ever worked with the Daw before, so to get to arrangement view, there's a couple different ways we can get to it. The easiest way is the tab key, so I can hit the tab key. And then my whole layout here changes right this box. It looks like it changes, but it's actually staying the same content. It's showing me the clip, but I don't have any clip selected over here. Here, I do have a clip selected right here. Everything else stays the same. So the other way you can get back and forth is between these two little guys. And if you look carefully at them, you'll notice that this one shows Ah, horizontal lines and swim shows vertical lines, which, if you look at the able to logo. Maybe I can pull it up right here. There it is. That is the session view and arrangement view, right? That makes sense now, right? That's why they use that as the logo. It's a session view arrangement view. Okay, so we can toggle between the two over here or with the tab key. So let's look at a range of you. Arrangement view is gonna be much more familiar to you if you've ever used a dog before, right? So I can drag clips in here, so we still call them clips. Um, any nugget of audio or video information and I can move him around. And now I've got a timeline. Right now. I'm looking at something kind of analogous to a musical score. Um, something where I can see time happening if I had the space fire. I hear this happening over time, right. I can move it between tracks. As long as I stay on audio track. I can actually move it to a MIDI track, and it converts it to an audio track in this case because there was no media on it. There are some other magical things that that'll do. Ah, in other situations. But this way, you know, I can drag other stuff in here. I can put notes together. I can piece together in my piece as an arrangement. Which is why we call this arrangement view. Right, Because we can see the arrangement. No. If I wanted to loop this note, I could just do this. And now it's gonna be in sync with my reggae beat and this big bass note. This will be weird. Okay, you get the point. Not particularly brilliant. But it could work. Okay, so that's the main difference. Session view an arrangement view. So just remember that an arrangement view we have a timeline, we can see the timeline. We can work that way and session view. We have clips. We can't see the timeline, but we can improvise. We can flow freely. Between are so another way to think about this would be that arrangement. The session view is more conducive to live performance and session view is more conducive to ah, production and writing a track. Now that's my opinion. And it's debatable. I know a lot of people that never leave session view. They do all of their composition and arranging in session view, and that is totally fine. Um, I like to work primarily an arrangement view and then go to session view after its I have every all the material that I want so that I can improvise with it or in some tracks and a lot of my tracks. I never go to session view. I use arrangement you for everything, because my background is as more of a traditional composer. So, you know, I like my timelines. I like things that look like musical notation in a way that lets me have kind of an insane amount of control. Over here, you're much more free Teoh to explore, to improvise. So, um, it's two different ways of approaching music, you know? And how you want to work on music in our next video, we're gonna look at our arrangement view and a little bit more detail 3. Arrangement Overview: Okay, so I have open here a session in arrangement view. Now. One thing you'll notice right away is that if I look over at my session view, it's empty. In this particular case, I didn't do it. I didn't do anything in session view on Lee an arrangement, but you'll notice my tracks were all laid out. And that's because, um, the 11 of the things you can keep in mind with the session view an arrangement view thing that kind of simplify your your thinking about this is that session view an arrangement view, have different content, but they share a mixer. So the mixer, which is kind of over here right now this is what we're seeing of the mixer for each track . This is where our volume is. Ah and our, you know, mute button, which they don't really call a mute button. That's a whole other story to talk about later, Um, who have volume panning stuff like that and the track label. This is the first track. It's called piano. If I go over to session view, the first track is called piano, and my volume and panting are the same. So they're very, um, shared between the two, the mixture of shared. So again we're going to go into more detail as, Ah, this class goes on but just has kind of an overview. What I have here is a whole bunch of clips and they're all called roads one. Because in this particular track, what I did is and what put this main keyboard idea right? And then I recorded it using a roads sound. And then I just kind of copied and pasted it and put it into different instruments and change some notes around. But all the clips are called one roads because that was the name of the track. When I recorded it, I could rename these if I wanted to, and we'll talk more about that later. Um, actually, let's talk about that right now because we're here. We might as well um, command R command are while I'm on a clip is gonna let me rename it. So let's call this main keys riff, whatever. So that changed that clip. But all of these air separate clips now the way that I've set this up so they're not loops . If they were loops than it would change for all of them. But there's their kind of copy and pasted riffs about the whole thing, so I'd have to change the name of them separately. If I wanted to do that, I could also ah, control click on the riff or on the riff on the clip and get this menu where I can get a couple of options, including I can change the color of it for keeping track of stuff if I want. But also right here is rename. If you want to go that that route, you could do that. So I'm looking at mid Eclipse here. I can tell their mid eclipse because I see a bunch of little dots and lines in them. If I double click on one of these clips, I get into the MIDI editor down here in this window down here. Basically, what we have here is it's kind of like a clip information that's not exactly what this area is called, but it's going to tell us more info about the clip. So with a MIDI clip, if I click on it, we're going to see the MIDI notes and some information about it. We can also see the instrument that is being used if I click over here in this bottom right tab, and here we have. Ah, grand piano. Ah, sampler. Very simple here. So we have these two tabs at the bottom of this view. More on that later. I promise. I No, I'm saying that a lot, but there's gonna be a big class, so we're gonna cover a lot of stuff later. Right now, we're kind of just looking at surface level. Um, so over here I have my mixer, whatever the mixer Aiken see in arrangement view. Anyway, So I have some IO settings here. If you don't see the Iot settings head on down to this little button right here, this is gonna show or hide the Iot settings, Iose ins and outs. So it's telling my ins and outs here I have These are mostly for automation. Like, what am I gonna automate? And I have a lot of things I could automate on there. So this is our automation lines. So I could draw some automation if I wanted to Of the track name, which again I can change with command R command are will go to a rename function for almost everything Over here I have ah, mute Ah which I have a track sold right now so you can see that so mute Ah which they actually call this If you look up in documentation, this is called a track activator, which means it's basically backwards of a mute. So this means it's on. This means it's off. So the track is active when it's yellow. It is not active when it's grayed out. So low record enable Ah, this is our volume. Actually, it doesn't really look so much like a volume, but this is our volume control. In this view, this is our panning. And this is our ah, we have to ox ends set up so we can send out these two. So this is the volume of the ox end. So these volume controls look a little different than you might be used to if you've seen another dog. But you just click and drag and you can just him if you want to get back to the defaults, like with panning. Ah, this is another kind of global able to trick. If I want to get back to the default Seiken just click on it, click on the parameter so that it's the active parameter. Ah, and then hit the delete key. And that will take me back to the default, which for panning is centered. So a couple quick tricks on the arrangement view we're gonna be talking more about this. Ah, as we get into more detail, just remember the clips. Each of these little nuggets are clips. I can move him around. I can arrange. I can do whatever we want with them. Up here, we see a overview of the whole track. Ah, and we can click and drag on it to kind of scrub around in big swaths. That way, if we want and zooming, let's talk about zooming while we're here. Um, this is, ah, kind of unique to able to anything. So if I want to zoom in on something Ah, and this goes throughout a lot of different stuff. This isn't just for arrangement view, but I'm sick of saying we'll talk about that later, So let's talk about it right now. Okay, here's the trick was zooming. Okay, so you need this little icon right here. So it's basically like a hand holding a magnifying glass. When you get that, you can get it above the ah timeline Here in this dark gray area. You can also get it down here. Ah, and some other places. Sometimes you'll get it depending on what you're looking at. So what you're going to do is click and hold down now Well, were held down We can pull down to zoom in. No, I still haven't let go of the click I can go up to zoom out down and up I can also go right which actually scrubs me left And Aiken go left with my mouth Which, actually skube's me, Right? So I can scrub left and right And I can zoom in and out and I still haven't lifted up my finger. So this takes a little getting used to, um, honestly, when I picked up able to and this was probably the one thing where I was like, uh, like, trying to navigate a session with this little gesture Took me a little bit to get used to. But once I did, um, it could be really fast because you get good at it and you can say like, Okay, I want to go right there, you know? And, um, I can zoom in and know exactly what I'm looking for in one quick motion, so it takes a little getting used to, but that's it. The key is to remember. Get that symbol in one of these areas, click and hold down, and then do all the navigation you want to dio and get right to where you're looking for and then let go. Good. Okay, let's look a little bit more at session view and just doing a quick little overview of what's there and then we'll move on. 4. Session Overview: Okay, let's talk a little bit more about session view and just do another little overview and talk about how you can control different sounds with it. So what I have here is a couple of elements from that last track that I was just showing you, um, arranged into session views. So I've got several different clips here. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rename some of these. So I've got this drum group I can mouse over this edge and make that a little bit bigger so you can see that it says group. So I just clicked right here till you got that symbol or held right there until I get that symbol and then click and drag. And you could make the track nice and big if you want. Okay. These two tracks, I have this one road, so let's call this and do Command are and call. This key's gonna call this one keys to because they're actually playing the same thing. If I double click on these clips, this is my keyboard riff. I double click on this one. This is also my keyboard riff. Over here, I have a little bit different kind of segment. Um, let's call this since lick, and this is these are all meant to go together. So I'm gonna call all three of these synth lick. Okay, Now, this one, this is a little bit different because this is a group, so you can have groups just like you can have groups. Um, in arrangement view, you can have groups and session views. So if I open this little toggle here we see I have a snare, a rim and a hat in here, and I can launch these clips separately, or I can launch them all at once using the group. So let's just launched the drums, all of them by hitting. Ah, the play button here. Okay, so now my drums were going. I wanted a little bit more control. I could stop some of these. Let's maybe go down to just the high hat, right? Oh, this room clique has turned off. Let's turn that on its muted. Okay, let's go back to adding the click. That's a little bright, adding the clap. Okay, it's cool. Let's close that out and leave that going. So that's gonna go for a while now. this keys. I want both of these to start at once, right? So I could hit, play and then hit play as fast as I can. And if I get it before the next downbeat, I'll be fine. They'll both start at the same time. I don't think it's gonna happen. Let's try it. I didn't make it. Now they're off each other. Launching these back to back didn't really work, right, cause sometimes you don't really want to do that. Most of the times you want to do that if you want them to play at the same time, which is another thing that we don't want to do. Um, all the time. But sometimes we do. If we wanted to play at the same time, we could go all the way over here to master. This is called if you go all the way across, this is called a seen. Everything in line is called the scene so I can launch the whole scene everything in that line by hitting this screaming organ. So now I just launched that whole scene. Now I want the drums back in that right. So now for these next since I could launch them one at a time, but much smarter to launch scene. But look at what launching that Sean's gonna do. It's gonna hit all these at once, which means all of these stop buttons are going to get hit right, which is okay for these tracks. But if I want these keys to keep going and the drama is to keep going, they're not. I'm gonna hit it right. And it stopped all of these because it hit those stop buns. So there's a couple different ways that actually, there's two different ways. I could remedy that for one of these keys to keep going. I could just copy and paste that clip down there and the same thing with the drums. I can do it in a group just like that. So now when I launch scene three, it's called right. So now it works because I haven't hit any of those stop buttons. So you have to watch out for those stop buttons. If you're trying to launch things Ah, from scenes another way, we could do it. If I go back and get rid of those, we can remove the stop button. If I control click on it. I could do remove stop button. I could also do Command E, and that removes the stop button. So now there's no stop button there. I could shift click toe, highlight all of these and say Remove stop button. So now if I've got the drum going and I launched in three, I think if I want the keys to come back and I can add a me whenever I want right or I could have launched the scene from right there if I wanted to. So that's the real basics of how it works. I could launch stuff whenever I want. It's gonna fall right on the downbeat. Ah, always unless I've told it a different quant ization point, which we'll talk about leader. So there you have it. Overview of session view. 5. Getting Around Intro: In this next section, we're going to focus on walking through the whole area of able to live and looking at the different windows. A bilton is sectioned off into these kind of four big areas with a couple smaller areas to , So I want to look at all of those. So we've already seen session view. And if I hit tab arrangement view, we also have the browser. We're gonna look at that the clip inspector area, which is down here and those are the three obvious ones. The less obvious ones are the transport controls up top, where we have a lot of useful stuff. We also have the groove pool, which is hidden right here, and that opens up another little area. Get rid of that for a minute. And this tab down here is where we'll have our instruments and effects. There's two other areas that I didn't mention. There are a little bit hidden, but they're super important for learning. They kind of really help you out and walk you through learning able 10 and those are they help view and the info view. So we're gonna look at those in the next video as we dive into all the different areas enabled in life 6. Info View: Okay. The 1st 2 places I want you to know about that are not two of the most obvious places because they may not be on your screen already. Depending on how you opened able to live, they may or may not be there already. I think by default when you open able to live for the very first time and you haven't messed with anything. You're seeing both of these. So if you're seeing an extra big little tab on the right side and a tiny little square on the left side at the bottom, that's what I'm gonna be talking about right now. So I don't have those on my screen. So I want to get them. So I'm going to go up to the top. I'm going to go to view and let's go to info view first. So I'm going to say info, view, and that adds a little box down here. Now the sole purpose of this box is to tell you what's what. It's great. It's super great. So I encourage you highly encourage you, Ah, require you if you will to leave that open, um, for a long time. Leave that window open until you are super ninja confident that you know what everything is . So right now it's not doing anything right. It's just empty. What it does is it shows whatever my mouse is over. It tells me what that is and what it does, right? So let's go, Teoh. Um, here. What are these? Two dots? I could put my mouse there and then I can look down at the bottom. I can see up. That's a metronome. Click here to activate the Metrodome to adjust measurements, volume, user preferences que volume control and the master track mixer. Cool. Ah, what does? I don't know. What does this do that is the track activator right? We talked about that was already It's kind of their fancy word for the mute button as you get more stuff on here like let's let's loden instrument here. So now I have an instrument, and now it gets even more detailed, right? Like I can say, What does this button do? And it says switches al fo one on and off. Right. So that's my LFO one control. What does this do? This is the rate of the LFO in hurts. So, you know all of these little things. Quick routing pitch. Ben Range. This info view just tells you what every single thing is. It's really great. Ah, so keep that open. And if you're ever just poking around and saying, G, what is this up here? What is this little pencil floating right here? Dio And it's the draw mode switch now, you know, and it tells you what it does and how to use it, so check that out really important. So that is the info view. You get it by going to view and an info view. Or you can also hit the question mark. Just a toggle it on and off with question mark, and you can leave it up as long as you want. The only real reason to get rid of it is that once you start to do a more complicated session, you might want a little more room down here at the bottom. And so you might think, Well, let's get rid of that window. Um, just for real estate reasons, um, I need more space to see all my stuff that's happening, so, you know, eventually get rid of it if you want, but leave it open for a good long time. Get used to being it, being there so that you can reference it whenever you're stumped. Okay. And next video. Let's talk about help view. 7. Help View: so wouldn't it be nice if able to live included some tutorials and lessons right inside the program that would help you get up and running? Um, it would actually probably be dumb of me to point those out to you, because you'd probably stop taking this class and just start watching those. But, ah, there, there. And I think you should know about him. So hopefully I don't put myself out of work. But I'm gonna tell you about him. So we're gonna go to view, and we're gonna go to help view. You might already have this up. If you do have it up, this is going to close it. So don't do this right away, but know that going to view and then help view will show or hide that. So this has helped view this big, huge chunk of the screen over here. And the way I like to think about help view is that I imagine that this is kind of like a web browser. This you know, there's links in here, you can click on stuff. And there's actually one thing that's not super obvious is that there's a bar over here, and this is actually a scroll bar. There's more down at the bottom and all of these things here are tutorials. So let's look at, um, creating beats. So I'm gonna click on that. And it took me to This says this session will show you how to record, draw and edit drum patterns with live going to create from scratch. So press command and start a new live set. So I'm gonna press command and I just don't want to save changes. Don't safe. Okay? And now it's gonna walk me through how to make some beats. And there's this next page at the bottom. So be sure you see that there's return and there's a next page. So there's multiple pages. And don't forget that you have to scroll down on some pages like this one that scroll down to get to the bottom. A lot of people missed that next page, etcetera. Some of these when we go to home here, let's do ah tour of live. Some of these have a live set built right in a live set is the word that they use for a session, right? It's like a whole session of a track and This is one of them this ah tour of live. So down here it says live documents or know his life sets. This lesson is accompanied by a live set which will be interactive or interacting with you as you follow the lesson. Whenever you're ready, please click here to load life set. So let's do it. Click here. Um and there it is. So this is my life set that it wanted me to open. And now and this is what's really cool about this feature. Now it's gonna walk me through it. So I say Cool next page. And now it says, Check it out. We're looking at arrangement view. Here's what you're seeing. Here's how to scroll up. And now we've already covered that. Here's how to do more stuff. And here's the jam school. It's cool Groove on the next page, talking about playing clips so we can go over to session, view its launch. A whole scene over here. Kind of funky harmonies. They're at school. I think the shaker out for a minute. Drop the drums for a minute. Come back in. Cool, right. So, Superfund, this is already on your computer. This is in there this whole session so you can start poking around and having some fun. Um, so you can follow along using help view. Just remember next page next page hitting the next page button scrolling up and down in this little tab are Don't forget that there's probably more at the bottom if it looks like it's ending in a weird spot, you can get back to the main screen by going to this home button up here. And this takes you back to this spot so you can hide this this area by going to view and help view and getting rid of it when you don't want to use it. It does take up a pretty big chunk of the screen, so get rid of it when you're not using it. But, um, when you've got some time and you just want to poke around with some of the stuff that's already in here, do it. Go to help view and just say I want to learn about playing software instruments. Click it. Here's a set loaded up and jam out and follow their little tutorials because they're great . Now that doesn't mean you should quit mine because mine's even better. But some of theirs are really helpful. So walk through them. The more experience you have walking through stuff, the better. So I don't think I'm putting myself out of work. So that being said, Let's press on and let's talk about General navigation within live in the next video. 8. Navigation: okay. Navigation within live. Now, we've already talked about the biggest oddity about live is the magnifying slide zoom contraption that they have here. Um, if you're experimenting with this as you go, which I hope you are, um, you might be starting to get used to it. It takes to sometime, like I've said, but, um, just remember to review quickly, you click and hold down, and then when you pull down on the mouse pad around the mouse or track pad or whatever you're using, you zoom in up, zoom out, and at the same time, you can go left or right to zoom left or right. Cool. Now a couple other navigation things about able to live live is best done with key commands . There are a whole long list of key commands that you should know. Um, to really get really efficient with using life. Um, So as key commands come up, please keep track of them. Take note of, um, I'm not one that encourages someone just to sit down and study lists of key commands. Um, I don't think that's the good way to learn, but do try to use key commands whenever possible. the more you use them. Ah, the more you'll remember them. And then pretty soon I'll just become second nature that you don't need to ah, look up the key command or even go up to the menus to find stuff. For example, going here. If I wanted to remove a stop button like this, um, I would just go command e without thinking about it. Um, it's almost like it's like a you know, a good analogy would be like when you're in a car and you're in the passenger seat and the driver is kind of nuts and you think that you might crash. So when you're in the passenger seat, you might like slam your your foot down as though there was a break there, which there is not. But it's just kind of like this. Ah, reflex reflex. That's the word I'm looking for. So it's a reflex that you do, and that makes it, um, very means. It's like in your body. It's very intuitive. So, um, these key commands can get that way. They can get very reflective, I guess. If that's the right word. Um, other navigation things. Watch out for these little triangles like this. This will show or hide the whole area. So this is our browser which will look at be looking at soon I can hide the whole browser by it. Closing that triangle Wherever you see triangles, you're going to show or hide something down here for the whole browser area. Sorry. The whole clip view area. I think that's all of them. That's all that are open right now. Um, over here we have some more show hide buttons for the different things the Iot settings we looked at before. So that shows us our sins and are out controls where we have sends and receive. If they're yellow, that means we're seeing them. Here they are, sends and returns. Sorry, M is our mixer, so I can hide the whole mixer by getting rid of it. There de is a delay. This is like a millisecond delay. Um, which can be hand handy in some situations, but not in my particular situations. I'm gonna hide it. And X is the cross fader. So you can set up across fader so you can say this is a This is B and here's my cross fader , and you can map that to a controller. So if you really want to do kind of, um, more kind of cross fade style ah, deejaying type situations, you can set up tracks you can have as many tracks is you won't be a and B, So we could say these three are a This one's be that one's a that one's beat or something like that. And then you have A and B over here like that can be handy. And then section view an arrangement view. We remember the key command for that, probably the number one most important one. Teoh, get in your head right away, which is Tab. We can also do it from up here. Those are the main controls, the main way we navigate, able to live, so get comfortable with all those things. And let's press on 9. Arrangement Navigation: Okay, let's go back to arrangement view and talk about our main ah sequence or window here. There's a couple of the things I want to point out when in, ah, as it relates to navigation and getting around. So when I click on something, this is one thing that ah, people get a little stumped on sometimes because it works a little different than other Dawes. In this case, I can click in drag and select a chunk of material inside any clip if I want. If I want to select the whole clip, I click on the heading The Header bar appear that selects the whole clip, but you have to click on the top part. You click on the inside. You can select something now if I click on the inside here and then I click and drag. I'm just dragging around that part that was highlighted, and I'm removing it from where it waas, right so that can sometimes trip you up. So let me do that one more time, so I'm gonna hit undo Command Z right, my favorite key command. So here's the deal. Let's say let's go somewhere else. Let's say this clip right here. That's just hanging out here all by itself. Let's say I want to move this to over here somewhere. I could click on the header of it, which selects the whole thing, and then I could drag it and put it there. Right? Easy enough. Undo. That would be the right way to do it if I selected something in the inside of it and then clicked in drag. I'm Onley selecting that which was highlighted a second ago. It was a very old, worldly way to say that, but I'm only moving around What? I just highlighted, right, So I clipped it from here. I essentially cut it out and put it here, removing it from here. Okay, so if you want to move the whole clip, you grab the header bar and then slide it around. Um, if I want to duplicate a clip, I can do it a couple different ways. I can do all my usual cut copy paste stuff so I could highlight this and command, See, to copy the same way that you do in your Microsoft word or whatever. And then click wherever I want to go. Put the cursor wherever I want it and hit command V for paste. And there we have it right now I have a duplicate of it. Okay, let's get rid of that. There's another way that sometimes more efficient for me the way I work, this is the way I usually do it. Um, hold down, option and then click and drag on the heading of the clip that leaves the original and drags you out a new one. Right. So let's say I want this to happen here, in here, In here, in here, right? I just kind of overlapped him. Real sloppy, like undo, undo, undo and do their Well. Okay, so, um, keep track of those edit commands Those cut copy paste. Um, option, click and drag. Undo those types of things. One other key command that I'll mention right now is ah, shift tab. So if we look down here, we're gonna be talking about this area more later. But while we're here right now, we're looking at my instrument. I have an analog instrument here that's playing the sounds of these midi notes. We'll talk more about adding content later. Ah, shortly, actually. But, um, this instrument is making sounds, I can add effects and things here if I want. But if I want to see the actual Midi notes, I would go down to this tab here. Right. This is where I see the MIDI notes. So there's these two tabs. If I want to get in between these two tabs quickly, it's shift tab that gets me in between those two tabs at the bottom. Um, it's like normal tab, right? Gets you between session view and arrangement view. But the whole downshift and tab you toggle between those two ah, views of the clip area make sense. One last thing to point out while we're here. You may have noticed this when I opened this session earlier is that I have this big orange bar at the bottom, like, what is that big orange bar doing what that big orange bars Dylan is? It says media files are missing. Please click here to learn more. Let's do it. So I click here and it's saying I can't find these files. The reason for that is that I made this session on my main studio computer and I record ah , these videos on a laptop, so I moved this session over and it can't find these videos. ERM, sorry. These audio files, they're they're not to be found because I didn't copy them over. So it's looking for him. I could copy him over. Um, but since I'm not really, like mixing or anything this session, I'm just using it to, ah, demonstrate something. I've got enough sounds here to go by. So that's what that orange bar is telling me. It's telling me it's missing some audio files and there's some problems with something in my session, so I'm just ignoring it for now. There's a better way, Um, that I could have dealt with that, which is before I moved it, done this collect all and save that will kind of bundle up all your content and put it into one spot, and then when you move it somewhere, else, you'll be You won't have that problem. So I should have done that. But I didn't and it's too late now, so we're often running. So those are all your main navigation tips for the arrangement view. Now let's look at some of how those same tips apply in the session view on the clip slot grid 10. Session Navigation: Okay, We're back in session view, and I have ah loaded up one of the default sets here. Same one we looked at a minute ago. Okay, so let's talk about some navigation things that we need to know. Ah, when we're looking in or when we're working in such a view. So Ah, first thing that I just talked about Ah, these two tabs down here work exactly the same. I could navigate between them by shift tab. Right? Ah, One thing I just did before I started recording him should probably point out as I made this area smaller. So the way you do that is you get this icon by sitting right on the light grey bar in between the bottom of session view and the top of the cliff view. And then you click in drag and you could make it smaller. You can slam it all the way down to get rid of that. And if you do that, you can do that. You can get back by doing that. Yes. That's how you can adjust that depending on how you're working. Now, remember, this is called the clip slot grid. This is all my clips. Lots. Um, I can move a clip just by clicking and dragging, just like in arrangement view. Um, I can option click and drag to make duplicates, right? We'll talk about that in a second. Well, let's talk about what just happened there. Please do that. So what this window is saying is that I drug an audio file into a MIDI track, and it's what it wants me to do is tell it. It thinks I wanted to convert it to a MIDI clip, right? So ah, this is one of the killer features about able to live is that it's able to analyze the frequency content of the audio file and convert it to a mini clip for us, which is really cool. But I don't really want to do that because I didn't want to convert that to a MIDI clip. I just wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, so I would say cancel and it's not gonna put that many clip there, so option click and drag will get you a duplicate. We can also copy command, see clicking a new clip slot and command V to paste. I can create Mawr clips lots by just dragging something to it. So if I just drag something down here, it's gonna make another one down here. I could just keep dragging stuff. It's gonna keep making clips. Lots down there that's gonna keep making scenes. I should say, Remember a seen as this all the way across? I can launch a whole scene from over here. I could go between scenes by clicking. I don't have to go in order. It's part of the great thing about this. Um, I can navigate around in here with the arrow keys if you wanted Teoh. This isn't the most ideal way to work with the clips lot grid, but you can use the arrow keys and then you can hit return, tow, launch whatever you're on, just go through a whole bunch of stuff using key commands. Um, also note what I just did is I hit the space bar to Stop Space Bar is the universal like play stop button for almost every single dog I've ever worked with. Um, space bar means play and stop. Last thing. I'll point out while we're here in the clip slot graders. When we looked at arrangement, view we looked at selecting parts of a clip and moving them around either accidentally or intentionally. How would we do that here. Using just the clips. Lot grid. We can't, right. We can move whole clips. We can. If we wanted to go into the editor like we could go down here and select apart and then do something with it that way. Uh, or what we would actually do is adjust the loop region. But we'll get into that more later. Um, the thing to remember for now is we're moving whole clips over here. We're in the clip slot grid. It's kind of all or nothing. If you want to stay strictly in the clip slot grid, we'll learn how to get a lot more control over your clips once we go down into the clip window. Okay, so I think that's everything. When it comes to navigation for the Eclipse locker, It 11. Clip View: Okay. Last thing for this chunk is to talk about this clip view down here at the bottom. So I've got nothing in it right now because I haven't selected anything up here, so I'm gonna select a clip. Let's find out. Audio one. Okay, so here's an audio clip, and what I'm seeing down here is the way form, right? I am also seeing a couple other things here that give me control of how the clip slot grid is going to handle it. So the envelopes, I can apply an envelope to it. And in this case, it's a volume envelope, because it's right here. So this is just gonna be a quick overview of what happens here. But if I launched this, let's stop everything along just this clip. Okay, so starts on, the volume goes down. So Aiken dio envelopes on clips and I can do an envelope for anything that's that's accessible in the clip, which is a lot of stuff. Ah, the sample area here gives me some info about the sample transposition quality volume boost . But most importantly to me, anyway, is our warp settings here. Now, warp is what we'll be talking about shortly warp means its ability. Teoh Kwan ties to our tempo, Which another way to put that would be, um, all clips play at the same tempo, regardless of where they were recorded or created, so we can throw five drum loops in there. And if one of them's at 1 10 1 of Mum's at 1 20 the other three are at 80. Ah, a Bolton is going to warp them in order to make them play in sync together. But we have some controls over how we warp things, So we'll be looking at that later. Over here we have our clip settings here. We can change the name, the color Ah, the keys, time signature of the clip, etcetera. And we also have Ah, this is hidden right now. But this l gives us the launch settings. So what happens when we launch it? This will become important when you do some performance stuff. Um, you can set things to launch by trigger by gate by toggle. Toggle would mean like when I hit play here it starts playing, and when I hit play again, it stops playing. It's basically an on off switch. There's a lot of different ways. We can do that now. If I was looking at a midi clip instead of the wave forms, I would see the MIDI notes, right. So the midi notes would be here in place of where the way form would be. Most of the rest of this is the same. We don't have warp settings cause mid eclipse don't need to be warped. Um, because they can play at whatever tempo they won't. But I think everything else is the same, actually. And then down here we have our instruments and effects. So when I'm on a midi track, I have to have an instrument first. So here's my instrument. This is a bit more complicated oven instrument. I can look inside of it and see what is actually creating the sound. And I can set my sound by controlling all these parameters than after the instrument. I have effects. If it's an audio track I'm looking at, I only have effects. I don't need to have an instrument for an audio track because it just plays the audio that's already there. More on that later when we start talking about content, but the thing to remember there is that a MIDI track is just notes, and it needs an instrument to make sound. Audio is an audio file, and so it doesn't need anything extra just to play notes. But we can put all kinds of effects and things on it should we want to. So I think that everything I want to show you about this area, okay, there's still a lot more to see. Um, we still have to talk about the browser area, some of the transport functions and other stuff. But I want to get right in the content and start talking about making some content and working with some content, and we'll explore these other areas as we encounter them, which will be pretty quick. 12. Adding Content Intro: all right, This next section, we're going to continue going through the interface, but we're going to talk about, ah, content like getting it clips in here. Remember, Clip is any kind of audio or MIDI file. So when we talk about content and the interface and the things that you really need to know were, a lot of it is talking about the browser, which is over here, which we hadn't really looked at yet. And then we're also going to talk about some basic, um, livens announced. Like, um, according, um, we have a whole huge other section on recording coming up in later parts, so we're not going to go into a ton of detail about recording. But I do want to talk a little bit about recording, um, and also our preferences and are settings and what they ought to be at to make the most of able to live. So with that, let's dive in and let's start right away with the Preferences window, which is something you can't see. It's not one that lives on the screen. And let's just walk through what our preferences should look like if we're set up correctly 13. Preferences: Okay, let's look at our preferences and make sure we're all set up correctly. And eso that You know what some of these things are in the preferences. Hopefully, this won't be the most boring thing you do all day. Um, I know that digging through preferences can be the less exciting parts of, ah, learning a dog, especially one like, able to live. But, ah, you ought to know what's in it. So if nothing else Ah, bookmark this video. Come back to it when you're having a problem or not sure how to set something up. And, ah, you can use it to walk through your settings so I can get to my preferences window. Ah, in two ways, I can go to the live menu and then preferences and click that or I can command comma command comes the key command that will get us to preferences. And it is handy to know. I mean, there are some situations where you'll want to jump to your preferences pretty fast, especially if something's going wrong. So in the Preferences window, we have a number of tabs on the left, so I don't want to go through every single thing, but I do want to point out some key things that you ought to know. So here in the look feel tab, we can set our language weaken set warnings follow behavior is like when you play it, is it scroll or not? Scroll. Um, clip colors, the skin, You can change the skin And there are some default ones here. This kind of change, the overall look of able to live. Like if I switch it to clouds, its a lot brighter. Um, Mono Lake. A little kind of a green tent. Not IQ blue tint as you would expect and default. So I'm gonna stay on default. But you're welcome to experiment around with those brightness. We can kind of dim the screen or whatever or brighten it up. That might be something you want Teoh experiment with. If you're live. Ah, and your screen is just too bright. You can pull it down here. Remember that whenever we adjust one of these number boxes, let me get this little orange triangle on the right. We can always that the delete key to go back to the defaults. Okay, let's move on. Let's look at our audio tab appear. So here's our main audio settings. So so what settings were using. Now, I'm not using an audio interface right now, so I'm just using my built in for able to him because I'm using my audio interface for my microphone in the screen capture software. So I'm just using my built in input. But basically, this is where you'd set your driver type Ah, audio input device output device. And then you can configure your channels here in these pop up windows should you need to. So if you have an external device plugged in like I have this motew ultra light plugged in right now, but I don't want to select it because, ah, my screen captures offers using it, but on that's where it would show up. And so you want to make sure that selected, Ah, if you're using some kind of external audio interface, if you're just using your built in stuff, that's fine. Make sure it's has built in in both of those, the input and output. If that's what you wanted to, we can change our default sampling rates our buffer size, and then we have down here a test tone where we contest some of this stuff out. So if I click on ah, the off button here to turn it on with a little test tone, just the volume and this is handy. We can change the frequency of it. You know, we can simulate the computer, just really chug in, you know, working really hard. But where this is handy is when you're adjusting the buffer size, you know, I go down to 32 samples in my buffer size, and we hear that test own just really scraping to stay on board. So we know that buffer sizes too small. That's true enough. 228 sounding pretty good. So that's an okay place to stay. So I'm gonna go back up to 5 12 Shows me my late and see amounts. Ah, Eric, compensation and things like that. So good stuff to experiment with here to get your audio configured correctly, especially when you're recording audio. Turn that tone off so that it doesn't drive us insane. Okay, let's move on to the midi and sink. Now, This is where you're gonna want to visit this place if you are using some external MIDI devices I have an external keyboard hooked up. It's the oxygen 49 is what I have hooked up here. So up here we see Axiom 25. So let's change this toe. Oxygen 49 which I believe is in this list 49 or 61. And down here we see input for oxygen 49 output for oxygen 49. We also see three ports on my ultra light, which has many ports in it. So we could use those many reports for many device if we wanted Teoh Don't know. I'm talking about and don't worry about it. Um, this oxygen 49 is a USB midi keyboard, so I've got it plugged in over USB. I've got it set up for tracking, not for sink and not for remote. I could turn on the input for sink and remote. So if I turned sink on, that basically means that this device has is gonna can control the tempo. So, um, when this is on, if I go all the way, appear where I would have seen the tap to make a tempo. Now that gets bumped over. And I see this external in there, so One of the things that this thing does is let the external keyboard control the tempo and other basically keep it in sync, drive the synchronization between the device and, um, able to live. Now, that would all be very silly for me to do, because this is a midi keyboard and so I don't really need it to sink. Um, because I'm just gonna play some notes on it. Remote, however, means that I can control more I can control, able to live in more than just midi notes. So basically, I can control live with my MIDI keyboards, so that could be fun. I don't really need it right now, So let's just leave track on so I can enable Midi notes. Now, when I play notes, you can see that I'm receiving Midi notes all the way up here in this little this little dot up here is just showing me that there's many notes coming in. When I played some notes, it sees them. Okay, let's go to this. Files and folders. The most important thing here is, um, are plug ins settings. Most important thing to me. Anyway, um, if you're gonna use audio units which you prob. Well, if you're on a Mac, you probably are. Um you want to be sure and turn that on, And if you're gonna use V S t. Ah, plug ins, you want to turn that on? Um, this custom folder you don't need to have on that, you can turn it on if you want. Um, what these basically means is by default, a Bolton isn't going to show you any extra plug ins. It's only going to show you its default instruments and effects. If you have more plug ins installed on your computer, you've got to turn him on here to tell able to that you want to use audio units and ah v S t plug ins. If you're V s T plug ins are not where we would expect them to be. Not in the system folder where we put our audio plug ins for all other applications. Then you would tell it with this and you would point it directly to what folder you keep your VSD plug ins in. So usually, though, you can just turn these two on. Ah, and then you're good to go. Also appear we have some of our folder settings. Where are our temporary folders? Gets stored where our max application is. We're talking about Max eventually. Um, if you know what Max is, don't worry about that for now. Okay? A couple other things. Where is our library? Very important. Ah, Location of the live eight library, location of user library. Um, installation packs for folders, impacts. Okay. Our record warp and launch settings. Some other settings in here that will look at once we start recording. Ah, And once we start dealing with warping, see few things, um, and then our licenses, all the important licenses from Mableton. So that's all our preferences. So have a look at those. Make sure you're set up The me the most important things that I think people, um, get wrong when their first setting up is not ah, enabling the audio units and v ST's and making sure your audio ah, devices set up correctly so that you have your ins and outs. Ah, in your, uh, either built in or your external audio interface to check those things out and let's move on 14. Browser: Okay, let's look at the browser. So the browser is this area over here, and it kind of works just like the finder. If you're on a Mac, um, it basically just lets us navigate through all our files on our computer. Ah, in a very efficient way without leaving live. So what that means is that we can stay right on this window and drag stuff right into our session as we're going, we can actually do it without, even, like, stopping the music from playing. If we're in the middle of a track, we can just start throwing stuff in here. Um, and it won't disrupt anything at all. So we've got to kind of big headings here on the left have got categories in places, So categories are different kinds of things that come installed with live, with some exception. So if you look at sounds, this is pretty much all of your sound presets. Ah, that come with live life? Sweet. I should say, um, if you don't have live sweet, if you have a different version of live, I'm gonna have a smaller list here. I think. Ah, but you know, these are organized by the type of sound have got ambient base brass effects, guitar mallets pad and I can click on one. Get a little preview of it. If you don't hear that little preview when you click on yours, be sure this this little headphone icon is selected that audition button so we can hear what the sound is going to sound like if we like it. These are synth tracks that I'm looking at, so or I should say midi tracks. So if I like it, I can either drag it right onto a MIDI track or I could just double click on it or hit return, and it'll load up on the currently selected track. So now we see it down there, right? So I like that one hit return and I can load that up. You can scroll through these with the arrow keys and audition them really fast. So if I go, that's when I like. I hit return and I'm on it, and now I'm playing it with my keyboard. So arrow keys and then hit Return loaded up on the currently selected track, and you can move quite fast that way. So I've got a bunch of different sounds Hear piano keys, strings different kinds of since some voices and winds. Um, those are on the sound. So those are all your instruments that are basically these are all your instrument presets . All your instruments by themselves are here by instrument. So these are the different instruments that come with live sweet. And when I mounts over the air when I put the use the arrow keys to select these I'm not going to hear anything because I'm just looking at the actual instrument. If I open it up Oops. I opened up a weird one. If I open it up, I'm getting these categories again, but organized slightly different. So all of this stuff, or most of this stuff is in this sounds just organized a little bit different. So these are all the presets, but these ones are organized by instrument. So there's an instrument called electric. Looks like this. This is the electric instrument. This is the default. Because I didn't select any preset. I just loaded it right in. If I load in collision, this is what collision looks like. And this is what the default sounds like, right? So I could load in a preset by opening up this arrow, sorting through here and saying, No, let's go with piano. Select one of these and I can make the browser window a little bit bigger by clicking here and dragging if I want se organs and I sound return. Load that one up. Theo. I've got that sound loaded up. So that's how you can navigate through here. So these instruments and these sounds are a lot of the same stuff. Drums. These are different. Drum kits that are loaded into are able to library, so I've got a drum rack. We'll talk about racks later. Um, but a drum. You can think of a drum rack as basically ah, kit. In a way, it's a little more complicated than that, but it's a kid, so I can mouse down and hear some of the sounds in this drum kit. Okay, let's load that one up, and now I've got my different drum sound here, and I could play it with my keyboard. I find where I am. So now I'm using the keyboard to control these these sounds, but these are my different drum sounds in this particular drum kit. right. So here's a let's go to a NATO. Wait, Here's a classic 80 wait and hit return. Load that up. So now I'm using my keyboard to play the different sounds just kind of tricky to do. Um, but that's where we have. That's so these are in the default installation. So moving on, uh, audio effects. These are audio effects. These are things you can add to an audio track on. They will add, um, you know, they will alter the sounded much different ways. We'll be looking at these in more detail later. Um, what each of them do, I m, but just like instruments, they have their effect, and then they have presets. If we open him up Ah, we're not going to be able to hear anything in the audition here because they affect things . So we can't really audition the thing that they're affecting right? So we can either put them on an audio track, in which case the audio will go through the clip and then through our effect. Or we can put him on a midi track. But we can Onley put them after the instrument. Right? So here's the instrument and its generating the audio so we can put any audio effect after the instrument, but not before. If I get rid of this instrument now, I have just in audio effect on a MIDI track, and it says you need an instrument because there is no silent being made on this track yet . You need an instrument to make sound on a median on a MIDI track. Ah, an audio track. You don't because you're playing audio files. Let's get rid of that because that's weird. By the way, to get rid of that, I was clicking on the header of its Let Me Bring one of those back clicking on the header up here and then just hitting the delete key. Get sort of that effect. Okay, MIDI effects work the same way. Many effects ah, effect of the MIDI data going through. So things like in our Pesci ater, probably the most popular many effect. We can also do some stuff with the pitch. The note length cords, scale velocity, randomized, some stuff. There's some fun stuff in there. Max for live Maxwell lives a whole other can of worms. We're gonna talk a lot about Max for live at the end of this whole big class. I'm going to a whole huge chunk on Max for live. Um, Maxwell live. I'll just describe as it's essentially a programming language, sort of that lets you build your own effects either instruments, audio effects or many effects. Ah, so here are some that are in here already, and you can use them, pick them apart and reorganize them. It's really powerful. It's also super intimidating. Um, if you've never used it before, So I'm gonna walk you through how to use this and even make some stuff. Ah, by the end of this class in Max, it's gonna be really fun. So let's leave that alone for now. Plug ins. These what we looked at in the preferences window because I've said let me use audio units and let me use V ST's. They're showing up here. These are all the V S T is in stalled on this computer and audio units installed on this computer. So as you install more plug ins like you would for any dog, they're going to show up in these lists. That's where you'd find plug ins. So one question I get asked a lot is what's the difference between audio effects and plug ins? And there are a couple different reasons are a couple differences. But one of the biggest is you can think of audio effects and instruments. The stuff in these two tabs as, ah able 10 made things. That's what goes in here is things that a Bolton has made and included in live plug ins are made by anyone else, right? So plug ins are not able to end. So you're a little bit crossing your fingers on all plug ins that is gonna work with a Bolton. Almost all of them do. So that's not really fair to say, Um, but instruments and audio effects are things that able 10 has built toe work in live. So, um, but that's just how it is clips. This button under categories just gives you a whole bunch of clips that are in your library . So these were just random little things preview I can scroll down. And if I want to use one of these, let's say I can't say I like this. I can add this either. I can just take this clip and I condone drag it into the clip slot grid right where I want it. This Okay, you go right there. I can launch it. Or I could just in the browser just hit return. And in this case, it's gonna make a new track, and then I could launch it. Also, if I was an arrangement view, I could do the same thing. I can just drag it right out and put it right. Where a lot, If that's what I wanted to use samples. These are a bunch of just audio samples that are in my library. This is what I was using before. So here's a kick. I can drag it. I can put it right there for in session view. I can grab a kick. I can put it right there and launch it. Um, so these air just audio samples now places these are user defined. You can kind of control a lot of these. So packs. Ah, I guess they're not all user to find some of these air just in here. Like, for example, packs Paxar. Ah, extra things that I've gotten from able to in from, like, able to dot com or other people. Put out packs all the time. Ah, able to live packs are great. Way to just add a whole bunch content in. So these are packs I have installed on this computer, which is not a lot. Um, because it's kind of my beater computer that I use for making ah, online classes. User library is stuff that's in my user library already. This is just kind of basically, this is just a link to go inside of my user library. Current project is what I have saved for this current project. Now the other stuff, including this Max Stuff folder. This is folders that I've put here. So I put this max folder here so you can basically make bookmarks to places where you keep a lot of files. So let's say I wanted to add a link to my desktop. How about that? I wanted to be able to get to my desktop really quick. I can click add folder, desktop open. So now my desktop is there, and it's going to stay there. So now whatever I'm doing, I can get quickly to my desktop, and then I can navigate around if I wanted to there so wherever you keep a lot of files, A lot of samples, um, things like that make a link to it in this place is so you can get to it really fast, Really handy. It's really cool. And if you want to get rid of one of these that you've added, just ah, control, click and then remove from sidebar and it's gone. Cool. Okay, so that is our browser. One other thing I wanted to show you is that if you are just super determined to use the finder or the browser in Windows, you can you can go here, Let's go to desktop. Ah, let's find an audio file. Okay, here's an audio track. I can just drag straight from there into my session, if I want or an arrangement view the same thing. This is a really long file, but I can drag straight from the finder if I want to, but that I have to go out of a Bolton into the finder to do that. And we tend to not like to do that, So avoid that if you can. It's much more efficient to get comfortable in the browser over here, Um, especially by adding this your links to your favorite places where you keep stuff, the much better workflow to get into. Okay, that doesn't for the browser. Let's move on to something else. 15. SignalFlow: Okay, let's talk about signal flow. Enable tin. So I have open here again. Ah, this this demo track that you can get Ah, by going to the help view and then ah, tour of live and then click right here. Eso you can follow along with the exact track that I'm using here. So I'm gonna close this. So this is that track. Here's a little taste. Go ahead to here. Okay. So what I want to talk about here is, um, the different signal flow options in live essentially like what I said before still holds true in that we have session viewing arrangement view. And one way to think of it is that they're almost separate, Dawes. That sharing mixer is one way to think about it. There are some exceptions to that where they will share content. But in the case of arrangement view here, there are two things that I want to point out here. One is routing audio around, and the other is just the general signal flow. Ah, One of the things that a Bolton has is the ability to kind of see the signal flow in these really slick ways. So I'm just gonna solo this drum track so we can just kind of see what's happening will launch it from this. Everything point. So I'm gonna click on that track, so I see it coming in down here, right? Okay, so I see audio happening here. So what's actually happening here? We can follow the signal path here. The sound is being generated here. I'm gonna open up this from track so I can see the midi notes. So I have Midi notes happening here. Right? So in Midi notes, this is a MIDI track, and from here, it's going down to here. We see these dots indicating a MIDI signal. They're not signals right there. Not like audio signals, thes air audio signals. This is a midi signal. This is an audio signal. It's important to notice the difference between those two. So it's going so right here. The signal is still midi. It's going into this 909 kit which is using the MIDI to generate audio. Right? This is an instrument. Instruments generate audio from midi. So now coming out of that, it's audio. Then we're going through a compressor and it's still audio, but this is the path is going from left to right, and then this is our last effect right here. So now it's heading to the mixer, which eventually heads to the master in the way that we're set up right now. We could interrupt that with a couple other things that we wanted to, but that's the general signal flow. So another way to look at this would be to think about. There are essentially three different kinds of tracks en able to live. Let's jump over to session view because they're a little easier to see now. If you can't see this area, here are Io section. Be sure you hit this button right here so that you can see what I'm seeing. So the way that I like to think about this is there's inputs for each track and there's output for each track, and we see that in the Iot. That's what I O stands for, you know. So some tracks say midi from, and then audio, too. Some tracks say audio from an audio, too, and some tracks which we don't have here will say Midi from and Midi, too. So let me put that a different way audio tracks will say audio from an audio to write. That means What do you want this track to play audio from what and where do you want to send it? And I want to send it to the master right, a midi track, which I don't have a MIDI track without an instrument on it here. So let's make one. Okay, so here's a midi track and there's no instrument on this. So it says Midi from, like, where do you want me to listen for the MIDI information from, and maybe to where do you want to send that many information? That's what that track is doing as soon as I put an instrument on this, then it becomes one of these other tracks that looks like this midi from audio, too, right? So there's Midi. This is a midi track. It's it's reading many information, but the track is then converting it to audio information because there's an instrument on it and then so we have audio to so many from audio, too. So the three different situations you can have audio from audio, too, which is an audio track midi from, and maybe two, which is a midi track and Midi from an audio, too, which is an instrument track. We'll call it now. In addition to that, there's a little bit more you can do in this Iot section. You can route audio around kind of wildly here, so let's take an audio tracks. We have audio from audio to what's in this list audio from Could be from an external in or which would be any kind of microphone. Ah, synthesizer. Ah, hardware, analog, Anything outside of our computer on, we could configure that Here you can see my voice coming in to internal the external in. This is the internal microphone of this laptop, Um, and that's fine. That's coming in there, uh, or it could be from another track. So instead of using ox ends and ox receives all over the place like a traditional mixer would able to essentially, let's anything gets sent to anything. Well, let me rephrase that. It lets audio tracks, gets sent to audio and midi tracks, get sent to Midi tracks and instrument tracks, receive midi and send audio. So let's look at that in hopefully a slightly less confusing way so I could say play the audio from any other track here, and I could send Send the audio two and any other audio track. I can only say audio track here because it needs to accept audio. Which enmity track can't do? Midi tracks I could say Midi from these are the available midi things. These would be my keyboard, my interface and my other midi tracks, and this has an instrument on it. So it says audio, too. I can send it to the other audio tracks that can accept an audio signal right this MIDI track here because it doesn't have an instrument on it, I could say midi from, and it's gonna be able to accept Midi from any of my devices that are connected. My many devices or my many tracks that are generating midi and maybe to my other Midi tracks or my or my other instrument tracks as well would be able to accept the MIDI coming out of this so I could put on my midi notes on this track and then route it the midi over to you know, the the drum track and have it generate the drum sounds there. Now there are a lot of reasons why you'd want to do that, which will cover indi de later. But I just want to cover in this video the basic signal flow of able to live, which is from clip to clip inspector area, which is down here. So we're generating sound here in this case, and then we're going from left to right, and then we're going to the mixer unless we decide to do some additional routing in the Iot section. If you that's the biggest way I can sum up the audio routing in able to live, there's a lot more we can do. We do have sends that we can use Ah, and weaken. Send those to thes return tracks over here, and we can create more of those if we want. One thing will also find later is that there's a way to split tracks in a really interesting way down here where the audio signal comes in and then down in the clip window down here, we can actually split the track into multiple kind of streams of audio and process them separately, which will look at later with the thing called racks. Really exciting stuff lets you choose from really powerful processing. So ah, quick overview of our signal flow in able to live, Um, just scratching the surface. But let's move on to something else so that we can get up and running in making some tunes . 16. Recording: Okay, let's talk about recording. Now, I know that we're still just talking about the interface and really kind of going over the main layout of live. But I know a lot of you want to get to this, so I'm going to jump right to it. And it does have to do with the interface because we need to know how to do one of the main functions of live. Um, which we've been talking about along the way, so makes sense that we talk about recording, right? So let's do a little bit of recording now. We've got two different ways that I want to show you how to do it here. There's a couple different ways. Um, I'm gonna look at session view and arrangement you. Right. So let's do actually arrangement view first, because it makes a little bit more sense. So down here I have two audio tracks. I'm gonna rearrange things. It's a little bit here. I'm gonna click on the heading of this audio track first. I'm gonna rename it. Let's call it voice, because I'm just gonna talk into it for a minute. Ah, And while I've got selected, I'm gonna click and drag and just move it up in my list because I am kind of O C d and like to have these things. It's top. So now I can see that my input is set correctly because I can see my voice coming in right here. I'm set to external in, and I can see this Channel one is happening. If you don't see that coming in automatically, go back to your preferences and your audio and make sure that your audio input device is set to whatever you're trying to record. So this is if I'm recording something outside of my computer. Um, like my voice, a microphone, anything. So I'm just going to use the built in microphone right now. I could try using the mo two that I'm also using Teoh run the screen capturing software. But I think something might explode if I do that. So let's not let's just use the internal microphone, OK, so it's called voice. Um, I'm gonna leave monitoring mode, which is this in auto and off. I'm gonna leave that toe off because I don't want it to play through when I hit record, because I am recording with a separate microphone and that just could cause craziness. Um, even with my computer muted, I might cause feedback. If I do that, if I said it to end, I would be able to hear it coming out of my computer speakers because they're, ah, what I have said to be my main output from able to live right now. And that's going to cause instant feedback because, ah, my speakers are gonna be recording my microphone, which is going to play out speakers, which is gonna get picked up by the microphone and etcetera on. That's gonna feedback. But if I put on headphones, I could set it to in, and I could play that through if I wanted to. I could also set it to auto, and then it's gonna be using the record setting, essentially to decide whether or not to play through or not. So with auto, when I'm when I'm armed to record, which is this button right here, then it's going to be playing through when I'm not armed to record. It's not going to be playing through. So if I was wearing headphones, I could set this toe auto and be perfectly happy but I'm not. So I'm going to set it toe off so that it doesn't play through. Remember that this is your monitoring section and getting comfortable with these will be really important when you're recording in different situations. So now that I have that set off, I'm gonna hit record. Now I'm armed to record. I see that coming through and I'm gonna I'm just gonna put my cursor somewhere by clicking on it and hit the record button up here and now I'm recording. Now you'll see that my output over here is kind of great out. And that's because it's not playing through its because of my monitor setting. If this was on in or Auto, this would be green and I would be able to see it. So I'm going to stop recording now and it's gonna hit Stop up here or I get hit space bar. Okay, I've stopped recording. I'm still going through, right, So I'm gonna disable my arm to record, and now I could play it great out. And that's because it's not playing through its because of my monitor setting. If this was and everything's fine, right? My monitor setting doesn't really matter here because I'm not accepting an input at the moment. I'm just playing through. Right. So I'm gonna leave that toe off. Um, actually, I take that back. It does matter. I could either. Be on auto are off right now. If I said it to in, Ah, it's gonna push my microphone right through, and I'm gonna feedback. Let's try E c. That's what it sounds like. I don't know if you could hear that. I don't know if that got captured or not, but, ah, it starts feedback right away. So I do want to keep this on auto or off. In my case, in most cases, I think, actually. So now I've got my voice recorded and it's here. Now let's record into session view, okay? Same thing happens. I'm gonna accept my monitor toe off Now it's down here, but everything looks the same, right? I'm gonna arm to record this track. I see it coming through. This is all exactly the same right now. You'll notice that all my what? We're squares here, the altar into circles. Right in my entire clip slot grid on this track so I can pick one and record on it. Okay? No, I'm recording under that clip. Cool. Let's click the next one. All right, Now, I'm recording under that clip and let's move to the next one. And now I'm recording on that clip, and I'll stop recording completely. Turn that off. And now I've got three different clips of me recording. Right. Put on it. Okay. No, I'm recording under that clip. Cool. All right, now I'm recording under that clip and now reporting on that. All right, So now I could jump between those. Now, that's kind of silly when I do it with my voice. But if you could imagine doing that with the instrument where maybe a drummer who was playing I grab a bar here, a bar here in a bar here and now all of sudden, I can jump between them at my leisure. Um, going back and forth can be super fun. So those were the two ways you can record. Um, there are some other options. Ah, and there's away. There's a couple different ways of getting between the two views that we're gonna talk about next 17. Record To Arrange: Okay, so let's talk about ah, moving from session view to arrangement. View. Now, what I've just done here is I've taken this. Ah, track. That is from our help view and ah, tour of live and then this track again. The one I worked with a couple of times here. So what I did is if I go over to arrangement view, I cleared all this out. I deleted everything that was here because I want to show you how to get between the two. Um, the first way I'm going to do this is what is called record to arrange. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna perform from from these clips, and then I'm going to record it as, ah, performance over on the arrangement side. Right. So this is record to arrange, So here I go. I'm gonna hit record. I'm gonna start going. So let's add in this, Okay? It's evolved a little bit here. Okay, let's add in some other stuff. All right, let's launch a whole scene. Full drum, beat to the scene. So now I just stopped recording by hitting the space bar, but I could have also hit Stop now what I did because I hit record up here. I wasn't recording on any particular track. Right in arrangement, view or sorry. In session view, I was recording an arrangement view. I was recording everything. An arrangement view is what I was doing. So if I go over to arrange with you now, here's what I just played exactly what I just played and you can see each clip like when I launched each clip. Like, here's when I switched that last little swell over to a different version of it A different clip. So what I can do now is not only have I recorded the audio from everything but I've recorded every time I launched a clip is what I've recorded. And the clip, right? So if I had many tracks over here, which I think I do, actually, yeah, here we go. I would have recorded the MIDI. Um but they're all gonna be going through the same instrument so I can play it back here. Exactly how I just performed it right. And that means I could, of course, clean it up. I could fix any performance errors that I made and tighten it up and get it ready, Teoh, Print it as a finalized track if I wanted to. So I basically just wrote the performance as an arrangement. Right. Um, hopefully that makes sense to you. Um, So I I moved the whole thing over here by just performing it and recording it using, um, the global record function up here. Now there's other ways. There's other ways I can get back and forth between the two. Ah, let's clear this out. Let's go over here to session view and let's move a single clip over to arrangement. View. One way I could do it would just be to copy and paste. So I'm gonna click on Ah, clip and say command, see for copy. I could also go up to edit Copy. So, command. See? Copy. Now I go over to arrange you. Click somewhere based. There it is. I have it. Now you have to be sure that when you do this that audio tracks go on audio tracks and midi tracks go on midi tracks. Um, because you can if I pasted this into a midi track, it's gonna convert it to a MIDI track. Uh, which is gonna be a little strange. There it is. So be sure that audio you paste audio tracks on two audio tracks and many tracks on the midi tracks. Or else it's gonna give you something like this. Um, another way you can do it is this is the one that most people don't know and is super time efficient. I can actually click and hold, like I'm going to drag this to somewhere. But instead of dragging it somewhere else while I'm holding onto it press the tab key. Now I've still got it. And I could just drop it wherever I want. Right? And I can go the other way to both of those last two things. Copy paste and click and drag work going from arrangement to session view as well. So if I click on this clip if I'm in arrangement view and I click like I'm gonna move it somewhere. But while I'm holding on to it, I press tab Now I'm over here and I can drop it wherever I want. Oops. I dropped it on a MIDI track. Ah, I can also copy it. Just come and see and go over. Click on an empty clips lot and paste, right? So that's how you can get between the two sides. Ah, pretty efficiently, right? You can either record to the arrangement view, or you can copy and paste from session view to arrangement view or from arrangement view to session view. Or you can click and hold and hit tab to go from arrangement, view two sessions. 18. Deconstruction 1: all right. Hopefully the interface of able to live. It's starting to make some sense to you. You're starting to get a feel for what's what and where things are, Um, what I thought we do in this video, it's kind of take a little bit of a break from introducing all of these new concepts and new terms and lingo and everything and just do a little bit of a dissection. I'd like to do this a couple times in this class. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna take this track that we've been looking at. This is the one from the help view. Ah, and the getting started with live thing. And let's just poke around and let's look at what's here. Um, focusing specifically on things that we know what they are. Right. So I am in arrangement view, right? So I'm just gonna kind of say things out loud as I'm looking through this. Um, Say I'm going to say things I know about it. Right. So follow along, um, in arrangement view. I'm looking at it. I'm gonna open up this drum track. You see that? It's a midi track. I'm going to click on this track s so I can see what's inside of it. Down here in the clip area, I can see the mini notes right. I could also go down to this tab and see the instrument, and I can get between those two tabs by shift tab if I wanted to. So here's the Midi instrument. So it's coming in as Mitty coming out as audio. So in here I have my individual drum sounds and then it's going as audio into a compressor and then heading out. And here's my volume. That's great. Look at the next track here We have audio, so I have audio tracks. If I click on this track or any of the clips in it and go down here, I can see that we're running it through a compressor. It's coming in as audio and out is audio. If I go to the other tab, I can see what's happening inside of here. I can see the sample is being transposed by two steps, and there's Ah, clip envelope on it where we're adjusting the volume over time, right? So let's let's let's hear that that clip. So this is the loop region. We haven't really looked at that yet, but this is the part that looping right now. So they're cutting out this beef with the volume. Let's pull that in, see what's there. It's an extra little hit, so that's interesting. Let's look at the shaker. The shaker is audio, and down here we see our audio file. Look at effects. There's nothing on it in that other tab. Our base is Midi, so there's MIDI notes here. Here's the bass instrument making sounds effects we have on it. This is ah, bit reduction, like Oh, are sometimes called a bit crusher. We have an e que on it and a compressor. So it's coming in as many here, coming out as audio and all of these places, and eventually gets back up to the track. This cords track is MIDI. It's got a lot of automation in the session in the arrangement, and this is a filter that it's automating. We'll look at how automating works later in the session, but, um, I can see down here. Ah, this is the instrument. It's got an E Q. And A compressor can look at the notes and see what notes are happening again. Zoom in on it this way. I can also zoom in on it. Over here. By the way, if I want to get deeper into the notes, same thing works, right? This is our little magnifying glass guy. E piano, little electric piano. I can see the notes by going down here. I can go over the other tab. See the instrument? Old school roads is the preset. They're using auto filter and a compressor. And then this swell, which is an audio track. And they've got this volume swell on it. No effects. Then here's the track. Cool, Right. We've got some volume adjustments here. Cem panning adjustments. All right, let's go over to session view and see what's here. Pretty much the same stuff. All the same tracks, right? Because that's how it works. Um, if I click on any of the clips weaken see different midi notes in them, we can go to the other tab and we can see the same stuff instrument and a compressor on the drum track. We can see just a compressor on the high chatter track. The shaker has nothing. The base has the bass instrument, a bit crusher and e q and A compressor and etcetera. So we also see over here little panning changes that happen. This is interesting here. This is our swell track, and you'll notice in the arrangement. That's swell. Has the volume automated in the arrangement and any parameter that's automated, we'll be able to see how it looks a little bit different, like it's got this. Um, I got rid of it. This this red button on it the same way that these are red. Well, no, I take that back in the same way that these air red have a little red square on him. That means that there's an automated parameters. There's one there. There's some automation happening somewhere. So that's just a little warning saying something's automated here. So f y I, um So there we go. That's what's in this track. Um, let's look at the Iot settings really quick. See if there's anything strange here. Ah, all of the ends are coming in. Nothing is being sent to another track, and they're all going out to the master. So no swapping channels between tracks or anything like that. Call. There you go. A quick little deconstruction. We'll get in more detail with those later as we look at him. But hopefully that helped just a kind of reinforce some of the things that we've talked about in this section of the class that 19. Intro to Editing: all right. In this next chunk, we're gonna talk about editing tools. And what I mean by editing tools is, um, the main way we're gonna be manipulating. Ah, audio and midi in the timeline. And also, we're gonna look at automation. Eso automation is letting his control a parameter over time. Um, that parameter can be pretty close to anything. Ah, in able to live. So we have a lot of control over that. Um, so without further ado, let's dive right in and talk about, um, editing and some workflow tips that will get you up and running quickly when it comes to editing. 20. Editing and Looping Audio: okay, Basic overviews of editing. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a track into my arrangement view here. So I'm gonna go over to my browser and I have this track on the desktop, and I could just go to the desktop and the finder and pull it in, but, um, let's use the browser just to get familiar with it. So uhm, I'm going to go to add folder here. I'm just gonna add the desktop like I showed you before. Okay, Boom. Now I've got the desktop now I never have to do that again. That's just right there. So I'm gonna hit desktop. I'm gonna scroll down and find Click on this track, and when I click on it, this is a full long track. So it takes a second to build the preview. I could hit the audition. Teoh here, the beginning of it. There it is. Now, one thing that I want to point out here is that this is actually not an audio track. This is an MP four track. Ah, this is a video, and that's OK, so let's pull that in. So I'm doing this just as a kind of bonus to show you, Um, what happens when we pull the video file? And so let's drag it and pull it in. And there we have it. Right. So the video comes up in a floating window and my audio comes up in the timeline, just just like where I wanted it. So if I play it video stays in sync with us. So now I have, Yes. So I'm actually gonna close this movie window because I'm not going to deal with the video right now. Um, I just wanted to show you that you can just pull a video right in, and it will describe the audio. Ah, and then we're good to go and you've got the video floating and you can get that back if you want by going to the view settings. But let's leave it. Okay, so we looked at a little bit of this stuff later in terms of copying and pasting so we can copy. Ah, we can paste a songs. I paste into an audio track. This is a midi track here, so I'm just gonna deal with audio for now, so I'm gonna get rid of that Midi track. So I'm just gonna click right on the heading there and press the delete key. And now I just have audio tracks, right? So let's, you know, pay something there and pay something there. Um, let's have another track so we can add another track in a couple different ways. I can go up to create and say insert audio, track or insert muddy track so I can add a new audio track there. Or I could just do command t for an audio track and command shift tea for many track. So that's a good key. Command someone to delete those for a minute. Um, so that's a great key command tohave because check this out. Let's say I'm working on a track and I'm like, I know I'm gonna need, like, five more audio track. So she you can just like rapid fire through those and I can concious eft click to select a whole bunch of tracks and then hit delete that way. Okay, The next thing I want to talk about, um when it comes a time line functions in our general kind of interface overview. Here is our loop settings. Now, this could be a little, um, goofy to think about. It's a little bit different than you might think. So when I click on this clip, that is the whole track right down here. I see the whole track. Now there's two things I want to point out. This bar right here is our loop. OK, so that's gonna be the beginning. In the end, it's not gonna loop right now because loop is turned off down here. So this this is the loop point. So when it gets to hear the end in this case, it goes back to here, right? Can adjust that by clicking and dragging. I can also adjust that down here with these settings right now. It's not gonna let me loop it right now because ah, the warp is not on. We're gonna talk about war later, but now that I turned warp on, it will let me loop it. Let's leave warp off For now, that's kind of a whole different lesson. Eso This bar is the loop. OK, now Ah, we also have these little flags here and a lot of stuff happens when I move those right because these flags are my start and endpoint. Okay, So why is starting in different than loop? Well, let's go into another clip. So let's look at this clip. So in this clip, what I've done here is I've highlighted something copied and pasted it down here. So this is just a little segment of the clip, right of the big clip. But if I look down, but if I look down here at this at the clip view down here and what do I see is I still see the whole clip, right? This is the whole huge track that's there. But my start and end points are just on that segment. But that means that this is actually a segment of the whole thing. And I can get more of the clip if I just drag it out right? I can get it back. This is called nondestructive editing. This is something that is in most Dawes now. Um, so we see it here. I can also open this up down here, and when I do it, you see up here, it's also opening up. Right? Okay, so that's cool. So this is my start. An endpoint. So this is not gonna loop right now. Let's turn on warping so that it will loop so I can show you something out. So what if I did this? Let's set my loop and my start and stop areas to be the same, right? So now it's it's gonna loop this over and over. However, I'm working in the timeline, so it's not going to jump back and loop around, over and over. So what does that mean when I'm in arrangement view like this when I'm in session view? That means it's just going to keep playing that clip over and over and over because session View doesn't have a timeline right over here. It just it would just go. If I put this clip, let's do it over here. And I played it way. Look down here, right and loops back. So this is gonna keep playing forever because it's set toe loop. Now let's go over back over to arrangement view and see what I did here. Here we are, so in arrangement view, it's not actually gonna look back. What that means is this When I drag it out like I just did, instead of getting more of the track, we're going to get more loops of the track. Right? So let me maybe do this in a way that's a little more obvious. Let's move my loop to this point. Okay, so now we can see what's happening. We're actually let's even line it up there. Okay, so now we're seeing the entrance of the beat here Now, because of loop is on, if I try to drag this out to get more of the track, I'm not gonna get more of the track. We're gonna get the loop again, right? So this is how we loop stuff, an arrangement view. It works a little bit different than session view, right? So if I turn loop off and then I dragged that out, we're going to get more of the track, right? If I turn loop on when it's drug out like that, it goes back to repetitions of the loop. Right. Okay, so let's take one more Look at our starting in points here. What if I did this? Okay, So what's happening here? When we start this loop, it's gonna play from here. It's got let's zoom in a little bit here so we can see a little bit better What's happening . Case A loop is going to start playing right here. It's gonna play through. It's gonna keep playing through. Then it's going to get to this end point. It has lined up a little weird, but that's OK. Oh, it's my loop. It signed up weird. It's going to get to this end point and it's gonna look back to here. And then it's gonna loop between these two areas over and over. So this we will only here the first time we launch it and you can see that reflected up here in the way form. Here's that opening part, which is this down here and then the loop goes on. So that's why we have the start in endpoints different from the blue points, right? You might want to do this much this. What if we did that? We wanted to start right here and then loop back to here. And then this is the loop from there on out so we can start at different spots than our loop is. Ah, imagine there's like, ah, drum fill right here. And then this is our groove, right? We might want Well, let's do this. Let's say This is the groove, and we want this ramp up. So when we launched the clip, it ramps up and then it repeats on the groove here. Right? So that's how you can do that? Um, a lot of control over the loops there. Okay, So I think I've covered all the basic editing functions of arrangement view I want to talk about, um Ah. The differences in working with MIDI tracks on. We'll do that in the next video. 21. Editing MIDI and Quanitizing: All right, let's talk about how we manipulate audio are sorry. Midi tracks. So I'm gonna make a new MIDI track in here, so I've got a blank session a blank set. Um, I'm gonna record a new ah, many tracks, so I still have my oxygen 49 plugged in. Um, first thing I'm gonna do is if I go. So this is a midi track, right? I'm gonna rename it. Let's call it oxygen. Sure. And then even my keyboard. It's not a great way to name it, but it'll do. And let's on this one to record. So now Midi information is going into this track, which we can see right here. We have the dots, so we know it's midi and not audio. That works great, but we're not going to get very far until we put an instrument on its Let's go over to our browser. It's go to instruments and let's put like the default default analog on it. Nice warm sound kind of love that sound. So now I've got an instrument on it. The default analog instrument. I could have also opened up this triangle and gotten some of my presets in there. Let's just fine. And I can program this however I want, which we will do in a later session. But for analysis, use the default. Okay, so let's add some stuff. So I'm just gonna hit record and I'm gonna play a few. Done little things. Great. My beautiful magnum opus. So, as you can see, have recorded MIDI information here into a new clip. Weaken Very clearly. Tell that it's maybe because we have these lines. Definitely does not look like a wave form. Right way form would be audio. So that's double click on it. That takes us down to our clip, Inspector. Here. Don't remember we have these two tabs down here. This one's gonna show me my instrument and then any effects this one is gonna show me my midi notes when we're looking at a media track and audio way for when we're looking at an audio track. And remember, the magic key command shift tab goes between those two tabs of the clip view down there. Okay, so let's go to look at my midi notes. Now, here's the notes I played. Let's expand this a little bit, so I'm just gonna click on this area right here and move it up. And I can scroll with just the I'm using the two finger scroll thing here and I can see the notes I played. I can click on him on here if you can't hear them when you click on him. Hit this little blue audition button up here so that you can hear them. Okay. Make sure fooled is not selected. Um, let's talk about fold really quick. What fold will do is hide all the notes you're not using. So this is handy for drums, right? For drums. We're gonna have a drum sound on every key that we have. But we might only be using, like, four different drum sounds so we can hit fold, and we can say hide all the notes I'm not using. Right. So now we only see the notes that I'm using, and you might have kick snare Hi. Hat like that, you know, seemingly only have three things you don't need to navigate the entire you range of the piano, But because I'm playing pitches, I'm gonna leave that off because I want to see what? No time playing cool. Now. Um, in terms of the clip. Everything works the same here. So I've got my loop area here that I can set, and I've got my start point in my endpoint, right? So we can just loop this first court if we wanted all of that stuff. So that works the same as it does for audio. That's opening all the way back up. Let's just take it to their find. Um, we could move the clip around. Everything works the same right now. What we can do that's different in the media trackers. We can obviously we can move around the notes. So if I click on a note, I can you I can click and drag Teoh, do whatever I want, right, Aiken, just drag it up, down, left, right. I can also use the arrow keys to move it around and the arrow keys to go left and right down here I have the velocity so I could make that note quieter or louder. And it's also reflected in the ah kind of color of the midi note. Um, a couple key commands will be handy is shift arrow to the right, extends the note and then left makes a note smaller, so right and left are gonna move the note, but shift makes it longer or shorter, and then shift up and down will make that note jump by an active. This is actually really time saving. So that's shift up. Will go up in active and shift down. We'll go down and active and buy up and down. I mean, the arrow keys on your keyboard. Cool. Okay, so, um well, is gonna do one really obvious thing. That would be nice. Would be to Kwan ties this. I didn't play this to any tempo. Um, but quanta izing is a very popular thing. Quanta izing basically just means snap this thing to the grid. You can see my sloppy playing all over the place here. Like like, right here. Like, I kind of wanted to play that right on. You know, beat four there, but I didn't. So, um, here's how I can quantities it quickly. Command A is gonna be select all. So that's command A. And then there's a key command for Kwan ties, and it is not command. Q. Do not hit command. Que, um, if you're trying to move really fast and you don't have your key commands memorized. You might think command Q is the obvious one for quantities, but no command. Que was quit. Um, and that's gonna cause you some problems. If you hit that in a hurry, eso quantities is command you second letter and you can see what just happened there. Um, let me undo it right now. Let's look really close at my MIDI notes here. Let's keep our eye right on that one. Command you right? It just nudged everything over onto what it thought was the best grid. Now, I've got a lot of settings with quantities I can change. How it Kwan ties is, um, what kind of note it goes to by going to this quantities settings quantifies the current grid or ah, the A division of the beat that I want to use. Current Greer basically just means are zoom level. Right. Um okay, so now it's quanta ized, so that might be more useful. I could also move all the notes. I'm gonna select all these. This is gonna make a horrible sound. There we go. That's kind of nice sound. I can select everything and then just move it to get it on the grid a little bit better. Maybe. Put that one there. That one there. It's gonna get these on better beats. Uh, let's do that. I mean, I'll extend these out. I'm just kind of eyeballing. Okay, Good enough. Um well, that one out to there, Sure. Now I'm gonna turn on the Metrodome up here, and it's where at court equals 1 20 And let's just hear this with the Metrodome. So now I'm in time, right? Even though I didn't play it anywhere close to time, Quanta izing will get me into time. So everything else with clips works the same. Aiken, select chunks of a clip and paste it into another MIDI track. Although you have to be a little careful about thes starting an ending of notes. Um, Midi works differently than audio. And if it doesn't get the attack of the notes, sometimes you have problems in that way. So m ah, just be careful about that, Um, about making sure you get the full ah note able to It is a pretty good job at compensating for that, but like you can see right here. Oh, well, I don't have an instrument on here. Let's put So I'm talking fast. Let me just explain what just happened here When I hit play, we didn't hear any sound. Why? The reason is I didn't put an instrument on this track. So instead of audio, look, we have on the first track, we still have midi. So let's throw this up to the first tracks. We can hear it. Okay. Done up there. Um but watch out for selecting chunks of midi. If you don't hear notes that you think you should hear, just be sure and nudge things inside the clip. If they're starting outside of the clip, you could have problems. Although, like I was saying before I interrupted myself a Wilton does a pretty good job at compensating for that, so you probably don't have to worry about it. So if you didn't understand what I just said, then ah, ignore it until you have problems and then go back and re listen to what I just said. Okay, great eso We've talked about looping setting our loops, um, a tiny, tiny bit about warping, and we'll talk more about warping soon. And also we've talked about editing and arranging mid eclipse and quanta izing up. Next. Let's talk about automation both in clips and in your session 22. Automation: Okay, let's talk a little bit about automation. Now, automation is a fancy way to say, controlling a parameter over time. That's all it is. So we're gonna have some kind of automatic way that a parameter is gonna change over time. And we have to write those in so we can kind of spell it out. And we can say, you know, uh, over a then over this whole bar, I want the drums to get louder. So we draw this line that basically moves the volume up. Right? So there's a couple different ways we can handle that in live, So I'm gonna open another session. Um, I've got to help view open here. So opened the session for me. I'm gonna go to help view, and then a tour of live and this one down here don't open this one. This is the one we just did in the previous chunk of lessons. Let's go. Next page. Next page. Next page. Next page. Next page next page in here somewhere. Next page. I'm on page in nine down here, and they give you another set. So it says, first, it's on a different set by clicking here It's a load that set. I'm using these because you've got him on your computer. Um and you can follow along. Okay, Now let's go. And let's look at this, Um, in the high chatter track where it says dub step slow. Okay, so let's solo this tracks. I'm gonna press s for solo. I'm gonna launch it. OK? Do we see what's happening here? So we have automation written into the loop in the clip level, meaning the clip has automation in it. So and so we could do this. So that means that So if we go over here, we look at the envelopes, right? So the envelopes are what make automation. In a way, they're what control the automation like envelopes open and close, right? That's what envelopes do. And that's what we need for automation is things that open and close. So we draw envelopes. Eso If you don't see this envelopes box down here, be sure you have this e selected. This is gonna show or hide our envelopes. Now we have two menus here. The 1st 1 is the the device that we're going to automate. So we've got some things in the clip and we've also got a compressor on this and we can automate some stuff in the compressor and we can automate some stuff in the mixer. So the mixer would be like if we wanted to automate the volume of the track going up and down right, which were not doing here. We're automating in the clip level, and then so once I select what we're gonna automate what device we're gonna automate from the first list, then we have all the parameters that can be automated in the second list. Right? So volume modulation is what is selected here. So volume, if I go to this compressor and I look at all the parameters, there's a lot right. There's a lot of things in the compressor I could do. I could automate the threshold ratio, the device on whether it's on or off, expansion ratio, attack, release, etcetera, of the dry, wet mix, all kinds of different stuff. And then the e que as well. So that's all the things that can automate in the compressor. So let's go back to clip and look what's here. So we're automating the volume in the clip for each of these automation points. We have a break point. Right, And we can move them around so I can grab one and that Move them. I'm moving all of them right now. There we go, so I can move it around. And this is the way the volumes gonna go. So this is the volume up, and this is a volume down so I can change how it works. I can essentially get rid of it by doing this. Or I could make it more dramatic. Let's have it. Get rid of this hit right here. Let's do that. Here we go. Let's hear that. It's kind of a fun group. Um, okay, cool. Right. So we can make another point by just clicking on the line somewhere and adding it we can make these arched points. This is kind of a new thing. Let me get to where I can add one here. So I'm gonna get rid of this point that I just made by clicking on it again. So let's say I wanted arch this point are at a curve like a Prabal occurred here. What I would do is put my mouse over the line. Not right on top of it like I'm going to make another point. But just off to the sides of the whole line turned blue like that that I'm gonna hold down the option key and you can see them. Cursor has a little curve next to it. Now, if I click and hold down, I'm gonna add a ah, bend to that automation to that parameter. Right? So and I could move my mouse around in different ways to really shape how that's gonna happen. So now it's the volumes really gonna ramp back in in a much more kind of exponential way. All right, actually, don't like that as much. But I had it before. Let's see that I like hearing that come back in any way. So and this is because this parameters in the loop Ah, it's gonna happen, right? Like it's gonna happen as the loop happens because it's within the loop. Now, speaking of loops, when we're doing automation, what would happen if I did this right now, I'm gonna have not a very smooth automated parameter, right, because here's what's happened. Here's our volume. It's right here. Let's make a point there. Okay? Our volume is right there. It's at the little box that pops up, tells me it's at 85.3 for volume. It's It goes down as the clip plays, gets down to almost zero. Let's pull it down, the actual zero right. And then right here, it's at zero. And then the loop happens, right? So it jumps back to here so effectively, what we've got here is this right? Because the loop starts over and it's gonna jump straight up back to here, and it's going to create this, this jarring motion. So when you're drawing automation, be aware of what your loops air doing. Let's hear what that does, right? So we're jumping all the way up to volume there. So if you want the volume to ramp it back in, you could do that. And even if you wanted to be more extreme, all right, so now we're we're going. We're going a little too high. It doesn't really matter. That's fine. Okay, cool. Now that is automating the clip. We could also automate the mixer, but if we automate the mixer, I go to mixer here and let's go. There's already some reverb automation on it, and we can tell that there's automation reverb on it in two different ways. One is that there's this little red or like pinkish ah reddish box here that boxes tells me there's automation drawn on this already. See, it's over here and over here I can also tell, because if I look at my sends up here, there's a That little box is here, too. That means that send a has some automation on it. So send a is going here to my reverb, right? So it's getting some reverb, um, in the parameter. So don't forget about those little orange boxes. Tell us there's an automated parameter there. OK, now let's look at automating of the timeline. So I'm gonna grab one of these clips, and I was gonna hold on to it like I did before, Then hit Tab and pull me over into the session view and let's pull it out, which is actually gonna add loops to it. Okay, we're still so load. Okay, so I still have the automation in the clip, but I could add more automation in the session, and that's what this line is doing right here. So these two drop down menus work the same as before, except we're in the whole session. So I could say mixer track panning if I wanted. And let's have the panning change over time. Let's have it just swoop left to right. Right. So this is outside of the clip. Now, this is kind of another layer of automation on top of the automation that's in the clip. We could do volume again, right? So if I did this, hoops invited this. What happens, right? The clip is gonna be dead quiet. We're not gonna hear anything. We're not going to hear this volume boost because the mixer is the last thing in the chain . So the the clip is gonna have this volume automated, but the mixer's gonna kill it for right here. And then it's gonna get louder and louder and louder. So this is still happening, but we're not gonna hear it because the mixer is down. Okay, so it's almost like another layer of automation. Um, to keep that in mind, there's one more thing we can do, which I don't want to go into a huge amount of depth quite yet, but there's this linked option in our in our envelopes box here. So if I turn this off and say we're unlinked, what that's gonna do is it's gonna let me draw an envelope over the whole course of a loop , like outside of the way the loop work so I could draw much longer envelope and still have it be applied to the loop or to the clip. So, like multiple loop. So something that maybe opens up over four loops. So like a a riff that loops four times. And each time you know, we we crank up, ah, filter higher and higher and higher. So that's happening in the clip instead of in the ah session, right? So it gets a little more complicated. We'll talk about that in a future session. But for now, let's leave that linked set up so linked and unlinked loops or something fun you could explore if that really, uh, appeals to you. But in the meantime, we'll talk about it later, but explored if you want to Ah, don't be. Don't be afraid to just kind of go out of my my order of talking about things and explore on your own. Okay, So automation 23. GroovePool: Okay. So as we go through all of the different interfaces Ah, things in live. There's one that we haven't looked at yet at all. Ah, and I would be an utter failure if we didn't. Ah, at least have a look at it. One whole little window that we haven't even approached yet. And that's the one hiding right here. It's got this little wave form. It's not a wave for him. It's like a wave. Right? Um, this is called the Groove Pool. So clicking on it opens up this other little box, right? And we haven't looked at this box yet, so let's take a look at it. Um, so the groove pool, right? So, like, it's like a little like waves. Like in like a pool, right? Like they're pretty. They're pretty clever guys with their graphics over there at at a Bolton H Q. Okay, So what can we do with the groove pool? This is a relatively new edition. Um, can remember what version of live we We saw the groove pool for the first time, maybe eight. Um, but ah, what this does is it lets us apply grooves to stuff, which is very kind of ethereal sounding thing, So let's take a look at it. So I've got two clips here, these air, both drum loops. So I'm gonna actually, like, pull them out just so I can hear the loot for a little bit longer. And let's hear them. This 1st 1 is this, like tabla riff. So I've got that soloed and let's hear it for a second. Okay, so it's got this. It's got a little bit of, ah, back like a back beat, kind of feel to it. I mean, not a back feet, but of behind the beat kind of feel to it. Now let's hear this other drumbeat. Okay, like this one's pretty straight right? Like just like right on top of the beat all the time. So here's the really straight drumbeat, and we can see that, you know, it's really right on the beat with all its transients, which is another word for just like the attack. The attacks are right on the beats, um, or right on divisions of the beat, right on 16th notes. If you look at the tabla, it's also pretty much right on the beat. But there's some like this one and this one that are not right on the grid. You know, they're a little freer. They're a little off. So what we wonder is, what could we do to the 2nd 1 to make it feel a little more like the 1st 1 right? Like, let's say we wanted to do that. Another example of this would be like, Let's say, like the classic groove pool example is to swing like Let's say you wanted to beat to swing . So what you could do is take a beat that had swing, or in this case, let's take the tablet feel and let's throw in the groove pool. So actually, there are grooves that come with a built in. If you dig through your library, you can find a whole bunch of grooves that you can apply into different stuff on. There are some different swing grooves in there, so you can just take a groove and apply it. But let's go one step back and make our own group, so I'm gonna take this clip. I'm gonna drag it right into the groove pool, and now it's saying, extracting groove so it's analyzing it and figuring out how it's working with the beat. Is it a little head little behind? You know how it's kind of treating the the beat, Really? So now we have this groove, this tableau groove. So now if I wanted to, I could go to my beat my straight beat and drag my tabla groove right on top of it, right? So now this will have that beat. There's one kind of more step to it. So now when I'm looking at it and I go down here, I see groove and the tabla groove is applied to it. I'm kind of auditioning it, so let's hear it right? So it gave us a little like it does feel a little bit behind the beat, but it also gave us a little bit of a hiccup feel. So we may or may not like that. We can change it. We have some more parameters over here. If we pull this open, we have a random ization and the timing. We can adjust how much of everything gets used, the base division of the Beat and once we like it, we can hit, commit, and then it's gonna rewrite the audio file toe have our groove in it. All right, so let's undo that. Okay, now, this is without it. So in this case is a bit subtle, but you can imagine how this could be really useful. Really powerful. Um, that's the groove pool. We use it. Teoh. Just apply different fields to stuff. It works on audio and midi the same way so you can drag Midian and midi out and apply grooves to midi tracks and extract him from MIDI clips in the same way. And that's the group pool. 24. Deconstruction 2: all right. Now that we've seen all the different aspects of able to and we know the interface pretty well, let's do another one of these. Walk through things just to, you know, give us a feel for ah, what's where? How I would dissect a track are a session or a set, as able to lex column and what I look for. So I'm gonna go back to this session I was in a few minutes ago. Our A few videos ago, So I'm gonna go to help view, and then I'm gonna go to let me walk you through this. You can get to the right spot a tour of live page nine, and then click here. Don't save. Okay. Nor back. Um, let's look at a couple of things that are here. So first thing, I'm gonna close. Ah, this over here by hitting his x. No more help you eso what is here? We have ah, bunch of tracks. So let's look at the 1st 1 So we've got this drum track to Midi track. Got a bunch different clips on it, doing variations of the beat. Let's solo that and have a listen to some of these. Okay, that's cool. So we're sending Teoh A and B, which overhears a reverb, and ping pong is a kind of delay that's in able to him so And these sends our automated right cause they've got these. So I'm just sending that one hit over there, and if probably this is being sent to the other one that are both things into it. Okay, so we're doing is really quick automation. We could look at that automation by going down here to our envelopes, scrolling down to find that automated parameter. There's our mixer all the way at the bottom And now we can see the a reverb That's this and also be reverb is being sent here, here and here. So just a touch of those things getting sent. It was really fast over to that delay. And that reverb. That's pretty cool on that clip. Same parameters seem sends on all our clips. Go to the next clip. It's going next one. Okay, same stuff. Let's look at our instruments. We would go down here, so we're using this kick or 909 That's one of the built in ones. And we have a compressor on it as well. Do we see any automated parameters in here? Nope. I don't see any cause. I'd see those little, uh, pinkish squares that would tell me there's an automated parameter. That's pretty cool. Okay, great. Let's look at one more thing. Let's go back, Teoh the clip, The Midi clip and let's go over and look at our groove pool so I can see that there's two different grooves loaded into the groove pool. Let's look at some of the other ones. So here's the clip that we've looked at before. Let's add that to the mix. It's turn off solo. Okay, Now, we've got this high chatter in there as well. That's fun. Uh, this is an audio file. I've got volume automation written into it. I also have a volume pulled way down. I'm not sure if that was I think that's the way they had it. So So where they wanted it. We've also got a little bit of panning moving it just to the left. A hair and some automation on the sent here as well. Okay, let's go to our shaker shaker. Another audiophile. I don't see any automation in this one. I would see something here got panning to the right a little bit. It's down pretty quiet. It's fun. Okay, let's look at this shorter. This one really interesting that zoom out all the way here. We can see the whole loop. I just got to notes, so I'm not sure what this is. Let's look at it. Hip hop sub base. So this is a base with a bit reduction and e Q and a compressor on it. Let's throw it in. Look at the clip again. It's kind of phone. All right, cool. Let's look at this 3rd 1 We've got cords. You can see these really quiet chords in here, right there really pink, which means the velocities are really low. I can also tell the velocities are really low down here, and I've got some pitch bend automation happening, which is interesting or no, I don't. I have modulation and pan automation happening just left on pitchman. I've also got a MIDI effect, so let's go over to the cords. We'll get you Q three compressor and minor to major lead. So sorry, not a midi effect. That's just the name of the parameter or the instrument preset that we're using so that in it's a lot of automation happening here, right? So let's have a look at that automation. Let's go over to the view. Let's look at the instrument. There it is. We're looking at the filter frequency right now, and the filter residence is doing that. That's really going crazy. Interesting note on this filter frequency. This is an unlinked loop, so this is passing through the loop. Looks like two times, and it's doing this pattern over two passes through the loop. Okay, let's look at this e piano. You've got just a chord here. What else could we see before I start to play it? Uh, let's look at the instrument. Old school roads. It's got an auto filter on it and also a compressor. Let's toss that in. Who? Let's look at the cord. That's pretty cool. Sounds rely on electric guitar kind of sound. Look at that auto filter just rocking. So you've got automation right there. That's what's controlling that. Let's have a look at it. There's our auto filter with our automated parameter, and it's unlinked, but it's really short, right? So it's a really short loop. That's just turning that up, over and over and over and over and over. Great. Let's look at this. Well, last thing. What have we got here? So we've got a volume automation, right? That's just slowly cranking up. Let's look at where that automation is. I got no effects on it. It's in the mixer, right? So it's just in the loop and it's just cranking up right at the end there. All right, let's launch another scene here. All right, So I went on down to the next drum loop with the full one lined up. Let's go down and get this heavy one in there. That's lunch. Little scene. A little noisy there from it. Cool. So we've got some grooves happening. We've got, ah, lot of automation happening, a lot of clip automation. I don't think there's anything over here. Anything in session view, just cool. That's totally fine. Our sorry, Anything in the arrangement view were all in the session view here. So a lot of stuff, A lot of stuff. We talked about getting used in this session, so a really interesting one, A lot of fun stuff, a lot of automation, so check that one out. You have that one in your computer. It's gonna be in those tutorial sessions. Go. Let's move on. 25. WrapUp: Okay, that brings us to the end of part one. Ah, what we did in this class was to examine all of the interface options in able to live. So we did a couple of deconstructions. We walked through the session view of the arrangement view the help you the proof pool, the browser, the clip view envelopes. Um, what else? Lots of other stuff. So, hopefully, uh, with all of the videos I've given you in this class, you understand how to navigate your way around able to. Really? Well, um, now there's still a lot more to go. Of course. So my plan for this, uh, Siris of classes is to make all of these as separate classes that you can jump back and forth and review as needed. Um, so this is the end of part one. And I hope you stick around and go come with me into part two. And part two is gonna be all about recording. We're gonna talk about how to record audio, how to record midi, how to record into clip view session view. Different recording techniques on some of our audio effects will be starting to talk about as well uh, maybe even many effects. We'll see. We're making some our own sessions from scratch. So please come with me If you want to get the full able to live experience and get all the way up to just kind of a master producer by the end of this course will need to stick around going to the next one. So let's press on and do that. 26. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.