Ultimate Ableton Live 9: Part 2 - Recording & Warping | J. Anthony Allen | Skillshare
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Ultimate Ableton Live 9: Part 2 - Recording & Warping

teacher avatar J. Anthony Allen, Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      2:31

    • 2.

      What We Will Cover

      2:18

    • 3.

      Recording Intro

      0:28

    • 4.

      Hardware Needs

      9:32

    • 5.

      Hardware Setup

      5:21

    • 6.

      Mics

      12:57

    • 7.

      Mic Placement

      6:33

    • 8.

      Monitor Modes

      5:04

    • 9.

      Tracking in Arrangement

      8:37

    • 10.

      Multi Tracking in Arrangement

      12:43

    • 11.

      Multi Tracking in Session

      4:15

    • 12.

      Overdubbing Punching In Out

      5:26

    • 13.

      MIDI Recording Overview

      2:44

    • 14.

      MIDI Hardware Needs

      3:19

    • 15.

      MIDI Hardware Setup

      5:25

    • 16.

      How MIDI Works

      6:32

    • 17.

      Recording MIDI in Arrangement View

      3:31

    • 18.

      Recording MIDI in Session View

      1:37

    • 19.

      Quantizing

      6:49

    • 20.

      Warping Intro

      2:19

    • 21.

      What Is Warping

      10:18

    • 22.

      Anchors And Commands

      16:39

    • 23.

      Warp Modes

      3:54

    • 24.

      Granulation

      3:27

    • 25.

      Wrap Up

      1:30

    • 26.

      SkillshareFinalLectureV2

      0:36

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About This Class

For years I've been teaching Ableton Live in the college classroom. As a University Professor, my classes are sought after, and, frankly, expensive. I believe Ableton Live can be learned by anyone, and cost shouldn't be a barrier. This class uses the same outline and syllabus I've used in my college classes for years, at a fraction of the cost.

This is Part 2: Recording and Warping

In this class, we cover everything when it comes to recording in Ableton Live - including Recording techniques in general.

  • Recording Hardware Needs
  • Recording Hardware Setup
  • Microphone Types and Options
  • Microphone Purchasing Tips
  • Microphone Placement
  • Audio Interface Needs
  • Audio Interface Purchasing Tips
  • Single and Multitrack Recording
  • MIDI Hardware Needs
  • MIDI Hardware Purchasing Tips
  • MIDI Setup
  • MIDI Recording
  • ...and much more!

I will be making 6 (six!) complete classes in order to bring you the most comprehensive manual on Ableton Live production techniques ever created. Each class has Sets, sessions, and experiments for you to try on your own and follow along with.

And of course, once you sign up any part, you automatically get huge discounts for all the upcoming parts (the next 5!) of this class.

You will not have another opportunity to learn Ableton Live in a more comprehensive way that this. Start here.

J. Anthony Allen is an Ableton Certified Trainer and a Ph.D. in Music Composition and master of Electronic Sounds. His music has been heard internationally in film, radio, video games, and industrial sound, as well as the concert hall and theater.

He currently is a professor at Augsburg University and the CEO of Slam Academy in Minneapolis.

Praise for other classes by J. Anthony Allen:

  • "Dr Allen does it again with his music theory for electronic musicians series. This course really opened up everything I learned from the 1st section and now I understand more about the composition side of things for music. I highly highly recommend this course to anyone!!! Really opened my eyes to many things I wasn't aware of."

  • "The Best Teacher Ever, who makes you understand the ins & outs of Music Theory by all mean without giving what you don't want to know."

  • "I have never had any formal training in music at all. Trying to learn all the notes and how everything translated was a serious challenge. After going through this class, Dr. J has totally brought down the barriers. The content was very useful and was easy to grasp for me."

Meet Your Teacher

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J. Anthony Allen

Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Teacher

Dr. J. Anthony Allen is a distinguished composer, producer, educator, and innovator whose multifaceted career spans various musical disciplines. Born in Michigan and based in Minneapolis, Dr. Allen has composed orchestral works, produced acclaimed dance music, and through his entrepreneurship projects, he has educated over a million students worldwide in music theory and electronic music production.

Dr. Allen's musical influence is global, with compositions performed across Europe, North America, and Asia. His versatility is evident in works ranging from Minnesota Orchestra performances to Netflix soundtracks. Beyond creation, Dr. Allen is committed to revolutionizing music education for the 21st century. In 2011, he founded Slam Academy, an electronic music school aimed... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Hey, everyone. Welcome, Teoh Ultimate able to live Volume two or class to recording and warping. So we're gonna be covering in this class is all things recording and all things working. So basically, we have this class divided up into three big chunks. First Chunk is about audio recording, so we're going to talk a lot about some non able to stuff. But you'll thank me later. Um, the non Mableton stuff is gonna be like, Ah, what equipment do you need to do? Good recording. What? What should you look for when you're selecting microphones? Even some stuff about placing microphones for doing recording. Um, and I really designed it. That section of the class and kind of the whole class Not for the person who has a big recording studio, but more of the home recordist eso where you've got the budget to maybe buy one microphone . Ah, and in audio interface. And if you don't want an audio interfaces, then you really should stick around because it's one of the most important elements of your studio that no one knows about that no one really talks about. So you need to know what that is. Ah, and we'll spend a good amount of time talking about it and microphones and all the good stuff. Part two of the classes. We're gonna talk about MIDI recordings. So also well, in that chunk will talk about the hardware needs, what you need to do midi recording and why we care about money recording its ah, really essential tool for production. Um, and then in the third chunk, we're gonna talk about warping, which is able to live super powerful engine that lets us change time in an audio file. It does quite a bit more than that, but that's kind of the surface level of what it does. You will find out more about what it does when you come inside to the class, so please join us in the inside. It's gonna be a lot of fun. You're gonna learn a lot about recording. And if you already know a bit about recording, you're gonna hear some of my tips on recording and using able to live for recording. So without further ado, let's jump into the class and get started 2. What We Will Cover: Okay. Hey, everyone, welcome to a built in to where we're gonna focus on all things recording with a built in. Now, in this class, we are going to be focusing on primarily to different kinds of recording we can do. We can record audio and weaken record midi, and that requires a bit of an explanation on what Midi is, um, which I think will be able to spend a lot of time on in this class. Midi is like using synthesizers using anything like that. Ah, in this overview video, I'm not gonna go into great detail. We'll get to it as it comes. We've got plenty of time in this class, but, um, midi means we're gonna play a synthesizer in able tense. We're gonna be recording it, but many works a little bit different than audio. Actually, I take that back. It works a lot different than audio, so Ah, it's quite a bit different. Um, the main thing that most people think about when they hear recording is recording audio, like in the same way that I'm recording my voice right now. I'm talking into a microphone. It's being processed by another piece of gear and that's going into my computer, which is Ah, then writing it as digital information so I could record straight into a Bolton. In this case, I'm recording into a different program, which is also capturing my screen and everything. Um, but I'm gonna walk you through how to do some recording, some audio recording, some tips and tricks and also how to do it in arrangement, view and session view. So you saw this Perhaps in the first, uh, able to in course, that I did the able to one course, and I'll do it in a little bit more detail here, so that was just kind of an overview. But here, we're going to really be talking about recording, and then we'll go into recording media as well. And possibly some fun ways. You can combine the two to do some interesting and wild stuff with making a sampler out of your own voice and things like that. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna talk about is the basic needs of your recordings set up. There's some hardware things you're gonna wanna have if you don't already. And these things are things were good toe have. But um, not always required. Ah, when you're recording. But we'll talk about that in the next video. So let's just get right to it. Let's start with our our hardware needs in the next video. 3. Recording Intro: Okay, um, we're about to talk about recording, so we're gonna talk about the hardware, needs the hardware, set up some of the software needs. Saw a lot of things outside of able to live that we need to know to get all set up. We're also gonna talk in this section about microphone placement, like just a little bit. Um, microphones. Ah, and some other things you'll want to consider when you're getting ready to record using able to live. So let's dive right in. 4. Hardware Needs: So let's get started. By talking about the hardware, you will need to do some recording. Now, this could go into ah whole, you know, semester long class. And it has before for me. So Ah, we're just kind of going to kind of ripped through the main components you need. Um, the main things you need that you probably know about are obviously a computer able to live things like that. Um, and a microphone right in a microphone. There's one other piece of the puzzle that you need is Well, um, that you might not think about. It's not so transparent. So let's talk about microphones first. Um, so I have Ah, I have with me here. Ah, slight assortment of microphones. Um, here is this is one of these blue things. This is Ah, USB microphone. Not so good. Ah, perfectly fine for, like, recording dialogue and like, just talking and things like that. Um, but for doing any kind of professional audio recording, you want to be sure that you're not really using something that's USB on the back. You want something that has an actual microphone output? This three pronged thing is called an XLR cable or an XLR output, and you'll need a cable that is an XLR cable. It looks like this on one side and this on the other. So it has this three pronged Ah thing. Um, the reason you want that kind of goes into this extra little piece of hardware that you may not have thought about yet. So let's talk about that, and then we will jump back to microphones, and this will all make sense. Um, the reason is, ah, professional microphone uses this kind of this XLR connector, right? So if you look around on your computer right now, find me the spot where you can plug one of these in. You can't, right? There is no connection. There's no XLR input on your computer. There is Not now. And there never was. I don't think Ah, maybe some bizarre computer did back in the day. Um, but you will not be able to plug us in your computer. And the reason is this carries an analog signal from your microphone down the cable. And then but your computer needs a digital signal, right? Your computer needs to accept digital information, so Ah, we need something that converts an analog signal to a digital signal. An analog to digital converter, if you will. That's actually what we call them a D converter A. D. C. Um, these kinds of microphones are an analog microphone. You can talk into it, and the converter is all built into here, which means that it's kind of a cheap converter, and these converters can be important. They are the things that change the way. Change the sound from an analog signal to a digital signal so you can lose a lot of quality in that conversion. So these ones that that are doing the conversion right inside the microphone are going to be kind of lower quality converters. Um, which again can be fined for something like dialogue. So you need a more robust converter. Now your computer has a converter in it. You can do. Your computer has a microphone. Um, it might be kind of hidden from you, but you know, if you can use Skype or anything like that, you can talk into it, and it can record it right, or it can transmit it through Skype. So there is a converter in there, but it's not a pro quality. So, um, what we do is we use these external pieces of hardware that are converters. So I have actually two of them here. One of them I'm using. So let me just kind of show you how this works. I have basically to hold separate setups here in my little home studio. So I have my main studio configuration, which is over there, which I'm not using it all to make this video. And over here, I have a laptop. Ah, microphone and a converter. That's what I need to do. Ah, to record this class because this microphone is plugged into a converter, which is then plugged into the computer, which is recording the sound. So I'm gonna I hope this works. I'm going to switch over to using my phone to record the next little blurb here just so I could walk you around a little bit more. I'm kind of tethered down right here and show you one of these converters and how it works . So I'm gonna try that. Okay, here we are. Um uh, this is me sitting in front of a computer. You were just here and now you're here So I'm just gonna, like, take a step back and show you how I'm set up here. So basically, I have ah, laptop. And this is how I do all of these videos have a laptop. I have a microphone. So here is my microphone. It's just this is Ah ah Beta 58. It's a sure it's kind of a slightly different version of the SM 58. You really need to know that. But it's a very solid microphone. Um, then I'm going down into here, and this is the interface we're talking about. This is called a mo to ultra light. Motive is the name of the company. Ultra light is the model. So here's my microphone coming in right here, and I can plug a couple more microphones into the back of it. And out of this comes USB, which is right here, and that is what does the conversion this box, Um, so I can plug microphones into that. I can plug several microphones into that, and I can also plugs speakers into that so it does the other conversion as well, which is giving me good quality audio out of my computer. So microphones go in. I can adjust some levels there and then it goes into the computer and the conversion is already done right there. Now if I look at my main studio set up here, I have a big mixer here and you might think that the mixer is where it something's happening. But it's not. None of the digital conversion happens in the mixer. This is just routing analog signals. These air all analog signals because they're either XLR cables or instrument cables were just routing different sounds. My actual digital conversion is happening over here in this box. This is a motew traveler, and this is kind of an older model, but it's just been really solid to me, so I really love it. I can play eight microphones into this into the back of it is where you actually put him in , and I could see the levels of each microphone right here. I can adjust. Um, I can see what's coming out right here. These are the outputs. By placing music should be able to see something coming out of it. There we are, some really quiet coming up. Um, it's pause that and so that is my conversion right there, and we go out of this. This is actually goes out FireWire because it's kind of old and into my computer, which is all the way over here and down there. Um, so many things. You need one of these boxes. Now, I'm sure you're probably getting seasick from me jumping all over the place, Um, with this camera. So let's go back into, uh, the screen world now. Okay, now we're back. Hopefully, that was useful. Um, it might be a little shaky, but I really wanted to show you kind of how it set up in here. So that box, um, it's called AnAnd analog to digital converter. It's also a digital to analog converter, like I mentioned. And the kind of colloquial term we use for all of those things is an audio interface. That means that it's a dac digital analog converter and an analog to digital converter in a D. C. So we call it an audio interface. So if you're gonna get one of these things, look him up online. Both of the ones that I have are made by a company called Motew, um, which I love motew stuff Ah, I don't work for them. I have no real allegiance to them. But, um, I've been using their audio interfaces for a long time and have been really happy with them . I think they're really solid. Um, price ranges are probably 600 to $1000 or somewhere in there, so they're kind of in the upper tier. But, um, these audio interfaces can get really expensive and really cheap. You can get some ah, less expensive ones. That also worked pretty well. So M audio is a company that makes some pretty decent ones. Um, the sapphire one. That's another company. Those ones are pretty good and somewhere less interesting. They're less good than mo, too, but still very solid. So that is an audio interface. That's how you can plug a microphone into your computer. And it does that digital conversion for you at a very high quality. So to wrap up here, the hardware that we need is our computer and all that good stuff. We need a microphone of some kind, maybe many microphones, depending on what you're gonna do. Um, and a audio interface to do the conversion for you. Okay, so we're gonna talk. Ah, I think talking about microphones requires a little bit more explanation. So we'll talk a little bit more about microphones in a minute, but first we'll talk about setting some of this stuff up. 5. Hardware Setup: So when it comes to hardware set up that we need, really, we just need, um to kind of walk through everything I did. Um, microphone goes into the audio interface audio interface plugs in with either a USB or FireWire or, um, more commonly, coming up would be a thunderbolt. Um, plug some kind of Ah, you know, digital cable like that. Sending data, not an audio cable. Um, aside from that, the one thing I really wanted to point out is that all audio interfaces are gonna need to have some kind of driver. So you're probably gonna have to install something in your computer when you get one of these things. Um and ah, they could be battered. Good. It used to be, you know, speaking like completely like, frankly, here. It used to be that m audio. Ah, gear audio interfaces socked. They suck so bad because the driver was really bad. Um, the hardware was okay, but the driver was just really annoying. So the driver is the thing that talks to your It's a piece of software, and it talks to your anything that's really plugged into your computer. So, like, ah, like your mind if you're using a mouse that's not part of a laptop, that's like a separate thing. There's a driver for your mouse. It's built into the operating system, so you never see it. But there's some kind of piece of software that knows how to talk to whatever is coming in from anything you plug into your computer so the audio interfaces need to have a driver. Um, some of them are built into your operating system, depending on what you're using, some of them won't be with the motew stuff. You have to download and install something. You can find it online really quickly. It looks like this. It actually opens every time I plug it in, you know, doesn't look like much at all. Ah, and you can actually close it just fine and it doesn't do anything, Um, but it basically is doing a lot in the background. I should say it's not not doing anything. It's doing a lot, but the the ah, I m audio one. It used to lose track of the hardware all the time, so you would be using it, and then all of a sudden you're software didn't know it didn't know where to go. Um, what to where that piece of hardware was. And so you couldn't get access to your microphones anymore. You need to have to reboot your computer all the time. I was disappearing. Um, I've heard it's much better since then. I kind of gave up on him audio stuff because of that. But, um, I've heard that it's gotten a lot better, so maybe I'm all your stuff is OK, but that was a big problem for a while where I would be using something, even look, a live situation. You know, all of a sudden you've got no sound because the driver failed. So, uh, there might be some set up stuff you need to do with the driver, but probably not. Um, it's pretty much plug and play at this point. So let's talk a little bit about this software set up in a Bolton. When you're doing one of these things with an audio interface, you need to be sure and set it up. So let's go to Preferences. Um, and then here in the audio tab of our preferences window is where we have the most important thing for this so audio input device is either the built in or it also lists the MO to ultra light that it sees. I'm not going to use the MO to ultra light right now. And the reason for that is because, um, I think that might screw up my screen capture recording because the screen capture software is using that, and I don't want to confuse it by having able to use it. Also, it might be fine now that I think about it, um, to select it. But I'm just gonna leave it not selected. So my input device is the MO to ultra light. Ah, my output device. Basically, what are my speakers plugged into? Ah, I could set to also the moto ultralight or the built in out foot if I just want to plug headphones. These can be separate things or the both the same thing. So they could both be set to Motew, or they could be set to totally separate things. Ah, you can configure your inputs and your outputs if you want. I'm using the I'm set up right now with the built in microphone. So it's just letting me dio Ah, the one and two. But, you know, I could turn that off. Turn that off. And now it says there's nothing, you know, set up for an input. So we don't do that. I'm gonna cancel that. Um, so, yeah, just watch out for just be sure your set up here as your input device is set to the motew ultra light or whatever your piece of hardware is what will show up there. Ah, and the driver of the hardware is what tells able tend to put that piece of hardware in this list. So that's important. Otherwise, we could also set up our sampling right here if we want, You know, our buffer size and things like that. Things we talked about in the first class, but now they've become even more important. So be sure you're configured correctly here with your audio interface so that your microphones air coming through. Ah, and then you will see them coming in to any audio track. Ah, that's armed. Are not armed a record, but is set up Teoh to receive an audio signal. Okay, now that we have our interface set up and we know what we're talking about with interfaces , let's talk about microphones just a little bit 6. Mics: So let's talk about microphones now. Like many other topics that we're covering in this section, I could do a whole class just on, you know, microphone types and how to use microphones, all that stuff. So we're going to kind of flash through a couple important concepts. If you already know about microphones, skip over this video. It's totally fine. If you don't know about microphones, this is gonna give you, ah, quick overview of some things to look for. Ah, when you are ah, selecting microphones in the next video, we'll talk about placing microphones. Um, so basically, there are a few different kinds of microphones. There are a lot of different microphones you can get, and you can spend anywhere between 100 bucks and an insane amount of money at the upper limit. Um, so let's. But those are all just different brands and different types, and the microphones tend to be kind of pay for what you get in my experience. So when you pay for a really expensive microphone, you tend to get a really good sound. But there are some options where you can get a really good sound at a really inexpensive are relatively inexpensive price. Um, let's just talk about the kind of two main categories of microphones to different kinds of microphones I think you're gonna be wanting to work with. There's a couple other kinds of microphones that don't fall into either of these two categories, but most microphones do, Um, and they are dynamic microphones and condenser microphones. Let's talk about dynamic microphones first. Ah, dynamic microphones are what I'm using right now. What my voices coming through is a dynamic mic dynamic. Mikes are, um, kind of like the way I think about these. A lot of the time in the way I explain the students, um is if you asked someone to draw a picture of a microphone, they're going to draw a dynamic. Like, um, it's the kind of image of a microphone that you expect. Ah, what that means is, um, well, I guess it doesn't really mean anything that you could draw a picture of it, But, um, they're probably more common than condensers. Well, they're definitely more common for condensers in a live setting. Um, when you go to a bar and you see a band, that the singer is almost for sure using a dynamic microphone. There's probably a handful of dynamic microphones on that stage. There's maybe a few on the drum kit. Also, dynamic mic phones are tough. You can then get thrown around. Um, they've got pretty solid components in them. Ah, you shouldn't throw him around just for the fun of it, because they can break. But, ah, there. They're good and they're solid. They're tough. And what that means is that, um they can also take a dynamic kind of beating. And by dynamic beating, I mean that if I ah, if I was to talk really quiet right now, and then I was to talk really loud. Um, I'm not gonna like, pop the diaphragm on this thing like it's gonna be able to handle dealing with me screaming into it. 40. Okay, Now, whether my software's ah set up to handle that is a different story. But the microphones gonna be just fine for those extremes of volume. Um, dynamic mic phones are also relatively cheaper. Um, there on the more inexpensive side. Ah, as compared to condenser microphones. Um, if you are in the market for Mike phone, um, a good all around it can do kind of everything. Microphone. It's a dynamic microphone, and it's called the Shure SM 57 and sure is spelled as h u R E. The Shure Sm 57 or the Shure Sm 58 is it is kind of like a standard go to microphone for everything. We use it for vocals. We use it for kick drums. We use it for all kind of stuff. It's not the microphone that's gonna be the most valuable in the recording studio, although I still use 57 50 eight's in a recording studio for things like vocals, drums, I use a couple of them. They're relatively inexpensive. And if I would say, if you can Onley by one microphone, get yourself one of those. It's basically what I'm using right now for my voice. I'm using, like a kind of newish or slight variation of it. Um, is this one's called a beta 58? So it's a Shure sm 58 but it's like a side version of its slightly different. But it's basically that, ah, 58 Um, so they're very common. So those air dynamic microphones, key points of dynamic microphones, relatively inexpensive um, they're robust. Um, and they can take this kind of dynamic. Ah, beating. They can get loud that can handle someone screaming into him. They can handle someone with spring into him just fine. Now, on the on the flip side of that, we have condenser microphones. Condenser microphones tend to be much more expensive. While I should say much more expensive, there are some inexpensive condenser microphones. Um, condenser microphones are more fragile. They're more sensitive. Um, and they're more fine tuned to get more Ah, color in your sound. More, um, subtleties in your sound. So for recording their much better for live music, they're not all that great. Um, because they're fragile. Um, because especially as a vocal mic and yell on stage, if I started screaming in, it could break the thing. Um, not super likely, but it's possible. So condenser mikes are better for recording studio If you're trying to buy. If you've got the budget to buy an arsenal of microphones, get it could get a dynamic, might get it, get a shure sm 57 58 maybe two of them, and then get an array of condenser mikes. They're gonna be much better for you in the recording studio. Um, much more sensitive. Now, the biggest difference here is that condenser mikes need power. Um, dynamic Mike's don't need any kind of external power, but condenser mikes do. So if you look at your audio interface, which we now know about, um or if you're using a pre amp um, which a pre amp. Is like another thing you can plug your microphone into to give it to give it power, first of all, but also to give it some a little more sweetening of the sound some juice that it might need. But assuming we're not using a pre amp, we're just going directly into our audio interface with a condenser microphone. You can you'll need to send power back to that microphone. No, it doesn't mean you plug it into the wall. What it means is that through that XLR cable that we looked at in the previous video, well ah, we're basically gonna send some voltage back up through that cable to power the microphone so it comes through them like cable, but you've got to turn it down. So on your audio interface somewhere, depending on which audio interface you're using. There's a button that either says Phantom Power is the kind of cool, sexy name for what we call that the un cool way to call it. What you also see on stuff is it might just say 48 v for 48 volts or plus 48 V or something like that. So you've got to turn that on. If you're using a condenser microphone, most audio interfaces have the ability to send it. Send that voltage up to the microphone. You don't need that void voltage in a dynamic microphone. And the question I always get asked is, if you send Phantom power to a dynamic microphone, will you hurt the microphone? The answer is, I'm pretty sure. No, but I've heard people say other things, I think. I mean, I think you will hurt the microphone, but I think a dynamic microphone can take it anyway, back to condenser microphones. So I'm gonna try, look screaming here. I have a condenser microphone here. This is I just don't really cheap one, um, the one I showed you in the last video, and I held up a microphone that was not the 58. This is looks really cheap Road. And he won a don't even know where I got it. Um, I'm gonna try switching out the microphone I'm talking into right now and see what happens . So here we go. So I'm gonna have to unplug this microphone, and then I'm going to turn on phantom power after I plug in my new microphone. So let's try it. Okay, check 12 Wow, that looks really hot on my meter. I can't really tell what's going into, um, the video capturing software. It doesn't give me an onscreen meter, but this is through that road microphone. It looks really loud. So I'm going to step back a little bit now. This isn't the best example of the difference in the like phones. It's just dialogue, right? Like I'm just talking. But maybe this sounds different. I won't know until I go back and listen to this video, but yeah, so I just had to turn on phantom power, and now I'm using a condenser microphone. One thing that I'm noticing is that just by looking at the meter, it's wave more delicate, like the this 58 that I was using the dynamic microphone. I can pretty much stick my mouth right on it. And this Start talking. Uh, this one. I'm actually about four feet away from right now, and every time I leave the meter, I'm like, wanting to move back even farther because it looks like it's getting really loud, but we'll see how it goes. So I just switched back over to my other mike phone so that I know I'm at least getting a decent signal. Okay, now we're back in the beta 58 so that's kind of a quick overview of microphones. You could go to even go online, find out 1,000,000,000 microphones. But the main thing to look out for is a dynamic. Mike is a condenser, Mike, um, And then to figure out what your budget is, um, for I mean, if you can afford to have a big arsenal of microphones than, you know, go to ah, go to a shop, start playing around with the microphones, listen to what they sound like, find something that's got the warmth that you want. And I guess here's an even bigger, um, thing that will help you out, learn how to read the diagrams for each microphone. I can't really go into it in this class, but there's a frequency diagram. Um, that you confined for most microphones that I'll tell you what its frequency response is. Look, those up. You know, you can just google it and figure out how to read those, um, and find out what it is you're looking for and then find a microphone that has that frequency response. Look it up. Um, it's much more complicated than I can go in here. Another thing to look for and microphones is the pick up pattern. Uhm, some microphones, especially condenser microphones, have multiple pick up patterns. Um, they have a look, a little switch on him where you can set the pick up pattern. Um, dynamic microphones don't. That's only in condenser microphones. Maybe some dynamic like friends do, but I kind of doubt it. The different pick up patterns is kind of like this area around the microphone that it picks up as especially well. The words you'll see associated with pick up patterns are words like omni or omni directional buy or bi directional, cardio oId hyper cardio oId or sometimes shotgun on what those mean is just kind of the, um the way they look, I'll throw a little diagram here up on the screen and, ah, like looking at, you know, like this Omni directional one just means that it picks up sound all around it like the microphones in a bubble, the cardio and one means that it's basically picking up sound in the shape of art. Um, so sound behind the microphone isn't gonna get picked up all that well, So that's what you might want in a lot of situations, right? You might not want a nominee microphone that picks up sound behind the microphone. You might only want a cardio. Anyway, look at these pick up patterns. That's another thing that will help you choose which microphone Ah, you want to use? Okay, enough of microphones. Let's talk about placing your microphones and we got to get back to able to, because I'm Ah, I'm itching to get back into able 10 and start actually recording some stuff. So let's go through this stuff 7. Mic Placement: Okay, um, we gotta talk a little bit about microphone placement. No, I can't walk you through the ideal placement situation for every every instrument, every room, every situation. So what? You what you will want to do and what a really good thing to do is just look up online. You can find people charting out how they like different instruments. You know, where their best spot to place the microphone is for the different instruments. Check those out. Um, the kind of big piece of advice I want to give you is whenever possible. Don't let your ah sound project into a reflective surface. So let me parse that statement out for you. So let's say I'm playing it. Let's say I'm singing. That's probably easier to relate to. Let's say I'm singing. And, um, I'm gonna put a microphone in front of myself to saying, and then I'm going Teoh, um, stand up close toe to a wall like a solid, you know, the wall of my studio. Um, so I'm looking like a pretty much straight into the wall, the microphones in between me and the wall. This is not good. Um, because that wall is gonna bounce the sound right back into the microphone. So the sound is gonna come into the microphone because it's gonna come straight out of my voice and into the microphone. That's gonna be good. That's the sound I want. And then it's gonna bounce against the wall and is gonna come back into the microphone again. That's what I don't want. Um, we don't want those bounce herbal sounds. So what we want to do is, first of all, don't get real close to anything on the opposite side of the microphone. But if you are singing into something, make sure it's a non reflective surface. So, um, what that means? The easiest way to think about that is imagine whatever you're singing into, throw a rubber ball at it. And if that rubber ball is gonna bounce straight back at you, so is the sound. So, um, the two ways we avoid that sound bouncing right back at us is really soft surfaces, and they're different. That's kind of that's a really general way to say that. But softer things like big velvet curtains or things like that. You know, it's if you imagine throwing that rubber ball at it. It's basically going to absorb the impact for the bonds fall of the ground. So and SoundWorks really similar. Um, aside from the soft surface, the other way to go is a really jagged surface. So that ball. So if we imagine, like, it's this, like zigzag e texture and I throw that ball at it, the ball is gonna bounce off it. But it's not gonna bounce right back at me. It's gonna bounce all over the place. Um, that is even a little better than just a flat wall thought walls sound's gonna bounce right back at me. So what you can do is basically, don't stand up against the wall. Don't put your source your subject or your sound making thing, whether it's a singer, trumpet player or something like that facing a wall. Um, unless it is, um, a sound absorption material, something that's not gonna let that sound bounce right back at us. Um, ideally, we kind of, um, we put something right on the other side of the microphone that is actually going to absorb that sound so we might get a panel of, um, you know, big, thick fabric and put it on the other side of the microphone just to like I'm immediately absorbed that sound to keep it from bouncing around. I have in my studio this stuff. It's called pressed fiberglass, and I have it wrapped in canvas. Black canvas pressed fiberglass is like the same stuff you put in your walls to keep you warm, except it's smushed really tight. Um, it's really good. Ah, sound absorption material. So I use that there's lots of every kind of foam you can buy. It's usually overly expensive. Um, people use egg cartons, they work. It looks kind of weird, but, um, gardens work any kind of soft fabric or anything like that. So keeping some of that stuff around, just Teoh, make sure you're not getting too reflective in the microphone. You know, the sound isn't bouncing back into the microphone, and you're only capturing as much of this source as possible. So the source in this case is the sound coming out of my mouth, not the sound bouncing off the wall in coming back. That's what we want to get rid of so soft stuff. Jagged stuff, soft and jagged stuff like foam works really well uh, used the rubber ball analogy. If you can throw a rubber ball at it, it's gonna bounce back at you. So is the sound. So watch out for that stuff. Um, other. Oh, and one other thing, I want to point out one thing that's so much overlooked. Ah, in my students that I find all the time pop filter pop filter is I'm using one. It's basically like this big piece of foam over the microphone. So, um, what a pop filter does is it captures, especially in dialogue. It's important, Um, it captures big bursts of of, ah, wind that come out of my mouth. So when I say pop top, you don't get this big like, you know, burst of sound from the P right, cause there's like, a whole bunch of air coming out of my mouth and see the Pete and that can clip the microphone. I'm gonna take the pot, filter off, do that Same thing, Case another pop filters off. Probably sounds more or less the same about when I do that same thing, pop pop. It probably just made a big, loud sound. When I did that p sound put the pop filter back on, and it worked well, you could buy these pop filters at any kind of music store. It's basically literally a piece of foam wrapped around a microphone. It doesn't really slow down the sound that supposed to get through. Hardly at all. Um, it's not noticeable if you don't have a pop filter, put a soccer on your microphone. Um, just wrapped a microphone and a sock, The sound you want to go through it and it'll ah, stop those big bursts of air from doing it. Try to use a clean socks because it makes gonna be If you're doing vocals, it's gonna be kind of close to your nose. So, um, you can create some awkward moments if you put a dirty sock over your microphone. Okay, I think that's all I wanted to say about that. Let's get back into a Bolton and, um, start working with setting ourselves up to ah record by looking at our monitor modes 8. Monitor Modes: Okay, One last thing before we get into, um, setting up our whole session to record as I want to make a special point about monitor modes because this can get you into a lot of trouble. Um, monitor modes air down here. So what these monitor modes do is the way to think about this is think about, um do I need to hear it? Well, I'm recording it. Ah, Think of monitor as a play through button doh. I wanted Teoh route through the track and then come right back out. The speakers. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. Um so let me just see if I can set this up a little cleaner going to get rid of this muddy track. Get rid of that many track just by hitting the delete key. Let's even get rid of this other audio track. So I just got one here. One nice big track. Okay, so this is using my internal microphone. Um, that's what this external in is doing. Its listening to my internal. So if I tap on my computer, you'll see it right? It's not using the same microphone that I'm using, So I have a kind of a weird set up here. Um, the microphone I'm using to talk into is routed into my screen capture software. Um, so it's using the Internet like phone and this The output is the, um, internal speakers. So if I go here to audio input device built in microphone, right, Not the motew. Right. So I'm built in microphone and my output is built in output. What that means is that if I tell this to play through, um, you know everything you get in the microphone play out. It's going to create instant feedback. So we wouldn't want to do that in this case, right? So if I say monitor in, monitor the input, right, so everything that comes in, spit it back out. It's gonna create feedback in a heartbeat just to prove it. Oops, I'm and there waas because everything that comes in is going out through the speakers, which is hearing the input which is sending it out to the speakers. It's a cycle that's feedback. So I don't want the monitor input here. Now, why would I want that? Ah, the reason I would want that is, let's say I wanted to hear what was being recorded. Um, and in a situation just like this, all I'd really have to do to remedy the feedback situation is put on headphones. If I put on headphones, it's not gonna feedback. And then I can hear what's being recorded. I could hear the tone of my voice. I could hear, um, if I was recording. Ah, you know, a guitar. I would be able to hear the tone that's coming in, um, and the levels and and adjust it. So I would want to hear it in that case so I could set the monitor to end just to hear what's coming into the track. Right. Um, but in this case, since I don't have headphones hooked up, um, I'm not in a separate room from where the microphone is. That would also solve this situation. By the way, if the microphone was in a separate room, um, I'm gonna leave monitored off. Now there's this auto mode also right? So I can safely turn that on right now, actually, because what auto does is it basically says, um, the monitor mode is gonna be controlled by the record setting. So when auto is on that means were Ah, we're basically not monitoring. So monitoring is off until we arm the tractor record, and then monitoring turns on so it it basically moves the, um the control of the monitoring to our armed record. So if I turn on this tractor record right now again, we're gonna get instant feedback, right? So, um, because it's going to start monitoring. So those are your three monitor moans. They're important because if you if you don't pay attention to them, you're going to get feedback. Ah, and that can be painful and dangerous, um, to your speakers, actually, so we want to avoid that as much as we can. So when you're fiddling around with microphones, just turn your monitoring Modoff. Ah, and plugging all you mike phones, get everything set up and then decide what you want to do with your monitoring. Especially if you're in a one room studio. Um, you're not wearing headphones, things like that. Just leave it off and then think about how to set it up for each individual track that you want to dio. But just remember, if you want to hear what's being recorded while it's being recorded, um you've gotta have the monitoring to either in or auto. If you don't need to hear it or can't hear it because it'll cause feedback. Leave it on off Ah, all the time. And then you'll be able to listen to the track played back once it's recorded just fine. Even when it's on off, you'll be able to listen to the playback and it won't matter. So those are our monitoring mode, so keep an eye out for those now that you know how they work. So now next, let's get into actual recording. We're gonna start with arrangement view and let's jump to a new video for that. 9. Tracking in Arrangement: So here's what we're gonna do in this video. We're gonna set up a whole session, um, to do some recording of a live instrument. Uh, I'm gonna do it twice. I'm gonna do it first with just a single microphone and walk you through it that way, and then I'm going to Ah, we'll set up a second microphone. We will record both at once. Um, so you can see what it what it looks like to do. Ah, bigger session. Um, Now, we only have me here, So, um, we'll see how that works out. Um, Okay, So the first thing I did is what I already did. As I went into my preferences, and in between making those videos, I experimented with this a little bit. And, Aiken, I got it to work now. So, um, I've set my input device to be the motew. So the microphone that I'm talking into for the screen capture recording is also using, um, the same input device that able to his recording on. So I'm not anymore. Using my internal microphone of my laptop, Mableton is now listening to the same microphone that I'm using for the screen capture software. So it's great. So, um, so let's set up. Let's record myself talking into, um, able to So the were pretty much all set to go. Right? We're in session view. Ah, my monitor mode is set off, and I'm gonna leave it that way, right? Because I'm not plugged into headphones and I'm in the same room, and it's gonna feedback if I do anything else in my particular case here. So I have set up. I'm on external in which is this microphone? Um, Channel One, which is designated on the my audio interface. I am plugged into Channel one, which is what we're listening to their now. I need to, and I'm armed to record. Right. So, um, I've pressed this button. If I don't have this pressed, nothing is going into that track, right? We don't see any signal here. Um, it's coming here, but it's not set up to record on it. So I click this and that gets it armed record. So it's already so when I hit the record button up here, it's going to start recording to the track that's armed to record, right? So that one's armed a record. Um we can see the signal coming in here. It's great out. The reason it's gray and not green like it is here is because the monitor mode it's saying there are stairs signal coming in here, but you're not hearing it. That's what great typically means in a Bolton like this is this is working, but you're not gonna hear it because your monitor motors set off in this case. That's why that's happening. Um, that's fine. That's the way we want it, actually. Right. We don't want to hear that coming through. We'll hear it when we play it back. Okay, so I monitor Motus set up. Everything is set up now in the next thing I need to do is I need to check on my levels, right, cause this is important. We need to be sure that we're not going to loud. So we get too loud in our microphone. What happens is we do a thing called clipping, and when we clip, we make distortion on the microphone. Gets too loud so we can see it here. We can see what's happening. What? The signals coming in. We can see the signal here, and we want this to be right about where it is. Um, we don't want it to be hitting the top here, and this will One will turn red when we see it. Ah, little bit better Way to see this is actually to go over to session view. So if I the tab key just cause we get a bigger mixer here. So now we can see it coming in. And if I get really loud and we can see it turn red, we don't want to turn red. Red means it's bad. So we want to make sure that the level coming in isn't too loud and there's a couple different ways I can adjust this. The best way is to one is just the position of the microphone. So, um, making sure I'm not getting like right up on top of it and talking, and I'm backing off just a little bit. Another thing is I have a trim knob and an input knob on my audio interface that I can turn down a little bit, so that makes the whole thing quieter. Or I could turn it up if it's too quiet. Um, but basically we want this to sit right in in this area. That zero mark right here. That's the absolute top of where we want to go. We've got a little bit more. We can go before it really clips and distorts, but we want to stay underneath that zero. So right about where we are is great. We don't want to be too quiet. We don't want to be too loud. Right in the middle is just right. So let's go back over. We've got a good signal. Um, so now that we've got that set up, I'm gonna put the cursor where I wanted to play head just by clicking somewhere. Um, if I hit stop up here. I'm gonna go back to the beginning. I always had stopped, like, three times, just out of force of habit. And then if I want to record, I'm just gonna hit record. Now, remember that I'm gonna record onto the track that's armed, which is this one. So I hit record, and now we're recording so we can see the signal coming in. Ah, it's a nice healthy signal. It's not getting too loud. Let's see what happens in that way. Form when it does get too loud. I'm actually going to turn out my trim here a little bit and just crank it. So now we'll see that thing getting all the way to the top. And that is called clipping. Because we see this way form went all the way to the top, and then it got clipped off up here, right? We don't see the tops of the way for him. It's just smashed up against the top there. That means it's clipped. It's clipped off. Ah, and that makes distortion. Okay, I'm gonna stop it. Recording. I can either hit stop here or the space bar. Okay, now we've got it. So we recorded my voice. We've got some nastiness in here, but that's OK. I'm gonna go back to right about here, and I'm gonna hit play. And I remember my monitor mode is still set off. I don't need to change that. Um, once we stop recording, we're not really monitoring anymore. So I could just hit Play is called clipping because we see this way form went all the way to the top, and we've got a nice, clean sound. Um, I could take off the armed record if I wanted to, but I don't really need to. That is called clipping. Ah, that doesn't really matter for for our playback setting here. Okay, so we're good. Let's Let's listen to my clipping thing, Getting all the way to the top. You hear how that's distorting? That's not what we want. You probably heard that when I did it. Actually, I think about it because you're hearing it through Lou through a built in. Um Okay, so that's Ah, number one. Ah, recording just a single microphone. The set up is pretty easy, right? We're all set up to do it in a Bolton. We just got a arm to record. Make sure our level is good and then start the recording happening. I'm playing If I want to record another clip somewhere, I just put the cursor where I want it. Make sure I'm armed to record and started rolling. And now I'm recording another clip onto the same track. If I want to record onto another track, let's make another track so I can go to create audio track or command T. So now I have another audio track. Now, if I hit record right now, we're gonna record under the 1st 1 which I don't want to do. I'm gonna record a secondary part to this. Dialogue will be goofy, but that's OK. So I'm gonna arm this one to record, and it's gonna turn off the 1st 1 because I only have one microphone plugged in. There's only one thing that can be recorded on at once. Now, we'll put in a second thing in a minute, so my level should be about the same. So now I'm gonna record under that track, and I'm gonna hear this track, right? Everything is set up. So this one's gonna play while I record under. This one is called Tech. Tech, Tech, Tech, Tech, Tech Tech is here. Stuff way form went That was confusing to my brain. But now I've got two things happening that is called clip tech. Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech tech is here stuff. Right? Okay, meet um, if I didn't want to hear this one while I was recording this one, I could just meet the track right now. I'm not gonna hear it. And I can record onto the other one without having here The 1st 1 Cool, Right. Okay, So let's talk about recording two microphones at once, and maybe we'll jump to another video for this. Um, just so that we can kind of keep everything separate. So recording a single mike, we can switch between tracks. We can do that all day long. We can make us many tracks is we want I'm record on them. So let's go to another video and talk about recording multiple mikes. 10. Multi Tracking in Arrangement: I am. Okay, let's talk about multi tracking. Now. Um, go back to turning both these on, and I have two microphones set up. Now I have the same microphone have been using. This is my Shure beta 58 um, that I'm talking into and that is plugged into my interface on Channel One. Okay, so my interface can have a couple of microphones into it. This particular interface can have two microphones, and then six more instruments played an instrument, like a guitar cable kind of thing. Um, but it's got to Mike from pre amps built in talking plug two microphones in, um, without doing anything weird, I could get up to eight. And if I really wanted to, um, so here I have microphone. So on Channel one, I'm just gonna rename this. I'm gonna call this my beta 58. And then I also have plugged in into channel to my other condenser microphone from before. So that's that road microphone that I don't really love very much. But it's what I've got here. So I'm gonna call this road the road microphone. Um and that's plugged into Channel two on my interface. So right Now we're looking at Channel One in both tracks. So the level we're seeing here is both Ah, input number one. So what I'm gonna do here is in this one. I'm gonna change it to input number two. Okay, so now I've got two microphones coming in Now. That road is on the other side of the room, so we should be able to hear it if I clap my hands. Right. So there. Now we see it coming in there when I clap my hands, okay? And it's really loud on the first microphone because I'm clocking my hands right in front of the microphone. So now I've got both set up Microphone one. The Beta 58 is on track one, and the road is on track to now. I need to record on both of these at once, so I'm gonna arm this one to record. I'm gonna first make sure my input modes my monitoring moons are off. And let's set its arm the beta 58 to record. So now it's armed or record. And now I gotta rick arm the road to record, and I hit armed record, and it turns off my beta 58. So how can I do in both command? Click. Ah, on both of them. So if I just have one set to record than I command click on the armed record on the other one. And now I've got both armed to record. So now I'm talking into my beta 58 it looks like it's working because I'm watching the signal coming here, and it's great out because our monitoring motors off and that's okay. Okay. I'm gonna zip over to my other microphone and test the level on that one. Okay, I'm on the other side of the room, and my level there is looking pretty small, but this is a more sensitive microphone, so I think I'm gonna leave it right there. That's OK. Okay. I know I'm back on. My beta 58 is kind of funny. Like jumping all over the same room. Okay, so I'm gonna record on both channels, and I'm going to stand somewhere in between the two. Um and, um I do, um Do I have anything that just makes sound in here like acoustic sound? Ah, have a really attitude violin, which I think I'll grab Okay, let's use this. This really attitude violin. Um, I could probably pause the video and tune it, but, um, haven't played this in a while. Um, okay. So I'm gonna stand about equally in between the two microphones. Now, the one thing to note is that the road microphone is actually pointed away from me. So I'm gonna out others turn that so that it's pointed more towards me. And then I'm gonna record both of them, and then we'll listen back and hear the difference between the two. So here we go. I'm gonna arm everything to record and hit Stop so that our cursor goes in the beginning and hit record. Now we're rolling. Okay, Stop that recording and have a look. So what can I tell? Just by looking at his way forms, Aiken tell, um my signal is way low, right? Like it's way too quiet on both microphones. So I'm going to go to my, um, my audio interface. I'm gonna turn up these microphones now. This is gonna probably is gonna make this one the 58 clip while I'm talking turn way up my road microphone. Okay, so now we both clipping like crazy, But let's record again and see if my violin it's a better signal. Okay, let's turn down. Now I can tell that road is way too loud. Um, because it's probably got a lot of noise in it because of how hard I cranked it up. But let's have a listen. So I'm gonna turn my, ah, the armed record off on both of these and I'm gonna solo let's solo just the 58 hear that? Wow, You hear how noisy that is? That's because of how how hard I crank that microphone so that I could stand so far away. The much better thing to do would be to not crank it that loud and stand much closer to the microphone. So let's try fixing that over here, so I'm gonna test my my signal. So this is what's called the signal to noise ratio. It means the louder you turn up the microphone, the more signal you get, the more noise you get. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but I want to keep the microphone down so that I don't boost all that noise that's happening right? So I'm gonna try to re record this. I'm looking at this level. That looks pretty good. So let's try this just for a second. Oops. Okay. Okay. That is a pretty good signal. It could be a little stronger, but it's not that bad. And hopefully it's not nearly as noisy. Let's have a listen. All right, So a lot of that noise is gone, so that's good. So signal to noise ratio, the better signal we get the better recording we're going to get And the less noise. So let's listen to you. This one now, on this one, I This is not gonna be very pretty, Theo. You can actually hear before I start playing the general noise level that it's picking up, which is actually really low. It's not picking up a lot of noise. It's just picking up ambiance of the room, right? And it's still too loud. So let's try that one. I'm gonna try fixing that one. So an arm, this wonder record, and I'm gonna get right up on that microphone and record it to get Okay, so here we go. So that was probably too quiet. I probably should have increased the I should probably turn that, like up a little bit. When I turned it back down, I probably too far. Let's do it one more time just for the fun of it. Crank it up a little bit more and let's let's delete this one and do it right over top of it. Okay? Okay. Now I've recorded both and turned that mike down every quarter, but so I can hear them both. Now, if I turn off solo Oops. I can hear both those. Now, at this point, I recorded them in separate takes. So the Boeing is gonna be different. The pitch should be about saying thing, but I can hear the difference in quality between the two microphones. Right? If I go between them thing, right. So I'm not nearly recording under ideal circumstances, but the main thing I want you to get out of this is number one singles in noise ratio. This is not good signal to noise ratio, and this is even worse. Um, there's just a tone of noise in here, right? Um, that we recorded because the microphone is way loud. Um, secondly, we can record two microphones at once by setting our inputs. Ah, to each individual microphone here and then our and then controller. Yeah, command clicking on the arm to record to arm them both. And that you can do this for us. Many microphones, as your interface can handle. So if your next question is, how many microphones can I record at once? Um, depends on your interface. How many microphones can you plug into it? Um, that's the answer to an extent, just to jump off that a little bit. There is a way to daisy chain interfaces together. So when you go into a big recording studio and they have an audio interface, that they can plug eight microphones into might be the case. But they can record, ah, 24 things at once. It's because they've got four of those interfaces, all connected together so they could record 24 microphones at once. Typically in our situation, we don't need to do that. Um, eight microphones. Pretty typical, but it all depends on your interface. Okay, so there we go. That's how we can do, um, are recording and a lot of basic recording in arrangement view. Let's jump over to session view and look at how it works. There 11. Multi Tracking in Session: Okay, let's walk through how to do some of this stuff in. Ah, session view. Ah, it's really the same Eso. I just kind of want to hit this and make sure that, um, you get it, and then you're with me. Um, let me hit my preferences here. Make sure that my my audio input device went to know device. Ah, and you know, that happens on occasion. That happens in between these two videos from the last one to this one. I restarted a bunch of times because, um, it was having some weird computer problems. And in that process, I unplugged and re plugged in my audio interface. So, um, let's set that back to that. Okay, Now we're back. So I have Midi tracks here and audio tracks here. So I'm gonna get rid of these many tracks because we're not gonna use those. Right now, I have two audio tracks, So down here, I have the same kind of stuff, right? There's my input. Microphone one. Um, everything else here is the same. I've got my monitor modes. I've got everything that I need down here. Is my arm to record? There it is. It's great out because the monitor motives set toe off. The only thing that's really different here is I don't need to go up here to hit record. If I hit record up here, I'm actually gonna be recording to arrangement View. Um, so I'm gonna be recording to this timeline, right? So I don't want to do that. I'm gonna hit record here, so we're gonna record into the clip slot glitch grid. So I've got everything I want everything set up so I can hit record here and now I'm recording into that clip. Now, if I want to go to another clip, I can just hit record on the next one. And on the next down be it's gonna move me into the next clip and so on and so forth. If I want to stop recording, I can either hit the space bar. So I hit the space bar. I've stopped recording. I can also hit Stop Down here. Ah, stop. Over here. There's a lot of different ways I can hit stop space bars the best way. So now I've got these three clips. If I just now hit, play on, one of them is going to start looping it and so on and so forth. If I want to stop recording and so on and so forth. If I want to stop recording so you can see how if if I was, you know, working with a singer and I want to do some improvising or any instrument, you know, as playing with a trumpet player. And I had a mic in front of them. They were improvising, and I wanted to grab little chunks and then loop it. Ah, that is exactly how I would do it. So I can set up instruments, uh, in the same way. Um, I can have multiple microphones set up here where if I had a microphone into my channel to actually just unplugged it, Um but let me put it back in really quick. Okay, Now I have a microphone plugged in to channel two here. So if I arm this one to record, I'm gonna command click to arm it to record. Now I can record over here. Now, let's say I want to record on Lee Mike one. I'm gonna do that right? Onley Mike to I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that. And that started this clip playing, which was great. Um, so I can record each mike individually here by jumping between them in the clip slot grid and recording in that way So you can have a lot of fun this way and make a lot of cool tunes to do a lot of improvising. Do a lot of recording, um, of individual segments of stuff. You could record a whole track this way if you wanted to, you know, just to just to be clear, so you can leave each one of these clips recording for as long as you wanted and record, you know, every take that way. And then you could have this set up to be multiple takes. I've seen people do that. Um, it could be a cool way to work, so Ah, that's tracking and multi tracking in ah, session view versus arrangement view. Everything pretty much works the same, except for how, really? Ah, set a clip in motion to record it right. We don't use the record up here because that's gonna record to arrange review. We use our little clip record buttons that's gonna record each clip one by one. 12. Overdubbing Punching In Out: Okay. I want to talk about overdubbing a little bit. Ah, this is something that comes up a lot. So what we do with overdubbing is basically doing a second pass at something. So let's first get something in there so that we can talk about overdubbing. So, um, I guess I'll do my I'll do my violin again. So here's my my beautiful violin performance. Oops. Okay, gorgeous. You can probably tell I'm not a professional violinist. Um, or even an amateur violinist. Okay, um, so let's deal with this a little bit, so I'm gonna first, I'm gonna chop off my talking right there, so let's just roll this back a little bit. Let's get it to right. They're gonna zoom in a little bit. I could see there's, like, one more word that I said. It's just delete that. Okay, so let's hear what we've got. Okay. Beautiful. Okay, so there's two ways I can overdub here. One is I could just record over it, right? So I could just say right here. I want to re record this section. I'm gonna put the cursor right there. I'm gonna hit, hit record. I'm gonna go. So let's just do it. La la, la, la la There. Okay, so now I've got ah, my violin. And then I jump in yelling la la, la la la la la la, la la Right, So I mean, that was a take over top of it. Um, I've still got the other one. So if I wanted to get rid of this, I could just, you know, command Z and undo it. Or I could delete this by clicking on the clip, delete it, and then I could just drag this back to fill in that missing information. And now you're not even gonna hear this little segment here, right? Because it's all continuous and filled in now so I can go backwards and forwards that way. If I wanted. Now there's a slightly more elegant way to do this. Um, I could overdub using Ah, the punch in punch out technique. And this this goes back to the old when we had to use tape machines to record is where we get this, this terminology where you would play something and if you wanted to punch in, you would do exactly what I just did. Accept. You would have to play and then literally hit the record button while you were playing. And then eso they called it punch like a punch in. And then you'd hit it again, to punch out to stop recording so you could get another take of it. Eventually, tape machines got to be where you would do that with a foot pedal. You would punch in and punch out so that you could do a new take. We have, ah, better way of doing it, but we still call it Punch in punch out. And it's these two buttons up here. So this is punch in. This is punch out right? And that sets up a loop region. Let's make it smaller and let's move it to right here. That's like it may get even smaller. Let's put it right there. Let's say right there, I screwed up, right. So here's I'm going to do. I'm gonna start the cursor back here. I'm gonna hit record. What's gonna happen is it's gonna play all the way through, and when it gets to write in this region, it's gonna record in that region on Lee, and then it's gonna stop recording, right? So it's on lee gonna record right there. It's I'm punching in here and punching out there. That means record punching and start recording. Punch out means stop recording. So as I hit it, So now I'm rolling, I'm rolling, I'm rolling. And now I'm recording and recording. And now enough. Right? And I didn't touch anything while that was happening. So now I get a much smoother thing on now I'm recording and right, so that could be really valuable when you're trying to re record something. Ah, and multiple do multiple takes of something punch right in. Get that note that you didn't get right the first time and then get right back out with the punch in punch out technique and turn that off. Um, and now I'm back to just having this be a loop region if I need it again. Cool. So that is Ah, a couple different ways. You can overdub, um, puncheon techniques punch out. Um, great. So I just wanted to point that out so that should you be trying to do it, you know? Ah, slicker way to do it. I see a lot of people not using the punch in and just trying to overdub by hitting the space bar as fast as they can and then start playing just not the ideal way to do it. Okay, at that, let's move on to the next big section. Ah, which is going to be working on Midi midi recording techniques works quite a bit different . So we're gonna have some fun dealing with some midi sounds in the next chunk, so I will see you there. 13. MIDI Recording Overview: Okay, So when this section we're gonna be talking about midi recording a mini recording works a lot different than audio recording. You may or may not understand, um, the ins and outs of midi. We're gonna be talking a lot about it in this section. So, um, just a kind of dive in on a quick overview midi when we record media were Onley recording, um messages. And it's a little weird to think that way. But, um, what Midi means is, Well, first of all, um, let's just rewind back to the very beginning, and it's kind of blaze through. Some of this MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface. That's what that these four letters stand for, and what it means is that it's It's basically a protocol that lets a device or an instrument talk to the computer. So when I've have ah Midi keyboard in front of me, as I do now and it looks like a piano and I can play it and do all kinds of fun stuff, I can play and the computer Onley records, um, what my fingers did write that. So when I pressed down on a note, it says it sends a message down the U. S. B cable or the media cable, whatever I'm doing and says, Hey, Mableton, the guy pressed note number 61 and he pressed it. Ah, this hard! He pressed it 100 hard. It puts a number on all those things. And then he let go. You know, after a certain amount of time, that's what comes down it. There's no sound that's transmitted in that message. It's on Lee. What I did with my hands that's, um, transmitted through the MIDI signal. Know what that means is that we apply sound to it later once it gets into the computers, when we make sound with those notes. So that has big advantages for us, because what that means is that we're not committing to any specific sound. Um, when we record, we're only really committing to notes and rhythms, which are very easy to change. So we're not committing to very much so we can keep changing and working with the sound. It's a much, much more flexible than audio. Um, but all the sound has to be generated in the computer. Right? Um, so you couldn't do a midi recording of a voice, for example, because the computer would have to generate the voice that we can do that. There are vocal synthesizers, Um, but to keep things kind of simple, we can't really do that. So we're gonna look at in this section how to get MIDI information into your computer, how to set it up. What you need all that good stuff. And then how to apply some sounds to it. Cool. So let's dive right in. 14. MIDI Hardware Needs: so hardware needs to do. Ah, Midi recording. Now, the this is a little bit more complicated because it could be anywhere between nothing and a lot of things. Um, so let's talk about nothing. First, we can just write all the many information we need. Right? Unable to despite like using the pencil tool clicking and drag again drawing stuff. I'll show you how to do that later. Um, but what I want you to remember is that we don't need any extra hardware to do midi work in a Bolton weaken. Do it just fine with the mouse. Basically, Um, but if you want to be able to play and record, um, what you played using midi into able to in, then you're gonna want to have some kind of controller. So there are a bunch of these, like a bunch of different controllers. When we think of many controllers, we mostly think of keyboards. And I'm deliberately using the word controller because I'm not talking about a synthesizer , necessarily. Ah, lot of midi keyboards and many controllers are also synthesizers. But these devices are, um they basically just send midi data and they don't generate sound. They're very simple. And that means the relatively cheap. Um, there's a lot of different midi keyboards you could get, um, to use as a controller. Most of them look like a piano, and then they have a bunch of knobs or several knobs, some favors and stuff like that on, Um ah, I use in my main set up. I'm using this Novation launch Key 61 onto relatively new keyboard, and I like it a lot. Um, again, these things are basically, you know, like plastic and circuit boards. They're not really expensive. They're, you know, in the range of 100 to 150 bucks. Now, what's cool about these things is you don't need to limit yourself to MIDI controllers that look like pianos. There are a lot of other many controllers, um, that don't look like pianos. You can get media guitars where you can play guitar into able to end. It will record the midi notes, and then you can use that. Um, so I've been really keen lately on this thing called a jam stick. Ah, which looks like this. It's ah, guitar. Basically, it's like a wireless midi guitar that let you Ah, you know, and you can play notes right in to able to him using it. And then so there's a lot of different instruments you can. I mean, I've seen many bagpipes. I've seen many didgeridoos. It's kind of insane. Um, they're not very common, but they exist somewhere. Someone's made them. So on the other end of the spectrum, there's also Midi instruments, or MIDI controllers that don't that don't look like anything at all like things like the able to learn are not be able to, but the acai, a PC 40 is designed just for able to him, and you wouldn't really play it like a like a keyboard from music note entry. But something like the able to push you would. Both of those two things are still sending many information, though, So a lot of different MIDI controllers. You can get there not very expensive shop around, play around with some different stuff and find what you like and final works for you. You'll find some cool stuff, so let's move on to how to set it up 15. MIDI Hardware Setup: Okay, So once you've got one of these many devices, let's talk about how to hook it up. So Ivan Midi keyboard here it's got some controllers on it, so I need to make sure that it's all set up and configured toe work. So let's go into our preferences, our live preferences. I'm gonna go to the Midi tab here. Now. The keyboard I have here is called the Oxygen 49. So there's the main thing I need to look for is make sure that the input is set up right and the output has set up if I care about the output. Um, so let's focus on the input first. So input Oxygen 49. And I've got three things I can do track, sink and remote from almost all midi devices. Well, that are things like keyboards that we're gonna be using to input notes and basically play as an instrument. We want to be sure track is on Ah, the rest of the sink and remote we don't usually need if we're using it to, um, play music on if it's something like in a PC 40 we do need some of those things because it's got to control able to an also. But this is just a keyboard that I'm gonna play. So I'm gonna leave track on now for output. I don't actually want anything on because I'm not gonna send anything back to the keyboard . That's not how many works usually and especially in this case, there's no reason for able tend to talk back to the keyboard. The keyboard is going to send information that says what my fingers air doing what notes were played and able to is gonna listen and basically take that information and record it, um, it doesn't need to send any information back now. In some devices, it does need to send information back. Um, but for playing a keyboard type situation, we just leave everything off there. So I've got everything set up. Now, let me show you a quick little check we can do. If you look in this little dot in the upper right corner, the upper right most tiny little square enable tune. That is a little indicator that will tell you if it's getting midi information. So I'm just gonna randomly hit some notes on my keyboard, and I see it light up, which means it's basically saying yes. I see that midi information you are sending me, which is great. Okay, Now, also, remember, monitor modes apply here too. So here we've got a midi tracks so I can record many information on it. It's set to auto, so we're not seeing the MIDI information come in, right? If I hit record, if I armless to record, we will see that many information come in or I can hit input. Now I can turn on input modern oring with this in button in this case because there's no sound being made here and there's no microphone to record. There's no feedback that can get made in this case. So when I click that toe on and then I play some notes on my keyboard, I see that upper right corner square light up. I also see some data coming here now. Important to note here. See these little these little dots we've got here? These separate Are these identify midi data? They look different than audio levels over here. Right. So these are midi data. Ah, uh, let me rephrase that. These are indicating that Midi data is coming into that track. Um, and these are indicating that audio data is coming into that track. So many data. We can't hear many data. There's nothing for us to hear with many data. We'll talk a little bit more about this in the next video, but there's nothing for us to hear. We need to put an instrument on it in order for us to hear any information. All that's coming in here. Is it saying I'm playing some notes but doesn't know what to do with him yet. We've got to give it some information. That's all we really need to do to set it up. You need to visit that preferences window. You know, make sure you're set up right for it to listen. Um, on the connection side I'm connected with with a USB cable. Um, any modern Ah, newish in the last, you know, seven or eight years or so, um, midi keyboard is gonna output USB. And when you're shopping for one, make sure you find something that outputs USB. If you find something older, it's gonna output. Ah, midi cable, which looks kind of like an XLR cable, except it's got five pins you want to avoid those five pin cables because you need, ah box to convert those into, ah, USB, um, cable. And to make a long story short. Most of the time, your audio interface will be able to do that as well. So your audio interface will have one of those five pin midi connector inputs in it, and you can plug in many device into your audio interface, and it will act as a converter for your MIDI information as well as your audio interface. If that was confusing, just ignore it. Find something that's got that outputs USB and plug it into your computer with the USB cable. So you got to do, um, that is the preferred way to go, in my opinion, Okay, In the next video, we're gonna talk about how MIDI works, which I've talked to a little bit about, but I want to kind of explicitly explain a couple things to get us on the right track, and then we'll get into recording somebody. So let's do that next 16. How MIDI Works: So I want to make one more pass at at talking about just kind of how many works, and I want to do it by showing, um, committee notes. So here I am saying, is before So I'm set up with my midi keyboard. I've got input monitoring in which I don't really need to do, but it's nice, cause I'm gonna arm this to record. So I consent that an auto and I'm gonna record it. So now I I'm I can see those that MIDI data coming in, right? So it's just many data. It's not sound, but let's record it anyway. Um, I'm gonna Let's go over to arrangement View says. I think it's easier to understand there. So I'm on a MIDI track. I'm armed to record. I can see those dots there to show that it's MIDI data we're talking about here, not audio data like I see down here. And I'm just gonna hit record and I'm gonna play some notes. Okay, Now, that looks quite a bit different than audio signal, right? Going to double click on it and just look at that MIDI data. So I was gonna grab the gray line here and pull it up. And now I can kind of zoom in on it going over here till I get my magnifying glass pulling to the right so I can see the notes Nice and and clean. Okay, this is MIDI data, right? All we're seeing here is what notes I played, all right. And where I played them. So if you look at over here, we've got basically a piano keyboard laid on its side. Right? So I played this note, which is a C. I played it right there. Here. I played a d here. I played an E here. I played an f on my finger, brushed up against the G. So I actually kind of screwed up there, right? Like I didn't play it. Ah, very smoothly, because I really just wanted to play that f. But because I'm a sloppy pianist, my finger touched the G. So if this was audio, I would be stuck with a little tiny glitch of a G in the audio signal. Right? There be really nothing I could do about it if I wanted to keep the f and get rid of the G . But in Midi, I can just select that little ah, glitch that little brush of the G and hit the delete key and get rid of it. Let's also say this A that I played soccer. I played that early. I actually wanted to play it right here. And it's a little early, so I could just fix it. Just drag it over, right? This be Maybe that goes there, right? So, you know, and and maybe the C I meant to hold out all the way to their right. So maybe all of these notes, I meant toe hold out quite a bit longer. Film, Right. So that's the joy of Midi information is because we have this, like, crazy amount of flexibility and that we can alter what we've what we've played. Ah, to kind of get it perfect. Now, remember, these air just ah, um, instructions, right? All they say is I played a G right there. I played that note right there. That's all it really says. Um, there is one other piece of information here, and it's a thing called Velocity Velocity Tells me how hard I hit the note. The way able 10 shows us velocity. Ah, in two ways. The one is the the pinkish nous, I guess we could say of the note. So the more read the note is, the harder I hit it. So if I make that note quieter, okay, another velocity here is really low, right? It's basically white. Um, if I make it louder, it changes a different color, right? Like, this is really loud. This is really quiet. So that shows the velocity the other way is what I'm moving down here, which is this These lines here show how hard I played it so I could select a bunch of these and then move them all up and down. So velocity is just basically a fancy word for volume. Um, it works slightly different in volume, but really, it's it's how hard I hit the note, which most of the time, we're going to translate to How loud is that note? Right. So let's get these nice and loud. That's actually even amount Here. Um, now, let's try to hear those notes, right? So I can't hear these notes because if I play this back, we are going to hear nothing. We still look over here. We're seeing this this mini data happen, but you know no sound, so we have to give it an instrument without an instrument. It's just notes. It's just notes with no instruments. Play money, right? So let's just I'm just going to throw the default analog on here and now I've got this analog. So if you remember from are able to in one class down here, I've got these two tabs when I'm looking at a MIDI track, these air showing me at my MIDI notes in the clip. And over here I'm looking at the instrument. So it's these two taps, right? So let's look at the instrument. This is a synthesizer, right? This is going to generate notes and it's gonna put all our Sorry, Let me rephrase that. So I get my Milingo clear. It's not generating notes. It's generating sounds. The notes are coming from the clip from the MIDI information, and they're going to get put through the instrument, and it's gonna output audio and look what happened as soon as I put that instrument on that track up here I went. My dots went away right. This one still has dot showing midi information's out being output. But this one now has an audio signal output because it's going to be because there's an instrument on it. It's gonna be generating sound. So it's here, right? So there we go so I could move stuff around. Now I've got notes on everything I've got. Sound that I could hear right? So just remember, Midi doesn't make any sound on its own. It needs an instrument to make sounds so okay, I think I've drilled that home. So let's move on and and talk about recording Midi. 17. Recording MIDI in Arrangement View: all right. Now that we've got through all of the kind of nuts and bolts of enmity, let's records a MIDI. So I've got a MIDI track here. I've got it armed to record, and I could do one of two things. Next, I could either start recording. Let's do it. So I'm gonna hit, So I'm an arrangement view, So I'm gonna hit record up here. It's playing now. I'm recording Midi notes, right. Cool. But I couldn't hear anything, right, because there's no instrument on it. So alternatively, I could put an instrument on it before I start to record. Let's get rid of that clip. Now I've put an instrument on it, and now I can actually play it and hear it, right? So now if I record, I'll be able to hear what I'm doing. So, um, the steps are creativity track. Select the arm to record and then put an instrument on its You can hear what you're doing. Unless you don't care. Then don't put an instrument on it and start recording. Ah, hit record the same way that we did audio. It's just now we're using a MIDI track. Now. If we didn't have a MIDI device. If I didn't have a MIDI keyboard because I did promise you when I said the hardware needs, I said You don't need anything, so let's get rid of that. What we could do is we could select a chunk here. We could go to create in certain Midi clip and make an empty mini clip here. I could click on it. Here's all the Midi notes. There are none in it, but I could start double clicking and making notes, right? I'm going to zoom in a little bit more so I can see what I'm doing. I can make it longer get it right on the grid here. So I'm stretching it out by getting the cursor right to the edge and then clicking and dragging. And I can also click the whole thing and move around. I can also use the arrow keys to move it forward and backwards. I can hold down shift and it'll make it longer. So shift and then the arrow keys to make it longer and shorter. I can also go on down with the arrow keys and I can go shift up or down to move it up by an octave or down by an active so shift up, shift down, Theo. I'm kind of obsessed with that sound lately, anyway, So I can do a lot with just playing in here and just drawing the sounds. Right. I can adjust the velocity. Let's leave that one note really quiet. Just so you can hear what happens when I do it. Right. So this one has a really low velocity, so I can just draw the notes in just like that, Right? Okay, let's talk about recording many information in session view. 18. Recording MIDI in Session View: Okay, so here I am in session view. And the big surprise here is that recording midi information in the session view is pretty much the same as audio. Um, so let me just do it really quick just to get some speed. So here's my mini track. Right. Ah, I can arm the record. Oops. On the record. And now I can start recording mid eclipse if I want. I'm not gonna hear them. Right. Let's put an instrument on there. Now. I've got an instrument. So now I can hear what I'm doing. Um, you don't have to put an instrument on their You don't want to eso No, I can start playing. Go to the next one. Next one, etcetera. Right. So now if I click on either of these, I can see the committee that I played in the three different clips. Right? And I can launch it, right. So great. You know, it sounds good. Really easy. I'm getting notes in there. Everything is fantastic. Um, the next thing you might be saying is is there a way to just automatically make me play like roid in time? The answer is yes, there is. Um and we're gonna look at that. The next video. It's a thing called quantum ization. Um, so ah, let's jump to the next video and get right into it. 19. Quantizing: so quant ization is a really important thing when you're dealing with midi, um and sometimes it's important thing when you're dealing with audio as well. But we usually first encounter it with MIDI. So what quant ization is is it's usually a rhythm tool, a way to, um, basically fix our rhythm, make our rhythm nice and smooth. So when you look here, let's actually zoom in on this a little bit. I'm gonna zoom in this way too. Okay, So you look here and you see, I didn't play these notes right on the beat. If they were right perfectly on the beat, they would be right on that line. Right? But they're not. They're off. All of them are off by just a little bit. Nothing's perfect. So, um, what we can do is we can very quickly fix that. And quant ization basically needs snap it to the grid, snap all the notes I played to the grid. I've got a couple options for this. First of all, let's just do it and let me just show you what happens. So I'm gonna select all of this stuff when selecting all of these, and then I'm going to use the key command for quant ization, which is not command que Do not get this in your head that Q is Guan ties because Q is quit . You don't want toe Ah, be in the middle of a session and having a great time and then hit command que because you're gonna quit, um, go to the next letter. Its command You is Qantas. Someone hit command you and do you see what happened? I'm gonna undo that with Command Z. And now let's zoom way in on these notes and I'm gonna hit command you again and watch what happens, right? Everything just snapped right to the grid right there. That's quanta izing. So the settings that I have for this basically determine what it's going to snap too. So if I go anywhere on my, um, piano roll editor grid here, which is what we call this area the piano roll editor and I'm gonna control click, I can see a couple different things here. So Kwan ties, which is command you, which is what we just did. Quantities, settings. Let's have a look at that. So quantifies to current grid or a specific division of the beat. So current grid means that, um, what we're seeing in the grid, depending on how far were zoomed in or out. That's what it's gonna Kwan ties, right? So if I zoom way out, that's actually canceled this zoom way out saying that tryto undo my quantity, easing from before and zoom out. So now it's gonna Kwan ties to these areas like this one. Is it going to get pushed over to the left or over to the right? I don't actually know. Depends on mathematically what? It's closer to the right. So now we just move those notes a bunch because we're way zoomed out, right? So if we zoom in there like quite a bit different than where they were before because we're quanta izing to where to what we're looking at, right? That's That's the default. So quantities, settings, current grid is the kind of the default we could always say it. Kwan ties to the quarter. Note to the eighth note to the eighth note triplet, um, and and to the 16th note to some other things. Um, if you don't know what you're gonna be working on, set it to current grid. Um, next best thing for me would be eighth note. Ah, is where I would like it to sit. So an eighth note is gonna be like, ah, every beat plus one spot in between the two beats. Um, so that's a good, really good place to start. So that's what quantities ing is. It's going nudge everything right onto our grid right where we want it. Right? Let me demonstrate this one more time to go back toe unquantifiable. I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna turn the Metrodome on, so I Metrodome is right here. So as we hear this Metrodome, what is gonna happen is you're gonna hear these una slow this way down so we can hear it. Let's go even slower than that. Okay, 53. Quite slow. So you're going to hear the Metrodome ticking, and then you're going to see these notes, not line up, right? Uh huh. Uh huh. Right. So let's select all I'm gonna go to quantities settings, and I'm actually going to say quarter No. Well, no. Let's do a thing. Oh, yeah, Let's do a note. So now notes Will Onley happen on a tick of the the um, Metrodome or in between two ticks, but nowhere else. So let's try now. Right? So that's really quantifies to be like Onley on Metro. No markings. If I did that, if I wanted to be even more extreme, I could say quarter notes, which is gonna make it on Lee happen on each ah, quarter note. So every time the Metrodome clicks, notes could only happen there. So we So we get these situations like this where it had to put two on one because it had to smash them all together. Ah, right. So that's too far. Kwan ties for my taste, but you get the point, so I'm gonna undo that. Um, so that's what quantity Zinkhan do. Ah, Setting it, Teoh. The current grid is a really good place to be. Um, that's their default. And that's where I like it to stay. So ah, think about that. Um, Quanta izing is a great way to just tend to make everything fit right into the pocket. Really smooth, um, and feet to the beat. So Okay. I think we we can get audio in now. We can get Midian now. Um, we could do a lot of recording. Let's talk about warping. Ah, in the next big section, we're gonna be working on warping and warping is one of the most powerful things you can do unable to live. So I want to devote a good amount of time explicitly to it. Um, and it is related to recording and quanta izing. Actually, it's like audio quanta izing in a way, um, so off we go into the next big section on warping. 20. Warping Intro: All right. So in this next section, we're gonna be talking about warping. Um, So what is warping? Warping is one of the most iconic things that a Bolton conduce do. Um, there are some other software programs that can do similar things, like pro tools has what it calls elastic audio. And there's some other things, but nothing does it quite as well as a Bolton and able to has been doing it longer than anyone. So it's related to Kwan ties in quite a bit, so it's actually a pretty logical little Segway. It's kind of like, um time quanta izing, which is what we were doing before, where we're nudging our midi notes into the grid. It's like that, but for audio like we can nudge little pieces of audio into the grid. Now, the thing that makes it powerful is that what we have to do in order to do that is we have to slow down and speed up little pieces of audio on a very small scale. So in between two beats, we might slow it down so that the next beat lines up on like, right on the grid red, right on the beat, So there's a lot of very fine tempo adjustment happening behind the scenes. And in the old days, um, you could do that the way you would slow it down. Just a touch is you put your finger on the record and the way you'd speed it up attach is, you know, you'd push your finger on the record. Um, but the problem with that is that the pitch would also go up and down, right? The pitch would would be all over the place would be a little bobbly, depending at how extreme you're doing this. If you're just, you know, tapping it down, you might not notice the pitch going down, but, um, that would affect the pitch. So what we can do here with warping weaken do all of this without affecting the pitch so the pitch can stay the same? Um, and this is really powerful thing. This is only, you know, we've only really been able to do this kind of thing in real time for I don't know. Well, since able to has been around, um, the technology to do it in not real time has been around for a while, but computers have weren't fast enough to do it. You know, like on the fly. Like we're about to start doing that with working. So anyway, um, let me Ah, let's let's jump to the next video and we'll just dive into what it is. I'm gonna show you what it looks like in action, So here we go with working. 21. What Is Warping: So let's talk about what warping is, um, and what it looks like. So I have here an audio file of a pianist playing ah, over the rainbow. So this is, um, this pianist just played it. I recorded him and, um, in his studio. So this is not midi. This is a person sitting at a piano in playing. Okay, so he's playing actually quite fast here. He's playing over the rainbow, probably a little faster than you might be used to hearing it. The reason for that is because of warping. So what I can do with this audio file as I can go to my main track tempo here, which is set at 1 20 and I can slow it down. Now, let's listen, toe. So if you're if you're new to audio processing and working with digital audio, that might not be is mind blowing to you as it is for those of us that have been doing this for ah, little while and know that that was impossible to do what I just did. Um, not more than seven or eight years ago, You know, I can slow this down, you know, like really slow here's 48 gets a little glitchy weight on there, but I can also go super fast, you know, So it's quite powerful to be able to do that now. A built in does that for us, and it does. It does it by using a trick called warping. So we're just changing the speed here. Warping is what allows us to change the speed. Um, and able to live will figure out the warping parameters that it needs for us, but it's not perfect. It needs some help sometimes to understand what's happening in the audio file. And that's where we need to know about warping and how to use it, right? I can make this sound better. It sounds pretty good, but, you know, when I go really slow, it got a little glitchy. I could fix that by adjusting the settings in warping. So let's have a quick look out at where they are, so I'm gonna double click on this. Now, here's my wave form, Right. We've seen this before. We've seen a way for him in this view. Um, the first thing I'm gonna notice is down here. The warp button is on. Okay, so If I turn it off, then I just have my audio file with no timing on it, right? And if I change, the tempo now doesn't change, right. It changes the start position, but it doesn't change the tempo because it doesn't know where the beats are. It doesn't know it needs some spots toe latch onto to know exactly where it is. So when I turn on the warp on, let's do just for the sake of argument, let's just dio, um, work from here. So now we see thes yellow points. These are our anchors. These air the spots where it knows. Okay, I've told it explicitly. This is the correct spot. This is like a downbeat or something doesn't have to be unhappy. But these air spots that are lined up correctly, um, and from there it can deduce what it needs to do to make them all line up right so I can move these around if I wanted to zoom in so we can see what's happening here. So let's say this is on the downbeat of beat seven, and this is on the downbeat of beat nine. But let's say the downbeat of beat eight is actually right here. It's actually that hit. So what I would do is I would put a war marker there that's just called a warp marker, and then I would move it to beat eight. When you see what happened there, it gets all trippy in there, right, Because I'm adjusting it. If that was wrong, let's go back. So now that's right. Let's say that this is beat eight, but, um, but this is beat two of Measure seven is right here, so I can put that one there, and then I can put this one there. And now this spot is now locks down, right? It's not gonna move. So every time I put one of these, I'm locking a spot down. Let's say that goes there. Say that goes there. So, like this one is only gonna move in between the two adjacent war markers is the only thing that's gonna happen. So those are wort markers. Those are anchors, right? Those are what we tell able to in this spot is correct. So you've got to figure out what happens in between to make those spots lineup. And that's how it knows how to figure out our tempo. Um, so warping is on, and we set these anchors. Now we can go through here and we can set an anchor on every single beat or a warp marker on every single beat. If we wanted to, you know, we could say yes. Put them there. From there, we see these little arrows here. These are the suggested warp markers. I'll get more into that in a minute. Um, we could put him on every single line if we wanted to and make sure it was crazy. Ah, warped, you know, But we don't want to do that because a it's really tedious and be the more wort markers you put the, um, more goofy things concerned eso we it actually can introduce some. Um, distortions is the wrong word, but let's just call it some artifacts. That's better. Let's call it some artifacts. So the more warp markers we have, the more artifacts that could get introduced. So we want to use minimal amount of work markers, but but enough toe where it knows exactly what's going on. So there is some tricks to that and finding really smart places to lock things down which is what we're gonna get into next. So that's what warping is. Um, it's basically putting these wort markers down, setting it, you know, setting a flag down on certain parts of the audio file and telling what's right. So that able 10 configure out what the tempo of this audio file is for every segment. And then when we adjust our tempo up here, it knows what it needs to do to get this to play at this tempo. If we don't have warping on it, doesn't know what this tempo is, and it doesn't know where these spots are. So when we adjust our tempo, it just says, no, I can't do it because I don't know where these points are. So that's what warping does. We gotta have it on if we want to, um, have things in time with each other. Now, let me show you another example of how war Pynchon be really powerful for us. And for this, I'm gonna jump over to session view. Okay? I have here two different clips. Ah, both drumbeats and both made at different tempo. Tempe. Different tempi. Yeah. Ah, at different tempos. Or Tempe. Um, this 1st 1 was made at 1 30 BPM, and the 2nd 1 was made at 1 34 PM Okay, so these shouldn't lineup. If I play them at the same time, they're gonna be off from each other by a little bit, and that's gonna sound pretty terrible, right? So delete this MIDI track here, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the 2nd 1 and put it right here because if I put him side by side, I can play at the same time. If I have them in the same track this way, one cancels out the other when I launch them. So this way I complain that same time now, what's gonna happen when I play these? At the same time, they shouldn't lineup right there. Audiophiles recorded at two different, um, tempo, but their warped. So because their warped this one has warping on. We see a couple wort markers this one has warping on. We see a couple of war markers and we can even see their original tempo here. This one If we look down here segment bpm. This means that a Bolton has determined that this is 34 beats per minute. And this one, it's determined, is 1 30 beats per minute based on its warping. But because their warped, they're both gonna play at my session tempo, right, So they're going to sink, they're gonna sink great. Everything that's warped is gonna play at this tempo because as soon is able to knows what this segment tempo is, it knows how much it needs to adjust it to get to our session tempo. So if I played these both at the same time, right there, totally in time with each other, I can speed the whole thing up way down, right? So that is what we can do with warping. We could make a whole bunch of clips and make sure they always all playing time as soon as able to knows what their tempo is. It knows what to do to adjust it, to get them to play at our session tempo, which is up here. Hopefully, that makes sense. That is the power of warping. That is why we care about it. That is why it's really useful and really integral to able to live. Okay, So without further ado, let's talk about how to warp a track, how to get it all set up, eso that it's worth correctly 22. Anchors And Commands: Okay, So I'm gonna start from scratch here, and I'm gonna pull in. Um, we work with two different beats here. Now, you don't have to use beats for this. Um, like I showed you the over the rainbow piano thing. This works with everything. Ah, it's easiest to explain with beats, at least at first. So, um, let's pull in. I have this, like, hip hop beat. Really simple. Right? I'm gonna pull that in right here. So I'm set up by default toe warp file. So there's a preference setting where you can say what you wanted to do when you pull a new file in, should it warp it or not? Um, mind warps automatically. It turns warping on, and it tries to guess the tempo. Now, did it? Guess it. Right. That's the question. So I can How do I know I can look at a couple different spots First, I could look at the segment BPM at 79.22 Now, this was created electronically, so the odds of it being 0.22 are kind of low, so I think it probably guessed wrong. Ah, and that's okay. Um I can also look at the grid here, and I can see where my main transience happened. Those are like the attacks, right? So this one is not right on a beat, right? I could look at it. Let's play it right. So these are my snare hit. So they ought to be on two and four. So this is beat to this is beat four. So if I haven't explained this yet, um, these numbers up here, one is the downbeat 1.2 is bar one beat to bar one, beat three bar, one beat for bar. To beat one is what that implies. Bar to beat two etcetera. So beat number 23 and four. So the snare hit should be on two. And it should be on four. Another way. I can check to see if it's correct is turn on the Metrodome. If I turn on the Metrodome, the Metrodome is gonna play at 1 11 in this case, right? It's gonna play at my global sink, their my global um, tempo. And if this isn't warped, right, this isn't gonna be in time with the Metrodome, right? So let's hear it right. It's totally not right. Um you can hear it, not on that grid. And you can also hear the loop isn't perfect, so I can fix that at the same time. So let's fix this one up. They can turn off my Metrodome for a minute. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna put these snare hits on two and four so we can see here. There's ah suggested anchor point of these gray little like Arrowhead things. Those aren't doing anything right now. They're just saying that's able to in saying, I think this might be a good place for a wart marker, but it's not actually active If I put my mouse over it, it creates this kind of great out wort marker saying, Do you want one? There is what it's asking me if I click DoubleClick, I make one. So now I'm gonna put that where I want it. Boom. Right on beat too, right? So I just click and drag and mouse did over. Okay, now let's put this snare on beat for okay. Now, did that make everything in between lineup? It kind of looks like it did like this beef. This is right on beat three. That's probably my kick, as is that which is on beat one. So that looks pretty solid. Whether or not these in between, things are exactly on where I want them. I might need to use my ear for that. So let's finish out getting my snare on two and four. And remember, I'm not just gonna automatically make this award marker because less is more here. I don't want to put wort markers on everything, if I can avoid it. So here's my next snare hit, and I'm just being able to tell that visually by looking at that wave form that should be on beat for that Looks like these all lined up. So let's see what happens. Let's turn on our Metrodome again, and it's hearing okay, that sounded all tight and right in the pocket until right here. So I'm gonna listen to that one more time and see if I can figure out what happened right there. Okay, so this is an extra kick that probably we want right in between Ah, on the end of beat four. So I'm gonna put that right in the middle, and then we're going to see if that fixes the loop here. Pretty good. Okay, so this one was just a little early. It was back here, and I just pushed it out to right there. So I wanted it right in between Beat four and the next downbeat, which is just off from right here. So that fixed my loop and that got that on the right spot. So now this is warped. And now when I look at my segment BPM, it says 85. It thinks it's right on 85 which is probably right. Um, you'll notice this segment BPM changes as I adjust. Like if I do that and look over here now, it thinks the segment tempo is 69.6. So if I do that, we're back to 85. Okay, so now it's in time with the Metrodome. I can hear it. I can see that it's on the grid. I don't need any more war markers. I could put them here. It's not gonna affect anything except eat up some processing power. Um, so I don't need those there, so I'm not gonna put him there, By the way, what I just did. Here's a wart marker double click on a wart marker again to get rid of it. Um, so this one, if I want to get rid of it, I could I'm gonna leave that one there, Okay? So let's pull in another beat now and do the same thing. 01 important thing that I wanted to point out here. So here's the file. I just pulled in, right. This is this is hip hop ish beat. Um, Now, what is this crazy file? This is a file that was created. This is an A S D file. This is a file that contains my warping info for the file. It's not an audio file. It's an able to file that is specific to each piece of audio that you bring into able 10 and warp. It's got some other stuff in there, too. But the most important thing is warping. So if you have a big folder of sounds, you're going to create these ASD files all over the place. You can delete him if you want. Um, they're not the audio file there just data. But the advantage of having this is that if I pull this file and again, it should reference this and be able to find my warp settings. And remember how toe warp it correctly so that it'll know to apply the same warping to it. So that's why we have those all over the place. If you delete him, it just means you have to reward the file every time, um, or another time. And then we'll make that file again. And there is a setting where you can hide these or put him somewhere else or whatever, but you'll see these all over the place. You'll learn to just kind of ignore him. Um, okay, lets grab another file. I'm gonna pull that one in. Let's pull put that into the second track here, and let's meet this first track to so I can focus on this. So I just pulled this one in for the first time. So it's gonna be making that that ah a s d file my metro domes on. Let's just hear it right away, just with the Metrodome and just hear what we've got. Okay, this one's all over the place. So how am I gonna go about warping this? Cause this is just kind of a nightmare. Here's I'm gonna dio first. I'm gonna find my down beats, so I want to find one. So I'm just gonna listen to the file, okay? Just that far. So the downbeat was right here. Was this spot right there? I can zoom in. Be sure I get right on it. There's my suggested war marker. So I'm gonna grab that. I'm gonna make a wart marker. I'm gonna put it right on the downbeat, which is right here. There it is. Okay, Now let's find our next downbeat. Okay? It's this spot right here. I'm just doing that. But basically, like counting in my head. 1234 I'll do it out loud the next time. Okay. There's that. Here we go again. One's 23412341 So it's this spot right here is where I counted one, and we need that to be on a beat one. Remember, this is bar four. Beat one when it doesn't have a 10.1, it's implied 0.1. Hey, let's keep going. 123412341 That was tough. One pretty sure it's right here. Okay. T for one for 12341 It's right there is where I counted one, two for one right there. No, let's just do this. Let's just do this. 123410 that was my mystic. That was scrolling. So the last bar e I think it's right here. And then we gotta figure out the end of this bar. Something weird's happening there. Okay, so everything is piled up right here. Um, I'm just gonna stretch this out and see if I could make some sense of what's happening here . So this is beat three. That's our snare drums That goes right there. I mean, something strange is happening here, so something strange is going on down here and I don't like it. So here's what I'm gonna do. I could futz with this and more pit, but I Here's another trick. I could dio I could just change the loop, which is what I'm gonna do here. So let's make this a four bar loop, so I'm adjusting the loop setting by going down. So now we have four full bars and we'll just loop those four and say this is Jang Ki So I'm not gonna deal with it. Okay, That feels good. Let's listen to it with a metronome. Okay, That sounds pretty good. I could go in and lock in some of these other spots and make sure they're there right on. But I don't really need to. I don't think so. Let's leave that for now. Okay, So now both of these air warped. See, my segment BPM is 1 40.4 So that makes me think it's maybe not perfectly on. And if I adjust some of these other spots, I might be able to get it perfect. But don't worry about that, though. Um, regardless of what able to thinks it is, it's gonna play it at 1 11 So let's see. Let's see what happens when I play both beats without the Metrodome and see how tight we are. Okay, so they're locked in, and they're totally in time. They're not the two greatest beats to that work together all that well, just for, like, purely rhythmic and stylistic reasons, but their warped correctly and they're tight. Okay, A couple other things you can do when you're warping stuff. I want to just point out a few more little things. One is that you can tell or you can ask able to in live to guess for you if you put a warp marker down or you just go down to the warp settings And you, uh, control click. You can get to some warp settings here, So warped from here. Basically say what you're asking here is take a guess. Start here and go forward in this clip and war but the rest of the way for me you can say what from here, starting at 1 10 1 11 bpm. So warp it at 1 11 BPM. So you're telling it where to start or from here straight, Just like basically lock everything down. Um, warp 1 11 bpm from here. So a combination of the 1st 2 and then warp as an eight bar loop There's a couple settings you can do here, and this set 111 here thing is really important. If you're doing something that has an intro that doesn't have a time and you don't want it to factor in, what you can do is let's actually do this cause this is important. Let's go, Teoh my over the rainbow file again. Okay, here's my over the rainbow file and let's set up a loop here. Let's do a four bar loop. 1234 And I'm gonna solo this and to see what we've got. Okay? Okay. This is for totally wrong. Uh, let me see if I can get a really fast. Okay, This is actually the downbeat, So I'm gonna set this is the down b. Going to get rid of that and put that over there. Okay, so I'm gonna set my second anchor point here so that this is my two bar Lu Pao. So what? I'm warping it incorrectly for musical effect because I think it sounds kind of cool. But if I wanted to warp from here forward, what I could do is say, warp one, set 11 here, basically so telling it. Ignore this stuff before this spot set this to be 11 so that I can warp going forward. And if I say court from here, it's a little bit easier, even though that changed my settings because I had already warped some stuff. So now that I've made this to our loop, I can throw this in and see what happens. Let's do this piano intro with, um Ah, that dove beat kind of thing. So it's kind of silly, but it works. So that is how warping works. Anchor points work from here. Set 11 here. All kinds of good stuff. Just don't forget about this contextual menu that comes up when you hit control. And then you've got all these extra warp settings here. Go. Okay, let's move on to talk about warp mode, Something we haven't mentioned yet. That is really important for when you're setting up warping. 23. Warp Modes: okay. I want to tell you about warp modes here. So when we're looking at our warp settings we have down here, this little drop down menu is little and subtle, but incredibly powerful. This is really important thing. So it says beats, um what this is is warping requires, Ah, lot of math. War being is like a huge amount of behind the scenes algorithms. Chungking. A way to make this all work really smooth and sound. Get so what you can do here as you can help out live by saying, Here's the best algorithm to use to get the best sound out of this. So it went to beats on this one. So and it's a beat, Right? Beats is going to, um, adjust the algorithm slightly. And I believe what beats does is it's going to favor your attacks. And if any degrading of the audio needs toe happen because you're stretching it out or some like that, it's gonna happen in these in between points, right, cause those are less important and a beat. You can also said it. The tones tones is going to try to preserve the longer sound. So if you're working with a sounds like a synth line or something like that, and you're trying to warp it, said it. The tones annual might have a little bit better luck. Texture is something that's more of Ah, more of a texture, a ambience, that kind of thing. And you get some more settings here. He's basically can help. Ah, playing with these can help get you a better sound. Let's just leave it at that re pitch re pitches great repeats what re pitched huzzahs that basically turns it into, um, it turns it into one into a record. So as it slows down, the pitch goes down. Um, check it out. Hold on. Right. So as I'm changing the tempo, it's actually changing the pitch. Ah, this is, you know, putting your finger on the record. This is basically turning off the really fancy war warp settings and just going with our old school stuff, which has its purposes and for musical effect. You might want to do that. Sometimes complex and complex pro are best used for if you're like pulling in like a whole track and you're trying to warp it for that Over the rainbow excerpt. I used. I probably should use complex or complex pro. Um, the downside, the complex pro is that they eat up a lot of computing power so they can slow down your computer sometimes. Um, so they might not be the best thing to use and live performance all the time. Um, because they're gonna you're gonna start seeing your computer chugging away if you have, like, a ton of tracks all set to complex pro. So we kind of want to reserve that for, like, if we're doing a whole song. But that can help with some of the granule ation problems that we face. Granule ation. Problem is like when we slow everything way down, let's actually do it. Let me set this to beads and then slow it way down. Hear those sounds in between the notes? Okay. Is that little echo? Those are called artifacts. Now, if I sent this to complex pro right, it's very, very different. Now I'm like, down a 20 b p. M. Here. I'm like, insanely slow. Right, So now I'm getting more of the whole thing. This isn't ideal for a beat, though. This isn't the type of sound you would probably want on your beat. You know, this is probably better so complex. Pro Reserve it for, like, warping like a whole track, whether it's a very complicated sound. So those are your wart modes. You might want to just experiment with those when you're warping something, find the best solution for the audio that you're working with. 24. Granulation: Okay. I want to talk about granule ation a little bit, which I mentioned just a second ago in the previous video. But there can be some cool effects of this. Ah, what I'm talking about here is basically using it for a musical purpose. So here's my over the rainbow clip. Okay, Right. So let's see if we can do something fun with this. So warping what I'm talking about here. I guess there's a warping incorrectly for a musical purpose. Right. So here's I'm gonna dio I'm just gonna kind of eyeball this. I'm gonna push a lot of stuff outside of my loop area here and turn this loop area on. Ah, And then I'm gonna just find some individual spots, and I'm just gonna warp this into make this loop a little smaller, make it just two bars, pull this way out, and I'm doing this wildly incorrectly because I think it will sound fun. Okay, so I just stretched out the first. Let's see. 123456 notes to be two measures long, and I think this will sound goofy and let's let's see what happens. And it does sound goofy, but that's kind of beautiful. Like those those accidental sounds, those artifacts or the granule ation is somewhat. We might also call it the Granular Process, which is the kind of name of the process that warping uses, is becoming more transparent because I'm stretching it out. So to such extremes, and that can be kind of fun. And it can kind of have cool musical sounds. What if I switch this to complex Pro? What happens? Oh, I kind of liked it on beats better, maybe tones for that re pitch. Remember, Re Pitches turns the pitch correction off, and we way low, kind of like this sound. So I guess what I'm trying to say with this video is, Ah, don't be afraid to get weird with warping and find some cool music in inside warping something incorrectly. Sometimes warping something perfectly is not ah, what we want to do. Um, there's there's music to be found in between the notes, and you can get access to it with warping. Um, if you just kind of started having fun with it, so check that out. Play around with it. Be sure you goof around with the warping modes, um, and where your anchors our and that you'll you'll make some cool stuff 25. Wrap Up: Okay, that is it for this segment of the ultimate able to live class Volume two. Recording and warping. I hope you got a lot out of it. I hope you know how to set up everything and do some recording both with audio and midi. And also, uh, you're getting familiar with warping and putting the other tracks. Um, please leave comments, questions, whatever you like, reach out to me. I'm happy to answer things as quickly as I can and stay tuned for the next installment of the ultimate able to live class, which is gonna be on editing and where we're really gonna start diving into some production tricks and really making stuff with able to live. So I hope to see you there, go forth and record some stuff and have some fun with able to live 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.