11 Ableton Live tips for AUDIO EDITING everyone should know

hi i'm dave hilowitz so as promised this is my video of ableton live audio editing tips uh a few weeks ago i did one that was more about midi editing so um yeah this one's gonna focus more on the audio side of things before i can get started of course i need some audio to work with uh so i'm gonna record a little bit of synth i'm gonna use uh that moog synth that i hardly ever use it's kind of a shame uh and i'm gonna do an intentionally sloppy job i'm not going to use a metronome i'm going to keep the timing a little bit loose and just kind of um hopefully come up with something that we can turn into a track okay i'm back i've got some audio but i don't have any sense of what tempo i played it at and there are a ton of timing issues which is a pretty common problem to have as we know ableton displays every piece of audio both up here on the timeline and down here in the little clip view but the two aren't exactly the same for example if i drag this to be much smaller the window here still displays all of the audio even though only a small portion of the audio is actually showing up in our actual timeline by default new clips have warp turned on which means that if i change the tempo of the session it's going to actually speed up the audio also allows us to play with the timing of the clip and we do that by double clicking on these little spots these little triangles and they turn into drag handles and then we can kind of just slowly move the timing of our audio so this is how we fix the timing now the goal when you're doing this is to find the down beats the downbeats are the notes that come right at the start of a musical measure of course in this case we've got an arpeggiation and it's super easy i was playing in 4-4 i did have four beats per measure so it's pretty easy to figure out what the timing should be okay so now we fixed the timing but you'll notice that the audio is playing back weirdly fast uh we've aligned it to the grid and it's playing back at the project tempo which i've set right now to 182 bpm completely arbitrarily ideally we would want to have our project tempo match the tempo of whatever it is that we played we want to figure out the tempo of what it is that i played even though i played it kind of out of rhythm i did a bad job intentionally we still want to find basically what the appropriate rhythm would be so if we go down here we can see that there's a bpm and it's 95 bpm and if i use that it's probably going to be fine at the same time if i advance through my clip here it's 100 bpm that's a very big difference a 5 bpm difference go to the next one 102. next one's 100 next one's 111. so i did such a bad job intentionally of course but i did such a bad job that it's very very hard to use any of these as an accurate gauge of what the tempo actually should be so what we need to do is we need to figure out the average tempo for the clip so the way we do that is we actually undo some of the hard work we just did what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to delete a bunch of these and what that does is it actually causes us to be given the average across that entire chunk of time so i think we have enough here so the average for this chunk of time is 103.76 let's just use that right actually i'm going to move it up to 104. so before i set the bpm i'm actually going to undo everything i just did because i actually want those fixes now i'm going to set this to 104. okay there's a secondary problem here which is there's some audio artifacts and the reason is that as it fixes the timing of my audio clip it's um stretching out some of the beats and it's shrinking other beats and you can hear it it's it's audible down here there is something called uh warp mode uh basically what's happening under the hood with warp is when it doesn't have enough audio it's kind of like inventing new audio using an algorithm and when it has too much it's shrinking it also using a different algorithm work mode allows us to choose different options i prefer complex pro but yeah basically you can tinker with them and improve your sound quality substantially yeah that sounds just like the original pretty good by the way um if we for some reason actually like the tempo of our uh recorded work like say we're trying to sync up an entire track to a performance and the performance has like you know musical timing fluctuations not just like some idiot hitting on the keyboard the way i was um you can do this thing here where you can click follow and now the entire track is going to use this one clip and the timing of this one clip as the basis for its tempo so for example if you look down here i'm going to open up this and we're going to switch this so that we can see the tempo it's applied tempo variations to this entire range of time so uh i'm going to go right to the start and we're going gonna see that 95 it's 102 it's just kind of jumping around in if i were to like i don't know pull in some random clip and you're gonna hear the fluctuation especially noticeable towards the end where i kind of really lost the plot okay i'm going to undo all of this so that we're just dealing with that one loop and we don't have this random clip hanging out and also we want to have a fixed tempo of course so now we have this nice clean arpeggio we have a bunch of options so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to kind of copy this clip over towards the end of my timeline and i generally have like an area off to the right that's kind of like the scrap yard and what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to consolidate this and what consolidate does is it creates a new audio file based on all of the changes you've made to that particular audio file so if you've messed with the timing you meshed through the pitch basically any of the things that you may have done using the clip view stuff or any of the modulations all of that is going to get burned into the new audio file it's sort of like a destructive edit although it doesn't destroy anything about the old file the old file is yeah still right here so i've got a nice new one with all these timing changes in it and i don't have to worry about oh am i going to mess up one of the um the warp markers or something like that another thing to watch out for is when you do consolidate whatever tempo you have your timeline at that's the tempo that it's going to use for making that new wav file so you want to make sure that you're working at a tempo that you ultimately want to end up in another great use for the consolidate command is you can actually use it to glue together pieces of audio like let's say that i decided that i wanted to um take this and we're going to zoom in a little bit and wanted to make an alternate version that had a bunch of the same note being repeated like that i could take this right click consolidate and now i've got a whole new clip with that timing preserved one of the challenges of course with electronic music is you need to find ways to keep your track interesting you know you can apply a ton of different effects you can have the effects coming in going out one thing i also like to do is i like to sometimes use ableton's pitch controls to create a shadow copy of a clip so for example we've got our original pattern here i'm going to paste it again here we can get rid of this and i'm just going to take this and pitch it up and what i'm doing here is i'm clicking on pitch and i'm holding shift and then pressing the up arrow in this case i'm just going to pitch it up and add a ton of reverb and use only the wet signal okay i love it it's perfect so i'm just going to go to export audio and i'm going to export just that second moog track and i'm going to render it as a loop it sounds amazing another cool trick is you can take audio like this and you can get ableton to actually transcribe the notes uh and uh use it to trigger any midi instrument for example let's say that i were to load up my own decent sampler now that i've got a midi track and now that the midi track actually has an instrument on it i can drag this audio right here and you can see that little note icon appears and i let go and it pops up this box that basically asks me how it should interpret that audio file does it have multiple notes playing at the same time does it have drum content in this case we only have one note playing at a single time so it's definitely melodic let's listen to this cell load [Music] works pretty well so for the time being i'm going to uh just stick with that original take that we had and i'm just going to kind of silence the other tracks we can get rid of this we no longer need it um okay next let's record another track uh this time i'm going to go super analog i'm going to record some viola okay so i just did some viola takes uh basically i put this on loop for way too long and i just recorded and recorded and i haven't played the viola in like a few days so i'm a little bit pitchy so um yeah a lot of editing needs to be done which brings us to the take editor which was added in ableton live 11 and it is so essential like it's become like just a central part of my workflow at this point um so here we've got the two viola tracks that i recorded and you wouldn't know it but there's actually a lot of audio here like it looks like it's just what nine bars something like that but if you look in the clip editor it's massively long and i kind of workshopped an idea for the first half and then after a while i started workshopping an idea for the second half so um yeah here's here's what it sounds like okay so that's a general idea it's obviously there are a lot of pitch issues uh in addition to some uh performance stuff so uh let's drill down into the first of these so i'm gonna mute this i'm gonna mute this piano track we've just got the mode going up at the top here and then down here we've got this one viola so to use the take editor all we have to do is right click on this and do show take lanes and it's going to pop up this and we can see i got a lot of takes you know in general it's good to have four five six takes that you know not too many because if you have a ton like this it's going to be really hard to decide between your takes you're not going to remember what you played in take three or that take you know 27 is better than take four or something like that so the important thing to know about this is that highlighting is very important so you can see up here we've got this vibrant purple this uh very noticeable highlighted purple and down here we've also got it highlighted and that means that what's actually playing in your song is this this field one three this third lane if i wanted for example to play this one instead i would click on this select it and then hit the return key or the enter key you can see what's up here changed and if i decided i liked you know from here on out in this take i would just do a split and the way i do splits is either right click and do split or do command or control e very very helpful editing command choose the part that i want and then hit enter you'll notice that immediately this part became unhighlighted and this part became highlighted if i then go into this clip this clip that's actually part of our song the one at the top and do some modification any modification at all in the clip view it's going to un-highlight this watch this see how it unhighlighted it and the reason that's happening is we have now diverged from this pool of takes there is no take down here that matches what's up in our song actually if i want to make a change down here i've now maybe fussed with the timing done something let's say i i do something like that and i prefer it i then need to reselect that clip and hit enter and it will propagate the change that i just made up here so that's super important to know uh it's not the way other take systems necessarily work um but yeah that's how it works in ableton so what i'm gonna do here is i'm basically going to listen to all of my first halves figure out which one sounds the best obviously the longer the chunk i can get the better i'd way rather have like you know an entire first half and then an entire second half and not have to do so much pasting so what i would say about that is that was great except there was a note here that was completely out of pitch there it is okay i'm going to do some edits on this clip audio editing in ableton is pretty straightforward the main thing is you select audio by clicking on the lower half of these clips if you click the top half it selects the entire clip but if you click the lower part it lets you choose a chunk then you can you know copy and paste using you know ctrl c ctrl v you can hit ctrl d and it duplicates whatever you had like that um another very useful command is the split which i already mentioned you basically you right click here you do split and from that point on you can move stuff around it's very helpful when you're trying to like work with a specific note like for example uh we had said that this first take is good except for one note so in theory i don't think it's actually gonna work i could just excise that's the bad note another useful thing to know is there are these fade drag handles if you zoom in you can see uh the way that it transitions from one clip to another so if i do this for example you get a much more gradual fade [Music] i'm gonna do that again over here sounds weird [Music] a couple other editing tools that are definitely worth knowing when you're doing something like this let's say you have a note like this and you decide you want this note to be way longer if i just take this and i drag to the right what's actually going to happen is it's going to roll out more of the audio it's going to show more of the audio that's in that file if you want to stretch the note however you can actually hold down shift and instead of expanding the clip to show more of the audio from behind the scenes it's actually just going to stretch what you have so it's actually a nice note i'm going to actually save that for later another super useful editing tool is if you want to actually change the specific audio that a certain clip points to you can just hold down option and shift or i think it's ctrl and shift on windows and what will actually happen is it will actually move the audio within the clip so let's say that you want this note to start sooner you just drag it to the left and then now it's starting much sooner because we've moved where the audio is within that clip so super useful so yeah now i'm going to do a bunch of edits and i'm not going to expose you to the misery of me going through 27 takes a viola just to get to like two that are like halfway passable uh i will meet you back here when i'm done with this uh extremely boring editing work now that i've got my takes sounding the way i want them finally i'm going to copy these to another part of the file just for backup purposes and then i'm going to consolidate them so that we can stop thinking about takes stop thinking about editing and just get back into the the business of building a cool track so let's hear what this sounds like [Music] okay it's good enough for now so another cool live 11 feature is track linking this is only available in standard and sweet it's very cool it allows you to do edits to multiple tracks at the same time so let's say that i wanted to do edits on these two viola tracks at the same time right click here and do link tracks and you can see now there's like a little chain link thing and now any edit that i do to this track is going to get propagated down to that track below and probably the most obvious use for this is drum tracks where you might have like four or eight microphones all on one drum kit uh if you're editing live drums you want to make sure that they all stay in rhythm you don't want to do any edit to just one track because otherwise you'll get these horrible phasing issues that's kind of like the perfect use case for this but there are a lot of other cases that also make sense if you've got four versions of a synth line for example and three of them have a bunch of effects one of them is the dry version you're going to want to do all of your edits at the same time to all of them and then you can turn the track linking off and do more edits so for example if i select these and decide that i want to do that or let's say i wanted to like use that audio slipping i could slip the whole thing forward like that very very powerful okay let's add something rhythmic to this obviously i could just pull in some you know drum loops or something like that i want to kind of try to roll my own using audio editing so i'm going to actually grab one of these viola notes and we can use it as the basis for i don't know some kind of organic loop or something like that bring it down into its own track down here and i'm going to pitch it down like super far down like 36 and i'm also going to stretch it out using the stretch tool so i'm holding down shift and i'm just dragging it out so it's much longer than it was before here what that sounds like [Music] so now i'm going to make sure that i'm in beats mode the warp modes as we discussed earlier determine the algorithm for filling in gaps in audio um the beats mode is the most basic and the way that it works is it tries to find the starts of notes and then it plays everything back in rhythm of course and if it needs to do gap filling what it does is it um plays the note and then it plays the note in reverse and then plays it again and basically uses little chunks to kind of fill up the gap in this case we've pitched the thing way down and we want to just exploit some of that behavior to make a cool rhythmic effect so what we're going to do is we're going to first switch this so that instead of being keyed to transients which is the default we're actually going to have it do it at a regular interval it's not going to detect any notes in one long sustained node anyway so uh by default uh it's set to sound like this and we're going to listen to it soloed [Music] i'm actually going to pitch it up a little bit just so that we can hear what it's doing [Music] so already we can hear that kind of cool rhythmic sound i want to use this as like a sub bass so i'm actually going to bring it down but before i do i'm going to shorten those little chunks this is basically the length of the the chunk so listen that seems pretty good okay now i'm going to pitch it back down negative 36 and we're going to listen to it with [Music] okay it's the wrong note but that's generally the range that i want so what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click on this and i'm going to do consolidate and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to fix the timing because for some reason it's kind of like out of timing a little bit okay there we go now i'm going to switch it to complex [Music] we're basically just gonna keep tinkering with it until it matches the chords that we have in this sounding pretty nice so this morning it's pouring in philadelphia so i recorded some of the rain um basically hitting my air conditioning unit which makes these loud popping sound and i'm going to try to use that as a drum rack so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to open this up go here go to the clip and transposition this allows me to actually modify the pitch data in real time and i'm just going to pitch it all the way down maybe all the way back up again and i'm going to right click this and i'm going to consolidate it and now i've got this nice seemingly useless audio file that has all of those tempo changes burned into it if you have something like this a little bit of audio that you want to turn into a drum beat and you want to use the drum rack you can actually right click it and do slice to new midi track and it's going to pop up this little window that asks you some questions basically what kind of algorithm do you want to use to slice up your audio now obviously this was meant for like grooves and drum loops and things like that it's not necessarily meant for rain samples or whatever this is we could try transients and see what happens i'm going to hit ok and what's going to happen is it's actually going to create a new track so what it's done is it's created pads on the drum rack and each one of those pads corresponds to a little chunk of the audio file if i double click here and zoom out you can see this is that first section this is going to work better than i thought i'm going to right click here and do insert empty midi clip turn this on this all-important little button here that allows us to actually hear what we're actually doing another important thing about the drum rack is by default what it does is it actually loops those little chunks so if i do like what i just did and play a note it's actually going to loop it if you don't want it to do that you can go into any one of these and turn it into a one shot for example i could turn this into one shot i'm gonna do that for a few of them that's a good snare [Music] okay we're getting somewhere and just like that we've made ourselves a little track okay hope this was helpful uh if you enjoyed this video it'd be great if you could hit like and if you haven't done so already yeah now is a great time to subscribe i've got a bunch of videos on the way so yeah see you soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: David Hilowitz Music

Views: 48,716

Keywords: ableton, audio editing, live, ableton live, audio, editing, live 11, tips, tutorial

Id: COptQGA1siw

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021