Ableton Live 10 Beginners Tutorial | Beat Academy

hey there this is ill factor from beat Academy calm in this video I'm gonna be doing a crash course into Ableton Live 10 covering everything you need to know on how to use the program to create the music you want to create so by the end of this video you will actually learn how to use Ableton Live sequence in it record audio and share your music with the rest of the world as my gift to you for watching this video I'd love to send you a sample pack that I've created from some of my projects over the past year this sample pack includes construction kits loops for different types of genres that you can use in any d8w and it's a hundred percent royalty free so feel free to use it in any of your projects today simply click the link below in the description box and download your beat Academy sample pack it's yours absolutely free so let's dive right in now Ableton Live primarily works in two environments you have your arrangement view which is a typical linear view in which you build out your arrangement of the song and then you have a session view which is where you can go ahead and control the overall balance and mix of that song and project you're working on we're gonna start here in the session view and work our way back to the arrangement view and you'll see why because the session view especially in my workflow is what makes it equal to live a bit more unique than other da w's in a sense that we're gonna treat the session view as a sketchpad for our ideas and just focus on coming up with the overall general vibe and then once we have that in place we can go ahead and transfer it over to our arrangement view so it's kind of in the sense of create come up with the over idea and what really feels good and then get that idea and then start flushing it out into an arrangement so let's get the lay of the land here let's get familiar with some of the parameters that we see in this environment on the top left hand corner you have a tap tempo button this is really helpful for you to just kind of get a general ballpark idea of the temple you're looking for or that you you feel like creating in and just simply tap the tap tempo one two three four and then the project will generalize that tempo and you see the play button already starts so the project will meet start after you've tapped tempo and so this is really helpful to kind of get more or less that the overall feeling the tempo more that ballpark of the the BPM so you want to work in and obviously next to that tap tempo is your global BPM the basic beats per minute that the tempo of your project you can simply click drag up and down you can also double click and just input whichever number you'd want double clicking it will take it default to your 120 BPM s and then you can go ahead and input whichever BPM you want next to it he had the nudge down and the nudge up buttons these are very unique to Ableton Live being that the whole premise of building this da W was centered around live performance meaning that artists might even use Ableton Live for a live performance aspect and so the nudge down and the nudge up make it really cool to allow you to basically speed up the project tempo and then have it snap immediately back to the temple you're at just so that you can somewhat beat match or catch up to maybe a drummer that's just off time or singer who's just off beat and you're performing with Ableton Live onstage let me give you an example I'm going to turn the metronome on so you can hear the beat now with the metronome on I'm simply going to click and drag I click and hold the nudge down button and then let go of it and I'll snap right back to 150 I'll do the same thing with a nun job so it's just a really quick way to nudge up and down the tempo without actually having to change the global tempo here it's pretty useful for live performances then next you have your time signature 4/4 you can set it to whichever time signature you'd like to work in right next to that as you can see that's our metronome lets us know the beat that we're keeping but right next to the metronome you can click and you have a specific countin which is really helpful when it comes to recording now I don't want to immediately record the second I hit the record so I want to give myself about a 1 bar count and then I record so that gives me a 1 2 3 4 and then record you can set it to 2 bars or if your bedrooms studio and you have your microphone down the hallway you can set yourself 4 bars so that you can hit the record button run down the hall jump over the the clothes that are on the floor and start recording the vocals and then right underneath you can actually change the sound of that metronome yeah the classic the click and a woodblock then you can also set the subdivision too so this is really helpful Ableton Live 10 has introduced this yeah the earlier versions didn't let you choose the subdivision so this makes it really helpful so we're at 150 I guess said to every 8th note so that I can hear the metronome in double-time you can also have the feature to enable only while recording which is really helpful especially when you're tracking vocals down the road you want to just leave it there so that when you're ready to record you can hear the click in your headphones only when you're recording and not upon playback so you don't have to go back and forth and click in the metronome on or off next to the metronome you have what we call the global quantization this is going to come in handy and useful later on as we explain how this impacts other elements in a woods life now right underneath is the browser window now the browser window is not only used to locate instruments plugins effects and sounds but it's what you're going to be using to create the right type of workflow that allows you to hit the ground running with that creative spark of an idea so right at the top we have what we call collections collections allows you to browse anywhere within the browser find something that you like bookmark it and categorize it by color so I have some drum one hits and I like when I browse some folders of mine on my hard drive I could simply right-click it and choose the color that I like for the collection you can rename them by right-clicking and then hit rename you're going to also add a sound or patch or preset or plug-in into multiple collections so this one's in the drums one hits pop / hip-hop I can also put it in the yellow category if I wish the name yellow something like great 808 or something like that and the right you see the results so you can also add plugins whether their third party or presets or plugins that come with Ableton Live you can also find samples or loops and just categorize them the way you like it so collections is a powerful way where you can bookmark specific sounds that you like to use on a regular basis that way you're not wasting time browsing and looking for those things underneath the collections you have categories categories is broken into sounds and they've pretty much broke it down into different types of sounds bass drums effects brass and these are all patches that you can use for proprietary instruments that come with Ableton Live so these are all just instruments that you can immediately use by just locating the sound clicking it and getting started right with right away with that sound do you have drums for the different drum rack and different drum kits instruments all the different instruments that come with Ableton Live 10 your audio effects which you can use on all that all the tracks that you'll be using now just because this has all your effects doesn't mean you can't use it on MIDI tracks audio effects are things that you might use on a MIDI track if the MIDI track is hosting a third-party plugin we'll talk more about that later MIDI effects which allow you to actually alter the MIDI data max for live which now comes installed with Ableton Live 10 so max for life is another host of plugins that you can use within your projects and a lot of these are great because they're open source so that means that you can people have been creating their own devices that they want to go ahead and use in Ableton Live world so these are great to have as an addition plugins which would be your third-party plugins that you might have installed from third-party plugins such as waves or UAD or anything like that you will find them in here and if you don't see any plugins show up here in your VST or audio simply head over to your preference window and head over to file folder and make sure in the plugins sources that you've turned on use VST plug-in system folder or you can browse for specific custom folders that you've created and use Audio Units make sure that those two are enabled so that you can now install or enable and have activated all the you the audio units and VST plugins that you have installed in your computer underneath the plugins you have clips that come with Ableton Live that basically act as loops that you can use in your sessions and then samples basically straightforward audio samples and audio files that you've collected then you have underneath that packs these are sample packs with instruments loops and things like that that Ableton has directly from their online store that connects through your Ableton Live account so you can just immediately download it directly from here and install it your user library is self-explanatory it's what you've created and presets that you might have have and saved away so you can access them there and all the things about the current project you're working on will be found here now places also allows you to bookmark specific folders on your hard drive so that you can access them at any time by just visiting the browser window simply go down and hit the add folder button browse your computer hard drive select the folder that you want and simply hit open and it will add it to the places sidebar so you can have access to them all the time this makes it really efficient when trying to look or locate sounds so that you can use in your project you can also use the search menu here on the top of the browser which is such an amazing helpful tool to locate specific files inside your places and presets and plugins as well so let's say I'm looking for a sound that sounds like a bird oh I can type in bird and since this beat Academy sample pipe folder is highlighted it's filtering out any samples with the word bird in it since there are none none show up on the right side but let's go over here to all results now let's see all the files with the word bird in them and these are all the files that show up the search field is a helpful tool when trying to locate a specific sample that you might be looking for which you know the filename of or if you're just actually looking for a specific type of sound and don't necessarily know where that file might be so you can type in you know bass fuzz and things like that and you will find patches and presets with that same two words base and fuzz in them so now let's go ahead and create an instrument so we can begin sequencing and creating an idea I'm simply gonna right-click on the session view and choose to insert a MIDI track this is gonna allow me to have a track in which I can load an instrument on there and triggering it with my MIDI device or even step sequence now we have an audio track and we'll come back to it and I'll show you how you can incorporate audio whether recording your own audio or incorporating loops into your project right now let's just go ahead and focus on the MIDI track the MIDI track is what's going to allow us to trigger different instruments such as drum kits synthesizers or any third-party plugins that you might have now without anything loaded on this track we can trigger it meaning click the record button to record enable button on this track and you can see the MIDI data coming from my MIDI device but you don't hear anything and that's because focusing your attention on the bottom window there are no instruments or devices loaded on this track so let's head over to the category section choose drums and in this drum section we're gonna choose a drum kit this is a drum rack loaded with drum sounds already you can simply click and drag this over the pre-existing MIDI track or you can simply click and drag it anywhere in the session view and it will create a separate MIDI track with the device already loaded in there or you can simply double click and it will load that instrument on the current MIDI device that you have selected so for instance I'll click on that first MIDI track we created double-click 808 and now we have the 808 drum kit loaded on both this one and this one so let's just go ahead and stay with this one here now if you focus your attention to the top of the mini instrument you'll notice these little individual squares and boxes these are called clip slots each individual clip slot is what you'll probably think of as an idea and that's what we're gonna treat them as let's treat these clip slots as ideas you'll notice that the mini instrument here this 808 cork it has circles in it and the audio track here has squares and that's because the MIDI instrument this MIDI track is record enabled meaning that the weaves triggered the record button and it's enabled and it's turned on meaning that we're ready to record we can trigger it with our MIDI device or with our computer keyboard so now let's go ahead and record an idea with my metronome on I can simply just click any clip slot trigger the record button and start to record and hit stop when I'm done recording as you can see here here's that idea that we've just recorded I can double click and it will open up the MIDI editing window on the bottom I can toggle between the device that I'm actually triggering by holding Shift + tab there's the drum rack that we have with the sounds and hitting shift tab again to see the actual notes in this individual clip now once I've recorded this clip I can move it place it anywhere in the clip slot doesn't necessarily mean that has to stay where I recorded it but now I've double click this and I can go ahead and edit the notes that I've recorded and simply move them to wherever it is I want within the grid that's me recording using my MIDI device I can also record by drawing in the notes without using any external MIDI device I can do this by just simply double-clicking an empty clip slot like this and it will give me by default a 1 bar clip in that one bar clip we can simply go into the MIDI editing window and simply double click to drag in notes and place them wherever it is that we want and the grid so once again let's go ahead and draw in some notes so we've created a 1 bar empty clip and we're simply going to double click inside the MIDI wet editing window and draw in those notes to audition the sound so you can hear when you place the notes make sure that the headphone mode is enabled without it you would be able to just draw the notes and not hear what the sounds are being triggered so I'll go ahead and place this on different places in the grid now the grid is basically how we can align the notes that we're inserting with the time or at the overall tempo see this is 1 bar so we have bar 1 beat 2 here beat 3 and then beat 4 and then we're introduced to bar 2 if we extend this out so for right now we're only dealing with one bar so if I want to audition this clip just simply hit the play button that is now on the left side of the clip and that auditions and lets you trigger and listen to the clip now the grid is important because that's the timing so if you didn't have a grid it would be really hard to have everything lock up in the right rhythm so you could set the grid in different ways you can right click in the MIDI editing window and you could use the adaptive grid or the fixed grid the fixed grid basically says I want to quantize or I want every note to be able to land on the nearest sixteenth note you can set it to every quarter note and you can see how now we lose a lot of the gray lines here and we only see a gray line and every quarter note bar one beat two three and four so that means when I double-click a note now the length of that note becomes a whole quarter note if I right-click on the grid again and choose eighth note we now have a subdivision so if I double click it's now the length of an eighth note and so on and so on if I had one bar it'll cover the whole bar so your notes when you double-click them will determine on the actual grid that you have currently set up it will highlight all this and just simply hit delete that's a fixed grid so it will always stay to whatever it is that you have it set to now you can also choose the adaptive grid which allows a little bit more flexibility because you can change the grid value determining on how much you zoom in and out so for instance let's use narrow and when I hover my mouse above this yellow line here it turns into a magnifying glass I click and drag up and down and more grid markers appear because I'm going a little bit deeper within the subdivision so if I double-click and I zoom out it's a lot shorter note so I wanted to get more precise in my timing I can zoom in and I can go ahead and choose narrow narrows medium and then the more I zoom in the more grid lines I see and then when i zoom out the less I see and you can work your way back to wide and widest so this is really going to depend on your personal workflow and how you liked sequence and be able to change your grid you can also use your pencil tool by hitting the B key and this allows you to draw repetitive notes instead of having to double click each time to draw in notes to fill this whole beat with for individual notes you could use the pencil tool just click once and drag to the right and it will repeat that note also you have to understand that the note gets repeated according to the grid value so if you've got this set to every thirty-second note you're able to draw twice as much and record a note just one so the pencil tool is really helpful when needing to repeat notes so we'll go ahead and delete that and now we play what we have so let's go ahead and instead of having quarter note hi-hats let's go ahead and have faith note I can use the pencil tool to draw over that and just [Music] now so far what we've been doing is step sequencing literally drawing in step by step the notes directly on the grid itself but when it comes to recording using an external MIDI device you might not always land on the grid because you're introducing a human element to it so I'm gonna record a be performed on my external MIDI keyboard and we'll cover how to actually quantize and get the notes played as close as possible to the grid so that it just doesn't fall off time so I'm gonna leave what I've just done here in that first clip and we'll go to another empty clip slot choose a record button and record so there's the idea and if we look at it we can zoom in and notice that some of the notes aren't directly on the grid as we look at the snare we see that beat four is right here but yet the snare is just a little behind so there's a couple options you can literally just click that one individual note and drag it or you can select a group of notes by just clicking dragging and creating the area of notes you'd like to select or holding Apple a to select all the notes and choose quantize settings so we can right click and head over to quantize settings quantizing is the ability to automatically have the notes move and shift to the grid that we've been working in now right here is quantize - we can set it to every sixteenth note so meaning at the nearest sixteenth value nudge that note I mean adjust a note at the start not at the end or if you want to have the end of the note meaning if you want the note to move to the right to the nearest sixteenth note you would have it at the end if you want the notes to move a little bit to the left then you would put the start basically the times you would use the start would be hey I sounded like I was behind the beat so you basically want to have the notes adjust from the start meaning you want the notes to move to the left if your man might my notes were rushing I played a little too fast then you probably want to have the notes from the end move to the nearest sixteenth note so I was behind the beat I'm gonna leave let's start now the quantizing amount determines how strong the quantizing will take place on the notes selected so let's do this let's set the quantizing to every quarter note and let's set the amount to be about 5% so we hit okay and there's barely any movement these notes should have moved to the nearest quarter note meaning they should have moved to the current lines of the grid that you see here but they didn't well they did but very little so let's go to our quantize let's select all the notes again and this time we'll go to a hundred percent and hit okay well now they drastically moved to sitting there it's quarter note so let's trigger this clip and so you kind of get the idea having a hundred percent set to your quantize settings will give you a a precise nudge to the nearest grid so you can kind of play with the amount if you wanted a little bit more loose you can kind of just dabble anywhere between you know halfway or if you want it to slightly just move then you would lower the amount if you wanted to move drastically you would raise the amount of the percentage when it comes to quantizing then you set the quantizing settings and once you have it set the way you like it you can hit okay and then you could always do a short key command which is just command you to apply those same quantize settings that you set and every time you quantize from here on out it will go back to the settings that you've currently left now I want to highlight a couple features in the notes section here that can be really helpful when sequencing and working with MIDI so first in a notes section you'll notice that there's a dialog box that tells you the lowest note play and the highest note played in that clip so we have c1 which is this kick here and we have f-sharp one which the hi-hat so when we select all of them the lowest note c1 the highest one is f-sharp one right underneath that you have two buttons divided by two and multiply by two divided by two allows you to play the clip twice as fast even though we haven't changed the tempo we're still at 108 bpm but the clip is just playing it cut time twice as fast multiplied by two does the opposite it lets it play it twice as slow so it's kind of cool to use as like a breakdown moment where you're going into halftime and you don't really have to change the actual tempo of the project and each individual clip is independent from another so this clip because it's now in halftime doesn't necessarily mean that this clip is it a half-time it's the same way we created that clip so now we can head over to the reverse and inverted buttons reverse would allow you just basically select whatever notes are selected in this case all the notes in this clip are selected if I hit reverse it would simply just reverse the sequence where the kick was first than the snare then we have the hi-hat snare kick the hi-hat stay the same won't because it's the same pattern whether you reverse it or not an inversion which is basically flip it'll take that note that's at f 1 sharp or F sharp 1 and put it at the bottom which would be the hi-hat and it would put the note that's on the bottom which would be the kick where the hi-hat is these are really cool useful tools especially when playing chords or recording any melodic elements you can really experiment with mixing these up and seeing what new results you get legato allows you to connect one note to the next basically taking the end of one note extending it to it reaches the next following note so I'll highlight the snare and kick and hit legato and basically the snare extended to where the kick is and they kick if I hit legato there will only extend to the nearest note that I've selected so in this case I didn't extend all the way out but if I select the kick and snare and hit legato that's what happens duplicate loop is a great use because it allows you to just duplicate the pattern that you've created in this clip this clip remember is just one bar length if I hit duplicate loop now we have a two bar loop say if I wanted to change the pattern maybe add another snare here then you can also duplicate that loop again giving you a four bar loop because we're duplicating two bars so this is really helpful to get really nice intricate program changes in your sequences because now we can go ahead and do little drum fills and stuff like that right before certain things happen that'll spice things up a little bit you can duplicate the loop again now it turns into an eight bar sixteen bar and so on and so on another thing to consider is the loop playback when the loop button is enabled that basically turns the clip into a continuous playing clip so it won't stop playing until you either stop the project or hit another clip we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second but you can adjust the length or the amount that this clip loop by going to the top right hand corner where the mouse cursor turns into a bracket clicking that and dragging both the loop bracket and the ending position to where it is that you desire so if we wanted a loop for one bar just drag it over to bar two now this clip will play in a loop for just one bar you can click that loop bracket and choose any specific one bar within the 16 bars that you've created so let's say we want to loop from bar 9 to 10 you can shrink the size of that now it's just half of that also to consider when the loop button is turned off this now just becomes a one-time played clip so there it won't loop but it will begin playing from wherever you determine the start position is so right now the start position is set at bar 9 let's head back to bar 1 by clicking and dragging that over to bar 1 and then going over to the end position and dragging that over to bar 2 now this is just a one bar clip and it should end playing as soon as it hits bar 2 that's it so that's the difference between the loop bracket which is the bracket you see on top here and the start and end position you can highlight a specific section and say I would like to loop bar 3 & 4 hitting command L and that will automatically turn the loop button on and create the starting and end position and set the loop bracket to that highlighted bar length now that whole concept of treating clips as ideas I hope that you're starting to see how this can play out see now each individual clip will trigger a sequence or a pattern for the instrument that's loaded on that specific track so we can have the beat that we have now and then create another beat underneath it in a different clip and have that play a whole different pattern and then go back to the original beat that we created so this is great from creating just like maybe a verse idea and then o doing a variation on having a chorus idea or something like that different progressions different beat patterns so for instance let's rename that first clip over here to verse 1 and what we'll do is we'll go ahead and duplicate it buzzies hitting command d and it's gonna do an exact copy and what we'll do is for this one will add some variation so instead of an eighth note hi-hat let's play a sixteenth note instead using the pencil tool click and drag so now we have a pattern with a 16 hi-hat right here I'll rename that but sixteenth and we have the verse one idea and I can go back and forth between the two so you can see you know that I can contain different versions variations different lengths this one clip can be let's see we had to duplicate loop button several times we can have a full 16th 16 bar loop but yet when I trigger the first clip it immediately went to that clip this is where the global quantization button comes into play as you notice that button we talked about earlier it's set to 1 bar this determines when the next clip will be triggered it will wait for the downbeat of the next incoming bar for instance if we set this over to 4 bars and I hit this clip here you'll notice that the play button is flashing until the end of the 4 bar count so now I won't hear that first reverse one beat until four bars have passed if I want it to happen every two bars I set the global quantization to two bars every eighth note I'm able to reach rigor the clip whether it's the same clip or a different clip depending on the global compensation now you can also that's going to affect globally all the clips in your project but then you can individually set when that clip will get lunch and that is by enabling the launch menu down here you will enable this and you could basically said I don't want it to match the global quantization I want it to follow its own rhythm so when this trick went I want this to be triggered in the next eighth note or the next quarter note so you can individually set each clip to be triggered in the next quarter note or the next two bars so the next eighth note down beat so this is allowing you to independently make each clip launched at a different launch point but for right now let's just set it to global so that it just follows what I do here and I'll set it to one bar so once again treating this as a a pallet for ideas so I'll have a different variation here I might go ahead and copy this duplicate this and let's go ahead and click this and hit the twice as you know twice as slow and now this will be playing at half time and then we can go right back to this one and since they're all set to the loop button there we the all the clips are going to continuously play until I trigger another one now there's also a button here that will allow you to stop the clips that are currently playing on that specific track so for playing the beat and we hit the stop button that stops that clip from playing or any clips playing on this track if you wanted to patterns to play at the same time meaning I want this pattern to play and I also want that pattern to play well that defeats the purpose of having different clips if you wanted to you would just basically copy whatever MIDI patterns you have in here by just highlighting them and hitting copy Apple or command C going to the other clip and simply just pasting that data into the desired clip you want so you can transfer that data so that you can hear that information when you press one clip so so far we've created different ideas and different patterns that trigger the device located on this mini track which in this case is a drum kit loaded in a drum rack now let's see how we can incorporate the same concepts using audio to create an audio track sensibly right-click and hit insert audio track or follow the short key command command T the difference between the two is with audio you can't simply use a virtual instrument such as a synthesizer or a third party plug-in directly onto the audio track and only handles pre-recorded audio or audio that you're going to record into that track so let's head over here to the interface the i/o section because this is going to determine where the audio is coming from if we're planning to record audio into this track here we determine the input right now it's set to external in meaning that I'm using my external sound card to determine the input I'm choosing to record if you're using the stock sound card in your laptop you might just have the option of one and two the basic microphone that comes equipped on the laptop I'm using an external device there depending on that device you'll get to see different inputs and outputs Ableton Live also gives you the ability to label those inputs and outputs you can do that in the preference window choosing audio and input configuration and here you can label what your inputs and outputs would be once you have that you can go ahead and choose in this case here's input eight my vocal mic and if I want to record my vocal I simply select that input and then hit the record button and record the same way right on the clip that we have with the MIDI patterns right underneath the input that you've chosen you notice an in Auto and off that's your monitoring section by default Ableton Live have it set by default Ableton Live has it set on/off and that's a good thing because what you what happens is if input monitoring allows you to hear pretty much some standby mode you're gonna hear what you're listening to and what its gonna sound like before you record but sometimes if you got your speaker's loud and the microphone close by you can get a really nasty feedback almost sounds like transformers trying to escape your brain something like that so by default it sets off meaning that you see the levels coming in but you won't hear it if you do want to hear your signal before you commit to recording it you can then set it to auto and auto would automatically let you hear it before you on standby mode so while it's on auto you can only hear the signal once you hit the record button once the record button is there then you're able to hear the signal going through depending on your settings you might experience some latency so go back to your preferences in the audio section and configure the amount of the right buffer size for you that's gonna allow you to work depending on your computer circumstance to get the least amount of latency which is the time it takes for your audio to travel through your computer and right out to the speakers for you to hear it the smaller or the lower the buffer size the less time it takes so there's six point sixty milliseconds the larger buffer size that means it takes longer but yet it's less CPU intensive so you won't have a lot of memory issues if you're getting a lot of crackling and popping you might want to try increase in the buffer size if you're getting a lot of latency try decrease in the buffer size do you get it where you can sound just right input monitoring allows you to hear regardless whether you have the record enabled on or off you're basically just hearing the input source so in this case we'll have it set to off because I don't need to hear myself I'll hit the record button and we can simply just hit a clip and record it hey how you doing this is me recording audio sounds great and now by double-clicking that clip we now have an audio recording and the same concept you can just use this as a sketch pad we'll get that down I can choose another clip recorder another idea so on and so on and each one could be its own independent length one can be one bar one could be sixteen bars thirty-two it doesn't matter and you can add as many more Clips slops as you want just simply right click in here and hit insert scene and that'll give you another row of clip slots that you can choose from now as I mentioned before audio tracks will allow you to record audio on to their tracks as well as import audio so we have this recorded audio that we did earlier Hey how you doing this is me recording audio that's something great you sure do and then you can go ahead and import audio to that same very track even though we have my vocal that I recorded here I can incorporate loops or different audio or mp3s any type of audio file format and place it in that same track by just putting it in a different clip slot so here we have a drum loop I'll click and drag that over to this audio track you can also click and drag it into the session view and a brand new audio track will be created with that track with that audio loop on the track so here going back to that first audio we have my vocal recording hey how you doing and then we have this audio loop both audio files are playing out of that same view is the same output of channel 1 or track 1 audio 1 so let's just rename audio 1 we're gonna hit rename and call this drum loops and I can go ahead and import several different loops click and hold shift and drag them right into them so now I have all these different loops all different loops different temples different vibes and I can trigger just like we did with the MIDI clips back and forth the different loops [Music] because this one audio track contains multiple files on multiple clips that we can trigger back and forth so let's play that MIDI clip earlier of the verse beat that we have and now we can incorporate audio we can incorporate audio alongside with this clip that's playing here but there's something that you notice and that's the timing so now we're gonna get into manipulating and warping the audio that we're incorporating warping and a listen live is the ability to manipulate the audio using in your project just as the same way we were able to take these MIDI clips and adjust a notes timing by snapping them over to the grid we can do so by warping the audio you can even use warping as a method to spark creativity and create new sound designs and sound scapes with the audio that you're using so let's go ahead and highlight the second audio file in this clip here an audio track one let's solo by clicking the S here so that this is the only track we hear playing and trigger that clip so right now this audio file this clip here is not warped the warp is disabled and what we're listening to is just the audio file raw so if we change the tempo of our project 108 it will have no effect on the actual audio file so the goal of warping this audio is so that the drum loop would be in time whether we speed up or slow down the BPM of our project let's enable the warp button and now we see the gridlines show up and we also have these individual little markers show up at the beginning of every transient these are our transient markers so now that this file is warped let's go ahead and speed up the tempo while this is playing now slow it down so this is gonna give us the ability to have that drum loop change with our project BPM but you notice that we still have the timing issues when I put the metronome on the beat is behind now that an audio is warped we can simply just click and drag and nudge each individual hit to where we want them on the grid I know what you're thinking having to go in there and double click a marker and adjust every single hit by hand that can be a little bit overwhelming especially if you're dealing with larger files so I want to share with you a three-step simple process that can help you immediately warp the audio that you're importing or using and have it automatically line up to the grid first let's go ahead and disable the warp the first thing you do when you're importing whether a drum loop or song or any type of audio you want to locate the downbeat so that's our first step in this case we found our downbeat here to be this first initial kick and your downbeat can be anywhere you can locate it in any portion or part of the audio that you're using so what what I mean by locating is grabbing the starting position just like we did with the MIDI editor and this is going to determine where the audio starts so if I have it from right here that's where the audio starts when I trigger the clip the grayed out area means that it will not play and it would just simply play right immediately from where the starting location is that so what we need to do is move the starting location to where our desired downbeat in this case by zooming in I'm going to choose right here so now when I trigger the clip it's right at that initial kick drum the next step is to simply right click on that starting position right on the little triangle part right there and then choose set bar one beat one here and what this is going to do is going to tell to live this is where my down beat this is what I'm considering to be bar one beat one so we're gonna do that once I've done that you already noticed that Ableton Live will click the warp it'll enable the warping and it'll just the timing for the whole file as you can see we already have things lined up with the exception of a couple little hits here and there but then what we can do is simply right-click on that first yellow warp marker and choose warp from here there are a couple different options when it comes to warping but we start with the wort from here that's gonna allow Ableton Live to automatically warp calculating where you set your bar one beat one so we hit work from here and you notice a little bit of adjustment but now we have the drum loop in time let's go ahead and adjust our loop bracket so I'm going to click this so that the loop starts from right here now if I put my metronome on and adjust the tempo we are now in time without having to go individually to any of the hits and adjust them now I can loop let's say bar three or maybe just give me a two from bar one to bar three we'll highlight that and simply click the loop button or you can hit command L and that now gives us a two bar loop now we can go in there and adjust any timing that we want if we still feel that things are a little bit off maybe like the snare drum right here double click that and nudge that over keep in mind though that this will adjust other parts of that file so the way this works is you treat this warp marker as like an anchor point say from this sound to the next transient I want to be able to adjust so now since there's no other warp marker to the left of this everything to the left of this sound will be adjusted so that's how you can use warping to even even manipulate the rhythm of the audio so if we bring this right back and then say I don't want this hit to move I'll create a warp marker so now that the only element that's moving is everything from this marker to this so you can pretty much create like an anchor point saying don't move at all I just want to move this one sound and so on and so on so I can double click this and now if I let go of that everything after this warp marker will also adjust and move as well as well so we can now just move the placement of this one snare head while leaving everything else in the same place you can also just select a whole group of transients and quantize them the same way you would quantize any MIDI notes head over to quantize settings make sure that it's the same and hit OK then you might notice that Ableton Live has already highlighted it selected and created yellow warp markers and shifted those transients to the nearest quantize settings in this case every sixteenth note so that's a really cool easy way to actually quantize the audio that you're using in your projects now we incorporated this by Unseld owing it with the beat that we have on track 2 they're now both instinct because we've manipulated and warped the audio so that it is now in time with the project now going further with warping if you focus your attention to the warping section here you notice that you have underneath the segment BPM this is just Ableton lives and guess of the original BPM of the audio that you've warped then just like in the MIDI editor you can play it twice as fast or twice as slow now underneath that we have the warping mode depending on the type of mode that you're using is going to depend on the actual integrity or the quality or the actual type of effect that you're getting when warping beats is probably the mode you would want to use if you're manipulating audio such as a drum loops or percussive elements it's things that are easier to locate these individual transient hits then you have tones and textures which are probably better for long played notes or strings or anything like that and then you have reap it which doesn't allow you to manipulate the quality of the warping but adjusts the pitch of the audio according to your tempo so for instance the higher we go in our tempo the higher in pitch so it's still in time it's just basically pitching up or down the audio so that it's in time with the projects BPM this is the same thing as using a turntable or C DJ and pitching it up or down so that it can beat match with the other record after we pitch you have things like complex and complex Pro you have complex and complex Pro these maintain the best possible quality and integrity of the audio so these are probably best to be use when using op vocals or long audio files in which you really want to maintain the integrity and quality of that audio file when doing big jumps so if you're warping an audio file where the original ppm is let's say 92 BPMS and you're trying to go from a 92 BPM audio loop and speed it up to 128 then you might want to try using the complex Pro or complex to maintain the best possible so you can have fun with these in the different types of warping modes they all have their own unique little texture and flair to them and so just see what works best with the type of material and audio that you're manipulating and now I briefly want to go through some of the instruments that you can use in your projects that come with Ableton Live 10 head over to your instrument categories and on the right side of the browser you'll notice some of the instruments that are available some are pretty straightforward such as synthesizers that you can use to generate tones and shape leads basis pads and you could do that using analog collision operator and wavetable and tension and then some allow you to incorporate audio from projects or anywhere in your hard drive and manipulate them so just a simpler sampler the impulse and the drum rack so let's go ahead and load a simpler I'm going to click the simpler and drag and drop that into the session view and that's going to create a brand new MIDI track with the simpler device loaded on it now you can see that this area here is waiting for you to import a audio sample to work with now you can use any file that you might have in your hard drive as well as a file located within the project itself so I'll use the audio clip that we've warped earlier I'll just click that clip and drag it right into the simpler now you see the audio file located inside the simpler so just by triggering it using a MIDI device or your computer keyboard allows you to play back the sound and depending where you're playing on the keys of your MIDI device will determine the playback pitch now by adjusting the starting and ending positions within the simpler you can determine where the sample begins to play when triggered if you just click the starting position and drag that to wherever you like to start that will determine the starting point of the sample you can click and zoom in by just dragging up and down same thing with the end position now the simpler comes in three different modes yoga classic mode which is the mode we're in now which simply allows you to trigger the sample and pitch it up or down on your MIDI device the one-shot mode which still allows you to do that but we'll play the sample once all the way to the end position and then there's the slice mode within the simpler this will create individual slices in the audio file using the transient markers each individual slice can be triggered and you can lower the sensitivity spread the distance between one individual slice to the other and they can all be warped so that each slice will play in time with the project now let's go ahead and take a look at the sampler click and drag the sampler into your session view and the difference between the sampler and simpler is that the simpler allows you to manipulate one audio file at a time whereas the sampler allows you to combine multiple audio files and have them either play simultaneously or create a specific zone where that sample will be triggered for instance let's hit the zone button and now we can simply drag and drop samples into this section so I'll click the sample of my audio that's one sample we'll put the drum loop that we warped and we'll go ahead and place another one so we've got three files so if I trigger the sampler and by clicking its own you get to see that specific audio file now the green lines you see here just indicate the actual zone that that sample will be triggered it so you can create a range saying I only want to hear this sample when I play notes from c3 all the way to let's say c4 and you can design specific areas or zones for that specific sample to be playing you can also just right click and hit distribute ranges equally in Ableton will automatically choose enough zones to fit the amount of samples that you have loaded in there next let's take a look at the drum rack a drum rack is similar to the sampler in which you can load multiple samples in there now when you click and drag a sample you can drag and drop any sample on your hard drive or even in the session click and drag it you notice that a simpler will pop-up simpler will be the device that the drum rack were used to trigger back that sample so everything that we went through with the simpler is basically what we're going to be doing with every sound that you can load in a drum rack now you can load up 128 multiple samples on the drum rack and load up multiple drum racks within your projects another feature to note about the drum racks is the ability to map specific macro knobs so that you can control more than one sounds parameters in the simpler with just one knob so let's say I have about five different sounds in my drum rack but I want all of the transpose knobs of those sounds to be controlled by one knob instead of having to go to each individual sample and transposing it up or down individually we can simply just go over here to the controls right click on the transpose section and choose a macro to map it so I'll map to macro one now when I move the knob up and down on this macro it's changing the transpose parameter I can assign multiple samples to the same exact macro this makes it really easy to control multiple samples at the same time by just turning one knob now let's talk about adding audio effects onto the tracks in your project to add an audio effect simply head over to the audio effects category and choose on the right side of the browser which effect you want to add to your track so for instance let's take this Auto filter we're going to click it and drag it on top of track seven and now the auto filter shows up on the bottom and now whatever we change on the auto filter will affect the audio on track seven [Music] now the signal flow works left to right so if I add another plugin such as maybe an EQ or a compressor and then let's say a chorus I can just double click and since I have this track highlighted it will continuously add more plugins to it whatever happens to the filter will affect the EQ and whatever I do to the EQ gets affected by the compressor so it works from left to right and if I wanted to change the chain of command I simply just click on a plug-in and shuffle it around if I wanted that track to be affected by the chorus first I would simply click the chorus and put that first in the chain if I wanted the filter to be last simply click the filter and have it become less it does make a difference where the plug-in is in the chain of the signal flow in this case the signal is being affected by the chorus and then the EQ and the compressor and then it gets filtered just because these are audio effects doesn't mean that they cannot be used on MIDI instruments you can also just click drag effects on our on an existing track and drop them on another track and that will remove that device over to the new track you placed it on so here we have an analogue which is a synthesizer instrument and we've now just placed a chorus on top of the analogue and the same things can apply from before you can add multiple devices as many as and as much as you want you can even group the effects by holding the shift button clicking the multiple effects and right-clicking and choosing to group them what this will do that will allow you to simply bypass multiple effects at once by just bypassing the actual group now so far what we've been doing have been inserting devices or audio effects onto individual tracks clicking an effect and dragging them directly onto that track that's called insert effects you can also place effects in return tracks like we see here delay on return track a and a reverb on return track B that corresponds to the knobs that we see here send a and send B which gives us the opportunity to just use one effect over multiple different tracks instead of having to use up our CPU resources by having multiple delays or multiple reverbs we can simply just have one reverb or one delay and send a little bit of that signal from each individual track so for instance let's send a little bit of track seven to the delay [Music] so we're sending a little bit of that audio signal to the effect that is placed on return track a and you can layer have multiple effects as many as you want directly on as many return tracks to create a return track simply just right-click and hit insert return track the moment you create a new return track you'll also create a new send and then you can send over to that certain effect so if we want a little bit of delay and we want a lot of reverb on track seven I would send just a little bit to a and a lot to be and then we can also send a little bit of the snare to you that same reverb so I'll send more of truck seven and a little bit of track two to the reverb so let's trigger track and that's how you can use return tracks and sends to save up on resources and have a more balanced effect processing in your projects then you can also insert MIDI effects head over to the MIDI effects category and on the right side of the browser choose one of the MIDI effects to use MIDI effects will only be applied on medieval tracks with devices on them you can't drag and drop a MIDI effect onto an audio track so let's head over to the analog which is a MIDI device and using the pitch plugin so even if we recorded any MIDI we can change the pitch or transpose the performance that we have simply by just going up and down the pitch on the midea plugin we can add arpeggiators chord plugins and all different types of midi plugins that affect the actual MIDI performance for that device so now let's talk about arrangement currently right now in the session view the clips that you see triggered or enabled are the ideas that I've put down for each in the individual track that make up the overall idea so let's just say this is the course or the vibe that I'm working on and so if I hit play we'll get to hear all the different clips trigger at once and working simultaneously together [Music] now notice that you don't need the clips to line up together in order for them to play together just simply click whatever clip that corresponds inside that track and it plays along with any other tracks on half clips in them but you can also line up the tracks together to arrange within the session view and if you put all the clips that you want to be playing together in one row that's called a scene head over to the master fader and trigger the play button here and that launches the whole row and which called and that launches the whole row which is called a scene so maybe you want to say that'll be my chorus beat I can rename that and type chorus beat you can duplicate a whole scene by just hitting command D and that will duplicate that whole row and so let's say in this time for this scene we don't want to have that crazy lady and we don't want to have the horn stabs and now you can go back and forth between the first scene and repeat the whole process leave him start off with not having anything at all maybe take away the kick snare and the 808 on the top and then introduce the next section and so on that's how you can do some quick arrangement within the session view but whenever you've gotten all the clips together or the over idea you can simply transfer and work in the arrangement view to flush out the arrangement by just simply hitting the global record button the global record button will allow you to record and transfer any clip that is being currently triggered into the arrangement window so let's pick a starting point let's say bar 17 will hit the record button and when you'll start to see is that Ableton Live will record the current clips that are playing in the session view into the arrangement view whenever you're ready you just hit the stop button and that will stop the recording process so now that if it stopped we've got the clip sent over here but yet they're still grayed out what's going on is that Ableton Live is still playing the clips and your session view so you're still jamming out sort of speak and you're not ready to commit to an arrangement but when you are ready to commit to the arrangement that you have here simply hit the back to the arrangement button which is located right here that will disable all the clips that have been triggered and now you can focus in on the arrangement notice now that when you hit play and if you're starting from here you really don't hear anything until the playhead moves over to bar 17 and since all these clips were set to loop mode you can just simply select all of them and drag them as long as you want and arrange any way you'd like so let's say we want nothing but maybe the sub to start the song with some high hats and introduce the kick at bar 5 [Music] maybe have the snare come right in bar nine along with everything else once you've committed to the arrangement view you can simply just continue to add on to the arrangement by just enabling a track and recording it so let's say we wanted to put a synth line so I'm gonna hit the record button [Music] now I'm recording directly on to the arrangement view the editing takes place the same way double-click a region and the MIDI editor shows up on the bottom you can also drag and drop into your arrangement from the browser or anywhere on your computer as well as your session view simply click any clip while holding it down hit the tab button and drag it over into your arrangement view or go to your browser and drag files directly onto your arrangement view depending on the type of file it would create a track to host that file and it will appear in your project you can also vice-versa send an arrangement in case you started from the arrangement view first into your session so let's say I want this four bar region of the arrangement to be sent to the session view just highlight that section and right click and choose consolidate time to a new scene this will go ahead and send a brand-new scene as you can see here with those elements highlighted from the arrangement you can go ahead and trigger that whole scene by clicking the scene and the master fader once in the arrangement view there's a couple tools that you can use to shape the arrangement to the way you like it for instance when working with regions that are set to loop you simply just drag and that track will extend for as long as you like because this is a four bar loop the pattern will loop for after four bars if I took the loop button off that means I can no longer drag it to the right because it's just a four bar audio clip if I wanted to copy it and have it played somewhere else I would either have to copy it or duplicate it or you can just hold the option key and click and drag it anywhere you like in the arrangement but that means that I can't drag it to the right or to the left because it's just a four bar loop if I mean if I enable the loop mode I can now just drag over to the right or to the left and it will continuously play wherever the four bar loop is that you can also split that region to create independent regions so if I just say well I only want one bar I'll select this one bar and I'll hit command e I now have created an independent region so like if I go ahead and transpose this that transpose won't affect this region over here same thing if I hit reverse to reverse the king it won't affect this region here so splitting regions allows it to become independent and not affect any other regions within that track you can also group tracks so if we have the kick snare and the hi-hat and these are all drum elements I might want to create a group that I call drums so I can hold shift and select multiple tracks right click and choose group tracks you can also use the short key command now I've created a group where all these tracks are in let's go ahead and name this track drums because you can also create subgroups and we'll call this the rest of the stuff music and then if I wanted to I could even group those groups just highlighting those two and creating another group and call this track one so you can group within a group as much edges like and this will help organize your arrangements so it's a little bit easier to navigate through this also makes it easier for when it comes time to mix to actually go ahead and affect multiple tracks by just inserting and dragging and dropping audio effects onto the group channel another essential element within creating the arrangement is the automation the automation is the ability to just draw in or record and program specific changes in a device plug-in or effect so automating in Ableton Live is really quite simple so here on this snare track we have a filter just simply click on any parameter let's say the filter frequency right click on it and hit show automation that will enable the automation window in the Ableton Live arrangement window now everything's a little grayed out and you see the red dotted lines that's indicating that no automation has been recorded programmed or drawn in so you can simply just click drag up and down and you can see how it corresponds with the actual device so let's say at this point I want the filter to start out at 208 Hertz and then just simply click another point and change the parameter let's say you wanted it to go back down at this point in the arrangement or there you go so let's go ahead and play that and see how it works you can see the filter starts to build up right and following the automation and then filter its way back down you can also make smoother curves by holding the option key and a little bend icon shows next to your mouse cursor clicking that allows you to make concave curves you can do it upward or inward you can view multiple aspects of each device by just simply hitting the plus sign and choosing another device another part of that device such as LFO amount and now you see the different parameters that you're currently automating you can also click here in this box and choose what device and inside the device which parameter you would like to automate let's say the slope now that's the one you're focusing on and you can repeat the same process if you wanted to record additional information on something that you recorded in the arrangement view simply enable the overdub button by hitting the plus sign in your transport bar and then recording and that will add additional notes to your arrangement you can consolidate both of the new pieces by hitting command J and then edit the notes in your emitted editor you can also loop a specific portion of your arrangement by enabling the loop bracket turning that on will loop that specific section you can change the length by just extending the bracket or shortening it next to that you'll see the punch in and the punch out this allows Ableton Live to simply record once the playhead reaches the beginning of that loop bracket and then leaves the loop bracket so let me give you an example starts to record and end recording once it leaves that loop record be sure to take the loop break it off or also to just continue looping or recording in a loop the other controls that you see in the transport bar have to do with the capture feature which allows you to actually capture performance without actually having to hit the record button so if you're playing the chords or you can simply hit the capture button and Ableton Live will capture what you've played without actually having to hit record great feature especially if you're just experimenting and trying to get a vibe next to that you have the overdub button for your session view this button allows you to add additional information like we just did in the arrangement view but in your session view and if you change any automation that's already been written you can always hit this to go back to the original automation that you've placed in the arrangement now the last thing I want to highlight is being able to MIDI and key map devices in Ableton Live and that is simply meaning that you can use your MIDI devices to control plug-ins effects since basically any parameter in Ableton Live with external devices and your computer keyboard simply go to the right-hand corner and hit the MIDI box anything that's shaded in blue you can go ahead and map but one thing to keep a note is you want to make sure it by going to the preference window and hitting the MIDI tab that your MIDI controllers such as the one that you're using have the remote section turned on that'll allow them to be a remote meaning that you can use that to trigger the device once you have that enabled go ahead and open up the MIDI mapping click on a parameter and then choose that device once I have that map you'll see the number there and it'll also show up in your MIDI mapping menu you can change the devices such as I the minimum and the maximum parameter change now let's go ahead leave the MIDI mapping and I can now use my MIDI device to control that remotely you could do the same thing by enabling the key box and that will allow the computer keyboard to do the same exact thing I'm gonna go ahead and assign the LFO to my number keypad five and exit the key mapping and now every time I hit the number pad five that will affect that parameter so that's going to wrap up our comprehensive crash course into Ableton Live as you can see we barely scratched the surface and it can get really deep down the rabbit hole but well we've covered in this essential walkthrough are the fundamentals and the basics that you're gonna need to get the ideas that you have in your head out there to the world you've learned how to record your music how to actually program your music and arrange it and add effects to it to getting it to sound the way you want it to I definitely recommend that you revisit this walkthrough from time to time just to brush up on some of the basics and just practice using this as an instrument the d8w that you're currently using to record your songs is an instrument in itself and so the more you practice and more become familiar with it the better you're gonna become at becoming efficient and getting your songs completed and as I mentioned earlier my gift to you for watching this video is a sample pack that I've put together filled with construction kits loops sounds one-shots transition effects everything you need to really hit the ground running and creating music right away can be found in this sample pack it's yours absolutely free and the bonus is its royalty-free so you can use it in any DW in any of your projects today the sample pack also covers a wide range of different genres of music so whether you're creating pop urban records or EDM you'll find things in there that can help inspire you and hit the ground running simply click the link below in the description box or visit w-w-w beat academy sample pack absolutely free today thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Beat Academy

Views: 2,024,590

Keywords: Ableton, Ableton Live 10, Music Production, Tutorial, Beat Academy, Cymatics, reid stefan, adam ivy, FL Studio, Ableton Live 10 tutorial, ill Factor, Masterclass, ableton tutorial

Id: 25Zcy8Uu4dw

Length: 79min 56sec (4796 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018