Ableton Live Using Hardware or Outboard Effects

hey what's up everybody today I wanted to go over how to use outboard gear such as guitar pedals which is what I'm going to use here or just anything else you want to try to use that isn't inside of Ableton to affect Ableton Audio and how to do it without having latency and all the other stuff so I'm going to show you my workflow let's dive in right now what I have attached to Ableton is my old tube screamer right here this is just a in a custom enclosure so it was just a little DIY kit I built a long time ago and what I wanted to do was give this drum loop a little bit of a vintage vibe so let's listen to the drum loop before any effects are on it okay so how is this done well you need an audio interface and this audio interface I'm using now is my trusty Apollo twin and this thing has more than two outputs and that's important you can still do this with just two outputs but it's kind of removing you from being able to hear what's going on the scarlett 2i4 like I showed before in one of my other videos I'll link at the bottom has two inputs and four outputs which is what's going on right now what I can do is I have one cable coming out of the interface down channel 3 and channel 3 is going into the input here of the tube screamer out of the tube screamer output back into input 1 on the Apollo to win so that's what I have routed right now okay so in live we have over here our inputs and outputs if you can't see them and this is I'm an arrangement view right now if you can't see them just click this little IO button ok now I'm going to take this loop and I'm going to send it out of my sound card into the distortion pedal and out of the distortion pedal back in to the interface how would I do that I would select external out it okay external output and then I'm going to send it down the output that I chose which is three and I'm going to send it back in to input one so let's listen to without any distortion what it sounds like so let's turn on the distortion see we got yeah that's nice I'm going to mess around with it right [Music] [Music] okay so it's it's really that easy in order to get the connectivity going however you have to be really careful when you go to record because sending signal outside of your interface through a device and then back into the interface causes the interface to have to impart latency there's going to be a certain amount of time that it takes for all that to happen and believe it or not it's not so much in the cables it's actually in the processing this thing has to change it from digital to analog send it down the analog lines and put it back in and then change it back from analog to digital so that takes time which you have to be careful of is that in live when your Hardware when your software monitoring which is what's going on here there's a huge difference between software and hardware monitoring what's happening here is that it's taking the audio let's see what's going on right now my preferences is taking the audio the input latency is ten milliseconds and the output latency is three so in total we're going to have thirteen or so milliseconds of latency that will be imparted on the recording if should I decide to record it and listen to it at the same time however there's a nice workaround if you record into one clip with it armed and you have the auto switch on what you'll do is you'll end up using the software to monitor the recording and still be able to record the audio however because you're using the auto switch here any latency that's that's being generated by the system is going to be recorded into the track okay so in track 3 what I'm going to do in order to to get around that okay is I'm going to also arm this track to now I have two tracks and what I want to do is I want to show you what I mean if I use here during in the monitor area if I turn the monitor area to off what will happen is is yes I'm recording into this track but I won't be able to hear what's going on see watch so I can't hear it it's muted if I turn the auto switch on I can hear it if I turn this to off though none of that latency is going to get imparted onto this track so really the best way to do this when you're recording is to have one track for listening back and then another track for recording the actual the actual recording okay so now look I can listen to it on channel 2 or I should I should say track 2 and I can record it onto track 3 - to prove my point I'm going to turn having it having the monitor on in or auto is pretty much the same thing having it on auto means that you can record into the track and having it on end means that it's just always you can always hear through it and you can't record into the track so the same latency would happen in either of these cases either in or Auto so I'm going to record with the auto switch on and record another track without the auto switch on I'm going to go ahead and mute those tracks so that we don't hear the track twice but I'm just going to show you what I'm talking about here [Music] okay so now I've recorded both of these tracks let's zoom in real close and I want to show you what's going on here notice that the track with the auto switch turned on is yeah about 13 milliseconds later than it should be all right however this track with the when I recorded it with the mono to switch off is right there so in the future when you're going to do this the best thing that you could do is to have one track to listen okay and then another track to record and that one with the monitor switch turn to off all right let's and let's look at this another way a lot of the newer interfaces have the ability to direct monitor okay and so direct monitor what that means is that I can turn up using the potentially the software that the interface came with or somewhere on the front panel I can turn it all the way to direct monitoring and let me show you what's going on with this interface if I click on the console right here this is just this won't apply to live but I just want to show you right now my my Hardware direct monitoring is muted okay if I unmute this I don't need this track anymore it's gone I can turn let's go ahead and delete this track and now I can listen to the direct monitoring coming from the interface okay so if I mute it I'll just loop this okay so if your interface potentially has direct monitoring you can skip that step of having to make an extra track you still need to make sure regardless of whatever interface you're using that whatever you're recording into the the monitor is switched to off okay so the next thing we're going to do is I'm going to attach my trusty Big Sky reverb right here and we're going to use reverb is kind of done and send effects are kind of done a slightly different way at least with using my method okay so as you can see now I have my Strymon big-sky which is a reverb a really really lush awesome reverb plugged into the Apollo to it and since it's a reverb I like to approach this just a little bit differently if I just go ahead and play the drum loop through the reverb with the mix all the way up this is what we get so that's not really this that's not really what I'm looking for just a fully wet reverb now I can turn the mix down on the device itself here's no reverb is that reverb on off on that what so I think what makes more sense when using reverbs is to do this cool thing where instead of going directly out of this first track we could also send the first track to the master okay so but since we have these in case you're confused this is one of the return tracks okay just right here you could you could send the audio to the Strymon big-sky as a return reverb and how do you do that well the return instead of going to the master it's normally default going to the master I'll select external out and send it down channel one okay and well sorry channel 3 because that's channel 3 is coming out of the Apollo twin into the reverb and then the reverb is going to play through the return track and then it's going to come back in down channel 1 how I have it routed just like the distortion pedal so now I can dial in if I have the dry/wet turned all the way up on my reverb I can dial in the amount that I want so right now I have time [Music] that's full so now I have a dry wet control in life so when I turn it all the way up I still have 50% dry and 50% wet and then less amounts of it so it's more it's more manageable so then the next step that I would do is just like before I'd record that reverb into a track and remember once again in this situation in order to hear the reverb if I'm not using any sort of direct monitoring I have to set up a software monitor and that's this track right here with the input and then the track I'm actually going to record into though is track 3 so now I can go ahead and record this [Music] okay and now here's my reverb I didn't have my gain turned up enough but that's okay I'm just going to crank it up here so I have my reverb and then my normal track I can go ahead and get rid of this listen back track and now I can dial this in and turn it down to where I want it [Music]

Channel: Seed to Stage

Views: 50,804

Keywords: ableton live, Strymon big sky, tubescreamer, ableton hardware, ableton external effects

Id: UI8e80FHBoU

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/StudioToolz]

Useful Video, thanks for sharing. I am starting a similar channel over at www.youtube.com/c/PaulWillocks

[u/mixmastersang]

The question I have is how do you cut out the low end of a external guitar pedal reverb - when 1) the external reverb doesn't have built in EQ and 2) Reverb sits on a track and not send. Working with external effects on individual tracks is easier than return tracks for a variety. Would love to hear people's feedback on my question :)

[u/Rhythmhead]

Alternatively I find it a lot easier to just use the external audio effect device. You don't have to worry about monitoring as much and you can compensate for latency. Then freeze and flatten, done ;)