Ableton Sampler: How To Use In Under 15 Minutes

ableton sampler is undoubtedly one of my favorite tools when I finally learned how to use it it really opened up a world of creative possibilities it's like it injected something organic into my music if you don't know what sampler is it's basically the simplest Big Brother in Ableton there is actually a bunch of patches or presets included that you might have used with it already but you've never really delved in to see how it actually works here's a few examples of what you can actually do with samples now when you first glance at it you might be like well this is a super complicated looking thing like what does this do what does that do what does this thing over here do so what we're gonna do today is we're going to cover all of the main features in sampler under 15-minute so that you can understand how to use this instrument to the best of its ability but please stick around that way you'll be able to get all the information necessary to actually learn this synth so without further ado let's get straight into Ableton sampler alright so what you're going to want to do here is load sample into a new MIDI track you can destroy click and drag or double click to load it up now this is the default interface now there's no point in teaching anything about to teach you here without actually loading a sample in so if you're following along just drag any sound and for now it doesn't really matter what sound as long as it's something with audio which is what you'd hope so this is a random sample let me just turn up the volume cool so let's have a brief overview of everything within the sampler all the sections of the instrument are available to access at the top here so you've got the zone section you've got the sample section the pitch oscillator section the filter global section the modulation section and lastly the MIDI section and then lastly we'll get into some more advanced features so let's start here so here you've got the sample display this is where you drag in your samples as I've just done previously now if you right-click you can do a bunch of things to the Sam like sure where it comes from normalize the volumes or the pans for both channels you can crop it if you've selected a certain thing which I'll get to in a second and you can zoom in and out from the certain region that you've selected so what you can do here as you can see this is the start point this is the end point now they're both toggleable down here as well if you prefer to fine-tune it that way for now let's bring it back to where it was actually I'm bring it back up here so we just have this small segment now what you can also do is reverse the entire sample that way it's going to play from the end point back to the start point rather than the other way around now snapping attempts to put these starting and end points onto a zero crossing which is basically just a point like that as you can see that crosses the centerline of the amplitude here's the sample file that you can actually hot-swap up in the browser here as you can see that enables hot-swap mode changing the route basically you're assigning the original samples pitch here if you drag in a sample that's an e you will want to change this to II or III or e to whichever octave it's on that way all the notes you play on the keyboard will be in its correct pitch which is something that the simpler doesn't have now you've got D tune which is pretty self-explanatory but one of the really cool things about sampler is scale now scale basically is the key tracking scale for this sample so a hundred percent is normal distribution across the keyboard whereas if you put it to zero for example it'll play the same pitch no matter what note on the keyboard you play so I'm playing multiple notes on my computer keyboard there it's all playing the same note changing you can go negative with this or up to 200% of course you've got the volume sample and the pan pretty self-explanatory we've already been over those and then you've got sustain mode so if you're not familiar with what an adsr envelope is the sustain part of the adsr envelope is the volume after its had its attack stage and it's the case stage now what the sustain loop mode determines is how it's going to play through the sample while the notes being held down so by default it will just end at the sample but you can change it to sustain loop mode here and I'll shorten this to show you the example it introduces a new bracket here which is the end loop point let me turn off reverse so you can see what I mean it basically starts from the start again this one zoom in you can see goes back and forth this link button here sets the sample start point to the loop start point so that no matter where you move this those are the same it's really handy if you want the start of the sample when you first start playing it to be the same point where it leaves from now secondly release mode once you've let go of the note determines the action of the loop it basically creates a second loop now by default it's off but it functions very similarly but it actually creates as you can see here a second looping point so if I press this here and I will actually add some release so you can actually see what happens here and we'll get to that in a second you can see now it goes all the way through there and they behave similarly as the sustain loop bird so either back and starting again or back and forth with all these points here you can customize the loop points on the display or up with these values here similar to the sample start and end selectors there you could also introduce a amount of crossfade for the sample loops you can actually detune the sustain loop and the release loop as well this doesn't detune the whole sample just while it's looping you can see at the beginning there it was on pitch and then when it started looping it was slightly higher that's a really cool way to add some kind of organic sounds to your sample you can interpolate the samples pitch in different ways this is good if you've got pitch correction obviously best interpolations better quality but it uses more CPU lastly you've got the RAM option here this basically allows the sample to play from RAM which is slightly better and faster although obviously Ram is a limited resource so that can be a bit of moisture on your computer vertical zoom zooms in on the waveform to a certain amount that's just nicely to see what you're working with you can choose the display option here which selects different channels so that's both left and right that's the mono channel that's the left and that's the right channel and that pretty much covers the sample part so let's move on to the pitch and oscillator there is a pretty straightforward you've actually had got an oscillator that you can use within sampler that modulates the original sample with FM or AM now it's functions as a very similar adsr envelope so I'm not going to go over how that works but you can also change the slopes of them by pressing on this little thing there or you can actually customize it in the display however you prefer to work it's got an initial amplitude a peg amplitude and an end amplitude if you want to customize those as well as well as a bunch of loop options beat NSYNC are on time sync is just sync to the hosts tempo and timing loop loops the from the point here to the final decay point back and forth and trigger does this kind of a free-form loop you can choose the modulation waveform like science or square triangle or noise the volume of it and you can also have it as a fixed oscillator frequency really fun stuff and you can also obviously snap the volume of this to the velocity of the note that's being played down here you've got a pitch envelope I turn this off pretty straightforward once again you've got an adsr envelope with the same controls and same looping functions obviously this is applied to the pitch of the whole sample you can also add spread which adds kind of a 2d adds like a 2d tuned voices effect to both to the sample so it's kind of more of a stereo sound you can obviously transpose the entire sample detuning the entire sample and zone shift which shifts the zone of the sample which we will get into once we cover the zone bit and you've also got portamento and glide and you can customize the time there if you wish to do so next we've got the filter section as well as the global controls here you've got your general filter controls very similar to how the auto filter in Ableton functions you can customize in the display or play around with the frequency resonance they're different circuit types as per this the auto filter you got slope tuk types that you can change and map it to both the velocity and the keys that are being played obviously certain filter types have dry as well you've also got an envelope for the filter which can add those kind of nice plays especially with a fast okay adsr envelope functions the same as all the others you just control the amount by playing around with that and you can also obviously mess around with the display if you prefer work that way you've also got the shaper section which adds distortion which is cool you can actually change the signal path by pressing on this arrow so the filter either goes into the shaper or the shaper either goes into the filter and you can customize between these for distortion types which is super fun lastly you've got the global section here which obviously just controls the overall volume of the sound and this is the overall volume adsr envelope you've also got pan controls you got random pan which is similar to simpler you got a time control which either accentuates or does the opposite changes the time of the envelopes across the entire device essentially so that way you can kind of mess around and you can also map that to the keyboard so that higher keys will have higher times you can also change the plutonium with the amount of voices and whether it's going to reach rigor all the voices every time you play a new note all right guys so let's hop on into the next section which is the modulation section one of my favorite sections here so many cool creative dope stuff you can do to sounds so first of all on the left here you got this exhilarated loop this is one of the coolest features about sampler and it's awesome because it's in addition to the filter envelope and the volume envelope so it's really cool and you can map it to two sources so you've got the list of sources here and you just select the amount on there can get positive or negative so once again it's the exact same controls for the normal envelope so for example let's try doing it with the shape or amount sign it like ads either distortion to the tail or you know you can go for something like so that's the ox envelope you also got three LFOs now lfo1 is slightly different to the other two because it's very similar to the simpler LFO in the sense that you can either do volume filter pan or pitch modulation you've got the wave selected there which is pretty standard sine square triangle saws and noise it can be synced or freeform Hertz you also add a bit of attack to the LFO that way what it does is it just blends in the LFO over one second in this case you can also reach Ritter it so it starts from the start point every time on your notes played and you can offset it once again keymap now LFO two and three are different because whilst they share a lot of the same controls same waveforms instead of having these four sections down here it's got two which like the axillary envelope you can map to any control on this list here and you can control the amount over on the side there in addition to that you've also got this stereo it's actually a stereo LFO so you can actually first of all change the phase of the two lfos off the left and right channel and you can change it to spin mode which basically increases the frequency of one of these LFOs in relation to the other so you get that kind of over time it widens which is a really nice effect [Music] and this is the exact same process with LFO three and you can have up to four modulation sources with two different telephones that way plus the original lastly you got this expression MIDI panel basically you can map all of these modulation sources to different MIDI parameters like your keyboard if the other options weren't enough for you already velocity the off velocity after touch which is the pressure applied during the pressing of the key which some MIDI keyboards have mod wheel which is pretty self-explanatory foot control if it splittable if you've got that in your setup and pitch Bend obviously pitman obvious like by default does control the pitch so you can control that range here by default is five semitones but you can go up to twenty four either way so obviously you've got two destinations for all of these as well and you can control the amount negative or positive lastly and this is probably where the real power and difference comes in sampler as opposed simpler is this zone mode and basically those three types of zones there's key velocity and selector what this allows you to do is basically assign different samples in sampler to different keys on the keyboard so I could drag in a second one and we could actually customize on this key selection here which notes are gonna trigger what sample you can see there are two different sounds there and on the keyboard playing different notes are gonna trigger those sounds differently the idea behind this is if you've got like say a recording of every note on the scale and you want to drag them into here like grand piano notes [Music] if you wanted to drag all them in a lot of the times it does assign them pretty pretty automatically if you don't have it you can select all the notes by holding shift right click and you can also sort them different in different ways as well as distribute the ranges across the keyboard which is really cool you can said you can assign different like for example the hardy play it'll play a different sample and then this is also this selector option which is actually a control that you can map so that if you change the MIDI parameter it will actually select different notes which is good if you've got like for example multiple samples that you want to play in a live performance and you want to switch between them without having to actually add a complete another sampler it's is the crossfade type between the different samples when it fades between them there's actually a second bar above this similar to how like drum racks or instrument rack selectors will function actually crossfade between samples so that certain notes or velocities will play one sample or two samples at the same time but crossfading between them you can always like depending on what notes being played it'll select the sample down here as you can see selecting a different sample changes the sample down there which is cool and that is basically all of the main functions of sampler awesome now we know how to actually use sampler what about making sounds from scratch with it if you click the link in the description it'll take you to a page and then you'll be able to get access to a private video of me showing you how to use these techniques to actually create sounds with sampler so just click that in the description or up in the corner there and if there's something you didn't understand from today's video please just leave a comment and we'll respond to you or if there's any other tips or tricks that you use that I'm with sampler that I didn't include in this video let everybody know there as well I'm sure everyone will really appreciate that make sure to hit that subscribe button if you want more educational videos and content and lastly if you want to share this like it so YouTube shows this to more people and share it on social media or with your friends so that they can get access is in nation to hopefully you have a good day and we will see you in the next one see

Channel: EDMProd

Views: 140,546

Keywords: ableton sampler, how to use ableton sampler, ableton live, ableton, ableton tutorial, sampling, ableton live 10, music production, music production tutorials, electronic music production, how to produce, edmprod, edm production, ableton simpler, ableton suite, advanced guide to sampler, sampler, sampler instrument

Id: 0B3SoYFlzjg

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019