Force Academy | Arranger Mode

thank you welcome to force academy now in this master class we're going to be covering the entire process of taking a live performance and then turning this into a song arrangement using the brand new arranger mode in 3.0.5 now we're also going to be covering the process of adding effects racks directly to our production and using the xy effects in our new macro setup to apply real-time effects and we're going to be automating these directly inside our arranger window so the first thing i'm going to do is play you the performance and how it's constructed in the arranger window and then we're going to break down the elements of how this was created so let's go to our ranger and start our production [Music] but [Music] i need [Music] all right [Music] all right so now that you've heard the track we're going to walk through the entire process of how we take this performance and capture this into the new arranger mode and then arrange this into a song structure now as we're working now with a linear sequencer we can actually see all of our parts directly so the first thing i'm going to do is go to edit and we're going to erase our arranger so we're starting with a complete blank canvas so the main thing i want to do now is capture my live performance so it gives me a really great foundation to start structuring my song idea so to record into the arranger we'll hold down record and press record to arranger this means we can now trigger our clips and they will record directly into the linear timeline so we can press play or trigger the clips [Music] and now force is recording our ideas now the key thing i'm doing here is i'm building my structure as i'm recording live into the arranger [Music] the great thing about triggering your clips this way is that you'll always capture something that you might not necessarily capture when you're programming [Music] so now we'll drop into a breakdown and now let's end our performance as we got enough bars to work with [Music] so now that we've captured our live performance into the arranger this means that we've now got a solid foundation to turn our production into a song now to play back our arrangement let's press the back to arrangement tab now that we've pressed that we can now press play and force will play back our entire live performance [Music] [Music] so now that we've played back our track the next thing i want to do is add this string clip into my arrangement now to do this it's quite simple so first thing i'm going to do is press the back to arrangement which means that we're playing from our linear timeline hold down record and press record to arranger now let's press play and record our part so i can now effectively punch this in so all i need to do is trigger the loop and now that's recording directly onto our timeline now when i want to punch this out i just stop the clip let's bring this at the end of bar 16. so let's stop our track and let's go back to arranger so we can play back our arrangement and i'm going to use my macros we can zoom in and have a look at the part so there you can see our string clip now the next thing i want to do is add some additional drum parts around our track such as fills symbols transitions etc so we turn on loop and then what we want to do we want to make our loop length around 8 bars and then what we can do is move our start and end points now we can either do this by touching the screen or we can use our macros so now that we've set up our loop points this is going to be the area that i'm going to be working around to add our additional drums [Music] so let's start recording so let's go to our drum track we're going to arm the track and then we're going to go into notes mode so i have all my single one-shot drums and then i'm going to hold down record and we're going to select record to arrangement press play and now we're recording midi onto our track [Music] uh so now that we've recorded those additional drums over the top let's play them back [Music] so this is a very familiar way of working when you're inside a daw we can just set our loop points and then we just work our parts over the top now we can go into our piano roll as well so we can see all of the notes within the pattern so if we want to move arrays transpose change any notes we can do that instantly so the next step is i'm going to stay with my drums and i actually want to add like a tambourine like a fast moving tambourine probably on a 16th note that will add some more dynamics and structure over our beat so we take our loop point and we're going to set the loop duration of where we want it to come in and come out so let's find our sound so that's the tamron we're going to use make sure we've got our record arm on hold down record press record to arranger and this time we're going to be using the art button where we can activate our note repeat so let's turn note repeat on and hit play and now we're ready to record [Music] bye so now that's recorded let's hear it back [Music] now as i explained this is the same approach that we take when we're working in our daws by structuring our song by working around different loop points so the next stage is i want to create some drops over our track where maybe the drums or the bass drops out so now that we set our loop points what we're going to do is zoom in and we're going to use our macros so we can expand our view so we're seeing what we're working with then i'm going to press the edit tab and we're going to go over to erase now what this has done it's taken my loot points so we're going to erase from bars 24 to 25 on that track so now that part of the pattern is gone so we select another track but this time we're going to select the tab at the bottom of our screen which expands the track view now i'm going to be using our toolbar so i'm going to use the scissors and i'm going to erase between our loop points of the part that i don't want on my track so now that part of my drums is completely gone now again this is how we work in a daw and we can repeat this process to remove individual parts so let's play our track so using this process you can see how easy and fast it is to be able to take a performance and structure into a song arrangement so the next step is we want to take this arrangement and we will add some effects using automation rack effects to really take our track to the next level so i'm going to hold down knobs and we're going to start with our project now this is where we've assigned some key effects over our entire track so we've got some really cool effects everything from eq kills to reverbs washouts dj effects and everything and we can apply these over our track now already as soon as we do this we start building up intros breaks and rises without having to program this so i've got a delay on the vocal [Music] and a phaser on the whole mix low filter cut so we can now apply these and record them as automation into our arranger now if we navigate to our vocal track so i'm going to go to my matrix and we're going to select our vocal track i've applied some effects racks which is a brand new feature in 3.0.5 which enables us to create effects chains save them and then load them onto individual tracks so this creates a whole new level of live production over your tracks so let me play them over a vocal so using this feature means that you can create any type of effects chain and then just load it directly onto your track now when you apply this to having the project effects as well this gives you so much control to really take your tracks to the next level so to add an effects chain onto a track let's select a track we go to our mixer and then here you can see that i've already got inserts applied to the track so this is basically a preset so we'll go to insert and then you'll see a folder we press the akai folder and now you'll see different categories that we can choose from to access our effects so we have everything from like performance dj effects through to vocal effects different types of guitar effects and you could just go into the folder load up that preset and now it's applied it to the track so what we want to do is take this effect and we want to apply this to our arrangement so let's go to menu go to our ranger and now we need to turn on automation into record mode so we make sure it's red so now whatever we do this is going to be recorded into our timeline under automation press play and start creating our effects [Music] uh [Music] so now that we've recorded our first automation pass if we open up our editor we can actually look at all of the automation and we can change this instantly in our view so as we turn our data will we can see all of the different effects that we've applied automation to [Music] so now let's play back what we recorded [Music] um [Music] so using effects chains is a real simple and fast way to add a whole new level of performance over your arrangement after you've constructed your song and you can just simply save and load effects racks and load them onto your tracks now another way that we can assign and record effects in real time is using the x y effects pad now in 3.0.5 we can now add any number of effects and parameters to the xy grid so let's have a closer look at this now to access our xy pad we go to menu and into macro and then you'll see on our bottom tabs xy pad so now what we can do we can assign effects anywhere on the xy pad now we can do this via column so we have up to eight columns where each column can have any number of effects we can do this by row and we can also do this by quadrant so for instance if we go back to our columns i'm going to come out of my full screen and soon as you press this you'll see the effects on the right hand side that i've assigned to that one column now we can also set up different preset banks so we could go to bank two and now we can completely customize all of our columns all of our quadrants with completely new effects so if you're in a live environment you can easily jump between different presets and different setups of your effects so now what i'm going to do i'm going to trigger our track and i'm going to start using our effects now this has a delay assigned to the vocal pitch shifter [Music] now i'm gonna use a filter that i've assigned to our drums on column seven we can create a live breakdown and then we can bring this back in [Music] so now i'm going to go to my project effects and i now have access to my project effects and my x y [Music] so as you can hear we have got so many different combinations of effects at our disposal to add to our production so what i want to do i want to take all these different elements and add them over our arrangement so let's go to menu press a ranger and we make sure that we've got our automation on red so now we can record this all in real time we can combine this with our project effects and our xy effects and build up our track all in real time whilst our arrangement is playing so because we've set automation into red record mode all we need to do is press play [Music] uh [Music] so now that we've just recorded that automation all we need to do we go back to our ranger we take it out of record automation put it into green for play and let's play back our track [Music] now once you finish your track if you want to take it into your daw this is a very easy process as well and we can take this with the full arrangement that we have in stems or as an ableton project so in force 3.0.5 we can basically send all this out as stems but we need to select the export arranges clips so this will take our complete arrangement and render this out into separate files now we can also include or exclude the track volume pan settings or we can completely bypass our effects our next option is audio mix down so this means that we can take our full arrangement or our live performance recorded into the arranger and then bounce this out as a complete audio mix down now we also have the ability to export our arrangement directly as an ableton live set so what we need to do is make sure we tick export arrangement as clips then you also have the option to include track volume data or we can also bypass or render our effects straight to the audio tracks now we'll press export and we'll set a location to send all of our tracks and then we can name our project so we'll just call this force demo and we'll press do it and now we'll press export so once that's finished exporting our files we'll go to our desktop open up our force demo folder and then inside this we'll see all of our ableton live set files so there you see ableton dot als and then all of our samples and all of our stems so let's open this file up now what you'll see in our ableton environment is our top row eclipse represents our full arrangement of stems now below this you'll see all of our individual audio tracks so we can click on these and then you can see the audio files in ableton then on our top row you can see the naming of all of our individual tracks that have come from our arrangement so now to play back our full arrangement from force let's use our master clip launcher and now we're hearing all of our original stems oh [Music] bye

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Views: 32,088

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Id: HoAX_gQ4MBY

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020