How I record hardware synths (with Ableton live example)

hi i'm dave hilowitz so my last video is about the arturia microfreak and one of the questions that came up again and again in the comments was how do you actually work with external synths like what does the workflow look like a lot of people work only with software-based instruments and they're thinking of maybe buying their first piece of external gear so yeah i figured i would make a video before we get started it's probably useful to talk about what our goals are with this project we want to obviously be able to record audio from the synth but we also want to be able to send and receive midi note data basically when i play something on the synth i want the information about what notes i played to be recorded in the audio software in this case ableton live and i want to be able to fix it and then send those fixed notes back to the synthesizer so that i can record that the fixed version okay let's get started uh our first order of business is of course to plug the synthesizer in that seems very obvious but there are actually a couple things you have to know about that some synths like the microfreak have usb midi outs that's super super helpful it's one plug you get both the input and the output for the midi data other synths have only midi connectors which means you'll have to plug that midi connector into a midi input on your computer some audio interfaces come with midi inputs but if yours doesn't you'll need to buy a usb midi adapter those are pretty cheap you can get a decent one for like 30 bucks so not a huge expenditure there the other kind of output from your synth is of course the audio output you'll want to wire this to an input on your recording interface not much to say about this except use the best quality cable you have access to last week when i was recording a segment i used a low quality cable i just had lying around and uh i recorded like nine minutes of this gospel radio station underneath what i was trying to record so um yeah kind of a drag i'm gonna be using ableton live for this because it's what i'm most familiar with but the same principles apply for pretty much any recording software okay now that we've got our synth plugged in our next order of business is to enable those inputs in ableton live there's a midi panel within the preferences basically lets you turn on your midi inputs in this case the arturia micro freak the track column determines whether or not midi note data is sent to and from the device and we're going to turn that on for both the input and the output and then over here you'll see that this is the sync column which is somehow automatically on sync is a little bit more complicated basically whenever ableton live starts playing it sends information not just about stuff that's happening within the track but also about the overall tempo of the session we definitely do want to be sending that information to the microfreak because it uses that data to synchronize its internal arpeggiator so we leave that on and we click here we're actually going to get rid of two of these tracks every track of music that you make with an external synth is going to have two tracks a midi track and an audio track the plan is we write all of our music in midi and when we're happy with what comes out of the speakers we commit to it by recording to the audio track so that's why there are two tracks okay so that's our basic setup and since this is ableton i'm going to group these and by the way in most jaws there's a way of saving presets for tracks like this so for example i can call this external synth and i can just drag it to my templates folder and now if i want to make more of these i can just drag them back out here and we can basically have as many external synth tracks as we want and we don't have to worry about like setting the inputs over and over again because that can get pretty tedious okay so we've got our input set up but we can't actually hear anything and that's because we haven't turned monitoring on monitoring allows you here the actual sound that's coming into the inputs of your recording interface but there's an important thing to know about it it actually sends it through the mixer in your audio software which means you can actually apply effects to it as it's coming in this is an important detail if you like to put chorus and reverb and stuff on your synth leads and know what that's going to sound like as you're playing it to turn on monitoring all we do is click auto and now i'm going to play a couple notes and you'll hear them if you don't do a lot of recording you may not be familiar with your audio interface's buffer settings basically when audio gets recorded to disk uh it doesn't get written directly it gets written in these little chunks called buffers the bigger the buffer size the less likely you are to hear pops and clicks in your recordings but there's a downside the bigger the buffer size the more delay there is between when a sound happens in real life and when it actually gets recorded obviously for the person doing the recording a shorter window of time is way better it can be very disruptive if you hit a note on your keyboard and then you hear it sound like 30 milliseconds later the problem is if you shorten your buffer time too much the computer won't be able to keep up with all the data that's coming in so you and your computer kind of have to come to a compromise for me any delay of like five milliseconds or less is totally acceptable i can play a little bit ahead of the beat um so i usually keep my buffer settings around 256 and then if i hear glitches and pops i'll maybe move it to 512 but i can definitely notice the latency at that point i should mention that many recording interfaces offer the possibility of zero latency monitoring basically you hear exactly what's coming in and it doesn't go to the audio software first and it's instantaneous it's a great setup for some people doesn't really work for me because i like to put lots of effects on my synth leads and i like to know what that's going to sound like as i'm playing the synth and you can't do that if you're using hardware monitoring so yeah not for me okay let's record a bit so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to arm this midi track and i'm going to switch monitor to in the difference between in and auto is that when the track is set to auto you only hear the input when the track is armed for recording and since i don't want to arm the track for recording yet i've switched it to in here okay let's play something okay i recorded something it's kind of a mess it's just like half of an idea but it's actually a good way of showcasing how we can work with the midi data and massage it and then record the fixed version uh i'm going to zoom in here to the beginning of the actual pattern and since this is ableton i do set one one one here which means i actually want my pattern to start right here [Music] let's get rid of this and we just get it to repeat itself not quite quantizing it just kind of moving around some of the notes so that it lines up a little bit more with the grid so one cool thing you can do with this workflow of course is you can mess with continuous controller modulation if we happen to know what midi cc values correspond to what knobs we can actually just kind of like draw a curve in the modulation manager here and it will modulate the midi i believe 23 is the uh cc number four cut off another thing we can do is we can record the knob movements so if i arm this track and click here [Music] and i can edit them by just dragging around in this window and we can see here we have data for any of the controls i may have edited so let's listen back that okay so let's say that i'm happy with this and i now want to record this uh since this is ableton i'm going to record it as a clip um but if this were a traditional recording software i would probably just use something that looks more like this and i would hit record but not a lot of difference otherwise i'm going to click here and record a clip [Music] i generally try to record a full loop plus one measure okay that should be enough and the reason for that is that when the recording first starts uh the synth doesn't have any voices playing and it's gonna sound very different at the very beginning of the loop than it is going to sound right after the repeat so for example um if we actually were to make a loop that actually consisted of the first four bars we recorded it's going to sound very weird when we cross back into that first measure [Music] you hear it kind of just goes back down to zero so the solution to that is we actually are gonna start at measure five [Music] still a little bit weird but uh better able 10 actually has this very cool thing that you can do is you can actually set the start point all the way back at the beginning so when you start playing this loop has a completely natural start plays through and then when it loops it's going to use that fifth measure so you kind of get the best of both worlds okay so remember when we talked about audio buffers and delay here's another place where that comes into play uh if i look at the very beginning of this you'll notice it doesn't start right at the beginning and it's not just a bit late it's like 38 milliseconds late the reason for that is it just takes a certain amount of time for ableton to produce the midi note and it takes a certain amount of time for the micro freak to decode the midi note and turn that into sounds and then there's once again that audio latency so you're going to end up with a signal that is delayed by some number of milliseconds and there are a couple solutions to that you can see down here ableton has this thing called track delay and we can actually do this so that it will actually send out the midi note ahead of schedule by 33 milliseconds or something like that and thereby in theory get rid of the delay i usually don't bother with that my solution is much more low-tech i just set one one here and i adjust my loop accordingly uh yeah just don't worry about it and nudge it a little bit after i record it and it's it's not as much of a headache as you might think okay so now that we're happy with this track all we need to do is mute our midi track so that it no longer sends out midi data uh and i'm going to duplicate this track get rid of any of the audio clips that might be hanging out in it and yeah start the process over again okay my final word of advice for working with external synths is take notes uh almost every single uh recording software has some way of attaching bits of text to tracks make use of that functionality you know save your patches write down the patch name if you are using a patch that was already in the synth but you changed it in some way just make a note like you know p131 but i boosted the cut off a bit or something like that even kind of back of the napkin kind of stuff like that is super helpful if you need to go back in and make changes to your track [Music] okay i think that's it if you enjoyed this video it'd be great if you could hit like and if you haven't done so already um yeah now is a great time to subscribe it's free and you'll be notified anytime i make one of these videos see you next time [Applause] [Music] one [Music] foreign

Channel: David Hilowitz Music

Views: 42,569

Keywords: synths, arturia, microfreak

Id: 8krWkxoBvv0

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SNERKerGODT]

Helpfull video! I have had an issue where I have my drum machine synced and in time in Ableton, but when I start a recording there is a few milliseconds that doesn't get recorded at the beginning. Is this a known issue when triggering external sequencers? My fix for this atm is just to not use the audio from the first loop, but this is kinda annoying in the case where I have some effects on the drum machine that spills over from the first to the second.

[u/Oscar_from_Underdog]

Just hopping on the bandwagon here to share a similar video explaining how to incorporate an analog synth into an Ableton workflow! https://youtu.be/a1YznzcWHi0 Hope it's helpful!

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