How to Record Guitar in Ableton Live 11 or 10: Step-by-Step Tutorial

in this video I'll give you a quick straight to-the-point tutorial on how to record guitar in Ableton Live the first step is the connect your guitar to your computer there are a couple of ways you can do this you can use an audio interface which is suitable for electric or acoustic guitars or a USB microphone which is suitable for acoustic guitars check out the link in the description to learn about different audio interfaces and how to choose the right one for you in this tutorial I'm using an I rig hd2 and will use it to connect an electric it's hard to my PC you can follow these same steps whether you're recording an acoustic or electric guitar or any other instrument once you plug your audio interface or microphone into your computer open Ableton Live the first thing to do when you open Ableton is to set up your audio device so Ableton knows what inputs you want to record from press ctrl , or go to the options and preferences menu and then click the Audio tab to bring up the audio settings this is where you set up able to enter use your audio interface under the driver type select Core Audio if you use a Mac and a Zeo if you use a PC a zero will be the best option for most cases but if you have issues you may need to use Mme slash DirectX under the audio device drop down menu look for an option displaying your audio interface for example if you have a focus write audio interface plugged in you should see Focusrite USB Accio as one of the options the option that matches your audio interface normally gives you the best results if you don't see your audio interface on the list of audio devices it doesn't mean your interface won't work with Ableton all it means is that there isn't a dedicated driver for it you can see that I don't have an option for my iRig but there is an easy workaround for this if you don't see your audio interface on the list of drivers you can install a free audio driver called a zero for all and use that with any audio interface once you download and install a zero for all reopen Ableton Live and you'll see it in the list click hardware setup to access your drivers settings you'll use this to tell Ableton what inputs and outputs you'll use from your interface in a zero for all click the spanner icon to bring up extra settings you can now enable and disable any devices you like as an example I'm going to enable my input from the iRig but use my computer speakers as the output that way I can hear my guitar through my normal speakers instead of having to connect extra speakers to the iRig once you have enabled the inputs and outputs check to make sure they are enabled in the input config section my iRig only has two inputs so that's why it only shows two mono inputs and one stereo input if your audio interface has more inputs you will see them all here I recommend enabling all of them so you can easily find which input your guitar is connected to later on then you can disable the inputs you don't use the lower CPU usage the sample rate you choose here needs to be compatible with your audio interface 44.1 or 48 kilohertz should work with pretty much any device some devices support higher sample rates so check your interface before you select a higher rate when recording guitar in Ableton the buffer length is important to understand the length or size of the buffer will impact the latency here-here latency is the delay between when you play a note on the guitar and when you hear that note on your speakers the lower the latency the better to lower latency you need to lower the buffer length at the moment you can see that I have the buffer sets of 512 samples which gives me an overall latency of 34 point 6 milliseconds which feels pretty awkward to play along with you may or may not be able to change the buffer size depending on the Audio Driver you use if you lower the buffer size too much you'll start hearing glitches and issues so try to get the lowest latency possible that doesn't create glitches the sample rate will also impact latency so if you're having latency issues try to increase the sample rate a higher sample rate will reduce latency but also cause your CPU to work harder once you have your audio device set up you can move on to prepare a track for recording when you first open Ableton you'll probably see the session view as I'm showing now press tab or go view and then toggle arrangement session view to switch to the arrangement view this view is what you'll use for record guitar ableton opens with four default tracks two MIDI tracks and two audio tracks delete the tracks by selecting them and hitting delete on your keyboard or you can right-click and select delete you can always add more tracks later on by right-clicking and select insert audio track we've now got one audio track in the view so let's set it up for recording you can see that the track is set to external input below that you can see a drop down menu for the different input channels available if your guitar is plugs in you should see a green bar fill up on one or two of the channels as I have a guitar cable plugged into our iRig it's showing my guitar signal on both channels select the channel you want to record from I've selected channel one to record my guitar in mono well you can see a green indicator you won't hear your guitar until you enable audio monitoring click the in button and you should immediately hear your guitar through your speakers you'll also see the meter on the right of the track show the signals rule this lets you know that Ableton is playing back audio from this track the next step is the arm the track for recording click the recording icon on the track so it turns red now the track is ready to record before you hit record make sure that your audio levels are set properly if the level is too low raise the gain level on your audio interface if the gain is too high you might see the sound meter turn red like this make sure the meter never maxes out like this or you'll end up with clipping in your recordings adjust the controls on your audio interface so you get a loud but not clipping signal once you're happy with the audio level you can hit the record button at the top of the screen or press f9 to start recording you'll see the arms track turn red and a waveform start appearing hit the spacebar or stop button to stop recording after you finish recording you might want to listen back to it but you'll notice that if you hit play you don't hear anything to hear the record eclipse you need to turn off audio monitoring click the off button on the track to turn off audio monitoring now when you hit play you'll hear your recording the downside is that you won't hear your guitar when monitoring is turned off one way you can fix this is to click the auto button this will automatically toggle back and forth between monitoring and playback you can hear that when I have this track set to auto you'll hear my guitar right up until the clip starts playing then it mutes my guitar and plays the clip after the clip is finished it turns monitoring back on this is handy to have but there's one more option that lets you keep monitoring on all the time simply drag the clip to a different track now you can have monitoring on all the time on the first track and still hear the recorded clips in the other tracks [Music] okay so now that you know how to record guitar in Ableton let's have a quick look at using effects and plugins Ableton comes with a nice range of effects and you can access them by clicking the Audio FX option on the Left panel click on any effect to access different presets to add any effect to a track just drag the effect or the preset over the track or to the bottom of the screen in the effects panel let's drag in the guitar amp effects to this track once the effect is loaded you'll see the effects settings in the bottom panel where you can edit it to use one of the presets just drag one of them over the effect like this [Music] [Music] you can toggle the FEC's on or off by clicking the top left button on the effect ok let's finish this tutorial by looking at how to use third party plugins if you go to the plugins section you might say that it's empty this is because we need to let able to know where to look for plugins open the Preferences menu and click the plugins tab you can select the folder where you keep your plugins and then click this button to tell Ableton to use this custom folder Ableton will then scan the folder and update the list of plugins now you can drag any of these plugins to attract just like any other effect so if I want to use AmpliTube I just drag it to the effects panel if you close the window for any of these plugins just click on this icon to reopen it hopefully you found this quick tutorial helpful in getting you started with recording guitar in Ableton check out my full guide in the description for more details and for solutions to common issues people have when trying to record guitar in Ableton let me know in the comments if you found this tutorial helpful so I know if I should make more of them

Channel: Aaron Matthies

Views: 164,852

Keywords: guitar lesson, guitar, guitar teacher, learn guitar, music theory

Id: bpFQy63xxoM

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020