How to Use the Ableton Live Groove Pool [Ableton Live Tutorial]

what's up everybody Sam SMI here today I want to talk about using the groove pool in Ableton Live the groove pool is something that I have underutilized over the years but recently because I have been making a lot of tech house I have been trying to use the groove pool a lot more because grooves especially in your drums or like your bases or leads having some type of GrooVe is very important when you are doing techout so let's just jump right into it now the grooves in Ableton contain information such as timing and velocity and you can use these Groove files to apply timing information velocity information to Mid eclips as well as audio clips to access your grooves when you open up this side panel in Ableton you will see this little wave icon this circle down here you've got two of these waves click on this and this will open up your groove pools and when you start loading in grooves you'll see the grooves pop up in this section here now to access some of the grooves I can go into the grooves in the categories and I can scroll through all of the different grooves this is a list of all of them I personally have not created any of my own grooves these are grooves that came with Ableton stock with Ableton you can access to the grooves in this panel or if I just go into packs under the places and I go into Coreal library then there is this folder with the groups I can open this up and there are groups for percussion if I open up this percussion then if I have some kind of midi that's maybe like a bongo uh a bongo progression then I can add in maybe this Bongo accent percussion Groove and you can hear when I click on it it plays these little clicks that are mimicking the groove and you can see that there is some velocity information in this groove because some of these clicks are quieter or louder and then there is some timing information as well in this groove and if I click on this headphone thing then it will play if I have that turned off they won't play let's just go into like a swing Groove I'll go into basic and let's go to a 16th note swing you have these swing 16th notes there's 52 all the way up to let's see 73 and that's like almost the intensity of this swing let's just try that so I'm going to drag it into my groove pole I just clicked and drag it if I just double click it will also pop up into my groove pool now I have those swing grooves let's try some other ones let's go to style and let's try just putting in like a bongo Groove in case we want to use it that is a 16th note one maybe I can try like an eighth note one as well let's go and click on this 16th note 59 Groove and I'm going to go to this midi clip and in this mini clip I just have a straight 16th note pattern no groove or anything let's go a and just Loop that now to apply a Groove I can select on This Groove and click and drag it on top of my midi and that applies the groove and now you can hear some timing variation I could also open up my clip and go to this clip menu and you have grooves here if I open this up it would say none and then I could scroll down and select these different grooves so this was that first one let's try the second one let's try this Bongo one uh let's try this Shaker one probably not going to do much on that eighth note one so this 16th Note One let's go ahead and just select this swing 16th note 59 now you can see there is this base quantize timing random in velocity so base you can select different bases for This Groove now what it's going to do is it's going to look at every 16th note in this groove and then it's going to compare those 16th notes to the 16th notes that I have in my pattern and then it's going to arrange my notes according to those 16th notes so it's going to like move them proportionally to those 16th notes if I have something like an eighth note then it's going to look at the eighth notes in that Groove and then arrange my notes proportionally according to those eighth notes this is a 16th note Groove if I just want to take a look at this groove I'm just going to drag the groove into an empty midi track and now I can actually see what what the groove pattern is so if I take a look at this groove pattern let's look at the midi of what this actual Groove pattern is so it's on C1 and if I take a look at the eighth notes they're almost exactly on beat you have these 16th notes which are the ones that are offset so if I were going through my base and I had something like e 1/8th note it's going to look at the eighth notes in this groove and it's not going to change my pattern because it's looking at these eighth notes and these eighth notes are exactly on grid so you can hear that my midi sounds exactly as it did before I applied This Groove it's going to put it on 16th note I can also use this quantise so if I played my midi I actually just wrote my midi in here so there it's just like exactly onbeat if I played my midi and some of these notes were like a little off like this or even like with audio clips because you can apply groups to audio clips you can quantize the audio or the midi clip according to the space so if I have this at 100% it's going to quantize my original midi and let me take down this timing to zero it's going to quantize my midi to 11/16th notes if I have it at an eighth note let going to put this at zero it's going to quantize my midi to eighth notes so it's going to quantize it before it applies the groove I don't really need any quantizing on here cuz I had all my notes just like straight on grid so this timing is the amount of the groove it's going to apply so if I have this at 100% it's going to apply 100% of the groove in this groove file uh 100% of the timing of the groove in this groove file to my file and put on 116th we have this Randomness which applies a bit of randomness to the [Music] timing and you have the Velocity and in this groove this is a Groove file there isn't any velocity I'm looking at this velocity section there isn't any velocity in this groove file but if I look at this let me check out this Bongo one let's see if there's any velocity information in this Bongo so you can see some velocity Chang in this Bongo Groove some of these notes are are varying up in the velocity let's go back to my original pattern and I will apply The Bongo and this Bongo is mainly about changing the velocity you can hear that the timing isn't really changing so if I increase this velocity you can hear some of the velocity changes now let's say I really like the groove that I found and picked for my clip I can go into this groove you have a hot swap option so you can quickly hot swap between grooves and test them out but there's this arrow button which prints the groove to my pattern so let's goe back to this swing let's say I really like that and I want that to be applied to my clip then I can hit this arrow and then we can see it being applied to my clip and all my midi adjust so you can see some now the midi is offset some of these notes are a bit longer now the groove has been applied and no longer sends none so you don't necessarily have to apply the groove like you could just have it in this uh menu turned on but if you do want to apply it and see what it's doing then you can do what I did just hit this arrow and then applies to groove and let me just undo that so I'm going to control command Z that now let me adjust this pattern let's say I have let's just make my own Groove so I'm ning this without listening to it let's go ahead and just do that maybe I'll adjust some of the velocities like this making it very different so let's say I have that pattern maybe I played that pattern and I really like the groove that I played then what I could do is I can right click on this midi file and I can extract the groove and I can create my own grooves doing this so if I have this midi file I'll extract the groove and now in my groove pool we can see it just says saw that was the name of the midi file I can rename this so let me rename this to Sam Groove let's do 16th note um one I guess I could maybe put the BPM in there so maybe I'll do maybe I'll do 125 and then I can hit this save button and then I can save it into my grooves folder and then let's say I have a lead Groove that I really like and then I want to apply that Groove to another song then I can just uh save it like I just did and then apply the groove to another song let's say I have some kind of high hat pattern that I really like then I can apply that to a another song so let me give you an example of where I could extract This Groove from an audio file let's say I have this audio Loop which is like a [Music] break and let's say I really like that groove of this break I have the warp mode turned on and let's go and just put it onto beats cuz it's kind of like a drum Loop and you can see that it now looks at like all the transients like it just estimates where the transients are so you just have to put some trust in Ableton that it it kind of recognize the correct transients what I can do now is I can do the same thing I can just right click on this uh break file and let's do extract Groove and now it's going to extract the groove depending on how long the file is depends on how long it takes so for this file I believe it's a little I could have maybe just like chopped it and selected part of it but it's going to take a little bit longer because this file was uh let's see 16 bars or so so kind of long now we see in my groove pool I have this brakes Groove and I can do the same thing I can save it if I want to use it for something else but what I could do now is I have this cool Groove from my brakes and I could go into let's say I have like a really boring high hat Loop let's go and just check out I think I put a high hat Loop in here here's like an Ado kit high hat so something you would probably hear in like Tech house a 16th note high hat Loop so here is my midi file and let's just go and check out what the midi is that it pulled from this brakes file let's see what the midi looks like this is the midi the from the groove of that brakes file and it looks like it pulls some information from like the velocity so the velocity changing we have some of the timing not not too much variation of the timing so mainly going to be some velocity changes so let's go and just apply this brakes grooove to my high hat and let's listen to what it did now a little variation on the timing let's go and hear what the velocity changes it can do so a lot with the velocity changes let's go and take this down let's go and just put a kick under that maybe an open hat maybe I'll take down the timing cuz I just want I like the velocity changes it's doing and let's listen to it without that Groove now turn the groove back on so now you hear this like really nice Groove to that 16th note high hat pattern where it would have just sounded like very stale before and this is something that you can do with a lot of your top loops and high hats especially with tech house because when you're making these you're probably just like putting a high hat on the upbeat U putting 16 o high hats and then not really thinking about like adding in a Groove but this is a easy way to add in a nice Groove is just to put in these Groove pools and I can now have this like cool Brak Groove and apply it to various high hat patterns now everything that I've done I've been doing in midi I have this hat Loop which has a bit of groove on it already it's a 16th note hat Loop but let's go ahead and uh apply a Groove to this hat Loop so I'll apply the brakes Groove to this hat Loop let me put my warp note on Beats experiment with the warp no uh warp modes because I don't know which one's going to do best uh it really depends on like your audio file that you're working with and that one is a bit crazy there so let me just take down the timing and I put that velocity about 23% let's listen to it with the kick and the open hat now and let's take that Groove off so yeah a little bit more interesting putting on that Groove I like it a lot more now so that's all that I really wanted to go over for the groove pull I hope this helps you make your next tra more groovy if you enjoyed this video please go ahead and give it a like and also please subscribe to my channel if you are not yet subscribed and if you'd like to check out any of my senior preset packs head on over to store. ss.com [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sam Smyers

Views: 4,144

Keywords: sound design, kim possible, ableton live, groove pool

Id: xxRCC10W21o

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023