The BASICS of Samples in Ableton Live For Beginners

what is going on everybody this is Tatro and welcome back to an all new chapter of the Ableton Live for beginner series the series where we're going through Ableton from the ground up from literally having no knowledge about Ableton Live to being able to create your own music with the Daw today's episode is going to be brought to you by distrokid I'll tell you more about them a little later in the video and I just want to say thank you to everybody who has already let me know how helpful this Series has been for you I would love to hear from you in the comments if this Series has been helping it helps me know you know which direction to go with these videos what chapters to do next so if there's a direction you want this series to go I would love to hear about that from you in the comments also giving the video a thumbs up really helps more people see the series more people see the videos which is good for the channel and good for the world more people using Ableton Live more people creating music I think that's a better world right but wait we've covered a lot of ground already in this series so if this is the first video You're stumbling upon go back and watch from the beginning there's a lot of very important stuff that we're going to be drawing on to further progress in this tutorial today and today while we are going to be talking about is how do we use samples in Ableton Live some common sample techniques ways you can even make your own instruments and some confusing things about Ableton Live and how it handles samples but without further Ado let's get right into it okay so loading up here with a basic default template let's start by talking about what kinds of samples there are now I'm going to go into my samples folder and it's very likely that I might have different things here than you will have I definitely have a lot of samples here if you've subscribed to a service like Lander or splice where you get access to lots of samples you might find some of those here but you also might find some samples that were included with your version of Ableton Live what kind of samples do we have well right here right away I see some drum samples foreign we're going to call these One-Shot drum samples they are just a single sound you can actually see the waveform here as we preview them and scroll through our library window and there's lots of them here that's a bunch of hi-hat sounds scroll down to the word kick we're going to hear lots of different kick Sounds here drum one shot samples we can also have melodic One-Shot samples instead of being like drums these are notes of a melodic instrument we hear all these different notes of a liar this is a liar instrument I created uh for the orbit 2 actually but these are just again single notes like the drum one shots but they're playing a note and usually you can tell which ones these are because they have a note name in the title usually so liar C4 means it's a liar instrument and it's playing the note C4 the last type of sample we'll talk about today are rhythmic samples these could be drums or melodic instruments how do I know when a sample is a rhythmic sample usually not always they will have a BPM somewhere in their title and they'll be playing a rhythmic figure like this hi-hat Loop here so 90 I'm assuming that's indicating the BPM of the sample this one here as well this one says BPM 105. [Music] so it's not just a single note it's a rhythmic sample of course it's an organ it's not just drums right here's another one here pedal steel guitar at 110 BPM so we've got drum one shots melodic one shots and rhythmic samples rhythmic samples can be drums or melodic instruments and depending on the type of sample we might use them differently let's start with drum one shots one of the most common ways we use drum one shots in Ableton Live is by loading up a drum rack if we go to Drums at the top here you will find drum rack make sure we're not we're not in the hits folder let's go to drum rack what this is and we're going to drag that onto a midi track what this is is a collection of little Samplers we'll we'll touch more on that later on each note of our keyboard essentially you can see C C sharp D D sharp and each one of those boxes can actually hold a sample so one thing we could do here is go to drum hits under our drum category and this is actually going to show us a bunch of drum One-Shot samples like clap let's drag clap onto D1 and let's find a kick on C1 great just to demonstrate this boom now we've got a drum rack that has a kick and a clap you can go to town you can go through these folders and fill up your drum kit you don't have to stay in this collection of 16 notes you can go all the way up the rack and fill it usually this ends up getting associated with your MIDI controller right if you have eight pads here you can use the eight pads of your drum rack Etc we've already seen this in this series because we've already used pre-made drum racks that have a bunch of samples in them let's load up boom kit here instead of that one we just made look same exact thing 16 samples different sounds kick a snare another snare clap metal this is pretty cool sounds but what's going on here with these samples let's pop this out with this little menu right here and what we're going to see is each of those samples represented here in a little sampler a simple sampler some would say this is Ableton Live's simpler device actually any version of live that you have no matter what you're following along with at home if you go to instruments you should see simpler because it is included with every version of live I believe so the drum rack just holds a bunch of those now what we can do with these samples once they're in a simpler that's where things start to get fun so now instead of looking at all these little simplers in a drum rack let's simplify things no pun intended and let's just drop an empty simpler clicking and dragging onto a new midi track as you can see this one is empty and it says drop sample here so let's find a sample I'm gonna go to my samples I'm going to type sign if you're following along with this at home I can't guarantee we'll have the same samples but try to find a simple melodic One-Shot sample we learned that right just a single note not one that's so strange like this one here how that one goes down in Pitch we don't want that just a simple note will do let's click that and drag it into our simpler where it says drop sample here now remember our keyboard trick if you don't have a midi keyboard we can go ahead and turn on the keys button here and use the home row to play some notes and what are we hearing of course our simpler track is armed we are hearing this sample but at different pitches we've now turned a single sample into an instrument and we can even play multiple pitches at the same time to play chords it does sound a little strange though right we're going to talk about why in a minute but what can we do with this sample once it is loaded into simpler well we've actually loaded into the classic mode of simpler which allows us to play more than one note at a time the fancy word for this is polyphonic poly multiple if we're in one shot mode you might remember that term one shot that means we can only play a single note at a time that has some uses and then there's slice mode I don't think we'll get into slice mode today but we will do that in a future video this is just an introduction to sampling for now let's stay in classic Mode we won't go through every single one of the parameters here but I just want to touch on a couple first of all there's a built-in filter here remember when we talked about EQ in a previous chapter this is like having easy access to some basic EQ functions like right now there's a filter and it is a low pass filter meaning the lower I bring down this frequency knob the less high frequencies we'll hear it's doing this shape here shaving off high frequencies as we go down of course we can change the type of filter we can do the exact opposite I don't hear anything right now because we've shaved off all the low frequencies actually all of the frequencies up to 22 kilohertz let's start down here and as we go up we lose low frequencies that makes sense right it's just a built-in filter which we don't actually even need to have engaged right now if it's on and it's turned all the way up it's not doing anything anyway the next panel I want to look at here is very important and these are Concepts that are going to follow us through our music production Journey because it applies to different synthesizers it applies to different instruments and samples like this attack Decay sustain and release let's try adjusting attack and see what happens when I play a note see eventually if I turn it up high enough we lose the beginning of the note and the sound almost just starts to fade in as you might have guessed the attack refers to that initial hit of the note so if we have a less attack or if the attack is slower we'll lose the beginning of the note and will actually be fading in at a certain time duration now the next two Decay and sustain these have more of an effect on notes that will end up holding for a longer amount of time since this is a short sample it's not going to be the best demo but it's essentially what happens to the sound after the attack and what level should it get to before we start holding the note and when we start holding the note that's of course called sustain but it's not something that's super crucial right now we'll touch on it in a bit when we have a better sample to work with what you can probably see though is if I turn sustain down we're hearing the attack and then when I'm holding the note it's very quiet right because we're going lower in decibels there for that level release is what happens when I lift off the note when I release the note as you can see when I'm releasing the note now the note is just very short right when I release the sound basically stops 50 milliseconds you know if I turn this up to two seconds which is longer than the sample even is when I press the note foreign [Music] just stops it goes or for the three seconds so hopefully you've got a good understanding of attack and release for the moment because those are the most obvious we're going to get back to Decay and sustain in a moment but there's also a volume knob here I'm going to tell you the honest truth I rarely touch this volume knob because there's a gain setting over here and this will give us a much more visual feedback of what's actually happening to our sample so obviously our sample is getting louder and our sample was quite quiet to begin with so we have some room to make it louder if we need to and also note that this gain and volume is separate from our mixer so we could bring our sample up to a reasonable level and then bring our mixer down accordingly essentially I'd like to get our sample up to a decent level where there's a tiny bit of Headroom left but it doesn't need to be quiet like this really in my opinion we can also have a bit of fun and transpose our sample for that now let's go to controls the controls tab here and ignore all the fun confusing stuff don't get overwhelmed for a moment let's just focus on this little parameter here trans which stands for transpose so we're hearing a note right let's go with transpose transpose is essentially taking our note and putting it up or down by semitones and if you haven't watched The Music Theory series it's a great series that you should watch hand in hand with this one so you can understand some music fundamentals but a semitone is one note up or one note down directly down two notes that are touching a semitone that's the semitone relationship C to C sharp or C sharp to D that is a semitone relationship we can also let these notes Glide between each other let's go ahead and set this to Glide let's crank the time up just for dramatic effect to about 100 milliseconds now if I play two notes simultaneously or one right after the other it will Glide between those two notes based on the time value that you set there obviously a higher time value is a slower Glide okay so you might be saying why would I want to do all that and what about those rhythmic samples you talked about and we are going to touch base 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single note you don't have to be a perfect singer for this but try to sing a single note here we go uh uh I'm certainly not a perfect singer now I'm just going to share that to my computer quickly and now that I've got that audio on my computer I can literally just drag and drop it into the simpler all right now look what we have here you notice that the start point is not correct and there's also some space at the end here let's fix that in simpler we've got some Flags very similar to how we've worked with Arrangement view in the past let's get that right to the beginning of the note let's get the flag closer to the end the the end doesn't matter as much as the beginning and now let's play a note like we were before uh uh that's beautiful get ready to listen to more of this folks okay don't forget we can change things like the attack [Music] fade in a bit and then we can also transpose it and we will actually have to transpose this I think oh I forgot I kept glide on let's turn Glide off for now so we can play more than one note [Music] interesting thing happening there we'll touch on in a moment so we've got our little custom instrument here by the way you didn't have to use your voice you could pluck the string of a guitar or hit a single key on a piano and as long as it's one note all this experimentation here will work the reason transposition matters here is because depending on your sample it's going to have a specific pitch let's scroll down the sample list again really quick here a lot of these say C2 C3 some of these say C sharp no matter the note of your sample we have to make sure it matches either you know if we're playing on our computer keyboard or our midi keyboard because we want C on the keyboard when I play a C I want to hear a c which might not necessarily be true if our sample note is not C and I'm actually not sure what note I sang so let's go to audio effects utility and tuner and let's see what note this is it looks like it's a and the pitch was not great but so if we were getting close to a then we know we have to go up [Music] and since I'm not a perfectly tuned instrument we can actually use the detune knob here to get it to a place where it's hovering more around that Center the sea foreign [Music] and you know what we all know how to use audio effects we talked about that in a previous chapter let's just drop a Reverb on here which will make this slightly more interesting to listen to great so now that we've tuned this sample that means as we start building a track and loading in multiple instruments everything will be in sync if you're playing you know in C on your keyboard all your other instruments will be in tune it'll be all in tune together there will be no problems that tuning step is so important but now we need to talk about warping which is a hugely important aspect of Ableton Live for a lot of different reasons what am I talking about this button down here that says Warp we're going to see this in different spots in Ableton Live but let's look at it here in simpler underneath warp it says complex if I scroll through this drop down menu you'll see a bunch of other ones beats tones complex Pro what does it all mean these are essentially each different algorithms that treat samples differently to re-time them or to get them uniform in time or to get them to adhere to a specific time as in the tempo of our project or the length of a sample depending on the pitch what the heck does that mean in terms of this note well let's set this to tones because tones has a pretty good algorithm for playing single notes or notes together if you remember before actually let's turn warp off for a minute and I want you to listen closely I'm going to play a chord and I want you to listen to even though I'm playing the notes at the same time how long those notes last and why and do some of them last longer what you're probably hearing is [Music] turn the Reverb off ah what you're probably hearing is the lower notes last longer and that's because to get the sample to play across different pitches the simpler has to you know shrink or stretch the audio to get it to match those pitches or at least that's what it's doing in this instance to get it to make those pitches with warping let's listen again everything is perfectly uniform in this instance this is really useful when you're working with melodic One-Shot samples so that your samples don't all end at the same time when you're just trying to play a chord foreign of course you don't have to warp but at least know that this is what warping is doing in the case here of melodic one shots but what about those rhythmic samples I talked about earlier let's talk about those and now instead of loading a rhythmic sample here into simpler I'm going to load it as just a regular old audio clip here to show you another way or another instance where you'll most likely be working with warping so let me just search hi-hat in here because hi-hat sample is very easy for us to find and remember I'm looking for a rhythmic sample so this hi-hat sample is a drum one shot I'm looking for something with time all right here's an easy one to work with let's drop this in on audio track three here and now it's a session clip we remember how to work with session clips of course because you've been following along with this series intently let's first go ahead and lower the volume a bit so it's not too loud and let's click play foreign now that sounds pretty good but something happened when I dropped in this sample as you might notice and it's because this is the first uh sample that we've dropped in here but it's actually changed the time of our project and it's changed the tempo to 159.91 I said time time Tempo I'm using those interchangeably and you notice down here there's a BPM that says 159.91 well this number here means that live has detected that this sample is at 159.91 beats per minute and that is highly unlikely we usually don't work in decimal points of tempos like that let me make this track a little bit bigger I notice that it says 160 BPM which is highly more likely and we can see that live got close but not perfect so actually right now I can't click in here and change this which is kind of frustrating but what I am going to do is unwarp the sample oh look at that there's a warp button here and live automatically warped the sample let's turn warp off for a second let's turn War back on and what do you know I can type in this box 160. press enter boom so we've corrected the record we can even set our project Tempo now to 160 and if I click play it's going to sound great if I turn my metronome on one two three four one two three four one two three it's in time great that's what we wanted right but how did this all happen why did this all happen first of all let's make sure our clip is looping let's Loop uh and we notice right that it automatically turned warping on and here's this list again you might recognize these from the simpler these are all the warp modes once again if you can imagine beats will work much better for a rhythmic drum sample like this in instead of you know the sample we used before A melodic one shot or even a melodic rhythmic sample and I also want you to notice that we have some similar controls that we had in simpler we have again we don't need to add much gain to this sample at all because it is quite loud already and then we have pitch control let's see what happens if we change the pitch of this instrument this sample so you can pitch up and down rhythmic drum samples as well not only that we can reverse the sample which will sound pretty cool we don't need to use that in this instance it doesn't make a lot of sense so let's reverse it back so it's normal and once we've got this BPM locked in we basically don't want to touch it unless we very intentionally want to do something like make it twice as fast or click it one more time make it half time let's put it back to normal that is of course dividing the sample length by two every time you click this button or multiplying the sample length by two every time you click this button warping is especially important for rhythmic samples because in your project you want everything to be in time and I might want to go grab a kick sample now kick let's find a kick Loop that says kicksoft 128 BPM our project is 160. but I want this four to the floor kick so what's going to happen now let's drag it onto this other audio track let's bring the volume down here so it's not too loud and let's click play well these samples are playing fine together why if they're two different tempos Y is 128 BPM matching up with 160. our project is still at 160. that must mean that our kick sample is playing at 160 and if you already guessed that you would be correct why is this happening it's happening because the sample is Warped live identified correctly that this kick sample is at 128 beats per minute and by warping it we're basically telling live hey get this synced up with my Project's tempo if I unwarp it listen to this you can hear the metronome going that's actually kind of fun play that again it's fun but it's not what we want to do at all by warping it we are in time and all of our parts can play together it's kind of similar to why we needed to tune that last instrument so it can play well with all the other instruments well with rhythmic samples drum rhythmic samples any rhythmic samples we need to make sure they are warped and all in time together so that they can play well together let's Loop this clip again great we've got two layers going here same thing can pitch this up and down you can change the gain if you want but let's zoom in and take a look at something else on this sample what is this little yellow thing here do you see that that's sort of marking the beginning of our sample and then if I hover around in this area that dark gray area I can double click and add new yellow markers these are called warp markers and they're going to actually help us sometimes customize our samples and move things around like this creating new rhythms this is interesting so aside from warping helping us get things in sync with our project they can also be a helpful tool in you know messing around with the samples and making them our own of course if I delete or if I double click on these warp markers I can get rid of them I don't actually need them because we've got one warp marker at the beginning which live put there on its own and we've synced it with the project anyway but one note on that is that when I put the warp marker here and let's say I drag this note first of all everything else behind it is getting affected and this note the note before it whatever came before it is getting stretched and that will affect the audio one way around this is I could put a warp marker here and now if I stretch this way okay we're not doing any harm to this note there's going to be some maybe some audio weirdness in that empty space but the other thing I could do is put a warp marker here and now I can move this around freely and the only audio being affected is the audio in between those two warp markers that are neighboring the one that I'm moving does that make sense because we wouldn't want to move this one around and then throw off our whole Tempo we want to treat each one of these notes as its own entity so we can move them around one by one that's why it's helpful to go in there and double click and put them in you can be more precise about this as well going in here I could turn the grid off right click turn the grid off and say I want to put the warp marker here for now keep things simple you don't need to do all that keep it at the time division that it's setting it to automatically kind of take live suggestions for now especially as a beginner one last thing to say here is that now that everything is Warped this will also allow us to change our project's Tempo and not lose our synchronicity of everything right so we're at 160 BPM if I bring that down to 116. we can now play at a lower Tempo but everything will stay synced together one thing you might notice though is that when we listen to this hi-hat it's starting to sound like just slightly distort it and if I bring this Tempo into an extreme even lower than it was it's gonna be struggling more and more especially with slower tempos the further away we get from a samples actual BPM the more distorted or the more artifacts will hear the harder live has to essentially work to get that sample to play in time with the project so just note that you can't always take you know a sample that's at 160 and bring it down to 90. so it's not like warping can overall do all this big crazy magic okay this is a long chapter but I want to show you one last thing with our melodic sample one thing that's available to you if you have a higher version of Ableton Live is sampler which is the full-blown Ableton Live sampler that's a little more complex than simpler and we can take any simpler device if you have sampler and convert it to sampler now this gives us a lot more things to control a lot more freedom over how we work with the sample but one way I use this all all the time is by putting it into a looping mode so instead of having a note that has a beginning and an end I can't hold it forever like I can some synthesizers we can actually get around that and we can do that via this sustained mode notice it's got a back and forth Arrow meaning that if I hold this note it will play forward and then it will start to play backwards now that's obviously not achieving the effect that I talked about a moment ago but what we can do is grab that top flag there and bring it a little closer in towards the end of the sample and grab this top flag here and bring it in a little closer to that and it's still not doing what I want we're getting like a ping pong sound so let's slightly cross fade which will instead of hitting those flags and bouncing back and forth it'll do a little leeway in Crossfade [Music] let's go a little bit further down so it's a more even sound and that's pretty good so now I have an instrument where foreign and I won't subject you to that too much so I know many of you maybe just have a limited version of Ableton Live and you don't have sampler yet so I just wanted to show that quick tip for those of you that do have sampler but what's the point of all this the point of all this is sampling can unlock a whole new world for you out there with Ableton Live and there's some crucial things like warping to make sure pitches play all at the same length or warping to make sure that your rhythms are all in time or so that you can be more creative and go adjust some of these rhythms in the loops that you've downloaded making them more your own and with this melodic sampling technique anybody who has simpler can take any melodic note and turn it into an instrument so say you don't have a big fancy acoustic guitar plug-in well you can go online and find a single acoustic guitar one shot and drop it in to ableton's simpler device and suddenly you have an acoustic guitar instrument on your computer or you can get fun creative and Sample your voice or throw anything into this simpler and have a good time this is just scratching the surface with sampling if you would all would like another chapter on more advanced sampling techniques let me know it might be something we get to a little bit later but we are getting to the end here of our chapter on the introduction to sampling in Ableton Live so thank you all for getting this far into the video I hope that that was helpful please let me know if you have any questions down in the comments below and where do you want us to go next what should be the next chapter what lingering thoughts do you have now that we've come this far in this series would love to hear your thoughts if you found this tutorial helpful please leave a like make sure you're subscribed and if you want to show some support to the channel joining as a channel member by clicking the join button is a great way to connect with the community we have on Discord get yourself free sounds attend free members events all cool things like that thank you again to distrokid for sponsoring this video that is going to be it for now thank you all so much for watching this has been Tatro have a good one

Channel: TAETRO

Views: 90,957

Keywords: ableton, ableton live, ableton push, novation, launchkey, launchkey mini, akai, beat making, drum pads, drum rack, tutorial, home studio, electronic music, recording studio, producer, home studio producer, beat maker, akai mpk, mpk mini, akai mpk mini

Id: xd2uPkWHPzE

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022