Lessons
Ableton Live Overview
14:35 2Sound Design in Ableton
29:50 3Quick Tips for Beginners
10:44 4Physics of Music
40:01 5The User Interface
28:37 6Sound Design: Building the Palette
14:37 7Sound Design: Kicks and Bass
10:31 8Sound Design: Lead Synth Sounds
09:35Sound Design: Pads and Pianos
16:51 10Sound Design: Collision, Tension and Effects
16:03 11Composing & Arranging: DJing in Ableton
22:15 12Composing & Arranging: Step Sequencing
18:22 13Composing & Arranging: Hatching Ideas & Songwriting
23:21 14Composing & Arranging: Riffing on Loops
18:14 15Composing & Arranging: Genre Hacking
10:26 16Sampling & Remixing: Sampling with Simpler
09:31 17Sampling & Remixing: Building Drum Racks
17:19 18Sampling & Remixing: Impulse and Clip View
14:26 19Sampling & Remixing: Slice to MIDI and Organization
18:07 20Sampling & Remixing: Remixing and Mashups
25:22 21Advanced Techniques: Modular Components
18:46 22Advanced Techniques: MIDI & Audio Effects Racks
13:24 23Advanced Techniques: Clip Launching
23:41 24Recording in Ableton
15:05 25Mixing in Ableton
36:46 26Mastering in Ableton
29:45Lesson Info
Ableton Live Overview
I'm andrew luck from the boy band split them and I am here to speak to you about the music program we all know and love able to live today first we're going to discuss just briefly why able to live because there's so many choices these days and, uh there's a lot of good reasons that you should use ableto uh basically it's the one stop hip hop shop you can make all kinds of music all kinds of sounds you can do all kinds of stuff from audio editing, making sounds and sound design and synthesis to composing and arranging and then actually mixing it down, mastering and then even taking it in and out of put into post production and remixing it so you can you can even use it at the party. So it's it's really awesome for a variety of things and it's geared to musicians and engineers and um it's it's really great so it's a good choice it's good that you're here. Uh so like I said it's designed for all kinds of artists and djs and engineers I feel like it's a little bit more geared to, uh artis...
ts and people that are performing live and want to be doing a really time effects and real time sequencing s o the user interface is a little bit more designed for that so basically there's a couple different things about live that that make it unique and the main one is that it has this thing called session view and session view is basically a giant sampler. It holds these middie and audio clips there's there's two kinds of these these little clips and these can be loops or just one shots that play one time and these audio in mid eclipse basically are what generates the sound for your project and you can trigger these in the session view, which hosts a whole database of clips and it's sort of this unique way to trigger things one at a time. And this is the sequence, sir, part that really makes able to special and of course there's also the non linear style arrangement mode where you get the full timeline viewpoint for doing things like writing songs or, um, any time you want to have the perspective of, uh, the overview. So in those of the session and arrangement muds now I feel like these these two modes basically complement each other well, but they they very much have their own place in the creative process. Uh, session mode for me is all about hatching ideas and experimenting it's really good for, like, finding cement inspiration from from within the program and then when I'm I really want to start composing and actually writing a song and actually getting getting ideas laid out that's when I moved to the arrangement of you and so hatch my ideas over in session get some get some things there it's sort of throw some pain at the wall and then I start tio t get a laid out in the arrangement so once you have a final composition kind of like this one you can see here there's a um there's an intro and a b and you can see the different song parts here and basically these air work markers that can take you through the arrangement so uh basically, once you have your song all all laid out an arrangement and finished you can actually break it back out and take it back into the session mode and you can perform were recording there were not supposed to be recording or I'm not supposed be recording and and you can actually performance and remix the song that you've written so you khun it's the three sort of three step process there's the the sound design and preparation and then there's the song writing and then there's like the remixing side of it sort of the post production or the performance of it so and that's kind of what makes able to awesome is it has all these different approaches and it's it's pretty much it's all real time for the most part so first we're going to talk about audio adding and just I basically never leave a bolton for for any kind of audio editing it's a pretty fully functioning ah little editor you can transpose you can automate the volume in the clip you can you can reverse the clip and this is all nondestructive meaning you can basically it doesn't actually edit the way file it just edits a little meta data file that it's like it's dot label dot s d that keeps your editing information so and then you can also crop it and that will actually save a new wave file of your edited version so real quick I'll just open up a way if I would see if we've got something in here. Most of this is many looks like so this is a drum break here I'll solo this guy and our trump group this is a an audio loop of just a drum break classic drum break and it looks like it's looping at two bars and you can see at the top of the the loop brace here are some numbers and those numbers are that's your grid and that's represented in bars beats in sixteenths so at the very first bar first be in six first sixteenth of the song that is you're the beginning of the song and it's also represented similarly in the arrangement of you here so this very beginning here that's one point one point one in the sequence, sir and as you go down if I were to click my cursor there that's at a bar twenty five that b twenty five point one point ones the twenty fifth bar of this sequence the first beat of that bar in the first sixteenth of the twenty fifth bar so back to our a drum break audio and let's we've got some on a mission here should come on in just a second and bounce over to a different part of our arrangement because we've got some okay so you can like if you go into the into the clip there's a bunch of information and some three there's three different dialogues here there's the launch information the sample information and the envelope information which you can show and hide so inside the sample information depending on how you're warping the clip there's a few different algorithms for for warping I you can actually transpose it right now I'm using re pitch, which is a very it's what I would call high quality over them uh and the disadvantage of it though, is well sometimes the disadvantage is that it re pitches the sample it works basically just like a vinyl record player would play back like an analog signal um so when you speed it up it gets faster when you slow down a bit slower with these other algorithms which like such as complex pro you can actually slow down and speed things up and it retains the same harmonic values on the same pitch values um and when you're in those modes are when you're in those warping under them such as complex pro you can actually really trigger the clip actually I'm just gonna pull in a different drum break real quick I've got some breaks over here some awesome kj soccer drum brakes for something closer to the b p m that we're working and which is uh one seventy and that information's up here let's see here eighteen thirty one fifty five b p m let's see spend this out so this is our browser that we're working in here that's drummond base might work okay, so I'm gonna pull this break and here and actually just going to make a new it's going to create a new a new audio track and trigger our sequence over here where there's nothing playing dropping lupin solo thing. Okay, this's, this is essentially an audio loop and it's working by the beats algorithm, which is a drum oriented algorithm and it's actually really nice because it it works basically puts spaces in between the hits and it retains some pretty good ah resolution of each of the drum sounds with time stretching so we're going to go in here way can re pitch with a fence post with some crazy sort of glitchy alias singing artifacts there and then this is the clip you can control the clip value there and then you can also do some automation of the envelopes in the clip for you with a just gonna switch over to my pencil just command be so I can actually I'm switching back and forth to see the command be that's just a keyboard shortcut to switch back and forth between your pencil and the the mouse cursor and actually be does it now as well that's a new feature live night so I just highlighted and deleted uh the I just highlighted the whole clip there and hit delete and that removed the clip envelope that I had just penciled in so there's and you can actually automate any of the values or any of the perimeters and your return bus and your mixer in these clip envelopes and if you hit shift tab that'll show you if there's any audio effects on that lane and you can actually automate from the clippers well you can automate the's audio effects that live on that channel so um that is a basic overview of some of the editing oh you can also split and join clips as well so if you're in the uh in the arrangement view is is the easiest way to do it um if I were to take this over look at it on the grid and I can I can select different parts of the loop with the cursor and command. J ok. Come. And jay will actually. Well, maybe not command e. Excuse me, commander. He will actually split the clip. Um, at the at the head there at the play had so, uh, command j will join them so you can bring them back together after you've split him, if you want, uh oh, yeah, the reverse. I wanted to show you that, too. So the basically there's a reverse button inside the sample. Uh, information in clip for you there, and it works pretty fast now in live nine. So those are some of the basic audio editing features on. And like I said, I rarely find myself leaving able to edit audio, which is one of the really awesome things about it saves a lot of time that way. Um another another thing you can do. Also, it was re sample. If if there's an effect or something and you want to render that you can just rico re recorded into a new club with with three sampling or you can freeze and flatten it.
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Electronic Music Production