5

Tips
Tricks
Tutorials
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 4
Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 4
Let’s make
some bass
Martin Delaney thinks it’s time to add some
bass to our beats, doubled up with a little sub
to make it bounce. Here’s his guide…
T
his month we’re adding a bass part, ideally one
that somehow fits in with our beat from the last
tutorial. Refer to the example set included with
the issue – it’s called TUGTAL4. The set includes
all the steps from the last tutorial as well as a
couple of samples you’ll need to complete this one.
Bass sounds change considerably across genres;
you’ve got classic electric bass played with pick or fingers,
Resist the temptation to
make a huge bass sound
because we plan to add
other instruments
analogue and digital synths, and LFO-driven wobble
sounds. They’re all good and they’re all readily available to
us these days,through real or software instruments and
Live Packs. We’re going to build our own bass sound and
program our own part. This is because the Simpler
instrument we use is included in every version of Live. If I
was to do the tutorial using the Operator synth, you might
not be able to follow the steps. You should try Operator,
though – it’s my go-to synth for bass parts. I’ll move
on to others only if I can’t find what I want in there.
We’re spending more time working with
instrument racks as this is a great way to build
deep synth sounds that would otherwise require
complex routing across several tracks. In many
ways they’re similar to drum racks, which we’ve
already encountered. We’re using two chains in our
rack – that’s two instruments playing together – but
you can have up to 128 chains in a rack. Impressive
enough, but then bear in mind that you can have
FOCUS ON… REAL BASS
The best thing you can do if you want to program good
bass parts is to get your hands on a bass guitar – it’s a
great way to try ideas against your drum tracks. You don’t
have to learn to play properly, it doesn’t even have to be a
good bass and it doesn’t matter what it sounds like,
because 99 times out of 100 it doesn’t even get plugged in.
This is my most common way to create bass parts, noodling
away while the drums loop. To get a bass vibe…play bass. It’s
pretty obvious!
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MT146.TUT live4.indd 46
On the disc
Accompanying
project file included
on the DVD
128 racks inside another rack, so you can quickly end up
with thousands of chains buried deep within your rack.
When you connect a MIDI keyboard or use your
computer keyboard to play those sounds, you’re going to
get a massive sound because all of the chains will play at
once. This can be a bit overbearing, but we’re only using
two today, so we’ll deal with that issue another time, and
there are various tactics we can use to specify which
sounds play at what times.
We’re using a transposed sine wave to create a sub
bass – a low bass fundamental tone which fattens up the
bottom end. It can be almost inaudible in the mix at
certain times. For reasons of simplicity, we’re pairing it
with our square wave sound, but there’s no reason why a
sub couldn’t be on a track of its own and subject to a
whole other round of editing and effect processing.
After drawing in the notes in our bass clip, we went
back to shorten the bass note in our sliced drum rack from
last time to make sure it didn’t overlap with the new bass
part. When you’re working with MIDI programming, a lot of
mixing problems can be fixed at the programming stage.
It’s the same reason we set the Simpler instruments to 1
voice each, to avoid overlaps that will affect the bass part.
Simpler sampler
Simpler is a very powerful sampler, although it has a
user-friendly interface. It makes it possible to build long,
sustaining notes by loop and crossfading short samples,
but on this occasion we don’t need those controls. Lucky
us! Maybe we’ll come back and use them later.
As I mention in the tutorial, it’s important to
resist the temptation to make a huge bass sound
right now. This is because we plan to add other
instruments, and sonically there won’t be any room
for them if we have a bass sound that’s riddled with
effects and covering a huge frequency range.
We use clip envelopes to create repetitive
movement of the Auto Filter controls; it makes our
bass sound a bit more evolving and interesting. It
depends on what genre you’re working with, but
automated filters can be a huge factor in the mix. If
you don’t like the restrictions and mouse-work of
drawing these envelopes, be aware that you can
record them in real time if you’re using a
suitable hardware controller. Also I can’t stress
enough the importance of unlinking clip
envelopes from the clip length. And remember:
20/03/2015 10:20

MT Step-by-Step Making some bass
Open our example set, which follows on from last time. Load
01 an empty Instrument Rack into a new MIDI track. Drag the
clip ‘square’ into the rack and it’ll automatically appear inside a
Simpler instrument.
In the ‘sine’ Simpler instrument, set the Trans (transpose) value to
03 -12 semi-tones, that’s one octave down. We’ll use this as our sub
bass and the saw as our more immediately characteristic tone.
Refer to the screen shot. It’s just E1 then D2 at 1.1.3 then E1 again
05 at 1.3, D2 at 1.3.3, and A2 at 1.4.3 and E1 at 1.4.4. Match the note
lengths to what you see in the picture.
each envelope can be a different length. You might notice
that the sine wave part of the bass sound doesn’t react
much to the filter, but that’s normal – sines are not so
responsive compared to other more complex waveforms.
We finished off the bass track with Live’s Compressor.
This is perfectly adequate as a clinical compression tool,
MT146.TUT live4.indd 47
The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 4 Technique MT
Arm the track and play your keyboard to audition the sound, in a
02 low-ish range. Drag the clip ‘sine’ into the rack’s drop area,
creating another chain. Now you’ll be playing both sounds together.
You might want to rename the chains now, for visual reference –
04 Cmd-R. Good, now let’s draw in some notes. Double-click in an
empty slot to create a new MIDI clip, as we’ve done before.
There’s a bass sample in the drum kit; our bass clip leaves room
06 for that. But, find the controls for the bass note in the drum rack
and reduce the Release to 1.00 ms, shortening the note.
although that’s one area where I think third-party plug-ins
or even hardware can step in and do the job better, for
those times when you want a compressor that purposely
adds some character to the sound. If you have the Glue
Compressor from the Live 9 Suite, that’s a good place
to start…
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 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 4
MT Step-by-Step Making some bass… cont’d
While we’re shortening, set the Sine’s Sustain to -7dB. This makes
07 it shorter against the higher, square sound; when you play the
clip, it keeps the punchy low bass hit without cluttering up the mix.
Our simple bass part will be monophonic – only one note at a
09 time – so we can set the voices for each Simpler to 1. This means
we can’t play or program any overlapping notes by mistake.
Let’s raise the sine volume inside Simpler to 0dB – Simpler and
11 Sampler always default to -12dB, I guess to protect us from
ourselves! You can keep tweaking the levels as you go on.
As we’re adding more elements to our track, we’ve got
to make sure everything sounds good alongside everything
else. While working with the bass sound, I was starting to
feel the Resonator settings were a little bit too abrasive. To
fix this you can go to the Resonator in our percussion track
and tame it a bit by resetting all of the fine tuning values to
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MT146.TUT live4.indd 48
Because we’re using short punchy notes for this, we don’t have to
08 play with the other Simpler settings for loop/fade, release time,
and so on. Our samples are long enough that it won’t matter.
We could add effects to each chain and use the Spread control to
10 make a monster bass sound, but it doesn’t leave much room for
other sounds in the song if the bass is too big.
Let’s add Auto Filter for some nice filter sweeps. Drag it right after
12 the rack so it applies to both chains and set the filter cutoff to
170Hz, and the Q (resonance) to 2.00.
0 using the white boxes under each Pitch control. That
should sound better!
That’s all for now. Next time we’ll be working on a
keyboard part to layer over our bass and beats. Once
again we’ll take a shot at building our own instead of
loading a preset. MT
20/03/2015 10:20

MT Step-by-Step Making some bass… cont’d
Sweep time. Inside the MIDI note editor, click the envelope arrow
13 and choose Auto Filter and Frequency from the pop-up choosers.
Click the Link button and type a value of 4 bars next to that.
Choose Resonance now, unlinking it again, anchor it, then draw
15 an envelope that ends at 2.90. You’ll hear that as well. Look at the
Auto Filter and you’ll see red dots marking the automated controls.
When you’re repeating these nice envelope sweeps, don’t
17 use the same values every time either – it’ll sound more
organic if you vary them a bit. You will hear the difference especially
with the Resonance.
MT146.TUT live4.indd 49
The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 4 Technique MT
Click the left end of the red dotted line in the editor to anchor it.
14 Drag the right end upwards to 1.50 Hz (Cmd-Click-Drag for finer
resolutions). Now the frequency changes as the clip plays.
What sounds cool is if you create different length sweeps for
16 different parts of the song. Once you’ve clicked that Link button,
you can set envelopes to any length, even with simple one-bar clips.
Drop in Live’s Compressor/Classical Compression preset. Make
18 sure it goes right after the entire rack so it applies to both chains.
If you’ve got Glue Compressor from the Live 9 Suite, try that instead.
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 The Ultimate Guide To Additive Synthesis | Technique

Basic Additive With Operator

Operator might be a predominantly FM instrument but it’s ideal for getting to grips
with additive synthesis too

Getting to grips with

additive synthesis at
its most basic level
is straightforward
and, because quite a
few synths have
additive capabilities,
you don’t even need
a dedicated
additive-based
instrument to get
started. We’re going
to use Ableton Live’s
Operator, which
while essentially a
frequency
modulation synth
also boasts a useful
additive waveform
1 Operator is Ableton’s bread and butter FM synth but unlike traditional
FM synths it has the ability to create and customise waveforms with
additive synthesis. Load the synth up on a MIDI track, and click the
2 In default mode this displays all of the oscillator’s 64 available bands.
Currently the oscillator is set to a sine shape and as such only the first
band is active. The additive display is pretty small, so click the 16 button at
editor, handy for
Oscillator button at the bottom of the envelope display. the right of the display to zoom in to the first 16 bands.
making waveforms
from scratch, and
editing the synth’s
library of included
waveform shapes.
Operator’s
implementation of
additive synthesis is
quite straightforward
and doesn’t allow for
modulation of partial
levels in real time,
but it’s adequate for
demonstrating the
fundamentals of the
technique. Building
up harmonically
complex waveforms
is easy with the
Oscillator editor
3 Let’s edit the oscillator’s waveform by adding some energy to the third
harmonic. Play a note and drag up on the third column to about three-
quarters of the way up. You’ll see the visual representation of the waveform
4 Continue adding odd-numbered harmonics that get quieter. Our
waveform begins to sound and look more like a square wave with each
one we add. This is additive in a nutshell! In some synths it’s possible to
page, and these can
at the bottom right change slightly, and the sound becomes more organ-like. vary the levels of these harmonics over time but in Operator they’re static.
be used to create
rich, evolving sounds
when modulated by
another of the
synth’s operators.
In fact, modulate
one additive
waveform with
another and you can
create filth to rival
the likes of FM8!

5 By combining Operator’s additive synthesis and FM capabilities, we

can create some useful sounds. Click User under the Wave parameter
and select Saw 64 from this list. This gives us a 64 band sawtooth wave.
Noise up the waveform by increasing the volume of some arbitrary bands.
6 Click operator B, set it to 0dB, and its attack time to 1.38 seconds.
This causes operator B to frequency modulate our sawtooth, with the
complexity of harmonics increasing as its amplitude level increases during
the attack stage. This gives us a filthy sweep, ideal for a grungy bass sound.

59
 MT Technique Subscriber gift tutorial special

Ableton Live Subscriber gift tutorial special

Getting started
with the Novation
Launch Control
We’ve been offering a fantastic Novation Launch Control as a special gift to subscribe to
MusicTech. If you have taken us up on the offer – or are tempted to! – here’s a special tutorial
on using the Launch Control, written by our Ableton Live expert Martin Delaney…

N
ovation’s Launchpad has become the go-to clip
launching device for Ableton Live users – it’s
amazing how often you see it, on stage, in the
club, or in the studio. It’s simple, mobile and
practical. From the original Launchpad to the
Launchpad S and Launchpad Mini, it’s… well… ubiquitous,
is probably the best word. But there are times when you
might want a different type of controller. The Launchpad
has it covered for Live clip and scene launching, and for a
certain level of simplistic mixer-type control, but
sometimes you still need faders and knobs to take care of
business. This is where the Launch Control comes in.
Our expanded walkthrough should fill you in on what to
expect from the Launch Control, and how to get it going
with Live. If you don’t have Live already, that’s cool because
the Launch Control includes a free copy of Ableton Live
Lite, so you’re ready to go straight out of the box; it’s a
really nice little bundle.
When you’re deploying the factory and user templates,
remember that you can switch between them at any time
during a performance or recording; you can flip from
launching clips in Live to sending MIDI to other devices and
hardware without missing a beat.
A bonus feature is that the Launch Control is iPad-
compatible. As usual, you’ll need an iPad Camera
Connection Kit to attach it, but then you’re good – it gets
its power from the iPad. You can use it with Novation’s iOS
apps, or any other app that’ll receive MIDI messages.
If you’ve visited the Novation website, or you’ve been
paying attention generally, you’ll be aware that the Launch
Control is part of a wider range of launch-type products. It
began with the Launchpad, which continues to thrive as
the Launchpad S, and as the dinky little Launchpad Mini
– and of course there’s the Launchpad Pro, which has been
On the disc announced and you never know, may be released by the
time you read this. There are also the excellent Launchkey
keyboards, in 25, 49, and 61 key varieties, as well as a
Accompanying Launchkey Mini version for the dedicated mobile diehard. I
project file included guess what they have in common is pads – they all have a
on the DVD
certain number – but also a clean, focused, design ethic,
which makes them very straightforward to set up and use.
If using the Launch Control doesn’t satisfy your control
itch, you might be a candidate for upscaling to the Launch
Control XL, which includes more buttons (adding track solo
and record arming, among other things), extra rows of
knobs and pads, and importantly, eight faders.
On the customisation front, each knob is backlit; the
default arrangement is red for the top row, yellow for the
centre row, and green for the bottom, but through the
Launch Control XL Editor software, you can change these
colour assignments, using red, yellow, green, or orange.
What’s also cool about the XL is that Novation has added
the extra while keeping it to the same size as the
Launchpad itself.
Whatever you use it for – whether you’re using it to
control your DAW, plug-ins, iPad, hardware – the Launch
Control is a very versatile and capable little thing. No
installers necessary, no mains power needed, and it
doesn’t take up much room in your bag or case.
You can’t do it all with touchscreens, and you can’t do
it all with pads. Sometimes
those two rows of knobs,
and some faders – a
MIDI mixer,
basically – are
just what you
need… MT

FOCUS ON… JOINED UP THINKING

Novation’s Launchpad and Launch Control hardware controllers function perfectly well
individually, but combining them makes a lot of sense for Live users. Perhaps it’s not a
coincidence that the Launch Control and Launchpad are the same width, hmm? Locate them on
your desk for a well-appointed setup that doesn’t take up much room, and packs easily for gigs.
The layout works well if you position the Launch Control directly below the Launchpad - the USB port
is on the side, out of the way. If you need more ports, Novation’s Audiohub 2x4 has enough to connect up
to three devices simultaneously.

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MT Step-by-Step Launching Launch Control
Connect the Launch Control to your computer using the supplied
01 USB cable. It’s one of Novation’s neat right-angled ones – but
don’t fret if you lose it, any USB cable will do. No mains power required.
The Launch Control is plug and play – you don’t have to install any
03 drivers on Mac or PC, but it will be useful to download the free
Launch Control Editor software – more on that later.
To get you off to a quick start, we’ve provided an Ableton Live set
05
to use for this tutorial. It’s on our DVD, and it’s called ‘Launch
Control’ (self-explanatory title alert) – open it now.
We’re in Live’s Session View for this one. For now, use your mouse
07 to start some clips playing. This is a mix that needs work, and we
can use the Launch control to tweak it.
MT147.TUT live–NOV.indd 53
Subscriber gift tutorial special Technique MT
If you’re running short of USB ports, you can connect via a hub.
02 I can tell you for sure the Launch Control works with Novation’s
own Audiohub 2x4 – but then you’d expect it to.
Now launch Live, and open the Preferences MIDI Sync tab.
04 Choose Launch Control from Control Surfaces at the top, and
from the Input and Output lists next to that. Close Preferences.
Before starting, let’s check the Launch Control has the correct
06 factory template loaded. Hold down the top right Factory button
and press the bottom left pad. There are other templates – we’ll
discuss them shortly.
The volumes and pans are all over the place. No need to assign
08 any controls manually. Use the top row of knobs to adjust pans,
and the lower for volume. The pads toggle tracks on/off.
MAGAZINE June 2015 | 53
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 MT Technique Subscriber gift tutorial special
MT Step-by-Step Launching Launch Control… cont’d
We have two return tracks in our set. ‘A’ contains Ping Pong Delay,
09 and ‘B’ hosts a Reverb. To access the sends, press the ‘down’ pad
to control Sends A and B with the knobs.
Don’t worry about losing track of where you are. As you use the
11 Launch Control’s knobs and buttons, the Status Bar at the bottom
of the screen lights yellow, giving you a helpful read-out.
In true Launchpad style, the pad LEDs light with one of three
13 colours. Yellow means there’s a clip available on that pad, green
means the clip is playing, and red means you’re recording into it.
The down/up arrows select devices within the track, and the left/
15 right buttons select tracks. In this mode, the pads select further
banks of eight controllers, going deeper into the selected device.
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MT147.TUT live–NOV.indd 54
Live Intro has only two sends available, but the full version of Live
10 has 12. You can access all of your sends by simply using those up
and down buttons.
Factory template 2 provides clip launching. Press the Factory
12 button with the second pad to get a micro Launchpad. The down/
up arrows provide scene navigation, the left/right gives you track
selection, and the pads launch clips.
Moving on to template three, the first two sets of four knobs from
14 each row, correspond to the first eight controls in your rack or
device. The other knobs remain freely assignable.
The Launch Control doesn’t create a pop-up red box in Live to
16 show you where you are, but again, the Status Bar – plus the
usual highlighting of active tracks, scenes, and devices – is enough.
29/04/2015 15:24

MT Step-by-Step Launching Launch Control… cont’d
There’s no limit on how many tracks, scenes or devices in Live the
17 Launch Control can access. Once you’ve used it for a while you’ll
be skipping around the screen like a skippy ninja.
Those templates are worthy enough, but there’s also that User
19 button. That gives us access to eight user templates, which we
can edit as we desire using the Launch Control Editor software
mentioned previously.
Thanks to the Editor, the Launch Control can take command of
21 your DAW, software instruments, Max for Live devices, and even
hardware synthesisers and drum machines… anything that’ll take
MIDI through your computer.
To control external hardware, you’ll need to create an empty MIDI
23 track and load the External Instrument Device. Choose the MIDI
input and output corresponding to the LC and the hardware.
MT147.TUT live–NOV.indd 55
Subscriber gift tutorial special Technique MT
There are eight factory templates ready to use – the others
18 aren’t intended for Live specifically. They contain various
combinations of MIDI control messages and notes, and you can view
these in the editor software.
The Editor software is a free download for Mac or PC, and is a
20 breeze to use. This lets you configure MIDI notes, CC messages
and channels for each control on the Launch Control.
For controlling plug-in instruments and effects inside Live you
22 might need to use the Device Configure mode, where you can
assign controls inside Live to specific controls within the plug-in.
Your messages go straight through Live and out to the hardware.
24 You can also configure that device to receive audio back in from
the hardware, if relevant. I’m using it with Elektron’s Octatrack here.
MAGAZINE June 2015 | 55
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 MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to acoustics

Although a purchased full

package is the minimal fuss
solution (such as the London
12 Room Kit pictured here from
Primacoustic), your room may
benefit from the more custom
treatment when building your
own solution. And, yes, we
know there’s no door.

MT Feature Music Technology

THE BLUFFERS GUIDE

TO ACOUSTICS Your room can make or break your sound. It’s all about
its acoustic. Rob Boffard explains all…

T
he most important piece of equipment in your studio is not your Powered by
computer. It isn’t your DAW or your monitors or your MIDI controller.
The most important piece of equipment in your room has zero moving
parts, probably looks a little bit ugly, and is something you will almost
certainly never actually notice.
We’re talking about your acoustic treatment. The acoustics of a room where
music is made, mixed or mastered is the single most important thing in the
entire production chain. It doesn’t matter how good your ears are or how
expensive your equipment is: if your space isn’t treated right, then what you’ll be
hearing won’t be accurate, and you won’t get a good sound.
In this guide, we’ll go into exactly what acoustics are. We’ll talk about what
sound is, how it behaves, and how you can tame it. We’ll also detail a short
construction project that you can undertake to make your own acoustic panels.
Trust us: it will improve your sound like you wouldn’t believe.

Ride the wave

Think about sound for a minute.
Very obviously, it has a source, like your speakers, and a destination – that
would be your ears. But in-between the source and destination, that sound is
doing some very interesting things.
Sound, as we hope we don’t have to explain, consists of pressure waves in the
air. When those pressure waves hit something, such as a wall or chair or desk or
coffee mug or bookshelf, they are either reflected or absorbed. We’ll admit, that’s

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 A bluffer’s guide to acoustics Feature MT

putting it a little simply, but the point is that the sound you hear is dramatically
Tech terms
affected by the environment it’s in. You’ve almost certainly experienced this:
SOUND WAVE:
think of the last time you were at church, or a massive concert hall. There is a The way sound appears
heavy reverb to the sound, which comes not only from the walls and floor and in the environment, as
ceiling, but also from the distances between them. Likewise, step into a cupboard a pressure and
very quickly (go on, we’ll wait) and say a few words. Chances are, your voice will displacement wave
sound muffled and stripped of character. that travels through
These are not ideal conditions for music making. It’s less important at the air, as well as solids
and liquids.
actual production stage, when sound quality and balance take a backseat to
musical creativity. But when you’re starting to mix, you want as little STANDING WAVE:
environmental interference as possible. You need an accurate picture of what’s What happens when
coming out of your speakers in order to make informed mix decisions. Plenty of two sound waves get
trapped between two
songs have been recorded in a cathedral, but very few have been mixed there. flat surfaces facing
Assuring that the environment you are in is as acoustically neutral as each other, common in
possible is absolutely key. Let’s have a look at how to make that happen. untreated rooms.
Causes unpleasant
Foam pit artefacts in the sound.
We’ll operate on the principle that you have a room at home for your music ACOUSTIC FOAM:
making. Furthermore, we’ll operate on the principle that you can do things to A thick, dense,
that room. If you are a renter, or otherwise unable to change the room too much, open-celled foam
this may not apply. That being said, it’s still worth reading, as it will help you designed to attenuate
understand the principles of how noise treatment works. sound waves. You’ll
want to invest in some
Chances are you’ve got a room with regular furniture. A table, chair, maybe a
of this stuff.
couch, perhaps a couple of bookshelves, too. Stand at the centre of the room, and
clap. Listen to what happens to the sound. Try to analyse where the echoes (or BASS TRAP:
A piece of acoustic
reflections) come back at you from, and what they sound like. Don’t worry if you
foam of above-average
find this difficult – it’s just a crude test, meant to illustrate that most rooms thickness, that’s
don’t treat sound that well. designed to be placed
There are a couple of things we can do to this room to make that sound better. in corners to corral
The first has nothing to do with acoustic treatment at all. errant low-frequency
It’s all about positioning. Every room will have a ‘sweet spot’, where the sound waves.
sound is at its most honest. This can be quite difficult to find, but fortunately,
there is a very good general principle you can use. Assuming you operate at a
desk, set that desk up so that when you sit at it, you’re facing one of the short
sides of the rectangle. Make sure you are at least three feet from the wall.
Now: your monitor speakers. Imagine that you and the speakers form a
triangle. It should be an equilateral triangle – that is, one where all three angles
are equal. Don’t worry about getting it too exact for now; just make sure that you
are roughly the same distance from the speakers as they are from each other. In
addition, try to arrange things so that your speakers are each the same distance
from the wall on either side. Even if you can’t get it exactly right, or if your room
is a weird shape, don’t worry. What we’re going to do next is to treat your room.
Look at your walls and ceiling. Right now, they are almost certainly flat.
That’s not good for sound waves, which will be reflected back into the room,

MT Step-by-Step Building an absorber

Back
3

Staple
4

Frame
1

Using 2 x 3in pine, make a frame that’s
01 1,199 x 650mm in size. Use screws to
connect the timber together. Staple in some
Cara fabric or attach a hardboard back. This
will keep the Rockwool in place.
Turn the frame over and insert a
02 60mm-deep mineral wool fibre slab
snugly within the frame. A tight fit will help the
material to stay in position.
Cut enough Cara fabric to wrap around
03 the front and to be stapled to the rear of
the absorber. You may want to place tape
over your staple heads to prevent marking on
your walls. Alternatively, make a wooden
frame to face the absorber. Use picture
mounts to hang it.

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 MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to acoustics

messing with your mix. You might think the way to MTM Pro Technique Studio ergonomics
solve this problem would be to blanket all flat
The ergonomics of your studio is something to
surfaces in acoustic treatment, but if you did, you’d
consider both for your comfort as well as its impact
end up with a room that sounded completely ‘dead’.
on your room acoustically. Naturally, it is important
We don’t want that. What we want is something
to ensure that all the equipment you use is well
between the two, where some surfaces are covered.
within your reach and doesn’t require stretching for,
That will ensure that you don’t have too many
something that perhaps later results in injury.
reflections, while allowing your room to retain its
Ensure that your chair is up to the job and that
acoustic character (and remain pleasant to work in).
you’re comfortable when you’re working. Your desk
What we’re going to use to cover them is acoustic
needs to be at the right height and should be suitable
foam. This is very different to regular foam, in that
for the kind of work you’re doing. Placing your most
it’s a lot more dense, with a ridged or textured
often used equipment within your ‘arc of reach’ will
surface. It is specifically designed to absorb sound
therefore prevent you moving your arms in repetitive
waves, trapping them before they get to your ears.
movements that can cause injury.
Plenty of companies sell acoustic foam, and in its
Also it’s worth considering installing your
most common form, it comes in slabs that are a
equipment in racks built within your desk or having
couple of feet square. Eggcups, by the way, don’t
them in a desktop rack. However, spare a thought for
work, no matter what you’ve seen on TV.
reflections that may be caused by such devices and
The goal is to put these slabs at key points on the
how you might tackle them if they cause unwanted
walls and ceiling. Again, this will depend on the
reflections. For more details, see last month’s Ten
Minute Master, in which we explored ergonomic

Even a little bit of acoustic considerations for the studio.

proofing will immediately benefit

the sound of your room
dimensions of the room, but a good rule is to
position them adjacent to your speakers, covering
the walls with a roughly nine-foot square section of
foam. In addition, you’ll need to put it on the wall
directly in front of you when you are sitting at the
desk, and the wall directly behind you. You would be
very wise to attach it to the ceiling as well. Don’t
worry if you can’t hit all the spots. Even a little bit
of acoustic proofing will immediately benefit the
sound of your room.
While you’re at it, isolate your speakers, either bounce too many reflections back at you. You’re not
with specially-designed stands or by placing them done yet. You need to deal with the bass frequencies.
on acoustic foam. Several companies actually sell Low-frequency sound waves have less power than
angled chunks of foam for this purpose. This will high-frequency ones, and traditional acoustic foam
ensure that the surface your speakers rest on doesn’t slabs can’t deal with them adequately. In addition,

MT Step-by-Step Building a bass trap

We’re going to look at a corner
01 broadband trap here. Take some timber
– 12mm plywood is ideal – and cut two
right-angle triangles (300 x 300 x 424mm).
These will form the top and bottom of your
trap. The backs will be 300mm by the height
you can accommodate in your room.
Connect the parts together, either with Complete the corner trap by facing with
02 screws or fixing blocks on the inside.
03 Cara fabric or a perforated wooden
Using a saw, cut Rockwool slabs into triangles panel of some description, ensuring it is
slightly smaller that can stack up snugly inside acoustically transparent.
the frame. These will provide a very deep
absorber essentially, but work well for trapping
bass and other frequencies.

108 ||June
March2015
2015 MAGAZINE
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 A bluffer’s guide to acoustics Feature MT

bass has a nasty habit of accumulating in the There are some products that
are difficult to DIY. Vicoustic’s
corners, and letting it do so can really muddy your
products are both elegant and
mix. To fix this, you’ll need to invest in bass traps, highly effective, such as this
which are thick, chunky pieces of foam designed to WaveWood Bass Trap.
fit right into the corners of a room.
Again, please note that these are general
principles. You don’t treat a live room as you would a
vocal booth, and acoustics can be a detailed science
that experts will charge a lot of money to get right.
But as a general guide, this should get you going.

DIY style
Acoustic foam panels differ from other audio
equipment in one crucial way. You can actually make
your own without any specialist knowledge.
We’re not going to go into the exact step-by-step
procedure here, as it’s relatively simple, especially if
you’re a dab hand with DIY. What you need to do is
construct a solid wood frame. Cover one side of the
frame with fabric, making sure it fits tight around it
(you can staple-gun it into place). What you’ll need to
do then is fill the interior with a substance known as
Rockwool. This material, readily available from
hardware stores, is very sound absorbent, and is
easy to work with. Once you’ve filled the frame, all What you can do, however, is attach each section
you have to do is close the back – we suggest using of acoustic proofing to a pre-cut wooden panel –
another piece of fabric, perhaps with a wooden bar chipboard will do. You can try using the spray, but a
placed across the middle of the frame to keep the better option might be to use metal brackets to hold
Rockwool in place. Congratulations: you’ve made an the foam in place. The panels can then be hung on
acoustic panel. If you want more detailed the wall like a picture. The real advantage of this is
instructions, you’ll find hundreds of them online. that if you move studio, you can simply take down
But how do you go about hanging these on the the panels and take them with you. MT
wall and ceiling? Many companies sell an adhesive
spray that you can use to attach the foam directly to This feature is endorsed by SSR which has been
the wall. We’re going to speak from personal providing professional education training in the
experience here: avoid this stuff. Not only is one can audio engineering industry for over 30 years. With
not sufficient to prove an entire room, but it doesn’t campuses in London, Manchester, Jakarta and
last very long, so your panels are in danger of falling Singapore, SSR has gained a healthy reputation
away. Despite that, the substance itself is absolute within the music industry for producing well
murder to get off the wall. trained, professional graduates across the globe.

MT Step-by-Step Building a diffusor

Building a diffusor is perhaps the most
01 difficult task presented here, partly
because there’s a bit more maths involved,
but also as it takes a little more skill in the
workshop. The prettier of the two is perhaps
the blockwork Quadratic (Skyline) Diffusor,
but both varieties are pretty difficult. The
best starting point is to download a diffusor
calculator from the net and consider how it
should perform.
Cut the blocks of wood into the
02 appropriate lengths. Purchase some
hardboard or 9mm MDF and cut to the required
frame length to support the blocks. The next
step is the tricky bit: arranging the blocks as
per the grid provided by the calculator. As you
arrange you’ll need to glue each block to the
back and to any adjacent blocks it comes into
contact with.
Leave the blocks to dry overnight (or
03 longer, depending on the adhesive).
Next, turn the whole diffusor over. Using a
drill, pilot four holes through the rear
hardboard to the longer lengths of block.
Screw together to aid adhesion. Make two
holes through the ‘0’ sections (no blocks) in
the sequence to connect the diffusor to the
wall or ceiling.

MAGAZINE June 2015 | 109

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Technique | Beat Loop Processing
Never mind cutting, chopping and layering with
individual samples… Let’s look at the beat, the
whole beat, and nothing but the beat
A
s producers, working with beats
brings us closer to our roots,
safe in the knowledge that we’re
following in the footsteps of our
distant ancestors and their noble traditions
– no, we’re not on about the caveman
banging on his animal-skin drum; we’re
talking about the dinosaur on the turntable,
making his breaks dirtier than a sewer-
worker’s kecks!
Today’s cutting-edge technologies let us
slice and dice on the atomic level, beefing
up our beats with single hits, and that’s got
a huge place in the art of production. But
52
we’re going to take a step back here and
examine some ways of processing whole
beats on their own, getting a little creative
along the way.
Layering beats together
Some of us like to get perfectionistic,
performing miniscule surgery on our beats
and getting them just right – adding a
sub layer onto kick drums, some extra
attack to snares, and whatever else. But
layering two or more whole beats together
can be the creative antidote to this mindset
for those looking to take a different
approach. So what considerations are to be
taken when slamming two unassuming
beats together?
Mixing whole beats is fairly
commonplace already, usually appearing as
a percussion layer added to throw some
rhythm onto a stiff kick-and-snare beat.
 Beat Loop Processing | Technique

Layering Beats Together

Some beats just work together, but most of them simply don’t, and sometimes
you’ve got to apply some processing…

INCLUDES VIDEO l
Here we’ll explore a
few simple rules for
getting two beats to
sound good together.
The ‘done thing’
might be layering
breaks onto beats for
a crusty top-end, but
we’re going to delve
into lining up two or
more whole beats.
Most often these
days, beat
processing is done
by layering in
individual samples,
but trying a
‘whole-beat’
1 When layering beats, most of them won’t go together. If two beats have
different rhythms, grooves and frequency content, there’s not much you
can do about it! Finding two matching beats will take some trial and error in
2 Some beats go together easily. For example, a kick/snare loop gels with
a percussion loop – the low-end of the kick, the impact of the snare
and the high-frequency rhythm of the percussion stay out of each other’s
approach can
auditioning, but it should be quicker to do than forcing two together. way, and even enhance each other. You can enhance the effect with EQ.
increase your
creative potential.
Watch how we go
about it in video
form on the DVD.

3 But it’s more likely you’ll end up with a pair that almost goes together.
How can we make them work? Try some filtering of one or both layers
– one high-pass, the other low-pass. This may help with chalk-and-cheese
4 If two beats have a slightly different groove, time-stretching is a simple
answer. Get a good look at the two waveforms’ transients, make sure
you’re in a percussive time-stretch mode, and line ’em up.
layers, but it’s not a solution if you’re trying to stick similar beats together.

5 Try retuning/pitchshifting one of the beats as a whole. This could make

it sound better or worse. You could also try shifting just one frequency
band, eg the snare, by copying the track twice, band-passing the copies in
the area you want, inverting one and pitchshifting the other.
6 Then, create a subgroup and experiment with compression and
saturation to glue the beats together. Use the compressor’s Attack
time to control which transients are emphasised or reduced. Saturation and
reverb can help in giving the two bussed beats the same character.

53
Technique | Beat Loop Processing

Layer In Phase
Layering anything can lead to
phase issues, and it can be
especially bad when it comes to
beats – they’re whole tracks of
multiple instruments working
together. If the waveform of one
beat layer is heading upwards
while the other’s heading down,
they can cancel each other out
and you can end up with a
reduced impact of the hits and a
not-so-perfect stereo field.
The old-school way to try and
sort this was to invert the
polarity of one channel – often
done for multi-mic’d sources
like guitar amps or snare drums.
It wasn’t always guaranteed to
work, mind. There are some
software analysis tools to help
detect and/or fix phase issues
(like Sound Radix Pi), but if you
don’t have the time to use an
electron microscope, you’d be
Line It Up
wise to check out track delaying.
By taking one of your beat Use track delay,
layers, disabling your DAW’s polarity inversion, or
manual waveform
‘snap to grid’ function, and
dragging to get the
moving the track by a few most powerful sound
samples (not milliseconds), you – trust your ears
may be able to knock out most above all else.
phase issues. Zooming right into
the waveforms and making sure
a hit’s initial transient’s ‘ups and
downs’ coincide will help but,
when layering entire grooves,
you could also cause problems
to other hits.
The best way to approach
track delay may well be to use Out Of Phase?
your ears – if slight movements
These two hits’ peaks
in position make your signal’s and troughs line up
transients more powerful, or give as much as is
it a better stereo impression, go possible, especially
with it – at least at the creative at the crucial
front-end impact.
stage of your production.

Breakbeats are often also used as a ‘crusty
top layer’, providing the vibe at the higher
ends of the frequency spectrum. So
dual-layer beats are there to complement
each other’s qualities – for breaks and
percussion, it’s the feeling and energy of the
top-end, and the aim becomes to enhance
those qualities.
Once you’ve discovered what a certain
loop is adding to the overall feel, it’s that
contribution that you need to keep. This
could be as simple as opposing EQ boosts
and cuts, or using high- or low-pass filters to
emphasise or de-emphasise the quality on
different tracks.
Groove shadows
Sometimes, just adding reverb to a beat is
enough to give it the qualities you want; but
if you’re after a different sort of atmosphere,
and your mix is begging for some extra
character, you can try using a heavily
reverbed signal from another beat
difference between a bland and an
interesting sonic scene.
When it comes to groove shadows,
considerations to bear in mind include the
level of the shadow, the frequency content
of the shadow, and the rhythmic makeup of
the shadow. These properties can be
controlled, of course, but sometimes finding
the right beat to use for a shadow is the
best policy to take from the start. There are
even sample libraries dedicated to groove
shadow sounds, which aren’t a bad place to
start looking, but if you’re seeking out the
unorthodox, you can create one from the
most unlikely of sources.
For extra character,
try using a heavily
MeldaProduction’s
reverbed signal
However, in addition to classic
compressors, there are multiband set-ups
for almost every effect you can imagine.
Check out the MeldaProduction range for a
huge amount of choice, and options like
FabFilter Saturn for some refined ideas.
When it comes to full beats, it can be
helpful to add overdrive to key snare
frequencies, or light modulation to
hi-hats, so make sure you check out
these simple options.
You can even get custom by crafting
your own multiband chains to add in any of
your plug-ins for some dedicated processing
on any band you like. It’s a good idea to
save these empty
processors in a rack/
macro for when you need
to call them up again
later. Check out the
third tutorial for a
quick how-to.
As well as full

from another beat

altogether. When placed very low in the mix
behind the main beat, this can be the
MMultiBandDynamics
is a powerful tool for
tweaking complex loops
Band processing
Multiband processing was previously the
preserve of the mastering engineer, but
working in the box has made plenty of
multiband plug-in effects available.
Dynamics are the most obvious things that
spring to mind when it comes to multiband
set-ups – the stalwart de-esser often
manifested as a multiband compressor
itself. These devices can be a great way to
claw back extra headroom from one track,
beating a flatter frequency spectrum into it,
but only when it starts to peak.
set-ups, we’ll also show
you how to create a quick
one-band processor with
some clever routing tricks. By duplicating a
track and filtering the band you want to
process, then phase inverting the copy,
you’ll remove that band from the signal.
Then, by taking another duplicate track, you
can apply the same filter to add the sound
back in again on a dedicated channel.
So, however you like to process your
beats – whether you’re a rough-cutter or a
micro-surgeon with robotic laser eyes –
check out these three tutorials to get some
creative ideas and a new approach to
processing any track!

54
 Beat Loop Processing | Technique

Groove Shadows
Here’s how to liven up or add atmosphere to one beat by using the reverb signal
from another beat

INCLUDES VIDEO l
A groove shadow is a
heavily reverbed
signal from another
beat (or any sound
source) that sits
behind your main
beat. We’ll show you
the basics and the
most vital processors
you’ll get help from
if you’re up for
making a groove
shadow. Check out
the video on the DVD
to hear and see it in
action. Try this one
next time you’re
about to reach for a
1 Set up one channel for your main beat, and another to create your
shadow. On the shadow channel, set up a reverb, fully Wet, and bring
the level down. Audition shadow beats alongside the main beat and see
2 Let’s get the beat and its shadow sounding better together.
Pitchshifting the shadow reverb signal up or down can give it energy
where it didn’t have it before. Choose whether to match the main beat or to
reverb plug-in.
what catches your attention. You don’t even have to use a beat; get creative. separate beat and shadow, depending on the effect you’re after.

3 Gating the shadow can provide a bit more rhythm. Set up a large
reduction amount, a quick attack and crank the Hold up. Getting
the Threshold setting just right is crucial if you’re auditioning a lot of
4 So we’ve got three crucial processes – reverb, gating and pitchshifting.
The ordering of these can make a big difference. Keep an eye on the
relationship between the gate and reverb modules; if the reverb’s smearing
different candidates. the beat’s transients, the gate may not have anything to detect.

5 As the shadow is a reverb effect that adds a sense of space, try

delaying it further, having the beat pop out over the top more
obviously. This can be done using the reverb’s predelay control, or with a
6 Try throwing some effects on the shadow signal to push it even further.
Modulation effects such as chorus, phasing and flanging are one way
to go, as is distortion, or any other creative effect.
simple delay processor set to 100% wet. Start at about 50ms and move up.

55
Technique | Beat Loop Processing

Band Processing
Use multiband processors to make easy work of whole loops, or set up your own
multiband or single-band signal chains

INCLUDES VIDEO l
When it comes to
quick processing of
full-band tracks,
getting good (and
fast) with multiband
processing will help
you out. We’ll look at
some common
multiband effects,
and show you how to
make your own.
Then, we’ll do a
fly-by of a rough ‘n’
ready one-band
processor, perfect for
adding an effect to a
select band of the
spectrum in a busy
1 Multiband plug-ins let you make changes to different parts of the
frequency spectrum in different ways. The traditional multiband
processor is dynamics; multiband compressors affect different frequencies
2 But there are plenty of other multiband processors too – distortion and
saturation might work better applied to different bands by different
amounts, just like the response of well-driven analogue tape; and all sorts of
mix (see below for a
in different ways – good for clawing back headroom while mastering. other multiband effects like modulation, delays and reverbs.
more in-depth
explanation). As
usual, check it out
in the video
version, too.

3 To get even more custom processing done, you can create your own
multiband devices by setting up some clever signal routing. Bypassing
the processing of multiband devices and only using their crossovers, on
4 You can make your own single band isolator to process a specific part
of the frequency spectrum. This could be useful for de-essing duties
(using a standard compressor), or collapsing the stereo field to mono in the
returns, new tracks or rack chains, lets you add your own effect to any band. bass region, for example. Watch the video or see below to find out how.

Band Caveats
To make a single-band
processor, duplicate the track
twice, filtering both the
duplicates with the exact same
settings, and phase inverting
one of them. The non-inverted
track should now control the
band you’ve filtered off, which
will be missing from the original
track when combined with the
phase-inverted copy. You can
use return tracks or channels
instead of track duplicates,
depending on your DAW. You
can continue the process to
arrive at a multiband set-up.
Before you run off and do it,
avoid filter settings with any DIY One-Band
Processing
resonance or Q settings that
create boosts – use filter cuts Here’s a quick and
only. Also, make sure your DAW
dirty method for
isolating one band
is compensating for the latency for processing. The
of any processors you’re using to original track is
filter or process your bands. copied twice.
Check your DAW’s settings
and manual.
You can phase-invert your Duplicated Waves
entire multiband set-up against
Both duplicates are
a duplicate of the original track, filtered, and one is
and check that there’s no phase inverted to
output, just to make sure your cancel out that band
set-up is a perfect replication.
in the original track.

56
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 5
Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 5
Make your own
keyboard sound
& sidechain it…
Anybody can load a synth preset but it’s fun to
build your own. Connect your keyboard and
Martin Delaney will show you how it’s done.
W
e continue our Ultimate Guide by adding a
simple keyboard part to our ongoing
project, following on from the bass last
time. You like the project? Good. You don’t
like the project? That’s fine too as it’s
merely a vehicle for us to introduce the core techniques of
using Ableton Live.
If you’re not great at
music theory Live has a
whole bunch of tools to
make parts sound busy
Once again we’re using the Simpler instrument device,
with a sample that you can load from the provided
example Live set. This works for us because there are a
few different versions of Live out there – Suite, Standard
and Intro, not to mention older versions counting from 9
backwards – so using a synthesizer instrument device at
this point could cause compatibility issues with some
folks reading this. We’re on safe ground with Simpler
because it’s in every version of Live – it has to be, because
drum racks in particular won’t work without it!
Either way it’s good, partly because we can now say
we’re using sample based synthesis, a form of sound
design that uses audio samples as well as waveforms
generated by the synth instrument itself. Many synths let
you combine these techniques in one preset, which really
opens up the sonic spectrum.
FOCUS ON… THE HARDWARE
In this tutorial we’re building a keyboard sound based on a sample
from a Waldorf Pulse Plus, a hardware, rack-mount synth first
released in 1997 (the range is still going strong in a tabletop format).
I used the Pulse for two important reasons: one, because it would
give a different texture than resampling a plug-in, and two, because
it was nearby! One of the great things about Simpler is that it makes
it easy to use almost any sound as a source. Hardware instruments
seem to be on everybody’s mind at the moment, so the Pulse it is.
48 | July 2015 MAGAZINE
MT148.TUT live5.indd 48
On the disc
Accompanying
project file included
on the DVD
As well as adding a new sample to our set – which
again, incorporates the steps from the last tutorial – I’ve
taken the opportunity to reorganise, rename, and colour
code the tracks and clips. Not only do I get a kick out of
organising everything, it helps me recognise what I’m
looking at faster and it avoids accidentally triggering or
selecting the wrong clip or track. I made a ‘spare’ group
track for unused tracks, and put the original beat in there.
We mentioned this before – Shift-Click to select the tracks
you want to group, then type Cmd-G. You can also drag
additional tracks in later.
Our keyboard part doesn’t have to be too demanding.
All we need for this project is something basic that doesn’t
take up too much room, sonically speaking; we’ve got
enough going on already. We’re just using one note, then
making it move with some sidechaining instead.
Whenever we talk about creating instrument sounds,
make sure you’re using a keyboard to audition the sound
constantly as you work on it. If you already have a MIDI clip
and notes in place, you could just keep that playing and
rolling round. But if you’re working on a sound that needs
to have some velocity sensitivity – some responsiveness
to how hard you hit your keys or pads – it’s better to use
your keyboard or pads in real time while you’re testing. As
I’ve said before, I like to use the computer keyboard as
well, and when I’m doing that, I’ll keep tapping on the c
and v keys to change through some different velocity
settings if relevant – they’ll take you up and down through
the velocity range from 1 to 127 in increments of 20. Don’t
forget to keep an eye on your track and master volume
levels as well as we don’t want to see any red peaks!
We don’t use any notes other than E4 for this clip,
because we want to start with a drone and then find a way
to make it sound a bit more interesting. If you’re not great
at music theory, Live has a whole bunch of tools to help
you make even a basic
29/05/2015 15:00
 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 5 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining
Be sure to use our updated example set for this tutorial. I’ve
01 added a new sample, ‘synth note’. This is a synth playing a long C
note (sampled from the Waldorf Pulse Plus hardware synth).
This should sound familiar, because we’ve done this step before
03 when we made our bass part. Click the Dupl.Loop button in the
MIDI Editor’s Notes box twice, creating an empty 4-bar MIDI clip.
Draw an E4 note across the entire length of the clip - launch the
05 clip and then it’ll play just like a drone over four bars. Keep the
velocity to around 100 or 110 – it doesn’t matter precisely.
programmed part sound busy i.e. the MIDI Effect Devices.
We’re using the Chord device a little bit here, but don’t be
surprised if we come back and look at MIDI effects again.
The other thing we do to make it sound more active is to
sidechain it, taking the timing of the drum track (or parts of
it) and applying it to the keyboard sound to create a
MT148.TUT live5.indd 49
Load the Simpler sample-playback instrument into a new MIDI
02 track, and drag the ‘synth note’ sample into Simpler’s drop area.
Double-click the top empty clip slot in the track to make a clip.
When you arm your track and play your MIDI keyboard, you should
04 be hearing the sampled synth tone playing across the range. We
used a C so it’ll be correctly in pitch with other instruments.
To edit the note velocity, unfold the MIDI Velocity Editor (click on
06 the little triangle) below the MIDI Note Editor, then drag the
velocity marker up or down until you reach the desired range.
‘pulsing’ quality. After you’ve loaded the Compressor into
the keyboard track, you can choose any sound as a source,
digging deep into drum and instrument racks to find the
exact trigger you want. However, from a workflow point of
view I find it much easier to work with a separate track as
a source for a sidechain, that’s why we’ve copied the drum
MAGAZINE July 2015 | 49
29/05/2015 15:00
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 5
MT Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining cont’d
So far we have a pretty dull synth part so let’s jazz it up a bit. At
07 this stage if you need to do any volume management for this
sound, use the Volume control in Simpler.
Set the Volume envelope Attack to 500ms so there’s a bit more to
09 the tiny little fade-in at the beginning of the sample (as you can
see, it starts quite gradually already).
Set the Chord device’s first two Shift control knobs to +3 and +5
11 semitones. As the clip loops or as you play your keyboard, you’ll
hear the extra notes. Set Simpler’s Spread to 50.
track here. Not only do I then have something that visually
helps me keep track of what’s going on, outside of the
drum kit, a separate track for sidechaining, it enables me
to program a totally different kick pattern to trigger the
compressor if I want to, or even to keep the sidechain feed
going when the drums drop out. You could even automate
50 | July 2015 MAGAZINE
MT148.TUT live5.indd 50
Let’s make some changes inside Simpler. Start by turning Loop
08 on and set it to 40%, then turn Snap on and set the Start to
0.30%. Set Length to 14% and Fade to 70%.
Now let’s add some interest: because we’ve been lazy with our
10 programming, let’s expand the part with one of Live’s MIDI effect
devices. Add the Chord MIDI effect to the track, it’ll go before Simpler.
The extra notes make it sound very full – too full, in fact. So drag
12 an EQ Three audio effect to the end of the chain and set the
GainMid to -12dB. This thins it out nicely.
that sidechain track and do very weird things with it,
without disrupting your drum beat. As it says in the
tutorial, remember that the sidechain source can be silent
– mute the track and it still works!
If you’re a musical type of person, who can play
keyboards and who understands musical theory, Live is a
29/05/2015 15:00
 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 5 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining cont’d
Now we need to add some movement to this keyboard part – I
13 guess you’d say it’s a pad sound; duplicate your MIDI drum track
by clicking on the track name and type Cmd-D.
If you can only solo one item at a time, check your Record/Warp/
15 Launch Preferences and make sure Exclusive Solo is off.
Otherwise, temporarily override the preference setting by Cmd-
Clicking on each item.
Click on the small triangle in the Compressor title bar, turn on
17 Sidechain and choose the sidechain drum track from the Audio
From box. Leave the other settings alone.
great tool for you anyway, especially with ‘alternative’ input
devices like Push and the new Novation Launchpad Pro.
But if you’re really confident or even conscious in terms
of theory, Live can really give you a boost with the MIDI
effects we’ve mentioned here. It’s about as novice-friendly
as it gets, and it doesn’t fail to deliver once you get more
MT148.TUT live5.indd 51
Inside the rack, solo chains 1, 3, 5, 9, and 13 and deactivate the
14 track by clicking on the yellow track number. Launch the clip,
though. Yes, that’s right. We have a plan.
Click on your copied drum track and use Cmd-R or the Context
16 Menu to rename the track ‘Sidechain’, then load the Compressor
‘Brick Wall’ preset into your keyboard track after the EQ Three.
Bring the Compressor Threshold down to -50.0dB and set the
18 Attack to 0.30ms. Play your keyboard and sidechain clips and you
should hear a new rhythmic pulse to your keyboard part.
knowledgeable. We’re making good progress through this
project. Next time we’ll be adding our final element – a
speech sample – and processing that in a few interesting
and different ways. MT
This tutorial is one of the all new tutorials available in the MusicTech Live
2015 Focus on sale now.
MAGAZINE July 2015 | 51
29/05/2015 15:00
 MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to MIDI

MT Feature Music Technology

A BLUFFER’S
GUIDE TO MIDI
Get your head round MIDI and you’ve got your head round music
production. Rob Boffard explains the ins and outs…

M
IDI can be one of the most mystifying parts of music production. Powered by
Although its basic purpose can be intuitive with a little bit of
practice, unlocking its hidden depths often takes a lot of time,
especially if you’ve never encountered it before. But it is crucially
important to know how it works, especially if you want to
produce anything involving software instruments.
That’s because all manufacturers of DAWs – from Apple to Avid to Ableton to
Propellerheads rely on it. It’s the Rosetta Stone of music production; a common
language that enables any device and any software program to talk to each other.
If you can master MIDI, if you can work out how it functions and make it part of
your toolkit, then your production will become much faster, and the results will
be as slick as they come.

MIDI Magic
Musical Instrument Digital Interface: that’s what MIDI stands for. We don’t
really want to go in-depth into its history (there’s plenty online if you’d like to
find out more) – this is a Bluffer’s Guide, after all – but what you need to know is
that it came to fruition in the early 1980s as part of a collaboration between
engineers Dave Smith and Chet Wood, and several synthesiser companies such as
Korg, Moog and Roland. Smith and Wood initiated this, because the market had
just got far too complicated. There were too many protocols, and too many
devices, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to talk to each other.
MIDI was the solution.

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By having your software
instruments respond to
properties of your MIDI notes,
you can put together
interesting effects.
MT148.Bluffers Guide.indd 107
A bluffer’s guide to MIDI Feature MT
But forget the
history. The best way to
understand MIDI is to
talk about what it is
now. We’ll get to the
complicated information
that a MIDI sequence can
contain in a minute. For
now, we’re just going to
talk about the basics.
The easiest way to
understand this is to
pull up your favoured A single MIDI note. This one is perfectly in time, locked in place on the grid.
DAW, and load up a
software instrument. I’ll
use Reason, but you can use any one you like. Once you’ve queued up your Tech terms
instrument, you’ll need to go into the sequencer, where you’ll see a virtual
NOTE: a single
keyboard (or equivalent) running vertically. Running horizontally along from that piece of MIDI data,
keyboard should be a line-up of rigid blocks. usually expressed as
Find the pencil tool, which is usually located in the toolbar, and click one of a slim rectangle and
those blocks. You’ll notice it will fill in. There: you’ve just drawn a MIDI note. displayed on a grid.
Now, if you press play, your software instrument will play a sound when the Instructs an instrument
to play audio.
marker reaches the note. You can play these back at any tempo you like, and they
will stay in time. VELOCITY: a method
At its most basic, a MIDI note is an indication for an instrument to play a of simulating the
note. A much-used analogy is that of an orchestra. If the instruments are the perceived loudness
of a given MIDI note.
violins, horns, woodwinds and the like, then the MIDI notes are the sheet music.
Measured in units
They tell the orchestra what to play. By arranging MIDI notes in sequence,
from 0 to 127.
running up and down the chords on the keyboard, you can create complex
melodies. This is why MIDI notes are so popular in electronic music production. QUANTISATION: the
process where MIDI
It’s worth remembering that MIDI notes, beyond just being sheet music, are a
notes are snapped to
way the different instruments are able to communicate with each other. It their nearest spot on
enables you to play a note on a physical keyboard (called a MIDI controller) and the grid in order
have it appear as MIDI data on your screen. That’s important, by the way: MIDI is to compensate for
not sound. By itself, it can’t do a damn thing. If you draw a MIDI note without an human playing, and
instrument connected to it, nothing will play. It’s just data, and it relies on the retain timing.
context it’s being used in for the outcome. CONTROLLER: a
device that’s used to
Up a level input and sequence
But of course, MIDI programming is a lot more complex than simple instructions MIDI notes. Usually
this is a keyboard, or
for an instrument to play a note.
set of pads.
Let’s start with one of the most common ways of treating a MIDI note:
velocity. If you hit a piano key hard, the sound it plays will be much louder than
if you just pushed it down gently. MIDI has the same principle encoded in it. The
higher the velocity, the louder the note. The advantage of this is that you can
tweak the volumes of individual notes on a particular track, instead of having to
automate the track fader.
Velocity gives you a hugely versatile way of controlling your sound. You could,
for example, set your instrument to only trigger certain effects at certain
velocities. Try doing this with a filter that has the MIDI velocity as its source,
and get it to activate only when the velocity crosses a certain threshold. Velocity
is usually measured from 0 to 127, so it’s easy to set an exact value for it. This
particular trick has endless applications. One we really like is setting different
samples to trigger at different velocities, which can really bring some life to a
track. At this point, we need to stress that not all techniques will be available on
all instruments, and it’s crucial that you spend time getting to know your
favoured software instruments before playing around with this.
There are other ways of controlling the character of a MIDI note, but they are
largely restricted to the software instruments themselves. You can apply
envelopes to the notes, changing their attack, decay, sustain and release settings.
You can apply filters to them. Some DAWs even let you adjust the fine pitch of
MAGAZINE July 2015 | 107
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 MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to MIDI

the MIDI notes, adding a human element to your

compositions. But really, once you understand how
MIDI notes and their velocities work, you’ll find it
extremely easy to start composing.
And since we’ve got onto composing, there is an
additional concept it’s worth giving your head
around: quantisation. Essentially, all MIDI notes are
displayed on a grid – but when they’re being
recorded, particularly if you’re using a MIDI
controller, perfect timing is often elusive. By
switching on quantisation, you essentially ‘lock’
each note to its closest segment in the grid, resulting
in perfect time, every time. Quantisation is always
desirable (it can sound a little robotic if applied too
heavily) but it’s a real boon when you’re recording.

Fine tuning
There are a few advanced applications of MIDI that
you can use once you’ve got the hang of things. We’re You can layer your MIDI notes to create complex chords.
going to go into a few of them now, although we’re

Once you understand how

As we mentioned earlier, you can also use MIDI
data like velocity and note on/note off to trigger

MIDI notes work, you’ll find it

certain aspects of the software instrument. This
gives you very fine grained control, and allows you to

easy to start composing

come up with some seriously wild effects. Also,
because you can draw multiple MIDI notes into one
track, including on top of one another at different
octaves, it’s easy to create complex chords and
not going to spend too much time on the individual layered effects.
steps to pull them off. This is because they’re largely One of the lesser-known ways of creating MIDI is
dependent on individual DAWs. to extract it from audio information. DAWs such as
One of the most fun ways of employing this is Ableton are known for enabling users to do this.
using the MIDI notes to trigger external Essentially, it means that you can input a piece of
instruments, not just software ones. In this way, you recorded audio and extract pitches and note
can use the data to get a MIDI controller, like a set locations from it. This is a great way to create
of pads, talking to another instrument like a accompanying parts to a recording.
hardware synth, and using one to play the other. It In addition, one of the big pluses of MIDI
takes a little bit of work to set up, but if you find composition is that it is highly portable. What we
yourself with a lot of different instruments and one mean by this is that because the notes are simply
preferred control method, then this is a neat way to bits of data, and contain no actual audio information
streamline your work. themselves, it’s really easy to port them over to
another computer and continue working on it there.
As long as you’re using the same DAW, and using the
same instruments and effects, you will easily be able
to move back and forth between the two.
In fairness, this is less important these days now
that even the smallest flash drive has multiple
gigabytes of space, but it’s a useful tool to illustrate
what MIDI is and how it works. It’s data, and
nothing more.
Every DAW will treat MIDI slightly differently,
display it differently, and enable you to do more with
it. So experiment, and switch between them until
you’ve found one you like. MT

This feature is endorsed by SSR which has been

providing professional education training in the
audio engineering industry for over 30 years. With
campuses in London, Manchester, Jakarta and
Singapore, SSR has gained a healthy reputation
Here, we are adjusting the note’s velocity. This will control its perceived loudness. within the music industry for producing well
trained, professional graduates across the globe.

108 | July
March2015
2015 MAGAZINE
MAGAZINE

MT148.Bluffers Guide.indd 108 29/05/2015 12:34

 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 6
Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 6
Recording and
manipulating
speech samples
Time to do some audio recording and get mic’d up.
Martin Delaney shows you how to add some
speech samples to our ongoing Live project.
S
o far we’ve used MIDI and we’ve used existing
audio samples, but we haven’t covered how to
record our own audio material. Instead of
jumping in at the deep end and attempting to
record fully-blown vocal or instrument takes,
let’s make it easy on ourselves by recording a short speech
sample that’ll also work inside our ongoing project. To be
I record short speech
samples into Session View
and anything longer goes
into Arrangement View
honest, this is more frequently the type of recording I do
with Live anyway – capturing short snippets to use in the
Session View. We aim to record one short sample, then use
it to create three different clips. Note, because this is such
a variable exercise, and I can’t hear what you’re doing from
here(!), I’ve included an ‘after’ voice track to make it clear
what kind of result you’re shooting for.
It might not sway Pro Tools snobs, but Live does a great
job of recording audio. It has the advantage of two views,
so two distinct approaches. As a rule of thumb I record
short clips like speech samples and effects into the
Session View, and anything like a full vocal track for a
song, rhythm guitar parts, and so on, goes into the
Arrangement View. In either View, you can record into
multiple tracks at the same time, and Live has very
FOCUS ON… THE MICROPHONE
It’s nice to use expensive microphones and recording hardware but
you should be willing to work with what you’ve got. It’s easier for us
because we’re recording a simple speech sample here so we’re not
tied up in the complexities of recording a sung vocal against backing
tracks and creating a headphone mix. What I will say is that unless
you have a very specific idea of what you want, you should always try
to get a clean voice recording, without distortion or baked-in effects.
Other than that limitation, anything from your computer’s built-in
microphone upwards will do fine.
44 | August 2015 MAGAZINE
MT149.TUT live6.indd 44
On the disc
Accompanying
project file included
on the DVD
thorough and immediate routing options, so you can send
and receive audio freely throughout the application.
There’s also the lovely Resampling input option which
provides post-master, post-everything, capture of Live’s
output, straight back into the Live set. Live works with
audio samples at different sample rates, mono or stereo,
and combines .aiff, .wav, and .mp3 files in the same
project. Despite what some say, there are no audio quality
issues with Live; you’re more likely to experience problems
through user error – choosing the wrong Warp mode for
time-stretched material or stretching a clip way beyond
what any reasonable person would do (we’ll be coming
back to that later).
Although Live isn’t an audio editor, it covers some of the
basics. Crop Sample, which we use in this tutorial,
discards unwanted portions at the start and end of an
audio clip; and Consolidate – available only in the
Arrangement View – combines two or more audio clips to
create a new one. These functions are non-destructive –
you’ll find the new samples in the sub-folders inside your
Live project folder.
You probably already have the necessary equipment to
record a voice sample – most computers have some kind
of built-in microphone. Then it’s a matter of scaling up
from there with a dedicated microphone and soundcard
(as far as we’re concerned, a ‘soundcard’ and an ‘audio
interface’ are the same thing). You can get excellent
affordable USB soundcards – look at the Focusrite
Scarlett range – and a basic microphone for not much
cash at all. There’s an ever-growing number of good USB
microphones, too, although you lose the flexibility
of a soundcard. There’s also
23/06/2015 12:35
 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 6 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech
For this walkthrough we have to make some assumptions about
01 your microphone and soundcard; read our main text for more
details. Connect your mic and soundcard, launch Live and go to the
Preferences Audio tab.
Open our example Live set. Make sure you’re using the updated
03 ‘part 6’ version and use the shortcut Cmd-T to create a new audio
track. We’re still working in the Session View, of course.
Below that is a list of available audio inputs – click to view the
05 list. As you talk into your microphone, you’ll see a level displayed
alongside one of those inputs. That’s your microphone. Click it.
the Apogee One, which is unique because it has
connections for a microphone and instrument, but also
boasts a built-in microphone. It’s a cool tool for the
travelling musician. I’m not going further into this
discussion now, because it’s a whole other tutorial…
Well, a whole other book, actually!
I’ve suggested that you set the track’s Monitor switch to
Auto, which means you’ll hear the mic input when you arm
the track, but bear in mind that your set-up might enable
MT149.TUT live6.indd 45
Choose your soundcard in the Audio Input Device and Audio
02 Output Device lists then close Preferences. Connect your
headphones to your soundcard (watch your volume) and turn your
monitor speakers off to avoid feedback.
Use Alt-Cmd-I to open the In/Out View. This will display the audio
04 routing options at the bottom of your tracks. Click on the Audio
From chooser to select your input – Ext. In.
Set up your microphone and mixer so you get a manageable
06 volume level. Exactly how this works will again depend on what
equipment you’re using but please avoid red peaks anywhere in the
signal chain!
– or require – you to monitor somewhere else along the
signal chain. As I said, we’re not singing along to a backing
track with this exercise, so frankly, accurate monitoring is
not so critical.
There are different ways to initiate recording: you can
use a mouse or trackpad, your controller, or even your
iPhone. You can go into record while Live is already running
or enter record to start Live running. Record start and stop
are quantised so that means if you’re using the default
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 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 6
MT Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech (cont’d)
Set the track’s Monitor In switch to Auto, and arm the track –
07 click the small circular button in the mixer, it goes red. Stop your
other clips – you’re not singing along to anything for this one!
We’ll record a short phrase to use as a one-shot sample and a
09 rhythmic loop. Click a slot button to start recording. Wait a beat or
two, then record yourself saying ‘Please be aware’.
Before you launch your other clips again, listen to your voice
11 recording on its own, checking for distortion and also checking
that you haven’t chopped the start or end off as it’s very easy to do.
global quantization of one bar, recording commences on
the next bar. It’s important to remember this and not start
talking too soon, otherwise you lose the beginning of your
sample. Record ending is also quantised which is great as
it gives you ‘pre-cut’ loops, rounded off to bars and more
likely to loop in sync with your other content straight off.
46 | August 2015 MAGAZINE
MT149.TUT live6.indd 46
As you arm/disarm the track for recording you’ll see the square
08 stop buttons in each empty Session View clip slot (in that track)
transform into circles; that means you can record into these.
Press the space bar to stop Live when you’re finished. Note the
10 clip length is cropped to the nearest bar. Disarm the track so you
can’t record anything else by mistake and always save after recording.
Double-click the clip to view the waveform if necessary. Let’s
12 discard some of the silence around it. Position the loop brace
around the ‘keeper’ part and the start marker at the front of that.
The most important thing when recording is to avoid
overloading and distorting your input levels. It’s very ‘rock’
to record to tape with everything in the red, and it sounds
cool, but sadly it stinks when you do it with digital
recording. Live has some great distortion effects, so why
not save that fun until later? If you’ve erred on the side of
23/06/2015 12:35
 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 6 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech (cont’d)
The Loop Brace is that bar above the audio waveform. You can
13 drag to reposition it and grab either end to change the length. FYI
the Loop Brace dimensions and coordinates are MIDI-mappable.
Select the first clip. From the Sample View at the bottom of the
15 screen, deactivate Warp so it’ll play just once at its original
speed. Now you have a one-shot, plus a looping version.
Make sure you adjust the length of the Loop Brace to
17 accommodate the stretched waveform. Experiment with Warp
modes – the difference between Beats and Complex is very noticeable
(but let’s stick with Beats).
caution and recorded at a low level, use the clip Gain slider
to boost the volume. Do this while the clip’s playing, so you
can check for the distortion that arises if you go too far!
We’re touching on Warping and audio quantization
during our walkthrough; it’s fun to over-stretch audio
samples and tweak the Warp modes; I can’t resist it with
MT149.TUT live6.indd 47
Make sure the Loop Brace is an even bar length, though.
14 Right-Click inside the area contained by the loop brace and
choose Crop Sample. Duplicate this clip to the slot below using Cmd-D.
Use Cmd-D to duplicate the second clip. Double-click above the
16 right end of the waveform to add a Warp marker. Grab it and drag
to the right, doubling the length of your original sample.
Quantize the audio-click inside the waveform and type Cmd-U.
18 Watch the waveform peaks snap to the grid; you’ll see Live inserts
yellow Warp markers to achieve this.
vocals, which is why we’re doing it here. A bit of
quantization also adds to the unreal effect, but it can also
make a looping speech sample sit more neatly on the beat.
That’s it for now. I hope that over these six workshop parts
I’ve given enough tips to inspire and help your music
making – happy producing! MT
MAGAZINE August 2015 | 47
23/06/2015 12:36
INSTANT
 instant inspiration / make music now <
Your music deserves more!
Step into that creative
frame of mind and get it
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While some tinker with music-making
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you read, knowledge and skills alone
aren’t going to get your music completed:
a large dose of hard graft, time and effort
is also essential.
But what about those times when your
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you’re stuck staring at a blank arrange window.
Maybe you’ve got an overwhelming number of
‘sketch’ projects that you can’t seem to arrange.
Or your tunes might be 90% finished, but you
can’t seem to draw a line under them and move
on. Often, trying harder only makes things
worse, and plugging away ad nauseam doesn’t
get to the root of the problem, leaving you even
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come a definitive solution, but a lack of
creativity is a more abstract problem to solve.
So, to tackle these problems head-on, we’ve
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You’ll probably notice that we’ve rejected
our usual step-by-step tutorial format in favour
of snappy tips and techniques. Inspiration is an
intangible entity – different states of mind call
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think of the next few pages as a big ‘creativity
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October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 37
> make music now / instant inspiration
20 Track
Starting
Tactics
Struggling to get rolling on
a new track? Here are 20
inspirational ideas to give
you the jumpstart you need
Picture the scene. You’ve set aside a chunk
of time for music-making, your other half/
kids/dog/phone are all locked out of the studio,
and you’re finally sitting down at the computer,
bursting with enthusiasm. It’s the moment
you’ve been building up to for days: it’s time to
get a new track underway! Visions of label
interest, Beatport No.1s and A-list DJ-play briefly
flash through your mind as you fire up the DAW.
You have a good feeling about this one – after
all, you’ve spent sufficient time and effort
learning the right tools and techniques, so why
can’t this be your best track yet?
Yet, when greeted with an empty arrange
page, it’s almost impossible to transfer that
enthusiasm into anything resembling a good
idea. Every sample you audition is greeted with
38 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015
a weak “meh”. The drum beat you’ve laid down
is bland and uninspiring. You have a few parts
working, but it’s nowhere near good enough to
even bother arranging. You flit between projects
and plugins, but to no avail. Deflated, you stamp
the session with an almighty ‘fail’.
This scenario is one that every producer has
experienced. Even with no distractions, the
perfect studio setup, and buckets of talent, it’s
all too easy to find yourself staring at a blank
screen. The passive solution is to attribute this
to an inevitable lack of inspiration, cross your
fingers and hope that your next session will be
more productive. The proactive solution, as
we’ll explore over the next few pages, is to roll
up your sleeves, analyse your weaknesses and
try out new approaches for starting tracks.
 instant inspiration / make music now <

01 Start with a
soundscape
Many producers choose to start a track with
drums. While this does get your rhythmic
foundation down straight away, drums in
isolation aren’t always that inspiring – and you
might inadvertently fill up your groove with
too many sounds, leaving less space in the mix
for other elements. Instead, aim for character
and ‘vibe’ from the get-go: consider beginning
with interesting, organic soundscapes, FX,
weird vocal snippets, strange noises, subtle
soundscapes, vinyl crackle, tape noise and so
on. These can all form interesting beds of
sound. Also, try and give this foundation some
kind of rhythmic element, to help visualise

02 Remix
how the groove of your track could progress.
Once you have something cool down, the

yourself
‘vanilla’ sounds such as beats and bass should
slot into place, and you may find you don’t
need to make those elements as elaborate.
Find a track or idea you’ve previously worked on,
bounce out interesting chunks of riffs or sounds, then
mangle them up beyond recognition for a completely
new starting point. Or, you can even use creative
plugins to resample one of your completed tracks.
Tools such as Elastique Pitch 2, Paulstretch and our
own XFadeLooper CM can all mash up an existing file
and deliver plenty of new starting points to the
inspiration-starved producer.

03 MPC-style drum pad chopping

Load different synth or vocal sections across a drum sampler’s pads, tune
them so they all work together, then play/record the pads live to create
stuttering vocal riffs or complextro-style bass chops. Here’s how it’s done…

1 2
Find a collection of bass and synth
samples or loops – the more varied,
the better – and import them into your
DAW. Quickly sift through the sounds and
chop out small chunks and phrases,
setting them aside for later. Aim for a
mixture of short cuts and longer notes
(or even longer loop sections). Again,
contrast is good.
3
Import your chosen cuts and chops
into a drum sampler, making sure that
each slice is on its own drum pad. Play
through the pads, auditioning the sounds
to find suitable interactions and riff
combos. Use the sampler’s tuning
functions to transpose individual pads,
ensuring the slices are in tune and work
musically together.
Now have fun jamming with a pad
controller. Try punching in potential
riff combos, alternating between different
pads to create stuttering, crazy, chopped
riffs and, ultimately, a Frankenstein riff
made from all those individual cuts. Note
that this technique works great with vocal
slices too.

October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 39

> make music now / instant inspiration

04 MIDI
trickster
MIDI data has burst the banks of the
simple piano-roll editor that it once
filled and has become a part of the
creative process itself. Many DAWs now feature
some kind of ‘Extract to MIDI’ function, which

05
can turn a musical audio file into MIDI data to
feed another instrument. Begin with a chord-
based musical loop that you like, extract it to a Spoken
MIDI file, then delete the original audio; use this
MIDI to trigger a synth or instrument, ideally
playing a different type of sound from the
vocal
original loop for contrast. This new part can now
be used as a springboard to start a new track.
We’re not all natural singers, but many
Almost all DAWs now feature MIDI plugins, electronic tracks feature processed spoken
which take incoming notes and process them in
interesting ways. These can be used to further vocals. Hook up your microphone – even the most
develop a new melodic idea. Start by duplicating
the previous MIDI part to a new channel, and basic will produce usable results – lay down a few
load up a different synth sound on this track.
For variation, head into the MIDI and remove or
words or noises, make it sound cool with effects if
change a few notes. Now use your DAW’s
arpeggiator device to turn the chord notes into
needed, then let the words and their rhythm guide
a monophonic sequence, and even use other your sound choices, so you end up with a piece of
MIDI plugins to further tweak the notes.
Finally, don’t be afraid to use MIDI plugins in music that complements the vocal.
unorthodox ways – an arpeggiator can become
a super drum sequencer, for example.

06 Drums to
melody
Coming up with inspirational melodic or
bass hooks can be tricky, and it’s easy to fall
into creative ruts. Next time this happens,
try converting drum loops to a melody line.
There are a few ways to do this. Here, we’ve
used Live’s Convert Melody to New MIDI
Track function to extract note information
from our drums and apply it to an
overdriven electric piano sound. If your
DAW doesn’t have a pitch-to-MIDI function,
try an automatic tuning plugin (such as
Computer Music’s very own vieklang 2 CM).
Even if you end up changing the notes, the
grooves are often much funkier and more
syncopated than you might otherwise play.
You could also try using MIDI effects to
create chords and arpeggios from the
notes; or how about simply slicing the loop
to MIDI and using that to trigger a synth,
giving a nice ascending rhythmic riff as a
starting point?

40 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015


07 Deliberate
accidents
Dance music used to be made with hardware
samplers, and each time you loaded a project,
you had to make sure the corresponding
sampler banks were loaded. If they weren’t,
you’d end up with, say, a MIDI file designed to
trigger drums instead triggering a chopped up
vocal, a bass part or sometimes totally different
drum sounds. Sometimes this actually sounded
great, and such ‘happy accidents’ are easy to
reproduce today. Check out how we approach it
in the video, and to get an idea of the kind of
unexpected results you can get.
08 The sounds
around
It’s easy to stagnate in the studio. For most of us,
the first port of call for creative inspiration is
some new sample packs or virtual instruments,
but the world around us is full of sounds. Get out
and about for half an hour with a field recorder
(or just your phone), record everything you hear
and try bringing it back to the studio and
manipulating it into something cool. We took to
the streets of Hackney and recorded everything
from keys and trains to sirens and people –
check out the video to see us transform our
found sounds pitchshifting, sidechain pumping,
modulating and more.
09 Stack ’em and
pick ’em
A fantastic way to build up an original but
convincing and authentic-sounding loop is to
comp together other loops. Take between five
and ten loops of one-to-four bars in length
(most should be beats but one or two musical
and vocal loops can be great), line them up in
your sequencer and slice each one into its
constituent hits, mapped to a sampler. Before
instant inspiration / make music now <
10
Build a loop using
only one sample
This creative sound design
challenge is a truly awesome way
to make a loop that sounds
nothing like anybody else’s
1
Kicks are ideal for this task, and
we’ve used a tonally rich one. We
tighten it up using envelope controls,
then use a version pitched down an
octave with a softened attack to play a
bassline, and another version an octave
up to fashion a tom-style sound.
slicing, it’s worth using a sampler-style
repitching mode to get them to the same tempo
and then render before slicing. Now play all the
loops together and listen for a groove, then go
through each loop, looking for the individual
2
hits contributing to the groove you hear and We use a version of the kick tuned
muting the rest. Often you might only take one high and processed to create a
noise per loop – or delete some loops metallic top end. A strong low-cut filter
altogether. In this way, you’ll quickly build up an then gets rid of the original signal so
original groove. Be sure that repeated near- we’re left with the metallic tapping –
identical samples (kicks, snares and offbeat that’s our off beat hat. A similar
instance (but tuned higher and heavily
hats, for example) are using the same notes. distorted) is our crash cymbal.
3
A bitcrushed version with chorus,
distortion and very narrow band-
pass filtering provides a crunchy snare,
while a syncopated version of our
offbeat hat is treated with a Frequency
Shifter for some percussion. We also
shift the sample start point much later
to create a clicking sound.
October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 41
> make music now / instant inspiration
10 more ways to get a track started
11. TRAWL YOUR BACK-CATALOGUE
Many DAWs allow us to import
individual tracks from project files,
including MIDI parts, audio,
automation and channel strips. This
means that all those unused riffs, melodies,
chord progressions and other leftovers from
your previous sessions are a potential
starting point. Choose one or two tracks and
parts from another session, or mix and match
from a couple of sessions – beats from one
and keys from another, say. And to make this
approach even smoother in future, get into
the habit of rendering out cool-sounding
parts as they occur during your sessions,
labelling by key and BPM. Do this and you’ll
have a stack of awesome ready-made custom
loops in no time!
12. MAKE A CHANGE
If you usually play MIDI using a keyboard, try
instead arranging and pitching sampled
notes as audio on the timeline; if you usually
draw drum patterns in the piano roll, try a
sequencer plugin or drum pads. Get away
from the screen entirely with Ableton’s Push
or NI’s Maschine software/hardware hybrids.
13. START WITH A RHYTHM
Get something rhythmic down straight away,
even if it’s not drums. Plenty of sounds in your
palette can be played rhythmically, good
examples being bass, guitar and percussive
keyboards such as piano. Use a click track to
stay in time, and loop a four- or eight-bar
section the same way you would for beat
programming. Map the results to beats once
you’re happy, or use the rhythms for melodic
hooks or basslines.
14. BUILD YOUR OWN SAMPLE PACKS
Getting sidetracked programming synth
patches, hunting for samples, or designing
sounds from scratch can get in the way of
those inspirational moments… so why not
create your own sample and preset packs?
Set aside time to do this as a task in itself,
without actually trying to write music. Give
your packs a theme or title – eg, 100 Ultimate
Synth Stabs, 50 Stripped-down Breaks, 80
Electrifying Guitar Loops, etc – and stick to it.
This will give you an achievable goal, and
when you do come to start a track, you’ll have
Many of our VIP Series artists use the sounds in their own tracks – so why not make your own sample packs?
42 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015
Try randomising the individual modules of your plugins, one by one, until you come to something fresh
a pile of bespoke, royalty-free sounds to call
on, all neatly categorised.
15. NATURAL MIMIC
Copy one aspect of an existing track, then
make it your own. In light of Pharrell’s Blurred
Lines lawsuit, this may seem risky, but if it’s
done correctly, the final result will bear no
obvious relation to the original. A good
example is to program a bassline to match a
track you like, then edit the notes and/or
rhythm until you’ve got an original bassline.
16. KEYWORD SEARCH
Choose a keyword, then search your synths
for sounds that contain it. Inevitably, many of
the sounds won’t inspire you at all, but it only
takes one sound to capture your imagination,
and you’ll be up and running. Try the same
technique with samples and loops, where
you’ll often find musical key, instrument,
genre and style used as file tags. Your DAW’s
browser may help make this process easier –
Studio One 3, for instance, has a ready-tagged
sound library, and these tags show up in its
search results.
17. RANDOMISE FOR FRESHNESS
Many plugins include randomise
options. Play from your MIDI
keyboard, or set up a MIDI loop,
then head for the Randomise
controls. Basic ‘full patch’ randomisation will
give rise to results that are rather hit and
miss, requiring patience and repeat button-
clicking; however, in the video, we’re using
MeldaProduction’s MPowerSynth, which
allows you to randomise individual parts of
the instrument – oscillators, envelopes,
effects modules, etc. Starting with one
oscillator, we’ll add two more oscillators, then
start to add in some filters and effects,
randomising and tweaking as we go. Don’t
settle – keep hitting that randomise control
until you get something that works or can be
tweaked a little to your liking.
18. NOTE DOWN THE CHORDS
Compile a list of progressions from songs and
tracks that you like, focusing on the order and
scale degree – I-V-vi-IV, for example – rather
than a particular key. When inspiration is
short, grab the list and work your way
through until something inspires you.
19. RESTRUCTURE
Step away from regular eight-bar structures,
choosing a different cycle length, then write a
melody to match. Start with a simple ten- or
12-bar structure, or try seven, nine, 11 or 13
bars for more interest. Or go all-out and
experiment with odd time signatures and
unfamiliar scales.
20. TRY A NEW INSTRUMENT
Record yourself playing an instrument you
don’t know how to play – often innocence and
naïvety result in the simplicity you’re after.
You can always use time- and pitch-
correction to improve the performance, or
treat it with effects to create something
completely fresh.
> make music now / instant inspiration

10 workflow accelerators
Try and comprehend the full music-making power, convenience and
potential of the modern computer. Mind-bending, isn’t it? But with more
options comes more choice, and an abundance of choice can be
overwhelming. Too many variables and decisions to make can sap your
creativity, disrupt your studio flow, and kill off your productivity. So, to
prevent you getting bogged down in technicalities, battling DAW options, or
generally doing things the hard way, we’ve put together ten key tips to help you
release and realise your musical ideas quicker than ever.

01
MIX AS YOU GO
It can be productive to quickly
throw your track elements together
roughly at the composition stage,
then address the mix later once your ideas are
down. This does mean that the incomplete mix
may lack the professional sheen of your
favourite releases, which may cause you to lose
heart. In this case, try the opposite approach
and mix as you go, adding basic processing to
each sound as you slot it in the track. Having
pre-prepared plugin racks or channel strips are
invaluable. Try both approaches and discover
which works best for you.
02
RTFM!
Getting stuck on a DAW feature
or synth parameter is a workflow
killer, so become a ninja at your
chosen software by reading the manuals of your
DAW and plugins. Also, follow software-specific
tutorials/guides such as our own How To Use…
series. Time is limited for all of us, so keep
learning time to a minimum, and restrict
yourself to only a handful of tools you can learn
inside out. Make your own notes if necessary –
compile a list of useful features, menu functions
etc. You can even print your ‘crib sheets’ out and
keep them to hand if needed.

03
PREPARATION IS KEY Spend a little time organising your plugins list to your
As the old saying goes, fail to prepare… preference, so everything’s in easy reach later on

and prepare to fail. So take heed and do

04
CUSTOM PLUGIN LIST
as much of your plugin and DAW setup If your DAW’s list of plugins is an
endless minefield to navigate,
ahead of time as you can. Have a variety of template speed up productivity by
categorising them into relevant folders -
sessions and racks ready, catering for elements such as perhaps by processor type or ‘most-used’. See
The CM Guide to Plugins in issue 217 for details
multi-out instruments, channel strips, creative plugin on how to accomplish this in many major DAWs.
chains, mastering chains, and outboard gear. To take this concept further, prepare custom
racks or devices for things that you do all the
time – from basic workhorse gadgets like a ‘bass
roll-off’ tool, to inspiring banks of sweeps/FX.
You can even have your own pre-prepared ‘track
finisher’ sample pack full of sweeps, crashes,
noise textures, or useful ‘instant FX’ return
effects loaded up for quick results.

05
DISABLE DISTRACTION
We’re all passionate about making
music, but external influences
always get in the way to some
extent. Be fully prepared for this. When you’re
ready for a studio session, minimise potential
distractions. Log out of your social media
accounts or disconnect yourself from the
internet, put your phone on silent and out of
reach, have food prepared, tell your partner or
friends to leave you alone for a few hours… then
Like many DAWs, Cubase lets you save common template setups as starting points, saving you tons of time focus your full attention on the DAW.

44 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015

 instant inspiration / make music now <

06
KEYBOARD
SHORTCUTS
Sending your mouse pointer up
to a file menu every time you
need a particular DAW command may seem
quick, but these frequent movements all add up.
While keyboard shortcuts aren’t sexy, they will
accelerate your workflow immensely and help
you to finish tracks quicker, so try and memorise
your most used keyboard shortcuts. Functions
like quantising MIDI, slicing audio at the
playhead point, looping sections and muting
regions are just a small handful of commands
you should know. Every time you reach into a
menu for something, see if there’s a shortcut
command for it, and use that instead next time.
Furthermore, many DAWs allow you to create
your own keyboard shortcuts – see Shortcuts to
Success in 186 for more on this. Some DAWs
even let you make your own chain of keyboard
commands (‘macros’) and define custom
processes to do things like muting all clips that
are less than a bar in length, for example.

07
SITTING
COMFORTABLY?
Is your studio chair comfortable?
Can you wear your headphones Compare your track to commercial releases early on – visual analysis tools can really help with this
for hours at a time with no discomfort? Is

09
everything within easy reach? Are your speakers
positioned for the best sound? It’s easy to focus
on what’s going on inside the computer to help COMPARE AND CONTRAST
speed up workflow, but if your studio setup isn’t
ergonomic, comfortable and set up for optimum Ever got a track ‘finished’, only to find
playback, your work rate will suffer, and you
may even develop long-term problems. that it doesn’t stack up next to your

08
TIME TO TIDY favourite commercial mixes? Start
Is your project getting out of
hand? Too many tracks? Loads of comparing it early on rather than right at the end, and
ideas and alternative
arrangements knocking around on the timeline?
then continue to do so with every vital change.
Bypassed plugins sitting around “just in case”
you decide to revert to that old EQ setting? All of
Also, hitting Save each time will overwrite your
this can hold you back, making the project slow
and confusing to navigate, and eating system
previous stages; instead, when you’ve made a few
resources. Work out a strategy to deal with it: significant tweaks, Save As, and create numbered
save the project, then delete unused tracks,
render parts to audio that you’re happy with, go versions. Render a mix out whenever you do this so
through all those unused ideas and delete any
you can’t see yourself using in this project. Now you can easily compare to your current version –
Save As to save this tidier project – most DAWs
have some kind of ‘Collect All and Save’ function, sometimes, you might decide to revert to an
which will save the whole project, samples and
all; but don’t retain any large, unwanted takes of earlier, better mix.
audio from the bloated project.

Tidy your project up! Place everything in a sensible order,
get rid of the chaff, and use colours for ease of navigation
10
QUALITY SAMPLES
Having a large, diverse sample
collection is all very well, but
rummaging through thousands of
samples on your hard drive can be a massive
buzzkill when you’re trying to focus on music-
making. Instead, make a highly organised
samples folder that’s all about quality, not
quantity – reduce the bloat and keep only the
best sounds that are unique to you and your
signature sound. The same goes for old,
abandoned projects, too. Harvest these for
parts, then archive them in an organised fashion
or just delete them for good.
In terms of how you should organise your
chosen samples, that’s up to you! Some prefer
breaking it down by instrument (‘hats’, ‘kicks’,
etc); while others prefer to go by genre or
sample collection. When you do choose a
structure, make sure you stick to it.

October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 45

> make music now / instant inspiration
10 Easy
Music
Theory
Tips
Spruce up your chords and
snazz up those scales with
our ten simple methods
Music theory has always had a slight whiff of
the uncool about it, conjuring up images of
dry, dusty, bewigged baroque musicians from
centuries past, the nightmare of childhood
piano lessons, or baffling overheard discussions
in jazz clubs concerning the superiority of
augmented 13ths over Neapolitan sixths or the
joys of soloing in the Mixolydian mode. This bad
rep is entirely unjustified however, since
regardless of whether you’re a composer,
songwriter, producer or DJ, shoring up your
musical knowledge with a smattering of
grassroots theory can have a profound effect
on the quality of your output.
Here at , we never underestimate the
importance of a good grounding in music
theory – hence our long-running regular Easy
Guide feature found in every issue. After all,
how music actually works is the key to
48 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015
everything we do when we’re creating a project.
The idea is to think of theory as a framework to
support and inspire your musical endeavours,
rather than inhibit and rule them. The best part
is that you don’t have to plumb the murky
depths of the subject to be able to use it to your
advantage. When a crippling loss of creativity
strikes – and this can happen to any of us at any
time, let’s face it – having a few tried, tested and
theoretically proven techniques in your back
pocket can be a lifesaver.
Over the next few pages, then, we’re going to
highlight ten of our favourite, most practical
theory-based tips that can help to kickstart the
creative process next time your inspiration well
runs a little dry. Every tip includes a video
walkthrough, so you can see and hear exactly
how to make them work for yourself. Time to
knuckle down and get theory-ous!
 instant inspiration / make music now <

01 Broken
chords
Should your keyboard parts naturally tend
towards the clunky side, things can be
improved by employing a technique known as
broken chords. This involves breaking chords
up into their component notes and playing
these as short arpeggios (runs of notes). The
technique doesn’t just add rhythmic interest,
but it can be a great way of coming up with
ideas for cool melodies that work naturally
with the chord progression, since the notes
you pick out are taken from the chords
themselves. In our illustration below, on the
left, we have a four-bar progression of simple
block chords. To the right, we have the same

02 Animating chords
progression, but played using broken chords.
Like finger-picking on an acoustic guitar,

with inversions
instead of playing all the notes on the same
beat, each triad is split into individual notes.
See 201’s Easy Guide to arpeggios for more.
Moving the order of notes around within a chord can
take a progression in new directions without
changing the actual chords. This is easily done by
selecting notes and shifting them up and down an
octave – most DAWs have a shortcut key for this, such
!
as Shift-Up/Down. Here we’ve taken a simple C, D, E , F
progression and completely altered its shape by
swapping the note order around in the second half.
These ‘rearranged’ chords are known as inversions.

03 Change the bass note

The notes a bass part plays can assume the role of root note for the
chords played by parts above it. Sticking different bass notes
underneath can radically alter the sound of a static chord sequence.

1 2
Let’s illustrate by looking at a piano
part playing a repeated rhythmic C
minor chord sequence over and over…
and over. It sounds pretty boring, as the
chord doesn’t change. Instead of thinking
up new chords, though, let’s try injecting
freshness by using a more animated
bass part.
3
For the first two bars, we stick to a C
bass note, as it’s the root note of the
chord. After two bars, however, we shift
the bass note down from C to A, forming a
completely different chord with the piano
! !
– an Am7 5, (A-E -G-C) in fact.
Keeping the piano chord the same, we
!
next move the bass from A to A ,
! ! !
making an A maj7 (A -E -G-C) chord. Then
down to F, up to G and back to C again. If
you’re not sure what bass notes will fit, try
picking notes that are already in the
accompanying chord(s).

October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 49

> make music now / instant inspiration

04 New flavours
with modes
If you’ve never encountered modes before, this
one tip could change your musical outlook
forever. Scales are a basic component of music
theory – most people know one or two of the
major scales, the most commonly known being

05
C major (C D E F G A B). But what if we told you
that you could unlock a secret world of
evocative alternative scales simply by playing Monotony
any scale from a different starting note?
Try it by playing C major in the conventional
fashion, from C to C on a MIDI keyboard. Now
rules
give your ears a few seconds’ rest to forget the
sound of it, and play the same scale again, but
Melody-writing can be tough, but sometimes, if the
without starting on C. Try going from D to D. Or rhythm is hooky enough, sticking religiously to one
F to F. Notice how they have a different quality
to the major’s happy, kindergarten sound? What note is all you need for a melody. Try using a
you’re playing are different modes of the C
major scale, and they sound different because of monotone melody in a verse part, and slowly add
the different sequence of intervals between the
notes that happens when you start somewhere
small variations through the bridge section to build
other than the root note of the scale.
Underpinning each new mode with a bass note
to a chorus hook. This approach also gives you an
the same as your new starting note will reinforce opportunity to focus on rhythm and sonic variety,
the effect. That’s enough to get you started, but
when you’re ready for more info on modes, rather than just melody alone, for adding interest.
check out 207’s Easy Guide on the subject.

06 Borrowed
chords
Diatonic means “in key”, and diatonic
chords are formed using only notes taken
from a particular scale. So a C major scale
containing the notes C D E F G A B – the
white notes on a keyboard – would give you
the diatonic chords C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and
Bdim, formed by stacking alternate notes
onto each note within the scale. These are
the basic triads you may already be familiar
with; however, a palette of only seven
chords can be limiting, so why not borrow
chords from other keys?
Borrowed chords are most often taken
from parallel keys – keys that have the same
root note as the original key. In the case of
C major, the parallel minor key is C minor,
so we have a whole new set of chords to
choose from – Cm, Ddim, E!, Fm, Gm, A! and
B!. 214’s Easy Guide has more tips and
advice on using borrowed chords.

50 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015


07 Layer chords
together
For an exotic sound, try combining regular
major or minor triads together to form
polychords. For a classic polychord combo, let’s
use C major as the first chord (C-E-G). For the
second, we need to find the major chord that
has its root a perfect fifth above the root of the
first chord. In this case, this happens to be G
major (G-B-D). Play the two chords together and
you get a Cmaj9 chord (C-E-G-B-D). If you’re
stuck for which chords to combine, go for ones
that already have a note or two in common.
For an in-depth look at polychords, check out
219’s Easy Guide.
08 Take some
giant leaps
To give things a kick when putting together a
melody, try making a dramatic leap up the
keyboard. A good interval to use for this is a
minor or major sixth. You find these intervals by
using the scale degree numbering system
outlined in Tip 10. With major scales, the
distance between the root note and degree 6 of
the scale is a major sixth, so in the case of C, a
major sixth above would be A. Jump up from C
to A in the course of a melody, and it’ll take you
up into a whole different area of the keyboard.
09 Build an
extension
Extending regular major or minor triads by
adding extra notes can radically transform your
track. For instance, in C major, a Cmaj7 is made
by adding the seventh degree of the C major
scale (B) to a C major triad (C-E-G). If we extend
instant inspiration / make music now <
10
Go pentatonic
Limiting yourself to notes from a
pentatonic scale may give you a
smaller choice, but it can give rise
to some memorable melodies.
1
While a conventional major or
minor scale contains seven notes, a
pentatonic scale only contains five.
Effectively, they’re regular scales with a
couple of notes removed. If we look at a
normal C major scale, we can see that it
contains the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B.
the scale up the keyboard beyond the octave,
we get into the extended range, where a ninth is
essentially the scale’s second degree played up
an octave. So an easy way to play a ninth chord
is to play a root-position triad (for example C
2
major – C-E-G) and add in the second degree We can then give these degrees
between the root and the third (C9 – C-D-E-G). If numbers, from 1 to 7. To make the
you want to learn more, 200’s Easy Guide is scale pentatonic, we need to remove
focussed entirely on extended chords. degrees 4 and 7 – in this case, that’s F
and B, leaving us with C, D, E, G and A,
the C major pentatonic scale.
3
For a minor pentatonic scale, omit
!
the second (D) and sixth (A )
degrees. For the C minor scale, we’re
! !
left with C, E , F, G and B . Pentatonic
scales sound great, and they’re fun and
easy to use, but if you need more
information, check out our Easy Guide
to pentatonic scales in 192.
October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 51
> make music now / instant inspiration

10 arrangement methods
In our Creative Concepts articles, Features Editor Joe Rossitter has
often discussed the notorious ‘loop land’ that all producers find
themselves in from time to time. It’s relatively easy to lay down a few
decent ideas, but turning them into fully-fledged arrangements is,
arguably, the hardest part of music production. If you’ve got a hard drive
full of cool 16-bar loops crying out to be assembled into songs, then read on for ten
loop-busting arrangement approaches that you can put into practice right away.

01
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
While DAWs are thought of as strictly
linear sequencers, most now offer
features geared towards
arrangement experimentation. Ableton Live’s
non-linear Session View, Cubase’s Arranger
track and Logic Pro X’s Arrangement markers
allow you to concoct and ‘perform’ multiple
arrangement ideas on the fly, the best of which
can be printed onto the timeline at your leisure.
Studio One 3’s new Scratch Pads offers an extra
timeline for trying out ideas independent from
the main arrangement. Take time out to learn
these features and reap their rewards.
02
TWO’S COMPANY
Many of your unfinished track
ideas probably consist of one
concept or ‘theme’ (ie, a chorus),
leaving you listening to the same sounds over
and over. If you’re bored with the same old
loop, try making a completely contrasting
section, or even concentrate on making two
sections work well together – for example, a
verse leading into chorus, or a breakdown
building up into a drop. Once you have two
differing sections working well together, it’ll be
easier to branch off and make a third, fourth and
fifth section.

03
COPYCAT Time yourself working, and set yourself time-limited
sessions to get tasks finished under pressure

If you’re making music in a genre that

04
adheres to ‘DJ-friendly’ arrangements, AGAINST THE CLOCK
Who says a great track needs to
drag a commercial track into the project, take hours and hours to finish? If
you endlessly fiddle with an 8-bar
and check out exactly how it’s arranged. How long is loop without getting an arrangement down,
you’re probably working too slowly; after too
the intro? When does the bass come in? How long much time listening to the same idea, you’ll
likely get bored of it, no matter how good it is!
before the second breakdown? Is there a long outro? Instead, focus upon working fast. Pull out all the
stops and try turning your loop into a full
Copy the track’s structure in your own arrangement, arrangement as quickly as possible – perhaps
even to a strict time limit – so you don’t lose
using it as a template, and no one need ever know. interest and focus. If anything seems to be
slowing you down during this process, identify
what it is, and look for a solution.
You can even time yourself, giving
yourself a deadline to finish a certain
task, and once time’s up, it’s done.

05
DUB IT LIVE
Back in 209, we explored the
‘modular mindset’, which involves
recording long passages of synth/
effects tweaking live to audio, then selecting the
best bits to chop up onto the timeline. This will
help prevent endless tweaking of ‘live’ plugins,
forcing you to commit to audio via a dedicated
record channel, freeze and flatten feature, or
‘bounce in place’. By responding and reacting to
your track in a live fashion, you’ll often end up
with cool FX and transitions that make your
Scrutinise a well-structured commercial track and nab its arrangement – just make sure you use your own music! arrangement seem more natural and flowing.

52 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015

 instant inspiration / make music now <

06
SEND/RETURN
TRACKS
A track idea will often need
additional ideas or sounds adding
to progress the arrangement, but throwing in
new sounds can sound disjointed and messy,
especially if your aim is minimalism and groove.
Instead, run parts of your track through extreme
reverb or delay effects, then render results and
mangle further. Or grab any outboard gear you
can – a cheap cassette deck, an old 90s mixer,
some guitar pedals – and run sounds through
them. Sending portions of track elements to
creative return tracks (such as eccentric delays,
long reverbs and mangling, glitchy effects) will
generate plenty of extra material that can be To create an arrangement, duplicate the main groove through the track (as above), then strip bits away (as below)
printed to audio and processed further – and as
these sounds derive from existing elements,
they’ll fit the tone and timbre of the track.

07
ENJOY THE SILENCE
We’re all guilty of creating
overcomplicated ideas and dense
loops, and you can easily end up
trying to cram everything you’ve got into an
arrangement – especially if you’re basing it on a
busy loop that you’re already expecting to be
the “climax” of the song – which may lead to a
messy, convoluted track idea. Instead, use
silence and contrast to your advantage.
Remember that dynamics are an essential part
of music. Take away expected sounds, or even
fade them to silence. As well as contrasting quiet

09
against loud, set off low bass with sparkling
treble, subtlety with intensity, and so on. Filter
or fade parts in and out rather than having SUBTRACTIVE ARRANGING
elements just stop and start; or identify
sections where the listener could get bored, Begin with a short 8- or 16-bar loop of a
and hammer them with a startling sound out
of nowhere! track idea, which should contain all the
core elements you’ll need, then

08
CLICHÉ CLUB
Don’t be afraid of using clichés.
They’re used time and time again
duplicate the idea throughout the project for five or so
for a very good reason: they
work! Every genre has its own, but a few dance
minutes. This should help you visualise the completed
music examples include four crashes on the last
bar of a phrase, 16th-note drum rolls, a white
track, and you’ll set yourself an ‘ending’ to work
noise sweep, an ever-doubling kick drum build- towards, as the original loop will probably be the
up, or a ‘trance-gated’ sustained vocal. You can
use them to lead the listener comfortably ‘climax’ of your song. Now, start from the beginning
through a track, or if that sounds a bit too safe,
surprise the listener by using clichés in an and form rough sections (intro, breakdown, chorus,
unexpected way. And, if all else fails… drop
everything out for a bar or two and throw in a etc) by removing, muting or filtering parts as you go.
cheesy sample!

Get your guilty pleasures from audience-pleasing
chlichés like snare rolls, crashes and white noise sweeps
10
SWITCHED OUT
Looped parts can become stale and
repetitive, but instead of throwing
them out or elaborating on them,
simply change the accompanying parts instead,
to ‘reframe’ them. Change the chords used
beneath a repeating melodic phrase to create
variation; switching the beat up to double- or
half-time to vary the pace throughout the track;
pitch material up or down by an octave or
transpose the key of all musical material for add
interest or to develop the theme. You could try
experimenting with MIDI data, through
stretching or compressing regions to alter their
timing, or using MIDI plugins in different parts,
creating arpeggios or chords that weren’t there
before. All of this can help maintain a sense of
cohesion throughout your track, as well as
helping you get the most out of your track’s
main hooks and phrases.

October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 53

> make music now / instant inspiration
Track-Finishing
Checklist
Don’t call it finished until you’ve ticked off these ten simple pointers
Clear out the clutter
It’s easy to get used to a mix with layer upon
layer of sound, but unnecessarily busy tracks
can be unlistenable. Often, this clutter exists in the
low-mid or high frequencies from multiple
instrument layers. Use or adjust high- and low-pass
filters on individual tracks to create more space, or revisit
your arrangement, removing elements one by one to
re-assess their impact on the overall mix. Less is often more!
Kick/bass relationship
This vital aspect usually needs
a final check. Listen to the
balance between the two to assess
whether either is too dominant, and
if necessary, notch a space in your
bass sound for the kick, using an EQ
and/or a spectrum analyser to hunt the precise kick
frequencies. Try putting a 100Hz low-pass filter on your
master bus to monitor bass levels and spot low-end clashes.
Check the sub level
Following on from the previous point,
excess sub bass can be problematic on
big systems, and it’s easy to unwittingly
accrue when mixing on smaller nearfield
monitors. If you’re mastering your own mixes,
use all available tools to check this – including headphones,
bass heavy systems such as car stereos – and do some
spectrum analysis, comparing your mix to similar tracks.
The low-pass filter trick in the previous step can help.
Overall vocal levels
If your track has vocals as a focal point, their
level has to be right. Take time to get the
levels right in specific sections using automation,
riding phrases and words if necessary. As a final
test, listen at different levels, on different systems
and in mono to make sure the vocals are neither smothered
nor too prominent. If you’re still unsure, opt for the slightly
higher vocal balance, or run off an alternative ‘vocals up’ mix.
Listen to transitions
These are usually delivered
naturally by live players but can
require more thought for
programmed tracks. If you’re lurching
from section to section and lacking an
overall ‘flow’, transitions may be badly
balanced or just missing. Remedies include sweeps, crashes,
stops/silences, impacts, bends and slides. If a transition still
sounds too abrupt, adding a touch of long reverb helps
smear transitions without dominating the mix balance.
54 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015
Check it in mono
If the mix balance changes
a lot when played in mono,
“phasey” stereo sounds/effects
(such as) reverbs may be too
dominant. Narrow or rebalance
them so the mono and stereo
mixes are consistent, ensuring a
solid mix that’s compatible with mono playback systems.
Listen on different systems
Monitoring on multiple alternative
listening systems can be confusing,
so it’s best used to highlight significant
problems rather than as an additional
monitoring setup. Car stereos, in-ear headphones and
consumer devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones
are all useful, particularly when judging lead instrument
balance. Make notes on anything you think needs attention,
then return to the studio and work through each point.
Pops, clicks and artifacts
Clicks and pops sound like
digital errors and have no
place in your final mixdown. They
can be caused by poor or missing
crossfades, level overloads, audio
file errors or badly edited audio
comps. Listen for any strangeness, zoning in on problem
areas and resolving these issues at source. Often the best
tool for this task is a pair of headphones.
Take your mixing hat off
Be as objective as possible, ‘hearing’ the track
as would a first-time listener. Techniques
include coming back to the track after a break (be
it minutes, hours, days, weeks… or more!); listening
from a different position or outside your room with
the door open; A/B-ing with commercial tracks you
rate; listening to the track as background music while doing
other tasks; and sticking your mix in a shuffled playlist.
Push it into a limiter
Output limiters are a key
aspect of mastering and
can highlight balance issues,
particularly excess low and high
frequencies. Insert this last on your
master output and see how loud you can make your mix
before distortion gets too audible. A good, balanced mix will
“go loud” quite easily; if yours doesn’t, it likely needs more
work. Study an RMS meter – an RMS peak of -10dB is plenty,
though higher is possible by tailoring low frequencies.
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 7

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 7 On the disc

Accompanying

Working with
project file included
on the DVD

audio effects
Things can sound a bit dry without audio effects. For
stage or studio, Martin Delaney shows you how to
add some ear candy to your Live projects…

Y
ou are probably at the stage where you have
recorded or used audio in Live. In this series we
specifically use a voice sample to use in our
project. That’s the last clip element we’ll be
adding; in this tutorial we’ll add some audio
effects to our audio and MIDI tracks, return tracks, and the
Master Track itself. Don’t worry if you don’t have the last
tutorial as you can make sure you’re using the latest
version of our example set included on the cover disc.
like ‘Cut-O-Move H’ or ‘Elastic Band’, you’re loading a
preset for the relevant device. There’s also the Hot Swap
button on each device – the little circle next to the Save
File button. Click that to jump straight to the relevant
Browser section for your current device, and remember to
use the Arrow keys to navigate and load fast. Your saved
presets go directly into the relevant category in your
Library, although you are free to move these and create
new folders to contain them.
You might be wondering about which effects go where.

When browsing and loading, it Generally, if you want to process something that only
occurs in one track, you add the effect to that track (I

pays to be keyboard friendly. You should state explicitly that you can use audio effects on
MIDI and audio tracks, but only MIDI effects on MIDI

can mouse around but it’s much tracks). If you want the same effect to apply to a selection
of tracks, group them and put the effect on the group. If

faster to use your Arrow keys
When it comes to browsing and loading devices, it pays
to be keyboard-friendly. Sure you can mouse around, but
it’s faster to use your computer Arrow keys. Inside the
Browser, Left and Right Arrows move between columns,
while Up and Down will scroll, obviously, up and down
through the listed items. If you’re on a folder in the
right-hand column, a Right-Arrow will open the folder so
you can keep moving down through its contents, while a
Left-Arrow will close the folder. When you’re on a device or
a preset, tapping the Enter key will load it into the
currently selected track. When you load an effect name,
like Auto Filter, you’re loading the default settings for that
effect device (actually that’s true of all Ableton devices),
and when you go below that effect name in the Browser,
inside what appears to be a folder, and load something
you have an effect that you want to blend by different
degrees over a number of tracks, that’s a job for Return
tracks. Using a single effect on a Return track instead of
duplicating it across many tracks can also save CPU if it’s
a particularly power-crazed plug-in. Finally, if you want to
process the entire song – everything, including the signal
from the returns – you need to be adding that effect to the
Master Track. You’ll find that effects behave differently
according to what order you place them within the chain
(you can drag freely to reposition them later). I don’t
personally feel there are ‘rules’ for this as such, it’s a
matter of what combinations work for the track.
There are times when I

FOCUS ON… RETURN EFFECTS

Within this tutorial I talk about the value of Return Tracks and their
Send controls as live performance tools. A good selection of return
effects, combined with a knob-rich hardware controller, makes a
great interface for dynamic live performance – in addition to, or
instead of, any effects you might have added at the production stage.
Sometimes you’ll see somebody playing with a set that doesn’t look
too busy, almost like they’re faking it, but check their controller and
their hands. Maybe they’re keeping the on-screen stuff simple while
they work with the controller and some carefully configured effects…

56 | September 2015 MAGAZINE

MTF40.TUT live7NEW.indd 56 31/07/2015 09:06

 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 7 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Working with audio effects
Let’s find some effects to add to our tracks, ideally a combination
01 of ‘helper’ and more ‘showy’ effects. Open the example set on the
disc, TUGTAL7. This’ll keep you up to date with our progress.
We can load effects in different ways. If you’re using the Arrow
03 keys to navigate, hit Enter when you’re on the device or preset
that you want, to load it into the currently highlighted track.
Let’s compress the drums. Load the Compressor/Brick Wall
05 preset. Lower the Threshold to -12.0dB. Lower it further if you
want to hear some drum smashing sounds, but put it back when
you’ve finished!
MTF40.TUT live7NEW.indd 57
Open the Browser. Don’t forget to use the keyboard shortcut:
02 Alt>Cmd>B. Click on ‘Audio Effects’ in the left-hand column, but
from then on use your computer Arrow keys to navigate the presets.
Alternately you can use your mouse to drag the effect across to
04 the target track. We’re going to use a combination of some factory
presets and our own tweaks to the ‘vanilla’ default settings.
Add Redux to the keyboard track, and set Downsample to 4. This
06 gives the sound a slight edge without pushing it too far. Redux is
great at extreme settings if you like chip tune sounds.
MAGAZINE September 2015 | 57
31/07/2015 09:06
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 7
MT Step-by-Step Working with audio effects… cont’d
On the voice track, add EQ Three and click the L switch, killing the
07 low frequencies. Then add the Vinyl Distortion/Awfull preset –
you’ll hear it does a funny pitch thing as well as adding grunge.
If you’ve created a sound you want to keep and reuse, save it as a
09 preset using the Save Preset button (disk icon). Live
automatically locates it in the correct place and lets you name it.
Use Alt>Cmd>R to view Return tracks, and Alt>Cmd>T to create
11 them. If you can’t see any, it’s because you haven’t made any yet!
Use Alt>Cmd>S to show/hide the sends.
would put a delay after a compressor, and there are times
when I’d flip that round; it does make a difference.
In the walkthrough steps, I mention turning effects on
and off with their individual little Power switches. You can
do this dynamically; you don’t always want every effect
active all the time. What’s cool is that when Live’s in Record
mode, those on/off actions are recorded as automation, so
it easily becomes part of your performance and then part
of your production. The switches are mappable, so you can
58 | September 2015 MAGAZINE
MTF40.TUT live7NEW.indd 58
Effects can be toggled on and off with the Power buttons left of
08 their names. You can remove an effect from a track using your
Delete key, and they can be copied and pasted.
We can also use effects on Return tracks. These let us share a
10 common audio effect over many tracks, while the Send controls
let us mix the amount of the effect applied to each track.
You can have up to 12 Returns in Live 9 Standard and Suite,
12 although Live Intro is limited to just two. A new Send control is
added automatically when you create a new Return.
use MIDI Map Mode (Cmd>M) to assign them to your
hardware or, more regularly for me, use Key Map Mode
(Cmd>K) to assign them to letters or numbers on your
computer keyboard. The good ol’ keyboard makes a very
useful source of buttons for jobs like this. We’re not hitting
it too much this time, but sooner or later you’ll encounter
screen space management issues; you can use keyboard
commands like Alt>Cmd>S and Alt>Cmd>R to show and
hide Sends and Returns respectively, and also double click
31/07/2015 09:06
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 7
MT Step-by-Step Working with audio effects… cont’d
Create two Return tracks, adding one effect to each – Ping Pong
13 Delay on A, and Reverb/Large Hall on B. Set their Dry/Wet
controls to 100%. We’ll use the Sends to mix the levels instead.
Send the tracks to the reverb effect on Send B. Try it like this:
15 drums -19 dB, percussion -9, bass -53, keys -9, voice -9. Set the
percussion A Send to -10 dB while you’re there.
Let’s add Beat Repeat, set like this: Interval 1/4, Grid 1/16,
17 Variation 5, Pitch -12, Pitch Delay 100%, turn on Ins. Practice
turning it on and off; you won’t want this on continuously.
on the title bar of an instrument or effect to fold it up –
very useful with long chains of instruments and effects.
You can use up to 12 return tracks in the full version of
Live. If you need more than that, maybe you need to start
experimenting with group tracks, as I mentioned earlier, or
with routing to and from audio tracks. When you open
Live’s In/Out View and look at the Audio To tab, you’ll see
that each track can be routed to Sends Only, which means
you won’t hear any dry output at all, and nothing until you
60 | September 2015 MAGAZINE
MTF40.TUT live7NEW.indd 60
Set the keyboard and vocal track sends A to around 3 o’clock and
14 12 o’clock respectively. You can see the dB values displayed in the
status bar at the bottom of the screen.
The final location to add effects is the Master Track; again, we
16 might be using practical effects like compressors and limiters or
more obvious types of effect, like filters, and disruptive time effects.
As a practical thing: add the Multiband Dynamics preset
18 ‘Multiband Compression’. This will make your track sound shinier,
beefier, and louder. If your levels are going red, add the Limiter/Upper
Ceiling preset after it.
bring up at least one Send in the track.
The tutorial ends with the addition of the Multiband
Compression preset. Mastering is a whole other subject,
and there just isn’t room here, so we’re shamefully throwing
in this preset, which is not ideal but at least it gets us
started on the topic. There’s so much more to cover with
effects, including MIDI effects, and mastering – we’ll be
coming back to all of this in time. Next time we put our raw
material into some kind of structure. MT
31/07/2015 09:06
 FM | PRODUCER’S GUIDE
INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK
Ableton Push
Part 1: Push Essentials
A
bleton Live is the DAW of choice for loop-loving
musicians and live performers, providing the
antithesis to traditional left-to-right sequencers
with its Session View: an environment where
cyclical clips (individual audio or MIDI loops) and scenes
(horizontal rows comprised of these clips) are triggered
and mixed. By firing off combinations of clips and scenes,
the electronic producer is able to experiment with multiple
arrangement ideas within a non-linear structure, while a
DJ can remix and re-edit any audio on the fly.
As you’d expect from such performance-oriented
software, ‘plug ‘n’ play’ integration with MIDI hardware
has always been a big part of the Live experience. Most
third-party Live-centric controllers allow you to fire off
clips and scenes via grid-based interfaces that mirror the
Session View, whereas others include faders and rotaries
for live parameter adjustment and automation – but these
usually require you to pre-prepare and edit the contents of
each clip to some degree, keeping you chained to the
mouse and computer. With this in mind, Ableton enlisted
the expertise of pad hardware gurus Akai to help develop
the first ‘official’ Live controller, Push, designed to not
only integrate with Live 9’s underlying code to a degree
unparalleled by other third-party offerings, but also to
provide the immersive and tactile experience of composing
with a physical instrument away from the screen.
While its appearance borrows from other popular Live
controllers, it’s clear that Ableton have set out to
differentiate Push from its peers through sheer
craftsmanship: the unit’s 64 velocity- and pressure-
sensitive pads, 11 touch-sensitive encoders and 49
buttons are luxurious and responsive, while the rubberised
matte-black finish and bulletproof build quality make
other Live controllers seem cheap and cheerful. In
operation, Push does do the usual clip-launching and
rotary assignments, but goes much further, enabling you to
construct clips from the ground up. Live 9 is the brains of
the operation, running everything behind the scenes as
Push is switched between roles as an MPC-style
groovebox, step sequencer, MIDI compositional tool, multi-
coloured clip-triggerer, device browser and editor.
Push demands a level of competency from the user, so
throughout the next few pages we’re going to help you get
up and running with Ableton’s hardware/software duo. You
can download the accompanying audio and video content
from vault.futuremusic.co.uk.
57
Producer’s Guide To | Ableton Push

Drum Rack is loaded, the 64 pads

are divided into three sections, so
you can simultaneously play the pads
live, step-sequence notes, and set
QUICK
TIPS
the current clip’s length and loop
length. If the current track isn’t a
Drum Rack (ie a regular MIDI
instrument), Note mode calls up
Push’s unique MIDI ‘keyboard’,

1
whereby the pads trigger MIDI notes
in a user-defined key and scale. Punching a Drum
Melodies and chords can also be Rack pad selects
step-sequenced by pressing that pad for
Note again.
Once you’ve laid down a few
editing, but it also

Push In Use
clips, you’ll want to re-order and triggers the sound. If
arrange them. Press the Session you’re recording, hold
button, and the 8x8 grid now
changes to display the available clips
Select and hit a pad to
and scenes in the Session View select sounds silently.
(triggered by tapping the appropriate

The Push user experience begins
with the Browser: hit the Browse
button, then use the top encoders,
buttons and screen to peruse and
load one of Live’s instruments,
effects or preset Racks – although
third-party plug-ins must all be
wrapped and mapped ahead of time
into Live’s Rack format if you want to
the hardware. Once loaded, the
encoders map to the currently-
selected device’s parameters and can
be tweaked accordingly. Playback,
record, undo, delete and most other
menu functions are executed using
the various menu buttons on either
side of Push.
After you’ve called up an
2
pads). The bottom-right arrows move Several buttons
the selection square around the
Session View, while holding Shift
(eg Accent, Note
accesses Session Overview mode – and Session)
useful for navigating large sessions. feature a ‘hold’
Finally, after assembling a
collection of clips and scenes that
modifier. Press the
you’re happy with, it’s a good idea to Repeat button to
print your live performance toggle the effect on, or
(non-destructively, of course) into
hold it down to punch
Live’s linear Arrangement View. To do
this, head back to Live 9 and hit the it in and out on the fly.
Arrangement Record button before

3
fully browse and control them with instrument, enter Note mode. If a using Push to ‘perform’ your track. When in Drum
Rack mode, Live
9.2 users can
Composing Melodies And Chords With Push hit Note to switch to
Push is designed to make composing a breeze, even if your knowledge of 64-pad view – perfect
music theory is limited. Here’s how to get going… for, say, auditioning the
multiple sections of a
Press the Note button once you’ve loaded any instrument that isn’t a Drum Rack, and the 64 pads turn either white or blue: white
pads are notes in the current scale, with the blue notes representing the root note at various octaves. When in In Key mode, notes outside sliced loop.
of the current scale don’t appear, so you can happily tap away on the pads to create musically-’correct’ riffs and chords with no prior

4
knowledge of music theory.
By default, playing the pads sequentially from left to right will ascend to the next note in the scale, while the next vertical pad up will Fully integrate
play a 4th higher in the scale. This configuration, along with the current key and scale, can be changed via the Scale menu. your favourite
third-party
plug-ins, effect chains
and presets into the
Push workflow by
saving them into Live
9’s Library as Racks.

> >
Enter Note mode and the 8x8 grid becomes
a melodic instrument on which you can play
in MIDI notes and chords. In the default In
Key mode, blue pads represent the root note in a
given key, ascending in octaves from low to high,
while white pads are notes in the current scale.
5
Use Push’s Note
Repeat function
with Note mode
>
Hit the Scale button to choose a key and Pressing the Note button again will call up
scale. When In Key mode is active, Push’s
pads filter out any notes that aren’t in the
the melodic step sequencer. Use the upper
row of pads to set clip and loop length, then
to drop in choppy note
current key and scale. Switch to Chromatic mode
to show all notes of the current key, with notes in
tap sequencer steps to enter notes at a division
set by the right column of Scene/Grid buttons.
stutters and rhythmic
the scale appearing brighter. Light up steps vertically to create chords. variations as you play.

58

Next Issue: Roland JD-XA
Get to grips with Roland’s new analogue/digital hybrid.
Available September 24th. Look out for Push part 2 in FM298.
Ableton Push | Producer’s Guide To
Drum Sequencing With Push
Learn how to sequence beats using Push with
our step-by-step guide…
> >
Let’s compose a beat using Push. Begin in
a new project: set the global tempo to
122bpm and global swing to 20% using the
top-right two encoders, then hit Browse and
navigate to the Drum Racks folder to load a
TR-808 kit (hit the Browse button again to exit
the browser). In Drum Rack mode, the yellow 4x4
grid mirrors a Drum Rack’s 16-pad layout; tapping
a pad will play the corresponding drum hit, and
also select that sound for step-sequencing.
> >
Let’s record some live pad-playing. Punch
the Record button then tap a yellow pad (in
our case, the rimshot) to overdub notes in
the clip; hit Record again to turn off recording.
Our timing is off, so we tap and hold the rimshot
pad while punching Quantize to lock the part to
the 20% global swing setting. A sequencer note’s
brightness indicates its velocity level: tap and
hold a blue note, then adjust timing, note length
and velocity settings via the top encoders.
> >
When in Device mode (activated via the
top-right button), you can tweak
currently-selected Drum Rack parameters
and effects with the top encoders. We add a clap
to every 2nd and 4th beat before pitching it up to
+3 semitones. After ensuring the clap is selected
using the top two Selection Control buttons, hit
Add Effect, then load a Reverb device; use the
encoders to tweak the reverb, and deactivate a
device/s with the lower State Control buttons.
Select the kit’s kick pad (hold Select
while tapping a pad to select that sound
without triggering it), then tap the upper
8x4 pads to enter kick notes on the sequencer.
Step length is set via the right column of Scene/
Grid buttons, while clip and loop length is set
via the bottom-right 4x4 grid, with each pad
representing a bar: double-tap a pad to loop that
bar, or hold the first pad and tap another to loop
the selected area.
When Push’s MPC-style Note Repeat
feature is active (either toggled or punched
in via the Repeat button), pressing and
holding a Drum Rack pad will repeat that note at
a division determined by the Scene/Grid buttons.
Try switching the repeat speed live to create
trap-style hi-hat rolls, and vary your finger
pressure on the responsive pads to change the
level of the repeats. We record in notes to capture
a cool 16th-note closed hi-hat pattern.
Once the red Automation button is toggled,
punch Record in and out while sweeping an
encoder to print these movements within
the clip. Try using this technique to add motion
and variation to repetitive patterns: for example,
we’ve automated changes in the closed hi-hat’s
decay time, plus the clap’s pitch and reverb decay
time. Finally, hit Double to copy the contents of
the two-bar clip, creating a four-bar clip within
which we can alter our pattern further.
59
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 8

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 8 On the disc

Build a musical
Accompanying
project file included
on the DVD

structure in real-time
and capture it to the
Arrangement View
Martin Delaney explains how to use scenes to working, creating our arrangements in a way that’s more
like recording a live take – Live is an instrument, after all!
organise clips and then capture them into Live’s So we’re launching scenes and individual clips to build
Arrangement View, ready for editing… our structure. You don’t have to do it this way – you don’t
have to use scenes at all. You can just hit record and start

L
ast time, we worked on applying audio effect
devices to our Live project. That was the final step
in the process of creating and compiling our
content prior to organising it into some sort of
structure for a more ‘traditional’ production
routine. Right up to the point of getting everything into a
workable timeline, and setting everything in stone, Live
gives us options, we can always rethink structure, try new
ideas, and introduce new instruments and effects.
And that’s where we’re up to. We have a small number
of clips, a few audio effects, and now we need to knock
them into shape. As I said, Live gives us options; if you
really want to – or if for some technical reason, you have to
– you can use Live in a totally linear fashion. You can
spend all your Live time working in the Arrangement View,
laboriously dragging clips around on screen, and perhaps
working with your eyes more than your ears. Used in this
way, Live behaves more like other DAWs, such as Cubase
and Logic. However, it lacks the refinements and
focused user interfaces of those applications. I’d go so
far as saying if you don’t aim to use Live’s Session View,
it’s not really worth using Live at all – it’s all about the
Session View! So, for this tutorial, we’re looking at how
we can use Live’s Session View and global recording
functions to totally short circuit that old-school way of
triggering those clips; a technique which works better with
Push and Launchpad-type devices, although they do
scene launching as well. The ideal is to create a hybrid
method where you’re using scenes for the ‘big picture’
changes, and clips for other, less global, activity.
When you’re using scenes to switch song sections, you
can create more organic transitions by employing the Clip
Stop buttons. If you have a long clip that you want to
continue playing across two or more scenes, click in the
empty slot below the long clip, and use Cmd>E to remove
the clip stop button. Now, when you trigger the following
scenes, the clip in the first scene continues playing. This
sounds good because it’s no longer just the sound of eight
clips going on or off simultaneously, there’s a bit more
‘bleed’ between parts when you want it. Use Cmd>E to
restore these buttons, too. You can also help expand
that organic vibe by playing

FOCUS ON… HARDWARE LAUNCH

Live is very spontaneous to use, that’s why we’re working with the
Session View here, to jam and capture everything we do. You can work
wonders using just your computer keyboard to control Live, with a
combination of keyboard shortcuts and the Key Map Mode, but for
advanced (and fun) clip launching, you’ll be better off using a hardware
MIDI controller. For the tasks in this issue’s tutorial, I’d recommend
something like Push, Launchpad Pro, APC40, or TouchAble on iOS. All of
these let you trigger clips and scenes, and control effects, and they all
show correct clip colours too.

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 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 8 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Clips and scenes
Let’s begin as usual by loading the up-to-date example Ableton
01 Live set from this month’s DVD. I’ve included all the steps we went
through in the last tutorial. The set is called ‘TUGTAL8’.
Scenes are awesome because they give us an easy way to
03 create dynamic musical structures in Live’s Session View,
without having to make the more permanent commitment of working
in a timeline.
We can create scenes by dragging clips up and down. Copy and
05 paste them with Cmd>C and Cmd>V, and duplicate with Cmd>D,
where they’ll automatically be placed in the next row down.
around with the various clip launch modes, which we
talked about in part 1 (see MTF Ableton LIve 2015).
Scenes can be triggered with the triangular launch
buttons in the Master Track, or mapped to MIDI control, or
the computer keyboard. They don’t have overall launch or
quantisation characteristics; that’s still set at clip level.
Scenes can re-ordered by dragging them up and down
MT151 p42-46 TUT live8.indd 43
You already know about clips; now we’re using scenes as well. A
02 scene is a horizontal row of clips, across any number of tracks.
We trigger scenes with the Launch button in the Master Track.
As far as launching and navigation are concerned, scenes are
04 quite like clips. We can launch them in any order, using those
Master Track buttons, or MIDI messages, or assignments from our
computer keyboard.
Should you need more empty scenes, use Cmd>I. However, this
06 way of building scenes is not very spontaneous – there’s a better
way. Click the Stop Clips button in the Master Track. Launch your beat.
in the Master track, and you can also delete or copy them
from there. You can use the Context Menu to rename and
colour-code your scenes. Renaming is interesting – as well
as helping you label your song sections, it gives you a way
to make more dynamics changes. You can use scene
names to tell Live to change project tempo and time
signature throughout your set. This is good for small tempo
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 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 8
MT Step-by-Step Clips and scenes… cont’d
Now type Shift>Cmd>I – the Capture and Insert Scene command.
07 Your beat’s copied to a new scene, without interrupting playback!
The new scene is placed on whatever row was highlighted at the time.
Get it? Keep going until you have made six scenes in total. Choose
09 any combinations of clips that sound good to you. After that, use
the Context Menu to rename and colour-code your scenes.
Now we have a basic structure that we can explore by launching
11 scenes, in any order. Along the way we’re still free to launch
individual clips, and change settings on instruments, effects, and
the mixer.
changes, and equally awesome for mad speedups and
slowdowns. It doesn’t matter if you use ‘bpm’ or ‘BPM’ or if
you insert a space after the digits. The ability to embed
tempo changes within scenes is one of the greatest
features in Live and is a great asset for live shows.
We want to move our Session View clips into the
Arrangement View, so we’ll have a linear timeline to enable
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Drag the scenes up and down after creating them, or choose
08 where you want the new one before capturing. Play the Beat and
Bass clips; Shift>Cmd>I for a new scene containing both clips.
Rename a scene with a BPM value, like ‘121 bpm’, and Live’s
10 tempo changes to that BPM when the scene’s launched. Time
signatures work too, or both together – i.e. name a clip ‘5/4 121 bpm’.
We’ll start recording by clicking the Arrangement Record button
12 at the top of the screen. When we do, everything we do inside Live
will be recorded – scene and clip launching, effects control, mixer
moves, everything.
the last stages of song arrangement and mixing. We use
the Session View and Global Record to do this, so we can
create a song structure in a spontaneous way, that also
includes audio effect and mixer changes, which will be
recorded as automation that we can edit afterwards.
Recording begins in different ways according to your
settings in Live’s Preferences. If count-in is enabled, you’ll
01/09/2015 15:19
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 8
MT Step-by-Step Clips and scenes… cont’d
Make sure the Automation Arm button is yellow, to ensure control
13 moves are correctly captured as clip and track automation. Push
users have a dedicated button for this on the hardware.
Shift>Click on the Arrangement Record button; it’ll go into actual
15 record as soon as you launch your first clip or scene. Make sure
you use your controller to be creative with device settings.
You can also use your Tab key to switch between Views, again,
17 while still recording. You can watch everything drawing into the
timeline, including automation. There are no rules about how long to
play – that’s up to you.
hear a count-in of your chosen length before the transport
begins rolling. If not, it’ll just go straight into action, unless
you right-click on the record button, in which case it waits
until you launch a clip or scene before recording starts. You
can also enter record at any time, when Live is already
running. It’s a good habit to get into double-clicking the
‘stop’ button before recording, which sets the counter to
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MT151 p42-46 TUT live8.indd 46
You can stop clips by launching others in the same track with the
14 Stop buttons, or by putting them into Toggle Mode if you’re using
hardware, so they go on and off when tapped a second time.
Feel free to experiment while recording. You can even drop in new
16 devices during recording, and Live won’t flinch. Use the Overview
(Alt>Cmd>O) for a heads-up of what your tracks are doing.
Stop Live, and save your set immediately. In the Arrangement
18 View, click the orange Back To Arrangement button, and use the
transport controls to review your jam. Not perfect? Don’t worry as next
time we’re editing!
1.1.1 and avoids you getting any bars of silence at the
beginning of your take.
Now that we have our arrangement mapped out, next
time we’ll go on to look at our editing options. In the
meantime, I suggest you keep playing around with Scenes,
explore Live’s automation recording, and experiment with
your hardware controller. MT
01/09/2015 15:19
 MT Feature 6 ways to…Get Inspired

01

MT Feature 6 Ways To…

6 WAYS TO
GET INSPIRED
Inspiration is essential to musicians, but it can be an elusive and
fickle beast. Rob Boffard brings you his six tips to make sure your
creative well doesn’t run dry…

W
riters often talk about their muses.
Stephen King’s muse, according to him, is
an old guy who sits around all day,
smoking cigars and doling out nuggets of
genius for King to make into stories
(judging by King’s track record, this must happen quite
a lot). While it’s not often put as explicitly as that,
musicians have muses as well. We might not have a
personified imaginary friend, but we do have places
from where we get inspiration… except when it refuses
to come. Inspiration is a very fickle thing, and it’s easy
to find yourself without any at a crucial moment. Here
are six ways to get that inspiration back.
01 Listen to something else
Seriously, anything. At all. As long as it’s not the genre
you actually create music in. If you spend your time
creating drum ’n’ bass, then turn off your regular
playlist and bump some hip-hop instead. Or rock.
Or classical. Doesn’t matter – as long as it’s something
different to what you normally bump. The science
behind this is that your brain needs to switch off to
make the right connections. Harvard scientist Dr Shelley
Carson calls this ‘divergent thinking’, and it’s about the
mind defocusing from the current project and being
allowed to just drift, letting it make the connections it
needs to. And on that note…
02 Capture it
You don’t get to control when inspiration strikes. It can
happen in the shower, at the shops, as you’re falling
asleep; and if you forget the details, you’ll have lost it
forever. So you need – absolutely need – something to
capture it on. Since the inspiration is musical, that
means something that can record sound. With
smartphones and their assorted apps, there have never
been more ways to jot down an idea. There are dozens
available, most of sufficient quality to put down a quick
idea, even if it’s a hummed melody or beatboxed beat.
We like Apple’s Garageband (free on iOS), Propellerhead
Figure (also free) and FL Studio (paid, on Android). They
aren’t as fully-featured as most DAWs, but they’re
fantastic for putting down bare-bones ideas.
03 Get out
Following on from that: sometimes, you need a change
of scenery. It sounds so obvious – and that’s the
problem, because it’s a trick that can often be

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 6 ways to… Get Inspired Feature MT

overlooked. Do whatever you have to do: go for a walk,

go for a run, go watch a movie, go play an XBox, go kick
around a football. As long as it takes you out of the
studio for a bit. It gives you distance from the material,
lets your mind wander a little and gives those
overworked neurons a break. If you’re really clever,
you’ll find a way to make your brain perform different
creative tasks. Video games are perfect – the benefits of
playing them have been well documented, and as much
as it might not look it, taking down a tricky boss or
02 beating a particular area is a creative act. Yes, we’re
giving you permission to go gaming. It’s work. Totally.

04 Show up
Inspiration doesn’t always appear from nowhere like
magic. Sometimes, it can come simply because your
brain is primed to give it to you. If you can train your

Do whatever you have to do: go

for a walk, watch a movie, play an
03 XBox, kick around a football…
brain to be in a regular creative space, then you’ll find
that inspiration comes that much more easily. A simple
way to do this is simply to work on music production at
the same time each day – difficult if you have a day job/
significant other/children, but still very possible. And by
doing this, you’ll very quickly find that solving difficult
problems or getting that much-needed inspiration
becomes easy. Your brain actually has a process known
as neuroplasticity, referring to the ability to form new
connections between neurons – and if you make a habit
of taking the time and space to form those connections,
02
you’ll be sorted.

05 There are no bad ideas

We’ve all been there. You start a session bursting with
creative energy, and within an hour you have something
that sounds like a cat being put through a combine
harvester. You hate both it and yourself, and you close
without saving, wanting to expunge the thing from your
brain. Next time that happens, hold up. Save it. Put it
somewhere – hell, put it in a file called Terrible Ideas.
When you’re stuck for inspiration, months or years
down the track, dig into that folder. You’ll still probably
go “God, what was I thinking?” but you’ll have the
05 benefit of distance, and you’ll be able to see what made
you make those production decisions in the first place.

06 Collaborate
You know what makes inspiration happen? Other
people. Even if you’re a total introverted loner, getting
together with someone for a pint or on-line can spark
ideas – especially if that someone is a fellow producer-
friend. Better yet: get together in-studio, and work on
a track together. This comes back to the Terrible Ideas
folder – forget how it sounds, just enjoy the back-and-
forth. You’d be surprised at the great ideas that can
come out of sessions like this, and it works even better
06 if there are more than two of you. Another mind can take
you in directions you’d never have gone in by yourself. MT

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 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 9

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 9 On the disc

Editing your
Accompanying
project file included
on the DVD

composition in the
Arrangement View
Previously we captured our Live jam into the Arrangement View
timeline. Now Martin Delaney shows you to how polish that and
create a finished structure…

L
ast time, we concluded with a recorded jam – a disc, which includes all of the steps from the last tutorial.
spontaneously-created structure, laid out along (There’s a good chance we’ve started to diverge as we’ve
the timeline in Live’s Arrangement View. The made different recordings, so these walkthrough steps
purpose of this was to show how Live’s Session might not make sense unless you use our example set.)
View relieves you of the pressure of making When you’re working with a lot of tracks, you will need
commitments and working out your songs intellectually. to manage your screen space. Folding and unfolding them
Instead you can start record, start playing and improvising, helps, and you can zoom in and out, but you can also
and just see where it takes you. expand individual tracks by mousing over the bottom of
After you tap the Tab key to view your recorded tracks, the track and dragging downwards. If you hold Alt at the
you’ll see they’re greyed out. This is because Live same time you can expand all your tracks simultaneously.
prioritises the Session View clips. To restore Arrangement Editing automation is easy in Live – just click to add or
playback, click the orange Back To Arrangement button remove breakpoints. Mouse near an envelope so it turns
above the top right of track 1, to enable all tracks (this blue, then you can drag it around, or copy and paste it,
button disappears when not needed, which is confusing/ delete it, whatever you want to do. Hold down Alt while you
annoying until you get used to it). You’ll also notice do this, and you can draw curves as well as straight lines.
separate Back To Arrangement buttons for every track, so
you can specify individual tracks you want to drop back in
to from Session View. This provides a very powerful and
dynamic way to work with the Views; useful if you’re
running a complex live show that might need both planned
and spontaneous elements. Understanding the
relationship between the Views is an essential step to
mastering Live. You’re seeing the same tracks in both
Views, laid out vertically or horizontally; if you delete a
track from either View, it’s gone from the entire set! But if
you delete a clip from, say, track 1 in Session View, it
doesn’t affect any clips in the same track in the
Arrangement view.
Our aim now is to edit the structure that we created
through jamming; everything is up for grabs, everything
can be tweaked. You can keep working with your set from
last time, or you can use the up-to-date version on the

FOCUS ON… MONITORS

You can get quite a long way into the composition and production process without high quality
monitoring - I’m sure many of us begin sketching out tunes on mobile devices or laptops, where we’re
either listening on tiny built-in speakers, or on cheap headphones. As you progress towards finishing
your track, though, you need to hear what’s going on more clearly, and across a wide frequency range.
You will need some high-quality monitoring headphones, and some monitor speakers as well. You can’t
be applying critical processes like equalisation and compression when you can’t really hear what
effect they’re having.

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 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 9 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Editing in Arrangement View
I’m using my recording; naturally this will differ from yours. You
01 can either apply similar steps to your own project, or load the
completed part 8 set from our disc.
Also be aware that if you now pop back to the Session View and
03 launch any clips, they will affect the arrangement playback, so
avoid that unless it’s really what you really want to do!
You can also zoom using the + or - keys. Manage vertical space
05 by folding tracks – click the small triangle at the end of the track.
Hold Option/Alt and every track unfold/folds simultaneously.
Caution! When you’re deleting an envelope, make sure you
have it selected properly, otherwise you’ll delete the
entire region that it applies to, clips and all. If you want to
view multiple lanes of automation in the same track, use
the little + and - buttons that appear when you unfold
the track.
In the walkthrough, we edit the beat in the first MIDI
clip, to remove the noisy sample hits from the beginning of
the song. If you remember, we created this beat by using
MT152.TUT live9.indd 43
Tap the Space bar or the Play button, to hear the recorded
02 arrangement. If any of the tracks are greyed out, use the Back To
Arrangement button to restore them – read more in the main text.
Zoom in and around the timeline by clicking and dragging above
04 it, where you’ll see a magnifying glass icon, or in the black
rectangle in the overview. Double-click there to view the arrangement.
If you move any on-screen controls during recording, these are
06 captured as automation, depicted by red lines that go from left to
right in the Arrangement View tracks – these are called envelopes.
Live’s Slice To New MIDI Track command. Each note
represents a slice of the original sampled beat, so when
we drag the notes in the clip around, we’re choosing to play
different slices at that point in time. By choose Slice 5
each time, we’re substituting the slice that doesn’t contain
the noisy sample.
We shorten some of the sections to the typical bar
counts that you see in music – everything happens in
fours! I’m just getting you to do that to practice editing, I’m
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 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 9
MT Step-by-Step Editing in Arrangement View… cont’d
If you can see a red dot on a control, that means there’s
07 automation present. Use the pop-up boxes in the Mixer at the
right of the screen to view the envelope.
Sometimes you need to dig to find the envelope. Click the lower
09 chooser, and you’ll see Track Volume listed, with a red dot. Select
that, and you’re looking at the track volume automation, in red.
Let’s automate the bass track’s filter. Unfold the track so you see
11 the automation for Auto Filter/Resonance. Use single-clicks to
delete each breakpoint between bars 46 and 54.
not suggesting you always have to use such regular bar
counts. Of course, you’re free to do it how you like.
Live is quite intelligent with its handling of automation,
when it comes to copy and paste, or to moving clips
around. When we copy and paste the bass clips in the
tutorial, you’ll see the filter envelopes for those clips are
copied as well. Also, if you copy and paste a clip between
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MT152.TUT live9.indd 44
Let’s tweak the example set as discussed. Unfold track 1 by
08 clicking the triangle left of the name. Choose ‘mixer’ from the top
chooser. It has a red dot by it, indicating there’s automation present.
At the beginning, I increased the beat volume. Right-click on the
10 Track Volume box at the end of the track, and choose Delete
Automation, to straighten out the entire volume envelope.
Unfold the Frequency lane and do the same there. What this does
12 is create a unique longer filter sweep for that part of the song.
Fold the track afterwards if you want to be tidy.
Session and Arrangement Views, the envelopes are
preserved, converted to clip envelopes – or vice versa – to
track automation.
We briefly touch on the topics of locators – these are
very useful for identifying and labelling sections in longer
songs. The arrows at the top right of the screen let you skip
through your locators, while the Set button can be used to
30/09/2015 11:28
 MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 9
MT Step-by-Step Editing in Arrangement View… cont’d
Double-click the first MIDI drum clip, revealing the notes. Drag
13 the notes for slices 1 and 9 vertically to align with Slice 5. Now
they’ll all play the same sound, without the noisy sample.
Likewise, cut out bars 9, and 33-35. After that, click and drag to
15 highlight bar 16, and tap the Delete key. Drag the ends of the
percussion and bass tracks to fill the gap.
Unfold the bass track. Click and drag from the start of bar 55 for 2
17 beats. Copy with Cmd>C. Paste with Cmd>V at bar 53 and 54.
Check out the automation!
insert them dynamically and all three of these controls are
MIDI-assignable. If you’re studying song structure,
sometimes it’s good to load a song you like, and use
locators to map out all the parts. Then delete the song and
build your own tune using the structure! It’s not stealing –
you’re not taking any samples, melody, or anything, it’s just
a good learning and experimentation tool.
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MT152.TUT live9.indd 46
The second ‘section’, starting at bar 37, is 5 bars long; let’s remove
14 one, just to keep everything even; click and drag to highlight bar
45, then use Shift>Cmd>Delete to delete the time.
Cut the last long section to 24 bars. Make a 2-bar break at bar 65.
16 Drag the percussion and bass across, but also drag the beat back
two beats so it resumes earlier.
Sometimes it helps to label song sections using locators.
18 Right-Click above the timeline, choose Insert Locator, then
rename it something helpful. Repeat as desired throughout the song.
Use the Arrows to navigate the locators.
Be warned, creating a piece of music in Live doesn’t
truly end until you render and master it. Even after
recording into the Arrangement View, you can drag in, or
record, more audio and MIDI parts, add new tracks, or add
new effect devices. As with a lot of music production you
have to be clear about reaching a cut-off point otherwise
you’re working on the same tune forever! MT
30/09/2015 11:29
Feature | Ultimate Edits
TOOLS OF THE
TRADE
Back in the days of magnetic tape,
there was one way to edit: you got a
scalpel, sliced that tape up good,
then stuck it back together. All very
hands-on, but it must have taken an
age compared to the practically
instantaneous results delivered in the
digital realm. What’s more, in a DAW
you can change the tempo of a track
without affecting its pitch, and vice
versa – tremendously useful for
creating mashups. This is known as
‘time-stretching’, or ‘warping’.
Most DAWs will automatically
warp the audio for you, making
editing even speedier and presenting
us with all kinds of possibilities for
mashups. In fact, most DAWs use the
same family of time-stretching and
pitchshifting algorithms, zplane’s
élastique Pro, including Ableton Live
9 and PreSonus Studio One 3. These
DAWs implement zplane’s algorithms
in different ways, and offer disparate
Basic Warping In Ableton Live
Taking a few moments to warp a track makes it easy to edit it up in a flash.
Here’s how to do it in the DJs’ favourite DAW, Ableton Live
If you’re unfamiliar with Ableton Live’s approach to warping tracks to fit the project tempo, it might look intimidatingly complex, but in
reality it’s a very straightforward system that’s extremely quick to use once you’ve got the hang of it. In the following tutorial we’ll show you
how to warp up a track in three simple steps. This is useful because it means, once a track is slaved to Live’s project tempo, we can adjust
the tempo and pitch of the track independently, and can quickly select specific bars and edit them as we see fit.
In the next tutorial, we’ll start slicing away at our freshly warped track, creating an extended intro and a shortened breakdown to make
the tune easier to mix. There’s even a House banger in the Tutorial Files folder to cut your teeth on, so chop chop!
> >
Load up Ableton Live and press Tab to
bring up the Arrangement view. You’ll find a
track to work on in the Tutorial Files folder:
Cubs – Vortex.wav. Drag the file onto the start of
an audio track, and Live will automatically warp
the track.
30
modes. The general consensus is that
Ableton Live offers the best choice of
algorithms and workflow for this kind
of work. Its warping features are well
established, and the program’s
transient detection identifies a track’s
tempo quickly and easily. It’s usually
pretty accurate, though with older
material you’ll often need to go
With its Warp capabilities and swift workflow, Ableton Live is a smart choice for creating edits
Double-click the audio clip, and zoom in on
the end of the clip by dragging down on the
timeline. You’ll see that by the first beat of
the track’s final bar (193) Live’s tempo detection
has slipped out of sync. Double-click the transient
above the waveform to create a warp marker.
through and make sight timing
adjustments. Another great thing
about Live is that it has the ability to
load practically any audio file: WAV,
AIFF, MP3, M4A, even FLAC and
OGG. This makes it a simple process
to drag music straight from your
media player onto an audio track
without having to convert it first.
Most DAWs will
warp audio for you,
making editing
even speedier
>
Drag the warp marker to the right – it’ll
snap onto the start of the bar. The Segment
bpm value in the clip view says the track is
130bpm, so set Live’s Tempo to 130. Activate the
metronome and play the track back – you’ll hear
that it’s now sync’d up.
As Ableton Live is the de facto
DAW for this kind of work, we’ve used
it in the following tutorials (if you
don’t own it you can follow along with
the demo version from www.ableton.
com), but it’s not flawless. Digital
time-stretching is analogous to the
musique concrète technique of
‘micro-editing’, where short,
millisecond
slices of tape
were edited
together to create
new textures.
DAWs time-
stretch by slicing
the audio into
many tiny pieces,
and adding or
removing these
tiny slices as
needed to make the tempo slower or
faster. This affects the audio signal in
an audible manner, and the artefacts
created will depend on the particular
time-stretching algorithm used.
All of Live’s warping modes are
compromised in one way or another:
Beats mode makes sustained notes
sound jagged and unnatural, and the
Complex, Tone and Texture modes
aren’t great at preserving transients.
This leaves us with Re-Pitch, which
preserves transient effectively and
works well with musical material. The
downside is that Re-Pitch doesn’t
correct the pitch of the audio, so the
faster you speed it up the higher the
pitch will get, and vice versa.
If this bothers you, a workaround
is to keep your re-edits at the same
tempo as the original version. If
you’re putting an acapella over the
top of an instrumental, the optimal
solution is usually to work to the
instrumental’s original tempo,
ensuring it doesn’t need to be time-
stretched. Because vocals’ transients
aren’t as crucial as the instrumental,
you can get away with using Complex
Pro to warp it. This gives us the best
of both worlds, and Complex Pro
mode even has a Formant parameter
which allows one to set the level of
formant compensation and prevent
so-called ‘chipmunkification’ when
pitchshifting vocals up.
Things get trickier if we want a
mashup of two tracks that are at
different tempos and a compromise
has to be made somewhere; though if
the tracks sound acceptable together
when Re-Pitch mode is used, you
can get away without time-stretching
or pitchshifting anything.
 Ultimate Edits | Feature

Re-Edit A Warped Track In Ableton Live

Once you’ve warped your track you can re-arrange and tweak it to your
heart’s content. Here’s how to get smooth-sounding edits…

> > >

If you haven’t completed the previous
tutorial already, load up WIP edit.als to get
up to speed. Vortex’s intro isn’t very long – a
mere 16 bars before a 32 bar breakdown.
Unfortunately, the intro features a pad with a
gradually opening filter on it.
We need to find a section we can loop
without it sounding too unnatural. Drag over
bars 1 to 9 on the clip, and press Ctrl/
Cmd+L to loop the section. Play the project back.
This loop doesn’t segue very smoothly: the filter
movement on the pad is too obvious.
Let’s try a shorter section instead. Move the
loop start to bar 5 instead. The four bar
section doesn’t sound too shabby! Drag over
the clip from bar 5 to bar 9 and press Ctrl/
Cmd+Shift+L to duplicate it four times, giving us
a 32 bar intro.

> > >

This edit won’t sound too incongruous in
the mix, so let’s roll with it. While we’re
at it, let’s cut that big breakdown in half.
Drag over bars 33 to 49 and press Ctrl/
Cmd+Shift+Backspace to ‘delete time’. Now
the intro goes straight into the second half of
the breakdown.
This sounds okay, but we miss the big
booming crash at the start of the
breakdown. We can smooth the transition
using Live’s fades. Select Fades in the Track Title
Bar, and drag the Fade In Handle at the top
right-hand corner of the intro clip, and drag it to
the right so that it sits at about 33.3.4.
This is a long enough fade for us to hear the
crash, but short enough so that we don’t
hear any of the spoken word vocal that plays
shortly after it. We’ve completed our simple
re-edit; now all we need to do is highlight the
entire track and select File > Export Audio/Video
to bounce it out.

31
Feature | Ultimate Edits

DOS &
DON’TS
DO… try out unusual
combinations of material
– as long as the music fits
together, the more
sophisticated audience
loves surprising
juxtapositions of styles.
Re-editing familiar tracks
into unusual new
arrangements can help
re-invigorate them too.
GOTTA KEEP ‘EM
SEPARATED
A common question asked by
newcomers to the world of music
production is “how do I extract a
track’s vocal?”. It is indeed possible
to isolate a piece of music’s
elements, but you will experience
various degrees of success depending
on the nature of the source material
and the techniques used.
The trouble with vocals is that
they occupy such a wide frequency
range that EQing isn’t usually a
viable option. Specialised audio
version (ie, without instrumental
accompaniment). iTunes and
discogs.com are great places to hunt
for acapella and instrumental
versions of your favourite tracks, but
the rub comes when these aren’t
available. In this case you’re down to
hunting on sites of dubious legality
such as acapellas4u.co.uk for a rare
rip, or even a DIY acapella. DIY
acapellas are something of a last
resort, and their quality can range
from acceptable to unusable. If
you’ve got access to both the vocal
and instrumental versions of a track
you can use some simple audio
processing trickery to make your own
DIY acapella – see below for more.

DON’T… go overboard isolation software does exist, for

on the processing. If you’re
using already mastered
tracks they almost certainly
don’t require further gain
reduction. EQ can be
useful to help two tracks sit
together in a mashup, but
won’t usually be necessary
instance Sony’s SpectraLayers Pro 3,
but these are aimed at high-end
users such as movie studios, and are
priced accordingly. What’s more,
they’re time-consuming to use, so
they’re not a practical solution for
most of us.
A relatively cheap and reliable
way to obtain an isolated vocal is
to get your hands on an acapella Specialist applications can help extract a vocal, but these tend to be expensive and time consuming

otherwise unless you’re

working with a particularly
poor or vintage recording. DIY Acapellas In Ableton Live
DO… make your intros If you have both a vocal and instrumental version of a track, it’s possible to
as DJ friendly as possible. create your own DIY acapella with a little phase cancellation…
That don’t have to be
The simplest way to create a DIY acapella requires you have both the full vocal and instrumental versions in your possession. The theory is
ridiculously long and that the only difference between these versions will be the vocal. Therefore, inverting the polarity of one of the tracks’ waveforms will cause
beat-centric, but a few everything apart from the vocal to disappear thanks to the magic of destructive interference. Unfortunately, there will often be subtle
clues to a track’s tempo differences between the vocal and instrumental versions, and they may have received different treatment at the mixing, mastering and
encoding stages, further complicating matters. The proof is in the pudding, so let’s give it a whirl. Here we create a DIY acapella with vocal
during its intro can make and instrumental versions of Cassie’s 2006 R ‘n’ B banger Me & U, but you can use any song you like and the process is exactly the same.
all the difference in a
stressful mixing situation.
DON’T… layer two
different vocals on top of
each other if you can avoid
it. It almost always sounds
horrendous, makes vocals
less intelligible and your
mix feel messy. If you’re
struggling to make an
arrangement work, try
> > >
Drag your vocal and instrumental versions Turn snap to grid off (press Ctrl/Cmd+4), If you’ve correctly aligned the track, you

looping the previous part
rather than proceeding to
the vocal section.
onto separate audio tracks in Live. Ensure
that both clips’ Warp modes are deactivated
by clicking on the clips and inspecting the Clip
View panel. When they’re both unwarped, ensure
their start points are roughly aligned.
then zoom in to the start of the waveforms
by dragging down on the Beat Time Ruler.
should hear the track sound normal, albeit
with a vocal that’s been reduced in volume
Keep aligning and zooming until you’ve zoomed in
as far as you can. Before you play the tracks back,
by a half. Put a Utility from the Audio Effects
folder on either track and activate its Phz-L and
turn them both down to -6dB. Phz-R buttons to invert the signal’s polarity.

34
 Ultimate Edits | Feature

Enhancing A Kick Drum In Ableton Live

If only the biggest and baddest beats will do for your re-edits, you’ll need to
do a little surgical drum replacement. Luckily that’s easier than it sounds

> > >

Load the Edit.als project up in Live, and put
Voxengo’s excellent spectral analyser SPAN
(a free download from www.voxengo.com)
on the master buss. Play the project back and
hover the mouse pointer over where the kick
peaks in SPAN – you’ll see this happens at 67Hz,
or C2.
We can double check the key of the track by
loading up a synth and tapping along with
the track, and this confirms that C is indeed
the key we’re working with. Let’s find a
compatible kick drum sound to supplement the
track with. Add a MIDI track, and put an instance
of Simpler on it.
Sequence a four to the floor kick pattern
like so, and loop the clip so that it plays for
the entire track. Now we just need to find a
suitable kick drum. You’ll find an appropriate
candidate in the form of Solid kick.wav in the
tutorial files folder.

> > >

Drag the sample onto Simpler to load it up.
It’s already tuned correctly so we don’t need
to worry about transposing it. Turn up
Simpler’s Volume to -4dB, and play the project
back. You’ll notice that, while the new kick drum
is providing us with more character in the mids,
the extra headroom it’s eating up is causing our
project to clip the master.
We can remedy this by ducking the original
track when the kick plays. To do this put a
Compressor effect on the audio track, and
set its sidechain input to the Simpler track. Bring
down the Threshold to -9dB, set the Ratio to
4.00:1 and set the Release to 20ms.
Our mix is still clipping, so put a limiter
such as iZotope Ozone’s Maximiser on the
master. We can now get away with pushing
the mix a bit. Add Live’s Saturator to the Simpler
track, and gradually turn up the Drive level until
the kick is banging enough for your taste. 4dB
gives us a good balance of solidity and presence.

37
 FM | PRODUCER’S GUIDE

INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK

Ableton Push
Part 2: Essential Techniques
& Workflow Tips
Back in issue 296’s Producer’s Guide, we
took you on a three page whistle-stop tour
of Push, Ableton’s feature-laden MIDI
controller instrument designed to control
multiple aspects of their Live 9 DAW. After
covering the basics – such as step-
sequencing in Drum Rack Mode, Note
Mode and general workflow – it was clear
that we’d barely scratched the surface of
Push’s capabilities. So, with that in mind,
we’re now going to build upon our previous
foundations and delve deeper into the
Live-Push experience to explore further
features and concepts. Many of the
following tips, tricks and techniques come
directly from one of the masterminds
behind the controller’s development,
Ableton Push Product Owner Jesse Terry,
who has kindly offered his expert insight to
help take your Push skills to the next level.
As you’d expect from an advanced
guide like this, we’re going to assume
you’re already reasonably acquainted with
Push and Live 9; be sure to check out our
Part 1 guide from issue 296 if you need to
get up to speed. Plus, as usual, audio
examples and video can be downloaded
from vault.futuremusic.co.uk.

75
Producer’s Guide To | Ableton Push

Push Preparation
can always get to the subsequent
parameters via the Edit view.
“There’s a great trick for drum
QUICK
TIPS
hits not many people know about: if
you keep a folder called Drum Hits in
An efficient Push workflow requires a certain the User Library and you have folders
in there that correspond to the folder
amount of pre-preparation, so we asked Ableton’s names Live uses, eg Kick, Hihat, or
Jesse Terry for a hefty helping of expert advice Snare, put your drums in those

1
folders – they will show up mixed
into Live’s samples when you browse When step-
FM: Firstly, what’s your role in the preset, put it into the Space folder so a drum pad from Push. Plus you can sequencing drums
development of Push? you can always find your reverb share these drums with all your Live or melodic
JT: “I’m the Product Owner for Push, presets together. I always put a [j] sets, without needing to copy them
which means I define the vision for before presets I make, so they rise to into each new Live Set.
material, you can use
the product, and try to translate this the top and I can quickly find them. “Finally, the most important thing several fingers to enter
vision along with a really talented to do is have a or delete several notes
team of designers and developers.” good strategy for
at once, or hold down
How should users organise sounds,
Have a good your User files,
called Places in multiple notes before
adjusting note or
sample libraries and Racks for use
with Push? Are there considerations
when building Racks and devices?
strategy for your Live. This is
where you can
organise your
automation values
“If you want to have a set of device
User files, called samples or loop
simultaneously.

2
parameters that are specific to your libraries. As a
workflow, make your own Instrument
and Effect Racks in Live, then save
these presets. Take note of where you
Places in Live Hip-Hop guy, I
have a folder for
samples that
nativeKontrol’s
free ClyphX is a
want the most important parameters “For VSTs and AUs, Live has a contain drum loops, a folder for MIDI Remote
to be – obviously the 1st and 8th ‘configure’ button, which allows you samples that contain drum hits, and Script that allows
encoders are the easiest to grab to rearrange the parameters of your a folder for general mixed samples I
you to save Push’s
quickly in a performance scenario. effects and instruments. This is a might want to work with – but how
“When you save presets to Live’s great way to make sure your top eight you organise your sounds depends current key and scale
library, move them to the right folders favourite parameters show up when upon what you want to do and what settings within a clip.
– for instance, if you make a reverb you load a particular plug-in, but you style of music you make.” Download the script at
http://bit.ly/ClyphX

3
Fixed Length Recording Create quick
loop variations
On-the-fly recording is an essential part of the Push workflow. Let’s see how when working
the Fixed Length function can be used to capture the perfect take with the step
Ableton’s Jesse Terry offers a handy tip for using the Fixed Length function when recording ideas into a new clip. “I generally keep this off, sequencer: use the
but there is a cool trick when making a long recording. With Fixed Length off, press record, and start playing and working on a riff – I Double button to copy
generally practise with Record on, and once I feel I’ve got it right, I press the Fixed Length button, which ends the recording and loops the
last few measures of the long recording (depending on the Fixed Length setting). It’s a good way to practise until you get it right, and then your current clip’s
loop the part when you’ve finally nailed the perfect take.” contents over, make a
few variations, then
tap on the loop length
pads to jump the loop
markers throughout
the clip on the fly.

> >
With Fixed Length deactivated, the length
of a recorded clip will extend until you
deactivate recording. When Fixed Length is
active, Live will record for a predetermined length
and then loop. Hold the Fixed Length button to
set a value of between 1 beat and 32 bars.
4
When in Session
Mode, to see a
scene’s name
appear on the display,
>
With Fixed Length deactivated, hit Record Fixed Length is great for generating multiple
and begin jamming away. As expected, the
length of this new clip will continue to
clips and variations too. Activate Fixed
Length, set a length, then record in an idea.
hold Select and tap
extend as you play. As soon as you’re happy with a
section, punch the Fixed Length button to loop
Press New, come up with a variety of loops, then
switch to Session Mode to move between or
that scene’s Scene/
the final take. launch the different ideas you’ve made. Grid button.

76
 Ableton Push | Producer’s Guide To

Navigating clips
and scenes with
Session Mode
Live’s Session View is great for
03 >
To stop a clip, tap an empty slot on that
track; alternatively, hit the Stop button to
activate Stop Mode, then press a track’s red

sketching out ideas. Here’s how to State Control button. Note that Stop Mode
won’t be accessible if you’re in Device or
Browse mode.

navigate it with Session Mode

01 >
When in Session Mode, the 8x8 ‘frame’ in
Live represents the clips displayed on Push’s
pads. Use the bottom-right arrows to move
this frame around by one scene/track; hold
Shift and press (or use the Octave Up/Down
buttons) to move by eight.

04 >
Busy sessions can be confusing to navigate,
especially live; in this case, use Session
Overview mode, accessed by holding Shift.
Each individual clip slot now represents an
8x8 grid: tap a pad to zoom in on that section.

02 >
Currently-playing clips pulse green, recording
clips white, and others their respective colours.
Tap a clip to launch it and launch a horizontal
scene using the right column of Scene/Grid
buttons. Hold Delete and tap a clip to delete.

05 >
When in Note Mode, press and release the
Session button to ‘permanently’ switch to
Session Mode. Hold the button to temporarily
switch over to Session Mode, then release
the button to return to Note Mode. The
reverse applies when jumping from Session
to Note.

77
Producer’s Guide To | Ableton Push
> >
Once you’re comfortable with
How to… basic composing and
navigation in Push, try
Become A combining several techniques in
Push Ninja quick succession: for example, start
off by step-sequencing the bare
bones of a riff, then quickly switch
back to Note Mode and punch
Record to enter additional notes in
the gaps between. When performing
in Note Mode, there are plenty of
different techniques you can
combine: vary pad velocity and
aftertouch, punch in quick Note
Repeat variations, use the touch-strip
to add subtle pitch bends and
wobbles, tweak parameters using the
top encoders, and so on.
> >
If two hands aren’t enough
How to… when composing or performing
with Push, hook up a foot
Use A pedal. Two connections are available:
Footswitch one for sustain and one for recording.
Ableton recommend using a
With Push footswitch with normal polarity, rather
than those which are inverted. Push
Product Manager Jesse Terry: “I play
guitar and bass, so Push’s footswitch
is a really great way to record hands-
free. The first press starts recording,
the second press loops the recording,
and double-tapping the pedal makes
a new slot to record into. I also use
the footswitch when I am recording
samples from my vinyl collection, so I
can have it near my record player.”
Controlling
Hardware
Push control isn’t confined to Live – it’s great used with hardware too
78
Push’s main 64 pads respond
How to… well to variations in velocity
and aftertouch, facilitating
Incorporate expressive, nuanced performances. If
Velocity And you’re designing your own Instrument
or Drum Racks, hook up velocity or
Aftertouch aftertouch as mod sources to
maximise the amount of timbral
Effectively variation you’ll be able to inject into
your live playing. Hold down Push’s
User button to access User Settings,
where you can customise the unit’s
Pad Threshold (how hard a pad must
be hit to trigger a note), Velocity
Curve (the gradient between strike
force and velocity), and Aftertouch
Threshold (how hard you must hold a
pad before aftertouch ‘kicks in’).
While Push offers plenty of
How to… control over Live straight out of
the box, several third-party
Pimp Up Push’s developers have sought to expand
Functionality upon the default functionality via
MIDI scripting. PXT-Live by
nativeKontrol, a $19.50 MIDI
Remote Script for both Windows and
OS X, adds a wealth of extra features
such as Arrangement View navigation
and editing, the ability to edit one
track while navigating through others,
APC40-style device control, and
heaps more. PXT-Live’s additional
features are only accessed when in
User mode, so you can easily switch
back to Push’s ‘regular’ mode at the
touch of a button.
Jesse Terry is particularly enthusiastic about the topic of
controlling outboard via Push, and he tells us how to go
about it: “I have a largish collection of old synthesizers and
effects, and I play them all with Push, as I’m not such a
great keyboard player. First, set up External Instrument
presets to work with your external synths: set the External
Instrument device to send MIDI out to the same channel
as your synth, and set the input to bring the resulting
audio back in from your audio interface, so you can treat
your external gear kind of like a plug-in and utilise Push’s
scales and step-sequencing.
“Once you’ve saved these as presets, simply browse and
load them easily from Push. You can also use Max for Live
to create editors for your synths (or find premade ones on
maxforlive.com). I have most of my synths sitting around
the edge of my studio, and I play and edit them directly
from Push – so my focus is in one place, even though I’m
using a huge variety of synths and effects.”
Next Issue: Sequential Prophet-6
The revived brand has produced arguably the synth of the
year. Take a tour of its capabilities. Available November 19th.
 Ableton Push | Producer’s Guide To

Melodic step- Watch the video

here: http://bit.ly/

sequencing and fmpg298

step automation
Push’s step-sequencing capabilities
are highly useful and inspiring
when composing melodies
04 >
Step resolution, set to 1/16th notes by default,
is changed via the right column of Scene/Grid
buttons. To lengthen the first note, we tap and
hold that note before changing its Length to
three steps using the top menu/encoder.

01 >
Let’s explore melodic step-sequencing by
composing a basic riff. In this session, we’ve
put together a drum beat before calling up an
electric-style FM bass patch from Operator.
We’ll set the project’s key and scale to F Minor
via the Scales menu.

05 >
It’s also possible to add parameter
automation for individual steps. We’ll tap and
hold a note of our riff, hit the Automation
button to reveal our device’s automatable
parameters, then change various macro
values. A square block in a parameter’s name
shows it’s being automated.

02 >
Enter Note mode on the bass track, then hit
the Note button again. The 8x8 grid turns
06 >
Finally, hit the Double button to copy the bar’s
into a step-sequencer: in our default In Key
mode, the blue line represents our root note contents over to the next bar, add variations,
of F, while the white pads are notes in the
current scale.
then tap the bars to jump between them. You
can also stack notes vertically to enter chords,
as we’re doing here with an added piano part.

03 >
The top row of pads set loop length.
Double-tap a pad to loop that bar, or hold a
pad and tap another to loop those bars. We’ll
loop the first bar, then tap pads on the
sequencer to enter notes. Use the touch-strip
to navigate up or down through the octaves.

79
MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 10

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 10

Accompanying

Getsomevideoin
project file included
on the DVD

yourLiveset
If you’re creative musically, you’re probably creative
visually. Martin Delaney reveals how to add movies,
either to make a music video, or pimp out a live show.

Y
ou’re making music on a computer, right? Well,
video is just as easy to do on the same machine.
If you’re a video virgin, don’t worry – if you can
understand how to use audio clips in Live, you
can handle this. It’s a good skill to have – you
might be asked to soundtrack a movie, you might want to
make your own music video, or you might want an
hour-long visual set for your own live show.
Live can open any QuickTime-compatible movies (be
advised that you can’t import video into Ableton Lite or
Intro, though), so you have many solutions as far as
content goes. There are websites that provide copyright-
free movies, and while they have restrictions on
commercial use, if you squirt them on a wall during a live
set, that may not be such a problem. There are also
browser plug-ins and applications that let you download
YouTube movies. A more rewarding way to add visuals is to
make your own. In my sets I’ve used video from cheap
digital cameras, DSLRs, iPhones, HD movie cameras, and
GoPros; if you mix and match you get a better texture, it’s
like sampling audio from different sources. For most uses,
video from a phone is easily good enough. I like to use
bright colours, and close-ups of small objects as they get
really trippy when they’re blown up big on a large screen.
When it comes to digitally-created images, and keeping
it within Live (read about VJ software elsewhere on these
pages), Max For Live users have options in terms of
visually-oriented devices, such as Ganz Graf Mod X,
Vizzable, and V-Module. This tutorial is all about using
actual movies, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t
combine techniques throughout your set. And you know
what? Whatever images you use, somebody will usually
tell you that they suit your music perfectly!
Live works great as a brutally simple movie editor.
You can stack multiple tracks, or place different clips on a
single track – any section not covered by a movie clip will
make a black screen. You can split movie clips using
Cmd>E (you can’t join or reverse them, though), loop them,
and choose which portion of the clip to play.
Live’s greatest video tool, though, is the ability to warp
video, which it does by warping the audio – the attached
movie simply follows along. Add warp markers and drag
them around to slow down or speed up your movie clip.
Even if there’s no visible audio waveform, you can still
insert warp markers above the ‘flat line’ where the audio
should be.
As well as being a fantastic visual effect, I’ve used this
a couple of times when syncing audio to video as I’ve
sneakily expanded or contracted the video to fit the music.
For those more ‘pro’ timing moments, Right-click in the
time ruler below the Arrangement View timeline and
choose to view different frame rates in FPS, instead of the
default minutes and seconds.
You can also load jpegs, dragging their starts or ends to
change their duration within the timeline. Try to make sure
your jpegs have the same proportions as your movies, so
you don’t get black bars, or unwanted glimpses of movie,
appearing behind your top-most image. Jpegs would also
let you add text titles to your Live video projects; you never
know, there’s probably a Max For Live device out

FOCUS ON… VIDEO APPS

For more sophisticated visuals,you’re probably better off running a
video application alongside Live.I like Arkaos Grand VJ – it’s been
around for years but it’s still going strong.It’s MIDI-controllable, so
Live can control it;all you need is a separate MIDI track,sending
notes to launch movie clips,and sending clip envelopes to change
effect parameters,so Arkaos will always load the right image for that
part of the set,even when you’re improvising.For timeline use,
Arkaos also has a record mode so you can capture everything and
render it to pair with your mix afterwards.

42 | December 2015 MAGAZINE

 The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 10 Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step Video in live
Start by opening your Live set from last time or, if you prefer, use
01 the up-to-date version supplied with this issue of MusicTech. I’ll
be referring to that version throughout the tutorial.
Drag ‘sky.m4v’ to the area under the current Arrangement tracks,
03
at the start of the song. It’ll behave just like when you load audio
clips, creating an audio track to host the clip.
Double-click in the middle of the video window to enter or exit
05 full-screen mode. Start Live running, and the video will start too,
it’s pretty simple. But the movie clip is very short…
movie titles for Live. If there isn’t, somebody probably
needs to make one.
We’ll discuss final processing and rendering of audio
files another time. For movies, if you’re working on your
own material, you’ll probably only use one or two settings,
02 We’ve also supplied a folder which contains the movie clips
needed for the tutorial – ‘Live movies’. You can navigate to that
and drag it into your Live Browser, to save it as a shortcut.
If you look closely, you’ll see the clip has little movie frames along
04 the edges to differentiate it. Live should have opened the Video
Window automatically. If not, use Alt>Cmd>V to show it.
Remember I said it’s like an audio clip? Go to the end of the movie
06 clip, and drag the end back so the clip is exactly 8 bars long – we
can ‘sync’ video cuts to our beats.
but the other controls are valuable if you’re working with
clients who need files in specific formats. If I just want a
‘take away’ render to watch on my phone or computer, I
use the iPhone preset. When I’m delivering video to
publishers, I’m following their stated requirements for
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MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 10
MT Step-by-Step Video in live… cont’d
Now go into the Sample box and turn on Warp and Loop. Grab the
07 end of the movie clip and drag it out so it loops to fit the entire
length of the song.
Drag in ‘flower.m4v’, once again creating a new track. Shorten it to
09 4 bars. Set it to warp and loop. Drag it to 8 bars length. Place it at
bar 9 on the timeline.
Load ‘synth.m4v’, but put it in the previous track at bar 32 and
11 again at bar 53. Don’t warp or loop this yet.Yes you can put many
movie clips in the same track.
image size, frame rate, and so on. If you’re impatient,
remember that video takes longer to render than audio,
and the more you’re compressing it, the longer it takes.
Everything we’ve discussed has related to the
Arrangement View; there’s a simple reason for that. Drag a
movie onto Session View, and you’ll be advised that Live
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This all makes more sense if you have a second display or video
08 projector connected. Drag the video window to the display/
projector window, then double click it again for full screen video.
Now play through that section. You’ll see that the video in the
10 lower track takes priority. That’s how it always works with video
tracks in Live. Hmm, this is getting to be like video editing!
Double click it to see the audio waveform – it’s some speech. Try
12 dropping Live’s Ping Pong Delay on that track, set the dry/wet to
whatever sounds good to you. We can process movie audio!
can’t handle video in Session View. But it’s not all bad – it’ll
give you a chance to ditch the video content but retain the
audio which is a fast way to extract audio samples from
movies! If you really need video coming out of the Session
View, it’ll have to be via Max For Live devices like the ones I
mentioned earlier.
MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 10
MT Step-by-Step Video in live… cont’d
Warp and loop the second instance of the clip. Add a Warp Marker
13 to the end of the clip. Drag that left until it reaches the end of bar
1. Shorten the loop brace to one bar.
With these techniques, you can use Live as a basic movie editor,
15 and the video warping is a nice extra trick.You can even warp
‘silent’ movies by placing warp markers on the clip’s ‘flatline’ waveform.
To render the movie with audio, open the Export Audio/Video, and
17 make sure video is switched on.There are many available export
formats; what options you see will depend on your computer and OS.
Although Session View is a no-no, you can have a
timeline full of movie clips in Arrangement View, and flip
back to Session View to launch clips in real-time like
always. Your video output isn’t affected, as long as you’re
not launching clips in the same tracks that contain video
clips. Sometimes it’s safer to remove the clip stop buttons
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Now play that section. Not only have you made the audio play
14 faster, you’ve made the video loop and play faster with it – isn’t
that cool? This is an awesome Live feature! So much fun…
Be aware that if you execute the Collect All And Save command,
16 the movie clips will be collected as well as the audio, so you will
get larger than usual Live projects.
See more in our main text about video formats. As far as more
18 detailed audio rendering goes, we’ll be talking about the more
final stages of finishing and exporting your completed tunes next time.
in the video tracks as they appear in Session View, so you
can’t accidentally stop or launch anything in them.
This is an easy route into movie editing if you’re curious
about that, and most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. You
already have Ableton Live and a computer, and probably a
phone with a camera. So what’s stopping you? MT