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Advanced Techniques: Modular Components

All right, welcome tio able to live fundamentals, advanced techniques splattered on remix. All right, so we're going to be talking about some of my favorite stuff about a bolton and what I waste my time doing for hours on end. Um, these air the I e if you want a fancy name for it, we'll call him the generative and modular utilities of able to live. So we're going to discuss building the tool set, saving out presets and saving out groups of clips, and basically building these sort of modular building blocks that you can combine to create sets and develop your performance, and also there's some different ways that you can export them and compress them in some little tidbits on how you can share these projects with friends or people that you're working with on music. S so we're going to look at some instrument audio effect and middie racks today, so racks are basically, ah, way that able to combines lots of different many instruments, whether their third party plug ins or, uh, soft sense ...

or samplers that table tennis created excuse me, and they also you, khun, you can basically change, select up to one hundred twenty eight of them, you can make them velocity sensitive with drummer acts, and I and you, khun, can also change lots of many effects and create all kinds of different combinations, and you can also automate the changing of those combinations so it's just an incredibly powerful way to approach making music and lots of fun, too, because you get so many options, and this gives you the power to control them. So, um, going to talk about assigning actions to clips and also and we're going to do something called pocketing with llegado mode, uh, there's another some more functionality called unlinked envelopes, and these unlinked envelopes basically allow you to extend the automation since from inside of a clip longer than the actual duration of the audio that's looping in the club so you could set the length of the envelope or the automation to be thirty bucks, thirty two bars, and you're only looping and aybar clip, and you can set those independently. Actually, um, we're going to talk about different ways toe launch and kwan ties the clips, so one cool thing that live does is it actually snaps the your percussion to the grid, what to whatever increments that you specify. So if you're drumming and I like to work it either and eighth noora sixteenth, and because that lines it up just perfectly to the sound, if you're pretty much anywhere within the ballpark of hitting the rhythm so it's almost drunk proof almost and you can actually just uh, you know, you can you can go through the grid and you can play drums and you can perform them out with the different kinds of colonization. You can also set up groups of clips to follow each other and you can so you can set the relationship to be random, or you could set the relationship to be in the next order, and we'll take a look at all of the operations that those deal so you can also save groups of clips by dragging track dragging and dropping them back into your browser. And, um, it's really easy and it's just a really great thing to start practicing right away if you are taking the time to bounce this stuff out because a lot of this does require some some detail and some, uh, sort of visual programming per se because, you know, it's it takes a little bit to sort of dial in the values, and it does take the time and it's totally worth it once you get it going. So my first tip is to make a habit of saving the patches. That way you can access your ideas quickly, and you can also hot swap the ideas say you've already got some stuff mapped out or you're happy with a setting of a filter or a telephone or something like that that way you can you can cycle through your your browser and you can swap out the instrument another advantage of saving all of your sets and your patches is that you can build your own recognizable sound like a signature sound and develop your you khun develop that and I think that that's a big difference between a lot of artists these days and a lot of the ones that are really known for their music are recognizable by what you hear and because everyone knows you know whether he invented or not everyone knows what a skrillex bases so I mean and he did it he carved a sound out for himself and that's very respectable so one cool thing is by using your own tools and and continuing to use them and refine them you can know I think that that will eventually lead to a unique sound and so you can also the cool thing about live is that it incorporates the studio environment with performance so you can apply a studio tools from your tracks and those those modular building blocks to your performance as well. So just keep building that library and saving your patches every time we make them and whenever you finish with a project go through and make sure you save all the good stuff that you've spent hours making because you can reuse it all right? So first we're going to talk about the wrecks drum racks many racks and instrument racks so if you do a command g on any instrument in this case this is an operator it will make it into iraq and here lives the chain I can also bring in other sounds other like I could I could learn analog in there I could put a collision in I could load an electric piano and that's going to sound terrible and so actually it's not that loud so just checking the scale here changes back to wei actually be in it s so if we go in here uh I'll see on my slides here I already told you about many racks and xm iraq's and audio effect tracks so um waken start with midi fact tracks so many affect cracks are very similar in that you can change them to uh you can chain all the many effects very similarly to those an instrument racks so in just like any of the other acts you khun select multiple media effects or just one into a command g and it'll select it'll bring them in so it looks like it actually on lee made um I might have only had that our scale effect selected so what I could do I could drag that randomizer actually I want this random either tow live before to see my r r r e flat minor d sharp minor uh scale scale effect so basically what I've got going on here is I am sending random midi notes into a scale effect and the still effect is filtering those notes to be in the key of d sharp minor or a flat minor so so I can play a one note melody so I'm just pressing one button right now it's doing a sort of round robin thing I can switch that to more random it's not too bad I mean it's not exactly resolving you know, the melody or our musical phrase or anything but but it sounds pretty good at least you're in the right key um so basically you can and you could take variations of this so I can duplicate this guy for me actually named this this is our random honor so helps okay, so well that's not excuse me it's not a material it's a flat later okay, so I'm just going to do a variation on that first patch so I'm going to go to the chain selector so there's there's the key range there's a velocity range so you can define so if I strike this one note if I strike it hard or by strike it between the values of sixty four and one twenty seven I can actually it'll it'll trigger the rack that I specify if I trigger it softer, it'll trigger the other one that I specify in that range um you can you can also so this is the chain selector and basically it just allows you to, uh, to put, uh, one it's put in effect up to one hundred twenty eight effects in here, and then there's a selector that you can actually midi map and you can use that to shift an alternate between the group, these groups of many effects. So I'm just going to do a variation on the second one, I put it on value, our first effect is on value zero, and our second effect is currently on value one and I'm just going to go in here and make it end it on that I'm gonna put in a mess like the right thing, so I want right now, e I wanted to be lower, so I'm gonna tio traction value so I'm switching the chain selector back to the first one on and now I'm going to a lower a lower octave and I just basically just edited the random effect so that's one another variation than I can, but I can there so and you can do this with any of the many effects I could even take an arc educator and I can program this to live on the third value or value many cc number two move my chain selector and all this is happening with one note we're just kind of a cool thing, which which also means that you could stick put this in a drum rack as well you could nest this, um this middie you could nest this instrument rack and mid iraq together and put that inside the cell of a drum rack and trigger uh that with one note and play it a different player different melody line with by just sort of like a drumming while while you're drumming so it's really kind of another unique way to get sort of, um, tow add some some melody or to add some notes to maybe some drumming if your hands are busy doing something else so you can and you can assign different these different values to the mac rose in the media fact iraq so I'm going to I'm gonna map skill and one scale in to get that and the step distance or the amount of steps in the aarp educator to macro one and no matter which one which of these stories I've selected in the chain, it'll still change that value for all three instruments really powerful and useful tool especially if you want to um maybe your maybe your you've got a middie affect her act that lives on one of your self sense and as you play through your set, you want to change the scale key to the correct the correct key signature well, you can just basically automate the the chain selector to switch to a different scale and so that you can modulate and start playing in another scale so I would be really useful if you're changing songs or something like that or maybe changing song parts and you you wanted apply a different media factor or do something different really useful like that? S o the zones are these the keys owns the velocity the chain and then you can the high just this hides it away but you've just got the mac the the macro view at that point we talked about making one that melodies and you can also do chord progressions um with this you can you could use a another example would be you take a court effect rename that are cord and I'm going to make a minor triad based on that so I don't know exactly how this sound is going to be with a cord and reports so it's just tested out you're bad teo so I could even take a randomizer and are e flat minor scale and pasted in there in front of the court now I can play with I don't know how um how much you want to play random chord progressions but it might be good for generating ideas though that's the kind of thing you could set up an automated recording of going a jug comeback and you've got your music. Um, so I'm going to see what it sounds like a round robin. Cool, and you can. You mean, you can all be also, you can adjust, which notes it plays in the different scale degrees. Aziz, cycle through as it does this sort of round robin effect, you can adjust that inside the scale filter.