Hands On: Ableton Live 5
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

Recipe 4: Chopping a Feel (in Stereo)

The basic transform in the previous example sounds okay, but not yet inspired. To ramp up the musical interest, I suggest loading another pad--perhaps "Fizz Pad - Chords 4.alc." (You'll probably want to grab all of the MIDI notes in this pattern and drag them up by three half-steps so they'll harmonize better with the sample.) Now:

1. Pan the new track to the right, and the first pad to the left.
2. Drag across the entire rhythmic envelope shown in Figure 7 and use Ctrl-C (or Apple-C) to copy it.
3. Open up the Envelopes panel for the new track. Because this is a MIDI clip, there isn't a clip envelope to control volume, so select the Mixer Track Volume envelope.
4. Drag across the second eighth-note region to select it, and hit Ctrl-V (or Apple-V) to paste the envelope. The result should look more or less like Figure 9.

Figure 9. Pasting the rhythmic envelope into another clip an eighth-note later.

Because you've pasted the rhythm an eighth-note later than in the first pad, you'll hear a staggered rhythmic effect between the left and right channels, like this:

• Transformer Envelope 2 (404KB MP3)

Just for fun, I messed with this example a bit more by adding rhythmic delays to both pad sounds. Here's the result:

• Transformer Envelope 3 (448KB MP3)

If you have Live 5, you can download Transformer Envelope.als (16KB zip file) to inspect the edits in detail.

Recipe 5: Secret Sends and Inserts

Each Live track has a pair of send knobs, which can be used to route signal to aux-return buses A and B. If you need more than two returns, you can right-click at the top of the Session View window and choose Insert Return Track from the pop-up menu. But that will clutter up the screen with send knobs for every track, most of which may go unused.

In some circumstances a better approach is to create a normal audio track and select another audio track as the input for the new one. Just grab the pop-up menu where it says "Audio From" and choose the source track. There are three scenarios in which this may be useful:

Virtual knobs. Some third-party insert effects lack wet/dry mix knobs. By parking such an effect on a separate audio track, you put the wet amount on its own mixer channel fader. Problem solved.

Delay effects. I like to process a delayed signal differently than I process the dry signal. For example, I may run the wet output of the delay through a distortion effect, a flanger, or a filter. Putting the delay on a separate mixer channel and setting its output to 100 percent wet makes this easy. For example, here's an MP3 of the same beat, running through two separate audio tracks (panned left and right), each with its own delay, distortion, and EQ:

• Stereo Delay (192KB MP3)

Multichannel processing. With synths that have multiple outputs, you can use this routing scheme to put separate effects on each output. After instantiating a synth, choose the separate output in a new audio track, and add effects as needed. I often use separate outputs on Native Instruments Battery drum synth, for instance, to put reverb strictly on my snare. The individual pads in Live's Impulse sampler also appear in the audio-track input menu.

Recipe 6: Moving MIDI

Some MIDI sequencers let you select both notes and controller data at the same time and move them around in the edit window. This is especially handy if you've recorded a good-sounding pitch-bend and now want to move the bent note to a different beat.

Live won't let you select both notes and controller data at the same time in the clip-edit window, but there's an easy workaround:

1. Drag the clip from Session View over to the Arrangement selector button in the upper right corner of the screen. Don't release the mouse button yet. The main window will switch to Arrangement view. Now you can drag the clip to the left of the screen and park it anywhere in its original MIDI track.
2. Zoom in to view the note where the cool pitch-bend is located.
3. Drag across the note(s) you want to move.
4. Click in the clip rectangle above the MIDI notes, as shown in Figure 10, and drag the data to a new time location.
5. The previous step separates the original clip into two separate clips, which is not what we want. So shift-click to select both the original part of the clip and the part you've moved, right-click (Mac: Ctrl-click) to bring up the context menu, and choose Consolidate. (Ctrl-J/Apple-J does the same thing.)
6. Now grab the edited clip, drag it back to the upper right corner to the Session View selector (which will cause Session View to reappear), and drag it into a vacant slot in the original track. Presto--you've just moved both the notes and the associated controller data.
7. To finish the job, go back to Arrangement View and delete the clip from the track.

Figure 10. Moving a portion of a clip in the Arrangement view.