Every now and then, it comes up that you want to loop a sound without warping it. For example, you might need to loop a bunch of field recordings for an ambient performance or installation. What you want is for all of the recordings play back at their original speed regardless of their length, or […]
FOLLOW ACTION FREAKOUT: THE GRIPPING CONCLUSION
So, as you may have guessed, we’ve just set up three separate MIDI tracks which will all be sending MIDI into a single Drum Rack. Let’s take a closer look at the routing: In the second menu below MIDI To, you have a number of options for routing MIDI between tracks. For the track called […]
FOLLOW ACTION FREAKOUT: THE SEQUEL
Here’s a more advanced version of the beat variation workflow that this whole Follow Actions series started off with. Here’s we’ll get a little fancy with MIDI routing, both to make a point and also to get some nice easy to manage results. After you’ve programmed your beats and set up the Follow Actions, duplicate […]
FOLLOW ACTIONS: NEXT!
If we carry on the example from the prior tip, it’s still necessary to set follow actions for the variation clips. The idea is to have a group of clips that heavily favor the main beat, with only an occasional variation. It’s not going to work to use the original Follow Action for the 3 […]
FOLLOW ACTIONS: CUSTOMIZING THE RANDOMNESS
You can come up with some very specific strategies for random behavior by using both Chance A and Chance B of a clip’s Follow Action settings. There’s also one particular gotcha you have to look out for. Let’s say we wanted to modify the eariler beat variation tip so the main beat plays most of […]
FOLLOW ACTIONS: ANY VS. OTHER
Most of the items in the action menus are pretty self explanitory. However, a few deserve special mention. For Follow Action randomness, you have two choices: Any and Other. Both launch a random clip from the current group. Any is a true random choice because it includes the clip that’s currently playing as a possible […]
ABOUT LEGATO
A key part of the drum variations tip from a few days ago is the use of the Legato switch. If you create a similar set of clips, but don’t turn on Legato, you’ll still get the contstant variation of clips being launched, but musically the result will be quite different. This is because Legato […]
FOLLOW ACTION FREAKOUT, pt. 2
Ain’t no party like a Live Tips party. Just sayin. Once you’ve got your beat variations dancing around using Follow Actions, the next step is to Extract Chains: In the above example, I’ve created a fairly simple beat using only three drums – you don’t need anything complicated to get great results with this technique. […]
OH GOD, MY BRAIN HURTS
So, here we are in the last month…being at this point in the process reminds me of the email reply I got from Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music when I told him I was going to write 365 Ableton Live Tips in a year: “You are completely insane.” Surprisingly, the project has been a […]
VOCODER: THE SNARERERIZER
If you’ve spent any time with Live’s Vocoder, you’ve probably noticed that in it’s default state, it tends to lend a snare drum like quality to anything it touches. That’s because it’s default carrier is Noise – a key component to any synthesized snare drum sound. Unlike using a straight noise generator, however, the vocoder […]
