Adding a click

[Dirtweed420]

HI Guys, I am creating scratch tracks for the real studio and my band needs to have a click as a part of the final product. I am wondering if there is a quick easy way to do this that is eluding me, I am totally amateur, and I am having issues adding a hi hat clip and looping it to create the track...

thanks for all the help!

-Greehorn

[nedmech]

You can always use Live's internal metronome:
https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/recor ... ng-in-sync

But for live work, this is how I've done it for most of my projects:

• Create a new MIDI track named CLICK
• Add an Impulse instrument to the MIDI track
• Add a couple click sounds you like to the Impulse slots. I like to use a different sound for the downbeat and the rest of the beats. I sometimes like to include basic metronome beeps, drum/hat sounds, woodblocks, shakers - it's up to preference at that point.
• Create a 1-bar (or whatever works for the song) MIDI clip in the CLICK track and make sure the LOOP setting is ON.
• Populate the beats in the MIDI clip as needed. I sometimes add the subdivisions using a shaker or tambourine if we're playing a slow tempo. You can also add off-beats or back-beats as the song meter dictates. It's super-flexible when you set it up this way.
• Use the MIDI clip with the rest of the tracks:
  • If you're in Arrangement view, just take and stretch the clip to the duration of the tracks. Since it's defined as a 1-bar loop, it will automatically repeat every bar.
  • If you're in Session view, just fire it off with the rest of the track clips in the scene - it will keep looping underneath of them on it's own.

Hope that makes sense. Ask if you need clarification on anything.

[Stromkraft]

[*]Create a 1-bar (or whatever works for the song) MIDI clip in the CLICK track and make sure the LOOP setting is ON.

I'd advise against 1-bar loops, also for audio, as making an eight bar loop out of the 1 bar makes it quite a bit less likely that Live doesn't act up under critical load. For some reason Live doesn't like short loops and can seemingly out of blue drag at loop point. While this doesn't happen often it's not something you want at all in a click track. This also happens with longer loops, but in my experience very less frequent than with shorter.

Note that most of the repetitions it works out as intended. But dragging the audio is not acceptable even in 1 repetition out of 10.000 IMHO.

[nedmech]

I'd advise against 1-bar loops, also for audio, as making an eight bar loop out of the 1 bar makes it quite a bit less likely that Live doesn't act up under critical load.

I've guess I've been lucky to have not encountered this yet! I typically always use 1-bar loops for my click since most of the arrangements I have to deal with are not particularly consistent in the number of measures-per-section of the song, and it means I don't have to fill in 8 bars of the pattern or tweak 8 bars if I want a slightly different pattern. I know using an audio loop would be less load, but leaving it MIDI leaves me more flexibility to tweak the click in a live performance setting. I'll keep an ear out for the short loops dragging. Thanks for the heads-up, Stromkraft!