work with audio clips just like MIDI

phonographist · Post by **phonographist** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 12:11 pm

I apologize in advance if this topic already has been touched, I just found it kinda hard to search for.

Well, I am not a owner of Live, although I'm thinking about it. I have tried it out and a lot of the stuff that's there is really good for my kind of music making (I make sample based hip hop beats and that kind of stuff, i work almost exclusively with samples).

Although there are some stuff that makes me reluctant to get into it totally.
I can't really see a way of working with audio clips in the same way as MIDI. If you bear with me, I'll try to explain what i mean.

It seems that most of the way you work with audio in ableton is with loops. And the problem is that I really rarely take 2 bars and loop them up. Instead I take different short clips from the same and also different sources (records, that is) and put them together in the way i want. You know, chop the suff up basically. Sometimes it's just one tone from something there or a snare from something there.

The problem I have with Live is that i can't really see a way to take different audio clips and put them into a pattern, like you can do with MIDI. The way I have been working so far is of course with software samplers (kontakt mainly) and "playing" differnt parts of a sample on different keys. This way to do it is okay, but it feels like a detour. You should be able to do this in any DAW, it feels like, but you can't...

I hope someone understands what I mean, and if someone knows how to do someting like this, no one will be happier to go and purchase a copy of Live than me...

six_o_clock_crow · Post by **six_o_clock_crow** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 12:43 pm

Hi there

I think you want to look at 'arrangement view.'

The default view you see when you fire up Live is 'session view.' This is great for launching clips, experimenting with arrangements and playing in a live situation. For more traditional DAW/sequencer arranging you want to be in 'arrangement view.'

If I understand you correctly, you want to take samples of kicks/snares/hats etc and build beats up by placing them on a timeline? You can do this in arrangement view. To get to arrangement view, press 'TAB' or click on the horizontal line type icon in the top right of the screen.

My instructions might not be clear enough, so check out arrangement view in the manual.

Hope this helps

Leon

phonographist · Post by **phonographist** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:02 pm

yes, i know about the arrangement view, and the thing is that i doesn't seem possible to build patterns from audio there either.
you can of course edit audio like any normal DAW here (well, almost), but you still can't group different edits into patterns, so that you easily could build a song, right? that's what I mean with working with audio just like MIDI, so you can repeat a pattern easily, without having to copy and paste it over and over...

monobeach · Post by **monobeach** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:10 pm

I don't know, if I understand completely, but anyway:

what do you mean with grouping different edits into a pattern?

from what i understand, "consolidate" would be your friend (Ctrl/J): groups different audio files on a track into one clip; to repeat this "pattern", just drag its right corner to the right (or select it and press (Ctrl/D) for duplicating

I don't chop up samples, but maybe there's some information in this thread:

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=102306

phonographist · Post by **phonographist** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:18 pm

monobeach: you kinda understand me right. but the thing is that i want to be able to still edit inside the pattern. consolidate is a destructive mixdown, right?

the thing is that cubase has a nice way of doing this (and i know cubase and live are very different, but still):
when you have a bunch of midi notes (for example prorammed drums) and want to repeat them, you copy the MIDI "part" (you can ghost copy so they all act the same when editing). And for audio, you can just select a couple of clips, choose to put the into a audio "part" and they act very much like a midi part (you can ghost copy etc).

The MIDI side of ableton works very similar to cubase's (you have your patterns that you can repeat and so on) But it seems you can't do this at all with audio it seems.

Zerobae · Post by **Zerobae** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:24 pm

what if you just work with midi then? drag the slices and one-shots and stuff you sampled each on its own cell in a drum rack and use midi clips to trigger the cells.

(if you drag audio on a cell in a drum rack, live automatically creates a simpler on this cell and puts your sample in there.)

edit: if you're not yet familiar with drum racks, you can watch a movie here:
http://www.ableton.com/_common/download ... _racks.mov

phonographist · Post by **phonographist** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:31 pm

zerobae: yeah, that is of course the easy thing to do, and it's really nice that Live is so integrated that you just can drop audio from the timeline into the samplers and everything. but it still would be really nice and easier to do small edit-changes if you could do it more directly, you know...
You know like, if I have built together a nice groove from different pieces of some song and decide that i want to put in another little part from somewhere else, i have to cut out that piece, put it into a sampler and add a new note, kind of a detour to just drag a piece of a audio file into the same place... and it would be easier of course to drag the start of a audio clip backwards in time with the audio in the same place musically...

4.33 · Post by **4.33** » Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:45 pm

i might be missing the point completely
but you can highlight a chopped up pattern then ctrl+drag it anywhere else