How dow I stutter a beat or tone?

[soupking]

Like, I imagine it's a relatively easy thing to do, but what's the most useful/flexible one in turns of down the road use?

There's got to be a kind of science as well as art to flipping on and of a switch really fast.

What's the best way? Just plain volume? Anybody with me on this one or can help me out?

Peace,
-soupking

[Lo-Fi Massahkah]

There's a brand new Live device called "beat repeat". It'll do what you're after. I bet it's mentioned in detail in the manual.

.m

[soupking]

You mean as an integral part of newer Ableton versions?

I only have Ableton 5.something w/ Rosetta nods.

[Jarvisimon]

Like, I imagine it's a relatively easy thing to do, but what's the most useful/flexible one in turns of down the road use?

There's got to be a kind of science as well as art to flipping on and of a switch really fast.

What's the best way? Just plain volume? Anybody with me on this one or can help me out?

Peace,
-soupking

I think you're talking about gating/ducking.

Add a gate onto the channel you want to be affected (this can be either midi or audio). It works great on vocals and other sustained sounds (pads, strings etc).

Then create another channel, again either midi or audio - I generally use a midi channel with a drum machine on it, (this second channel can be muted if you don't wish to hear it, as it's only really used to trigger the gate). Create a clip on this drum machine track and draw in some notes on the kick drum.

Now on the first channel, open the gate effect and click on the small triangular arrow to the left of the word "gate", it should now display the side chain settings, Turn on the side chain and direct the "audio from" box towards the drum machine channel.

You should now hear the first channel being muted by the beats drawn in on the drum machine lane.

Play around with the gate settings (gain, dry/wet, threshold, attack, hold and release) until you get the effect you want.

This is just one way of using the gate.

Also, many other Ableton effects have this side chaining capability, experiment with it, as it's the key to many production techniques.

[Jekblad]

for straight stutters use Auto-pan, especially if there is pitched material that needs to continue to be heard, BECAUSE

beatrepeat grabs a small portion of the audio and then plays it back to use in the user determined time. So if there is a chord change after the point the audio is recorded, the BR will play back the wrong chord.

i'm pretty sure BR is available in Live 5. Learn it well, it's extremely useful in TONS of situations even pitched materials.

EDIT watch this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PRqQz6SGIA