Ableton Forum

hi
i enjoy using ableton for electronic music making,
and im also a guitarist, today i had a nice drum beat going in ableton,
and i picked up my bass guitar, i recorded into ableton, thinking ill
make some good loop points of guitar bits, i edited the audio in soundforge,
and when it was transferred back to ableton, it was warped and the tempo was
twisted and time stretched. i could turn it off, but then it doesnt loop.

i plan on recording much more guitar in near future, wondering now which application
to use, as i have pro tools and logic too. but i hate pro tools for midi programming
and logic is difficult with audio for me.
im starting to really enjoy using ableton, just wondered if im missing some
obvious guitar orientated techniques to use and or whether ableton is suited for
jamming and building up guitar ideas.

not sure if i can record in arrangement view, and its unwarped, like a normal
linear recorder. unwarped clip, copied and pasted multiple times...

my aim is simple, just get a click track going or basic drum beat, to play in time,
record bass guitar or electric, edit good loop, get the loop going, jam on top
with guitar, record that, same thing, edit, loop, finished. then can edit further
and tamper with sounds later on.

there does seem to be some exciting options for experimenting after though,
like with making clips for each chord or note, and trying diff launch sequences

thanks for any advice and help given.

Hi Bob123,

I record guitars both into session and arrange view.

In arrange I jam along with my click or superior drummer. Making sure that in preferences that the default warp is set to repitch.
Arm your track and press record. F9 arms your global record. Space bar to start and stop. Shift + Spacebar to play from where you stopped.

Once you have selected the say 8 or 4 bar chunk you like you can do Ctrl E to Split (or drag the starts and ends of the clip). Then select the 4 or 8 bar clip and press ctrl J. This will consolidate the audio to just the 8 bars. Turn on "loop" in the clip properties and you can drag it out. Remember that consolidating will only keep what you consolidate, if you want to keep other areas of the clip make a copy or duplicate the track.

Session recording is easy, arm your track, in preferences you can enable 1 bar count in, record your take. Press stop. In clip view move the loop braces around as desired. Read the manual regarding how the braces work. In session veiw whilst recording you can click on the "play" button of your clip as its recording and it will switch straight to playback acording to how you have the global quantization set. You can midi assign this to to maybe a foot switch.

Theres a lot more to it than that but I hope that gets you started.

Ableton is great for laying down ideas quickly and in session view you can flick back and forth between sections etc.

Session view with a guitar is absolutely a blast. It's one of my favorite ways to come up with ideas in Live.

Basically what he said up there, but you're going to want to have multiple tracks ready to be armed for looping multiple parts.

Looper could similarly work for you, but I've found it's not as useful as having 2 or 3 or 5 separate guitar tracks ready to go.
If you're using a plugin like Guitar Rig, you may not have the CPU to do it with multiple instances without noticeable latency.

If that's the case, I would recommend having a single guitar track with an instance of GR on it, and then setting up multiple tracks so that their audio inputs are set to receive the output from the GR-enabled track.

agent314 wrote:Session view with a guitar is absolutely a blast. It's one of my favorite ways to come up with ideas in Live.

Basically what he said up there, but you're going to want to have multiple tracks ready to be armed for looping multiple parts.

Looper could similarly work for you, but I've found it's not as useful as having 2 or 3 or 5 separate guitar tracks ready to go.
If you're using a plugin like Guitar Rig, you may not have the CPU to do it with multiple instances without noticeable latency.

If that's the case, I would recommend having a single guitar track with an instance of GR on it, and then setting up multiple tracks so that their audio inputs are set to receive the output from the GR-enabled track.

This is what I do. But make sure 'monitor' on the receiving tracks is set to 'off'. Otherwise when you record the part it will sound louder than when you switch to playback.