Ableton Forum

So I'm new to Ableton (using 8 ) and DAWs in general, forgive the newbieness of these questions.

In a loop, the notes (or at least beats) in a loop have fixed relation to each other as they were recorded. So as you mess with BPM and loops, you'll distort the sound, no? Doesn't this make loops pretty difficult to manage? How do I know for sure that when I purchase loops online, that they'll work in my projects? I feel like I just need to use individual instrument samples, and sequence them myself to be positive I'm not going to get loops at 180 bpm that are unusable in the music I want to make. Finally, for loops and effects, I'm stuck with applying affects to the loop as a whole, correct? If I want individual sections of the loop to have different effects, I have to slice it up into smaller loops (or individual samples)?

Samples: if I record a single note from a trumpet, for example, can Ableton transpose the single note to others? How far can it go before the sample starts to distort? Can you record multiple notes and have Ableton interpolate between them? What is the best way to sample an instrument for use in Ableton?

Let's take a simple example: I want to record a shaker that I have, and say I record a couple measures at 100bpm, and want to use it in my 120bmp song. Does Ableton know how to auto adjust for this? What kind of control do I have over all this? Is it better to record one or two individual "beats" of the shaker and have Ableton sequence it?

Thanks in advance.

have you seen demos of ableton? Time stretching is one of the reason's why it is so popular. If you have entire songs and are trying to reduce it by 100 BPM you might hear some artifacts but generally anything percussion related you will not hear any difference.

kanuck wrote:have you seen demos of ableton? Time stretching is one of the reason's why it is so popular. If you have entire songs and are trying to reduce it by 100 BPM you might hear some artifacts but generally anything percussion related you will not hear any difference.

I've worked through a few, but like I said, I'm new to DAWs in general, and it's all rather overwhelming.

Still, the question about the shaker stands. A WAV is a WAV, with no information about BPM or anything other than the waveform. Will Ableton automatically fit my 100BPM 2 bar shaker loop to my track? What if I'm not metronomic? Handling this is a mystery to me.

ableton is quite good with automatically finding the beats in a wave file especially something straight like a shaker. If it doesn't seem to fit to your ears you can always manually stretch the audio to grid which is something I've never done before but many people here have. Personally I'm a visual learner and so watching youtube videos have helped me quite a bit.

Live scans wavs for rapid changes in amplitude (transients) and uses these as a guide to how to organise the warping of the wav to fit in with the bpm you want to work at. You can influence this process significantly. If you want to apply different effects to compoents within loops you'll have to tease them apart in one of two fundamental ways.
One. You create multiple tracks for the same loop. Each track has its own effect chain. You chop out the bits you dont want effects on.
Two. You use paralell processing on the wave, with one chain being the unaffected signal and the other chain (or return) having a filter on it that cuts out the frequencies... high, low, whatever that you don't want to be affected.
Lastly... the question about how to set up a sampler to play a range of notes relates to a whole field of activity called multisampling... searches on that will tell you too much to handle in one go.
Your entire approach sounds really instrumental, I recommend you learn as much about using simpler/sampler as you can... since these are really good ways to take control of samples in live. Slice to midi is also really handy.

Thanks, oddstep. I'm an acoustic musician who has waited all too long to get into digital audio.

Another quick question: I've dropped a sample (actually a 2 beat piano loop) into Simpler, and as I transpose the sample, the beats play closer together. Is there a way to transpose samples up and down the scale without any time dilation?

Whats going on with that piano phrase accelerating as pitch increases is reflecting the basic relationship between playback speed and frequency/pitch. A single cycle of a sine wave played at 440hz (440 times a second), is an octave higher than the same wave shape played 220 times a second. To break the relationship between loop length, pitch and playback speed you'll need to get into timestretching. This isn't very easy to do with simpler. Its easier with sampler and audio clips were made for it- particularly the complex or tone modes.... maybe you could make something playable using midimapping of a keyrange to a single clip... particularly if the launch mode is right. Its not something I do, I use sampler with timestretching from a beat synced lfo that is modulating sample start position.