Ableton Forum

Hi all,

I have tried searching for this solution for many months but haven't seemed to find a streamlined way to do this.

I have multiple hardware synthesizers that are connected to my PC via USB Midi. I also have the Ableton Push 2 because I want to be able to play and record my ideas live without fiddling around with a mouse and disrupting my flow.

What I would like to do is be able to play my music live, and whenever I hit the record button for an instrument, I want Ableton to save both the MIDI data coming from that instrument (so that I can remember what notes I played) and I also want it to save the audio. This way, when I playback the clips in session view even at a later date, the audio is preserved even if my synthesizers are off or if I never saved the patch I was working on. But if I forget the notes I played, I can always refer back to the MIDI sequence. Or, if I come up with a patch, I can play the MIDI again and choose to overwrite the audio with my newly created patch.

Currently it is cumbersome: for each synthesizer, I have to create one MIDI track AND one audio track. Every time I want to record that instrument, I have to hit record on both the MIDI track and the Audio track. And as my ableton set becomes complex sometimes the MIDI track's clips don't lineup with the audio track's clips, so it's not easy to remember which MIDI notes refers to which audio I played.

Any suggestions? Is what I am doing possible? It doesn't seem like the "External Instrument" has this capability, either...
Also, I don't care to control my instruments via MIDI. I just want to capture their MIDI information while also capturing their audio information.

Any advice, even if it is a workaround that streamlines this workflow, would be very much appreciated!

Thank you!

I'm no expert in this field as I don't have any external synths to record but MIDI and Audio require separate tracks in Live but it should be possible to record both at once, but you will have to set things up correctly first.

This is all off the top of my head but I am sure someone can jump in and correct me if I am wrong...

The "External Instrument" device isn't quite the thing you need. It is close, but that takes the MIDI from your track and sends it out to your hardware and receives the audio back from your hardware but cannot record the audio on the same track.

What you would need to do (for each synth you want to jump between) is create a MIDI and an AUDIO track for each. Set the MIDI IN for the track to be the midi from your synth then on the audio track, set the audio input that the synth is connected to.

Next you will need to ARM both tracks so it can record both inputs. You should now be able to play the midi notes and hear the audio and see the meters in Live reflecting everything.

Once ready, activate clips to record onto (or enable arrangement record) then start playing and it *should* capture both them midi and audio from the synth.

Should work based on what I can kind of see in my head but u'd need to set it up and test it out from my vague overview.

Hey, thanks so much for the reply!

I think I have managed to accomplish what you described below, but I'm facing two challenges which I'm hoping can be solved:

1) Instead of having to always hit the record button for both the MIDI and Audio clips, I wish I could just hit the record button once so it records for both tracks. I tried grouping the MIDI and AUDIO tracks into a single group, but there is no single record button that appears for a group.

2) When using the Ableton push session view, all the MIDI tracks create clutter because they double the number of tracks I need, making it difficult to easily manage my synths when trying to playback audio clips live. But if I try to keep all the AUDIO tracks together and have all the MIDI tracks separate, then I can't easily hit the record button for both an AUDIO track and its corresponding MIDI track.

I hope this makes sense..

Yeah I don’t have solutions for those, sorry.

I think you’re doing it the only way feasible. Just organize and name your tracks better. There may be DAWs that will record both to the same track, but I’m not sure. Bitwig and Reaper come to mind.

Also, there’s a setting for exclusive arming, though I don’t know if this affects Push or not.

Thanks so much everybody! I think the takeaway is that there is no specific feature that lets me get all of this done with one click, but I can use your suggestions to streamline my workflow a bit.

I noticed that on the Push, if I double click on the name of a group (the button just below the LCD screen), the Push automatically expands the group. So, if I do a good job of having 1 group of 2 tracks for each synth, and have clear naming conventions, then the fastest way to record MIDI and Audio on the push would be:

1) double tap a group name to expand it
2) use two fingers to select an empty clip on both the MIDI and Audio track so they both start recording
3) when I’m done recording, I can double tap the group to collapse it again to reduce clutter.

I’ll try this out, I think it will help a lot. Thank you!!

On a related note - how do professionals do it? When coming up with a song using external synths and creating some complex tune or series of arpeggiations, how do they remember what they did? Fine, maybe they used MIDI to remember for next time. But then how do they preserve the audio that they generated from the synth? What if it was a random patch they came up with but didn’t save?

The beauty of software is that I can load up an old project at any moment and pick up where I left off, make changes, and have access to all the original notes and sounds I made. It seems to be cumbersome when dealing with hardware.

Or maybe even the professionals don’t always have access to being able to recreate their own songs after they are published?

Did you try the grouping idea? I just started rebuilding my studio and all of a sudden I have to find a way to deal with this. I don’t like having 2 tracks for each thing.

Yesterday before I fell asleep this was my last thought. Need to group both midi and audio into one and then only put the effects on the group channel. Then when I’m mixing I can just use 1 fader for each synth. When recording, I expand the group.

One more thing I want to try tomorrow is putting all the midi tracks on A and the audio tracks on B. That way I can easily fade back and forth from all live midi to all audio.

Anyone else have some ideas? Everyone must be dealing with this. It seems like a combo midi/audio channel would be really helpful! Especially with the new resurgence in hardware!

Having used DAWs which offer a combined MIDI/audio channel (Cakewalk Sonar) I really don’t like that setup and am much happier with separate MIDI and audio tracks. I don’t even use the external instrument plugin, it’s fine for one instrument but when you’ve half a dozen it makes MIDI and audio routing less visible “at a glance” in session view.

I find grouping the MIDI and related audio tracks works well enough for me up to the point I decide to save and rename the project then delete the MIDI tracks and mix with just the audio tracks present.

I'm also using two tracks (midi + audio) with a group track where I put my fx.
On the midi one I use an external audio effect with audio input from my synth and on the audio track I set input from the midi track output, with monitoring off. That's necessary to have zero ms latency in your audio recording. Live automatically compensates the latency of your system with external audio effect / external instrument. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQkzBB6Szc. It's great especially when you quantize your midi and record again.

NB : I had some ms of jitter on the audio recording, jitter is coming from midi over usb to the synth. I solved it by using an USAMO device.

Triggering two recording at the same time is cumbersome without a controller. With push it's ok. I wrote a remote script to do that but I don't know if any are available for this.. It would be a killer feature for Live though. With my script I'm also able to switch mute / monitoring states when arming / unarming tracks and it makes everything so smooth.

PS : Audio clip tails. This is a problem I had and it's a bit technical but i believe any one recording hardware synths loop with high or medium release time will encounter it. How do you manage the clip tail then so that you can both play the clip in one shot with the clip tail AND loop the clip but still with the tail playing ? (meaning not having the loop start dry which sounds horrible).

I never read posts about this, but I imagine people are doing something like this, so I'll explain my approach
(I'm assuming you have midi clip of say 4 bars and want to bounce it to you audio track. Let's say the audio tail lasts one bar)

The only solution to this is recording the audio tail in a second audio track. Like this you can play the tail after every end of the normal audio clip.
You'll get natural sounding loops and a normal audio tail on the last loop.
Every other solution including only one audio track will not work in both cases because a clip cannot be played simultaneously at different playing positions.
This solution works well in arrangement with a little editing of both recorded audio clips. In session view I would not know how to do it without a remote script.

bxn wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 04, 2021 12:38 pm

Every other solution including only one audio track will not work in both cases because a clip cannot be played simultaneously at different playing positions.
This solution works well in arrangement with a little editing of both recorded audio clips. In session view I would not know how to do it without a remote script.

Doesn’t having the wet effects on the group solve a lot of these issues? Whether the clip loops or stops, the wet tail is still passing through the group bus…

Another workaround that might suit your workflow is: go to Preferences > Record, Warp and Launch and turn on "Start recording on scene launch".

You can then Arm both the midi and audio tracks at the same time (holding cmd/ctrl to select both) and hit the scene launch button on the right hand side.

This will record both the audio and midi tracks at the same time.

If you don't want to hold cmd or ctrl to arm 2 tracks you can turn off Exclusive Arm in the same preferences page as above.

Tested on Live 12 only.