Ableton Live - Comprehensive Tutorials

Tetsujin

Tetsujin

Tetsujin

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Joined
23 Oct 2002
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That London, née Brighton
I obtained an Oxygen61 keyboard and Tascam US-122L external soundcard a whiles ago, and have recently started playing about with Live 7 to try and create some musics. Ideally I'd be looking to create dubstep stuff, but any form of dance/house/trance is on the cards, if I can figure out how.

I've been using the tutorials from sonicacademy.com which are fine and dandy but don't go into much detail, after my first day of playing I've already exhausted them.

So, can anyone recommened a good comprehensive site for tutorials, or a forum for advice, specifically on Live?

My current sticking point is creating the long, undulating basslines you find with dubstep. I can generate bass frequencies, and envelope an auto-filter etc to make them undulate, but at the end of the bar/clip the note is released and a new one starts and I want it to be continuous across multiple bars/clips (when in the arrangement) instead (I think?).
 
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Yeah I've seen a few on youtube, but it's a case of, if someone on here already knows and can share the knowledge of where's good and reliable, that's infinitely preferable to trawling through potentially dozens of vids

dubstepforum looks like a good start, thanks!

Any others?
 
simisker said:
Anyway, Tetsujin: If I'm reading your post correctly, you've got, say, a 4-bar bass loop but you want that filtered over, say, 16 bars, right?

If you look at the little 'Clip' info box when in Session View, you'll see three round buttons underneath marked "L", "(musical notes)" and "E".

Clicking on "E" opens up the 'Envelopes' panel. If you switch Region/Loop to "Unlinked" you can then set the length for any parameter, filter, softsynth control etc.

If you want filter sweeps or whatever that span a number of different clips, however, I think you'll have to do that on the Arrangement View, yeah. But maybe someone with more experience knows better :)
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I think so, but it's less about filtering and more about the note not stopping and restarting. If you've heard Skream's remix of LaRoux's 'In For The Kill' (pretty hard not to have!) it seems to have a bass note playing for the whole duration, not stopping and being re-played every bar or anything, so I was wondering how that's done.

As a side issue the knobs on my keyboard aren't working with Instant Mappings for some odd reason, though I'm hitting up Ableton's own forums with that issue (as soon as they auth my account).
 
I'd experimented with Cubase before Ableton, and while that was a messy pile of gumph which crashed every few minutes for no reason, wouldn't save core configuration settings like midi mappings (even when it didn't crash), and was a messy mess, Ableton (instant mappings issue aside) worked straight out of the box and has a nice simple UI. Definitely check it out, Mr Hunt
 
Yeah I just read on the afore-linked dubstep forum that Logic is perhaps preferable to Ableton as Live's more geared to performances than recording, which version of Logic would I be looking for, for just production purposes? From Apple's site there's Logic Pro 8 and Logic Studio and Mainstage and... a lot of things I'm not entirely sure of the purpose of
 
I'm getting on ok, at the mo just trying to get to grips with all the different stuff, instruments, and what all the terminology means, and how to achieve certain effects, and then ultimately trying to figure out how to actually make a tune, heh.

Still no replies on my instant mappings issue, mind, but that's of minor concern, really.
 
MikeHunt79 said:
Have you tried asking on the Ableton forums, it seems a few people are having troubles with v8 so it could be a bug?

I've only made a few drum loops so far, I'll post some up once I get time. :)
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I'm only on v7 and yeah I did try the Ableton forums, no reply though. Considering bumping my own thread but I've managed to not do that (iirc) ever in history and don't want to start now. For the record, it's hither

Also, cool on making a few drum loops :) That's also basically as far as I've got, there's a lot to learn
 
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D'oh. So the keyboard has some sort of 'mute' function to stop the dials and sliders sending signals. I'm so blushing right now. Seems it defaults to being 'on' to prevent accidental nausing up of things.

Anyways, I watched a few tutorials on Reason on youtube today, by a guy explaining the difference between trance and prog trance, and boy, that flipping them over to access the routing thing is mighty smart. So I'm obtaining the demo of that to give it a try.
 
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