Tutorial using Ableton Live 11 Lite with Ski Oakenfull - part of the Music Radar series
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TechTranscript
00:00 Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.
00:05 So in the last video I showed you how to add some chords and a melody to the track.
00:09 In this video we're going to add a vocal sample which is going to be the final layer.
00:13 I'll be introducing the concept of sampling using a device in Live called Simpler which allows you to get really creative with audio.
00:21 So a simple definition of sampling is where we can take an audio recording and we can manipulate it and play it on the keyboard up and down so it changes pitch.
00:31 And in Live Lite we have a device called Simpler which we can use for this purpose.
00:35 There are also lots of presets that come with Simpler with loads of great sounds, bass sounds and effects all made up of samples so I thoroughly recommend you go and check those out.
00:45 Now first of all where can we get some vocal samples?
00:48 Well I found this great webpage here, it's actually on the Music Radar website and it's 1338 free female vocal samples.
00:57 So if we just scroll down you can see some examples and then there's the link there.
01:03 So download those and I'm just going to show the desktop now.
01:11 There we go and this will be the folder that you get and you can see it's divided up into different genres, rock and trance and house and disco.
01:24 But this is where we can use Live's Places feature.
01:27 We can drag any folder of audio samples into the Places area so it's then accessible in our track and in any future projects we work on as well.
01:36 So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag this over to this area here, click on OK and you can see the folder has appeared and then you can also see all the different categories.
01:51 Great so let's just make this full screen again.
01:56 I'm going to create another MIDI track, there we go and we can actually delete that audio track, we don't need that anymore.
02:06 And let's just have a little listen through to some of these samples.
02:19 OK there's some good ones there. Keep going down.
02:36 Oh I really like that one there, that's really nice.
02:38 OK so how can we get that into Simpler?
02:41 Well we can just go over to our instruments and I'm just going to drag a Simpler onto this track here.
02:47 There we go, it's loaded up and you can see there it says Drop Sample Here.
02:51 So let's go back here and then let's drop it on. There we go.
02:58 And I can now play the sample on the keyboard.
03:05 OK so let's just play the first scene and see if we can make it work with our track.
03:18 OK that sounds really good. One thing you'll notice though is that as I play it up and down the keyboard it's changing the timing so the higher I play it the faster it plays.
03:31 So in order to fix this we can use warping again. So you just click on this warp button here and just like that mini-log part that I put down in the previous video,
03:41 we can select Complex because it's not a beat. We want to use a warp algorithm that works for this kind of sample.
03:49 We can also change the start point of this sample as well.
03:53 So there's a bit of a breath there.
03:59 Let's just make it a bit closer to the H of holding.
04:05 OK so let's play this again and listen to what it sounds like.
04:19 Great that's sounding really good. So I'm just going to bring down the level slightly and also that synth part as well.
04:26 So let's just try recording a few variations of this part.
04:44 That's very simple for that first scene. So let's quantize it. Command U and let's just give it the groove.
04:52 And let's go to the next scene now.
04:58 Maybe let's play that lower note to start off with. OK let's record it in.
05:16 OK quantize it again and give it the groove.
05:24 Now I'm just going to tighten up slightly the start point again just to make sure it's a bit more in time.
05:37 Great and then for the third scene which is a little bit funkier.
05:45 Let's try playing something a bit more rhythmical. Let's just play along first. Have a go.
05:56 OK let's record that in.
06:11 Let's quantize it and add the swing groove.
06:22 So this note here is just slightly too long so what we can do is just let's just zoom in so we can see it.
06:29 And we can just hover over the end of that event there that note and we can just drag it to the left just to make it a little bit shorter.
06:45 Great so we've got three vocal riffs there over our three different scenes.
06:51 OK great so that's all the main elements of the track added.
06:55 In the next video I'm going to show you how to add some audio effects and then arrange these parts into a final track that we can export as an audio file and share.