The solution? Simply hold down the Alt key while drawing your envelope to deactivate snap, enabling the manual entry of high-resolution curves.įor much finer control of Live's mixer and device parameters than you get by just dragging them with the mouse, hold down the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (PC) key while making your adjustments - total precision! 8. When drawing automation with the pencil tool, the envelopes' breakpoints will snap to the grid - great for rhythmic work, but not so useful for those smooth filter sweeps. Track and Scene names in Live are straightforward text fields, just like in any application, so they can be Tab/Shift-Tabbed through editing one by one - no clicks required. You can also use this feature to send the output from individual Drum Rack Chains to Live's main Return channels - something that we're quite surprised isn't a standard feature of Drum Racks anyway. Want to get some hi-hat bleed in there too? No problem: just make another Chain in the kick Drum Rack and repeat the process! The snare is now routed through (in parallel with its original signal - watch out for phase issues) to the kick drum 'channel', where its level is controlled by the Compressor's Gain knob. Activate Sidechain Listen on the Compressor, and set the sidechain's Audio From menus to the snare channel (you'll get a choice of Pre or Post FX, for tapping the signal before or after any effects you might be running on the snare track). Now create your snare pattern, be it within your 'drum kit' Drum Rack or elsewhere. In a Drum Rack (which can be nested in a higher-level 'drum kit' Drum Rack, of course), create a Chain to host your kick drum sound, and another Chain below it with a Compressor inserted. Let's use bleeding a snare drum into a kick channel as an example. Live's Compressor's Sidechain Listen mode can be sneakily used to feed audio between tracks - handy for simulating 'bleed' on acoustic drum kits, amongst other things. The answer lies in the Envelopes pane of the Clip View - specifically, the Linked/Unlinked button, which, in the latter mode, lets you specify an independent loop length for automation envelopes in that clip, allowing them to run on for as long as you like while the clip itself loops around alongside them.
One way to do it would be to move over to the Arrangement view, pasting the clip out four times and drawing your automation envelope onto the track, but you're not done in the Session view yet, so you'd really rather not. The scenario: you have a four-bar-long clip that you're looping in the Session view, but you want to automate a 16-bar reverb swell using a Reverb device inserted on the clip's channel. From there, you can either drag an entire track into the Session or Arrangement view - where it'll be recreated with all devices, plugins and clips in place - or hit the disclosure button on the track in the browser to unfold a list of its hosted clips, which can then be dragged in individually, again along with their associated devices and plugins. Navigate to any project file in the browser and click its disclosure triangle to reveal all of its component tracks. One of the best things about Live's browser is its ability to import tracks and clips from other projects into the one you're working on. or a Fairlight dog bark and a shotgun), simply rename them, say, MetronomeORIG.wav and MetronomeUpORIG.wav (for backup and to prevent accidental overwriting), then copy your chosen new sounds into the same location, renamed as Metronome.wav and MetronomeUp.wav. To change them to the alternative samples of your choice (a shaker and a clave, perhaps. These samples are contained within the application itself on OS X (Applications/Ableton Live 9.app/Contents/ App-Resources/Misc/Metronome/Samples), and in the folder C:\ProgramData\Ableton\ Live 9\Resources\Misc\Metronome\Samples on Windows.
It might surprise you to learn that Live's metronome sound is just a pair of samples (Metronome.wav and MetronomeUp.wav, the latter being the downbeat), rather than any kind of real-time synthesised tone. For many more Ableton Live guides go to our massive learning hub: Learn Ableton Live and Ableton Push: music production tips and tutorials 1.