Pony Racks in Ableton Live

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Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby VaporBlaze » 30 Mar 2013 02:18

Hello everyone!

I'm starting to learn Ableton Live (got intro 9), and I found it was really easy to to build custom drum racks out of any sound files on your computer (you can even select multiple files and drag them all in at once), so I made a few custom drum rack instruments and loaded in voice clips from that one big compilation. I thought it would be a good way to do some improv with vocal splicing. It works pretty well, the main thing I needed to do after making them was tighten up the beginning so the voice started right when the I press the pad.

My next project is to pick out individual syllables from the songs (I think I"ll start with Wonders and Hush Now because I'm so familier with them, and Fluttershy's voice is just so pretty) and assigning them to drum pads in a similar fashion.

How do you all manage vocal splicing? Manually dragging and dropping sound bites into the timeline? Using simpler/sampler? Midi mapping in a similar fashion?

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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby itroitnyah » 30 Mar 2013 06:20

I use slicex, so you just have to load the sample into Slicex, manage the markers so that they're where you want and it's already in piano roll for you.
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby ph00tbag » 30 Mar 2013 12:22

I use SliceX in FL Studio, myself. With vocal splicing like in The Caves, or my remix of Dear Luna, I usually do some custom chopping (since the default chopping doesn't really do well at isolating vowels from consonants). Then I do a combination of improv and sequencing. I create a rough idea of the pattern by playing it out, but since my current midi controller isn't supported for Windows XP, I only have my computer keyboard, and Fruity has a weird delay with the key board (plus no ability to vary velocity), so I typically manually write in the patterns that I have.

Back when my midi controller worked, I used it to record a few patterns, though. It's actually pretty fun.
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby Pimps_McGee » 30 Mar 2013 12:39

I typically just cut, drag, and drop when I'm sampling audio. I'm also using Live 9 and the way it automatically fades really helps to make the audio sound connected.
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby vladnuke » 31 Mar 2013 20:46

Slicex is invaluable to me, it's just so much handier than cutting out each sample individually.
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby Wisp » 01 Apr 2013 14:54

In Ableton, there are many ways you can do vocal splicing. You can drag and drop sound bites of the voices you want throughout an audio track to get the desired splicing, or you can right click the sound file that has the voices you want to splice and select "Slice to New MIDI Track". From there, you can simply place notes on the part of the vocal sample you want to play at certain times.
You can also slice the sound file to a midi track, and then put each slice that you want into a drum rack. This is good for getting rid of all the vocal slices you don't want to use in your song, and makes things neater.
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Re: Grin Racks in Ableton Live

Postby Acsii » 02 Apr 2013 04:19

I pretty much do what you do but as I have a launchpad I also have some effects and stuff at the ready to just activate
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby VaporBlaze » 03 Apr 2013 20:45

Thanks for all the responses! Has anyone who uses ableton found it better to have Sampler, or is the Simpler sampler sufficient? I"m still not entirely sure what the benefits of upgrading are.

When slicing audio for a drum rack, do you just move around the start and finish within the attached Simpler instance, or do you actually cut the audio file itself up?

I really like mucking around with improv to flesh out ideas, then either quantize or manually build a sequence once I find something that works.

ASCII: The Launchpad and Push look so awesome, I"ve been watching a ton of videos of people playing/tutorials. What kind of a set up do you use? Like, what kind of effects, and do you use sends to link them to certain channels? I'm super new to ableton, kind of floundering in the wonder of all its capabilities right now.

Finally, is there a good resource to find high quality WAV or AIFF files of the songs/vocal samples, instead of the mp3 dump?

Thanks!
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby Acsii » 03 Apr 2013 21:38

I split the button sin half and have half of it set as drums the other half a splits of audio. Most of the time though I have only a handful of standard drums. Then the scene buttons I have set to effects for the track. These are mostly effects that fit the song, however Chorus and filter delay make frequent appearances. If I have more than 8 effects I map these to the buttons in User 2 Mode. Also lastly just to make sure ableton is receiving the key presses and stuff I turn MIDI Feedback on. :) On the note of the push. I want one because it has an in built step sequencer and the in key music bit :)
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby VaporBlaze » 07 Apr 2013 17:17

Do you set up the effects on different sends, and have specific channel, or maybe just one channel, going in? I understand the idea of setting up sounds and stuff to launch off of the channels well enough, but I don't fully grasp the logistics of effects themselves are triggered with individual buttons. Also, do you "record" into the timeline from playing on the launchpad, or just build up musical ideas then put them together by hand in the timeline?

For the in key feature of the Push, I agree it's really cool, but at the same time, it has the potential to do two negative things: First, it might make musicians really lazy, leading to thoughtless mashing on buttons without learning about how scales actually work. Second, it puts a fairly large limiter on your creative expression if you use the chromatic mode, or switch scales during the song, both of which are rather cumbersome to do.

However, I found the idea so fascinating that I wrote some code that generates a matrix of midi note identities, with inputs being what scale and what step up between rows. I haven't done much with midi mapping, or worked with a launchpad, but it might be useful to you to easily and quickly set up your launchpad in a similar way that the Push is setup.
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Re: Pony Racks in Ableton Live

Postby Acsii » 07 Apr 2013 17:21

When ever I do vocal glitch stuff I use one channel with effects on it and I assign a button on the launchpad to the power button on the effect... And yes everything is done live a recorded into the timeline
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