How To Create A Track In Ableton Live 11 Lite: Using Sampling To Obtain The Perfect Vocal | Music Radar
Tutorial using Ableton Live 11 Lite with Ski Oakenfull - part of the Music Radar series
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00:00Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.
00:05So in the last video I showed you how to add some chords and a melody to the track.
00:09In this video we're going to add a vocal sample which is going to be the final layer.
00:13I'll be introducing the concept of sampling using a device in Live called Simpler,
00:18which allows you to get really creative with audio.
00:21So a simple definition of sampling is where we can take an audio recording
00:25and we can manipulate it and play it on the keyboard up and down so it changes pitch.
00:31And in Live Lite we have a device called Simpler which we can use for this purpose.
00:35There are also lots of presets that come with Simpler with loads of great sounds,
00:39bass sounds and effects, all made up of samples.
00:43So I thoroughly recommend you go and check those out.
00:46Now first of all, where can we get some vocal samples?
00:49Well I found this great webpage here, it's actually on the Music Radar website
00:53and it's 1,338 free female vocal samples.
00:57So if we just scroll down, you can see some examples and then there's the link there.
01:03So download those and I'm just going to show the desktop now.
01:12There we go.
01:13And this will be the folder that you get and you can see it's divided up into different genres.
01:21Rock and trance and house and disco.
01:24But this is where we can use Live's Places feature.
01:28We can drag any folder of audio samples into the Places area so it's then accessible in our track
01:34and in any future projects we work on as well.
01:37So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag this over to this area here.
01:43Click on OK and you can see the folder has appeared
01:48and then you can also see all the different categories.
01:51Great, so let's just make this full screen again.
01:56I'm going to create another MIDI track.
01:59There we go.
02:00And we can actually delete that audio track, we don't need that anymore.
02:06And let's just have a little listen through to some of these samples.
02:19OK, there's some good ones there.
02:22Keep going down.
02:36Oh, I really like that one there, that's really nice.
02:38OK, so how can we get that into Simpler?
02:41Well, we can just go over to Instruments and I'm just going to drag a Simpler onto this track here.
02:47There we go, it's loaded up and you can see there it says Drop Sample Here.
02:51So let's go back here and then let's drop it on.
02:56There we go.
02:58And I can now play the sample on the keyboard.
03:05OK, so let's just play the first scene and see if we can make it work with our track.
03:18OK, that sounds really good.
03:19One thing you'll notice though is that as I play it up and down the keyboard, it's changing the timing.
03:24So the higher I play it, the faster it plays.
03:31So in order to fix this, we can use Warping again.
03:34So you just click on this Warp button here and just like that Minilog part that I put down in the previous video,
03:41we can select Complex because it's not a beat.
03:44We want to use a Warp algorithm that works for this kind of sample.
03:49We can also change the start point of this sample as well.
03:53So there's a bit of a breath there.
03:59Let's just make it a bit closer to the H of Holding.
04:05OK, so let's play this again and listen to what it sounds like.
04:15Great, that's sounding really good.
04:17So I'm just going to bring down the level slightly and also that synth part as well.
04:23So let's just try recording in a few variations of this part.
04:44That's very simple for that first scene.
04:46So let's quantize it.
04:48Command U and let's just give it the groove.
04:52And let's go to the next scene now.
04:58Maybe let's play that lower note to start off with.
05:03OK, let's record it in.
05:15OK, quantize it again and give it the groove.
05:23Now I'm just going to tighten up slightly the start point again,
05:27just to make sure it's a bit more in time.
05:32There we go.
05:36Great, and then for the third scene, which is a little bit funkier.
05:45Let's try playing something a bit more rhythmical.
05:48Let's just play along first, have a go.
05:56OK, let's record that in.
05:59Let's quantize it and add the swing groove.
06:22So this note here is just slightly too long.
06:25So what we can do is, let's just zoom in so we can see it.
06:28And we can just hover over the end of that event there, that note.
06:34And we can just drag it to the left, just to make it a little bit shorter.
06:45Great, so we've got three vocal riffs there over our three different scenes.
06:51OK, great, so that's all the main elements of the track added.
06:54In the next video, I'm going to show you how to add some audio effects
06:57and then arrange these parts into a final track that we can export as an audio file and share.