- Oh, look at that, it's purple.
I 🤡 love purple!
Hey, it's Will from EDM Tips.
Today I'm gonna show you the top 11 features
in Ableton Live 11.
I'm going to tailor it to people who make music
at home in their computer,
so they're not doing live performances so much,
so it can be a bit focussed.
So, let's go through them.
Number one, comping.
This is a game changer for Ableton.
Before I would have to recommend
that my students recorded vocals in Logic or Pro Tools,
but now you can do comping in Ableton.
So what that means is you can record several takes
whilst it loops around.
And this is perfect if you're recording singing.
So let's have an experiment with that now.
This is me recording my first take in Ableton Live,
and then you can record a second take.
As you can see it's going into a lane
and then it makes another lane,
and then you've got four lanes
from which you can choose your lovely comp.
So, now you've done that.
Then you've got four lanes
from which you can choose your lovely comp.
So you can select the best phrases
from your different takes,
and then it composites together in one long take,
and that's comping.
And I'm so pleased that they've done this in Ableton now
because it's been a long time coming.
You can also then right click and create cross fades
on clip to make it.
Recording a second take in Ableton Live.
And then it cross phase the clips making it a bit smoother.
Okay, top feature number two in Ableton Live 11.
This is where you can actually choose the scale
for a MIDI clip.
So you can see here now in the clip controls,
you can choose a scale.
You can choose one of many scales.
So let's choose C minor 'cause that's what this track in.
And I used to teach my students to draw
in all the notes of a scale and press fold.
But now you don't have to,
you can just press the scale button
and all of these notes are in the key of C minor.
So if you play along with our tune.
(upbeat music)
So basically you can never hit the wrong note
when you're programming a MIDI in a particular key.
So that's the second feature.
The third feature are the macro improvements.
So before in Ableton 10, you could have up to eight macros
in your rack but now you can see, you can actually
have up to 16.
So that obviously gives you loads of opportunity
to assign many different macros within your rack,
similarly or conversely rather,
you can reduce the amount of macros
and make it much cleaner.
So, if you've only got one macro that controls anything,
you don't have to have eight showing all the time.
It doesn't actually delete them,
it just hides them, which is great.
And the two more cool things about the macros
is that you can now press randomize
just to get something a bit more interesting,
but you can also save a snapshot.
So if you want one setting to be like this,
you can just press new and it's gonna save it.
Then you can make changes as you want, like so,
you've probably wanted to be listening to this
whilst you're making the changes, press new
and then it saves it.
And you can rename them as you want.
And then you can just switch
between these different macros snapshots.
So that's very cool as well.
So number four is MIDI polyphonic expression
or MPE capabilities within Ableton.
So if you've got a MIDI controller
that has got MPE capabilities,
like the one shown on the screen now,
you've got more control over your MIDI inputs.
So even with my kind of rudimentary MIDI controller,
you can see I've got after touch,
which you can assign to different parameters.
So yeah, that's number four, really good MPE control.
And you can actually automate then the different parameters
of the MPE elements within the clip view as well.
So you've got slide and pressure
you can see that as well.
So that's very cool and opens up a whole world
of possibilities for advanced sound design.
Number five is the browser, just a simple thing really,
having the audio effects in these subcategories,
just makes it quicker and easier to find
what you're looking for, especially if you're a beginner,
because you can see the categories of each effect.
But it also integrates the max for live instruments
a bit better as well so you can see they all show up
as well, you don't need to go into max for live
to search for those particular instruments.
Number six, and this is a biggie.
This is the piano roll editor,
which has been one of the weaker points in Ableton
for quite awhile but now as well as this really cool scale
thing that I just showed you earlier,
you can now draw in melodies just by holding and dragging.
So if you've got this going on whilst you've got
the scale button pressed and you've chosen your scale,
you can just draw out a melody like that,
it'll sound rubbish, but it will sound in key.
(upbeat music)
The other cool thing you can do with
the piano roll editor now is you can have a range
in which the velocity will operate.
So, you know when you have the velocity usually it would
be assigned to say the filter the cutoff or the volume?
So if you were to grab everything
and put the velocity right down,
and right up, you can assign the velocity
to whichever parameters you really want within the synth,
but now you can actually create a range
for that velocity to operate in
and it randomize within that range.
(upbeat music)
So this is a great way to add more of a human feeling
to your MIDI clips and basically more of a natural thing
because you're having the MIDI notes randomized
within this range parameter that you've set.
You can also randomize the velocity
by pressing the randomized button,
which gives you even more variation.
(upbeat music)
But, this is a really cool thing,
you can also adjust the probability of the notes playing.
So if you've got a 100% probability, the note will play.
So every note here is playing.
But if we change that to 50% say,
so grab all the notes, change the probability to 50%,
then those notes are only gonna play half the time.
Now, if you've got two or three or four MIDI clips
like this in a row, then each one is gonna be different,
and that can add some real interesting variation, like so.
(upbeat music)
So all of these different piano roll tweaks
just make it a much more intuitive
and a much more natural sounding
and kind of a fun to experiment with feature
of Ableton live 11.
So, this is a little thing, but actually it's really useful.
You've now got improved metering for CPU usage.
So if you've got a track that's using loads of CPU,
you can press this little button here
and it will show you which tracks are using most CPU.
I mean, this track isn't using much CPU anyway,
and my computer's quite fast,
but if you've got one peaking right up here,
then you could just freeze that track
and then that's gonna be freeing up loads more CPU for you.
And you can also see the average CPU usage across the song
and what it's doing hitting at current points
in the song as well.
A seemingly small thing but it's gonna be really useful,
especially when you've got complex tracks going on.
Number nine is that you've got some really cool new effects.
The first of which is
this convolution stroke algorithmic reverb,
it's called hybrid reverb, I think, something like that,
which would make sense,
and it's just a really nice combination
between those two sorts of reverb.
♪ Don't get emotional ♪
♪ I don't get emotional ♪
- So you can get some
really nice professional sounding reverbs from that,
but we've also got a couple of new effects as well,
which I haven't played with that much yet,
but you've got the spectral resonator
and spectral time as well.
So let's try the spectral time on this synth,
see what that sounds like for example.
And put one of the, let's see, one of the presets.
(upbeat music)
So that's pretty cool, lots to play with there.
Okay, number 10 is the improvements
to some of the effects that were already there before.
So the first that I noticed was Redux
because I like to use this bit crusher a lot.
You've now got a dry wet control as well,
as well as a few more controls for this.
So let's have a listen.
Let's do this on the vocal actually,
it's gonna be a bit more obvious.
♪ Don't get emotional ♪
♪ I don't get emotional ♪
♪ Don't get emotional ♪
♪ I don't get emotional ♪
♪ Never felt this way before ♪
- So that's a much nicer Redux now.
There are also improvements to the chorus ensemble is now.
♪ Don't get emotional ♪
- Really nice effect.
And you've also got the the phaser, sorry,
and the flanger both brought into one unit now,
so you can choose between them,
and it just makes everything a bit more nice and neat
and you don't have to worry about whether to choose
a phaser or a flanger because they can have quite
a similar effect, you can just choose between
the two whilst it's loaded in.
♪ Don't get emotional ♪
♪ I don't get emotional ♪
- So they are the main elements of what I will be using
in Ableton live 11.
There are more improvements as well,
but I thought these are gonna be the ones
that are gonna be most pertinent to you
and I've tried to do it in the order
of their importance as well.
But there is one more I want to show you
and that's the ability to link tracks
and then edit them together.
And you can link them by selecting different tracks
and just linking them together.
Now this means that when you cut one of them,
it's gonna cut all three of them,
which can be very useful if you've got multi stems
in a vocal, I'm gonna be using this a lot
for things like little breaks just before a drop,
like micro tension, things like this.
And then when you finish editing them getting them together,
you can always unlink them.
As I said, there are loads more improvements,
these are the main ones that I'm gonna be using.
Let me know if you want me to make more videos
on the upcoming release of Ableton live 11,
I want to know, drop them in the comments below.
You can also get a great deal on the upgrade
if you've got Ableton 10 or an earlier version.
So head over to ableton.com
if you want to get an introductory offer
on the upgrade which I think is gonna probably
be running until the end of this year.
Thanks for watching, until next time,
cheers and happy producing.
(upbeat music)