Hello there my inspirations my name is InspirAspir and in this video I'm gonna
teach you how to make launchpad light effects using ableton light now to do so
we're gonna be working with what are called chain based light effects this is
just a fancy way of saying we'll be working with Ableton's built-in MIDI
effect library to make all of our light effects there's a lot to get through and
there is a bit of a steep learning curve however I'm gonna do my best to cover
everything so that you beginners out there have a better grasp on what it is
you're doing so when you boot up Ableton lite
you should come across a screen that looks like this this is just the default
new session in Ableton first thing I'm gonna do is hit the tab button on my
keyboard to go into the layout view by default a new Ableton session creates
two MIDI tracks and two audio tracks for the time being I'm just gonna delete the
two audio tracks and doing that by clicking them and pressing delete now
I'm assuming that you're making light effects to be paired with a launchpad
projects a cover for example so at this point your first MIDI track will be
used for your samples at which point you'd probably you know drag in a drum
rack and do the entire steps here in terms of sampling but obviously right
now we're focusing more on light effects so my second MIDI track is gonna be used
for the lights I'm gonna rename that to lights now before I even make my light
effects I need to set up my launchpad to produce output I can do that by clicking
this drop-down menu right here and selecting my launchpad for output so in
my case I'm using a launchpad Pro and I want to select this top selection right
here launchpad Pro output be sure to select your launchpad next I need to
change my channel to channel 6 that is only for the launchpad Pro and the mark
2 if you're using a launchpad S or mini you don't need to do that last step
finally I need to arm my track for recording I can do that by clicking this
button right here notice that when you click once it changes from this default
selected one right up here down to this however I want them both to be selected
so I'm gonna press command and left click on the other one that's not
selected this arms both for recording mind you if you're using Windows you may
not press command it might be something along the lines of alt maybe if you go
to your launchpad assuming it's plugged in turned on and we're in user mode or
if you're using the s and the mini make sure you're on user 1 mode you should
notice that we have light feedback which is a good start but now we need to
actually take our light effects to do that we can
navigate into Ableton's library on the left side under MIDI effects there
should be 8 MIDI effects in this library for the sake of making light effects
we're really only gonna use seven of these next thing I want to do is drag in
a MIDI effect rack onto my lights MIDI track I can do that by simply left
clicking and dragging and letting go on top of this lights track or I can click
this lights track and then double click on the MIDI effect rack in the bottom
left corner of Ableton you should see this up here click this middle button to
expand your MIDI effects rack now I want to click this tab that says key the keys
on this horizontal piano roll correspond to the buttons on my launchpad notice
how if I were to press any button on my launchpad that a key lights up red in
this MIDI effect rack what that's essentially saying is hey this button on
a launchpad corresponds to this key right here now is a good time to note
that the launch pad buttons increment in the following order the bottom left
button is your starting button incrementing by one's the next button is
to the right of that to the right of that over here and then after you get to
these four it jumps up a row into the leftmost column continues this pattern
until you get to here at which point it jumps down to here and then it repeats
this pattern again until you get to the top right corner to make a new light
effect we can right click over here where it says drop MIDI effects here and
select create chain hence chain based light effects each chain is going to be
a light effect to maybe make this a little bit more concrete I'm gonna
rename this chain I can do that by right clicking and selecting rename to
something along the lines of effect 1 now what I want to do is make this chain
encompass my selected note or if you'd like notes you can select a range but
for the sake of this example let's pretend I want this button in particular
to be my light effect when I press this button I want it to do something right
so to do that I can press this button and then left-click on the ends of this
green bar click and drag until it selects this red key or it made it live
that can be a bit tiresome so another thing you can do is press the button
you'd like and double-click on the green bar automatically collapsing it to
select only this button now at this point if you press any other buttons on
your launchpad they will not light up and that's because we added in a new
chain based light effect by default if there are no chains
it'll just allow feedback from all the buttons but now that we added one in it
only receives feedback from the button we selected so technically we have
actually made our first basic light effect it's certainly nothing to brag
about it's not too crazy however when we press one button we get specific
feedback so now let's make it such that it does something unique something
exciting this is when we now implement our MIDI effects one particular MIDI
effect is called velocity I'm covering this one first because it is pretty
simple what it does is it changes the color of your button there are certain
velocity numbers corresponding to different colors for the launchpad Pro
and Mark 2 - and then there are different velocity numbers for different colors
for the s and the mini to change your color all you want to do is click this
circle right here the one that currently says 127 and change that to whatever
value you like you can do that by left clicking and typing in whatever number
you want anywhere from 1 and to 127 so I'm gonna type in the number 5 which on
the launchpad Pro corresponds to a red if I were to press this button now it's
red change it to a different value say 9 is an orange now it's more another
useful MIDI effect that you'll be using often is what's called a chord left-click
on the chord and drag it anywhere onto your chain now it's important to note
the order of your MIDI effects matter in your chain when I'm clicking and
dragging my mouse hovering over here there's a blue bar right here in between
my chain and my velocity that means if I were to let go it'll insert this MIDI
effect right here now if I were to move my mouse slightly to the right you'll
notice this snaps over here to the right at which point my MIDI effect will be
dropped after the velocity if I were to move my mouse further to the right the
bar snaps over here this is outside of my entire MIDI effect rack and we don't
really want this because that isn't corresponded to our chain so we can
simply move it by left clicking and dragging it where we want meaning the
leftmost effect in your chain will happen first and then anything beyond
that to the right building off of that effect let's demonstrate that here by
showing this chord MIDI effect the chord MIDI effect allows you to stack multiple
lights on top of your button say if I were to press this button right here but
I want another light to light up right here I will click on this knob under
shift 1 and type in any number anywhere between negative 36 and 36 this simply
corresponds to the number of semitones away from this button that light effect
will be say for example if I were to type in one
I now have a light effect here because I added one semitone up if I were to
change that value is something I don't know like six for example the light
should show up one two three four five six right here a common use of the chords
is to make an entire row light up can do that by assigning shift one two one
semitone shift two to two semitones and shift three to three semitones that will
light up four buttons in a row to properly demonstrate this let me show
you what the pitch mini effect does adding in a pitch mini effect simply
shifts where your light effect is you can change it by clicking this knob and
assigning it a value if I were to sign up one semitone that means it pushed
every light effect that I had up by a semitone so right now if I were to press
this button I should see this entire row light up
now again the MIDI effects work from left to right building off the
cumulative light effect that's made so if I were to create another chord and
add it in after everything I've made and if I were to assign this value of let's
say four for example it'll take that row that I had lit up and duplicate it
moving it up by four semitones essentially now making another row right
here I can then also say add in eight and twelve semitones which will then
light up this entire square because essentially what I'm doing is taking
this row and duplicating it four semitones eight semitones and twelve
semitones up if I were to add in another chord here and maybe on this shift one
assign it something along the lines of negative sixteen right then I should
have this entire left side of my launchpad lighting up I can then add in
shift to maybe positive sixteen and positive 32 and now my entire launchpad
should be lighting up now let's move on to the arpeggiator arpeggiator to put it
short and sweet kind of gives a strobe light effect if I were to drag that to
the beginning of my light effect and press my button you can now see I have a
strobe light effect I can change a few parameters here such as the rate it's
currently set at one eighth I can change that to anywhere from one one twenty
eighth which is extremely fast all the way to one over one which is relatively
slow you can also do things such as set the number of times it repeats say for
example I only want it to go four times you can also click this hold button and
then once it's yellow that means that when you press the button once it'll
keep going for however many repeats you designate
now an interesting thing about the arpeggiator is this makes a huge impact
on your light effect depending on where it is in your chain if I were to have
this at the very end of my chain not recall that my chain is lighting up the
entire launchpad yeah is it'll iterate over all of that light effect that I
made you notice that it's kind of pulses going up it started at the lowest
semitone value of my light effects and is just going upwards
I can change where it starts by changing this style a drop down menu that allows
you to select what you'd like so if I were to select up that starts at the
lowest semitone value and goes up if I were to select down it should start at
the highest value and go down you can also play around with other versions of
this as well if I were to move this arpeggiator in between some of these
chords for example like right here some interesting things start to happen now
it's doing this because this chord is to the right of the arpeggiator if I were
to deactivate this chord you'll notice that it was doing what I was doing
before but on a much smaller scale it's only on this little grid right here
which we then duplicated four times and that's why when the chords after it it
looks like this or if I were to move it to the left over here in between the
first and second chord I have this light effect why is it doing that let's turn
off everything to the right of it and look at what it's doing it's just going
back and forth on this row which we then duplicate that row onto the this tiny
square and then onto the entire launchpad so I think you can start to
see how changing the different chords and changing the order of the
arpeggiator can make some really interesting light effects another thing
you may want to use is the note length and what this does is it decides how
long the lights stay on for after they have been triggered so if I were to
press this you notice there's a bit of a trail behind my light effect I can
change the time the lights are being on for by changing this length where maybe
I could change it to 1.4 seconds meaning once the light lights up it'll stay on
for about one and a half seconds until it turns off so maybe I'm happy with
this light effect maybe I want to make a different light effect what I can then
do is then right-click over here in my main MIDI effect rack and select create
chain at which point I can repeat the process maybe I want to make a light
effect for this button for example I press it I double-click on the green bar
and now I have a light effect here and not anywhere else except
the one that I made before to make some more complicated light effects what you
can do is you can drag in a chord and then let's light up this entire row say
for example now let's drag in a MIDI effect rec after that so now we're two
MIDI effect racks deep if I were to press the key button on this MIDI effect
rack and then press my light effect you'll notice that all four of these
lights are lighting up in the MIDI effect rack what this allows you to do
then is every time these lights are triggered these keys will be triggered
and then you can create light effects inside light effects and this is how
you're gonna create more of your advanced light effects something that
kind of seems to have a motion to it if I were to add in our Pidgey ater before
the MIDI effect rack but after the chord this lights up all four of these buttons
as so if I were to press this now and look in my MIDI effect rack these light
up so and then in the second MIDI effect rack what I can then do is create a
chain and then I can assign these to each of these buttons so it looks like
maybe I want this one to be right about here right and I'm just gonna duplicate
this by copying and pasting moving this one over and then doing the same thing
so essentially all I'm doing is I'm now creating four light effects for each of
these buttons that are lighting up only at the press of this one button keep in
mind what I can then do is maybe I want to do a thing such as the following
where I can give this particular light when it lights up maybe I can light up
his entire column you can do that by making chords lighting up the buttons
for 8:12 adding a court after that shifted by 16 so when I press this and
then now I want to add in an arpeggiator after that maybe I want it to be about
this fast maybe I want it to go once and I'm gonna click this hold button because
this button doesn't stay on forever so essentially what I'm doing is when I'm
pressing this button I'm making it so that this shoots up like that now I want
to duplicate this for all of these chains just copying and pasting as you
would normally do and if I were to press this button now I have this strange
light effect and then if I really wanted to in each of these four columns that
are lighting up I could also add in a MIDI effect rec after that so then as
each of these light up I can then create a light effect that triggers as well and
you can start to see how there are multiple levels and layers to this
you could have a light effect in theory be eight or so light effects deep just
depending on how complex you want it to be and those are pretty much the basics
of making chain based light effects like I said it can be a bit complicated I'm
well aware it's certainly no walk in the park however once you get the hang of it
you can create really complicated light effects so I hope that helped at least
maybe a little bit those of you out there who didn't know how to make light
effects before in ableton light if you're curious to learn how to make
other things Launchpad related I have a lot of tutorials on my channel as well
you can feel free to check those out I'll leave links in the description
below and also at the end card of this video but that's all I got for you
hopefully it helped thanks for watching guys talk to you later