[MUSIC]
It's quite common in electronic music for the performer
to manipulate various aspects of the sound while the track is playing.
So let's take a look at a few examples of
doing that with a couple of different controllers.
[MUSIC]
Add the Midi Fighter Twister here.
It's essentially a controller with a bunch of dials that
we can assign to manipulate various aspects of the sound.
If I want to use this with Ableton Live,
I will have to go into the settings and ensure that it's setup,
so Ableton Live can see the controller.
So in Ableton Live here,
I'm going to click on Preferences and go into the Link MIDI tab,
and at the bottom here,
under input where we see Midi Fighter Twister,
I'm going to make sure this remote is set to on.
So what that ensures is when we twist a particular Dial,
Ableton Live sees that information,
and we can then assign it to manipulate a certain parameter.
So let's close out of this Preferences window.
I have this Pads section over here.
Let's have a quick listen to this.
[MUSIC]
Let's say I want to assign a specific control like
this filter one frequency [NOISE] to any dial on this controller.
To make that happen, I need to click on this MIDI mapping button up top here,
and I'm gonna go back to that specific control.
Click on it once and then just twist the dial that I want to map it to.
Once that is done, you'll see a number of here.
I can click on this MIDI map mode to get out of the mode,
and now when I twist the dial,
you can see I am controlling that parameter. Let's have a listen to this.
[MUSIC]
That sounds pretty cool.
Now, if you find the range to be a bit too wide,
we can adjust that.
So back in the MIDI mapping section.
In the left section over here, we can see the mapping.
So CC number 15,
which happens to be this tile over here,
is mapped to Filter one frequency,
and here we have a minimum and maximum range.
Let me increase that minimum somewhere around 66,
and then set the maximum to somewhere around 12 kilohertz.
Let's get out of MIDI map mode and try that again.
[MUSIC]
So as you can see,
that dial is not limited to that specific range.
Let's map another parameter.
There's this chord strike here, I'll just play the part.
[MUSIC]
That's all of it.
[MUSIC]
So that sounds pretty cool.
Let's look at a parameter I would like to map to the second dial over here.
How about this PW parameter,
which stands for pulse width.
[MUSIC]
The process is exactly the same.
Now, let's have a listen to this.
[MUSIC]
It's clearly working,
but it doesn't sound too obvious because this particular synthesizer has two oscillators.
Let's go ahead to the second oscillator,
and map that PW or pulse width parameter to the same dial.
So you can do this in Ableton Live.
You can have one dial control multiple parameters. Now let's try that again.
[MUSIC]
So now both those parameters work on those two separate tracks.
Let's now look at how to do the same on the push.
It's a lot simpler because we don't have to do any mapping.
The push works as a control surface,
so I just have to access a particular track,
let's say the Pads track by clicking on it here.
Now, that very first dial is Filter one frequency,
and you can see I'm manipulating it. Let's try it out.
[NOISE]
Great. So both work.
We can use an external device like the Midi Fighter Twister or just work with the push.
Now, you may wonder why you need to have a second device to create these mappings.
When you're working with the push,
there's a lot of button pushes involved to access certain parameters.
So for example, that Chords track,
if I want to look for the pulse width parameter,
I need to go into the Wavetable instrument
and scroll across here to find that specific parameter.
Sometimes it's easy to access a parameter,
sometimes it can be quite far away.
So it's helpful to have a dedicated controller where you
know that one particular dial has been assigned to a particular parameter,
so whenever you twist it,
you always accessing that control.
Those are a few techniques that use various controllers to
create dynamic change over your composition and performance.