- If you're running tracks in a range review,
what do you do when you get between songs
and want to make a smooth transition
using a drone pad?
Hey, my name's Will Dogget.
Ableton Live certified trainer
and founder From Studio to Stage
and today's tutorial I'm gonna show you
how you can use drone pad audio samples in a range review
alongside with your tracks.
Make smooth transitions between pads
and help make transitions between keys.
So let's get started.
(whoosh)
Okay, so let me show you what I'm talking about.
I've got a track loaded in, in arrangement view,
and I just wanna play the last bit here
and show you how the song ends.
(music playing)
So it's fading out of the end
and then we drop to silence.
Now, at this point I may have
another song setup to transition.
This song is in the key of D,
but what if we get out of here
and we're not sure exactly what song we're going to,
or we need to go from D to G, or to C.
I'd like to be able to use some sort of
drone pad to make that happen.
So let me play from a little further out again,
just kind of a noise thing.
I'm gonna go ahead and start a pad that's in the key of D,
so you can hear how that's adding to the sound.
As soon as we get done, that pad's gonna keep playing, okay?
(music playing)
And you here the pad going?
So now I can play keys on top of that if I want to.
(playing piano)
Okay, but what if I need to get to the key of C.
So let's say I'm gonna stay on this G.
(playing piano)
I'm gonna trigger my pad in the key of C
and that's gonna get me to C
and then now I can play any song in the key of C.
(playing piano)
Okay and now what if I want to fade the pad out.
The end of this and I'm gonna do that.
And that's gonna smoothly fade my pad out.
So I can just go back to keys if I want,
or I can start another song in a different key.
This is super easy to do
and for this example,
I'm gonna be using rendered audio pads.
Let me show you how I did it.
So the first thing you're gonna wanna do
is create a drum rack
and drag a drum rack into Ableton Live.
And you can see what I did here.
I'm gonna try to re-create it for you.
So you kinda see the process step-by-step.
So I'm gonna grab my drum rack
and then the next thing I wanna do
is drag in my audio samples.
So I've got just a few different pad sounds.
I have five different keys,
C to G.
So what I'm gonna do is gonna drop each of these
onto individual pads here in the drum rack.
And I wanna drag 'em so they correspond
with whatever key they were recorded in.
So E goes to E, F goes to F, and G goes to G.
Okay?
Now on each of these pads, I want to make a couple changes.
Right now, they're set to One Shot.
This is only about a minute long pad,
but if you have a pad that's about 12 minutes
and you'll never go beyond that, that is great.
And if you need it to loop,
you can go to classic and set the loop point,
so that your track at the end loops,
and they can loop back and forth.
Or it can start at the beginning and loop again.
And you can do some really cool stuff.
But for the sake of this,
I'm gonna leave it set to One Shot.
Because most drone pads are pretty long.
So I've got my pads loaded in here.
A couple changes I wanna make in the drum rack.
One, I'm gonna set the fade end point for each of these
so that it's a little longer.
So about a second long.
And then I'm gonna right-click
and do copy value to siblings.
That's gonna really quickly take that same value
and apply it to all the other presets.
Which is really really cool.
Now, I wanna go into some settings here from the drum rack.
So I'm gonna click the Chain List.
Then I wanna show the I/O.
And this is gonna allow me to see
which choke group each of these sounds is in.
Now choke group is really beneficial
when you're programming drones,
so that if you're playing a hi-hat,
you never hear the open hi-hat sample
with the closed hi-hat sample.
You want it to represent a real drum set,
so we can only play one of the sounds at once.
And the way we would do that
is put those sounds in the same choke group.
I'm gonna use that trick,
so that when I play a C drone pad,
it does not also play D at the same time.
It kills the C pad, transitions to D.
So I'm gonna select all of these.
Hold Shift to select them all
and then I'm just gonna change the choke group to one.
So that all of these again are in the same group.
So let me just show you.
Just by doing that, what happens.
If I trigger C.
(C note playing)
Okay, we hear C playing.
Let's trigger F.
(F note playing)
And you hear, it stops C and transitions to F,
which is good.
We get a little bit of audio fade in there, too,
which is awesome.
So let me press, Stop.
Now one thing I wanna do is
make my transitions really smooth,
so if I hit, Stop, in Ableton Live,
my pad doesn't just suddenly drop out.
And when I transition between the pads,
there's a little bit of overlap
and it doesn't get,
just a real quick drop out.
So I'm gonna go to audio effects and add a reverb.
This is kinda the secret sauce to make this happen.
I'm gonna increase the decay time here.
Okay? So this is gonna be a pretty long
12 second decay time.
I wanna put it to high for quality
and increase dry/wet so it's 100%.
So I lose all of the original sound
and I just get a really reverb and affected pad sound.
You may want to bring spin down slightly,
adjust course as needed.
But this is what I get now.
Let's trigger C.
(C note playing)
Okay.
And let's change our key to the key of G.
(G note playing)
Okay and you hear it slowly fades out
because of that reverb.
And that expanse slowly fades in, which is perfect.
Now if I was to hit, Stop, in Ableton Live,
it's going to set all notes off and stop that clip.
But what if we want to stop just the pads,
but keep the track running?
So this is how we can do a pretty cool trick here.
So what I'm gonna do
is go back to the same presets I dragged in.
I'm gonna drag another one.
I'm just make it C2, okay?
And then I'm gonna make it a part of choke group one,
but the difference I'm gonna do here
is bring the volume to this all the way down to zero.
The other thing I can do,
and this would probably the better way,
is to use a clip of silence.
Like a dummy audio clip,
but this is really really a fast way to do it.
So I'm gonna re-name this and just call this, Stop.
And when I trigger that,
that's gonna stop all my pads.
I'll show you how this works.
So let's press C.
(C note playing)
Okay, let's transition to G.
(G note playing)
Okay, smooth transition but let's stop all those pads.
So I'll hit, Stop.
Then you're gonna hear, kill all that,
but we get the reverb trail kind of happening
which is really really nice.
So the way to put this practically is we can reach up
and click each of these drop pads with the mouse,
which is not very elegant.
Or we can use a midi controller
that's just assigned to those pads.
So in this case,
let's make it to where I'm gonna use this keyboard
and all I wanna use this keyboard just for those pads.
So let's go to MIDI from
and I'm gonna select, the AKAI MPK61.
And I wanna make sure my track is record enabled
or set to input for monitor.
And then this keyboard is just set to trigger those sounds.
So if I press C, you will hear C come in (C note playing).
And I can use a separate keyboard and then play it here.
You can press, G, and you can hear that pad fade in.
Let's go to E.
(E note playing)
Again, you'll hear that smooth transition happen.
And then finally, when I press the C3 there or C2
that's gonna stop all of my pads.
So that's a really cool kind of hack.
An effective way to use pads
and run drone pads alongside
your tracks in arrangement view,
so you can transition to any key at any time.
Or if you wanna run pads along with your MultiTrack
and your stems and then transition between songs.
It's super easy to do.
If you wanna learn more about
how to use Ableton Live on stage with keys,
make sure to head to fromstudiostage.com.
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And thank you so much for watching the tutorial today.
Hope to see you again soon.
Take care.
Bye.
(upbeat music)