[MUSIC]
We're going to do one of my favorite things in Live which is sampling.
So sampling has been around for a really long time,
and it's a very basic concept.
It's taking a piece of audio and repurposing it.
So either we're slicing it up and playing it back in
some other rhythmic pattern or we're
taking a sound or a piece of audio and creating an instrument based out of it.
The creative applications of this are really far-reaching
and it's super simple to do inside of Live.
They've made it really easy for us to do that.
What we need to do is create a new MIDI track and insert a device called Simpler onto it.
A Simpler is just a very simple sampler,
which is going to allow us to play back
that audio file as if it's an instrument or slice it up,
and play it back in a different order.
So to begin with, I'm going to go to Create,
Insert MIDI Track here,
and here I've got on Track 6 an empty MIDI track.
So heading over to Live's browser,
I'm going to open this up and we're going to find this in the instrument section.
So here's the Simpler, I'm just going to click,
drag and drop it onto the empty MIDI track,
and now it is called Simpler.
So down here you can see it says "Drop Sample Here".
It's very inviting.
It's asking me to drop a piece of audio onto it.
So what I'm going to do is grab one of these original vocal files that I had,
and just drop it directly right onto the sample here.
All right, now I'm going to arm this track
and move the start marker a little bit closer to where this audio begins,
and I'm going to play my MIDI controller which right now I have
a Lightpad Block and I should be hearing this file being played back.
[MUSIC] So you can
notice as I play a lower note,
it's really slow, and if I play a higher note
[MUSIC] it sounds cool but it's a lot faster.
So what we need to do is the same thing that we did when we were warping audio,
we need to select this warped function and selecting the right algorithm.
I think for vocals,
pretty much going with complex is always a good idea.
So now as I play things back,
they should be happening at the same time but with different pitches.
[MUSIC]
Immediately, I can do a bunch of stuff.
I can make this file quite small.
Maybe I just want to catch the beginning part of that.
[MUSIC]
I can loop
it to create a new texture altogether.
[MUSIC] There's a lot
of parameters that I can mess with here,
changing where to start,
places where the loop happens,
how long this entire thing is.
[MUSIC] So immediately,
this took me maybe 20 seconds and I've created a texture that's
completely different but based off of a vocal file.
So I've really quickly created my own simpler instrument.
There's a lot more behind the scenes here.
Also I can go into a control panel and for those
of you who are more interested in sound design,
I can do filter adjustments,
[MUSIC] change the Amp envelope,
there's also a pitch envelope and an LFO there for you as well,
or you can just play this back in a really really simple way.
One thing I do want to make sure that we talk about is tuning the sampler instruments,
because if you're playing them on a keyboard,
I was maybe not singing the note C. So when I play C,
they might not be lined up.
So what I'm going to do is tune
this instrument so that I can play it on a MIDI controller.
So going back to the browser here,
I'm going to go into
the Audio Effects category and then pull in an audio effect called Tuner,
and we'll put it directly after the Simpler device.
So this is C1 on my MIDI controller.
[MUSIC] You can see it's telling me that I'm actually singing a B.
So if I want to go from B to C,
it's a semitone up.
So I'm going to switch to the control panel here,
and there's a transpose parameter.
I'm just going to go up one semitone [MUSIC] and then here I'm
singing a C. So now I've got my instrument all tuned up,
I'm ready to go, and I can record directly into a clip right here in Session View.
So I'm going to play the chords and one of
the progressive patterns and mess around here until
I find something that I think is cool and then I'm going to record it into a clip.
[MUSIC]
All right, here I go.
[MUSIC]
So there's my entire sequence of me now playing
this instrument like it's a MIDI instrument, which it is.
It's a virtual instrument that I've created with a sampler.
I'm going to take the ends of this and just
create a smaller clip based upon my preferred parts of the file.
[MUSIC]
Sounding really cool, sounding awesome.
So let's take another look at how to do this by slicing this file up inside of Simpler.
So I'm going to create an additional Simpler instrument
by inserting a new MIDI track here.
I'm going back to instruments,
grabbing another instance of Simpler and I'll use the other file.
So I'm grabbing idea Number 2,
dropping it into the Simpler.
So the first time we did this,
we were in classic mode and that's just playing back
that file either in a monophonic or polyphonic sense,
like a playable instrument.
So now I want to go into slice mode which is going to
allow me to slice this file up a bunch of ways and play it back.
So you can see it just automatically puts a lot
of little blue slice markers into this file.
If we look down here, it's saying that it's just slicing by transient.
We already talked about what a transient is.
Every time it thinks the file is beginning,
it's putting a slice marker right there for me.
So I can do this a number of ways but going by transient is always pretty safe.
I'm going to pull the beginning of this file over just like I had done before.
So now I'm going to arm this new track,
and I should be playing back the slices as I play my MIDI controller.
[MUSIC]
See in here,
there's just like the ends of certain files.
You can get some really interesting things happening.
[MUSIC] Fun.
So I can do some pretty surgical stuff here.
I could just double-click on any of these warp markers to insert or remove any of them,
I can grab them and move them around.
However I'd like to have them represented here for me.
So I'm going to do the exact same thing.
I'm just going to play the drums and the chords,
mess with a few patterns here and see what I can come up with.
[MUSIC]
All right, I'm into that.
Make you're going to make this a little bit shorter.
[MUSIC]
Okay, here I go.
I'm going to record this into a clip in Session View.
[MUSIC]
All right, here's my file.
[MUSIC]
I feel pretty good about that.
So I can go in and edit this just like any MIDI sequence.
Let's play some stuff together and see what happens.
Let's see what I came up with when I play a lot of these ideas together.
[MUSIC]
Cool, so I just created so much more texture and tone and interests
in this song just from a simple vocal idea that I recorded into my microphone.
The only limitations with this is how creative you can be with the tools.
[MUSIC]