Ableton Live Racks: Creating an Instrument from Simple Waveforms
Tutorial Details
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Time: 1.5 hours
- Requirements: Ableton Live 7+
Ableton Live is now an industry standard production and performance software. When it comes to instrument design and routing, other software like Reason or Logic may look more user friendly but once you get used to Live’s rack system, you’ll find out that Live has limitless routing and controlling possibilities.
In this tutorial, I’ll try to explain how to create an instrument from simple waveforms and blend these two sounds together using the device chains.
Step 1: Creating the Instrument
Select an empty midi track and create an empty Instrument Rack. To do this, go to the instruments folder in your Live Devices then double click on the Instrument Rack.
Now, from the Live’s browser, go to Samples > Waveforms > Components folder, there are quite lot of samples here you can use with this project. You may choose any you want, I will use “Spectral > Analog Saw.aif” for example. Click and drag the sample into the Instrument Rack you have created. Now a Simpler device should have been created like the one in the screenshot below.
Next, right click on the Simpler and select “Group”. This command will create another Instrument Rack within the first we have created. Now click the little button “Show/Hide Macro Controls”.
Now select the inner Instrument Rack, press CTRL/CMD + R to rename it, then enter the name of your sample, in my case it is “Analog Saw”.
Step 2: Mapping the Macros
We are ready to set up now. If you play this instrument now you’ll hear short sounds, so let’s click on the “loop” button on the Simpler device to make the sample loop. Also enable “filter” and “LFO” parameters so we can tweak the sound.
We won’t edit the sound directly in the Simpler device, instead we’ll map some controls to the macro controllers. First right click on the filter freq and select “Map to Macro 1″,
Like this you can map any control on the Simpler to the macros. Here’s my mapping:
- Macro 1 > Filter Freq
- Macro 2 > Filter Res
- Macro 3 > Filter Type
- Macro 4 > LFO Attack
- Macro 5 > Attack
- Macro 6 > Release
- Macro 7 > LFO Type
- Macro 8 > Filter to LFO and LFO Freq: in this step I mapped two different parameters to the same macro control so that I can control those parameters with one knob, then right clicked on it and renamed as “LFO”.
Now play some notes and tweak the knobs to find out how your mappings effect the sound, mine looks and sounds like this:
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Step 3: Adding the Second Sound and Blending
From now on, adding extra sounds is really easy. Click the first Instrument Rack’s “Show/Hide Chain Selector” button then select the “Analog Saw” chain, right click and select “Duplicate” or press CTRL/CMD + D to duplicate that chain.
Now go to the Simpler device’s “Sample Display” area where the waveform is shown, when you mouse over you’ll see a small “hot swap” button on the bottom right corner. When you press it, it will become orange and the sample you have loaded will be highlighted on the Live’s browser.
Now you can select another sample from the browser, I will use the “Digital Spike.aif” from the same folder. Now go and rename the second chain we have created. All the macro mappings will be same here as we have duplicated the first one.
When you play this device two sounds will play together. To create a blend between these sounds click on the “Show Chain Select Editor [Chain]” button above the chain list. Now you’ll see two lines for the both of the chains, the thinner one is “Fade Range” and the thicker one is “Zone”. When you move your mouse over these lines your pointer becomes a square bracket “]” this way you can drag these lines. First, drag the “Zone” lines all the way up for both of the chains. Then for the first chain, go to the right end point of the “Fade Range” and drag this line all the way down. Do the opposite for the second chain. It should look like this:
Next, right click on the numbers above the bars and select “Map to Macro 1″.
You’ll see that the macros will appear and the first one is mapped to “Chain Selector”. If you tweak it you’ll see the orange bar above the zones is going up and down in the chains bar. You can now click to “Hide” the chain editor.
This macro knob is our blend control, if you play the device and tweak it you’ll hear the morphing between two sounds. Here’s an example:
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From now in you can add more sounds and with the Zone and Fade Range parameters you can define the blending ranges of these sounds. I hope you find this tutorial helpful and clear. In the next tutorials I’ll try to explain Effect Racks in Ableton Live.
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By Gönenç Giray
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Hi everyone,
Feel free to comment about any questions or suggestions, I check back here often and try to answer them. Also, if you’re interested in seeing more Ableton Live tuts, let me know. I have quite more tricks in the bag. =)
Easily the best Ableton Live tutorial so far on this site. Would love to see more like this: using the basic built-in capabilities of the software in creative ways.
Hey, glad to hear you liked it, tell me about the devices or setups you want to discover and I’ll try to put quickie tuts here.
I normally skip over most tutorials but this one is one that I enjoyed.
Thanks for the tut.
great! thank you.
I’m not a Live user (yet?) but of course would love to see more tutorials. One thing for me is that I’ve never been able to get used to the Ableton Live paradigm for music making (the interface too). Logic and Cubase make sense to me and I guess my problem is that I’ve tried to use Live in the same way. So, I know that Live is capable of some cool things and would totally like to be exposed to more.
Also, if you’re into MAX for live I’d definitely like to hear about that!
Cheers
Live is mostly not sufficent when you’re doing all the recording and mastering with it, but it’s unbeatable when it comes to laying down ideas in the easiest way or experimenting with sounds and effect combinations -as well as live performance. So mostly people do their compositions in Live, then hook it up (via Rewire) to Logic or Cubase and polish their music.
check this video out if you haven’t: http://www.ableton.com/live it’s all about the “Session View” =)
PS: Sorry I’m not really into MAX for Live, but I know they have epic documentation and getting started patches.
I’ve recently got into Live [primarily because the Session view is a lot of fun when trying ideas] so more tuts like this would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers.
thanks Simon, I’m working on that. =)
Is it normal that I’m missing some waveforms in that folder? I don’t seem to have the ‘harmonic’ folder, only the ‘spectral’ folder. I’m running the download version of live 8.1.1. And for some reason the loopmasters>waveforms folder has a bunch of percussion instead of waveforms =S
Is my folder structure messed up or is this how all of you guys have it? I’d really appreciate it if someone could verify this for me. Thank You
ps: awesome tutorial!
Hi fluff, that harmonic folder may have came to my library from another Live pack that I installed from another source, I have to check on that, as I have tons of free and paid Live packs installed. Though the ones I used are included in the default library as you have mentioned.
In this tut I tried to use “simple” waveforms, though you can experiment the same technique with bigger sounds -like a glitch or noise sample, or even drum loops. You’ll get quite different and interesting results.
Cheers.
Indeed… great tutorial. So, we need more great Ableton tutorials .. :)
I am glad to see the simpler getting some love. Programming synth sounds out of waveforms can be a bit a tricky, but this tutorial did a great job of explaining things! Time to try it out. Thanks for the great post.
-Ryan
I tried this with different analog waveforms + a few of Live’s built in effects and I have to say that it sounds as good if not better than 95% of the VST’s I’ve heard, the source waveforms make a really big difference to the sound quality. For anyone who’s underestimating simpler + waveforms (I know I did), go try it out with vintage hardware wavefoms and you’ll be in for a surprise. This will certainly make me spend less money on vst synths in the future :). Very big reward for a bit of time spent.
I wanted to add that the mixer macro is convenient, but that you can get much thicker sounds if you use more than 2 oscillators and mix with the chain levels. It’s also possible to use the chain selector to morph between more than two waveform mixes, and you can still use the chain levels on top of that.
You should figure out one thing about live, and those are it’s built in stuff. For handling audio, and jamming anything from waveform, you should use “Simpler”. Drop it on a channel and it will play a sample as it is when you press C3 key (playing higher or lower keys will pitch it up or down). You can create some cool sounds with it, but basics here in the tut is grouping I suppose and routing ofc.
I’d like to give away a tip about that. Let’s suppose that you try to produce everything “in key” so the elements sound like really playing together not pumping out of rhythm and you have just finished first two or 3 parts of a drum loop, (kick snare or clap, or even some hats). When it comes to percussive elements try to double or triple the SAME element inside of its Rack and modify your percussive elements in pitch. Transpose it +12, -12 -24 etc…so your elements are still in key…Mapping volumes from separate percussive elements to knobs reciprocally (first mapped to macro 1 from 0 to 1, and second from 1 to 0 on same knob….) could make you a really nice sounding percussions. Automating that single macro can make great build-ups :)
Cheers :)
Hey, I know this may sound stupid but whenever i type in Samples into the search bar nothing will come up :-( somebody plz help me??
This was brilliant. Exactly what I was looking for. Simple, easy to follow, and illustrative of how user-friendly Ableton can be if you’re trying to design your own “instruments”. Cheers!
GREAT video. But I have certain doubts, and maybe someone can clarify. So I bought the Launchpad and it’s upgraded to ver. Live 8.2.7 Launchpad edition. Now I want to create a drum-rack, etc. But I dont have the same Instruments nor the arrangement that is displayed in the screenshot from Step 1. I have instruments, but I feel kind of limited. This is because of the version, correct? And remember I started using Live like a week ago, so bear with me. Thank you