Setting up Macro Controls for Effects in Ableton Live

In this video Jonny Miller (Jus’Listen/Sonarpilot Audio) builds a basic dubstep beat and demonstrates how to group an effects rack and assign various parameters to a macro control. Jonny uses the arpeggiator and chord devices to turn a single long midi note into to shorter stacatto hits. Assigning his favourite parameters to a macro enables him to quickly access these when jamming with the rack, making it a quicker and more intuitive and process to start developing the musical ideas. Try then assigning these macro controls to your midi controller and you’ll be jamming till the break of day!

He is using samples and loops from the Jack Sparrow Dubstep Pack.

Jonny Miller is celebrating 20 years in the music business throughout 2011. His musical roots lay in the early 90s rave/drum&bass scene while his DJing and productions have seen him journey through the full spectrum of electronic styles. Most notably he is known for his broken beat, dubstep and cosmic disco releases. Jonny lovingly curates his own Jus’Listen Recordings label but now also runs the brand new Sonarpilot Audio imprint, recently featuring the music of Ramadanman and Simbad. Watch out for see further developments and releases on the label in 2011. He teaches the Ableton Production and Ableton Dubstep Production online courses at Point Blank. For more about Jonny head to his soundcloud and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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Video Transcription:

My name is Jonny Miller. I am a Point Blank Online tutor and I write courses and teach Ableton Live courses for Point blank. Tonight I’m putting a little sketch together using some of sounds from the Loop Masters Jack Sparrow sound pack. Jack Sparrow being one of my favorite Dubstep producers. A very versatile producer there, if you’re into stuff like Subtract, or Night Sludge [SP], records, Buk Buk, that kind of sound. You know, the post dubstep stuff.

There’s loads of sound in here that you could use in here. It’s not just deep dubstep or a kind of dirty dubstep; it’s a little bit more intricate, a little bit more percussive. That’s why I personally quite like it. I’m going to show you a trick in this tutorial using MIDI effects on this old school synth hit that I’ve got loaded into this simpler device. Before I do that, let me quickly show you inside this sampler pack. We’ve go construction kits. Six construction kits that are quite fun to put the track together and twist it around and recreate one of the Jack Sparrow tracks in your way.

Also, you’ve got this main folder here, atmospheres, drum hits, instruments, which is one of the ones I’ve use. I’ve used one of the old-school keys here. These are great. The quality is amazing. And you’ve got some really nice base sounds too. Lots of different spirals. So, again, it’s a really versatile packet. It’s one that I know I’m going to be using in my own tracks quite a lot I think in the coming months. Let’s go over here and I’ll show you what I’ve got. For the moment it’s just a beat and one of these simple old-school riffs in the key of “C” just in a simpler device. And inside the MIDI clip, I’ve just literally, I’ve just posted one note, one bar long. And I’m going to use [arpeggiator] and chord to create some interesting little effects.

I’m going to turn this chord from a single long note, into a staccato note using our arpeggiator and then show you some of the tricks you can use with arpeggiator with a chord device to make new music. Here are the drums just from the Jack Sparrow, one of the construction kits in the Jack Sparrow pack. Just to give me a little backing beat for this tutorial really. And here I’ve just used the old-school ‘C3′, which is a chord sample. And I’m playing a four bar pattern here. Quite simple. Just move it down one semi-turn at the end of the four bar pattern. That’s a traditional dubstep melody.

What I’m going to do here is add some MIDI effects to this old-school chord sample and do something a little more interesting with it. If I go to the midi effects folder and bring in arpeggiator. So because I’ve got long notes inside my MIDI clip, our arpeggiator is going to take those notes and create a series of staccato single notes. At the moment we’ve got the right value set to 1 over 8. If I bring it up to 1 over 16 and press play, let’s just solo this for a second.

Then instead of having long notes, we’ve got 16th notes the arpeggiator is creating now. This is how midi effects work. They take the MIDI note from the clip, effect it, and then send the effected signal into the instrument, which triggers the sounds. Unlike regular effects, which affect the outgoing signal from an instrument or device. Two things we can do here with arpeggiator. Firstly, you can use the steps value to bring the arpeggiator patent up a couple of octaves. And that just sounds a bit more interesting. And also use the gate value here to open and close decay almost. And that’s really nice sometimes when you experiment the right value and the gate value. And you kind of create arcade style effects just using a faster rate.

Also, with the groove here, at the moment it’s on a straight groove, if I change that to the swing 16, here the gate value really affects arpeggiator’s performance. Next up I’m going to bring in the chord device. This is just going to bring in an extra note into the proceedings, if I change the shift value down to shift 1 minus 12 semi-turns, that’s 1 full octave. Now, instead of just having 1 MIDI note coming into arpeggiator, we’ve got 2. We get a much deeper notes triggered thanks to arpeggiator. Now what I want to do is put these devices into a rack so I can set up some macro controls and control them with a bit more ease. I don’t have to go and find the parameter of the device. If I select “chord”, and then hold down, “shift”, and click on the simpler device, all those 3 are selected now, and I can right-click and group.

Now if I open up the macro controls, I’m just going to assign some of these macro controls to rate and gate, and maybe the filter too. If I switch the filter, bring in the filter in here too. I’m going to hit map mode. Let’s click on the filter frequency. Anything green now on these devices, I can map. I’ve clicked on filter frequency. I’m going to click on macro 1. Then I’m going to click on arpeggiator rate, put that on macro 2. Arpeggiator gate, put that on macro 3. There are my values at the top here. I can change the minimum and maximum values. So, I’m going to change that. I’m going to start at 16 and go down to 8, I think there, on the arpeggiator rate. Let’s bring these values up and down a bit as well. Filter I’m going to leave alone. And that just sets the ranges on these parts.

So there I’ve set the synch rate and the lowest value at 1 over 16, highest at 1 over 8. So I can quickly switch between those 2 values just by turning that part up and down. The filter as well, filtering up or low pass filtering, in this case down to 30 hertz. So I get loads of different patterns and flavors just out of this rack now. I’ve got my 3 main parameters set up that I want to play with in the production. Okay, you can load loads of cool stuff up.

This is PointBlankOnline.net. I’ll be back again next week to show you some tricks with Ableton-Live8 and sounds and samples from clickproduce.com.

Peace.