Audio Editing in Ableton

Set up your audio interface, then turn your library into a short edited arrangement: pull the sounds onto the Arrangement timeline, then trim, level, fade, and place them. By the end you have about thirty seconds of music built from your own sounds.

What this covers

1. Set up Live: the audio interface, the ins and outs, and your first save.
2. Bring your sample library into Live and onto the Arrangement timeline.
3. Edit the clips: trim, set clip gain, add fades.
4. Arrange three or more sounds into about thirty seconds.
5. Save a copy and try warping in it.
6. Export the finished arrangement.

Set up Live

Live needs to know which audio hardware to use before you hear anything. Open Live's Audio preferences and choose your interface as the audio device, so playback runs to your headphones.

Then set the inputs and outputs. Your interface gives you two channels, one stereo pair, which is all you need here.

Open a new Live Set (Ableton's word for a project) and save it into your working folder right away. Saving now creates the Project folder that holds this session's work.

A new Set opens with a default layout: two audio tracks, two MIDI tracks, and two return tracks. Here you use the audio tracks. The MIDI tracks hold instruments; the return tracks hold shared effects. They sit there unused until you need them.

Two things make the rest of the work smoother. Live's file management keeps each project's pieces together, and the Info View, the small panel in the lower left, tells you what any control does when you hover over it.

A handful of keyboard shortcuts save real time. Learn the few in this video now, and you will reach for them constantly.

Bring your sounds in

Add your sample library to Live's browser so your sounds sit in the sidebar, ready to preview and drag in. You add the folder once and Live remembers it.

This video gives you the layout of the Arrangement view.

The transport bar along the top starts and stops playback and sets the tempo.

Now pick four to six sounds from your library that you might use. Preview them in the browser, then drag each one onto its own audio track in the Arrangement view. Aim for variety: a sustained sound or two, a short hit or two, and a rhythmic loop if your library has one. You will want the contrast when you arrange.

Edit the clips

Work on each clip in turn. Trim the start and the end so the clip holds just the part you want, set the clip's gain so it sits at a comfortable level, and add a short fade in and fade out so nothing starts or ends with a click.

This video walks those edits in the Arrangement view.

That video also shows MIDI clips. Here you work with audio clips only, the ones that show a waveform.

These shortcuts speed up the same moves.

Most clip edits live in the Detail View, the panel along the bottom of the screen. Open it and you see the selected clip up close in Clip View.

That same panel is multi-purpose, and what it shows depends on what you open. Double-click a track's name and it becomes the Device View, the track's chain of devices, where its instruments and effects go. Double-click a clip and it becomes the Clip View instead, which comes in two kinds: one for audio clips, one for MIDI clips, the MIDI one often called the piano roll.

Two controls in Clip View are worth a close look.

Notice the clip's pitch control. On one of your short hits, changing the pitch also changes the clip's length, the way speeding up or slowing down tape does. That is specific to repitching a clip this way. When you play sounds from a sampling instrument, you repitch them a different way. Set it back to zero when you are done looking, so it does not shift the sound in your arrangement.

Now the gain slider. Drag it and watch the waveform in the clip grow and shrink. That gain belongs to the clip, and it is the first of several places you set level in Live.

Edit freely. Nothing you do here changes the files in your library; you are editing clips, not the sounds underneath.

Build a short arrangement

Arrange three or more of your edited sounds into about thirty seconds of music. Duplicate clips, move them along the timeline, and layer them across tracks. There are no rules about what it should sound like. The point is the moves: placing, trimming, fading, and stacking clips until you have something whose shape you chose. Save as you go with Cmd-S.

Save a copy, then warp

Before you experiment with warping, branch your arrangement: run File → Save As and name the copy something new. Do all your warping in the copy, so the original keeps the arrangement exactly as you built it. Saving a fresh version before you experiment is a habit worth keeping, since it lets you try anything and still walk back.

You already met one way to stretch a sound. Turning a clip's pitch control sped it up or slowed it down, and the pitch rose or fell along with it, the way a tape plays higher when it runs fast and lower when it runs slow. Speed and pitch move together there: one move, both results.

Warping is the other way. Live stretches the timing of a clip to match the Set's tempo and holds the pitch where it was. A loop recorded at one speed can play faster or slower to sit in time with your project, and it stays at its original pitch the whole time. Speed and pitch come apart: the timing bends to the tempo, the pitch stays put. That separation is the point of warping, and it is the thing tape could never do.

Live tries to do this for you. Drag certain sounds in and it guesses their tempo and warps them on the spot to lock them to your Set. That guess helps for some sounds and gets in the way for others, and at this stage you want to take the wheel yourself. Open Live's preferences (Live → Preferences, or Cmd-,) and choose the Record/Warp/Launch tab. In the Warp section, set Loop/Warp Short Samples to Unwarped One Shot and set Auto-Warp Long Samples to Off.

With those off, every sound you import plays at its own recorded speed and ignores the Set tempo until you decide otherwise. Warping becomes a choice you make one clip at a time, on the clips that want it.

Now try it. Take a rhythmic loop and turn Warp on for that clip: it locks to the Set tempo, and if you change the tempo in the transport bar the loop follows and stays in time, its pitch unchanged. Take a one-shot, a single hit with no built-in rhythm, and leave Warp off: it plays at its recorded speed, indifferent to the tempo. Loops usually want Warp on, one-shots usually want it off.

Warp has several modes (Beats, Tones, Texture, Complex). Leave them at the default for now. The how, and what each mode is for, is here:

Export

Export your arrangement to a single audio file at 48 kHz, 32-bit, saved into your working folder.

Read more

Links and further reading to come.