From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music

Slice to MIDI - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music

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Slice to MIDI

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- [Narrator] Ableton Live offers some really cool and flexible options for working with MIDI in some really interesting ways. First, we're gonna review a technique that we covered in a previous chapter, but then we're gonna go on to some new techniques to really get creative when working with MIDI and converting audio to MIDI. So I'm in our drum and bass project here and let's play this again by triggering the scene to hear what the project sounds like with everything playing. (electronic music) Okay cool. So for this first one, I'm gonna go over to our drum loop, let's check out this clip. So we have an audio clip with a drum loop playing as a sample, but I'm gonna go ahead and right click and then we see this menu here of all of these different things that we can do with MIDI. Let's go down in order. Again, we covered this first one in a previous chapter, but we're gonna dive in a little bit more here. We're gonna go and we're gonna hit slice to new MIDI track. And then there's different options for how we can slice. I'm gonna go to transient and I'm just gonna use the built in slicing pre-set, not any of these kind of slicing effects. But I do want to preserve the warp timing. And now we're gonna hit okay. So, when we've done this we can see that it's created another track immediately to the right of our drum loop, and you can see that this has a whole bunch of slices, kind of like a REX file if you've worked with Reason and REX files, but it also has this jump kit. I'm gonna mute the original and just play back and solo play back this loop. (drums) Let's go bring this up. Awesome. So now we have all of the slices from this sample as MIDI that we can rearrange and really go in deep with. I'm gonna go over here working with Ableton Push 2, and we're gonna select our drums, so (drums) so. (drums) So there are all of our slices. And I can actually go in and go to slice one, and then you can see that we can zoom in here to the wave form, adjust that if we wanted to, adjust the start point, adjust the end point. (drums) And play these new slices in any order. If you're not working with Push, you can also just go in and manually rearrange these slices. You can try and move them around, and see what we get. We can try and maybe option drag and copy some of these. I'm also gonna adjust this loop here, just a shorter loop for a second. (drums) so that could be maybe a good loop for an intro before the track kicks in. So you can see that's a really easy way to take an audio sample or drum loop and convert that to MIDI so that you can rearrange the slices. And now we're gonna move on to some of the other advanced techniques for working with MIDI, but in a little bit later we're gonna come back to this technique of working with slices in a next chapter around getting creative with vocals to create melodies out of vocal samples.

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