Ableton: Working with live sets/bounces

Pro Production Masterclass | Ableton Live | Sie Medway-Smith (Bjork, Depeche Mode, Rudimental, Rita Ora, Massive Attack ...)

Live sets.

That’s what today’s lesson and session is about,  working with live sets  and why is that important and why are we doing it right at the start? Well,  let’s say  this is why it’s important. Let’s say  you were collaborating with someone else at Songwriting Academy  and they were using Logic or they were using Pro Tools, or they were using FL Studio or Reaper or any number of  wonderful pieces of technology.

 If you were across platform  collaborating,  you are gonna need to send that them files. They’re gonna wanna send you files and you’re gonna need to share things, bring their parts into your tracks. You give your parts, they bring ’em into theirs.

 So this is a very, very important  thing to get under your belt. A very important part of the process.  You know, I’m sure some of you have come across problems. Someone says,  I’m gonna send you the  vocals  and you’ve got your track.  They send you the vocal on an email  and  you put it in your song and it’s in the wrong place.

You have to find where it goes in the track. ’cause  right or wrong, they bounced the vocals out for you and they just appeared.  So I’m gonna show you all about  these ins and outs of the, I like to call it  housekeeping. That’s kind of, I’m sure some of you already used that same too, but that’s the way I’ve always referred to it. Housekeeping,  by the way.

thank you Jan. I mean, whoever wrote that for Jan  Ya was saying, Simon Graysmith for Kieran,  oh, not Kieran, sorry for Oscar.  Oscar arrived obviously a few sessions in here. Hi Oscar,  I’m Simon Graysmith. As Jan has informed you there,  we can chat later.

 Okay. So without further ado, working with live sets,  I will be handing out  a document tomorrow just to refresh you on this stuff. So if  you don’t take everything in first time, don’t worry. There’ll be a PDF handout of a recap of today’s session  working with live sets,  okay?

 File structures,  sharing sets or projects as some people call them.  Exporting tracks,  bouncing tracks, WAVs, A i Fs,  MP threes,  all these words that I’m saying. Now,  this might be second nature  to some people,  it may be a foreign language to others.

I’m going to explain what those terms mean  because you will hear them  when you’re collaborating. You will hear that, you will hear them in studios. You will also come across it on forums and things like that.  Okay?  So let’s begin by opening the session, an Ableton session.  I’m gonna share my screen with you  and sound.

 Here we go.  Now  would somebody  gimme a little thumbs up or a yes in the chat to tell me if you can see my screen? Ah, thank you very much everybody. Very kind of you. Cheers for that  one more step in this process.  Can you  hear  this?  Excellent.

 That’s good news.  I’ve done my housekeeping correctly then, didn’t I?  Everything’s working as it should. Alright, so I’m not gonna keep an eye on this chat now, by the way,  I’ll leave that to you guys to talk amongst yourselves whilst I’m doing the session  at the end of the session. This is for Oscar, really ’cause I think it’s his first time.

But for the rest of you too,  at the end, I will answer as many of you as I can in the q and a  tab. So if you’ve got stuff to ask me  at the end of the session,  that’s where  I will  be. I will read all of your stuff in the q and a,  but you guys use the chat for yourselves. Okie dokey.  Here we are. This is a track  that I’ve been collaborating with a friend of mine on.

As you can see,  it’s all in arrangement view, which is what we were learning about last time.  And the session view has nothing inside. That’s because my friend and collaborator on this track,  he doesn’t get along with session view very well. It’s not his flow.  So  he works in a range,  which is fine by me ’cause I can work in both.

 As you’ll see,  there’s all the tracks there from bar nine all the way up to bar 1, 9 3  or 1 9 4.  So we know how long the song is. It’s six and a half minutes. We can see what’s happening. There’s an intro, there’s a bridge, there’s a chorus, there’s a verse, a bridge, a chorus, et cetera.  It’s in front of us.

We know what’s happening.  Now this song  started life  as a bit of a loop in my computer, in, in my sessions here in my studio.  I built some drums. I built a little baseline,  some ideas. And then I shared  my project with my friend Alberto, who, who did some work on it.  Now  you can refer to them as projects.

Most people do. I’ve got a project to send to you. Might be some of the terminology you use,  Ableton speak. They like to call them live sets. So  I may say both of those things tonight.  Hopefully that won’t be too confusing.  So this  live set, this project came from Alberto after he’d done some work on it.

 And in order for me to hear exactly what he’d done,  he bounced every single piece of this track and every part the work he did, he bounced it as audio. There’s that word I used earlier. Bounced,  bouncing basically refers to rendering audio. If you’re working with film and things like that. You also refer to things as renders.

It’s where you take everything. And in this case it’s 19 tracks  of sounds. And we render them out  as individual tracks. And that’s called a bounce.  A bounce is  one track. A bounce could be  the overall  track, the mix.  You could bounce all these together  as one stereo file  or you could bounce them out as their individual parts  as you see here,  let’s say you,  I said to you, can you bounce the vocals and send them over?

 If you did that and they started at bar 97  and there was nothing here.  If you were in logic or if you were in Pro Tools or another DAW, there’d be no way of me telling that that started at nine bar 97.

 So I would need it bounced from the very beginning  to the end of the track.

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