From the course: Ableton Live 11 Essential Training: The Basics

Editing pitch and duration - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 11 Essential Training: The Basics

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Editing pitch and duration

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- [Instructor] While quantizing is an important MIDI editing tool, there are others available to edit and improve MIDI performances. Let's take a look at how to transpose MIDI notes and how to edit note duration. So I've got Exercise 5 from Chapter 5 open, and let's select the clip on the Marimba Bass track. So, first of all, if you accidentally played the wrong pitch in a performance, you can fix that by click selecting a note and just dragging it to the right pitch, like I'm doing here. Now, another way that we could do the same thing would be to select the note and then just use your Up and Down Arrow keys. So the Up Arrow will take it up a half-step and the Down Arrow will take it a half-step at a time. Now we can also do that to a range of notes. For example, if I drag and close this group of notes, I can use my Up and Down Arrow keys, and I can do the same thing to all of the pitches on one note by selecting that note over here in the piano roll and using my Up and Down Arrow keys. Now, at times, you're going to want to transpose things by a larger interval, and a common way to do that would be to transpose a clip up or down an octave. So if I select all the notes by going Command + A, that would be Control + A on a PC, now I can transpose things up by going Shift + Up Arrow. You'll notice that I'm now on A3 here, and by then going by Shift + Down Arrow to take it back down an octave. We see we're back at A2. Now another way that we can transpose notes by larger intervals is to use the Transpose field over here on the Notes tab. So you can click and you can drag in this field, or you can indicate this by typing a pitch. Now, what we're reading here is telling us that the bottom note in the clip is D2, and the top note is B2. So if you click in this field, and you type, let's say A2, we're indicating that we want the bottom pitch in that group of notes to be A2, and then it's going to transpose everything else accordingly. So I'll hit my Return key, and now it tells me that the bottom note is A2 going up to the top note of F-sharp 3. And that is plus seven half-steps from the original range. So if I double click that, it'll take it back down. And now if I want to transpose this by indicating where I want the top pitch to be, I can click in that field and type Minus, and then the note that I want to be the top pitch and hitting my Return key. And now you'll see that the top pitch is B1, and the bottom pitch now is D1. And I've transposed it down minus 12 steps or one octave. Again, I'll double click that to bring that back up to the original pitch. Okay, let's go over to the buzz bass track, and let's talk about note durations. So here, we're looking at a bass line that the notes are actually looks like they've been played short, and there are some gaps here. And I actually wanted this to be very connected. So you can extend note durations by hovering your cursor over the end of a note. And then when you see the trim cursor shape, you can click, and you can drag to extend the note duration. You can do the same thing on the start point on the left edge of the note by clicking and dragging where the note is starting. Now we can do the same thing to a group of notes by drag-selecting them all and then hovering your mouse over the end of the note and clicking and dragging. And if you want to override the grid while you're doing this, note that you can hold down your Command key if you're on a Mac or the Control key if you're on a PC while you click and drag. Now notice when I do that, I'm actually seeing a dotted line, which indicates the grid's overridden. Now, for some reason, it's actually snapping. So let me do that again, and now it's working. There we go. All right, so when you have a performance where you want all of the notes to be connected, the easiest way to actually do this is just to go over on the Notes tab and go down and click the Legato button. When you do that, you'll notice it extended the note durations until the beginning of the next note. And it did that for the entire clip. Now, I think that's what I wanted, but let's just check out and hear how that sounds now. (deep electronic music) All right, so they're all connected, and that's what I was looking for. All right, let's go back over to the marimba clip. And let me show you one other way that you might adjust note lengths. So here, what I want to do is I want to set all the note lengths to be the same thing. And I've got some that are longer, and I've got some that are way too short. Check it out. (staccato electronic music) Right. So I need to fix that. So let's select all these notes. Again, that's going to be Command + A if you're on a Mac or Control + A if you're on a PC. And this time I'm going to open up the quantize settings dialog. So I'm going to go Command + Shift + U 'cause I'm on a Mac. If you're on a PC that's Control + Shift + U, and now I'm going to choose a value that I want to quantize the note ends too. So I'm going to set that to a 16th note, and I've got this set to Note End. So it's not going to adjust where the notes start, but it's going to extend or shorten the note ends to the closest 16th note. And I'm going to leave the amount or percentage at about 85%. That just means that this isn't going to be exact, but it's going to be close to a 16th note, and I'll go ahead and click OK. And now we can see, these are all about the same length. So now we know how to fix simple pitch problems, transpose groups of notes, and edit MIDI note durations, check out the next video where we'll look at editing MIDI note velocities, creating velocity ranges, and introducing the element of chance.

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