From the course: Ableton Live 11 Essential Training: The Basics
Real-time automation - Ableton Live Tutorial
From the course: Ableton Live 11 Essential Training: The Basics
Real-time automation
- [Instructor] Drawing in graphical automation doesn't always yield the most musical results, so let's take a look at how you can record real-time automation using your mouse or a MIDI controller. So I've got Exercise 4 from Chapter 12 open, if you want to follow along, and we're starting in arrangement view. And as I record real-time automation, I like to see what it's doing, so let's go ahead and let's enable automation mode, which we can do by clicking the automation mode button here, and enabling it. Or we can use the key command, which is just the letter "a." So, I'll hit that so that we can see the automation. And let's do a couple of things to get prepared here. So first of all, to record our automation, you're going to want to enable the automation arm button, which is this one that looks like two nodes connected by a line. Now, when we're recording automation in arrangement view to a MIDI track, we'll want to make sure that we have the MIDI overdub switch enabled. Otherwise, as we record the automation, it's going to be erasing, or overwriting, the underlying MIDI notes. It's also helpful to have your count-in enabled. So, I've got that set at one bar, so when we get ready to start recording the automation, we'll at least get four clicks before this drops into record. Let's see. We also need to make sure our cursor is set at where we want to start recording automation. So, I want to start over here at the beginning. So if my curse was over here, I would just simply click at my start point to set that. And then I'm going to be using my mouse in this first demonstration. So to go into record here in arrangement view, we'll just need to hit our F9 key, which is the shortcut for enabling the record button. That way, that'll leave my mouse handy so that I can move the value here on the track volume, which is what I'm going to automate. So, here we go! (metronome tapping) (upbeat synthesized music) All right. Now once we've got that, you might want to zoom in, so I'll hit my + key to do that. And you can see that when you write real-time automation, the automation nodes, or break points, can get pretty dense. So, this is just a good reminder that we can thin that by simply selecting it, and then right-clicking on the selection, and choosing Simplify Envelope. And you'll see that that's removed the unnecessary break points. All right. So, now we see how to record automation on a MIDI track, let's see how it's different on an audio track. Let me zoom back out. Now this time instead of using my mouse, I'm going to use my MIDI controller. And by the way when I was demonstrating that with my mouse, I was starting to run out of room with my mouse. And so it's just a good reminder that this is a lot easier to do with the MIDI controller than it is with a mouse. So, I'm going to automate the track volume here on this FX track. I'll select that, just to make sure that's selected. And then I'm going to go into MIDI mapping mode. And with this parameter selected, I'm just going to turn a knob on my controller to assign it. We see it's assigned there. We can see it over here in the mappings browser, that the track volume on the FX mixer has been assigned to something via Controller 13. Now with that done, we can either Escape or hit the MIDI-map mode. And now when I turn that knob, you can see that it's controlling the volume. So let's set my cursor, and let's record a quick pass here. Before I do that I should mention, track doesn't need to be in record, and I don't need the MIDI overdub button enabled, because this isn't MIDI. And let's go ahead and hit the record button, and we'll go into record. (metronome tapping) (upbeat synthesized music) And then just press your space bar when you want to stop. So you can see, that's very easy to do. And I can go ahead and select that as well, and right-click on it, and choose Simplify Envelope from the contextual menu. And then if there's any editing that you want to do, you can just simply click your break points if you need to drag those to another location, and we can quickly edit that so we get exactly what we want. All right. So we've seen how to do it in arrangement view, let's hit our Tab key, and let's go over to session view, and let's do it there. So, let me hit my stop all clips button. So, this is where we're going to work. I'll double-click this pad so that we can see it down here in clip view, and I'll click the tab for the mixer automation here. And let me go, for some reason it's on modulation, but let's switch that to automation, because I want to automate this control. Now that's not assigned yet, so let me go ahead, and let's go back into MIDI-map mode. This time, I'll use the key command, Command + m, it'd be Control + m on a PC, and I'll select that fader and move a different knob this time. You can see that that's been assigned. And I'll hit my Escape key to get out of that. And let's get ready to record that automation. So here, I will go ahead and click the automation arm button so that it's enabled. We already know that we've got a count-in, so that's good. And then there's one preference that we ought to check, so let's go into preferences. That would be under the Options menu on a PC, and under the Live menu on a Mac. And I'm going to go to the Record Warp Launch tab. And I'm just going to point out, we have this option for Record session automation, and this can either be on any track, or it can be lended to only armed tracks. I typically leave this on All Tracks, because I'm not worried about recording automation to something that, you know, I didn't notice that I bumped a controller. I don't really work that way. But if you are using a number of controllers, and you're worried about writing some automation by mistake, then you might set this to Arm To Track so that wouldn't happen. But I'll leave that on All Tracks. And then we need to do one other thing to get ready here. And that is that we're only going to write automation in session view to clips that are activated, or in-focus. So, I'm going to click the play button on this real quick. (upbeat synthesized music) And then I'll stop it so that we can see that the launch button here is activated. Now all I need to do to go into record is hit the session record button, which is the circle that's not filled in. So I'll do that, and I've got my, yup, you can see that down there in clip view, that I've got control of the fader. And now we can record automation to this clip in session view. (metronome tapping) (upbeat synthesized music) So, as I did that, you'll notice that I did it a couple of times, and with each successive pass, the automation that I was writing was wiping out the previous pass. So, that's just something to realize, that you can just continue to do this until you get the automation exactly the way you want it. In this case, I would probably just edit this first little bit, and then we'd be good to go. So, now that you know how to record automation in Live, you can record real time changes to mixer and device parameters in your projects.
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