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

Recording MIDI in Arrangement View - Ableton Live Tutorial

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

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Recording MIDI in Arrangement View

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- [Instructor] Now that we have a routine established to get us ready to record, let's make a MIDI recording and learn how to use the MIDI Overdub function. So, I've got a default set open. And I'm going to start by tabbing over to Arrangement View, where we've been working, so let me hit my tab key. And I've already kind of teed up Impulse here. And I'm just going to grab this first preset and drag and drop that on this first MIDI track. So let me just make sure that I've got sound. (drums beating) Okay, my track has Record enabled. And it looks like I'm ready to go there. So let's set a tempo. I'm going to bump this down to around 100 BPM. And let's enable the metronome, so I'll click on that and I'm going to just double check that I've got a count-in set by clicking on the arrow here and making sure that I've got a one-bar count-in selected. So that looks like that's ready. And the last thing that I need to do to get ready to record is just to set my record start point on whatever track I'm going to record on. So if my cursor is somewhere out in the middle of the track, but I want to be at the beginning, all I need to do is click at the point where I want to set the start point. Now, in this case, I can just click the Stop button and go to the beginning of the track, and I'm ready to go. So the track has Record enabled. And the last thing that we need to do is just hit the Arrangement Record button here. Now, there's a Quick Key for that as well, which is F9, which will allow you to have, you know, your hand on your MIDI controller and not have to be using a mouse to try and start Playback, or start Record. So I'm going to do that. Now, while I do that, I'm going to just give you a short disclaimer, in that the software that I'm using to capture this video really messes with the kind of delay and latency. And so, it's really hard to play in time with this software running at the same time that I'm using Ableton. So, just please forgive me if this isn't the most in-time thing you've ever heard in your life. Okay, so I'm going to press F9. And we're going to go into Record. (drums playing) Okay, so I've recorded about four bars there. And you can see that the clip that I recorded is a little bit longer than four measures. And if I want to be able to use Ableton's loop functionality, I need to make sure that that original clip is set at exactly the right length. So I'm going to double click on that clip, and down in the Clip Overview area here in the MIDI Editor, I'm going to grab the triangles over here on the right side of the ruler, and I'm going to drag those, so that they are in line with measure five. And that sets an exact four measures for the length of our clip. And if I want to be able to loop this, all I need to do is engage the loop switch over here in Clip Overview, and then when I trim this clip out up here, you'll notice that when I do that I get iterations of the loop. Okay, so now that I've got this clip recorded, I want to add a high hat part to this drum beat. Now, in most cases, if I just hit the Record button and started recording, the new MIDI information would wipe out what's already on the track. So I want to enable the Overdub function, so that anything that I record now will actually be added to the clip. So to do that, all we need to do is enable this plus button up here on the Control Bar. And now, if I reset my start point to the beginning of the clip and hit F9, I'll go back into Record, and whatever MIDI notes that I record are going to get added to this existing clip. So let me find my high hat. (fast high hat beat playing) There it is. So I'm going to press F9, and I'm going to go back into Record. (drums playing with high hat beat) Okay, now you'll notice that when I finished my recording, Ableton again did not truncate the loop to the right length, so I'm going to have to grab that and make an adjustment there. So with this selected and visible down here in the MIDI Editor, again I can grab those outpoint triangles and move those to the right spot. Let's check it out, and let's hear what I've got. (music playing with high hat beat) Okay, that's pretty close. So, now that you know how to record an overdub record MIDI in Arrangement View, you're ready to start working on your projects.

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