There are many ways to shape a waveform with the Operator, in this video we'll have a look at a method originally posted by Robert Henke. A High Quality video can be downloaded from the Vimeo page.

Ableton added a cool feature to Live 7, it allows us to determine our own personal default settings for Abletons Devices. I made a list of 10 Tips that explain how this feature works.

This is a brief, wordless walkthrough of one of the ways I zone in on pitched sounds in seemingly unpitched source material. Hope you find this useful!

for DjViral and the Ableton Live forum.
- oh, and sorry about the clipping. Twas a quickie.

Lets say you want a note to never end. You could either make an absurdly long clip with a note that is longer then your song. Or play with the attack and release of the instrument to make it sound like a smooth loop.

Neither of these methods really achieves the task we wish to do. Luckily there is a feature in Live just for this reason.

Make the note a bit longer then the loop. And let the loop have a lead-in.
For example: The note starts 1.1.1, Make the loop start at 1.3.1 and let the loop end at 2.1.1. The note ends at 2.1.2, past the end of the loop.

Now you have an endless note.

New York Style compression adds extra punch and presence.  On the Ableton Forum there has been some debate as to how best to implement the approach in Ableton Live. Here's one take on it - as always go through the links by the video to get to the tasty HD on vimeo :)

And don't forget NOT to blink... this one is QUICK! 

Here's another one of those things that settled with me over the last couple of years. Originally I did this with audio samples, repitching and pendulum looping on an Akai s-950 (yes, I'm old, so what?)

HD version at vimeo - although the message does come across in this smudgy version ;-) 

Wikipedia entry on "Phasing" in musical composition 

Here's an audio example: Three nearly identical midi loops, each slightly shorter than the other. 

I have always loved the sound of a howling tape delay, and when I first got Live (version 3 at the time) it didn't take me long to start to build some of these routing structures I had previously worked with in hardware, using so called "dub mixing" techniques to send audio to delays and then manipulate the sounds within an effects feedback loop.

^^^ wow, that was a long sentence!

 Anyways, I have been rigging my machine to do HD video captures, and I think I finally nailed it. Please add any requests for future videos or comments on the quality/lack thereof, hehe. Click the first link below the video to go to vimeo if you need the HD version - cheers.

In the past few years I've written many times about Dummy Clips. Every time a new version of Live arrives, it gets a little bit easier to use them. We have done a small collection of videos that will highlight many of the uses for Dummy Clips, starting with the basics and working our way up.

In most of our recent packs, you'll find racks that look like a maze. Racks with a lot of devices, sometimes for a single purpose. These purposes can be summarized in a collection of tricks and techniques.

In this closing part on the AMS files, we'll see how we can draw waveforms and we'll hear some sound examples.

In this part we will have a look at the code and what you can do with it.
AMS files are plain text documents with the .ams extension instead of the .txt extension.
Each line of code is a command for the decoder inside Ableton Live that translates these text documents into samples. Some commands are better left unchanged, other commands are used to transmit values of specific parameters.

When Ableton started the public beta test for Live 6, we learned about a new audio file format called "Ableton Meta Sound" or ".ams".
You can read the discussion with Ableton about the meta files in this thread on the Ableton forum.
There is also a link to an experimental max/msp patch created by Robert Henke that can be used to generate these files.

If you read my previous article on the Chain Select Ruler, you are probably hungry for some more tips and tricks concerning this feature.
This trick will show you how you can lower the Audio track count in your Live sets.

What better title for a little chapter on the Chain Select Ruler? I see too many posts on forums, suggesting that Ableton needs to implement program changes for their devices. In a way, they gave us a better solution and that solution is what we're going to explore today.

You can use the racks in Live 6 to do a lot of things. They can be used to make your own MIDI effects, audio effects and instruments.

What are dummy clips?

Dummy clips are either audio clips that do not send any audio or MIDI clips that don't send out any notes. The only thing that dummy clips do, is modulating the effects or instruments in the track.