From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music

Using Ableton Live with an analog synth - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music

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Using Ableton Live with an analog synth

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[Instructor] If you're working with a lot of analog gear or are thinking about incorporating an analog synth into your workflow, it's really easy to connect Live and your analog synth so that you can do some cool stuff. Especially if your synth has MIDI, you can just go in and hook up your synth to Live, send MIDI note data out from Ableton Live and record the incoming audio for further processing, and I'm gonna show you how to set this all up and how I work with analog synths in Ableton Live. So, I am working with an Arturia MiniBrute here. It's an awesome synthesizer and I have MIDI connected with an Uno USB MIDI device here going out the back ports, and I'm gonna go to Preferences, and you can see that I've enabled the Inputs and the Outputs for this MIDI interface. By the way, if your device is not showing up here you might need to download some driver, so check your manufacturer for that. You can also connect with a standard MIDI cable if your synthesizer has a MIDI port to your audio interface, if it supports MIDI rather than this USB MIDI device that I'm using. Once we've done that, you also wanna make sure that MIDI is going to the right place, so you see I have selected the Uno here, and I have MIDI coming in from all channels, so I could change my MIDI routings if I had multiple synthesizers connected, so it's really easy to work with Live and MIDI, and a bunch of devices at the same time. Now let's check out this clip, I'm gonna double click to expand it, and I'm gonna play the clip, which is sending this MIDI note data out to the analog synth and I have Channel 7 recording the audio back in, or right now, listening to the audio back in as I tweak out the synth in real time. (electronic music) So, another cool thing is that when we have a sound we like, I can also go in and on the Audio channel, we can use Live's effects, so I have a Delay on this channel. Let's listen to what this sounds like. (electronic music) I can also go through and while the clip is playing, I can continue an overdub and add even more MIDI data, so let's try that. (electronic music) Cool, and I'm just gonna go in and let's Quantize that, just a little bit. Cool, let's listen. (electronic music) So you can see how fun that was to set up an analog synth, working with Ableton Live and it's a really fun way to make music.

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