From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

Recording MIDI in Arrangement View - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

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Recording MIDI in Arrangement View

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- [Instructor] Now that we have a pre-recording routine established, let's make a MIDI recording. So I've got a default set open and I'm working in arrangement view, and let's load an instrument preset. And I'm going to go back to the same thing that we were using in the previous video, so let's go to instruments and impulse. And I'm going to grab this impulse 808 preset and drop that on that first MIDI track. So let me just hit a key and make sure I've got MIDI signal. (instructor tapping) I do. The tempo 120 is fine, and I'll 4/4 for my meter is going to work. But let's enable my metronome. And remember, that you can either do that by clicking the metronome button or by hitting the letter O on your computer keyboard. So the next thing I need to do is set the point at where I want to start recording. Now, currently my cursor's over here at measure one and that's fine, but if you want to record at measure 13, you can click over there. So with the track record enabled, the last thing I need to do is click the arrangement record button to start record. You can also do that by pressing on F9. Now, if you try that and it's not working, it's because of a setting, so let's go into our settings. Remember, that's command comma or control comma on a PC. And under record, warp, and launch and under the record area, there's a setting here for start transport with record, and I've got that enabled. If that's disabled or if that's off, when you press F9, it won't start recording until you also press the space bar. So I like to work with that on, so I'll leave that the way it is. All right, so I'm going to hit the record button up here, and then I'm going to record just a simple kick and snare pattern. And I'm going to need to wait for the count off, which is currently set at one measure. (light electronic music) Okay. So let's take a look at that mini recording and I can do that by double clicking on the clip, and that will open it up down here in clip view. Now, I'm doing this to show you that Ableton does not intelligently truncate clips when you record them. When you hit the space bar to stop recording, that's the end of the clip. So if I want this to be a certain number of measures long, I'm going to need to go in here and adjust the length of the clip. So I can do that by grabbing these triangles here on the right and dragging those over to measure three in this case so I have a two measure loop. So we've recorded some MIDI, but I want to hi-hat part, and so I want to add a hi-hat part into this recording. Now, if I go back and just start recording at measure one, I'm going to wipe out this kick and snare part. So what I want to do is I want to overdub that hi-hat part, and I can do that by enabling this switch here in the control bar for the MIDI arrangement overdub. So let's click that. I'll put my cursor back at measure one here. And, looks like it's not doing that for me. Let me do it again. There we go. Now, I could have done the same thing by clicking the stop button, which would probably have been easier, but with the overdub button enabled, now when I click on the record, it's going to allow me to record this hi-hat part over the top of my kick and snare without losing them. So let me find a snare. (light percussion music) I'll use that one. And I'll click this and we'll get four clicks, and we'll be back in record. (light electronic music) Okay. Again, I didn't stop the record pass at exactly the right moment, so I'm going to need to go down here and adjust the end of this clip. So let's grab these and drag those over. And I can verify the length of that clip by going over here in the clip properties area, and you'll notice that the start says measure one, and the end says measure three, beat one. So it looks like we are good to go. So now we know how to record and overdub record MIDI. Check out the next video where we'll talk about punch recording MIDI.

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