Matt McCoy and the Loop Community team give an introduction to Ableton Live and using Loops in worship.
TOPIC COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Overview of the Ableton Interface
- Importing Audio Files into the Session
- Scenes
- Editing Launch Tempo and Launch Time Signature
- Intro to Warping
- Audio Routing / IN & OUT Settings
- MIDI Mapping and Controller Assignments
In the spring of 2011 I found myself in somewhat of a dry spell, a rut both musically and in my worship. My band had tons of songs we have played for quite some time and it seemed that we had climaxed as a band, essentially in my mind this was as good as leading worship could be for me. Then one afternoon while browsing through YouTube I stumbled across a video from Matt McCoy talking about how he used something called “loops” in their worship and a few google searches later I found LoopCommunity.
After signing up for free on the site and perusing the forums I made the decision to give it a shot. I invested in a midi pedal, a copy of Ableton Live and combined with some other gear I already owned I was set to go.
From the first time I used a loop during rehearsal I was hooked!!!! This simple addition added so much to what was already a very good band and had re-sparked a creativity in me that gave me a hunger and desire to learn, play and write again.
Now I know what you may be thinking, “backing tracks suck”, and to respond to that yes, at one time they did. Back in the day you were stuck with a fixed arrangement and digital instruments just didn’t sound good, but now the technology is changed. Your arrangements can be as diverse and creative as you would want them to be and the high quality VST’s out there are simply astounding compared to the old days. Check out the video to see how I use Loops in Worship.
Don’t get stagnant in your week in and week out routine in leading worship. Re-ignite your passion for music and your passion for worship will follow.
Paul Case
Worship and Media Director
The Promise
www.LoopCommunity.com
www.YounWorks.com
www.ThePromise.tv
www.PaulCaseWorship.com
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a full orchestra at your disposal? To show up at your gigs with dozens of talented musicians who know their parts and can produce a wonderful, full tone. Too bad you probably can’t do that. You want them to know the parts, and you don’t want to spend 300% of your budget on them, but you’d be lucky if you could hit even one of those goals.
So you’re trying out loops instead. You’ve got some canned musicians instead of live ones. They can be a little difficult to work with sometimes, and you have to learn the equivalent of a whole new instrument yourself, but the computer always knows its parts and rarely ever messes up.
But then you come to one of the biggest conflicts of backing tracks: It doesn’t sound real. It’s so close, but your looped drums just don’t have that… something that a live drummer brings. Even when your loops sound better than your live musicians ever did, they just don’t sound the same as real instruments.
But then… why should they? Every voice, every sound that you add to your band contributes something to your overall tone. But who says that the sounds you add need to match what everyone else has done before? Sure, it’s important to have that percussive backbone to keep your band in time and drive the song forward, but who says it needs to sound like a drum set? Sure, it’s important to have something filling out the low end of the audio spectrum, but who says it needs to be a bass or piano?
That’s what the Regdar and the Fighters Vol. 1 sample library is about. It’s 156 percussive samples. It sounds a lot like drums sometimes. It can fill some of the same roles that drums do. Heck! Sometimes it even is drums, but it’s fundamentally different from what drums normally are.
Every one of these samples is a short loop of procedurally-generated percussion. Some of it is old video game noises. Some of it is assorted things I found around my kitchen. Each one was randomly-created using my ever-growing collection of personal samples. Seriously, I feed the samples into Regdar, the computer, and it randomly creates the beat. Some are weird. Some are hard to use. Some are probably straight-up unpleasant to listen to. But none of them are the same old drum beats that you’ve heard so many times before! Will it sound like drums when you use it? Unlikely. Can you replace your live drummer entirely? Maybe not. But you can add that something new and incredible to your loop library. You can play those sounds that make people pause and wonder what the heck that was!
Here’s an overview of some of the sounds that were used in this library:
Amen Break – We disassembled and reconstituted the classic Amen Break.
Beat Box – I don’t know how to beat box, but I do know how to make random noises with my mouth and let Regdar build beats out of them!
Bike – It turns out that you can make a lot of cool sounds out of a bicycle and a drum stick!
Toys – Lasers, finger cymbals, and a junior size drum kit are just some of the toy samples that Regdar and the Fighters use all the time in our songs!
SID – The SID chip from the beloved Commodore 64 was a huge milestone in digital audio technology. Can’t do chiptunes without SID sounds! (Unless, you’re more of a Game Boy person…)
Video Games – We sampled sounds from Blake Stone, Commander Keen, Cosmo’s Cosmic adventure, Diablo, Doom, Duke Nukem (the 2D one), Jill of the Jungle, and Prince of Persia (the 2D one) because you can’t make Nerd Rock without nostalgia!
Stephen Smith is a guest blogger, front man for Regdar and the Fighters, and creator of the sample library Regdar and the Fighters Vol. 1.
You can follow him @RegdarFighters or visit his website .
In a previous post, we showed you the most basic setup possible to run loops in your worship set. This time, we wanted to get a little more fancy and layout what a multi-channel setup might look like.
(Click the picture for a full size version)
I have a strange affection for iOS audio apps. I think it is largely related to the newness of the platform. Each new app seems to take the platform a step further down the digital audio frontier. Propellerhad’s Figure is no exception.
I really like the app. The interface is simple and interesting. It provides just enough functionality to tweak and tweeze the available sounds to make me happy. The app’s audio engine is built from two of Reason’s Thor instruments and and one Kong drum designer, which is to say it sounds great. Like most audio iOS apps it is fun, but that’s about it – generally no serious audio sound design.
With this particular app you’re locked into two bars of audio and you can’t export your sound. It is designed to have fun killing time while riding the train home from work. But what about the moment when you make a killer little groove with this app and you want to use it as the basis of your next song or as a loop in your next live set? They key and tempo function of the app allow you to do this type of sketch, but how do you get the sound out of the app? And what if you wanted to hear each track individually?
Propellerhead made a very cool mixer function (see image above and to the left). The mixer function allows the user to mute any of the three sound engines mentioned above, and it is this little gem that allows you to use this cool little time killer for actual concept design.
To get the audio from the phone I used the following signal path.
Once you have your signal path setup, open a live set and set the global tempo control at the same bpm as your Figure song. Next create three audio tracks and name them drum, bass, lead. Once this is done you simply mute the two tracks you don’t want to record and record the remaining track to your Ableton session. In the picture above I have muted the bass and lead track and I am preparing to record to my drum track in Ableton.
Individual Figure tracks recorded into a clip with loop in and out points set in the sample editor.
Next you want to begin recording a new clip in Ableton and then start the playback in Figure. I let Figure play through the 2 bar loop about 3-4 times to ensure I could easily identify the beginning and end of the loop both visually and audibly. Once recorded to a clip you adjust your loop points in the Sample Editor window of live. Do this for all three loops respectively.
Once this is done, you can trigger each loop individually, add effects, and continue sculpting your sound. Thats it.
The app will run you a whopping buck in the app store and in my opinion, the sound quality and functionality are well worth the spend. If you want a fun little app to make a legit loop then check out Figure. Coupled with Ableton, this little time killer can become a viable loop creation tool.
Below is the quick little loop I made in just a few minutes. I simply launched the scenes you see in the image above.
Tanacea is a music technologist and one of the founding members of LoopCommunity. Leave him a comment or question below.
