Here’s a way to randomly chop up drum samples (while making them stay in beat) in Live.

From the manual: Follow Actions allow creating chains of clips that can trigger each other in an orderly or random way (or both).

1) Drag a bunch of warped drum samples into Live onto one track, and select them all (Command-A)

2) Down below, in the Clip View (you may have to press Shift-Tab to get there if you are currently looking at Effects/Devices) make sure the Launch settings view is open by pressing the L button.

3) Now let’s set the Follow Action time to 1/16th note (which means something will happen every 16th note)

4) Now we’ll the Follow Action for all clips to “Other” — this means that, after 1/16th note, any other clip on the track will be launched (Note that Follow Actions only work on Clips on a track touching each other).

5) If you triggered a clip above (don’t yet), you’d hear the first 16th of each clip randomly played back. But we don’t want just the first beat, we want each clip to take over the play position from whatever clip was played in that track before. To do this we press the Legato button.

You also want to set the samples to RAM (meaning they are loaded in your computers RAM so you don’t get dropouts).

Here’s a track that uses this technique:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If you want to record this into arrangement view, just press the Global Record button up top.

Jethroe

Categories: Ableton, Tutorials
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Automatically Add to iTunes 

If you’re like most musicians, you probably have duplicate copies of many of your MP3s, because you dragged them from your desktop or downloads folder into iTunes, and iTunes made a copy for you.

The Automatically Add to iTunes folder is the key to eliminating a bunch of duplicates all over your computer. Go to Users/YOU/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Automatically Add to iTunes.

Right click on this folder to create an alias that you can keep on your desktop or your downloads folder,

…or just drag the folder up to your finder window header.

You can drag Mp3s into this folder and it will correctly move them to your iTunes library – and iTunes doesn’t need to be open when you do it.

You can set up another alias for the iTunes libraries you keep on your external drive. To have a second library, you’ll need to learn how to make multiple libraries…

Categories: iTunes
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A little known trick for iTunes is to hold Option as you launch iTunes, and you get this dialogue:

This is great for a few uses:

- Keep one library for your external hard drive, with your ‘big’ collection of music (I’ve got a terabyte of music that obviously doesn’t fit on my laptop).

- Keep one library for your laptop of the things you keep on your laptop.

- Keep a separate library for your Serato Scratch Live music (the stuff you DJ with).

Multiple libraries can be tricky when you have an iPhone or iPad that you sync to iTunes. Make sure to either select the correct library with all your apps before syncing.

I got tired of worrying about this, and copied the XML file from my Laptop to my external drive, along with all my Mobile Applications.

It works for me (though I have to make sure the Apps are the same on both libraries manually). But I don’t recommend doing this part, as I have no clue what I’m doing…

Categories: iTunes
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