Alright, welcome back. In this video I'm going to show you how to make a custom template tailored to your needs. If you want to save some time I have a premade template you can download that is in the link below this video. So let's open up Ableton from where we left off. Here we go. So hopefully it doesn't look all confusing.
Oh gosh loading. So I'm going to close these tabs get a little more organized here. So here we are starting fresh. Let's create this template we have some work to do. First of all, let's make this look aesthetically pleasing. I'm going to space some things and color some things.
So I'm going to bring up my template and give you a quick glimpse of what it looks like what it functions like. Alright, so here is my template. As you see it's all color coordinated. It's lined up for 16 songs. And I have some pre made clicks here and some pre made count ins. Here's what they sound like.
And this is only going to come out the left side because I already have the output routed right here to channel one. So here's what it will Sound like 1234. So that's the eighth note accented for for half time, I'm going to drag these down. These are all just preset made ones. Typically for song One, I would put the BPM here, launch tempo, let's make it 130 BPM. And let's make it four four time signature.
And with a quarter note, I'm holding ALT to duplicate these. And as simple as that, I would press play 1234. That's the basis of how this works. These counters are already made and there's way more count ins I will show you it probably looks real confusing right now, but that's what the final products gonna look like. So let's open up our just first base, new project if command n open new project, I'm going to say don't save to this. Here we go.
So back to the beginning. Let's get working on creating this template. It's not that Heart, trust me, I'm going to close these tabs so we have a much more organized spot. First thing we'll do is line up the colors and the spacing and make it aesthetically pleasing. I'm going to duplicate these, let's make a bunch of them. And I'm going to take the numbers out, I'm doing command R to get rid of this.
It's you can edit, rename, and right there, it shows you all the shortcuts. So I'm just gonna do that quick. Let's get these out. I don't like the numbers in there, boom, boom. So first one, I'm going to make orange. Second one, I'm going to make blue.
These are just my colors. Actually, I don't need these. I'm going real quick. I want to save your time too. So I'm going to just duplicate which is Command D, or you can edit, duplicate, or you can actually right click Duplicate. So I'm just gonna keep doing that.
1234 1516 Let's number these. Alright, all done. I'm going to expand it here and I'm going to make this master orange as well. I like the look of that. Better. Okay, we're getting there, we're making progress at this point.
Let's save this project. So we have it, you can do this by hitting Command S, or you can go up to File, Save Live Set, as I always do that as feature because it allows you to rename it sometimes if you don't, I lose track of where it is. So I'm just gonna put this in downloads, and I'll save it as template save. Alright, at this point, let's start with the click track. So you have two options here. Ableton has a built in click, and we also can make our own custom clicks.
I choose to do that because there's a lot more freedom there. And you have a lot more options here is where Ableton click is it's these two dots right here. You can hear that going. So this took me forever to find out. Turns out the volume for this is this blue knob down here. So it's getting quieter, getting louder and if you press if you select it and hit delete, it'll go back to its default.
And if you want to change the output for Ableton click, you just open the i o tab, and it's kind of hidden right here, it's called q out. So if we want that out the left side, there it is. And if we want to have the right side, there it is. I'm going to keep it in the center. For now, let's not use that let's make our own custom click. Here we go.
So we're going to start by deleting these audio tracks. We don't need them for now. Let's take this first MIDI track. Let's make it green. I'm going to command our I just hit and call it click actually click we'll make it lowercase. So there's our click.
This is a MIDI track. Go ahead in this drop down right here and we're going to select in instruments you will find this impulse feature. Go ahead and drag that on the MIDI track. And now it drops here and we have eight slots. This is just a super useful feature if you just follow along. you'll be all set.
We'll go a little more in depth later. So to do this, you will need a click sound like a click sample a beep sound. If you don't have this or don't want to do this and there's too much of a pain just download my template in the link under this video. Otherwise, I recommend just google free click sound and go find one download, pick one you like. So I'm going to drag my click sample right into this impulse first slot. So click sample.
Boom. There you go. You hear it? It's kind of quiet. So let's change the volume of that. I'm going to bump this volume up.
Okay, close enough, we'll move on. Let's also drag another one into the second slot and let's put the same volume on that mine was 19.4. There we go. You just want it to be in the healthy green area. Don't let it go into the red. This second one we're going to transpose up four steps are so now we have an accepted Click, there's our two click sounds.
Now we can really, really quick, make some custom clicks, it's as easy as that. So let's close this bottom spot and close this side spot. It's so easy to make these. Here's the trick, put your mouse on this clip slot right here and double click, boom. And now here's our sample showing up. We have this grid that's really easy to draw a line.
And I'm going to click here, B, one, B, two, B three, B four. And there it goes. And loop is already on by default. So we are blasting away here. That's because the velocity is too high. So I actually need to adjust this.
Let's go down to 15. For each of these, I was too loud there. There we go. We're getting a better level negative 55. Okay, over the years, I found a certain amount of these custom clicks to basically cover everything I do. And those Our eighth note, eighth note accented eighth note triplet, quarter note and quarter note for four clicks.
So let's just make some slots here. I'm going to delete this and create some blank ones. If you hold Alt and then click and drag, you can create a new one new one, new one, and I think there's going to be 12345 different ones. So the first one, I'm going to hit command R to rename his eighth note and quarter notes for four. Okay, now let's fill these in and make sure they're looping right. So eighth notes, we want to within one quarter note, so I'm going to bring this loop feature down over here and check this out.
1234 You can watch the clock up here to make sure you're correct. And this is doing eighth notes as simple as that you can copy me Let's stop this with the clock. Stop the all the clips this stop button right here stops all the clips. Let's go to eighth note, accented, boom, at this point, let's hit, same exact thing. Going to bring it down and this time, let's make the second one a little quieter. I'm going to change these little red nodes here our velocity, so I'm changing that down to 67.
Let's hear how that sounds. That's better. Let's make it lower. There we go. I like that a lot more. That sounds good for that.
Let's go to the next one. eighth note triplet. So here, we don't even have to touch the time signature if we don't want, I'm gonna make the accented one and then the other low ones, and these are eighth notes. For that nice effect. 123456 kind of like that. Cool.
Let's get the next one which is it can be quarter notes. One This is the easiest 234 the loop is already set. Easy. And then quarter note for four, I found this to be very useful as well. Boom. All right.
Our clicks are made. boom, done. Let's move on to making the guide. Actually before I forget, let's save which you can do by Command S. Now let's move on to guide. So to create a guide track, we already have our MIDI track here. Let's make it red.
And I'm going to right click Rename, which is also command r if you want for Mac at least, let's rename it to guide. Once again over the years I found some different uses of these And long story short here are the guide countyians that will save you a lot of time that have been really useful to me. It's 4444 half two 12123468 count in 682 bar three for counting and a 342 bar. Once you know how to do this, though, you can make any custom one you want. So that was 1234567 different clips. I'm just going to double click and do the alt trick, hold Alt and duplicate these.
You can always right click if you need as well. So we have seven of them. First one, I'm hitting command R is going to be four, four and 342 bar. All right, we're getting there. Thanks for hanging with me. Okay, so let's make this functional.
I just saved it as well. I recommend doing that PS a little side note, let's turn this quantization right here. I'll open this you can see it, quantization menu, turn that to none. This is just how I prefer to do it. That's going to make it so when you hit things, they happen right away. We'll get into that later.
So to make guides, we are going to go to instruments Drum Rack and drag that Drum Rack over here and then you can scroll you see all these slots here impulse only had eight slots, drum rack has like 140 summon, we're going to use like 60. I'm going to drag in the guide from my templates and show you what our final product is going to look like here. So if I double click this, all of these cues are already pre recorded 123456 and we need to line these up and I basically put them in alphabetical order it Ableton is weird it starts from the top right for some reason, but that way, when you double click a clip slot, they show up in alphabetical order like this and make it really easy to draw the notes in at this point. If you didn't download the template I provided I also have all these vocal cues available in the link below this video.
If you don't download either of those you'll have to record and make your own keys and crop them up. If you do that, you would drag it starting at ga right here, and then we move on this way. It's kind of weird order how they do it. I'll drag some of these just so you can kind of see how the process goes here vocal cue pack. So I would go here and I drag number 123. And you go so on in alphabetical order, and I'm just going to skip ahead for the sake of time.
All right, so now that you have all of those vocal cues, pasted in here ready to go, let's start making some countians. So for for for, let's click it, we need 1234. Let's just write it in on the beat. And there's this pencil tool that's really useful if it's on, you can just click these slots. 1234 loop is already on and it happens to be in the right spot. Watch this 1234120 so we have a problem.
We don't want these to loop. Turn loop off. Now this is grayed out and 1234. Boom, we're good to go. So now we're just going to repeat that for the next one's, for for halftime, we want loop off, and we want this to be twice the amount of length. So I'm going to go end at measure three.
Let's zoom this out 1234. Let's hear that 1234 There we go. As simple as that 11234 turn loop off, same concepts, here's what it'll look like. You can just copy me. I hope this makes sense, actually 121234 Let's double check it 121234 and let's go to six, eight here, turn loop off. Let's make the time signature six, eight.
So now we want 123456 and we need this to end at one There we go 123456 and if this time signature were lining up with it, that would make more sense. Let's make that slower 12345 There we go. That makes much more sense 682 bar, I found this is a great way to do it. I got a turn loop off time signature 6812 and then I like a 123456. I'm gonna put this up, measure three, there we go. 123456 There we go.
One to 123456. There we go. And then three, four. pretty self explanatory. Let's change this to three, four, turn loop off. And make this just measure two.
One to three, easy. One, two. Three my tempo slower 123. Let's go to the next 1123 I got a turn loop off. Let's go to 312-322-3223 and I got a fixed time signature three, four. There we go.
1231230 I need to two, three. Here we go. 12322 Beautiful. We also need to fix our levels here. I'm going to put this at full volume, I forget how that cut off. I'm going to put this to master so it's going in the center as well.
Actually, I'll keep it out at Channel One. There we go. 123. Okay, so that's way too loud. Now, that's probably why I had this down one to always forget more than two and we want a good balance between guide and click so At this point, save it, we are wrapped up for creating the guide. Alright, so this last thing is situational.
If you are planning on running tracks, you will need this so so if we're going to run a track live, we need whoever's performing it to here click and guide. And then we also need a spot to play the track. So let's make an audio track right here. Right click Insert audio track or it's Command T. And I'm just going to put track right here and make that yellow. This is optional if you want it in your template or not. And we should just make sure here's our output here would need to be different from clicking guides.
So let's make an x t out to and we are not receiving any inputs. Let's also turn off this input we don't need that so we have our click going down one, our guide going down one day Track going down to, I'm going to drag in a quick track just to show you how this will work to run clicking tracks. So I'm going to drag these out of the way, I just clicked this little top left one held shift, and then click the bottom and you can select all of them and move them so I always move these out of the way. I'm going to hold Alt and drag this quarter. Now actually, we're going to need an eighth note accented, so I'm going to hold Alt and select this one, drag it up, they're going to hold Alt again and it's option technically whatever. And bring in this for four.
And then I'm going to go find a track that I made. Alright, so new song One, I need a new song One Instrumental 93 BPM, so I'm just gonna drag it right into the track slots. And there's a few things we have to do here. It's 93 BPM and our global tempo is currently set at 99. So I need to change this to 93 And I'm going to change the time signature to four, four. But the great thing is with scene launches, so when I hit this blue, basically, I'll clarify a few things.
The orange here is just purely for aesthetic. And I will typically type the song name there. So I'll put new song one. So I know what track I'm doing. And I have one so I know its first song. The second part is what's actually doing the work.
So when I press this play button, it's going to launch the track, the guide and the click, and remember the clicker is on loop so the click is not going to stop. So when I hit this, let's see what happens 1234 Okay, so everything worked. But it started the track right away and we need the track to wait so to do this, we're going to double click the track in hit warp. What this does, this adds a grid on here. That is 93 BPM. So I'm going to hit warp.
Now there's lines on here. So I know and look at that line up here. So I know I did this song to 93 BPM, so it's gonna line up. So now I need to do start at negative one. That's adding a bar of nothing before. So now when I hit play 12340 boy, so what did what did I do wrong there, the time signature of this track needs to be in four, four.
There we go. So let's put this at negative one again. There we go. Let's try this 1234 perfect we got to work in so there's one other little detail and I'll go into this a little later. But we need to set our launch tempo to the right tempo, which is 93 BPM and let's set our time signature to four four. That will Make sure these controls are global.
So if I change this, if I mess this stuff up 127, and let's go like 12 four, as soon as I hit this play button, which is now a different color, because there are changes BPM or time signature changes, it's going to change right away. So keep an eye at this spot up here. And watch what happens when I hit this play button. One, two, it changes instantly or so this is essentially how you'll set up a track. You will or asset, you'll set up your multiple tracks with your different BPM, 1234 and so on. A very common issue that happens is needing to change the key of a track if you have Ableton standard or Ableton suite.
This will be no problem, no complications at all. Really. All you got to do is double click, and here's your transpose. So listen to this. I'm going to hit play. Here it goes transposing up But I can tell you beats this mode that is gone by default is not the best mode and there will be some problems.
So put it on complex. And notice up here, this number is telling me how much percent like my CPU is working. So I don't want this, like really ever above 40. Even you started getting clicks and pops, and it starts to be just a mess. As soon as I put that on complex, I'll put it back on beats, watch this. It's at 3% 4% 3%.
As soon as I put out complex, it's like nine or 10%. So this is no problem for one track. But as soon as you're running stems, which is basically multiple audio tracks at the same time, you're gonna want to render them out. So let's say we want to play this two steps up, we can go like this, two steps up, put it on complex, right click, and I'm going to freeze So now it's freezing this as is. So I can actually run it on beats. So it's going to rerender this track at the new key.
So it's not going to take as much CPU because currently it's like transposing it live, boom. Now this is green. I can't really touch much like, it's, it's kind of stuck how it is like, I can't adjust any of these. So if I go, right click, flatten. Watch what that does. Boom, we now have the track in the new key.
What's here? Oh, it sounds there's the new key, boom. So that's what I do when I have make a bunch of audio tracks. I'm going to duplicate duplicate duplicate, you have a ton of audio tracks and separate stems, which are basically different audio tracks. It's It's when like, you could have a drum stem, a bass stem guitar stab the different tracks that compile an entire track. Some people like to send those out all different outputs.
If you're running a audio in interface and have multiple outputs more than one and two, like we currently have. But I highly recommend freezing it on after you transpose with complex modes can be the highest quality that way. So I've been doing this as we've been going, but I just want to review inputs and outputs are down here at this i o button, you hit that, and EAX t out will give you the options of the numbers. This is really what we want to see if you wanted to, you can send it to the master, and then it'll show up over here. And then you can send master out in different ways. So just some options there.
But I generally suggest just x out and choose the output you want to send it. So we are almost done with our templates here. I'm going to get rid of this track. You can keep in the track if you want. I'm going to do command r get rid of that. And I'm going to delete this.
I'm going to get rid of this audio track for track as well. Because we don't need that in our template. I'm going to save it right now. And One of the last steps we're going to do is key mapping. So check this out. Ableton has this awesome feature, this key right here, you hit that everything turns orange that you can edit, all you have to do is hit a key has what's called key mapping.
And that key will perform that function. So I just hit one right here. And let's get out of this mode by hitting key. It's also command k if you want. So now when I hit one on my keyboard, check this out. 1234 starts a song for you.
Super nice, I love it. I also do. This is just my preference. I won't put it in the template but feel free if you want to. You hit key map and I put B on stop because I want to be able to stop all the clips, which is this button right here. You can see these stop buttons flash.
So both of these are actors who will stop and I want to stop the clock up here. So I mapped the letter B to both buttons there. And now when I press B, both happen, and I did that because it's right by spacebar and you can't map the button spacebar, unfortunately. So let's go through the entire template and key map 123456789. And after this, we don't really have any more numbers to use. It's pretty rare.
You played as many songs maybe not for you, but it's kind of depends. So if you want, you could do like for 10, you could put in parentheses are and keymap the button are right here. Just an option. You don't have to. I'm going to get rid of that. For this sake.
I just leave them unmapped typically, and I'll click them if I get that far. So we are basically done. I'm going to put these back up top. I'm going to save. Make sure you save it constantly. You won't regret it.
And let's just look at what happens when I save. So I saved this In downloads, let's go find it. We have template project. Here's what happens when you save a project. It creates this template project and then puts all your files in there together Ableton project info, this is just a configuration file, they need to run the set backup. So we actually have backups of a minute ago, two minutes ago, way earlier today.
And it's great to have that option. I think they keep like 10 backups or so. And then samples, these are any samples that we loaded in here. Here's the track that I froze, so that's when I consolidated it, or I froze it and then flattened it, that shows up here that actually rendered an audio file so it takes up room on your computer. This is very important. If you ever want to transfer a session from one computer or one drive to another drive.
It's very important you do this, collect all and save. It's right up here file, collect all and save. I'm gonna do that here. And it says specify which use media blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. files from elsewhere. Yes.
Files from other projects. Yes files from user library. Yes, I don't, I'm not using anything from factory pack. So okay. And what this is doing saving current current set that just made copies of every audio file necessary to run this set, because there's all this who three, four, all these chunks of audio and the click sample we used necessary to run this set. So let's look at our file.
Now go to downloads template. Now in samples, we have imported all of these boom. So in our click sample should be in here somewhere too. There it is. So that's how the file sorting works. When you create a project, it's creating folders and then at this point, we could actually send this template project to a friend and they would be able to run it as long as they have Ableton.
So we are all set good to go. Great job making it this far. In the next few videos. I'm going to be sharing In you creative ways of how you can use this, utilize it and really get the best out of this template. I will see you there. Peace