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Extending Push

Lesson 16 from: Ableton Push Fast Start

Josh Spoon

Extending Push

Lesson 16 from: Ableton Push Fast Start

Josh Spoon

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Lesson Info

16. Extending Push

Lesson Info

Extending Push

Talk about extending push before kind of while we do that it's kind of an extension of push uh I have this some fatty here and the big question that gets asked is can you sequence hardware with push uh of court? Well, from my point of view of course pushes really just sending the notes and the information alive lives interpreting it and then just like anything else if you've ever used life, you could send that information out to an outside source. So what I have here I have you know, the push going in through ah hub in to live right? And I have also we have a court ted over here, but I ended up using a um m audio usb committee that I have that hasn't in and out and then it plugs in usb into the laptop so sending the notes out to the laptop and then out of the laptop into the sub fatty uh the way to get that all set up inside of live on dh then we also have a cable running out of the sub fat into the quartet so that we can hear it and is actually being routed in tow live as well see if ...

you go into a live audio wise you can go into a live through the courts head or whatever interface you have and then come out your speakers or you could just route it straight to the house or whatever you want or into the quartet and right straight out to the outputs it kind of depends on your interface if it allows you to not have to go through your dog tio do that but you have that option if you like because I know some people don't like going back into the doll from hardware they just want to go straight out so do then sort of live to get it to where you can sequence and everything you need to first use the external instrument that is probably the easiest way to go about doing it and I can dio ad track and then I'm going to go down to external instrument and I'll just press uh the default to adhere I actually already have it see it says jazz sub fatty but I'll show you how you set it up so this external instrument is what it's going to do is going to send out midi and that's going to get back audio all within the same track and you guys are old school live users you know that back maybe even before I was using life you had to have like separate tracks so here you could just have one track where goes out mid becomes an audio so go maybe two ah and then I'll do I'll select u s b you know midi so that's the little device that I have uh it's channel one and then I'll select audio from and I'll do one and so when I'm selecting channel one this is the mini channel and it's going to send out of live into the sub fatty so depending on what extra hardware or since you have you've got to check what channel that this receives middie on and if you're trying to do mehdi out you should check what channel it's sending out on so so right now this is the sub fatty right now way and so if you want to do stuff on the sub fatty right, you'll have to come over here and round way which is kind of a hassle it's not much you know, but you got to go over here and deal with it but there's a way around that so um this kind of goes into the extending push because I'm talking about a couple of max for live devices and I actually found this one or a re found it last night it is called ah si si make sure I'm looking for the right thing sometimes you don't remember that name you just got to go to the browsing like I don't remember the name people I can't scroll to so described the cc sender sixteen so cc sender sixteen is available on the max for live dot com site max five dot com is a third party a website that allows you to share maxim alive devices when I mean max for live it's ah it's a program language and it's also kind of like a v s t architecture but the cool thing about is it allows you to easily make your own devices and also goes deeper than probably v s tease or a used tio which where you can actually rewrite the way that live work. So if you wanted to write a device that said when I press this square on the device I want all of the volumes on all the tracks to reset the zero d b you can write a program that does that and actually I mean right I'm used to be a coder so I was thinking writing it's all just like cables and patches so you just point when cable point out to another in and then you do that and it sets up and then you get you I controls like this to be able to control what's inside just similar to like this sub fatty there's all sorts of stuff going on and hood here but you just deal with this and so that's kind of like how we consume it if somebody the person who built this probably knows everything that goes inside of here but that's not really the concern of us we just mess with knobs that air right here so ah, this cc sender will send seat c season of what I specify to whatever instruments on the track or whatever the middie sending out too. So I'm going tio on the way that I figured this out and I'll just show you is I made another track, you know, the middie track and then I just recorded and I turned the knob see where I was getting ready from so I see control or nineteen is where I turned the filter so then I went back to external instrument and then I typed in nineteen right here so this is where you put the cc message so it's c c nineteen and now whenever I turn this knob it's going to change the filter also if I rename this, uh filter that should change in here some macs for live devices will won't necessarily update because they're built by third party people, so I think that's why we're not seeing that here and then all I did there after I set up a couple of the sisi messages I selected both of these and then grouped um so then that just became my rack for uh, my sub fatty and then if I open this up I can then map macro one and map all of them and then rename filter and if you see right here I'll show you the final peace so you can see everything but I'll have the name on the push and then it'll have filter if you get in switched to the push for a quick um so you'll see the instrument here and the filter above and um that will be all there for you so I'll just go and grab the go to external instruments so this is the one actually saved on the push uh some fatty one so this is the one finished I just grabbed a couple of primus and ran one way it's changing the filter on there I'm changing wave one into so the type of wave from triangle tio thin erecting a wafer wave one on then changing the same wave on too um residents so you have all that control I can add more to them. This thing does up to sixteen um so if I open up the rack I could put sixteen parameters from the sub fatty into here and I can control eight of them from with in the instrument rack and then I could still dig in and select on c c sixteen and then dig in the c c sixteen and there's uh banks and here to go through the different ccs and settings that's the way that you could hook it up to your external gear you could do the same thing with let's say you have a tr eight you could do the same thing the same routing you would do with a tiara or any other mini based drum machine or anything like that. Any questions that people have about that you have some questions about sends rook has a question send a return howto access send all the way up to the abc I j k on the track screen I lose access to later channels via push knobs after the eighth send there's no arrow or in button to access and I hope that makes sense yeah um let's see so if I want to make new returns I could do add track, hold it down and then just do return that's what you said eight six geese a j ok so b t o I got up to kay strange um I would say with that make so sendem sent a letter to support at a bolton dot com on email them tell him say hey, this is walked them exactly through your problem if you want to if you have like screen floors I'm like that you screen cap it and they just play it so you make the returns and then you show yourself on push on might be a lot of work I would do something like that I'd have liked my camera here doing that and but maybe just sending letters say hey, I'm putting in returns up until k and then it won't talk past there on dh said that's him they'll probably ask for a report that live spits out and then they'll be able to kind of look into it and help you figure out the problem so yeah I'm not having that on this and sorry about that said on the track screen on the track stage okay uh ceo yeah so you can only get to I don't use a tennis sends I usually make my own sends in racks so they were all on one tracks and I could stem out easily s o yeah, it seems to be so let me write that down and see if I know if any other certified trainers know if that's a thing or could you make a note for me? What room like trying to remember but yeah, I'll try to look into that um and you know, maybe I was supposed to on twitter or something if I find out I'll get any other questions how can people follow you on twitter? Oh yeah, I think you just go on twitter and type in that guy s o josh spoon uh that's where I'm at on twitter and you, khun follow me tweet at me certainly nice things don't don't talk about my beard s o okay, any other questions I think we're getting what do you do when your laptop is really slow responding to notes from the push other than go out and get another life by a mac pro for eight thousand dollars ninety course. Okay, man let me get rid of these returns. Uh, so one issue maybe ah, if you check check your leighton see if you go into preferences. Uh I always do command comma, but make sure you're late and cia's goods to go into the audio tab on your computer and then go down the buffer size. Oh, wow. I never check. This is at five twelve that's pretty good somehow, um usually having at one twenty eight but you can lower your buffer size and that will help the notes coming because of what happens is you hit the note and if your buffer sizes hi it's gonna wait a while. So if you see down at the bottom of this overall leighton c says ten point one milliseconds so the higher your buffer is the long you have to wait to hear the sound and the longer the notes will get there so it says your input late and see if I did twenty forty eight it's forty nine milliseconds so it's definitely really far off, so just lower your buffer size. The other end of the problem is he has a real computer, so the lower you put your buffer size, the easier your computer can get strained and if you start hearing crackling then you know that your buffer sizes too low and you need to raise it up so yeah, I had a two thousand eight or six uh laptop until two thousand twelve so I know your pain uh I've been there before so trying to like mess with oversize put in notes and then have to bring it back up to then hear it back yeah I've been there side I feel you on that er yeah try that um your buffer size so I talked a little bit about max for alive and what it is and I'm gonna show you a couple of examples of how you can use the push with max for live there's a company called isotonic studios run by one of my home is in the u k and he started out making a lot of things for a p c forty and then when push came out he got into that he's making things for a lot of different devices so if you are using maybe something else he has a lot of great things as well but they he has a team of people he works with and partners with and one of the ones that came out was called asteroids and so asteroids is really cool it's kind of like the asteroid of snake game and you could do it all on your push so I'm going to I'm in sl switch just to this track and I'll do browse and good devices make sure I'm on the instrument before hit browse and we will go teo max for live make sure thiss to actually this is a middie device so click off browse we'll do at effect shift at effect and max for live asteroids push it's gonna load the asteroids push here and I'm going to change the instrument now I want to do a bell kind of sound and so it's brows and I mean d'oh simpler what that pick your pants and then the seahorse we've been using a lot of kids sounds today ok? So going back we'll hit browse to get back to my device view so do asteroids and first I have to go over and initialize it and so that as you see the push is changed and if I just get one here so I got to start the transport here and let me throw away this clip this other track we don't need that and so I should be able to start the transport and right now it's playing a note and I can go let's go teo so the first thing it does is when I hit a note it starts one sequence and then I can go in on the effect and then change like the sequence of the next one let's say, so do snake and then if I press a direction, I could send it off in the direction that I wanted to go for the second one someone a press right and I'll send this one off and then I'll now start the third one and it's a classic and I'll start the fourth one and I'll put it a yo yo and let's see let's turn this up a little bit and we were talking earlier in the studio about live being used for museums and things like that so this is kind of ah setting where you could do things like that just turns up manually it's patch is really, really low way go so now I can add mohr so I had a fifth one and what's not going left just go on and go to the bank that change the rates so they could maybe go a little bit faster wait and you have options that changed it for things like the chance the note length you can change the key active way on so I can go back and change into these styles you have random values chances for each one to knock into each other, then there's a ghost note noting that can happen on this thing as well let's say a grab one more sound here was too ethereal it's tio go back out of the asteroid so that's another thing when you're when you're in on a device you may kind of get lost cause you're like wait a minute I see you like I see banks I need to get to another device totally and then when I press device it doesn't go there um you can always just bank right back out so you know I'm gonna go to this device and then do browse and let's dio simple piano and make sure my volumes down just in case here you know no likey well that's strange but ah you get the idea of how this astro works you can just sequence a lot of different notes all at once make kind of like nice organic or like futuristic sounds depending on the synth or past that you have loaded eso that's the asteroids one it's really fun uh you know, you can mess with it for a really long time I sit around and just kind of like let's stuff go and then change the direction and change the rate and then it generates a lot of different cool notes all right, so let's see was delete that whole delete. All right, so sometimes we have max relied devices um you've got ah deactivate them before you delete them on and on and then sometimes you have to like just restarted please turn it off, turn it back on all right so now I'm just loading a different scent here you know and try one of these j p exit jakes eight's okay s o the next day I want to show is, uh the expressive control or the expression control so if you download if you have live able to live nine sweet you for free get a lot of stuff or added in however you want to call it uh get a lot of things and one of them is max were alive but then you kid also the maxim alive essentials which has a lot of essential functionality and on top of live so I talked to you about how you can switch if I hold down, select and then turn this uh, touch trip I can change it to modulate uh but right now this isn't set to anything so using the expression control weaken set that and then we can also set a couple of other different things. So I have this pad here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna load that, uh, max for a live device. So I'll go to any effects max were alive and then I'll navigate down to expression control and then load that as you could see ah on my computer here you have a couple of different settings that you could do so you can now um map it too you can map the velocity is something you can map the mod will teo won the pitch the after touch you could map those different things and you can set him in max all inside of this one expression control so if I want a map, a couple of things to the expression control first we will do is the mod will cause that's what I was originally talking about, saul, turn this to the filter section, and like I said, you can't turn the filter section on from push, but once you turn it on, you can get in there, but I'm gonna map this so I need to get to it with the mouse I do mod will map and I can do frequency cut off and some some advanced people may say, well, you can go to mittie and do it here, but this is just so you know, in any general for sampler you khun get to these function out this functionality, but not all instruments you could use this, you should also set them I will do anything which is nice so I could that ahmad will to do a filter just a filter in general or a macro that I've picked I'm just using this as an example, so we have the filter frequencies set to the mod will, so we should yeah, now that I moved, the mod will up, it changes the filter frequency and you could see it also has the output of how much I'm doing it even though we can see it on the touch trip right here and I get set of men max so if I don't want to go all the way down to two hundred I could do I'm in maxim here too so then it just goes from this range and it's set that back to zero uh also let's see what was that also the velocity you can set a swell so depending on what velocity you put I can hit frequency in the harder I press I open up the filter if I change it to pitch man I can also have the pitchman changed the pitch but also change something else if I wanted it to and that's actually the model so hits select tap it again so I don't have the pitch band let's say change the it's to spread so widens on pitches up and then after touch is really nice because on push it has after self touch as well so I can press for volume and if I press harder if you look at the after touch amount I press the note and then I press harder and then it registers and then depending on where I press afterwards, they can still modulate it second press in and out and no modulate their and if we remember earlier we have the user bowed and then we can go to after touch threshold so anything before eighty so it zero to one twenty seven anything before eighty it's not going to register is after touch anything afterwards it's going to do a percentage of like eighty two one twenty seven so you have the ability to change that depending on if you have heavy fingers a light fingers or things like that s o that's available as well seiken map this let's see to do the sustain and I can even reverse this believe yeah so gonna have the sustained men be one hundred and so as I'm holding down the note I can change this sustain right on them and then there's key tracking as well. So depending on what note I play, it will change so far because you see I play a note lower notes sustained goes down as I play a higher note sustained goes up and up and up and you can set anything to these. So if I want to change this to map and do this to the feedback let's say so go over the feedbag so as I play higher it does more feedback you have that cool ability as well, so there's a couple of ways that you can change your expression the other cool thing is that with other masks five devices you can kind of chain different things together so we'll see if that's here it might be another one there are a couple of maxfli devices that allow you to chain multiple ah effects to one knob and then you could chain you could map that one now so let's say you're after touch so you hit the but you hit the pad you press up and down and then that changes the knob that then changes eight different things you could have a plethora of interesting sounds happening based just off of this expression controller um this last maxim alive device is really cool so some people asked like hey can I can I chop clips and things like that like mlr um how do I do that on push uh well you can't like at it way forms and then chop him up like you can't do sliced committee on push but there are quite a few different methods of getting around that the one that I like that works the best currently is called push mlr and what we need to do first is get a couple of clips because it's based off audio because it's chopping up audio clips so I'm just gonna look for some jerome this year not my style that work so I'll drag these drums onto an empty audio track in the ditch all these guys here and then I'll look for a baseline and it's just it's already over here I'll just search for and they are push on the large I'll just drag it to the first track and I can just on push here just turned display on and then number clips is only one clip so I'll go to session view and both clips need to be looping for toe work correctly so is quickly turned asleep on start these two so changes the grid as you khun see a little bit on the push right now so to change the size you can go up to the one bar and change it to let's say sixteenths it started together so you have the ability to uh chopped him up and then what I like to do with that is I'll either load into a new clip or I will I will recorded into a new track or I'll even just used looper and just we put a looper on their on the record ah sequence so just so you can see I was too one with a new track a master out to three audio all arm both of these guys yeah, but both of them through there so once you record that you have all that audio in there and then you can just trim it fine the nuggets and then you have ah, a little piece that you may like and you have that ability a swell s o some other ones, like I mentioned, uh, native controls p x t live does like the monitor ins and outs, all that type of stuff px see general, if you are a multi doll user and you want to use this with pro tools or reason, they also have one that allows you to map it through their software to be able to change it up. Also, cliff x is really great may be the same guy and hate of control. Uh, eso live doesn't save your scale that you're currently in, so if you're playing in b flat minor, ah, and then you close the project, open it up and then you forgot what scale you're in, it doesn't save it. So cliff axes a little added bones midi script where you can save in a clip, the actual key and what's cool also is if you're performing live or need to changes, key changes let's say you're playing push with a group or practicing it could change the scale for you, and you could just put in the clip, so say scenes one through three are in one key and then fours and another key you could have two separate clips with two keys, so nave control as a lot of great things as well.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Push Dummy Sheet.pdf
Push Chord Sheet.pdf
Beat Sheet.pdf
Read Me.rtf
TPK Files.zip

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