We're going to do one of my favorite things in Live which is sampling. So sampling has been around for a really long time and it's a very basic concept, it's taking a piece of audio and re-purposing it. So either we're slicing it up and playing it back in some other sort of rhythmic pattern or we're taking a sound or a piece of audio and creating an instrument based out of it. The creative applications of this are really far-reaching and it's super simple to do inside of Live. They've made it really easy for us to do that. What we need to do is create a new midi track and insert a device called Simpler onto it and a simpler is just a very simple sampler which is going to allow us to playback that audio file as if it's an instrument or slice it up and play it back in a different order. So to begin with, I'm going to go to Create, insert midi track here, and here I've got on track 6 an empty midi track. So heading over to Live's browser, I'm going to open this up and we're going to find this in the instrument section. So here's the simpler. I'm just going to click, drag, and drop it onto the empty midi track and now it is called simpler. So down here you can see it says "Drop sample here." It's very inviting. It's asking me to drop a piece of audio onto it. So what I'm going to do is grab one of these original vocal files that I had and just drop it directly right onto the sample here. All right. Now I'm going to arm this track and move the start marker a little bit closer to where this audio begins and I'm going to play my midi controller, which right now I have a light pad block and I should be hearing this file being played back. So you can notice this as I play a lower note, it's really slow and if I play a higher note, sounds cool but it's a lot faster. So what we need to do is the same thing that we did when we were warping audio. We need to select this warped function and selecting the right algorithm. I think for vocals, pretty much going with complex is always a good idea. So now as I play things back, they should be happening in the same time but with different pitches. Immediately, I can do a bunch of stuff. I can make this file quite small, maybe I just want to catch the beginning part of that. I can loop it to create a new texture altogether. There's a lot of parameters that I can mess with here, changing where the start places, where the loop happens, how long this entire thing is. So immediately this took me maybe 20 seconds and I've created a texture that's completely different but based off of a vocal file. So I've really quickly created my own sampler instruments. There's a lot more behind the scenes here. Also, I can go into a control panel, and for those of you who are more interested in sound design, I can do filter adjustments, change the amp envelope, there's also a pitch envelope and an LFO there for you as well or you can just play this back at a really, really simple way. One thing I do want to make sure that we talk about is tuning the sampler instruments because if you're playing them on a keyboard, I was maybe not singing the note C, so when I play C, they might not be lined up. So what I'm going to do is tune this instrument so that I can play it on a midi controller. So going back to the browser here, I'm going to go into the Audio Effects category and then pull in an audio effect called Tuner and we'll put it directly after the simpler device. So this is C1 on my midi controller. You can see it's telling me that I'm actually singing a B. So if I want to go from B to C, it's a semitone up. So if I'm going to switch to the control panel here and there's a transpose parameter and I'm just going to go up one semitone and then here I am singing a C. All right. So now I've got my instrument all tuned up. I'm ready to go and I can record directly into a clip right here in session view. So I'm going to play the chords and one of the percussive patterns and mess around here until I find something that I think is cool and then I'm going to record it into a clip. All right, here I go. So there's my entire sequence of me now this instrument like it's a midi instrument which it is. It's a virtual instrument that I've created with a sampler. I'm going to take the ends of this and just create a smaller clip based upon my preferred parts of the file. Sounding really cool, sounding awesome. So let's take another look at how to do this by slicing this file up inside of simpler. So I'm going to create an additional simpler instrument by inserting a new midi track here. Going back to instruments, grabbing another instance of simpler and I'll use the other file. So I'm grabbing idea number 2, dropping it into the simpler. So the first time we did this we were in classic mode and that's just playing back that file either in a monophonic or polyphonic sense like a playable instrument. So now I want to go into slice mode, which is going to allow me to slice this file up a bunch of ways and play it back. So you can see it just automatically puts a lot of little blue slice markers into this file and if we look down here, it's saying that it's just slicing by transient and we already talked about what a transient is. Every time it thinks the file is beginning, it's putting a slice marker right there for me. So I can do this a number of ways but going by transient is always pretty safe. I'm going to pull the beginning of this file over just like I had done before. So now I'm going to arm this new track and I should be playing back the slices as I play my midi controller. So you can hear there's just like the ends of certain files, you can get some really interesting things happening. Fun. So I can do some pretty surgical stuff here. I could just double-click on any of these warp markers to insert or remove any of them. I can grab them and move them around however I'd like to have them represented here for me. So I'm going to do the exact same thing. I'm just going to play the drums and the chords, mess with a few patterns here and see what I can come up with. All right, I'm into that. I'm actually going to make this a little bit shorter. Okay, here I go. I'm going to record this into a clip in Session View. All right. Here's my file. Feel pretty good about that. So I can go ahead and edit this just like any midi sequence. Let's play some stuff together and see what happens. Let's see what I came up with when I play a lot of these ideas together. Cool. So I just created so much more texture and tone and interest in the song just from a simple vocal idea that I recorded into my microphone. The only limitations with this is how creative you can be with the tools.
