Ableton Live Question...
 

As I mentioned in another thread, I have become an Ableton Live convert. Amazing bit of software, but now I have one question that I can't seem to find the answer to in the manual.

Is it possible to mute a section of an audio clip in session view?
For example, can I mute just the vowel sounds out of a vocal loop, or just the snares from a drum loop? I have been playing envelope mode and I can do it here, but I'd rather a mute function similar to where I can just mute the slices like I would in Recycle or Cubase (using a scissor tool, then the mute tool). This would leave me envelope mode for crazy FX automations and the like.

By the way, I am currently using Ableton Live 6...

Good question, I may have an answer after I do my Live course in a few weeks :-)

Try upgrading to live 7 or 8, it has slice to midi option and it breaks everything down in midi slices and everyone is muteable.

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same. But, yeah I'm not sure if you can specifically slice at the snare transients.

Otherwise, just duplicate clips and select different sections in the clip browser. Unfortunately, it does not have a scissor tool or selective mute function.

Oh, wait that might not work either. :rolleyes:

Just pull it into the Arrangement view, zoom in, slice the parts you don't need, delete, consolidate and pull it back into the Session View.
________
trichomes

Its more like recycle but you can move your markers around the wave sample. Im pretty sure you can do everything that your looking for in live.

hey Hollowcell,
yeah, the other posters are right. With the version you are using, you're options are limited. The envelope method is probably the easiest but as splat stated, you can also pull the audio clip into arrangement view to cut it up. I'm still a bit old school in that I pull everything into wavelab for audio edits.

What about using automation and just drop the volume in that particular part

Yeah that's actually what I have been doing with clip-envelope section, but it doesn't give the control I am looking for as it seems to snap to quantize; if there is a way to turn that off I wouldn't mind knowing about it though.

Good to know that the newer versions have the ability to slice, but what does it mean "slice to midi"? I just wanna keep the audio fully intact but tell Ableton to just mute sections of the audio clip.

I am actually borrowing a friend's laptop with 6 at the moment as I wanted to make sure I finish a track from start to finish on it, including the separate exporting of the tracks etc to mixdown externally. When I buy it'll definitely be suite8 with the APC.

Thanks for all the replies so far fellas! :)

slice to midi is very much like using recycle. you set slice points along the audio clip and the slice to midi option creates a midi clip with a midi note mapped to each slice point. If you play the default midi clip that was made, the audio file will sound exactly the same as before (as it plays all of the midi notes sequentially). But now you can completely manipulate the audio sound by working with the midi file - ie, mute sounds in the audio clip, rearrange the audio slices etc.

That sounds very cool indeed! Can you then play each slice from the keyboard/pad as well? Or do you have to load it into the sampler?

It's been a while since I played with this, but if memory serves me correctly, each slice gets loaded into their individual samplers (so if you have 16 slices, you now have 16 samplers). At this point you can do whatever you can think of to each slice - map each slice to a key on your keyboard to trigger, add different effects to each slice, reverse one slice etc.

Sounds cool Doc. Thanks for that!

I just read through a fair chunk of the Live8 manual and I still couldn't find that particular point - did find some great other little things I didn't know about before though.

here's a neat overview of slicing audio to midi


Live 8 looks very cool, but I have been stuck in limbo mode trying to finish up a song before upgrading (same thing for the TI os)

Holy shit, that kicks some serious butt!! Brings me to another question though; can you have the slicer slice the audio in regards to the trasients of the audio, or do you have to stick to tempo grid settings (16ths etc)?

It does get mapped out to your keyboard. Simpler is a basic version of Sampler. ;)
________
Mercedes-Benz 380

yeah, you have control over where the slices will be placed. You can select default templates like 8ths and 16ths or you can go in and manually adjust where the slice will be.