The Covert Operators

On the Ableton forum there's a thread entitled "Stuff in Live you wish you figured out a long time ago". In this thread people post about the features that weren't that obvious when they started with Live. You could be using Live for years and still discover a feature that has always been there.

This thread is getting literally and figuratively as vast as Live itself, making it harder to find the stuff you haven't learned yet.

As a solution to this growing problem, I figured it would be helpful to have some of these features condensed in short videos. Instead of mentioning these type of features as an aside in bigger tutorials.

In the first part I show two simple things. How to resize multiple tracks in the Session View and how you can start the transport from where you last stopped.

The Little Things in Live: Part 1 from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

This is a brief video that shows how to get started with a synth and a voice input to create Vocoding Voices with Live 8's Vocoder.

Download HD version.

Vocoding Voices in Live 8 from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

Hi all, I was working on a device chain, and came up with this little trick. I've made a device chain that automatically morphs between a shrill 1/8th delay and a mid-range 3/16th delay - in time with the mooosic.

What are dummy clips?

Dummy clips are either audio clips that do not send any audio or MIDI clips that don't send out any notes. The only thing that dummy clips do, is modulating the effects or instruments in the track.

I am of course talking about ... Noise!

You want a swoopy sweep, or a synth crash, or just a simple hihat. Where would you turn? Many synths have white noise samples, but they're just that: Very short samples that need to be looped, which makes them sound fake and periodic.

Here's roughly 20 seconds of white noise.

- Done properly. By politely asking an expensive synth to produce it. You can easily plop this sample in everywhere you need white noise, and it should fit the bill. 

In this closing part on the AMS files, we'll see how we can draw waveforms and we'll hear some sound examples.

The Covert Operators recently released a small free pack that contains 3 sets of AMS files that will be useful to experiment with. You can download it here.

In this part we will have a look at the code and what you can do with it. AMS files are plain text documents with the .ams extension instead of the .txt extension. Each line of code is a command for the decoder inside Ableton Live that translates these text documents into samples. Some commands are better left unchanged, other commands are used to transmit values of specific parameters.

When Ableton started the public beta test for Live 6, we learned about a new audio file format called "Ableton Meta Sound" or ".ams". This article used to start with a link to the Live 6 beta section on the Ableton forum, but since that has vanished, these 3 articles are the most detailed info you will find on this subject anywhere.