Freddy Frogs is our resident Ableton Ninja and tutor on our online school – don’t believe us? Check out his recent 30 Quick-Fire Ableton Tips! Every fortnight he pries himself away from his studio to give you unmissable insight into Ableton Live with his regular Tech Tip article. If you’ve missed any of them, make sure you click here to catch up and if you like what you see, find out more about our online Ableton Live Diploma here. It’s the A-Z of producing in Ableton Live, everything from composing and mixing to sound design and sampling. Claude Von Stroke studied Ableton with us, so if you want to join dance music royalty, find out more about our Ableton Live diploma here.
Detecting the Pitch of a Sample
Sampling is the ultimate joy. Once loaded in a sampler, an audio file is turned into a MIDI device. You can then write a melodic progression for it, loop it and introduce all sorts of envelopes and LFOs to completely transform the original sound. There are two approaches to sampling: You may simply want to use the sound so it’s unrecognisable and new, or you may want to keep its original shape and feel to write a melodic progression that would have been tricky to achieve while it was in the original audio format.
In Ableton Live, Simpler is the basic, ‘easy to use’ sampler. No matter what sound you drop in it, Simpler will always place it on C3. When playing C3 on your controller, you will hear the sound exactly as you did when it was still an audio file. Now here is the catch: The original pitch of the sample may not be the note of C. The sound could be a D or an F. If this is the case, the notes you are inputting in your MIDI clip do not match what you hear which can be confusing especially if you’re classically trained or are using chords. It’s recommended to ‘transpose’ the sample in your sampler in order to match C to avoid confusion.
The tricky part consists in analysing the original pitch so you know how many semitones difference there is. Here are various techniques to do this:
Firstly, you will need to create a MIDI clip and input a C3 note in there to trigger the sample at its original pitch.
If the sample is a ‘simple’ sound – one that doesn’t have a complex harmonic structure – you could load the ‘Spectrum’ device behind the sampler and ‘read’ the pitch. Simply place your mouse pointer at the highest peak on the Spectrum diagram and look at the bottom left hand side in that small box. There, you will see the Note your pointer is on.
You could run the new ‘Convert to New MIDI track’ functions. Going back to the original audio file you loaded in the sampler, right-click onto the clip and choose ‘Convert Melody to New MIDI track’ if it’s a simple monophonic sound and ‘Convert Harmony to new MIDI track’ if it’s a chordal sound. Ableton will analyse the pitch of the sound and create a new MIDI track loaded with a MIDI clip. In that clip, you will find the MIDI notes matching your sound’s one. However, this function isn’t 100% reliable. The sound would have to be cleaned before hand. You could use EQ and warping to do this.
The traditional way to detect the original pitch of your sound is by using a piano instrument to play along. Using your ears you can easily find out the pitch of a sound. This basic pitch recognition technique is the minimum required to be able to produce music on a computer. Here are a few tips to help you with it. Play the piano on a high range, as our pitch detection is more accurate at high frequencies. Make sure you try all the 12 keys in the chromatic scale as you may confuse the third or fifth note of the scale with the root key.
Once you’ve found out the original pitch of your sound, you then need to use the transpose function in Simpler to make up for the tone difference between C and the sample’s pitch. If your sample is an F, for example, you then need to lower the transpose value by five as there are five semitones difference between C and F. That’s it! Now, the notes you play on your keyboard are the notes you actually hear!
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