Midi Routing for External Instrument Audio - Ableton

There is a ton of people out there that have a good sounding keyboard/Synth with great sounds, but when they record it on Ableton, they have issues with audio timing and quality. Unless you are a professional it is very difficult to stick to tempo and get all the nuances right in a single take. Multiple takes and warping audio for tempo will result in degraded sound for the user who is not experienced in warping audio to tempo. 


There is an easy fix for this, all you need is to follow the tutorial below for getting great sounds from existing keyboard into Ableton and not invest more in expensive VST instrument packages. Example, I use a Roland Juno Di keyboard, that has both USB and the normal midi ins and outs and has an insane amount (over 1000 patches) of good sounding Strings, piano, guitars and synths etc.

I am going to use the existing midi in and out ports on the keyboard for this tutorial. Make sure you a midi interface to USB connector for your instrument hooked up to your PC/MAC with all the drivers installed.

Please check the tutorial on home studio setup using Ableton for the interface that I currently use. Once you have your existing Keyboard Workstation/Synth/Digital Piano connected to the PC/MAC using the midi to USB cable follow the steps below.

• In Ableton open the following 3 channels. 1 audio, 2 midi channels.
• On the first midi channel select any instrument of your choice from the Ableton Instrument rack. Acoustic piano patch for example.
• Drag and drop the external midi instrument from the instrument rack into the 2nd midi channel. 
• Set up the midi out for the external midi channel and enable audio in through your audio interface. The external instruments audio needs to be routed to your audio interface either through mono or stereo. In my case it is stereo.
• In my Audio track I set my audio to receive inputs from my audio interface through the I/O menu.

This following image shows how the routing works.

Once the routing has been done, and Ableton set up the way the instructions are provided in the steps above, you should be ready to record high quality audio from your instrument.

The best part about this method is that you can play using the same keyboard/synth on midi channel 1 and use the instrument patch in Ableton to tweak the velocity, sustain and also the timing on the midi track.

Then you should copy and paste the recorded midi track onto your external midi channel, hit play and arm/record audio on audio channel 1. The midi notes will be sent out from Ableton at whatever tempo you desire, and the audio from the external device should come back on time with the same tempo and with all the playing nuances such as sustain and velocity edits that you made.

Check my Tutorial on how to Record audio into Ableton.

Hope this tutorial helps those of you who cannot afford a professional/Session Artist to play your master composition!

Ableton Basics - Tweaking Instruments in Ableton Live

In the last tutorial I talked about to how to record midi into Ableton. In this tutorial we shall focus more on what settings you can use to tweak a sound of an instrument inside Ableton.

One of the first things you will need to understand is the concept of frequency and how sounds occupy a particular frequency space. A human ear in theory can distinguish sounds from 20-20000 Hz, that is the general guidance. I think with age, hearing abilities and difference in hearing between people most of the frequency above 15-16Khz is very difficult to discern for the majority of the worlds population. For example, take the bass drum. It has got tons of energy in the lower edge of the frequency spectrum (around 100hz and below depending on the kick used) and the drum also has harmonics present which have a very weak presence in the higher end of the spectrum (100-20000 Hz). Similarly the cymbals and hats occupy space starting from mid range around 4000-15000 and above. Vocals occupy most of the mid range, depending on the voice and the ability of the person to sing it can be as wide as 50-10000Hz.

The fact is for any track the kick in most cases provides the low end punch needed to drive the track. To make this tutorial easy. I am using the Classic 606 kit with a very flat sounding kick drum. how do you take this Kick drum and turn it into something punchy with a great low end presence.

For a more in depth explanation continue reading below.

When you add a drum kit inside Ableton, on top of the track view you will see a small triangle. If you click on this triangle (shown in the image below) the kit is expanded to the instruments that are present inside of it. This is needed since you will be dropping certain effects on some instruments but might not want the effect to be present on the entire kit.

Once the triangle has been clicked the kit will be expanded and you will see individual instruments in the kit as separate channels. This is shown below.

Now that you have separate channels, this becomes like any other midi channel with each one able to get separate effects apart from the sends and returns. Gives you an immense amount of options to tweak the sound.

An example of adding an EQ to the Main Kick-606 is shown below. You can then tweak the EQ and the mixer levels to get the right sound for your kick drums and the other instruments in the entire kit.

The same workflow can also be applied to other instruments. Say you have a bunch of string instruments, both audio samples and midi instruments. You can select all the tracks and group them together into a single master track called Strings and then redo the mix internally by expanding them. This whole method helps a lot when you are dealing with a lot of tracks in your productions.

Hope this tutorial helped. The next tutorial will deal with getting good sounding audio from your existing midi enabled instruments, keyboards, synthesizers, workstations etc into Ableton.