New RM-Sounds Tutorial - Audio Hot Swap

Hey guys, I wrote up a new tutorial on my site at www.rm-sounds.com. It is titled "Ableton's Audio Hot Swap: A Little Known Feature With A Lot Of Potential". In this tutorial I discuss an Ableton Live technique for swapping out audio files in your arrangement while keeping your actual arrangement intact. It's quite useful for anyone that arranges beats using samples directly spread out on the arrangement.

Check it out, hopefully some of you may benefit from it. I've got a few more videos to come soon as well. Thanks guys.

I'd like to talk a bit about a little know feature in Ableton Live that I like to call Audio Hot Swap. Audio Hot Swap is very similar to the regular hot swap feature that I'm sure many of you are familiar with which allows you to swap out instruments/effects/presets/grooves and many other things in Live. This is commonly identified by the orange circle with rotating arrows in the corner of all of Ableton's devices, etc. All you do is click this orange circle and you will bring up your browser on the left which will allow you to try out different presets or whatever until you find what you are looking for. As I'm sure all of you know, this is very handy and I use it on a daily basis. Audio Hot Swap is similar to this in the sense that it allows you to swap out the actual audio contained within your clips in the arrangement, while leaving the actual arrangement of the clips intact. Not only does Audio Hot Swap leave the placement of your clips at the same point in time in your arrangement, but it also preserves clip settings like volume, transposition, envelopes, etc.

I should begin by explaining the relevance of this. I have recently begun to start composing in a slightly different manner, dragging and dropping samples and audio files directly onto the arrangement view and arranging them by hand into beats and patterns. Common functions like copy/paste, duplicate, chopping, fades, reversing, etc. are all tools at my disposal. It's actually amazing how flexible working with audio can be when you get right in there and mangle the waveform by hand to sound exactly how you want it. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks. One particular example is this: imagine you choose a kick drum sample. You spend all day programming in an entire song's worth of kick drum patterns using that sample, only at the end of the day you decide you don't really like the sample so much any more. What are you to do? If you decide to go choose another sample you are basically going to have to re-program your entire song again. Or so I thought...

It helps to understand how Live handles audio files. You need to separate audio files from the containers that hold them (clips):

When you duplicate a file, you are not inserting a second audio file into your project folder as this would most definitely lead to massive project sizes very quickly. Instead, when you duplicate a "clip" you are only telling Live to reference the same audio file at another point in the timeline. So for example in the following picture you can see on the Perc 2 track there is a hi-hat repeating itself over and over again. Every one of those green containers/clips is referencing the same file. For this reason even the most complex looking projects may only reference a few separate audio files on your hard drive.

Now, Live has a couple very useful references that can be accessed by selecting "View - File Manager" at the top. There are other things in here worth noting, but we are mostly concerned with "Manage Set" then "View Files". This will bring up a list of every audio file currently being used in your Live Set. Some will be located in your project folder, others may be External (located elsewhere on your hard drive). An easier way to access this list, and one that you should discipline yourself to use as it can get very confusing very quickly, is to double click on a clip in your arrangement, and in the sample window right-click and select "Manage Sample File". This has the benefit of highlighting in the list exactly which sample you are currently working with.

At this point you may have noticed that every entry on your file list has our beloved hot swap button! If you select this hot swap button, you will encounter similar behavior to any other hot swap in Live, and you will see the browser pop up on the left with your sample highlighted. From here you can swap out different samples, and you will notice as you select different samples it will change the audio files in all the clips in your project that are referencing the same file!

Go ahead and attempt this with clips that all reference the same file, but have different volumes, different lengths, different transposition, different clip envelopes, etc. and you will see that all of that stuff stays exactly the same, only the audio inside the clip changes. The only time you will run into trouble is when you either consolidate a clip or reverse a clip. Both of these functions create new audio files within your project which will then isolate them from the rest. For this reason the method isn't perfect (I do a lot of both of these functions when composing), but it is better than nothing. This is extremely useful specifically for percussion and beat elements that have a ton of repeated samples spread out across the arrangement, but can be applied to anything that references the same file.

Play around. Discuss.