Uncategorized

The 12.1 update brings significant additions and improvements to all Editions of Live, including Live Lite.

Auto Shift – real-time pitch tracking and correction device

Live 12.1 now puts real-time pitch correction within reach for anyone working with vocals. Select a scale, or define your own, to keep every note in tune with your track. Play and make harmonies from any monophonic signal using Auto Shift’s MIDI sidechain. Add vibrato, and modulate your sound using MPE or the device’s LFO.

Drum Sampler – compact one-shot sampler with built-in effects

Beatmaking becomes more fluid with this small but mighty device. The new Drum Sampler presents all essential sampling controls for immediate manipulation – and pairs them with time stretch and looping modes, FM and ring modulation, and the ability to layer a sub oscillator or noise, add punch, or crush sounds with an 8-Bit mode.

Auto-tagging for all your samples

You can now search your entire user library faster with filters – and there’s no need to tag the samples yourself. Live 12.1 automatically assigns new tags to any sample in your library less than a minute long. VST3 and AU plugins will also be assigned tags based on metadata. 

Improved Limiter and Saturator

Limiter gets a complete overhaul – with a smoother release curve making for less distortion, better metering with the improved UI, and the addition of Mid/Side routing, True Peak, Soft Clip, and Maximize modes. 

Along with a more focused front panel, Saturator sees the addition of a Bass Shaper curve ideal for low end processing. Drive 808 kicks and sub basses as hard as you like and let Saturator keep the frequencies in check.

MIDI improvements

You can now filter and select MIDI notes by time, pitch, velocity, chance, duration or by a number of other dimensions using a new toolbar in the MIDI Editor. 12.1 also introduces two new MPE-specific MIDI Transformations – Glissando and LFO – allowing you to create curves for the MPE parameters of selected notes.

Create more intuitively on Push

Live 12.1 comes with a host of updates to Push. With Push 2 and 3 you can now design sounds with more detail and control by mapping Macros, and experiment with a range of different sounds using Macro Variations. Push 3 now also lets you add groove instantly to all the MIDI clips in your Set with a single twist of an encoder.

The new update brings Live 12’s filtering system to the browser on Push 2 and 3, as well as auto-tagging for samples on Push 3 standalone. Plus, you can now save Default Sets and Template Sets on Push 2 and 3, and organize your Sets by moving tracks and scenes.

For more detail on Live 12.1, including updates to Push, check out the release notes.

If you’re a Live 12 user, you can join the beta program to try the free update now. 

3. Minimize note shifting to create smooth movement

When creating satisfying and effective voice leading, a central principle to follow is that all voices should be well-written individual melodic lines. We know that great melodies usually don’t include large interval leaps, so we should apply the same idea to voice leading.

Generally, it is safe to leave any common chord tones between chords in the same voices. Where we can’t keep tones the same, stepwise motion is always preferable to leaps. “Stepwise motion” refers to moving a tone or semitone away, rather than a big interval jump (like a sixth). The only voice where big leaps are permitted is in the bass (voice 4).

Remember that chords don’t have to be written in ascending vertical order. As long as a C, E, and G are the notes that are present in the chord, it is a C major. Writing the chord as G, then C, and E, still leaves us with a C major chord.

Let’s move through our chord progression and keep all common chord tones where possible, using stepwise motion in the other notes.

Music transcends cultural barriers, geographic locations, and spoken languages. In honor of World Music Day on June 21, we’re sharing a musical journey that takes you from the island of Cuba all the way to China and West Africa by way of diverse, iconic instruments that you can use in your own productions.

And during Summer of Sound, you can get all of these instruments sampled within the Spotlight Collection from Native Instruments at a discount.

Explore the Spotlight Collection

What is World Music Day?

World Music Day, also known as Fête de la Musique, is an annual celebration held on June 21. Originating in France in 1982, it has since spread globally, encouraging musicians of all levels to perform in public spaces. The day promotes the joy of music and aims to make music accessible to everyone, fostering cultural exchange and community spirit.

Let’s take a listening journey through some of these beautiful instruments from different cultures across the world.

East Asia: Guqin

The Guqin is a traditional Chinese string instrument, known for its delicate, expressive sound and cultural significance. With over 3,000 years of history, it features seven strings and is typically played by plucking with the fingers. The Guqin is highly regarded for its association with scholars and its role in Chinese art, literature, and philosophy.

What are samples in music?

Samples are sounds that can be used to make music. They’re called “samples” because the way digital audio recording works is by taking a sample of the level of the input signal at regular intervals (known at the sample rate), and this is used to make a file that recreates the sound. Hence, “sample” has become shorthand for a digital audio recordings in the music production realm.

Samples can come in various forms, and are often “loops” (usually rhythmic material of a specific number of bars that can be played repeated to create a backing), and “one-shots” (a single sound that can be played back rhythmically and chromatically, i.e. pitched up and down a keyboard).

What is a sample pack?

A sample pack is a collection of sounds, often designed to work well together to create a specific style of music. Native Instruments Expansions are sample packs that also include instrument presets, and now expansions are available in “WAV-only” editions that just feature the sample content.

Tape Wobble

Tape Wobble emulates the sound of analog tape machines, characterized by wow and flutter, saturation, noise, and a limited high-frequency response. You can use it to apply classic lo-fi effects, particularly when playing sustained notes, pads and melodies.

Dedicated controls for Wow, Flutter, as well as the Speed and Age of the tape enable you to adjust the effect in great detail. The Scrape control expands the sound palette by degrading the sound and adding a crunchy quality.

What is Maschine best for?

Maschine is a versatile beat making tool with both an extensive included sound library, and an enormous amount of extra sounds available via Native Instruments expansions. It’s also capable of sampling on-the-fly, allowing you to record internal or external audio signals without having to stop the sequencer.

This makes it great for spontaneous music making, and its fun-to-play pad-based hardware interface means its the ideal tool for those after a more tactile approach to beatmaking and live performance

Can a Maschine be used standalone?

There is a model of Maschine that can be used standalone: the Maschine+. This version has its own built-in processor, RAM and storage, meaning that it can be used without a computer at all. All other Maschine devices including the Maschine MK3 and Maschine Mikro require a computer to be used.

For more info on the Maschine range, check out the Maschine product page.

There are many different ways to arrange a beat. Most beats have an intro, a couple of main sections, and an outro. There might also be a breakdown in the middle, where some of the main elements are removed to create suspense. Beats with a vocal might be arranged into “verse” and “chorus” sections.

For now, we’ve arranged our beat into two sections: a more stripped-back intro, followed by a “main” section that showcases all of our parts together.

To do this, we first duplicated our 4 bar loop a few times to create two sections of 8 bars each. Then, in the first of the two sections, we muted some key elements to create an introduction.

At first, only the chords and a couple of the drum layers can be heard. Halfway through the introduction, the bass line enters along with the hi-hat. In the second eight bars, the kick drum and melody enter to complete the beat. Gradually bringing in elements like this gives our beat variation and a sense of narrative.

How to use a glue compressor

Every mix requires different glue compression settings, but you can use the following settings as a starting point:

• Attack: 10 ms
• Release: 0.1 s
• Ratio: 4:1
• Threshold: 0 dB

To dial-in settings that fit your mix, start by dropping the threshold level so that you see 3-4 dB of gain reduction being applied on your gain reduction meter. If you want the bus to sound less “pokey” and “snappy,” reduce the attack time. Attack times longer than 15-20 ms won’t usually provide the glue you want, but feel free to experiment.

A fast release time will lead to a clear, transparent sound at the risk of top-end distortion. If you hear unwanted distortion or want to make the compression more noticeable and musical, boost the release time.

At this point, you should readjust the threshold level to fine-tune the amount of compression applied. A ratio of 4:1 might be too intense for certain buses, but it’s often a good choice for your drum bus and more aggressive stereo buses. Drop the ratio to 2:1 if finding an appropriate threshold level at 4:1 proves challenging.

Phrasing refers to the technique of aligning the musical structure of two tracks so that their beats and phrases (typically 4, 8, or 16 bars) coincide, ensuring a smooth transition between songs. This helps maintain the flow and energy of the music, creating a seamless listening experience for the audience.

It’s important for new DJs to learn to use the phrasing of the tracks in their collection to smoothly mix tracks together.

For example, every eight or sixteen bars of four could be good spots for a transition to the next track. A DJ transition is the technique used to change from one song to the next in a set.

Basic DJ techniques include fading tracks in, cutting to the next track in the mix, and utilizing the EQ and/or effects to sculpt the transition. The simplest type of transition is called the fade, where one song fades in as the other fades out.

Here’s a beginner’s quick-guide to fades:

1. Start by loading in a track in Traktor in Deck A, and analyzing the track’s structure to find a part in the track that you can use to transition into the next song.
2. Play the next track in Deck B, beginning on beat one of a bar so that the second track comes in as the first track in Deck A fades down.

You can use Traktor cue points to put markers on your tracks at key places in each song, and use these cue points to remind you to transition. To learn more about how to transition, and phrase mixing, you may want to take a few DJ lessons with a local or online teacher.Learn more about five types of track transitions in our guide.

In music theory, you’ll commonly see chords referred to as their Roman numeral. This makes it easy for us to use the same concepts in different keys. For example, a I chord in C major is C major. But a I chord in D major is D major. To take that a step further, a V chord in C major is G major, whereas a V chord in D major is A major. Shifting the same relative pitches from one key to another is called “transposition.”

All of these types of chords are used in rock music. But there is also another, simpler type of chord used in rock chord progressions. It is called a “power chord.”

Power chords are similar to triads, but they only consist of two notes – the root, or first degree, as well as the fifth. We can make a power chord out of any triad by removing the third degree of that chord. If we take a C major (C, E, G) and remove the E – which is the third – we are left with a C power chord. Power chords are also sometimes referred to as “5” chords, like “C5”.

To hear the difference between a triad and a power chord, let’s listen to them side by side. Here is a C major chord: