Add a software instrument and record MIDI and quantize in your DAW. Including preparing the track(s), adding the instrument, setting the click and count off, and recording efficiently.

My name is Sebastian La Rocca, I`m from Buenos Aires Argentina. I`m a musician composer and I`m going to show you how I record MIDI, and set all we need to do that.

This lesson is for week 2 of Introduction To Music Production at Coursera.org

My DAW is Live 9 by Ableton.

Assuming that we already set our project in the Options/Preference window.

WAV archive 24 bit word Length Count 1 bar 48.000 sample rate Buffer size 512 samples

Now, let`s start to set our tempo project by clicking in TAP and choose a tempo in for example 110.

Important things to set:

-Name the track

-Turn on the click

Session view

We have two kind of view in Live:

Session (vertical view) Arrangement (horizontal view)

I work in Arrangement view. We already have by default two Midi Tracks and two Audio tracks in this view as well as the auxiliary tracks (reverb and Delay) and the Master.

We see in the left side, the plug in folder where we are going to select a Korg piano (Virtual Instrument Synthesizer). But before that, we need to arm the Midi track 1. By default be are in 4/4 near the click button.

Now, I`ll perform four chords in a couple of bars. Let see the screen and the piano roll whit the Midi notes.

The first part of my editing is the Quantization of the midi data. I have to set the grid. The metric values of the notes I perform are close to sixteen note value. So to make the sound tighter than the original I have to pull it to that grid line (black circle).

There are some notes a bit sloppy and I wanted more accurate, more in time on the bar. So, Quantizes is move something to a determinate grid. I can manipulate every midi note just moving the mouse over it. To do that I need to use the zoom to figure out how close to the beat I was in the performance. We have Horizontal and Vertical Zoom in the piano roll editor. We can scroll up and down in the piano roll as well. We can grab the end or the beginning of a note, to edge edit there. Or move back and forth the entire note grabbing in the middle. We can move the notes vertically and horizontally and change the pitch and listen through the midi monitor. For example, I can change the octave of a chord selecting the group and move over the piano roll.

Now I select a group of notes to quantize. Adjust the quantization in 1/16, to the start of the beat, and 100% of amount at the quantization strength.

Done

Every single note (represented as a rectangle) has a velocity value associated, located at the underneath. We can change the velocities amount of every note clicking the vertical lines associated individually. We can also select a group or entire clip and adjust the velocities at the same time.

It is very common to do overdubs in the same midi clip. Just clicking OVR in the DAW, and we can add a melody to the chords already record.

I hope you enjoy this lesson as I did doing it. This kind of tools are very efficient to fix mistakes or for those people who search more accurate and perfect final jobs.Thanks for read.