Add the Human Touch to Ableton Live Work

With all of the incredible music production tools we now have beneath our fingertips, it’s easier and easier to make an end product that lacks the particular warmth of good old human error. You probably didn’t start writing with the idea that you wanted to create something that sounded like it was generated by a machine, so how do you add that all-important human touch? Here, Ableton Live expert Hens Zimmerman shares some very human words of wisdom.

The Challenge

The risk of working entirely ‘in the box’ is that you end up with sterile-sounding tracks. The days of dealing with unreliable tape machines and analogue hardware that starts sounding different when it gets too warm are long gone, along with the more wandering tempo, timing and tuning of all of the ‘60s and ‘70s studio productions that we love so much. These days, all of those loops you build, copy and paste and line up neatly in a row come perfectly in tune and perfectly on beat. In Image 1, you can see just how inhumanly tight your average MIDI clip looks. Of course, this inhuman level of tightness might be exactly what the genre you’re working in demands, but here, we’re going to take this humble clip and add some human mess to make things sound a little more natural, a little more warm and a little less robot.

Image 1: Inhumanly tight note timing

The Grooves

Ableton Live comes with a host of widgets that can help bring some humanity back to tracks and that doesn’t mean that we’re going to make the tempo of our clip jump around all over the place, but it does mean that we’re going to add some subtle timing and velocity variations to certain elements to see what that does. One of the easiest ways to do this is using the Groove Pool. Double click on the MIDI clip you want to make more human, then click on the Hot-Swap button next to Groove. In Image 2, you can see what I mean.

Image 2: The Hot-Swap button next to Groove

The Groove Pool window will now appear on the left in Ableton Live, displaying a list of various grooves. You can also click on the little ‘wave’ button in the bottom left corner (indicated by the big arrow in Image 3) which opens up a number of pretty interesting options as well. We’ll talk about these more in a bit. Basically these grooves are a combination of timing and velocity information that can be applied to a MIDI clip – or a whole stack of MIDI clips!

Image 3: The Ableton Live Groove Pool

You can try out the different grooves by just clicking on them and a sort of metronome will ‘play’ them back so you can get an idea of what they sound like or, by playing back your clip and then hitting Enter, you can see what effect the selected groove has on your MIDI clip. While Ableton Live is in Hot-Swap mode, you can try out all the grooves, but before we take the next step, there are a couple of things worth knowing about grooves:

When you select a groove for your clip, you’ll hear the effect it has on the timing etc, but you won’t be able to see that the notes have shifted, so they’ll still look tight to the grid. When you click on the Commit Groove button (see Image 4), the groove information is fully transferred, so you’ll see the notes shift to fit the new timing (see Image 5).
You can find the grooves that you use in your project in the Groove chooser of every clip (see Image 6). This is a good thing, since it means that if you add a bass line or whatever later, you can make all of your clips move to the same groove, and therefore the same timing.
It’s not that easy to understand how it works, but you can also apply grooves to audio clips. The process is exactly the same as with MIDI clips but Live will automatically add some Warp Markers to the audio clip you’re treating.
You can also extract grooves from clips in both Arrangement View and Session View. This means that you can do stuff like lend your own music the ‘feel’ of an existing track. It’s simply a matter of right-licking on a clip and then selecting Extract Groove(s) (see Image 7). This way, you can expand your Groove Pool library by adding your own collection of grooves that you can then use to spice up your own work.
You can also partly apply a groove to a clip. This means that the timing of the notes is only shifted by a certain percentage.

Image 4: The Groove is active but not yet committed

Image 5: As you can see by the slightly shifted notes, the Groove has now been committed

Image 6: You can see the selected groove in your clip

Image 7: I’m stealing this groove from an Aquasky clip

To see how you can put all of this into practice, I’m going to try it out with a test subject and extract the irresistible groove from Boogie Wonderland by Earth, Wind & Fire. Of course, you’re free to pick your own track to steal from. Boogie Wonderland was recorded in 1979 and while it sounds like it, it’s not perfectly tight, so we will need to Auto-Warp it in Ableton Live. The auto-warping process can sometimes demand a bit of patience. If Live does make a serious mistake while processing a song, then make sure to throw away the .asd file found in the same folder as your track before trying again. In any case, you need to make sure that Auto-Warp Long Samples is selected in your Preferences and, between you and me, I’ve always had more luck with the Beats mode in Auto-Warp than any other mode (see Image 8). What also helps sometimes is to adjust the tempo of Ableton Live to match the tempo of the track you’re importing and auto-warping as closely as possible. When we then drop Boogie Wonderland into a track in Live, you should be able to see if it has been ‘warped’ correctly from the wave-form. In image 9, you can see how the beats of the track match up to the grid. In the same image, you can also see how tight the beat is. Because I made the clip the Warp Lead, Live has applied tempo changes so that the whole session now follows the 1979 timing. However, that’s besides the point.

Image 8: The Auto-Warp Mode in Ableton Live Preferences

Image 9: Earth, Wind & Fire auto-warped by Live

Before extracting the groove from the song, we first need to decide which bit of the song has the best groove going. Under the hood, Ableton Live is incredibly smart, so it would have no problem with us just selecting the entire song. You could opt to extract from just a couple of bars or a clip in Session View. Me? I allowed Live to go nuts and simply right-clicked on the whole song in the Arrangement View before selecting Extract Groove(s).

Image 10: Live analyses the track and fishes out the groove

You can see what this looks like in Image 10. Because I decided to extract the groove from the entire track, it takes quite a while. The perfect time for a brew.

Image 11: Save the groove to your User Library

The moment that Live has finished pulling the groove from the song, it automatically appears in the Groove Pool. You can now save your new grooves and make a neat little corner for them in your User Library so you can easily find them and use them in later projects. In Image 11, you can see where the Save button is so you can tuck the new groove away safely and you can also see where you can then find it in your User Library.

With our groove saved, we can now make a new project and write ourselves a super-tight drum beat. If you’re struggling to find inspiration, just grab something out of your own Packs. In Image 12, you can see my own inhumanly tight beat. Now, I can drag my saved groove from the User Library and drop it into the Groove Pool. Earlier, I explained that a groove includes velocity information as well as timing information, and we want both. You can see in Image 12 that every kick and snare and so on is set to exactly the same velocity, which is, of course, not how any human drummer would ever play it.

Image 12: My inhumanly tight drum beat

There are also tweakable settings for every groove in the Groove Pool but, in this case, we’re going to just set the velocity to 100% so that the loud and quiet dynamic variations from Boogie Wonderland are included in our clip. Image 13 shows you how to do this in sequence. First, we need to drag our groove out of the User Library and into the Groove Pool before setting the velocity. Now, we just go into the Groove chooser of our clip and select our groove. As soon as we hit the Commit Groove arrow, the info from our groove is transferred to the MIDI info in our clip, so we can clearly see a shift in both the timing and the velocity. Have a listen back. It’s feeling a bit more human now, right?

Image 13: Apply your own groove to a MIDI clip

As a final experiment, we’re now going to treat the bass line using the same method. To start, I picked out the Bass Guitar Sights 115 bpm D audio clip from the Ableton Live Sample library, but naturally, you can use whatever you want. This bass line is 8 bars long, so I duplicate my drum clip three times to match the length and have a quick listen in loop mode. At the moment my bass line in no way matches up with the rhythm of our groove. If we were to blindly follow the same steps as we did to treat the drum track, the bass line would sound weirdly quiet and hesitant. You can see what I mean in Image 14: the velocity information from the groove has been applied to the clip as a volume envelope which is way too extreme for this bass line.

Image 14: The groove has applied a volume envelope to the clip

So now, we’re going to try setting the velocity info level to just 8% and see what that does. When you select the groove and hit Groove Commit, things are immediately sounding a bit better! In Image 15, you can see that Live has added and shifted quite a few warp markers to line up the timing with our groove and that the volume envelope is now far more subtle.

Image 15: 100% groove timing 8% velocity applied to the clip

Just using grooves, you can really pack an Ableton Live project with a more human feel, but we don’t have to stop there. Below, you’ll find another three tips for helping you to bring some humanity back into your music.

Tip 1 – Analogue Warmth

This is about everything that we love about the sound of old tape recorders, vinyl, valve amplifiers and analogue consoles and the secret to that sound is usually nothing more than a bit of subtle distortion. The non-linear character of tape and analogue hardware helps extra harmonics to come through in the audio signal which, in some cases, can make something sound more pleasing to the ear. This kind of warmth can be clearly missing from digital work, which is why it’s very good to know that you can emulate the analogue vibe using plugins. One of my favourite Live plugins is the Color Limiter and, since we can safely end the signal chain of a project with a limiter, I usually place the Color Limiter on the Master bus.

Image 16: The Color Limiter

This is a Max-for-Live device, so you can also break it open, unfreeze it and customise everything to meet your needs. The Color Limiter uses what’s called a ‘one pass filter’ which we can use to add some warmth to the music by turning up the Saturation knob. With the Color knob, you can adjust the timbre slightly, but this control is essentially a low-pass (high-cut) filter, so don’t expect too much from it.

There are plenty of other ways to simulate some analogue heat in your projects. Here are a few randomly selected options:

Since adding saturation to the Master bus is a bit of a blunt solution, you can temper things a bit by using saturation to add a little warmth to individual tracks.
Live also features the Dynamic Tube plugin, Vintage Tape Channel Audio Effect Rack and Saturator plugin which are all ripe for experimentation and all come included with your Ableton Live Suite as standard.
A bit reduction to around 12 bits (for example) can also add a load of harmonics to a signal. You can do this using the Redux plugin. Try it on a drum track that’s not quite hitting the sweet spot. The world-renowned Akai S900 vintage sampler from 1986 was also a 12-bit sampler. Just saying.
If you have the means, then there’s also plenty of hardware you could invest in to help out, like the 500 series Empirical Labs DocDerr EL-Rx-V enhancer, the Drawmer 1976 Stereo Three Band Saturation Width Processor, the Empirical Labs Fatso EL7x analoge tape simulator / optimizer or the Solid State Logic Fusion bus processor.
Looking for a software version? Just Google some tape simulation plugins and a whole world will open up in front of you.

Tip 2 – Let the Panning Dance

The human character of something can also often lie in the tiny imperfections that all add up to make music that sounds natural and organic. For example, you can add a natural touch by making the panning of a track dance around the centre a little bit, mimicking the fact that guitarists very rarely stand in exactly the same spot when on stage. The default panning of any track is always 12 o’clock and, of course, you can manually adjust it whichever way you want. But we’re not looking for a fixed panning value, we’re looking for something that wanders around, and we can easily create this effect by modulating the panning with an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator). First, make a track where the guitar is panned slap bang in the middle. Then add an LFO plugin from the Live Audio Effects bank and click on the Map in the LFO before clicking on the panning control of the track. In Image 17 below, you can see how this is done. At the moment, the guitar is swinging left and right quite dramatically, which isn’t the subtlety that we’re after, so we need to do a little more tweaking.

Image 17: LFO mapping to the panning

In Image 18, the LFO is set to Random and a little bit of Jitter has been added. The trick is to tweak everything to taste until you reach the point where you can’t quite notice the effect any more. You can actually add a whole load of LFOs and map them to a range of other controls. MIDI Instruments also have a lot of controls that can be mapped. One of my favourite ways to inject a little unpredictability is to add a Beat Repeat effect to a track and get almost every control randomly fluctuating back and forth using LFOs. Another nice effect is to have all of the LFOs moving at different speeds so that it takes a good while before they all return to the same starting point.

Image 18: A subtly set up random LFO

Tip 3 – Slow Variations

All of the things we’ve talked about so far will work in the short term – as in, you’ll immediately hear the difference. A really beautiful way of filling a track with more variation is to add really slow moving changes that you don’t notice at first. Here as well, subtle edits work much better than drastic curves. The most obvious slow changes you can make are in the tempo and volume levels, but these aren’t actually the kinds of variations that I’m talking about.

The danger of producing music entirely ‘in the box’ is that you’re often working with self-created loops that repeat exactly the same sequence over and over in exactly the same way. This risks making the music feel static and sterile. By making small and constantly evolving changes to the timbre, you can actually guarantee that one part of the track will always be different from the next. I do this to almost every track in my Ableton projects to help give everything more flow.

A great plugin to start with is the Auto Filter effect, which you can find in the Audio Effects bank. As standard, the Auto Filter is set to low-pass but there’s nothing standing in the way of you using the filter differently. By slowly increasing the frequency of the Auto Filter over a long time, you can make a track sound that bit more interesting. In Image 19, you can see how the filter frequency in a track slowly rises (as the LP filter opens) before slowly falling and then rising again to finally fall. The cut-off frequency varies for approximately two minutes between 2 kHz and 8 kHz and only briefly rests at exactly the same point a couple of times. I manually drew this automation curve in the Arrangement View. You can easily switch between Automation and Clips by hitting the A key. If you don’t like seeing any straight lines, you can turn them into curves by holding the Alt key.

Image 19: A gradual Auto Filter frequency variation

It’s also interesting to experiment with all of the options and make some more surprising variations in your track by playing around a bit. In Image 20, you can see an example of a little bit of percussion (from the Konkrete Breaks pack) where I’ve slowly changed the transposition, the reverse rotation level and the randomness over time. Because these automation curves don’t follow each other, the effect of the gradual changes gives the clip a really organic character. Nothing in this percussion happens in exactly the same way as the last bit or the next bit, making things far more interesting.

Image 20: Gradual variation across every percussion parameter

You can also apply these kinds of curves to a specific part of your track. So, you can do things like gradually increase the Saturation of your Color Limiter towards the end. That way, you can maybe reduce the extra harmonics a little bit at those moments where the energy of the track could do with stepping down a bit. Here are few more randomly selected ideas you can experiment with:

Add an Auto Pan audio effect and automate the Amount and Frequency to make a track more interesting. This works beautifully on long sweeps or risers. If they also swing back and forth faster and heavier, this can make some extra urgency happen.
You can also play with automation curves in third party plugins, like Serum. Simply click on Configure and dial the parameters that you want to automise. In Image 21, you can see what that looks like.
It’s actually not possible to think rationally about all of the possible effects that treating plugins this way can have. Set a Phaser-Flanger on a random track and set the Amount to vary from 10% 15% over the course of 6 minutes – just see what it does. And what would happen if you allowed a random LFO (like in Image 18) to control the Dry/Wet setting? Experimentation is the magic word.

Image 21: Automatised Serum parameters in Live

Conclusion

In this blog, I’ve hopefully taught you a few ways to give your tracks a more human touch. Some of these methods will have a direct impact on the sound, while others are more slow and discreet, helping to make things sound less flawless and sterile and more imperfect and warm. Of course, you don’t have to use every tip I’ve shared to quickly build yourself an interesting track, but on the other hand, I really do recommend combining at least a few of them just to see what happens.

Enjoy yourself with these tips and please share your own humanisation tricks in the comments!