How to Loop Vocals with Ableton Live 

*tips banana hat*

Also nice mic punch @9:18

Ableton makes midi mapping super easy, maybe I’ll make a more in depth vid on it in the future :)

I would take a look at your chain! If you need to be in USB 3 for midi devices, or if your interface might be slow for vocals/instruments. You can toggle low latency protection and see how that goes, the only time I ever really experience it is with my octave pedal which tends to be a little behind You can also look at lowering your sample rate to find a point where the latency isn’t going to affect you too much!

Good question! I took a look at it, and I can't seem to recreate it on my side, I'm in 11 but I don't know that there would be a difference. I keep my looper set to global, and my global quantization is one bar so I know the loop will start recording at the next down beat. Sorry I can't be of more help!

@@AlannaMatty Thanks for answering and taking your time. I should add that even the quantisation without the looper as global quantisation, is still failing. So It’s not a specific problem for the looper at my side. I have to dig in to it further.

@@AlannaMatty Well I watched your video again I realised that quantisation only works when you playback the project, as you did in the video. At my side I also needed to fix the projects master tempo via master scenes. So now the quantisation within the looper works as well😀. Thanks again

I've experienced the same in Live 11 when using the "Device" mode on my Push2 and using the rotary encoder on the push2 to control the looper's "state" value (stop/record/playback/overdub). When dialing away from the "Stop" state, recording starts instantly, the quantization setting doesn't seem to be respected and Looper acts as if it was set to none. Also, dialing to play mode acts as if tempo control was set to "None"; the looper shows a bpm which is off from the song's BPM. Could this be a bug in Live11?

I’ve done it live many times yes!! The amount of pickup really depends on the volume of the room and the volume of your monitors! If I know I’m going to be doing vocal loops I generally don’t use stage monitors just in ears, but I find that the bleed is generally not that bad when using a normal SM58 mic

@@AlannaMatty Got it! I'm always very hesitant to do "technical" performance on stage just because of tech, but the Shure mics true don't pick much external. Thank you for all your insights :)

You don’t have to no! I just play it directly from the looper plugin :)

@@AlannaMatty Amazing thank you!! I've been using the Boss 505 for the past 8 years and am finally making the switch to using ableton and the push 2. It's been quite the feat to learn with a newborn babe! Thanks again for all your videos ! This morning I made my breakthrough and it's all working!! You're the best!

You are correct. They exist as separate clips within the vocal looper plugin. There is the option to drag them out of the plugin and onto a track to trigger them in a scene but generally I just trigger them from the plugin As for 2, yes you could do this with any source you want if you wanted to loop in a more “traditional hardware” kind of way, but I tend to use it just for vox

And yes, I have four tracks with the looper plugin on it so that I can record different parts for each song

I mainly do because I usually layer 2-3 vocal loops at once and if the loop is on the main vocal track I can’t control the reverb or volume independently Chances are I probably don’t want my harmonies to be as loud or using the same processing as my main vocal so I like to micro manage and have them each on the return tracks 😅

There are a couple! If you google “midi foot switch” there are a few different options, the names aren’t living in my head at the moment 😥

I only hear it afterwards! The first recording I’m just monitoring my vocal track as usual

Absolutely you can! The key is that you have your vocals going through your computer before they go out to the sound tech. The other thing you want to watch out for is that if you are using a monitor on stage (like a speaker to hear yourself) that it’s not getting picked up on the mic. I’d recommend either using in ear monitoring or talking to the sound tech about the vocal levels in the monitors :)