How to Sample Audio in Ableton Live

Learn how to sample your favorite loops and beats with the Ableton Live software.

Hey, this is Kevin. You’re watching WinkSound.com. In this video, I’m going to look at DJ basics and I’m going to get started with an overview of sampling, just check it out. So, let’s do some sampling here, go to my file browser and I’m going to drag in a completed Mac-song. As we can see, here’s our wave form so let’s take a look and see how it sounds. [Demonstration] Alright, so as you could tell, we got the little work here. Drag your first bar right up on the transients and what you really want to do is find the one at the end of the intro there. So were just getting a little closer there, I like to find the one at the end of the intro there. I’d like to find the one at the beginning of the intro and the one at the beginning of the song itself. [Demonstration] That’s not sound pretty good and as you could see the illustration where it works to which is like 126 so if you want to preserve the song tempo itself you could bring that up to 126 if you want. [Demonstration] Now, I just wanted the sample of the intro right here so we’re going to loop that and so that’s our end point, it is going to be measured five. [Demonstration] And what I noticed here is that in the third measure it comes all the way, and I thought perfect so we’re going to drag that over there, just to get that on film. [Demonstration] Alright now, we’re ready to play this loop, and then you press tab and go over to your arrangement view and let’s see the sample that you have created, straight that over here, just add loop a little bit. [Demonstration] So, there we go, now I can cut up my sample. I particularly don’t like this little symbol at the end here so I command E then I’ll chop it up and we’re going to delete that and then copy this little part that was right before it and if you hit command D it will allow MAC to duplicate it so let’s see how that sounds. [Demonstration] Well, it’s not that bad, another cool thing you could mess around with this little button right here. We’ll reverse the sample itself but since I only have this little chop right here, select that. It will just reverse that part. [Demonstration] Yeah, like that but there is a little clip on the end and then play this right there. So what I usually do is I duplicate that, control command D and then you will still hear a little bleep that you could reverse one of them so that they go in and out of each other smoothly. So these are the samples. [Demonstration] And you get the edit. So that is the basic of sampling and when you are done with your sample and you got it the way you want it, make sure you click save and that will save all your markers and you’re starting end points and the loop points.