How To Produce A Bass Line With Automation Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar
Tutorial using Ableton Live 11 Lite with Ski Oakenfull - part of the Music Radar series
Transcript
00:00 Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.
00:06 So in the last video I showed you how to program some basic drum patterns into clips in Session
00:10 View. Now let's start adding some other musical elements to build up the layers of
00:14 the track. In this video I'm going to program a melodic bassline which will act as a foundation
00:19 to add some more parts on top. Let's go!
00:24 So before we get started, one thing I want to mention is about going into the red or
00:27 clipping as this can cause the mix to become distorted as we start adding more layers to
00:32 our song. If I just adjust the track volume and turn it up, you can see it goes into the
00:38 red on the master channel here. So we don't want that, we're going to bring that down
00:42 and that's going to give us a bit more headroom when we start adding tracks.
00:49 Ok so now we've got the beat, we're going to look for a bass sound. So we've just been
00:54 working on this one drum track here. I'm now going to go over to this MIDI track and I'm
00:59 going to set the record arm on so we can monitor this channel. I'm also going to go back to
01:04 the first scene so we can record into the adjacent slot. Ok so let's look for some bass
01:10 sounds. So I'm going to go to the sound section here and open up bass. There we go and...
01:21 And in the same way as we did with the drums, as we're flicking between the sounds, we can
01:28 audition them at the same time. We can do that either by clicking on the sound or just
01:37 using the up and down arrow keys as well. Now I quite like this organ bass, it sounds
01:43 very very housey. So let's make sure we're selected on this track, double click, and
01:51 you can see that it's just loaded in. Ok so just so you can see the notes that I'm
01:58 playing, I'm just going to bring up a thing called the virtual MIDI keyboard. There we
02:03 go. So I'm just going to play along with the beat and see if I can come up with an idea.
02:19 I quite like that one there, that was really good. Now you may have noticed that I didn't
02:23 press overdub and record anything into a clip. But there's a fantastic feature in Ableton
02:28 Live which is called Capture. And what Live is doing is actually capturing everything
02:33 that's going on whether you hit record or not. So we just have to click on this button
02:37 here and you can see that it's come up amazingly there. Now it's a little bit out of time,
02:47 it's not quantized but I'm sure we can fix that. And we can do that just by pressing
02:53 command U. There we go. And remember we set the groove for the drums, well we can apply
03:00 that groove to this bass line as well. Now I don't think we want any of these other parts
03:10 that I recorded in, we just want these two bars here. So I'm going to do the similar
03:16 thing I did before, I'm going to use the crop clip function. So press control and click
03:20 to bring up the menu and crop clip. There we go. So I think we can duplicate that clip
03:27 to the next clip slot just by pressing command D. But it might be quite nice for this scene
03:42 here to create a slight variation of the bass line. So let's bring back the keyboard again
03:49 and this time rather than using Capture I'm going to try recording directly into the clip.
03:58 Now what's very useful for this is to give ourselves a count using the metronome and
04:03 we can do that just by clicking here and setting the count into one bar. We can also actually
04:09 change the sound of the metronome, so we can change it for example to the wood sound, a
04:14 particular favourite of mine and we can also change the volume of our click as well. So
04:19 let's just put that on. So let's try recording in a slight variation of that bass line.
04:27 I played a slight wrong note at the end but never mind. Okay so this time I'm going to
04:34 change the quantise settings. So rather than quantising to the grid I want to change it
04:55 to 16th. So let's go to the quantise settings, there we go and let's set that to 16th.
05:02 And have a listen through and see which part of this MIDI we want to keep.
05:10 Okay, I quite like this middle section here, so I'm just going to set the loop brace so
05:17 it just loops around the section I want to keep. There we go, so it's four bars.
05:38 Great, so let's do the same thing, let's apply the groove and control click and crop the
05:45 clip. So we can also adjust some of the parameters of this sound to change the tombra. So if
05:58 I just double click on the track we can see that this is the instrument here and there
06:04 are various parameters that we can adjust. Now that we've got two sounds, we've got the
06:08 drums and the organ, I just want to solo this sound so I can hear what it sounds like by
06:13 itself. So if I click on the S button here this will solo that sound. Now we can change
06:20 the filter cutoff for example and the FM setting, I really like that.
06:27 Now we can actually record those parameter changes into the clip as it's playing. We're
06:34 going to press the overdub button here and that's going to record it into the clip.
06:57 And you can see that little red dot there indicates that we've recorded in something
07:00 called automation which we can actually look at. If we just double click on the clip now
07:06 and then we go over to the envelopes tab, you can see that parameter change has been
07:11 recorded into the clip. Let's take it out of solo now. Now I'm just going to lower the
07:22 bass sound a little bit just so it's balancing nicely with the drums. And now we can trigger
07:29 these scenes so we're building up the sections. Okay, so we've got a great starting point
07:39 now with the drums and the bass. In the next video I'm going to show you how to build on
07:44 this by adding some chords to the track.