How to make a track in Ableton Live 11 Lite: creating easy chords with MIDI effects
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00:00Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.
00:05So in the last video, I showed you how to add a bassline to the beat.
00:08Now we're going to add some more musical elements and continue building up the layers
00:12of the track.
00:13In this video, I'll be adding some chords using two different sounds, making use of
00:17Live's fantastic MIDI effects and also recording in a melodic part from a hardware synth.
00:23Things are getting serious, let's get into it.
00:26So because we want to add some more parts, we need to create some more MIDI tracks and
00:29you can see we've already used up two of our MIDI tracks already.
00:32So what we can do is just create some more.
00:34So we just go up to here, create and insert MIDI track.
00:39We can also do that with shift command T as well.
00:43So there we go, we've got two new MIDI tracks.
00:46So I want to look for a piano sound now.
00:47So first I'm going to click on the arm recording button on this channel here and we're going
00:52to use the search function.
00:54It's a really really useful feature of the browser.
00:56So if we're in the sounds category and we click on here and then type in piano, you
01:03can see that any presets that have piano in the title will come up here.
01:07So let's go to piano and keys and let's try this grand piano sound.
01:14Double click on it to load it into the track, there we go.
01:23Now the bass line I played went like this.
01:29Okay so the key signature of this track is A minor and it's just all the white notes.
01:35Very very simple.
01:37Now I want to play some chords and a chord is defined as when you play more than one
01:41note at the same time.
01:43One of the simplest chords is a triad and this is often called a stack of thirds.
01:47So we have the first note, the root note, we go up a third and then a fifth.
01:54So this is A minor.
02:01Now what's brilliant about Live is there's actually a MIDI device that can do that for
02:05us without having to play the notes.
02:07So it's really good if you're not that familiar with playing the keyboard.
02:10Let's go over to the MIDI effects category here and go on to chord and I'm just going
02:16to click on this triangle here to bring up some of the presets and the one that I'm
02:21going to choose is this one, it's called house for the go and all I have to do is just double
02:26click on it and it will load it up for me just before the piano device.
02:30So if I now play the keyboard, it's playing those chords for me, fantastic.
02:40And you also might be able to hear that the volume of the chords is changing and that's
02:46because the keyboard I'm playing is velocity sensitive.
02:50So if I play very softly, it's quiet and if I play very hard, it's much louder, kind of
02:54what you'd expect from a real piano.
02:57But for this style of music, I'd rather that it was more of a constant volume.
03:00So again, there's another MIDI effect we can use for that and it's called velocity.
03:04I'm just going to scroll down and we're going to select this one, fix 127, so let's double
03:08click on it.
03:12So whatever velocity I play on the keyboard, it's always going to be the same volume.
03:16Now I can hear that's already a bit loud, so I'm just going to take the volume down.
03:22So let's try jamming something onto this third scene here.
03:30Okay, we can use capture again, I quite like that first riff that I played.
03:44It's captured it all but it's just looped that last bar, so let's just drag the loop
03:48brace back here and see what that sounds like.
03:58Okay so let's quantize it, again going up here, quantize, we could just do command U
04:04and let's not forget to apply that groove as well.
04:15Okay great, so that's really working for that kind of more funky section there.
04:19Now I'd quite like to find some chords that are maybe a bit more mellow and for that often
04:22pad sounds are really good.
04:25So this time I'm going to go up to the first scene and let's go over to this MIDI track
04:31and let's look for a pad sound.
04:33So I'm going to go over to the sounds again and there's actually a sound category for
04:38that called pad.
04:40So let's just listen to some of those, oh that's really nice and that sounds like it's
04:49actually got a chord kind of built into it, maybe a chord device which is really good.
04:53So let's drag that over and again I'm going to bring the volume level a little bit down.
05:03So what we have here on the left hand side of this device are things called macro variations
05:08and you can see these are actually preset chords, that's a major, minor, major 7th,
05:14minor 7th or even no chord at all.
05:18So this is one of my favorite chords, it's a minor 9.
05:25So let's just try playing that with the first scene here.
05:36Okay so as you can see that's quite tricky to play but I've actually created my own chord
05:41device preset and I want to quickly show you how I created it.
05:45So I'm just going to go to the user library here and if you just go to presets and MIDI
05:50effect rack you'll see it's here, skis minor 9.
05:53So let's just go over here and I'm just going to double click on that, now you have to make
05:58sure that no chord is selected on the pad device but now if I play this.
06:09So let's have a quick look at my effects rack, I've set the chord device here so these are
06:13the settings for the semitones, I'm also pitching it down two semitones so I can just play the
06:20appropriate key and I've also added a velocity device here, not fixed at 127 like the other
06:26velocity preset but it's got a lower limit of 86 and I'm just going to adjust the filter
06:31cutoff on this pad to make it sound a little bit more mellow.
06:41And let's just try recording something in, I'm going to record it in manually this time
06:45so we've still got our counting as one bar, there we go, you can see it's recorded it
07:03in nicely, let's quantize it and one great feature I wanted to show is the fold function
07:13as this will focus the clip by only showing the notes you've recorded or programmed in.
07:20So let's supply the groove again to that and let's duplicate that down to the second scene.
07:34Just playing through the scenes.
07:43Okay so now we've got the chord parts in, I want to record a melody and for this I want
07:48to use one of my hardware synths, my Korg Minilogue.
07:52So up until now we've just been using MIDI tracks, now we're going to use an audio track.
07:56So I'm going to click on this track here, click on Arm Recording and what we need to
08:01do is to select where we want the audio to come from.
08:04So if we go back to the preferences here, this is where you can set which inputs are
08:10active depending on which sound card you're using.
08:13So click on Input Configuration and I'm going to be using these inputs here.
08:21Okay so now I can select input 14 which is where my Minilogue is coming in and let's
08:28just play something now and you can see we have an input.
08:37So let's record this on the first scene here and we'll just record it into this clip and
08:42then we can kind of jam something down and then edit it afterwards.
09:06Okay I quite like that part so let's just put auto on now and let's just solo it so
09:10we can listen back to it.
09:20Now another great thing about Ableton Live is the fact that you can quantise audio in
09:25the same way that you can quantise MIDI and you can see in this clip there are these little
09:30kind of white marks and these are called Pseudo Warp Markers and what it's done is identified
09:37the transients which mean the peaks in the audio signal and it's added a marker there.
09:43Now what we can do is we select all so do Command A and then Command U to quantise.
09:53It's then quantised it all to the setting we had which was 16ths and even better than
10:00that we can now apply the groove and let's play it.
10:09Now this is called warping and with warping there are some different settings according
10:13to the type of audio that you're trying to warp.
10:15Now the default setting I've got here is beats but this isn't a beat this is a melodic part
10:20so I would suggest selecting the complex mode just to get a better quality.
10:26So let's just play it now.
10:37Great really happy with that I'm just going to duplicate that part down there.
10:51Okay great so the track is really taking shape now.
10:54We actually have two distinct sections.
10:56In the next video I'm going to show you how to use a device in Live called Simpler to
11:00play a vocal sample.