Learn Ableton Live 12 in 2026 – FULL COURSE — Transcript

Hey, I'm Bound to Divide, and in this course, you're going to go from knowing absolutely nothing about music production to learning basic music theory and finishing your first song. We then spend some time exploring basic sound design and creating this song, and finally explore some more intermediate to advanced techniques, which leads us to this track, "I Don't Want to Love You."

song and finally explore some more intim mediate to Advanced Techniques which leads us to this track I don't want to love you and when you're ready I've taken this whole thing step further and created a more intermediate to Advanced style

And when you're ready, I've taken this whole thing a step further and created a more intermediate to advanced style course. We will be creating another two tracks completely from scratch, providing you with all the sounds so that you can follow along at your own pace.

producing for 9 years and been a professional producer and sound designer for six I've released tracks with some of the biggest labels in our genre it songs placed in the popular video game Rocket League played shows across the UK

[Music] [Music] [Music] But first, let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Jules. I've been producing for nine years and been a professional producer and sound designer for six. I've released tracks with some of the biggest labels in our genre. My songs have been placed in the popular video game Rocket League, played shows across the UK and Europe, and amassed millions of streams over the years.

going to quickly break down what we're going to be learning we're going to be making a very basic melodic house track we're going to be using piano we're going to use p ads we're going to be making a lead we're going to be using

So, without further ado, time to grab a coffee, sit down, and get started. Okay, welcome to your first track in Ableton Live 12 Suite. So, for this first track, I'm just going to quickly break down what we're going to be learning. We're going to be making a very basic melodic house track. We're going to be using piano, we're going to use pads, we're going to be making a lead, we're going to be using drum samples to build out a nice drum loop, we're going to be using effects, we're going to learn sidechain compression, and we're also going to have a look at EQ and filters. And then we're going to also arrange our entire track into a full song.

arrange our entire track into a full song okay so let's uh get started uh when you open up Ableton Live 12 Suite you should be seeing something similar to what I'm seeing over here in front of you uh you might have a different um

Okay, so let's get started. When you open up Ableton Live 12 Suite, you should be seeing something similar to what I'm seeing over here in front of you. You might have different colors over here or different channels, but you should be seeing at least a MIDI channel and an audio channel. These are two different types of channels here, and we'll get back to that later on. You should be seeing some return channels here and your main—it's called your master channel in Ableton Live 12—they called it main. I'm not sure why they did that. And then you've got kind of two different views here. In Ableton Live 11, you might have noticed if you had tried using that before, that when you open it, it opens up in this session view. In this version, it opens up, I think, in the arrangement view. But if not, you can always click on these to toggle between them, or you can hit Tab. In Live 12, you can also open up this to have a look at your mixer, can click on that, or click on it to make that disappear, which is a nice little upgrade.

return channels here and your main um it's called your master channel in Al and live 12 they called it main I'm not sure why they did that um and then you've got kind of two different views here enablon live 11 you

On the left here, you have your sample browser. You probably don't see all the same folders that I have over here. These are third-party sample packs that I have saved here on the left. But if you don't have any sounds, you can just go to your library here, click on All, or you can go to Sounds here, and you can find sounds there. You can also click on Samples; that should show you all your samples.

toggle between them or you can hit Tab and live 12 you can also open up this to have a look at your mixer can click on that or click on it to make that disappear which is a nice

Okay, so throughout this course, I'm going to be using basic WAV samples. You don't need to use them. Ableton has a nice library of drum sounds that it comes with—stock standard sounds. Think if you click here, Sounds—is it? Where is it? I think you might have to go to Drums. You can choose some drum kits over here. And there's also some—you can search. Like if you search clap, you can find a bunch of stock sounds here.

you you can just go to your library here click on all uh or you can go to Sounds here and you can find sounds there you can also click on um samples that should show you all your samples okay so throughout this course

So, let's get started. The first thing I want to do is I want to get into our MIDI channels and how we can make something musical. We want to write some piano chords, so for that, we need to use our MIDI channel. And so this is a MIDI channel, and if you don't see a MIDI channel, you can always right-click here and go Insert MIDI Track, and that'll give you a new MIDI track. I'm just going to click on that and delete it with the Delete key.

to go to Drums you can choose some drum kits over here um and there's also some you can search like if you search clap you can find a bunch of stock Sounds here so let's get started the first thing I want to do is I want to

And how we can add some notes to that is we can highlight a section on our channel here, and we can right-click and go Insert Empty MIDI Clip, and that'll allow us to start writing notes, making some melodies and chords. But in order to do that, we need to have an instrument loaded into this channel. And what I want to do first is make some piano chords. So here, we can go down to Instruments, and maybe we can filter here. We can go down to Piano and Keys, and we can see we have a bunch of instruments here. The instrument I want to look for is the Grand Piano. So if we just click on the down arrow here in the instrument rack, you can browse and look for Grand Piano, or you can just search Grand, and then you can see you have the Grand Piano.

see a midi Channel you can always right click here and go insert midi track and that'll give you a new midi track I'm just going to click on that and delete it with a delete key um and how we can add some notes to

And if I try and drag that onto an audio channel, it won't let me drag it onto an audio channel. You can see here at the bottom, this turns orange and gives you an error. It says only audio effects can be inserted into an audio track. So we've got to insert it onto a MIDI track. So here, you can drag it onto there like that, or you can just click on the channel and then double-click it, and then it'll load it onto the channel.

need to have an instrument loaded into this Channel and what I want to do first is make uh some piano chords so here we can go down to instruments and maybe we can filter here we can go down to to piano and

So now you can see it's loaded onto the channel here, and it's got a bunch of knobs. Don't worry about that just yet, but now we should be able to make a sound with this channel. So if we click on this, double-click on this MIDI clip here, this is where we can put notes in. And you can also change the length of this clip. So what might have happened is you maybe would have created your own MIDI channel, but your own MIDI clip, but maybe you made a much shorter one than me. If you want to make it longer, you click and drag it. The problem is it's set to loop mode, so you can see these little dots here show that it loops. So if I put in a note here by double-clicking, you'll then get four notes spread across there, whereas on this one, you get one note. That's because loop mode is turned on here, so you can just turn off loop mode, and then you'll be able to drag this out to whatever length you want. So just be aware of that. So I'm just going to delete that.

piano or you can just search Grand and then you can see you have the grand piano.

Another thing you might notice is that this has a bunch of purple lines on it, and that is just highlighting the scale that we're in. You can see here it says C major, and at the top here, it also says C major. This is our global scale that we have set up over here. We can change that. I think today I want to work in A minor. It's one of the easiest keys to remember because even if we turn off the highlight scale, we can see that A minor starts at A, and it all makes up all of the white notes over here.

effect can be inserted into an audio track so we've got to insert it onto a midi track so here you can drag it onto there like that or you can just click on the channel and then double click

Okay, so I think at this point it's time to do a tiny bit of music theory before we start writing our first chords. So very basic music theory is we have these things called scales or keys, and all it is is just a collection of notes that sound good together. So here we have the A minor scale, which starts at A. It goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and then back to A, and it just repeats all the way up this keyboard. So we can move all of these notes across so we can hear each one of these notes. And I'm just going to hit my space bar, and it'll play them.

sound with this channel so if we click on this double click on this midi um clip here this is where we can put notes in and uh you can also change the length of this clip so what might have happened

[Music] I'm just going to make these a bit longer, so I'm just going to highlight all of them, and then I'm going to hit the times two, which is going to make them twice the length. Okay, so you can hear these notes when you play them together. If I—I'm just going to duplicate them with Ctrl D here, and then I'm going to reverse them, and now I'm going to play this in a row. That's our A minor scale, and you can hear all of these notes sound good together.

so you can see these little dots here shows that it Loops so if I put in a note here by double clicking you'll then get four notes spread across there whereas on this one you get one note that's

And what do I mean by they sound good together? Well, if I take one of these notes and put them outside of the scale, so I'm going to move this down so instead of it being on the E here, I've moved it down to the D sharp. And see here it says D sharp. It's going to now sound like there's a note in there that sounds wrong. You know, it has a different vibe now. So let's move that back up.

delete that um another thing you might notice is that this has a bunch of purple lines on it and that is just highlighting the scale that we in you can see here it says C major and at the top here it also

says C major this is our uh like our global scale that we have set up over here we can change that I think today I want to work in a minor it's one of the easiest keys to remember because even if

we turn off the Highlight scale we can see that a minor starts at a and it's all makes up all of the white notes over here okay so I think at this point it's time to do a tiny bit of music theory

before we start writing our first chords so very basic music theory is we have these things called scales or keys and all it is is just a collection of notes that sound good together so here we have the a minor scale which starts

at a it goes a b c d e f g and then back to a and it just repeats all the way up this keyboard so we can move all of these notes across so we can hear each one of

these notes and I'm just going to hit my space bar and it'll play them [Music] I'm just going to make these a bit longer so I'm just going to highlight all of them and then I'm going to hit

the times two which is going to make them twice the length Okay so you can hear these notes when you play them together if I I'm just going to duplicate them with contrl d here and then I'm going to reverse

them and now I'm going to play this in a row that's our a minor scale and you can hear all of these notes sound good together and what do I mean by they sound good together well if I take one

of these notes and put them outside of the scale so I'm going to move this down so instead of it being on the E here I've moved it down to the dsharp and see here it says dsharp it's going to now sound like there's a

note in there that sounds wrong you know it has a different vibe now so let's move that back up to the E and for the rest of this lesson we're going to be sticking to the scale of a

minor so all you need to know is we need to avoid all of these Black Keys just for this lesson okay so I'm going to delete all of these notes and we're going to make our first chord so if you don't know

what a chord is um a chord is basically just a collection of notes that are played together at the same time that together make a nice Harmony and create an emotion so typically when we talking about chords we're talking about three

notes together which is called a Triad and what I want to make here is called A Minor triad and how we make our Triads is we simply I'm going to copy this note so I've just highlighted it I've hit contrl C on my

keyboard and I'm hitting contrl V to paste it and so now I can use my up and down arrows on my keyboard to move this note up and down and how we can create our chord our first chord is we're going to place a

note here and then we're going to copy and paste that and paste another note here so it's the easy way to remember how to construct a basic Triad is to skip a note here and then place a note

then skip another note and place a note so starting at a we place a note at a and we skip the B we place a note at C we skip the D we place a note at e that's how we created our first A Minor

triad so what happens if we want to make a chord that starts on a different note let's say d we place a note at D we skip e we place a note at F we skip G and replace note at a that's our D

minor chord um let's try one at C we make a note at C we skip a note at D we make a note at e skip a note at F we make another note at G that is not a G minor chord that's a G

major chord if you look at these two you can see there's a a difference what's the difference one is minor one is major but how do I know that one is minor and One MA is is Major the easy way to tell

just by visually looking is the number of spaces between the first and the second note so you'll see here if I count the lines we've got one black line we've got a white line and then we've placed our Noe so there's

one two three steps so we got three steps and then this one I'll major cord one 2 3 four steps that's our major chord the gap between the D and the a the bottom note and the high note is the

same as the gap between the bottom note and the high note that's seven steps so another concept or another word I want to introduce is the word semmit tones semmit tones are the same as steps so the gap between our first and second

note and our Minor triad is three semmit tones one 2 3 and on this one it's four semmit tones 1 2 3 four semmit tones so anytime I mention semmit tones just know that I'm mentioning basically this kind of a

difference One semmit Tone or two semmit tones you get the picture um so the difference between a semmit tone and a whole tone whole tone is another concept whole tone is just two steps all right so now you know semmit

tones you know how to build basic Triads and that's basically all the theory we need to make our first chord progression so let's listen to our a minor cord I'm going to just turn off these notes this is what our a notes SS

like then we're adding a C I'm going to just turn off the a note so we can only hear the C and then we're adding our E chord and all together when I play them we have this chord Let's uh listen to what some other

chords sound like so I'm going to just copy and paste this across here I can highlight all of them and I can hold down the control key on my keyboard if you're on Mac it might be the command

key or it might be the control key I'm not sure just try both of them or the option key um so I'm just going to hold that down and then I'm going to click and drag then I can copy these across so

let's make a different cord here let's uh go up to the C chord and now you should notice a problem with this chord let's listen first of all doesn't sound right does it well what did I say in the beginning

is that we're in a minor the scale that we're in and we have to adhere to all the white notes here um if you have a look on a piano I I've been calling them white notes and here they're kind of just like a light

gray but I mean if the reason why I'm call them white notes is if you have a look at a piano all of these uh Keys would be white and all of these ones would be black so we've got the problem

is here we've got a black note so we need to move this note somewhere what happens if we move it down do we have our basic C major Triad we don't the reason we don't is because we haven't made a C major chord

here if we count the number of steps here if we remember a major cord has four steps up to the next note goes 1 2 3 4 that would be a C major Triad so what happened when we copied

this over is we made a C Minor triad because the space between this note and this note oops space between this note and this note is one two three semmit tones which is a minor and we want to just move this up so that

it's four semitones and we are in now back in our key of A minor so now we have two chords placed one after each other let's hear them let's take another one we're going to copy this over and here I'm going to make

a e minor chord now we've got an E major chord cuz we copied the c major chord over here so we just need to make sure we move this down so that there's only uh three semmit tone Gap over here one two 3

let's hear how that [Music] sounds and let's copy that over again I'm going to copy it again by control holding down control clicking and dragging and now we going to the G and you can see that this lands on a

black note so probably in the scale we need to make a G major chord so let's move that up and hear how that sounds okay so there's a basic chord progression chord progression goes like this a minor C major E minor G

major this chord progression is also called a 1357 chord progression so this is another important concept uh and that's just the concept of numbers so every time anytime I'm talking about numbers here if I say let's go to the one chord or the three

chord all I'm talking about is the degree of the scales so if we look at the a minor scale we've got a b c d e f g and if we count that that's 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 so if I say the one chord you know I'm talking about a because it's the first chord if I say the three chord you know I'm talking about C because that's one 2 three so there's our three

chord and if I say my seven chord we know that's the G here because if we can't up 1 2 3 4 five 6 7 so if I said uh the four chord what chord would I be talking about you try and count it

yourself one two 3 4 what does that say that's D so I'm talking about the D chord and we don't know if D is major or minor until we build the chord so let's build it D we're going to

skip a note and place a note going to skip a note and place a note again so here we've got a let's count the Gap here 1 2 3 That's A Minor triad so the four chord is a D minor

chord all right so we've got our chord progression written out and um one thing I want to do with this chord progression is just make it sound a bit nicer I think it doesn't sound very nice it's a bit um it goes up

too high in my opinion I don't want it to keep on doing that it's going to be a bit boring um and it doesn't sound very rich so what I want to do is I want to transpose transpose means

move I want to transpose this whole chord and a number of semmit tones um into a different space here I want to move it further down so what we can do is we can move it down one octave an octave is 12 notes 12

semmit tones and what happens if we move 12 semmit tones is we land on exactly the same chord but it's just going to be lower down it's just going to be deeper so if I move this down 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 you'll see that starts on an e just like it was before it was on the E over here but now it's further down and let's listen to it so it's a bit more dramatic when it goes

down when it goes up it almost feels a bit lighter it feels I'd say emotion wise uh happier I'd say it feels more dramatic when it goes down and so let's uh let's have a listen to what it would sound like if we mooved

this down 12 semitones so I don't feel like pushing the down arrow 12 times again the quick way to do that in Ableton is to hold down the shift key on your keyboard and just hit the down arrow and then it's going to move it

down 12 semitones so let's listen to that now okay so that sounds a bit nicer generally speaking when I write chord progressions and when most people write chord progressions you want to try and get the chords kind of closer

together uh I'd say it sounds a bit more classy when you don't have these massive jumps and chords are being played in different octaves it's not a rule uh it's more just like a a guideline um rules are there to be

broken and guidelines are there to be bent somebody might write a chord progression that has chords in you know many different octaves and it sounds incredible um but just generally speaking as a beginner I would say try and keep your chords a bit closer

together there's also something else that we can do here with these chords is these notes so for example this chord our C major chord is made up of c e and G we don't have to play them in this exact order we

can play the G in a different octave so I could move that up 12 semmit tones I'm going to hold down shift and move it up and that's going to give us a different feeling but it's going to have it's

still the same chord it still gives the same emotion it's just the notes are voiced differently they're being played in different tives likewise we can move it down 12 sem tones like [Music] that it sounds different but the overall

message that the cord is delivering is still the same it's still a a C major cord it's just what we would call now is an inversion an inversion is when you play a different note in the base so in the

in the lowest note you have a different note but it's still the same chord we're not we're not um choosing like a a completely different note so we're not putting an a over here you know the G is

still part of the c major Triad we're just moving it down an octave and now our notes are even closer together okay so those are inversions and I think what I'll do is I'm not going to talk too much about inversions

because it's a bit more of a I wouldn't say Advanced topic but maybe a topic for our next song for this song I'm going to stick to uh just basic Triads so that you can get used to making them and

using them and so my recommendation now is to go and try and make your own chord progression you can copy this one but it it would be good to pause the video and just try a few different chord

progressions uh for example we could duplicate this over here I just highlighted everything and hit control D and then we could try out some different degrees of the scale at the moment we're doing 1 3 5 7 what if we

tried maybe one four something let's try we go from the one up to the four which is a needs to be a minor chord because you can see this one sitting on a black key so we move it

down and uh we go maybe let's go from the one four let's maybe go to the uh let's go let's let's stick to 1457 see how that sounds so I'm going to play this one first and then play this

one oopsie I'm going to play this one first and then play this one after it and you can you'll feel the different emotion that the chord progressions have and maybe you'll prefer one over the [Music] other so this one had a bit more of

[Music] a bit more of a dramatic feel maybe a bit darker and that's because our second chord is not a major chord major chords tend to feel a bit more happy a bit brighter um so maybe we can try another major

chord because we'll have more major chords in the scale let's try and find that major chord is it the e no it's not the E because if we try and make a minor chord we can see here it fits perfectly if we had to make a

major chord it sits on the G sharp here which is not part of the scale so let's let's make our major chord and just move it up and down until it fits all the white notes ah there's a G

chord and we've already got a G chord in in our chord progression let's let's try and make sure that we have four different chords and see how that sounds that's not a rule by the way sometimes having the same chord twice in

a progression sounds nice um so let's keep moving around what about oh sorry that was an F I said g that's my mistake so F we actually don't have in this chord progression so let's try going from a minor to F and see how that

[Music] sounds so that gives a different feel let's maybe move it down and see how that sounds let's compare these two [Music] now okay um I think I prefer the first one you might want to play around a bit

more and see what you like I know a nice cord progression is uh going down from from the one to the seven to one to the six to the seven and then back to the one can sound quite nice so you

could make a a three chord chord progression like this let's listen to how that sounds [Music] and if we want to Loop this section so that we can hear how this chord progression would sound if it kept on

playing over and over again we can highlight a section here of our clip and just hit contrl l or you can click on this button and that'll make a loop brace this thing is a loop brace we can drag

it to make it longer or we can make it shorter but if we play it this play heads just going to keep on looping here let's listen to what this one sounds like [Music] looped okay so I think that's enough uh

explaining how to make chord progressions there are thousands if not unlimited types of chord progressions that you can make um there's various resources online if you just search for something like common chord progressions you'll find the uh let's call them

uh the algorithms for different chord progressions the uh the codes like 1457 1356 1 641 or something something um so you can go and and Google various cord progressions and try them out and see how they sound but for

the rest of this lesson we're going to be using the first C progression that we wrote so I'm going to delete that one and um here we're going to be sticking to our M our very basic 1357 chord

progression Okay so at the moment this piano doesn't sound very nice I want to uh make these chords sound a bit Fuller a bit thicker a bit beefier so what I want to do here is I just want to

copy the bottom note of each chord and you can do that by holding down shift and selecting like I have and I want to copy and paste it crl Ctrl V and then I'm going to hold down shift and the

down arrow and what I've done is I've just duplicated the bottom note down one octave down 12 semmit tones so if you missed that another way you can do it is you can just click on that contrl c contrl v and

then hit your down arrow 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 and make sure that it's landing on the a that's one octave below this a this one you want it on the C

that's one octave below here I just did that by holding down the control key and clicking and dragging so there's many different ways you can copy and paste or duplicate or move a note uh so clicking and dragging is one

control by holding down control and clicking and dragging the way I typically do this is by highlighting all of the bottom notes holding down crl c contrl v and then shift and down arrow and now I'll listen to

this now it's Fuller because we got that Low Bottom note let's hear how it sounds if I shift and hit shift and down one more time now we get that really deep note I think for now I'm going to keep it over

there another thing we can do to make this piano sound a bit nicer is we can turn down the velocity so what's velocity velocity is how hard you push down on the keys if you were sitting at a Pio you could either slam down your

fist on the keyboard I'd say that would be maximum velocity or you very gently just touch the key so it make barely makes a sound that's a very low velocity and so here you can see it says velocity and you got these lines we can

click and drag them it'll bring down the velocity of that specific note so if you click on another note you can click and drag down the velocity another way you can do it is by holding down alt on your keyboard I

don't much sure what it is on Mac could be option um hold down alt and then click and drag up and down on any note and that'll control the velocity of the notes so I can select all of them bring

down the velocity of all of them let's try bring them down to like 64 and so you can hear it gets a bit quieter and also it's not as bright it's not as doesn't sound as hard so let's select all of them I'm going to

hit contr a and then I'm going to hold down alt and just drag down all the way to the Bottom now I can hear it's really quiet let's move it up a bit more I think that sounds nice so I think um if we want to make

these sound like somebody is actually playing the piano we can make this sound a bit more human by maybe having different velocities for each chord um if you think about a human playing the piano they don't play every

chord exactly the same velocity each chord will be slightly different because we're human we're not perfect uh also the note placement will be slightly different so we can select all of these and here you can see under velocity we have some randomize and this

is a a really nice uh feature of Ableton Live 12 we have randomize and we have ramp so we can randomize the velocity here if we just bring down if we click on this um slider here and click and drag

up and down you can see the notes have random velocities applied to them now in different amounts so if we just do say 23% randomization you can click this and it'll keep on randomizing and changing them and we can just just listen to how

this sounds now and if we do a very high randomization now each chord feels pretty drastically different I don't want it to be that random I'd say like maybe 30% that sounds nice and um now we can Loop this cuz I

want this cord progression to play over and over again and so I think let's do like a 16 Bar Loop so if I click and drag across here you can see each one of these is a bar and if you're seeing something

different you might be seeing like a layout that looks something like this with lots of little bars here um that's because of your settings here so you can I always work on narrow this is a kind of like a dynamic

bar structure where you can see that bars will get closer and closer together as we zoom in you can zoom in by clicking and dragging here up and down or you can have a fixed grid uh by selecting your fixed number

of bars here so you can have eight bar sections so now we when we highlight it jumps to these eight bar sections you can have four bar sections one bar but I always stick to this narrow because I like it to dynamically adjust

to how zoomed in I am and how I can tell how many bars I have highlighted is by reading in this section here as I highlight it'll say Here length and it'll tell me the number so you can see

it says 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine and I want 16 bars so if I drag this across to 16 bars you can see this is looping because we have Loop turned on if I turn it off and

drag it out it doesn't Loop that cord progression so let's turn loop on because we want to Loop it but now the problem is it's not looping it there's a big gap there why is there a big gap

let's look at our midi clip here if I just double click on it you can see this blue bar here yours might be a different color if your clip is a different color so if I just change that to a different color You'll

See This Bar is now yellow um but this is the bar I'm talking about and here I always recommend keeping this eye on if you click on this eye you can read what these things are called so as I hover

over that it says Loop brace and it def tells you what the loop brace does um so that defines basic basally the length of the loop so if I reduce the size of this and you keep your eye

up here you can see we start getting a proper Loop where this core progression is now looping over and over again okay so in my opinion these chords are playing a bit too quickly you know it's uh it's very fast the way the rate

that going out D ding d d i want it a bit longer like d [Music] d so how can we do that we can select all of these and make them double the length going to select all these notes

and hit times two and now you'll see they stretch but now we've got a problem because our Loop brace only extends to our second chord now we have a loop like [Music] this and we want to hear these two

chords too so now we just need to extend that Loop brace or you can have a look at the Loop length here so here it says two so that's a two bar length which you can see here on the numbers we got 1 1.2 1.3

1.4 2 two and that's a two bar Loop so if we change that to four you can click and just type the number four and hit enter now we have our full chord [Music] progression okay so that sounds better

to me now the chord progression is going a bit slower and we have some time to write a nice melody to go with the chord progression all right so let's go on to the next step which is going to be

writing our Melody so what is the difference between Melody and chords or Melody and Harmony well a Melody is typically a collection of notes played one after each other that kind of will create something that you could remember

something that you could hum uh for example you can hum the cord progression goes so the cor progression does have a Melody but typically when when talking about a Melody I'm more talking about um a succession of single notes

being played one after another so maybe something like this let's do [Music] uh we're going to we're going to draw notes now above these cords and I'm just going to quickly draw draw up something let's see uh let's see I'm just guessing here

and okay so I'm going to duplicate this [Music] across okay so that is what I would call A Melody so we've got these notes that are playing over the top I'm just going to make them a bit louder and when I hear

them it's it's what I would call The Melody of the song because it's the part that I would [Music] remember so if you listened to that for the next 30 seconds and walked away into the kitchen and made yourself a cup of

coffee that Melody would probably be stuck in your head going that's a Melody so let's um let's try and write a melody that that we really enjoy the sound of but maybe let's do it on a different Channel

because I want to leave these chords Alone um I don't want to write them in the same instrument I want to use a different instrument so let's um let's drag a different instrument here onto that second midi channel so here we can go to uh

instruments and Let's uh go down to well let's keep it on piano and keys so we're going to filter by piano and keys and maybe let's go for electric piano I want an electric piano and um I think what I'm going to use is

electric so let's go to Electric because that's like an electric piano kind of sound and let's go for H let's listen to some of them [Music] see they all sound pretty different quite liked that mellow one I also like the basic

one actually I really like the basic one let's let's try the basic one so I've got this one selected I'm just going to double click here it's going to open it up and now we're going to highlight a section

of this so the same length as our chord progression and I'm going to right click and hit insert midi clip or control shift M that's the key I recommend using the hot Keys know right from the beginning because you'll learn them and then um

your workflow will just be so much faster so much faster than right clicking so highlight control shift M get used to it okay and if you didn't have a midi clip a midi channel to drag this onto just remember you can right click and

insert a midi track or hit control shift T um all right so now we want to write our Melody okay so there's one rule when we writing our Melody for today and that is we need to stick with a minor so

remember we are in a minor it's all the white notes hton has this feature where it also lets you highlight the scale so you can see which notes are in the scale uh this makes it a lot easier to remember

the reason why I haven't spoken about this before is because I think it's really important for beginners to learn scales um just visually knowing where the scales are rather than relying on this highlight scale function um you might one day be collaborating with

somebody using a different daww and they don't have the Highlight scale feature and then you haven't learned any of the scales it's a little bit embarrassing so yeah just uh yeah just a little word about this highlight scale thing you can also use

click on the scale thing which will only let you use the notes in the scale that you have selected uh but I also recommend at least for a while sticking to um remembering scales until you know your scales I would say don't use the

scale feature um I use it now but that's only because I know my scales and it speeds up my workflow it's kind of like a you know do as I say don't do as I do and the reason is because you you need that

solid foundation of Music Theory anyway enough rambling on about that uh we're going to write our first Melody so writing a Melody is really all about feeling and a little bit about music theory so we know we need to stick with

all the white notes and we know our scale is a minor and so when I'm writing a Melody often what I want to try and do is you want to either start at your home base it's kind of like going on a

journey you're starting from home you're going somewhere and then you're returning back home and returning back home is typically referred to as the resolution because it feels like um a complete sentence or like uh a resolved problem so if I had

to for example write a melody that went like this uh let's say we ended there I never finish the melody that feels unresolved but what if I go [Music] [Music] [Music] now it feels resolved you know even if I

don't continue playing a [Music] melody and if I just stop over here it's kind of what's Happening like where's it going it feels like we've gone on a journey and just kind of forgotten about the journey so that's what what I like to

aim for um and my kind of process for writing Melodies is more by feel so what I typically would start doing is trying to write a rhythm because a Melody is is basically made up of choosing notes in a

specific Rhythm um and so maybe we can just start with one note let's start with just the a note and make our Melody um make some rhythms so let's try an eighth node Rhythm so if we divide this up into e

here you'll see these blocks on our eighth note if I play that and I just keep playing that I'm just going to control [Music] D It's kind of hypnotic it's playing these eighth notes it's not very interesting Melody but sometimes the

very basic one note Melodies work really well you might hear like um I think kind of music do that quite a lot if you listen to them um or we can try maybe a different Rhythm we have something called a dotted

eth which is just 38 notes [Music] oops all the way across or you can divide it up into 16 and do a dotted 16th note which is just 316th notes [Music] um or you do a combination of different

rhythms so like maybe if we take a a dotted eth which is 38 notes and blend it with let's do two dotted eth notes and blend it with two uh eth notes like this and then take this collection and

and duplicate that across [Music] [Music] so that has quite a nice memorable Rhythm to it it's simple it's you could clap along like it's uh it's something that would be quite catchy I think and so now all we need to do to write a melody is move

these up and down and see what sort of Rhythm or what sort of Melody we can write what emotions does it evoke let's try that so let's uh let's maybe do let's move this one up let's go up to

the B and then let's uh let's stay on the B and then let's move up to the C see how that sounds well let's go here and move the B up to the C and move the C up to the D

or let's um try going down this is like what I'll be doing 90% of the time when I'm writing Melodies is just trying different things until I eventually find something that sounds cool to me oh there I'm hearing

this sometimes you'll get like a an intuition about what you want the next note to be I'm hearing ding D D D D D D D something like [Music] that maybe this one goes up ding ding that would be our variation is what I

would call it so instead of going down now we surprise The Listener by going up [Music] or maybe we go up to the [Music] B yeah that sounds quite nice let's Loop that and see how it [Music] sounds I quite like that Melody I want

to show you one more method for writing Melodies that might help you if you don't really trust your ear if if you're sitting here and you're trying to write your Melody and you're like man I I don't know it all sounds

the same to me I I think it all I'm not sure if what I'm doing sounds right um and that is to really use your chords to CH help you choose your notes so I'm going to duplicate this whole Channel um

you can right click and hit duplicate or control D I'm going to turn off this one which is our first Melody that we wrote I'm just going to delete all the notes here or actually let's not delete them let's

keep that same Rhythm and so what I want to do here is I want to use the notes in here to dictate which notes we're going to make our Melody out of um and so if we have a look at we can

kind of overlay these on top of each other enabled and we can click on the first one first uh midi clip here and I'm going to hold control and click on the one below it and now you can see they're both selected

together and so now we can select and move either of these notes at the same time which makes it really fast for editing the other thing we can do is we can click on focus and that kind of Grays out our

Melody at the moment but if we click on this blue line here now we focus focusing on our Melody and we can adjust it and we can use these chords as kind of a guide so what if I just move these

down and place them on top of my chord notes we know those notes are going to fit the chord progression because they are a part of the chord progression and so if I just choose the top note now we get this

Rhythm sorry this melody [Music] which works it's a Melody that works it's not very interesting Melody um it's not very hypnotic like the other one I think had a bit more of a Cool vibe to it uh but you don't have

to use the top note you can try other notes so what if we stuck to that note through this one so we played the same note and then on this one we moved down to oh we stay on this note here and then on

this one we move down to the bottom note and maybe uh on these two notes Here We shift them up to that note you see I'm just kind of sticking onto the gray lines here and on this one we go down to

that note and this one we go up to that night this is just a wild guess let's see how it sounds [Music] you know this could um allow us to write a bit more of a complex Melody maybe it

doesn't have to be exactly the same in Loop maybe this melody could have continued uh into this section with this note these notes moving down or something um how do we do that because if we change this note all of them change on each block we

have to change the length of our Loop so let's set it to eight bars instead of four and now we could continue the melody here let's just delete that I'm going to select all of them and hit control D and

now I want to move this so when I listen to this [Music] melody I kind of heard going I heard it going down so what if we just move down let's see how that sounds I'm going to play it from

[Music] here oh that works quite nicely let listen to the whole enity [Music] okay so now we've got a a bit bit of a longer Melody and it's a bit more interesting because it doesn't loop with the chord progression you know

it's not changing so this section feels completely different to this whole section because the context is changing we're using a different note here rather than using that note and we can take this even further we could make this

whole Melody unique we could increase the length to 16 bars and let's duplicate that all all the way across and highlight both of these and now we can take we can listen to it and see where does this melody

want to go so if I just play it I'm just going to kind of use my intuition and see oh maybe it should go up here or maybe it should go down there [Music] I think what I'm hearing is that this

plays the same as this and then this last bit is different so if we had to think of this as in different letters like this is our a section this is our B section here we've got an A section section again and

another a section maybe we can make a pattern like an a b a b or an a b a c so this section should be different to this one so how do we change that how can we make it

different um maybe we could try a different note on this chord so it goes to a different place what if we go down to there and then on this one we move up and on this one we move up

again and we we'll leave that over there let's see how this whole thing feels now [Music] I almost like that it just felt like the ending was a bit too happy for me so what if we take this and try and take

take it somewhere else we could go to that cord that note or we could go to that note or we could even go down to this note here that might be kind of dark um let's see how that

sounds sounds a bit weird I'm going to go back up and knock [Music] I quite like that it's just a repetition it's like we're going somewhere and then we come back to it there's nothing wrong with repeating um

notes uh repetition is one of the most powerful things in music and don't think that just because you've used this note here that you can't use it again there you can definitely do that so if we overlay these we can see we've stuck to

all the same notes that are in our chords and we've landed up with something that is both sounds I think memorable and it fits nicely so let's compare our two Melodies and see how one sounds versus the other

so here's the other one [Music] I like that one and I also like this one I wonder what they would sound like if we played them together H let's see [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] sometimes it sounds cool and sometimes

it sounds a bit tense I think uh maybe what we should do is keep both of them but play one on a different instrument than the other let's see uh what it sounds like if we change this instrument

this one to maybe like a softer Paddy sound so pads are if you don't know what a pad is a pad is kind of just like a really soft atmospheric sound let's try something let's um filter by pad and um let's just go

through uh let's try drift [Music] that one's quite interesting see what it sounds like if we drag that onto this [Music] channel maybe it's a bit low down we can try and move this whole Melody up and not active so I'm going to hit contrl a

and just hit the shift and up arrows oh it's a bit uh yeah a bit dissonant let's try another [Music] pad let's try that one [Music] let keep trying different ones until one uh just sounds [Music] [Music] good I like that one

[Laughter] [Music] Okay so we've got a chord progression we've got one Melody here and we've got another Melody here I I would suppose that you would call these counter Melodies because they're doing different things they're playing at the same

time um and so you might hear people talk about counter Melodies how I like to think about counter Melodies is typically you would have one Melody which is kind of like the lead Melody and then a count a Melody that's doing

something different and also is being played at uh kind of a different pace so typically you'd have like a fast Melody like this one that's really fast and Plucky and then we've got this kind of slower one that has

longer notes in it uh and those can generally work quite nicely together um okay so let me uh introduce you to something called EQ and filtering because we can use those to make this sound a bit nicer so I'm going to open up the

eq8 so if you just search EQ and just make sure you don't have anything selected and then go down to audio effects you'll see this eq8 here I'm going to load it up on our pad sound and I'm just going to hit click on the

solo button here so we're only hearing the [Music] pad so we can use this e to control the frequencies of our audio Spectrum here the high frequencies sitting up here and the low frequencies and these are our mid

frequencies and so you can take this number four here and click and drag it up and down and you'll see what it sounds like if we boost the high end right it gets a lot brighter a lot sharper what happens if we bring it

down starts to sound a bit muffled and a bit filtered so this is called a a low shelf filter when where we're just kind of turning up and down on the high end you can see this this line is kind of like a

shelf we can change the shape of that by turning this on or we can change the shape here this is called a low pass filter and you can see that's cutting out a lot of the high end so if I take this and

drag it [Music] down it gets so muffled that eventually we don't hear it [Music] anymore so we're going to be using these filter shapes a lot another filter shape that we use is called the high pass filter which is the same as

this but it's just the reverse of it and we could use that to basically only hear that crackly high [Music] end or if we wanted to filter out the high end we can do that okay so we've got an EQ on here now

let's take another EQ and put it on here and play with it and see how that sounds if I fil turn on this low pass filter we can make it a lot [Music] softer okay um so that's filters basically explained

to you it's actually quite an intuitive subject I don't think it's too hard to understand let's see how they sound on the piano because the piano I think it'll make a big difference we can make the piano feel

very dark and Moody if we low pass [Music] it that sounds really nice see how these sound together let's turn this one down a bit [Music] yeah I like that all right so I think it would be cool to actually put some

effects on this some delay and Reverb and if you don't know what Reverb or delay is well the best way to understand them is to just hear them delay will kind of create a copy of a sound kind of like an echo and a Reverb

well it's Reverb is what you hear when you're standing in an empty bathroom and you make a sound that kind of uh fills the whole space and sounds really atmospheric um so Let's uh let's I think put maybe a Reverb on

this and see how that sounds and I'm going to search Reverb and Reverb will be under audio effects the Reverb I'm going to use is just the standard Ableton Reverb here let's see how that [Music] sounds you can't really hear it that

much I'm going to turn up the Decay to make it much bigger [Music] if I turn it off you'll notice that it's gone turn it back on makes it really Spacey let see how Reverb sounds on the piano double click on

that let me add some Decay to it sounds really Spacey and Atmospheric now you got to be careful with Reverb because I know that what it's like to be a beginner and you you discover Reverb it sounds amazing you want to put it on

everything but it very quickly builds up and starts to sound very amateur and cluttered and and messy so I think when it comes to reverb on like a sound like this piano I would have a much shorter decay

bring down the dry wet a bit dry wet is just the wetness the wet side of the dry and wet is the Reverb that you're hearing so it'll just be this the dry is just the signal without the

Reverb and you can blend them [Music] together so let's bring down the decay have a little bit of Reverb on the piano we have a lot of Reverb on this because it works nicely and together they sound [Music]

nice and maybe on this it would sound nice to have a delay so let's try delay I'm just searching delay make sure you have audio effect selected double click on delay and our delay is just going to repeat the

sound and it's going to do it at whatever interval we choose here these are intervals of 16th so you have 1 16th 26th which is an eighth note three which is a dotted 16th four which is a quarter

note and so on and so you can hear how this sounds if I put it on one put it on two [Music] three and we can control the dry wet here other things we can control is we can use filters just like we've done

before if you click on the circle and drag down and up it's going to make a what's called a almost like a band pass which is a combination of a high and a low pass and we can filter out different

frequencies so if I make this 100% wet you can hear just the delay [Music] so now I've got a really filtered dotted 16th note delay and if I bring back in the dry signal you'll hear how they sound

[Music] together I open this up a [Music] bit we also have this ping pong with makes the delays Bounce from left to right in your [Music] headphones and we have the feedback which is how many times it's going to

keep [Music] [Music] bouncing you see if you have too much feedback it starts to really build up and uh gets a bit cluttered so we can just bring down the feedback a [Music] bit and maybe we can listen to them all

together and see what combination sounds [Music] [Music] nice maybe we turn this one down a bit [Music] see what it sounds like on [Music] two I like to because it feels like the groove feels a bit like it moves a bit

more like a it's a bit more dancable bring up the feedback [Music] okay so the I think the last thing we need in terms of a musical element is we need a bass line because we've got all the stuff that's sitting high up in the

frequency spectrum The Melodies the chords the pads but we don't have something deep and low down for to like really fill out the song so let's make a new channel so I'm hitting control shift t uh or you can right click and go

insert uh Medi track and then we can um we can highlight the the portion that we want to insert our Baseline onto so we want a baseline that goes all the way across but there is kind of a rule here

that we're going to follow with the Baseline and that is we want our Baseline to use the bottom notes of our chords if we use use different notes because we have these low notes on our piano the base will sound a bit weird

like it's kind of clashing so we can copy these notes and use them for our Baseline I'm just going to highlight them hit contrl C and then I want to make a new midi clip here h control shift

M and I'm just going to click here and hit paste and now I can drag this across and if yours didn't work make sure Loop is on and that your length is set to four okay so now we' got this Baseline

already written there and now we need a sound for the Baseline so let's uh let's clear this we're going to go to sounds let's go for base and let's look at character and see maybe we can filter by by um character or type yeah let's go

for character so what kind of Base do I want I don't want uh I don't want something Punchy I want something kind of soft and just warm so let's try filtering by soft and like listen to these ones

[Music] [Music] I quite like the sub shaped one I think that'll be a nice base let's just solo this and listen to it okay it sounds a bit too high up to me and you can if you didn't hear that

yourself just grab an EQ and just always check that when you're writing your base especially your subbase you you want the notes to be playing typically under 100 so you can see this one's sitting right above 100 [Music]

htz and it doesn't sound very thick very warm so let's try pitching this all down one octave so I'm going to highlight it all hold shift and then hit the down arrow and now can see that note is

playing well below 100 oh but that bottom one kind of disappears we don't hear it very well so maybe what we should do is shift just that e up an octave so it's playing an E1 instead of [Music]

e0 okay and um we can uh we can try some of these dials here to see how it sounds the these are called macros and they're going to change the sound of our Baseline let's try this pulse [Music]

width that's interesting what if we turn the sink up [Music] cool so you can see what those are doing what what is this so far I quite like the pulse width out sounds let's just hear the sink on

its own well that that fills it up a bit more and you can see it fill it up because you see all these little individual like Peaks those are called harmonics and you can see we get more harmonics when we turn up that

and more harmonics usually leads to a fuller sound let's see how that [Music] sounds okay so just to illustrate how much the sub has filled out the track if I turn it off off you'll feel like oh something's missing it suddenly feels a

bit thin when I turn it on one 2 3 [Music] [Music] we can just play with these and see what we like quite like it at about 12% there okay so now we've got a we got four different instruments we've got a

chords we've got I'd say what I'd call a pad or counter Melody maybe we got our Melody and we've got our subbase so maybe we should just rename these Bo and if I went a bit quick there sorry

for not explaining you can right click and uh choose rename or just hit controlr and you can type chords and the quick way to start renaming the next element is to just hit Tab and then you can rename this to

let's call that pad and this one Melody and this one base okay so what else do we need or well first I want to save this make sure that we don't lose it so I'm just going to save it here to

my projects folder let's call this uh live 12 first track okay so we've got our four melodic elements I'm going to take a very short pause and um I'm going to go get myself coffee and then I'll be back and then we're going

to add our drums and then we're going to take all of the stuff that we've made and we're going to turn it into a full song it's going to be your first song I'm excited hope you are too okay see

you shortly okay guys we're back um now we're going to start working on our drum Loop all right so there's many different ways we can program our drum Loops uh we can use midi channels like we've been doing before with sort of

drum instruments and we can also use audio files by just dragging and dropping them onto our audio channels so I'm going to show you both ways and you can kind of choose for yourself which way to use drums but uh my personal preference is

to use midi and using Samplers I just feel like you get a lot more control and it's a lot easier to modulate the drums and make them interesting okay so let's first start with the the way that you can do it

through audio and so the first thing I want to put down is Kick Drum I'm just going to go into um one of my kick packs here I'm going to [Music] choose and you can just literally drag and drop it onto the playlist like I've

just done you just click and drag like that so I'm just going to delete that one now if I play you hear the kick drum Play Once well what we want is we want a kick drum to land on each quarter note so if

you divide this up into quarter notes you'll see these are our quarter notes then we can hold down control click and drag and we have a bunch of kick drums on our quarter node [Music] um but the faster way to do that would

be then to be to highlight all of them and just hit control D now you don't have to divide it up into quarter notes you can also just um visually see where your quter notes are so at the top here you can see

17 7.2 17.3 17.4 you want them at each point number over there just like that and then copy them across let's turn down the kick drum a bit and you can copy that all the way across until we have a full

[Music] loop okay so that's one way to add a kick drum to our project the other way is using a midi Channel hit control shift T and make a new midi Channel and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to choose my kick

drum and I'm just going to double click on it uh or drag it onto the instrument or sample here see you just drag it down there or H contrl Zed or you can just double click on it much

quicker so that loads it into an instrument called the simpler now simpler is a sampler what a sampler does is it takes an audio file and it basically replays it for you and it has a bunch of knobs and parameters

that you can adjust to change the way that audio file sounds now the reason I love using this for drums is that if I wanted to make a change to my drums like let's say I want to make this

sample uh this Kick Drum a bit shorter like this I would then have to go and copy and paste this and delete this and you know then copy it all the way across which is pretty slow workflow um it might also be other

things that I want to change like the attack which is basically like this slope uh maybe I want to take this and Pitch it up well then I have to do for all of the kick drums or I have to consolidate it

into one long stem it's just a slower way to work in my opinion um so with the simpler how we add the kick drum into the project I'm just going to turn this one off is we're just going to add a midi

clip over a quarter note space fast way to add a midi clip is to just double click in the space oops so I double click and you can see it adds no clip wherever I double click and the length of that clip is defined

by the grid so if I have it more zoomed out and I have a much larger grid then the clip will be bigger so I just zoom in until I get like a Quin note and then here you can see we got

our quter note and then all we need to do to play back that sample you'll see it's like kind of like um you can play it on your keyboard if you have a keyboard connected to your computer and you hit this arm

button I'm now just tapping my computer [Music] keyboard you can see it starts playing the kick drum um otherwise you just double click here and you can play it you can hear that note the thing with a simpler though is you have to put the

note on this specific key is C3 if you place it any higher it's going to start pitching the kick drum up so C3 if you go to C2 or C4 sorry your Kick Drum now sounds much higher up much

shorter go down that's how it sounds originally you go down even more it's deeper and eventually you just can't barely hear it make sure you stick to C3 now we have one note stretched across C3 and we just drag this out because

it's got that Loop brace enabled we get a kick drum all the way across there much faster so the process for putting that kick drum down I'll go through it again we just zoom in here and double click and we place a note at

C3 check that Loop is enabled and now all we do is just zoom out again click and drag that all the way across super quick and now it's playing the kick drum you can see it being triggered inside

this simpler we can change the volume of the kick [Music] drum um we can shorten the length of it here using this one shot mode you can fade out and make it much shorter longer you can pitch it

up Pitch it down add a fade in so you can see just how much control we have over the kick drum in this mode um all right so we've added a Kick Drum and that's a pretty simple process now we just need to set the

volume of it [Music] so I typically when I'm setting the volume of my kick drum in relation to my instruments I'm just using my ears what I'm listening for is I don't want the kick drum to be too loud I don't want it

to be the main focus of the track I wanted to be there just adding that punch and and groove to the track so you know having a kick drum up here all I can hear is the kick drum I if if I turn it down too

much can't feel it anymore I want to just turn it up until I can feel [Music] it I'd say about there feels good okay and so while we on the topic of the kick drum I'm going to introduce

you to side chain compression side chain compression is is really important in dance music cuz typically we're you're using it to make the kick drum cut through the mix without having to turn it up too loud so one problem that you might have

is you put in a Kick Drum and you just can't really feel it and if you turn it up too much it gets too loud and you get Distortion and it sounds horrible what we can do is we can use

side chain compression to turn down whatever element we want to turn down every time the kick plays so let me show you an example of this visually using uh volume so I'm going to use this utility which just controls

volume and if I play this Baseline make sure you have headphones on by the way maybe I should illustrate this with another element actually something that you can hear more clearly let's use the pad okay so I'm just going to put a

utility on the pad what the utility does is just another control that I can turn down and up just using the gain to turn it up and down and so what I want is every time the kick drum

plays I want to use this to turn down the volume of the pad so that we can hear the kick drum more clearly but I want more control than that we can automate this don't worry about what I'm

doing here I'm just doing it to illustrator concept um all you need to know is this line is going to be controlling the volume here so that you can see the volume goes from zero down to minus infinity and

then turns back up and what I want to do is just C copy that all the way across and now you should hear each time the kick drum plays the pad is going to go down in volume and then it's going to come back

up compared to this that is essentially what side chain compression is we're using a audio source to turn down the volume of another audio signal um and there's a much better way of doing this there's something called a

compressor that is built to do this so here I'm just going to search compressor and double click on that if you just go to all when you search it should pop up uh bit quicker for you over there

and now under the compressor we can click on this little arrow here and we turn on side chain and we take the audio input from the kick drum because we want to listen to the kick drum we want

this uh pad to this compressor to be listening to the incoming signal of the kick drum and we got two kick drums we got five BTD kick 51 and six BTD kick 51 so we need to choose six BTD kick

because that's the one that we're using and so now when I play it you can see the kick drum popping up in the viewport here and then all we need to do is just turn down this threshold this line needs to be below

the peak of this and then you'll hear the compressor starts to react to the kick drum all right so that's how you basically enable side chain compression um now the trick here is to dial it in so that you don't have this

super obvious side chain you don't have too little where it's not doing anything that's even that still quite a lot of side chain we can take this a step further and get a bit more control out of this

here using this frequency this EQ section so I'm going to set it to this high pass filter don't worry about too much what this is doing right now I'll explain it quickly but if you don't understand it's not super important you

can just copy my settings and then once you have your side chain setup you can just copy that and use it across your project so this EQ is basically all it's doing as I turn it up is taking out the low end from the kick

drum but only from the signal that's coming through the compressor we won't hear any difference in the kick drum you'll see a difference on the peak so as you watch [Music] that you'll see the peak get smaller and

smaller and more pointy that's exactly what I want I'm going to put it at about th000 kilo th000 Herz so 1 KZ and and I'm going to bring the threshold all the way down not all the way down my threshold

is at - 51 now and now we get a much nicer point a much nicer shape to work with and we can use this release to control the length of that curve just keep watching that curve as I

make it shorter and make it longer so yeah I have it usually at about 50 milliseconds here and set this to 1K make sure that it's on that setting Threshold at minus 51 and that's my side chain compress

compressor set up but now I'm not too worried about the kick drum and the pad conflicting what I'm worried about is the base because the kick drum and the base are both play playing in very low frequencies look at the base here it's

playing down here Kick Drum we have a look at that it's going to put an EQ over here it's also playing very low down because they're playing at the same time in the same space they're competing for attention and so we want to solve

that competition we want to give want to make the kick drum the winner in the competition so let's go to the pad and I'm just going to cut this off of the pad so I'm going to hit contrl X the

compressor I'm going to paste it on the base so now you'll hear the base ducking down every time the kick plays we can drag this a bit further down now we have a much cleaner sound okay so let's hear that

now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to copy this across to the melody and the pad just so you can hear how the side chain compress compressor makes the kick drum come through a lot more so

let's listen to that [Music] now you get that kind of pumping sound that you might have heard like and Eric pid's call on me you know the call on me kind of like that pumping sound that's exactly what we're looking

for but it sounds a bit maybe outdated so let's just reduce the amount of side chain I think on the chords we don't need that much and on the pad let's do l and the melody let's just bring down the

threshold a bit okay so let's seear how this sounds [Music] now okay let's add our next um drum sound I think next up we can start adding some high Huts so I'm going to do control shift T and we're going to add our main offbeat

high hat when the kind of sound uh so we need that open high hatut so I'm just going to go here to the BTD drum pack and go into symbols and we're going to look for an open high hard

sound let's go with a 909 high hat that's a pretty common sound in dance music I'm just going to double click on that and uh we're going to make a new midi clip here and now we're going to place notes

at C3 but where do we want these high hats to land we want them to land between each Kick Drum so you'll hear a kick drum plays here and we want a high hat to play here and we want another

high hat there so let's let's just place our high hat notes here like that and now we got Loop enabled we can drag this all the way [Music] across okay sounds cool this high hat is a little bit paned to the right if

you're listening to your headphones you can hear it's kind of like leaning on the right hand side we can change the panning by using this dial here the paned left right center but now the sample itself is a

little bit paned right so we can go in the controls here and also pan it I think I prefer to use these controls when I'm using the simpler so we can pan here a little bit left [Music] little bit

more now it feels like it's sitting in the middle and that's what I wanted Okay so we've got an offbeat high hat that's playing now um we can change the length of that high hat in the sampler this is what's

so nice about the sampler I showed you the one shot mode where we drag this down and change the length like this [Music] there's another way we can do it and that's using classic mode where we use Decay and release and sustain to change

the length of it so if we bring down the sustain all the way down to zero then we can use the Decay Change Control the [Music] length I think I want it like that nice and tight it's a bit quiet so I'm just going to

turn it up if you want it at zero you can just double click [Music] here okay let's add some more high hats I think now we can add some 16th note high hats so at the moment we got

that eth note high hat that's Landing between the kick drums I think we should have one that lands on all the 16th notes all of these little spaces here fild those up we can cck here and make sure this set to 16 we can see them and

then just duplicate that across and then we'll drag it all the way now we can take let's find a closed high hat maybe that one double click on it and let's listen to how that sounds hey I want to turn that down a

[Music] bit this one could be a bit louder maybe let's turn it up here we can turn it up with the gain or you can use the volume let's just use the volume here [Music] and we can make these high

Huts have a little bit of balance to them by using the velocity here let's turn down the first note and the second note and the first note and the second note in the OR note progression now it's got a bit of

balance to it we can also make it pan around left and right we can go to controls and just there you see where says ran and pan it's going to pan it randomly if we turn it up all the way to

100% And here it's moving a around a lot let's go down to like 30% now we have some [Music] movement okay the other thing that we can use to help program our drums is we can uh use top Loops or drum Loops this is a

very common thing everybody's using them um these are like pre-made Loops that you can just drag in and um kind of help add some Groove to your uh project so here you'll see in the sample pack we have perke loops and

we have top Loops let's go for top loops and so we can drag this one onto an audio channel here if you don't have an audio Channel you can either make a new audio Channel another way to get a very

quick new audio Channel or midi channel is to just drop a device or audio file here drop files and devices here you'll see if I do that it makes a new one for us and hit control Zed so now if I play

this it's too loud but uh let's just bring it down a [Music] bit so without it [Music] with so we're getting um a lot more Groove and some interesting percussion in there with this Loop and honestly do not feel bad about using Loops I know

that um when you start out you think oh I need to make everything every single sound needs to be programmed by me and there can be some set some satisfaction comes from that but dance music especially house music is very very

deeply rooted in sampling you know all all most of the great house hits were written with samples that people sampled from other people's records and used from sample packs doesn't matter where the sound comes from what matters is how

you put it all together and the final result as long as that final result is a good song it's come from you it never existed before you uh that's all that matters um Okay so we've got that top

Loop in now what you here is that top Loop has a clap in [Music] it we can I think we should add a clap ourselves just so you can get an understanding for the house beat the typical house

beat um so we've got a kick drum we've got the closed hat on the F 16th and we' got the open hat but now we want that clap and the clap needs to land on the two and the

four if we look at the Beats we've got 1 2 3 4 we want the clap to land on the two and on the four so I just draw a midi clip here the clap would be landing here and whoopsie run down

there and here we want the clap to land there and there let's drag that out and now we're going to go down to claps and we find a clap and sounds nice and that claps got a little bit of noise

at the beginning and so I'm just going to start move this play head so the clap starts right on the transient here in the big peak and let's play [Music] it it sounds nice maybe turn it down a

[Music] bit we can try different claps to see if we like something else just keep dragging them in [Music] there quite like that [Music] one that one fits nicely so do that one let's go back to this one it's got a nice bit of crunch and

because we have another clap inside this Loop they're going to layer together and make like a nice full [Music] sound maybe we should make this track go a little bit quicker what do you think I think um at the moment we're at

120 BPM I know I didn't speak about this at the beginning of the track but it should have by by default been at 120 so it wasn't really important but now let's change the tempo up here where it says

120 let's move it up a bit bit faster let's make it like [Music] 124 yeah that's a bit quicker it's a bit more groovy and we don't need this kick anymore we can delete it so now um quick way to expand all of these

or collapse them you don't you can use these up and down arrows or you can hold down alt and click the up and down arrow then it'll open all of them or close all of them [Music] okay okay there's um some more drum

sounds that we can use I mean this covers the typical stuff but you might want to start your loop with a crash for example so we're going to symbols we can choose a crash here yeah this is your typical like 909 clap

crash I think which is a very common [Music] sound you know just for a bit of energy on that down beat maybe we don't put it over there but maybe we put it here and here and might be nice to have a little

drum fill at the end of this section uh just something to tell the listener that you know this is the end of the loop and then it starts over again with the crash adds a bit of Dynamics to the

sound um maybe we can take one of these perk loops and make [Music] yeah let's use this one so I'm going to drag it there to the end and I only want the last piece of it so I'm just going

to put that over there and let's listen to how that [Music] sounds okay I think I just want the ending piece over here [Music] [Music] maybe we can have a Different Drum fill over there let's try something [Music]

else maybe this one we can put it over there see how that sounds [Music] [Music] okay so whenever I'm working with two different samples I like to put them on different channels I'm just going to drag this down here that way I can

control the volume of this one independently from this one turn that one down a bit I think I'm going to going use the ending [Music] here okay so looking at this we have now pretty complete Loop now I think the next step here is

to just name everything so that we know what's what when it's all closed we first up we got our kick and we have our I'm going to call this OB hat which is our offbeat hat and then we've got 16th hat is our

closed hat basically and then over here we have a clap we have a top Loop we have a crash we have fill one and fill two um and I also like to color code stuff a bit more more intentionally here

so I'm going to have my base be the color orange and I'm going to have my kick Also let's keep it orange CU they're kind of like your lowend elements and all of my drums I'm going to have them

in green and my chords and pads and Melodies let's do them in like a pinkish color and we can select all of these just go assign track color to clips and now it's a bit easier to look at this

project and easily see where all our drums are and our base and our kick and stuff okay all right time for another short break and then we're going to arrange this into a full track okay it's time to

arrange our track so the way I like to approach Arrangement is basically we're going to be taking our Loop idea here and just expanding on it so the one of the more common ways to approach it is to take

your idea and kind of duplicate it over the length of a track so for example we could take this duplicate it how long is this now you can check the length of something by highlighting it and then looking down here as I hover my mouse

over there says their duration 1 minute so 1 minute's way too short for a song um if we're going to be making this kind of like a radio friendly track I would say 3 three and a half minutes is

probably good let's duplicate this one minute thing three time or two more times oops you take all of it and duplicate it across that should be 3 minutes and then maybe we have um a little bit of an outro so

let's do one more duplication for an outro and one more for an intro which I'm just going to copy all of that over there so now we've got basically 4 minutes of uh of a track uh we could probably cut down the outro by

30 seconds that'll give us how long is this 3 minutes and 52 maybe we can cut down the intro or so and that gives us a how long is that 3 and 1/2 minute track so let's see if

we can make this idea stretch across 3 and 1/2 minutes now obviously we can't just leave it like that because that's going to be incredibly boring no reason to listen to the same Loop for 3 and a half minutes so what we want to do is we

kind of want to choose a section that is our fullest section and Mark that as our climax I think over here we can add a locator let's call this our Climax and this is going to be where everything comes together and so before

that we want to kind of start working like a sculptor and reducing um certain elements so let's also map this out a bit more so this is our Climax and I think I want our climax to be 1 minute

long or 32 bars so here I'm going to add a locator and say hro these locators I use them for labeling if you haven't seen how I did that I just right click over here add locator they can also be used to trigger

to start playing from a certain area so if I hit play here and then click here then it jumps to there um so I will think over here we have our intro and then let's call this our drop I know it's not really like a

EDM big drop it's kind of chilled out but I'm just calling it a drop and then we have let's maybe a [Music] breakdown and this breakdown is going to be 1 minute let's actually maybe have a bit of a shorter

breakdown bring our make our climax a bit longer maybe we can make our climax this long then we have a 1 minute drop a 46 second breakdown and then a bit of a longer climax 1 minute 17 second

[Music] climax um I think that's a pretty standard Arrangement very basic Arrangement but this is our first basic song and I kind of just want to communicate the idea of how to arrange across here all right so if we looking

at this like a sculptor and we're reducing elements um we could for example take out the drums in the breakdown and maybe take out the drums in the intro and maybe we remove the base from here this section let's call this the

buildup build and then in the beginning maybe we only start with the chords so we don't have pad or the melody we also don't have the bass we also don't have the kick in the intro intro is just the chords and then

we drop into the cords and maybe we remove the pad and it's just the base and the cords uh um and then we bring in the pad over here and then in the breakdown we remove the chords and we just have the pad and the

melody uh then in the climax we have everything together and in the outro maybe we remove the kick in the base and we just have Accords the p in Melody all right so that's just me visually arranging it

and that's just to show how you can use what you've got and stretch it across a full length but obviously if we listen to this it's still going to be R unfinished so now what I want to do is

take this very um high level Arrangement and go in and make it all detailed and add effects and basically just listen to it and and make it flow nicely so let's see what we've got so [Music] [Music] far okay so quite a lot happens

there when we go into from here there's not not a whole lot happening we're just hearing the chord progression twice um that then we drop in and we hearing the chords we're hearing the base the kick all the drums come in

together so what if we take out a lot of the drums uh in this section I'm just going to delete that and we only have the kick in the base then it drops into this [Music] and then maybe

we bring in the just the offbeat high hat over [Music] here and maybe we can take out the kick drum from here [Music] and musically I don't think it's very interesting um up until we get to this point so maybe it'll be better to bring

in the pads a little earlier but we can kind of tease them in so what if we only bring in just like the first note over here [Music] I can repeat [Music] it repeat it here again [Music] maybe that second note

[Music] also have a break [Music] okay it's starting to get a little more interesting I think something we can do to make this flow a bit nicer is start using some effects so here we can go to our FX mega pack and we can use

something called a sweep which is just White Noise going like that um let's take that one and we're going to drop it here so here's a New Concept for you and that is called warping so you'll see we have this sweep and it

kind of ends over here before the drop happens and what I want is for it to go all the way up until here so how do we make the sample that full length well you can see in the file

name over here it says 122 and that stands for 122 BPM our track is in 124 BPM and over here we also have another BPM marker so this BPM marker is what Ableton thinks the sample is um originally at but Ableton has got

it wrong here it says 97 but we know that it's actually 122 so what we need to put in here is 122 you always put what the sign is in over here don't put that number over here over here this is

the speed that the sample is the original sample so it's at 122 so here just make sure that this warp is on and now it says 124 but now we just need to bring it down to 122 and now you can see goes up to

exactly where I wanted to and then kind of Fades out and now it's going to be too loud and it also starts right from the beginning so we can shorten it and we can also add in a fade so that it

fades in more you add in a fade you click on this button make sure it's off and then you can click on these Corner squares and just fade it in and I'm going to start playing it from here just so I can hear the volume

of the noise way too loud let's turn it down and bring it in so that we can just hear it okay so that's one effect and what else can we add here maybe uh let's see maybe we can add

some um a drone kind of a drone sound this is what the drones are they're just kind of like atmospheric beds of mus of sound and they're labeled you can see here this says am which stands for a

minor and we know we're in a minor so it'll we know that these sounds will fit our [Music] track what about this one so maybe we can have that fade in and uh think it'll sound nice with our track we fade it into here and then

we'll stop it see how that sounds we got to first set the volume of it though way too loud [Music] okay that sounds about right and I also have wanted to cut off like so suddenly so I might add uh a Reverb to it let's

add a Reverb yeah I've uh added Reverb to my favorite so you can do it like this you just right click here and go oh don't know why right click's not working should be able to right click it

and then go set as favorites and then it goes into your favorites don't know why it's not working now maybe a bug or something um so yeah let's put the dryway up to 50% and then have a really

long Decay so it's a huge Reverb like 30 seconds or something [Music] okay so let's hear how this intro feels now [Music] [Music] [Music] now we can use this [Music] again I turn it down a bit more okay it still feels somewhat empty

through here so I think what I'm going to try is see how this top Loop sounds if I bring it in from the [Music] beginning and what we can do is we can maybe use something like automation I

haven't explained what automation is yet so I think now is a good introduction to it so what if we Tak take something like our Auto filter and this filter is basically like our EQ just on the low pass filter mode here

and I'll show you what it sounds like I bring up this frequency can hear how it filters out the sound and I'm thinking what we could do is have that open over time just like this [Music] [Music] so I think that works nicely so let me

show you how to automate that so we don't have to manually do that we can click on this automation button to arm the automation and now as I move this up and down you can see that red line dotted line

appears if that red line doesn't appear and this button is on there's one more thing that it could be and that is that you have selected show automated parameters only and so if you select that then certain things as you touch

them and move them some of them might not show up so make sure you have that selected as show all parameters now every time you touch something it gives you a new line new automation Lane for it so here I want this to

start pretty filtered and then we're going to open it up we're just drawing a line here we can have another bit of um noise that comes in through here like instead of our sweep that goes up you see sweep UPS let's choose a sweep

down something like that and we'll turn that all the way down [Music] [Music] [Music] maybe we can use this again here [Music] okay another thing I'm thinking we can use to fill this out is maybe a different drone let's try adding another

drone that kind of sits underneath this section of the track Let's uh grab one of these and see how this one sounds [Music] let's try pitching it up we can click over here and just hold shift and push

the up arrow that goes up 12 semmit [Music] tones try some different ones that one might work if we filter it down let's uh let's for an auto filter again and I'm going to need to go to audio effects Auto

filter well I've just put it onto track 15 here and I meant to put it onto that one let's just take that cut it and then paste it here and I'm going to take this and filter it [Music]

down let's turn this down a bit see how that adds a bit of fills out the background of the track a bit more that's sounding better another thing I want to add to this track and I often this is what starts happening in

the arrangement phase is I hear things that need to be added I think maybe we could add another drum sound to this that sits low down in the track like um Tom TomTom so I'm going to add a new

midi Channel below my kick double click here and now I'm just going to go down to uh the BTD drum pack and let's find a one shot Thum sound let's use this one CO3 and now because the sample is in C

we don't even need to tune it we know that when I play the note C the sample the note that the sample is going to play is C it's going to be in the key of C let me go up an octave so you can hear

that more so that's a c and we're in a minor so what if we try an A so that fits nicely any of these white not it should fit but the ones that I would probably be using here is a C or

[Music] E and we could uh maybe go down an octave and maybe make a sort of like a bit of a Groove here something like this Maybe and Just Loop it [Music] I can try going down like maybe to the

E I think here is nice it's just too loud let's turn it down and I sometimes like to add like an extra note here like maybe a c and maybe an e [Music] or maybe just sticking to the

A's let's take these higher notes and turn them down on the velocity wise so if you remember you can select these and hold down alt and click and drag down and you'll see the velocity come down so those higher notes are a bit

quieter now we have that nice tum there add the groove let's see how this feels [Music] now and this down a bit [Music] [Music] think I'm going to delete that [Music] sweep and with this crash I want it to last a bit longer so

I'm going to put a big long Reverb on it so it's going to be like really splashy let's go add a big decaying down the dryway a [Music] bit there we go [Music] here we can take this and paste it

here and then as we go into our [Music] breakdown okay so what I want to do here is in our breakdown I think I want to hear the melody kind of fade in more and maybe take away the kick drum let's

delete the kick drum and let's fade the melody in with automation just like we did um what did we fade in oh the top Loop so we can grab an auto filter I'm going to go to my favorites

I'm going to choose my auto filter and let's bring that all the way [Music] down so I don't think I I want that to happen straight away I'm going to give it a little bit of a gap and then I'm also going to give the

base a little bit of a gap and what I want to do here with this pad is change it so that it's only playing one note over here I'm going to delete that and then just drag out one

note and that's going to give us a bit of attention bit of tension um one way to create tension is to hold out a note without any changes because it creates this anticipation like when is that change coming um and we can also maybe put a

filter on this one and have it so that this note over here in the breakdown becomes quite [Music] filtered let's have a to like filters down pretty low and then it opens up and then as we get to the climax it

fully opens so you might have just seen this Co this Bend and curve like this instead of being a straight line how you do that is you just hold down alt on your keyboard and then that little curve line

should have appearer on your cursor and then you can bend it up and down by just sliding up and down I've done a little bit of a Bend there and um we want to also control this so that

it opens up a bit more maybe we can use our drone over here and the breakdown give it a bit more space see how it sounds to maybe pitch it up an [Music] [Music] octave and I'm going to remove the kick

from there [Music] and I think over here we can for our build we can have this melody kind of just repeat that first note and build some more tension again like this um I'm going to bring down that

loop race so that it's just time to that [Music] long we have this [Music] drone and what else can we do we can also a bit of attention through this buildup by taking our BAS notes what I'm going to do is

I'm just going to cut out a section of this and you can do that by highlighting it and hitting control e and now that this is cut out it's separate from these I can copy it contrl C or just click and hold

control and drag and I want to delete these notes drag this all the way across uh I don't want it to Loop I'm just going to turn off the loop and I'm going to drag it across again and drag

that one all the way across [Music] [Music] and then maybe we can keep this repeating through here for a while to just hold on to that like hypnotic tension for a bit [Music] might be nice to layer this with a new

sound over here so it's like something we haven't heard before what I'm going to do is just duplicate this click over here hit controll D and I'm going to delete all of this and now we are just going

to have this be a layer let's find a different sound I want something similar to this sound uh so we can actually use feature in Ableton Live 12 I think it's called the similarity search something um where we find this

sound the epano basic and we want to find something similar to it and use it uh on this midi so if we just search here e piano basic we then click this button here it'll find similar sounds oh hang on I think maybe I have

to do it like this uh instruments go to piano keys e piano and it's under electric piano basic there we [Music] go I wonder how that would sound let's see I'm just putting it on this channel [Music] let's try a few ones

[Music] [Music] I like that I might turn it down a bit can also try maybe changing the delay on this to be a different speed [Music] and we can change this melody to be a bit more interesting so what I'm going

to do here is if I want to make changes like if I just move this B up you'll see all of the notes in the loop will be changing so all of the B's are now becoming C's we don't want that so I

want to make this I want to consolidate it into one clip if I can if I click there and hit controll J or you can right click uh consolidate over here now I can move the individual [Music] B's I move that up to the D let's copy

that to the one above it let's see how that sounds [Music] and let's move this one maybe up to the [Music] E and then up to the [Music] G let's just copy these down again now these two clips are exactly the same

see how that [Music] sounds we mustn't forget our drums here the toms [Music] and our drone [Music] sound okay so I also want to add some effects here like maybe we can just copy these and use them I'm going to highlight all

of them hold down control and just copy them all across here this is kind of lazy producing usually I would find different sounds um but yeah we're just kind of working with a very basic Loop so I think it's fine for now I'm going to

move that one over there and that one over there see [Music] [Music] there that sounds cool um maybe we can keep this a bit more filtered here and open it [Music] up and I think this track really need

some more effects like little things that just pop in in and out I like to call them ear candy um I've got this FX mega pack and we've got a bunch of effects called aernal one shots just kind of

little hits and stuff that you can throw in here and it'll sound really nice especially if you put like some Reverb on [Music] them like that we can probably use let's see I can drag that and put it

like over there see how that sounds [Music] maybe [Music] here maybe another [Music] one something over there we can put it over there [Music] maybe put some Reverb on this one I'm going to steal Reverb from another Channel steal it from our crash contrl

Z paste it there [Music] [Music] I think this sound is getting a bit harsh so I want to just remove some frequencies from it these ringing frequencies I'm going to just reduce that a bit [Music] let's find some more

[Music] effects some of these things sound weird and you wouldn't think that they'll work in the track and maybe they won't but it's always worth a try cuz and improve the track drastically let's see how this sounds uh maybe I'll

put it chair [Music] maybe with a bit of [Music] Reverb sometimes reversing stuff can sound cool so if we take this and hold down shift and R then it goes backwards [Music] I'm going to just keep on adding a few

more effects here let's add this one maybe [Music] yeah always turning the volume down and just feeling at what volume it fits nicely maybe we can get that [Music] one get this one in again somewhere and just duplicate

[Music] that and this one [Music] and I'm going to copy this one across [Music] too let's move that [Music] [Music] here okay I think on the outro I want this melody to just Loop uh only this section where it's

just a and G A and G I don't want it to go up to the B so if we just drag that Loop down to there then it'll outro like this and we can filter it down [Music] can also filter out

[Music] this and I'm thinking these drums would also be nice to like filter them down and um so one thing we can do instead of on track by track adding an auto filter and doing them all one by one we can put

these all into a group and then do them all together so if you select hold down shift and click on the first one and the last one I'm just going to go and hit contrl G that's going to group them and

we'll call this our hats and now we can take an auto filter I'm just going to steal one from this track it's much quicker than doing it from the beginning and I'm going to click and paste it here but now you have

a look at the automation if I just click on that you can see oh you might find sometimes you click it and then the line goes gray you don't know how to fix that just click on this button again that'll

repair your automation okay so you can see this now this automation is filtering out the whole like all the high hats throughout the track here all the way down to 400 HZ we don't want that we want to open it

up and over here we also want to open it up we only want the filtering to happen here [Music] [Music] and then you can resolve the cord by going back to the first one over here and ending it there let's

[Music] see yeah sounds nice maybe hold out that last cord a bit longer here I've just hit contrl J and now I can drag this out and just drag this one [Music] [Music] across last thing I think maybe we could

add to this is a little bit of a human touch maybe some some vocal sounds so in this mega pack here we've got vertical fxs and phrases you can see they're all labeled key labeled um so let's have a look at some

of maybe the phrases go to the wet phrases that means they've got already got like Reverb and delay and stuff on them and let's have a look at the a minor section [Music] that's [Music] nice okay so let's try out some of

these I think maybe this one I'm going to drag it down here and let's so we start hearing the melody over here see the Melody comes in maybe after hearing the melody once we bring in a vocal to go with it now remember this is

in 120 BPM so we need to tell Ableton that it's at 120 BPM type in 120 there and let's turn it down cuz it's going to be a bit loud see how that sounds [Music] that's nice I can kind of hear this one coming

in afterwards maybe over there it's also at 120 just tell Aon 120 [Music] yeah how this one [Music] [Music] sounds maybe we can put that one over there wonder if it would sound cool to take these and put them in a group

together I'm going to put all of them in a group contrl G now group up and then I'm going to put a delay on the group so that all of them delay together and it becomes like one big sound that'll be nice for the

buildup over here let's try that we go to all here go to audio effects and choose our delay and let's make it four here let take an eighth note delay or a half note delay and I'm going to bring up the feedback

pretty high like 90 dry weight I'll bring it down a little bit like 40% a bit of filtering maybe some ping pong and then what I want to do let's bring this feedback up really high is I want to automate this in so

that it only starts coming maybe we can automate it into like 50% you can click and make a node here then right click that Noe say edit value and type 50 and then it puts it at 50% then we're going to click and drag this

one down the lay is only going to start fading in over here let's see how that sounds [Music] we can copy this again and use it again how about we copy this whole thing including all the automation so

you have to make sure that you click on this gray little square up here not this one click and drag everything and I'm going to paste it just going to duplicate from here make sure that this automation flows nicely so I'm just going to click

and put a marker there delete that one and delete that one and then bend this line up that let's [Music] see hang on start it again listen to this breakdown actually let's listen from here [Music] [Music] oh [Music]

that was cool except there was two things I want to change one is I want to have more of some effects going into this section across that transition and I want to fade the vocal in using the auto filter so let's do that uh Auto

filter again and let's have this kind of fade in from about I don't know 800 HS or [Music] something yes that works nicely and then this little transition over here it could be cool to have maybe some delay on the high

Hut and we automate that in let's put on a delay and here I'm going to automate it up to 50% down from 0% and then I'm just going to bring that back down to zero because we don't want the delay on those high

hats and then I'm going to bring down the filter a little bit take some of the highend maybe some ping pong and bring up the feedback bit let's see how that sounds [Music] okay I think that was too much so I'm

just going to bring down that to like 36 and I'm going to bend this it only grows up at the [Music] end I also want to maybe use this sweep over here [Music] and let's use this sweep as well there

[Music] [Music] maybe we can hear more of this [Music] [Music] okay I think we're almost done the last thing I want to do is whenever I'm listening to a track I don't like to hear that the drums stay the same

throughout the track so if I play the track here and play here I don't want to hear the exact same drums so I think we can add something different here one of the things we can do differently simply make this high hat

a bit more open a bit longer so if you have a look at my settings here the sustains all the way down and the Decay is at 245 all we need to do is just increase the Decay a bit

and that'll make the high heart a bit longer so I'm going to click here and then drag this up make it a bit longer okay then you compare this section to this one and you're just listening to this

high hat it gets a bit longer and so that's one change another change that we could add is maybe adding like a Shaker or something over there so let's uh go into our drum pack again there I'm going to

look for shakers maybe we'll just use like this Shaker I'm going to make a new channel below the Hat actually maybe I'm hit contrl Z here and put it inside the hat so let's make a new channel inside here and then drag

that onto there drag it all the way across to the outro and or maybe we can start that over there let's see how it sounds I'm going to turn it up turn it all the way down and then bring it in slowly

[Music] and now we'll hear the difference between this section in this [Music] section maybe we can take out the kick drum here for a little bit [Music] oh [Music] okay so I think Arrangement wise this is pretty good for our first track

ever and uh the last thing I want to do is just do a tiny bit of mastering all we're going to be doing is just pushing the volume of the track up just a little bit um and that's just so that when we

render the track out and show it to our friends that it doesn't sound like way quieter than all the other tracks out there in the world and so what are we're going to be doing is working on the main

the master Channel um I don't know why they're calling it main now I want to rename it to master um but what are we going to use is just put a limiter on there so search all and then just go for

limiter here all we're going to do is just turn up that limiter until we see a little yellow block start appearing there and that means we've turned up the track as loud as it can be um and now the limiter is just

stopping it from distorting basically so just play it in the busiest part of the track which is probably around here just keep turning it [Music] up okay now you can see that little yellow block starts appearing here that's the

gain reduction that's how much the volume is going trying to go over the maximum level of the limiter which is minus 0.3 DB and then the limiter stops it by pushing down the volume and so you can see that happening

here okay so I think that's it for our first try back there was an introduction to Aon live 12 um for complete beginners uh just a quick recap of everything that we did we learned how to use midi channels and add

instruments to it we learned basic music theory how to write chords and Melodies um we used a piano a pad um two different electric piano presets we used a bass sound we learned how to use use drum samples inside of the simpler and

also manipulate the drum samples inside of the simpler um we added some Tums we did high hats and shakers and then we did a bunch of effects working with audio and um adding some Fades and also reversing samples we also learned how to add stuff

to groups and we did a bit of Automation and finally we covered uh some limiting so hopefully uh everything was clear over there you missed anything you can go back and rewatch it um you can also join the Discord and uh you know

the Discord I think is in the description and you can um message people over there everybody's really helpful and uh you should be able to get some help if you get stuck um but anyway I think it's time to

listen to our creation and see how it sounds all right 3 two 1 let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] o [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] okay guys that was it for our first song hope you enjoyed that and we're going to

be taking a break now and um we'll see you for the next song shortly okay welcome to your second track in this track we're going to do a bit of an introduction into basic sound design we're going to be writing a sort

of melodic techno kind of track with a rolling Baseline um slightly darker Vibe and I'm going to be explaining less about the you know the basics like we went over the last time the creating new midi channels making new midi clips and stuff

like that so if you are not familiar with that I recommend just going over the first track again and familiarizing yourself with with all those shortcuts and stuff as I'm not going to be um repeating myself each time I do

them um okay so let's get started so whenever I'm writing kind of dark like atmospheric melodic melodic techno kind of track um I always like to start by making a drone sound something that just kind of runs through the track and sets

the the vibe and it also gives the listener Q as to uh what the key of the track is so I think with this track let's let's write in maybe F minor and let's turn the temper up a bit

let's go a little bit faster on this one maybe like 125 all right and then we're just going to go through this um FX mega pack here and we're going to find a nice kind of bed for us to write to uh so you see in

the drones we can scroll down there's some F minor drones [Music] I think the first one's a great one because it's doesn't have a lot of highend that's kind of um gives me a bit more of a darker

Vibe so that's going to be like the bed of our let's call it our harmonic bed all right now I want to start adding some kick and base because kick and base is really important in this style we're

going to be having this like rolling kind of Baseline and um it's really important to how the kick and the base feel so let's uh find a kick drum that has a nice bit of punch in it think that one feels pretty

good use that one and I'm just double clicking here to create a new midi Channel and here we going to create a note at C3 if you remember whenever we're using a sampler or a simpler we need to place our notes at

C3 duplicate that and then make sure loop race is turned on we can just drag it all the way [Music] across another thing to note that whenever you're using this simpler well we can see that the sample is being played in full but sometimes

you have a long Kick Drum sample and um it'll cut it a bit short based on the Decay and sustain and release parameters um so like also it depends on the length of your note so if I have a really short

note it's now not playing the sample in full it cuts it short over there so you just need to bring up the release if you want that to be played in full let's just do that just remember that whenever I've putting a kick trium

in here if I want the full kick to play release all the way up well not all the way up at least I would say like maybe one second long okay and now we need to add in a

baseline And so here's where we going to do a little bit of an introduction into sound design um we're going to make our own Basse sound and I think this is the perfect sound to make as your first sound so

let's um let's use a synthet probably everybody's going to have access to which is wave table um so just open up wave table here just search wave table go to all double click on it and then we've got it here

on our first midi Channel and now we're going to just make a rolling base we want to have let's choose our um note as uh F1 here and make sure that this is set to 16 so you are adding 16th notes and then

we're just going to add four 16th notes and then another four so eight and then just drag this all the way across and now you should hear this okay so it's just a plain sine wave it's not very

interesting um so what we want to do here is we want to change the waveform so over here is our different waveforms and they each will have different sounds to them so the most basic one we have here is the sine wave and that just

sounds like a a clean Tone If I play a note on my keyboard you'll hear it and it's actually good to visualize this with an EQ here so sine wave sounds like this it's just one harmonic you can see

it [Music] here uh let's just familiarize ourselves with a different waveform so this four basic shapes here so we can slide this up and go to the next one next one is called [Music] triangle and you can hear that has a bit

more of um like bit more highend to it and those are called harmonics and here you can see those little harmonics the quieter as it moves up and then we're going to just sweep this up to the s you can see that has a lot more

harmonics it's a very full wave form and then we go to the square wave that sounds kind of like the triangle wave but it's um kind of the harmonics are just a lot [Music] louder and you can see the difference

between the saw wave and the triangle wave if I just hold down the note and I sweep between them you'll see that the S Wave just has I think pretty much exactly double the amount of harmonics in [Music]

it so it's basically fills in all the gaps all right so now you know what the different waveforms sound like the waveform we're going to use today is just going to be a sore wave and if we play it it sounds like

this but we want um we want it to be a bit deeper down I think so we can use this transpose here the semi to move it down and up notes and I just want to go down an

octave so if you remember an octave is 12 semmit tones and the quick way to move down 12 semmit tones in Ableton is to hold down shift and hit the down arrow so I'm clicking on this holding down shift and then down

arrow and I think what I want actually is a combination of um low notes and one octave up so let's take these these two and these two I'm just holding down shift and selecting both of them then I'm going to hold down shift

and hit up and now I've got too low too high okay so the next thing we're going to use is the filter I think in the last lesson or the last track we used the eqo like a a filter

where we just took out some of the high end like this well we're not going to use the EQ this time we're going to use the filter that's built in here we can bring that filter all the way down

to it's bring it down to like 98 Herz here okay so what we want is basically for this to move really quickly up and down each time the note plays and what we can use for that is something called a

modulation so these are this is where might get a little bit complicated but uh just follow along with what I do and uh the more we do it the more it'll make sense to you so I've introduced you to

the waveforms and now we've got a filter the next thing I'm going to introduce you to is the envelope an envelope is basically just a line a shape that dictates the volume of a sound over time so it's broken up into four stages

uh the attack stage is basically telling us how long it takes for the sound to reach its maximum volume I'm just going to open up this filter while I explain this so if I play I'm just going to hold

down a note to my keyboard if uh if I lengthen the attack back to let's say 1 second it's going to take 1 second for the sound to reach its maximum volume so you can hear how it kind of

like swelled up all right the next stage we have is the Decay stage and this is the stage basically between this point and this point here you can see the D and that's how long it takes for the

sound to go from its maximum volume down to this volume and this volume is dictated by the sustain level here so if we hit the sustain all the way to zero all the Decay is telling us is how long

it takes for the sound to go from here down to silent so if I make a really fast Decay you can hear it shuts off really quickly as soon as it takes 100 milliseconds from the maximum volume down to the minimum

volume and if I increase the Decay it's 5 seconds it's going to take 5 Seconds to go to silence after it reaches its maximum [Music] volume okay so now we know what the a the D and the S is the sustain is just the volume

that it it reaches while you're holding down the key so as long as I've got my finger on the the key it's going to stay at -12 or -3 DB once it reaches that first has to go up to its maximum then it decays down

to Min -3 and then once I release the key the next stage comes into play which is the release stage and that's set to 600 milliseconds so I'm going to release it and I took 600 milliseconds to go to

silence I'm going to shorten this attack quick make it instant and now I'm going to increase the release to like 5 seconds and you'll see what happens when I let go of the key I'll tell you and you'll hear it'll

take 5 seconds for it to go silent okay I'm holding down the key I'm holding it I'm holding it and release okay so this is a very handy tool this envelope allows us to shape our sound and so the kind of shape that

we want for our sound this time is a really fast Plucky sound so we want it to be loud almost instantly and then we want it to Decay really quickly let's say probably about like 400 milliseconds and we wanted to

Decay pretty low down like almost to silence let's take it to minus 32 DB and then we want short release but we do want some release let's call it 192 milliseconds let's hear the sound and you can um click and drag

these squares if you want but I recommend familiarizing yourself with these parameters so let me um let me start with it all the way up and then as I shape it you'll hear the the sound change and get more Plucky

so bring down to sustain bring down the Decay slowly bring it up [Music] again let's bring up the sustain again so that there can play with the release I think about there it sounds nice all right so now we know how an

envelope Works what we can do with this envelope is we can use it to control different parameters so this is at the end of the day it's just a shape and we can use the shape to control the frequency for example at the

moment all it's controlling is the amp you it says amp it's controlling the volume of the sound over time but we can use a second envelope here we have envelope two and we can map it to the frequency

and to do that we go to the Matrix here and we're just going to click on frequency and you'll see it appears here make sure you click on that and then filter one frequency will appear here and we use this

Matrix to map the envelope 2 to frequency one so it's pretty um intuitive I think here you just go to envelope 2 and you go down to filter frequency one and here we're just going to click and drag that up and what

that's going to tell us is use envelope 2 to move move the frequency up I think that's a percentage 41% from its original value so if I bring this down to I think we wanted at 98 Hertz and then play it you can see it's

jumping up and down now based on the shape of this envelope so if I shorten it it's filtering really quickly up and down and I can increase the length bring up the Decay also bring up the sustain let play with the

release um all right so the other thing that we can just adjust is this amount here do we want it really dark or do we want it a bit brighter can bring it up a bit so I think it sounds nice about

there let's leave it at 42 we can also change the shape the steepness of this curve by clicking here see how it gets steeper and just listen to what that changes brighter darker I quite like how it sounds

there let's see how it sounds with our basine with our [Music] kick sounds good um okay so I think what I want to do with this sound is I want to boost the low end of it a little bit

more here I'm going to just take this EQ let's take the first one here click on number one and we're just going to boost it like let's call it 3db and I'll bring the frequency up to say 100

[Music] HZ maybe we got a bit more four see how it sounds if we push it more and more I think there sounds nice [Music] okay so another thing I want to do with this sound is whenever I'm working with

Basse sounds I want to make the sound monophonic so what's the difference between polyphonic here you say it says poly if I click on it it says mono there's um a little bit of confusion that can happen in in this on

this topic between poly and mono sometimes when people think of Mona they're thinking of Mona versus stereo where you you know you'll have a sound system where it'll doesn't have a left and a right speaker it's just uh a mono

sound system um there's no difference between the left and the right the sound is very centered the other the other version of mono that we get in electronic music is uh the synthesizer version monophonic versus polyphonic and that all that means is when it's

monophonic you can only play one note at a time it's polyphonic you can play two or more um so if I play basically let me show you here if I take these notes and play like two like this let me place it higher up so you

can hear a bit clearer so you can hear both of those notes together right [Music] you can hear them playing together but if I switch it to Mono we only hearing that top note when it's Polly you can hear two notes playing on

top of each other mono it's only playing as the top one so I want the sound to be monophonic when it's a baseline And the reason for that is sometimes you have the release of a note being a bit long

and it overlaps with the next note and that can make it a little bit muddy it doesn't sound very nice and clean so that's the reason I switch it to mono and um the other thing I want to do

with the sound is make it a little bit dirty I want to have a bit of distortion on it so let's grab a saturator uh I'm just searching stue and then if you go to audio effects you'll see saturated to

here um maybe we can just use a preset here we can use a one this one called a bit warmer let's put it here before the EQ it's made it a lot louder because you can see the drive here has got 6 DB on

it so we just need to take out maybe 6 DB I'm just going to type minus 6 here on the output another thing I can hear is the sound is clicking a lot and that might be because the attack

is at 0 milliseconds anytime you hear a click it's probably because the sound is changing from one volume to another instantly without any uh curve to it without any slope so if we give that a little bit of a slope

even if it's just a tiny bit I'm going to click there and just hit the up ar oh why is it not working yeah hit the up Arrow until it goes to maybe like 4 milliseconds see that click

disappears there's the click and then as I push it up it disappears and if you want to also hear the Distortion more you can try changing it to like a a different wave different shaper so like an analog clip

maybe or hard curve now you can hear that like proper Distortion actually quite like how that sounds let's bring down the output there so whenever I'm adding like a saturation or anything any effect it's always good to balance the input and output you when

you turn the plug-in off and on you don't want to hear it getting louder unless the intention is to make it louder the reason for that is you can trick yourself into believing that something sounds better just because

it's louder although the quality of the sound might be worse um so just make sure that you're checking that so it's not getting louder it's just getting more saturated it's got more harmonics on it okay I think maybe a little bit less

Drive let's just tame that a bit to 3db and I add a bit more output okay the next thing we want to do is side chain so you should remember how to side chain from the last video that if not just follow along here we're

going to add a compress at the end of the channel we're going to open up that arrow and click on side chain then we're going to take the audio input from the kick drum okay and now you should see the

kick popping up in there that's the sound that's a signal that when it goes when it plays we want our signal to duck out of the way of it okay so if you remember also in the last time I like to set up my side chain to

use this EQ to take out a bit of the low end from the side chain signal so I can have more control over it so as I bring that up you'll watch the point of this change it gets lower but also gets more

pointy and a bit more a bit sharper um and then we can bring down the threshold to below that point okay and now we can control the length of the side chain using this release so I'm just going to bring it up to

like 50 there now we should have a nice balance between our kick and our base [Music] okay let's EQ out the low end from this drone sound just to clean it up a bit you can see it's got some Sub in it but we've

made our own sub now so let's just take some of that out to about there is probably [Music] fine and we can try side chaining the Drone to see how it sounds [Music] I think it's too much side chain so it's

kind of like making giving it this real like pumping sound that I don't really like and so we can just bring down the ratio of the side chain so it's just doing a little bit of side chain cool let me just save that

[Music] okay um all right so we've got our kick we've got our base let's just name them this one's going to be named kick this one I'm just hitting controlr to rename this one is base let's call this one

[Music] drone and what is the next thing that we're going to need for this I think we should um add like a an arpeggia or something like a a lead element Let's uh let's make a new channel and we're going

to to find a nice sound to work with um all right let's uh yeah let's use wave table again because I think I I really want to like explore sound design at least beginner sound design with you guys so let's uh

use wave table and we can really like get used to those envelopes okay so I want to make an arpeggio and uh for this I want to use a s wave and make a Plucky shape like we did for

the base so um let's go back up and switch it to a saw again and then let's just make a new midi note and um we here in F minor and so you might not know the F minus scale yet

and that's fine let's turn the Highlight scale so you can you can see which notes are safe to use in F minor and just make sure that this is selected at F minor selected here and here and then you uh you can't really go

wrong so let's um make some notes yeah let's choose an f and um let's just make our F minor chord which is if you remember how to make that chord it's place a note skip one place one Skip One Place one

and then I'm just going to bring down this Loop brace all the way to here make sure that's turned on this Loop otherwise you won't be able to drag this around and then I'm going to drag just to zoom in here and drag this

across and now you should hear an arpeggio so that's um we I don't think we've been over our ped yet but yeah basically an arpeggio is just a chord normally the chord would be notes on top of each other we're just

going to break those notes up and play them one after another sorry I'm back now and we are busy making our arpedio so it sounds like this at the moment but I want to make it Plucky like without

other sound let's just hear it in context [Music] first so yeah let's make it nice and Plucky and short so so let's just bring down this envelope shape we're going to bring down the sustain and the [Music] Decay now that's a bit

cleaner let's try a different way [Music] for go back to the soil listen to that one and this one okay let's bring down the filter and see how that [Music] sounds okay let's um let's do the modulation of the filter here so we're

going to bring that down and then we're going to go to envelope two make a bit of a Plucky shape something like that and then go to the Matrix here make sure that we've clicked on frequency and then

we're going to go to uh envelope 2 here and just assign it to the frequency okay um that sounds like this now and I think it sounds cool but it's going to get old very quickly if it just

repeats like that so what I want to do is add a bit more modulation to it and get it sounding a bit more alive so we can use these things called lfos to bring life to it these uh lfos

are basically you can see them here it's just a a shape like this sine wave think of it like an envelope that repeats over and over again it just goes on a loop this this uh shape just keeps on looping

but here we've got a sine wave shape and we can use that to move something thing let's say up and down like the frequency uh let's test it out let's go to the Matrix here and we'll choose lfo1

and assign it to the frequency so I'm just going to move it over there and we just need to turn off re-trigger otherwise it's going to keep starting over and over again turn it off and now you can see

it's moving up and down we can change the speed of the the rate of it going up and down and we can also change the amount and we can assign the alepo do different things so maybe we can use a different

LFO here and assign it to let's say or what about if we assigned it to the shape of the amp envelope so that it got longer and shorter like this so here we take lfo2 sorry on The Matrix we need to go

to LFO 2 and let's click on uh just make sure you've gone to First the amp here and you clicked on the Decay just click on it and then if we go to the Matrix you'll see it says amp Decay we can

assign it to envelope 2 and we need to turn off re-trigger now I can hear it getting shorter and longer let's change the amount here and slow it down [Music] maybe okay let's go to envelope one just bring up the Decay

a little bit okay so now it's changing a bit I think the next thing we can do to give some life to it is add some delay delay sounds good on these sorts of sounds usually so let's bring down the dry wet

a bit bring up the feedback so it bounces around more let's turn on ping pong that's going to make it bounce from left to right and let's listen to it let's try uh some different numbers let's try one let's try

two let's bring down the filter a bit okay that sounds cool I wonder if we lay it in a second oscillator so here it says ask one ulate is just the the thing that's generating this waveform so we can add another

one and now we can lay them together can have a square wave with a S Wave and we can change the pitch of it we can put this up let's put it up an octave so 12 semi turns hold shift and

hit the up [Music] Arrow you also change the volume of it so it's only slightly there Okay let's listen to [Music] that okay I think that's sounding pretty cool how about uh the next thing we add is going to be like a kind of a hook a

lead sound let's make something else here so I'm going to double click here and um this time we're going to use wave table again and we're going to make another sound but this time I want the sound to

not be so Plucky I want it to be a little bit longer um so if I play the sound let's use another maybe this time we use a square wave so we can get used to the sound of a square wave so when I play

the sound I want it to be sustained like [Music] this so we have a high sustain can maybe bring it down a little [Music] bit and I want the frequency to come down a bit the filter and I think what I want with this

sound is to use the envelope to open up the filter maybe a little bit slower so let's go to the Matrix here we're going to click on frequency and then we go to envelope to assign it to the frequency by turning

this up and then we can increase the attack and make it a bit [Music] longer yeah I like that maybe give it a bit of release and on this this sound we're going to increase the attack a bit

too give it a bit of [Music] release okay so we got a longer sound let's uh put let's actually bring down the frequency a bit and make it steeper by hitting that button make it 24 DB filter and we can make

we take this second envelope go to the Matrix and just decrease the amount okay and then I'm going to put a big Reverb on this and we're going to make a bit of a Melody with it I'm going to bring down the dry wet

and bring up the decay a lot that sounds like that now pretty fun so let's go here and let's make um pretty long midi note here you can see this is just looped over and over again I want to consolidate it so I'm just hit

control J and now it's one long clip and we can start placing notes here like what if we start on the C and do something like and just like walk down it or something [Music] okay I think maybe here we can um we can

do this and then and then we'll just do a simple walk down [Music] again and do maybe like this see how that [Music] sounds again [Music] so that's um it's a very soft sound and kind of in the background but it gives

the song Some identity it's it's the first I'd say Melody of the song that uh could get stuck in your head um but it's not at the moment I don't think it's upfront enough bold enough for it to be the main hook but I do like it so

let's stick with that for now and maybe we can make it more interesting by moving between different [Music] shapes so let's try modulating this so it moves up and down and so if I click on that and move it up and down you can

actually see it in the Matrix here moving up and down so let's assign that to an alfo bring it here click on the alfo turn off re-trigger slow it down of [Music] it we don't want it to go all the way

down just bring down the [Music] amount uh so yeah let's go back to the Matrix here actually let's move the original position so it's kind of sitting between them and then we can just change the amount of movement

here there we [Music] go all right so what else could we use I think we need more drum sounds let's um let's move all of our drums below all of our synth sounds so let's call this our pad Melody because it sounds more

like a pad it's kind of soft let's add a new midi channel here um and what are we going to have Let's uh I think let's add H I think we we should add an offbeat high hat um let's see so we need to add midi

notes Here at C3 and let's just click over there and we need to add them between 1 and 1.2 and then we just bring down the loop rce so now it's just going to Loop this over and over again as we play

it so if I play it you'll be able to see looping it okay but we want a nice high hat sound to go there sorry dogs just jumped on my lap okay and um let's find a high head sound

uh we'll go here to the bount to divide drum pack and here we go to the open high hat let's go with this 909 sound that's a very classic drum sound I think we used it in the last track

too I'm just going to turn up the gain a little bit here so it's a bit louder and let's use our envelope here the attack Decay and sustain to make this a bit shorter so I'm going to bring down

the sustain [Music] here it's also a little bit paned right I'm going to pan it to the center turn it up a bit okay what else do we need I think we need some Fuster high hats some 16th

note high hats so let's uh draw those in so those are 16th notes and then I'm going to shorten that and bring that out okay so we need some fast high hats let's just try something let's try that one see how it

sounds turn it down a bit we can use our velocities to make it bounce a little more so here I'm going to bring down the velocity of the first one and the second one a bit and we can also just try different

sounds until one feels like it fits best [Music] see quite like that that one actually could maybe be a little bit shorter bring down the sustain and just play with the Decay and now we can do something called

uh random [Music] panning so if we click on controls here and we turn up this round pan here it's a percentage if I turn it to 100% you'll hear each time a note plays it plays in a different spot left

to right okay it's a bit too random so I just want to bring it down to like let's say 177% nice nice and clean okay and now I think what we need to add here is maybe a a nice

snare let's just double click here I've just made a new Mini Channel and we're going to I'm just going to hit control s to save it in case it crashes or something and now we're going to add our

snare so let's just try out a few different snares and see which one fits the track nicest so our snare is going to go on the two and on the four the 1.2 and the 1.4 noes at C3 and

that let's turn that up a bit can even turn it up here a bit more okay that sounds cool let's try a couple different snares I'm going to just duplicate this with control d and then the first one I'm going to

let's try a different snare here let's try 707 one see how that [Music] sounds and together maybe we lay them together let's turn down this one turn it up slowly no I prefer it without that snare so before I delete that I want to try

just a few more other snares and see which one if any of them sound better you can see how much it changes the feel of the track when you're using different sounds quite like this one also changing the pitch of this

snare can help a lot so like moving it up or down here if we transpose it I think I quite like it at this pitch let's compare to this one I think this one sounds best so I'm going to delete the the

snare and we can also try brightening this up a bit with EQ so let's grab our EQ uh eq8 and I'm just going to take the high end here and just turn up the [Music] gain and maybe we can add a little bit

of Reverb to it search Reverb and scroll down use that Reverb okay so I just want to turn down the dry weight here maybe like 10% or something 177% okay so that sounds pretty good now um what else do we need for

this I think it's still lacking that Melody that I want the the main hook so let's try writing one more Melody for this uh I'm going to make a new midi channel here and then let's see what sound can we use I think um

let's make one more sound I think the more sounds that we make in this the closer you'll be to really understanding how these envelopes work okay so um let's use a swaave again and now I want a Plucky sound so see if

you can pause the video and make a Plucky sound and then come back and see how I do it okay so how I'm going to do it is shape that amp envelope I want a bit of release on it

and then on this frequency I'm going to assign envelope to and I'm going to shape this make it a bit longer maybe increase the attack a bit kind of soften the attack a little bit and then I'm going to add a delay to

it some feedback and bring down the filter on it and uh yeah let pingpong it okay I'm going to do something else here I'm going to duplicate this delay and have a different timing on the ping pong so we're going to have a let's do

two and a three and make this one a bit more filtered now it's like a galloping kind of Rhythm let make it a bit brighter I think here I want to use two different waveforms and the second [Music]

one I'm going to pitch it up seven semitones and so if we think about this what we're doing here when we do seven semitones I don't know if you remember this but the semi seven semmit tones is actually a perfect fifth so if we

started at uh F and then we made our F minor chord which looks like this that c would be seven semitones higher and so now that sounds like this let's bring down the feedback it it's a lot of

[Music] delay all right let's uh see what this inspires so I'm going to go highlight my scale here and then I'm just going to start placing some notes let's see maybe we can walk down from like the [Music]

sea something like [Music] let's see how it sounds to repeat this idea [Music] okay it's cool but that could get really boring so let's um I'm going to take all of these four here I just hit contr e to split that

clip and I'm going to click here and hit contrl J and that's going to Consolidated into one clip and now we can start changing some notes so what if we change uh this note here to that one see how

that sounds I don't like that um maybe we can change this note to let's say that one maybe this one can go up again and we could have like a joining note on this one so like a note that

happens say over [Music] there so I'm just going to duplicate this across [Music] and I also like to test like how sounds like this would sound an octave down so let's highlight all of these with CR a and then hold shift and hit the down

arrow and don't be afraid to like play with these envelopes and see how it changes the sound another thing I would like to introduce you to is Unison Unison is when we take a copy of this entire sound and

basically double it and then spread the voices so that they kind of detuned from each other you'll recognize it it sounds almost like Ry so if I turn this on to let's say a classic Dune and then bring

up the amount [Music] eventually it sounds like almost too like Ravi and dune you can bring it down and it sounds quite nice so this versus this this is becoming a bit more of like a proggy kind of

track that's fine what's up sorry my dog is looking for attention um Okay let's listen to how that [Music] sounds let's try these different ones and see how they sound just quite like the classic one I think it sounds really

good okay I think we've got enough sounds there to start building out a a whole track so I'm going to take a little break and then we'll come back and arrange it cool all right guys um yeah we're back

now and time to start arranging the track first thing I want to do is I just want to um yeah I want to start renaming stuff so we're just going to rename this up and what is this one this is our

let's call this our lead lead and then we have um that is our main hat let's call that OB hat or offbeat hat and this is our 16th note hat and then this is our snare okay so that's everything renamed

now and I think um I want to do a little bit of color coding just so it's easier to look at again I'm going to have my kick and my base kind of together and I want to make them both both

orange and the rest of my drums we're going to make them like kind of greenish color let's do that one and then all my musical stuff I'm going to go with pink just delete that and then let's do that

okay all right so um you know the last time we arranged it we kind of duplicated everything across what was it like four minutes or something and then we kind of carved away it this time I'm going to do a

different like style of arranging and this is just how I pretty much arrange all the time and that is um I'll just almost like continue expanding this Loop and adding to it until I get to the breakdown and then uh create my

breakdown and then my final drop and then I'll create the intro and the outro so at the moment this is a 16 Bar Loop which is only 30 seconds long so I'm just going to duplicate that and then what we need to do is kind of make

an A and A B section so we want to make the track this half of the drop feel like it's growing like like it's gone somewhere um and so it's actually kind of similar to the way that we arranged

before where I'm going to probably just remove something from this half and then start adding effects um and uh yeah and then we'll move into the breakdown I think what we can do is um maybe only start playing the

lead or what we can do is hint at the lead so I'm going to delete the and then I'm just going to take this lead and play it half as often so instead of every uh two bars I'm going to play it every four

bars and so I'm just going to copy that across like this and then when we get to this section I'm not going to play that higher octave I actually don't really like hard sounds I'm just going to keep

it in the lower octave for now then we're going to get to that the other thing I'm going to do I think is um maybe remove the offbeat hat from this section and see how that sounds or maybe

only bring it in over there see how this sounds now [Music] okay um so obviously we need a lot more difference than that I think another thing I want to do is just take out the kick drum for a little bit so it signals

a change coming and then maybe with the offbeat high hat we can we can make it a bit shorter so we can automate that so if you remember automation we just turn on this automation toggle automation mode and we

can maybe bring down the Decay here see what happens when it what it sounds like if I reduce it okay I'm going to hit control Z and go back to 600 so if we reduce that over here to like 200 it's going to sound

like this and then as we get into this new section it's going to open [Music] up and maybe we can also do some filtering with this stuff just to keep it interesting uh let's put a an auto filter actually rather than using Auto

filter let's use the built-in filter on the lead so here I can just click on the frequency and then that gives us a line here and then I'll reduce this [Music] and maybe we can turn this off over

here feels like something's missing though over here oops now that I've taken that out it's it feels like a bit more empty so maybe we should try and replace that with something so let's uh let's add like some sort of effect or

something that goes in over there or maybe something a new different kind of pad let's try out like some of the different drones here um let's see and go to FX pack here and see I'm going to play them in context

[Music] that one's quite nice maybe what we can do is use this let's try pitching it up 12 and seeing how that [Music] sounds okay so here's a little Technique we can turn this and just a pad into

something rhythmic using this warps warp mode if we set it beats over here then have it on the forward Arrow change it to 16th notes and reduce this get this nice stutter the shorter we make it the tie

to the [Laughter] stutter let's see how that sounds [Music] I feel like I want this to still be there but maybe like rarely filtered down so let's take uh let's take this and um yeah I'm going to put an EQ on

it and just take out some of the high [Music] end it's like really muffled and we all we'll do is just turn this on and off so here I just turn it on and then here it's off yeah let's

listen to this full loop now [Music] I think it sounds better not started so I just switched it back from beats to complex and turned it down and that sounds good let's listen to that and maybe we can have that fade in over here

so it's not so jarring when it comes in like this oops and if you missed that the Fades how to create them I have explained it before but um here I've just extended it out and then all you do

is make sure that this is Switched Off and then you as you hover over here you'll get these little squares and then you can drag that across [Music] might be nice to get some shakers in there uh have actually been working on

some really nice shakers for a new pack that we working on think they turned out really nicely so let's test them out maybe by the time you see this this new pack will be out so let's see um

[Music] see how the Sounds in [Music] there sounds quite nice turn this hat up it how's the sound over again maybe we should run that all the way through okay so I think another nice thing would be to play with the effects

on this lead so maybe like the delay we can automate that so that it opens up a little bit more or we can have another delay so who says you can't have three delays and on that third delay we uh we have it be like extra

long like we set it to 8th 8 over here which is 816 which my brain can't work out at the moment uh I think that might be like a bar or yeah think I think it might be a

bar anyway let's uh let's go with that and then I'm going to turn off ping pong and I'm going to add some modulation so here it's really simple all we're doing is adding time modulation here by increasing this percentage that's just

going to make the uh the timing of this in slow down and speed up and because this has a Mode called repitch You're going to hear like some weird like pitchy effects let me show you what I mean so I'm just going

to turn up the dry wet so you can hear it you can hear it going up and down and that speed that it goes up and down is controlled by the r [Music] here so let's see how that sounds

so I feel like that's something that could be added like maybe on the last hit over here so I'm just going to automate the dry wet so we don't hear it at all we don't hear it at all and then on the last one

we hear it and then I'm going to take it back out that's just going to create a bit of tension I think [Music] okay um let's add a little bit of automation to this just to give it a little bit more

life I think one thing we could automate is maybe the attack of the envelope like this and maybe the Decay too and see how that sounds so I'm going to do I'm going to click on this and then I'm going to bring it

[Music] up like let's see maybe uh 20 milliseconds it sounds a little bit different there and then it comes back down another thing we can try and well every time I do automations I like to click this plus arrow so that we can see

all our automations there we go now we can see our filter frequency opening maybe maybe we can keep opening it more and more get brighter and brighter and then we can play with this Decay and maybe bring that up a bit

like and then open it up towards the end [Music] yeah see how that sounds I think that's something that could like maybe just grow steadily as this drop progresses is the Decay I think it'll sound nice gets more and more intense it's

also getting a bit louder so I want to kind of control that volume um so I'm just going to put a compressor on here let's use the glue compressor and I'm going to put it straight off to here so don't worry too much about

compression um I'm not sure if I went over compression in the last track uh maybe I should just quickly explain a little bit about compression um so the compression has many different uses and I'm going to explain one use and that's because I

want to use it in one way right now so all I'm doing is using a compressor to control the volume of this lead you can hear it as this Decay opens it actually gets quite a lot louder and becomes a

little bit kind of overwhelming and all this compressor is going to do is when the volume reaches a certain threshold it's going to reduce the volume so here we can Define the threshold you can see what when I um am

not using the compressor I mean sorry when I'm not bringing the threshold down this needle doesn't move but at a certain threshold starts moving slightly and then more and so what this is saying is that when the volume goes over the threshold

let's set it to like minus 16 when it goes over that threshold reduce it reduce it at a ratio it's set to four at the moment so for every one how the ratio works is that for every the moment it's set to four which is 4

to 1 so for every uh 4 DB that every 4 DB that the signal goes over the threshold it's only going to allow One DB of volume through um so obviously a higher ratio means that it'll compress the signal

more and an infinite ratio is like using a limiter where just our right stops the volume from going over that threshold um so right now all we're doing is that when this as this signal starts getting louder we apply more

compression and it controls that volume and you can see down here the needle doesn't move that much let's actually bring up that threshold a bit there you go then as we get up here applies more compression okay so let's listen to

this we can have a faster attack so it has more control over the volume it's not letting that little pluck through in the [Music] beginning okay so now we've made this Loop sound cool um I think that basically is our

first drop so to speak and now we want to arrange the breakdown so here let's go into the breakdown here and um what I'm kind of imagining is that this op has kind of been a really background element I kind of want it to grow

through here so I'm going to extend that out and then we're going to automate it I'm also going to keep this drone going [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and I think what we can do here is start opening up the Decay or the sustain of

the amp let's do the [Laughter] Decay let's also do the dec of the filter envelope oops cck there and open that up [Music] so that's just you know changing this section a bit and adding some Dynamics to a sound that

otherwise before we probably didn't even notice was there as a you know if you're just a casual listener um maybe we can put this back in [Music] here and maybe make a change here to this one so I feel like we can open this up a

bit more because that sounds cool but it's kind of in the background so let's uh also open up [Music] this now I'm hearing it go up even further [Music] there we go back down there we go sounds quite cool so yeah just a little

bit of change you know something that we haven't heard before you don't want the whole song to just feel like elements that are being looped um let's keep that going let's maybe pitch this drone back down over here

yeah I think with that drone changing down to the low octave it's too much of an Abrupt change I'm going to keep that at the high octave and then I'm hearing something deep coming over here so I'm going to

make a new channel and what I want is something called a respace I think I'm just going to use a preset for this reace because it's a pretty uh involved sound to make I mean a basic respace is

pretty easy but you know to get a really good sound uh I think it's a little bit more of an advanced sound I'll show you both you know if you don't have serum then you can just we can just quickly

make it in wave tap table and then I'll also show you how it sounds with a preset that I made so let's uh grab wave table and so respace is typically two or more sore waves or square waves whatever you want

whatever wave form you choose um you take them and you dtune them so they are playing at slightly different pitch you see here's a dtune amount if I turn on two of these these and make them both s

waves I'll show you how that sounds if I play them together let me make uh let's make some base notes here let's go down to F0 uh I just want to make this a narrow grid [Music] okay so I want to make um kind of like a

Baseline that almost follows this pad Melody um let's see [Music] [Music] so I think that sounds pretty cool and maybe it'll sound even cooler layered with that okay so back to the re base so we've got two s waves

playing so what happens if we dtune them we bring this this one down let's bring it down like 15 cents and then this one up like 15 cents The More We detune Them the more like pulsation you're going to hear

and it sounds kind of ugly until you so I'm just bringing this sustain all the way up until you start filtering it filtering is when it starts sounding cool so I'm just going to turn up that 24 DB filter and bring down the

frequency and we want to make it mono and now let's listen to how this sounds [Music] [Music] so that's one that's the respace that we just made very simple kind of respace um but that's still sounds good let's uh just hear how presets can sound

ones that I've made here in serum so if you have serum um you can get this sample pack it's called Bas lab there's a volume 2 volume 3 as well and we have here some resp spaces this is a warm

respace or it's too low so I just need to turn it up to a different octave here let's move it up to F2 it's warm oops I got this liquid base which is sounds pretty cool and this re one I mean this angry

one I was thinking of using the liquid [Music] one so I quite like them both to be honest nice thing about this one is you can start doing cool things cuz it's got like a pitch band in it so if

we um add it in an extra note here maybe at the higher F let's go up to this [Music] F those pitch bends sound really nice even if you go higher it sounds pretty cool um but yeah let's not over complicate

this let's just stick with this one for now so everybody can follow along so I'm thinking the difference that we can add to this second drop is that you may have noticed that our base note here doesn't change through the

first drop it just stays on F so maybe in the second drop our BAS notes can change to follow this pattern let's copy that across over here and I'm going to just consolidate this whole clip so now we can go in

and copy this kind of a pattern so we're starting on the F and then these notes are going to move down to uh set the E flat and then down here up to here we have that note uh which is our d flat that's our

yeah our d flat so we're going F E flat d flat and then we're just doing the reverse we're just walking back up see and then we Loop that I think that could be cool a nice kind of difference and then for the rest

of the elements I'm going to just copy all of these and copy the kick and all of this stuff let's see how this sounds let's turn this [Music] off yeah so that sounds pretty cool um I think we do need like a little bit

of a buildup back into that maybe we can REM remove all of [Music] that and maybe we can open up the base uh the rolling base here we can maybe open up the filter a bit see how that up

[Music] Okay so um I think that's starting to flow quite nicely uh I also want to have like a bit of a buildup and maybe um I don't know I feel like we need something to happen in this

section like something something cool something big uh maybe we can make like a cool base stab or something uh let's see I'm going to make a new channel here and let's let's try and create like some big kind of growley Base

sound maybe I can follow these base notes yeah let's try that I'm going to let's use wave table bring this up and um I'm going to bring down the filter a bit let turn off [Music] py and we're going to use another

envelope to control that filter so you use fil envelope to okay and then I'm going to add a bit of Unison here well let's rather not use Unison let's use just two oscillators and on the second one D

let's actually put them at different octaves see may bring down this frequency of it [Music] and now I'm going to use some crazy Distortion use OverDrive overdrive is a cool Distortion let's try and turn off this dtune and see see how that

sounds okay I quite like the D let's bring that back let's duplicate that and I'm going to distort the highend [Applause] okay so after all that Distortion now we going to add another filter and I'm going to give it some

resonance and then we're just going to put it about there at two 2.8k some resonance okay so now if we take that and um put a big Reverb on it it should sound pretty cool in theory let's see that a big reav bring down the size

a [Applause] bit and we can low cut it to take it some of that low end [Music] let's bring down the Decay on this amp on the filter envelope [Music] sorry bring down the sustain a [Music] bit okay that sounds pretty

[Music] cool we can even make it poly and see how it sounds to add some harmonies to it so and highlight all of this contrl Ctrl V and then move it up seven semmit tones 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 see how that

[Music] sounds let's go up a full octave from there [Music] [Music] [Music] sounds pretty wicked I think let's bring down the revive [Music] [Music] can see how moving this filter on the overdrive changes the sound a [Music] lot see how it sounds in the drop

I like it but I don't like the the wobbly kind of tail so I want to bring down the [Music] frequency and the Decay a bit I mean and the sustain [Music] maybe we can side chain this a bit so

I'm going to copy the side chain from the base and then put it onto [Music] here bring down the ratio [Music] see how it sounds if I pitch that oscillator down an [Music] octave I like it where it was okay so

that's another cool sound I think we should take out the lowend from that sound though because we've got so much base already [Music] and duplicate this across now now we're going to bring it the sound and we can open it up even more

yes [Music] I think here what I want is is this to be nice and [Music] filtered so let's um in this section bring down the filter [Music] maybe we can build up to [Music] that take out the kick TR for

[Music] here okay I still want some some more changes to happen here so it would be cool I think to um maybe take the lead and do something different with it in the breakdown I'm going to copy the midi

from it make a new midi Channel and paste the midi let's paste it here and so I'm kind of imagining this in my head right now so we got a new sound playing that midi and then we could call this maybe this section I'll

build up and I'm going to take this and just copy it all the way across like this just for the buildup and let's try and find a sound you know I'm just going to look for sounds now I'm going to go click on

sounds and then let's look for a maybe a mallet sound [Music] how would this no don't know about Mel let's maybe go with um punchy [Music] and adjust this to make it more Plucky no I don't like [Music]

it try [Music] stab uh uh Snappy [Music] that could be a nice layer cuz it's quite Punchy let's keep that [Music] it's also [Music] Punchy I think I'm going to keep those both as layers and [Music] then sounds like it could be good

[Music] no I don't like it um [Music] maybe we can repurpose our sound that we made for our base let's grab that I'm just going to copy the whole Channel and paste it over here [Music] we don't need that low

there maybe we can uh pitch this up an octave or we can just go here on the wave table and move this whole thing up in [Music] octave maybe make it a bit brighter let's just delete these actually I'm we're just going to hit

delete Automation and now we're going to open it up shorten it a [Music] bit release come [Music] on okay maybe let's give it some Unison let's try [Music] noise okay some more [Music] voices let's see I like that and maybe give it some delay and

Reverb Sometimes using a delay with a really really fast unsynced timing like 50 milliseconds or something can sound really [Music] nice or let's just try a normal timing like this not actually a fan of the Shimmer of the

UNIS [Music] maybe we should use a sign W try this up sounds pretty interesting actually I can imagine if we distorted all of that it would sound really nice I'm going to just delete this other one let's try

putting those in a group contrl G and then here we're going to grab an overdrive just makes it a bit more aggressive you can turn it down a bit [Music] [Music] not really liking that I like this part

so maybe we should just roll with this maybe we can try the new Ableton Live raw just put a Roar on there after the overdrive and see how that sounds can turn up the amount we can play with like

the these knobs here just experiment so let's turn up the amount on this FB mode you don't have to know what it does sounds cool it is cool [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] there we go it's giving me a Vibe now

[Music] and uh I think we can add a little bit more of a change in the drums here um what if we add one more Loop maybe like a a top Loop or something to that let's go to

this where's my pack there um yeah let's go to do this drum pack here and we'll just go for a top Loop and well let's just try out a few and see what what sticks [Music] just keep trying

[Music] be honest I quite like the first [Music] one okay I think I think this shouldn't come in like that I think we need to um filter it so let's grab a an auto filter and put it on this

group and here we're going to automate that in [Music] okay so I think over here is when we're going to start needing to do some buildup effects so let's uh let's go back to this FX mega pack here I'm going to just grab a snare

roll and I'm going to place that one over there turn on warping and we want to have it at 122 BPM that's what it says on the file name and then we're going to bring down the volume and just set it at the right

volume uh where it's it's loudest so at this [Music] section sounds right right okay then we're going to get some more effects let's do uh uh let's do a riser [Music] maybe something like that also turn it to

122 and the righted [Music] volume and let's find another one let's take this one and can see it's in F so we just need to pitch it down one semit tone and also put it at 122 pitch down One semmit

[Music] [Music] Tone maybe we'll start that RIS over there and kind of like fade it in can also take the low end out of the base oh I don't think we want this oh we do want that it's this that

we don't want the low end so we're going to put an auto filter and we're going to take out the low end right before the drop so we just reverse this so it's taking out low end it's a high pass

filter and I'm going to click here and add little automation it's automated up to like 100 Herz can actually right click and hit edit value and then type 100 [Music] okay let's add one more effect [Music] here which is going to be like a crash

sound I'm going to grab it from this nappy pack I'd like uh where's it crashes I like that [Applause] [Music] one might also in the FX mega pack use a sweep sound we take that sweep let's make sure you set at 122

here set the volume [Music] right maybe bring that 16th up could even use a sweep down [Applause] here something like that [Music] he [Music] okay sounds good and now all we need is an intro and an outro and a few effects

and um yeah that'll be it going to take a short break and then we'll do the intro and outro okay we're back and now we're going to do our intro and outro and then just a little bit of last

minute tweaks and yeah so maybe a little bit of mastering okay so let's do this so we just need an intro now so the track at the moment currently probably about 3 minutes long and if we have a a 2minute

intro and maybe another minute or two of an outro that's going to take us up to about 7 minutes which is good for a an extended mix which is kind of what we're doing here um so yeah let's do that so I'm

going to we've only got a minute long over here uh actually no that's not a minute that's 30 seconds I'm going to highlight that section I'm going to hit control I to insert more space that's one minute um maybe we can

do let's do a one minute intro followed by like a kind of a 30- second bridge buildup kind of thing um all right so let's uh let's copy the kick and the base and all of that bring it over

here I'm going to take the kick out uh sorry the snare out of there yeah and we'll go with that for now um let's not bring in the base until this point actually no I quite like having the base

from the beginning maybe the Shaker can only come in here and go across there let's take out this okay so it starts like that and then we'll bring in all be hard here let's also take this drone and make that

go all the way [Music] across I did make one small change here there was inside in this drone there was a kind of a tone that kept reminding me of um my baby monitor you know monitors that you use

to put in your kids room while they're sleeping um and basically when the monitor loses its signal because it's wireless it makes this beeping sound which was exactly the same tone as this tone over [Music] here that like that turn over there

that ringing tone it's the exact same frequency as as that monitor and it was annoying me so I just cut that out um anyway I think what we can do with this is filter it [Music] in so let's put in an auto filter here

we just take out all the high end maybe bring that in over here and then open it up as we get towards the drop may you put it in [Music] here maybe I'll just take out the kick for like one one beat over here

something [Music] let's do that okay then what I'm going to do over here take out the low end of the basee um we need another Auto filter and here we're going to just do a high pass and slowly bring it up to about 90

htz and then back turn it back off over here and maybe bringing this up [Music] oh let's filter it in I'm not thinking that this op maybe would sound better without that higher octave in [Music] there yeah [Music]

and maybe we can copy this over here [Music] see just do it twice maybe we can also like really wash it out so that it's kind of like a background element at first I'm going to take a Reverb put it on

there think it like almost 100% wet RAR big Decay take out the mids and the highs something like that and then I'll just turn the Reverb off over here [Music] turn it all the way up [Music] 100% maybe over here bring it down a bit

[Music] and it might be a cool time to do this pad [Music] Melody maybe we can use this part here [Music] I need wash it out even more [Music] okay I think we need to do some buildup effects there so let's

grab one or two of these like maybe these sweeps we can use that there and the crab [Music] let's bring this back to the [Music] okay sorry I had to just pause that quickly um but we're back now all right

so we're working on this little uh Bridge section let's listen to it from here and just see how it's sounding [Music] okay I think what I want over here is maybe for this to be extended a little bit more so we can move this uh over

here and then I want a little fill with our snare I'm just going to cut this section out here and then I'm going to put in four snares one two three four I want it to be much faster I'm

going to divide it by two I'm going to select all of them divide by two [Music] could even um take this a little bit further like right to that [Music] snare I want this snare to smack a little hard out you know I'm going to

put on a little plugin called Ott not really a plugin a multiband preset that's just going to make it a lot brighter a lot more up front uh like this it'll be too much then we can bring down the

[Music] amount compare this to this and it's uh definitely more compressed bit louder and to make this rever a bit darker okay so I think that's okay for our kind of like intro and bridge and then we go into our drop and now for our

outro all we need to do really here is just duplicate this section and begin kind of winding it down so what we could do is uh start removing some sort of melodic ideas here um see maybe what we can do is

remove the lead let's see how that sounds if I just delete them [Music] I can kind of hear the base being taken out of or the low end being taken out over here so we slowly sweep this up to

like let's go to like 100 here and then do the same as our Kick Drum I want to just get another Auto filter and here we going to added value 100 and then this is kind of like I

guess cool down section I'm going to duplicate this one more time and then here we're going to go back to our single node Baseline I'm just going to copy this across [Music] there delete this and I delete those

and with this I think we can filter out the high end of the Strone as we kind of go down into this section [Music] okay so how long is the track now 5 5:30 yeah I think that's about about

right um probably make it six minutes long um and maybe extend this section so let's see um I'm going to just hit I'm highlight the section and hit control shift d it's going to just duplicate this whole section one more time and now we

can maybe do something like this where we only do this bridge over here and and over here we can keep this lead going for another section but kind of start filtering it out so we could uh take both of these put them into a group and

call it lead and then I'm going to put a filter on that and slowly bring it down then take this try and maybe F to this over here now I shorten this hat now okay now we got a 6 Minute track and I

think that's a pretty decent length for an extended mix um so I would say the arrangement is done now and the last thing I want to do is just um a few effects just to spice it up a bit first thing I want to do is

uh the snare I want to have um you know some changes every once in a while so first change I want to have is that like let's say every eight snares we have maybe some Reverb that happens on one of the snares and the perfect

thing for doing that is using sends send is basically just another channel that we can send the signal to and then put an effect on it with without affecting the original sound so what I mean by that is if for example we put a Reverb on

here and I send using this dial my signal to this channel both channels will be heard the dry snare and the snare with Reverb so you'll hear this and you'll hear this without the Reverb and so I can do things like I can put a

filter on on this one and take out all the mid-range so I'm only hearing the high end of this but I'm not actually eqing the snare itself it's a really handy way to [Music] work um and so what I want to do here is

just temporarily send one of the snares to this channel so for example we can we can automate this and it'll go like [Music] this so we just got a big smack like every eight bars I mean every eight

beats every snares something like that oops my key just flew off my board there we go and we can copy this to this section maybe we'll do it until the outro so we can turn that down a bit the

volume of this Reverb I think we can also make it a bit bigger there we go we can also use the delay sound over here it's already got a delay on it um and it's already set up pretty

much exactly how I want to do it we're just going to bring down the feedback to zero and then I want to send uh let's do little plus here so we can see this on a different Channel then

we're going to send this snare to that delay and it's going to do like a kind of um dotted note delay and feel like almost like a bit of a bounce like [Music] this I can just turn that one down like

maybe to minus three minus two let's not do it so predictably let's uh I need do there so here if we have have to look at this like a loop uh I got like kind of like an A and

A B section so yeah I'm going to just carry that across there and that's already going to spice up this snare a bit make it sound more interesting maybe we can keep that going through to the outro [Music]

and we can use this in the final snare there we go cool that was that makes the snare a bit more interesting to look listen to and now I just want to add a few more um effects in there let's just go

here and look for maybe uh some atonal one shots something like that maybe I just want the last hit so I'm going to just drag this to here playhead maybe that [Music] one sometimes when you pitch stuff up

and down it just sounds better in the mix and in this case I think pitching up plus s sounded [Music] good let's get some other sounds like that use that maybe and just move it somewhere yeah pretty cool maybe this one can go over

here turn it [Music] down check another one here maybe we'll put it on that grid line [Music] [Music] [Applause] that one's pretty cool how about over here just want to start it at that point I don't want to have that little sweep

turn off [Music] warping May maybe we can um place it right there or there sometimes it's cool to us have like some tonal stuff in there like uh these flourishes are pretty nice [Music] yeah let's try that over

there try some different [Music] ones I like that one [Music] I mean [Music] uh oh here Let's uh put in a riser at the end of this just to build some [Music] tension doesn't have to be an F minor we

can always change the pitch of it or because it's a riser it doesn't always really matter it's changing in Pitch anyway um let's see how it [Music] sounds let's try and Pitch it to F minor so we're going to go down from a 1 2 2

three 4 that goes down to [Music] F I think that sounds [Music] better maybe we can grab our sweep not the crash put that [Music] there no let's not use that let's use something we haven't heard before like

a an impact yeah I'm going to grab that and put it there [Music] actually want to filter out this op it gets a bit much over there I think so let's try filter that down [Music] we need to turn this off on over

[Music] here now we can take all of this stuff and use it again [Music] here maybe just copy this and use it again [Music] okay let me just turn that off over here turn this off [Music] this one down a bit

[Music] oh [Music] I'm not going to use that Riser there what I might use is the [Music] sweep and the C [Music] let's filter this up out hey probably want some effects here in the intro let's use some unique effects CU I

don't want to you know keep using the same ones over and over again it can get a bit old uh let's use um some different sweeps let use this one here maybe over there 122 just got to check the

[Music] volume and maybe an impact [Music] that could be a cool one [Music] might over here use this Mo that [Music] there see I we just use a couple of them okay I think as far as effects goes

that's uh pretty good effort um so the last thing I want to do is just put a little bit of a limiter on it and maybe a touch of EQ on the master and then we can listen through right so let's put a limiter

going to push it as loud as it can go but we still want just a few DB of gain reduction we don't want the limiter to sound [Music] horrible okay so that sounds good and now I think maybe a bit of

EQ just to open up the high end a little bit here I'm just going to click on number four and I'm just going to add to DB here of high [Music] end now you're Touch of [Music] lower otherwise not much else and then

maybe we can just add a little bit bit of saturation uh just like some gentle saturation saturate saturator that over there and let's just put about 4 DB and we'll take out 4 DB and that's just going to gently add

some extra harmonics to the master let's see how it sounds you what you don't want to hear with your saturator and your master is bunch of distortion like this um so let's when you hear that you got to just back

[Music] off I think I even had 60b sounds pretty good put minus 6 here [Music] oops okay we have a nice loud track now and I think we should play it through and see how it turned out all right let's go 3 2

1 oh three two one [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] he [Music] oh [Music] he [Music] oh [Music] he [Music] okay cool guys that's it for uh this track and I will see you in the next

track where we're going to be doing something a little bit more advanced okay okay guys welcome to your third track and today I thought it'd be fun to do something a little different and do something kind of in the style of

kind of music um sort of Afro house kind of style and we're going to kind of be using everything that we've learned up until now we're going to be designing our own sounds we're going to um be using Concepts like side

chaining and EQ and filtering modulation automation um and so yeah if you're still not comfortable with all of those Concepts I recom commend just following the first and the second tutorials and uh know making two or three of your own

tracks following those tutorials until the concepts are more or less uh ingrained all right so yeah there's um there's a few I I would say kind of standard sounds that we want to use for this we want to have lots of uh um

Plucky rhythmic sounds going to be building interesting rhythms um going to be using TS and uh lots of claps and snares and stuff to really kind of drive home that like afro Rhythm I think we're also going to be using

piano making a really nice uh chord progression and Melody to go with it um yeah I think let's just get started right so um as always I use usually like to make some sort of atmospheric bed for the track to sit

on um so I think this time we're going to go yeah let's start with the FX mega pack again and let's go to these drones and let's choose a key to working today yesterday we did F minor so let's

uh let's go to let's go B minor I like B minor let's go B minor today and so let's see if we' got any we've got two in B minor but we can always take other ones and Pitch them so

let's just find one that we like [Music] feels like it could be good it might take out some of that high end and just really like filter it down so we're going to take this drone and we want to

go down from C to B minor let's just pitch it down one semmit tone and then I want to get an auto filter and just filter this search Auto [Music] going to bring that [Music] down exactly like that I wanted R

[Music] filtered okay and then I think what I want to do is make sort of like a kick Tom Groove uh and create a rhythm that will inspire our chord progression because I think the chord progression needs to be

to to rhythmically fit okay so um yeah let's start off with our kick so I'm going to go to I think arst kicks to here and uh use this kick one of my favorites no we don't want it on B

remember we need to put it on C3 that's on C4 so let's go down an octave and we just want some kick drums there Tempo wise we're on 122 um yeah I'd say 122 is fine for this afro house it's not going

to be like full on afro house so more like kind of music I'd say there's is kind of a blend between melodic Progressive and afro um so yeah I want to have nice Tom Groove to go with that so

I've got some lovely Toms here in uh in this drum pack um they're under one perk one shots [Music] go with that one so I'm just going to make a new midi channel here and then double click on the

Tom bring up the gain a little bit there and now we need to make a rhythm that fits nicely with the kick uh so I want to make this a little bit longer to's make it eight kicks long which is two bars

long and I'm just going to consolidate that so it's One Clip and we're going to Loop it and now we need to make something that fits nicely I'm going to divide it up into 16 grid pattern and I don't want to really like

over complicate this uh Groove Let's uh have a simple kind of GrooVe like [Music] that what's happening here why is that jumping [Music] okay it's fine um let's duplicate that [Music] across and I want to have some higher

notes in there too uh so let's see maybe we can there's some space here I think and maybe uh we put a note here on the fifth which is the F you count that up one 2 three four the fifth note or seven

semitones 1 two 3 four five six seven oh that doesn't quite work I'll tell you why that doesn't work one two three four five six seven yeah I counted it wrong okay so yeah that was right so seven

semit tones [Music] up so want to see if we can add in maybe another note maybe this one here I think it s nice to have that on the F maybe up here I quite like that let's see if what

it sounds like to add a little bit of uh delay just a subtle delay so we can get a bit of Bounce bring that down that one down a little bit [Music] think I'm going to bring down the

feedback a [Music] bit sounds good [Music] all right and um I think let's get a maybe a Shaker in there let's use one of the Shakers from this new pack that I'm working on which is um melodic house and techno Essentials

volume one it's not ready yet but uh hopefully by the time you see this this pack will be ready [Music] let's just try a few different grooves and see what fits nicely with the kick in the tum always with the Shakers I like to

shift the starting position and see if uh moving it changes the groove and if it feels better let's try this yeah how that feels different Al that feels different I'm going to try a few different ones and just choose the one

that fits the best [Music] that works quite nicely let's keep that one I'm just going to duplicate this Channel and turn this off and then listen for another [Music] one right to the bottom like that let's turn it down a bit

and I want to try and bring in just a kind of like a straight normal Shaker just to tie it all together try opening up this filter here this is quite a noisy Shaker I think it's going to be a bit distracting

while I'm writing so I'm going to turn it off for now but I do like the Rhythm let's just stick with these for now okay let's um start writing a piano before we start adding more to this groove I think

uh it's empty enough to where there's a lot of space for us to write this piano um so we're just going to search for piano here and then let's go to um our instruments [Music] and what do we want do we want an e

piano or do we want maybe a like a grand piano S I think we probably want more of like a standard piano sound it's more fitting okay so I'm just going to make a midi clip Here and Now I'm going to set it to

narrow and we have got to write some chords now right so let's start with a B chord which is b d and fshp um if you unfamiliar yet with the writing Triads make sure you watch the music theory or rewatch The Music Theory

section in the in the first track right at the beginning not going to really explain what I'm doing with the the chords here but we're starting with a B minor chord let's see how that [Music] sounds okay so I mean that immediately

fits the track um maybe we should do some slightly more advanced music theory here and that is where we incorporate inversions and inversions are simply just playing the same chord but moving these notes into different octaves so for example the first

inversion would be moving the B up an octave now you have your dnote in the base that has a different sound but uh overall the emotion is the same I quite like that sound um and then the second inversion

would be when you take the B and the D and you move them an octave so the F Shar is in the base maybe if we move those all down an octave it'll sound nicer I think out of all those

inversions the one that sounded best to me was when we had the B up which is the first inversion just like that there goes dfb and then let's duplicate this and choose our next chord uh um what if we just move the

bass note see how that sounds let's try moving it up [Music] first that's quite nice I want to just see how it sounds if I move it down that might sound a bit [Music] funny it sounds actually pretty nice I

think uh and let's try moving it down to B [Music] here that's um a nice sound but to me that just sounds like the cor progression has just come to an end and I want to first kind of go on a journey

so I think choosing that note down there sounds nice let's duplicate it across again and then try and change another note [Music] let's try to move that one [Music] up let's try um moving this one up to here

[Music] let see how it sounds up moving that one up to there so you can see I'm not really using music theory here I'm just moving notes around and seeing what sounds nice I find if you always following the standard like cord

progressions that you find on Google they generally sound a bit too Poppy and [Music] uninspired let's state that one again and maybe we try something else here see how it sounds to move this up to there [Music] no um let's

see maybe we can now move this top note because it's been the same every time always been on the B what if we move it down to there and we make like a Triad so we have a note there we skip it

note replace a note skip a note Place one there see how that [Music] sounds kind of hearing another chord come in [Music] maybe we can move down now see down to that chord let's see how that sounds and let's keep these closer

together so we can shift this one up and make an inversion [Music] that will resolve nicely one last thing I want to try is just moving this note down to there see see what happens [Music] I think that has a really nice emotion

so these are like the top notes of our piano I think what we need now is base notes to go with that and so I want to try and place some notes at the bottom here and see what

the sounds like maybe further [Music] down Okay so let's move this one somewhere down [Music] maybe and let's keep walking down and see what that sounds [Music] like and we can check these chords and see you know does this chord actually make

sense so that's a g technically the Triad would be g b d and let's check what notes we have here we have a e we have a g and we have a b GB we have an e here so it almost

works that would be our standard Triad over there let's just uh see how this sounds [Music] compare that to this what it was [Music] before I think that one's a bit more dramatic but I just want to see what it

sounds like if we follow this bass note so we make this an e yeah uh where's our e there we go down [Music] here and maybe it should be ABN notive [Music] okay that sounds quite nice and then

what is this next cord going to be maybe we just follow these notes like that see how that [Music] sounds okay that worked um remember this is an inversion this chord of we bring that back down that is a a a

minor chord so maybe if we place this on the a over here there I struggled to see these notes when all the highlights on and let's see how that sounds [Music] so it was this versus [Music] this well my ear says that this feels

nicer [Music] maybe we can have a variation with this is the the variation this note over here this cord changes just the bottom note um so we can change the color of this so we know it's a variation

or we don't change the color of the whole clip we just change the color of the last cord so we know it's different uh so that sounds nice I think we can make it sound nicer though let's just see what it sounds like to pitch

all of this up an [Music] octave maybe these ones go down and OCT [Music] yeah I think that sounds nice and it gives us a bit of room in the low end to have sub okay so now we can make this piano

sound not so cheap there's some controls here we can control the [Music] brightness let's bring that down a bit you can also control the tone think the turnone I'll just leave it where it was soft hard you want it's

softer I think [Music] okay we don't want to have any attack I think the rest of it sounds okay um let's also EQ it a bit [Music] bring up a little bit over there and I'm just boosting a little bit

around 100 Herz and I'm going to take out that noise at the [Music] bottom can also humanize all of this a bit um so here in live 12 we have this humanized function we highlight all the notes and click

it you can control the amount of humanization and what this is doing is you can see the note placements are kind of not really all on the grid [Music] now which is really nice nice function but we don't want to overdo it I think

probably like 20% or something [Music] we can also randomize the velocity of all of this I don't know why that's not working right now there we go um let select these ones first and then these ones I think so now we're just going to bring

down the randomize amount here [Music] maybe this cord we can bring down a little bit last twise and if you missed that I just held alt after highlighting all of them and then that arrow appears and you can

control the velocity see what it sounds like to have a low velocity on this piano [Music] it just gets really quiet actually so let's bring that down a little bit and then let's also humanize this to just a little bit maybe like

30% and sometimes it might be nice to have like a cord that is more humanized like do something like that bring it to like 42% and just click this and see how this sounds think the Bas note I'm going to

bring over there there we go nice little [Music] strum i' like how the notes feel a bit heavier down there maybe these two we can pitch down yeah maybe do that [Music] I think over there sounds nice just keep

adjusting this see how Reverb [Music] sounds maybe a bit of Reverb on [Music] there I think the bottom notes I don't want them so like deep and growly so I'm going to turn down the velocity on them I'm highlighting all of them then

holding alt and clicking and dragging down there you go I just want them Silent not completely silent quiet I [Music] mean hey that's nice right now we have some some room for our sub and I think our sub can pretty much just follow

those lower notes so easy way to do that is we're just going to highlight all the midi here then hold down control then click and drag this down and now we've just copied all of this but now we want to change out the

piano sound probably want to also delete the EQ so let's just search for a sub base um and so there's a really nice preset here I think it's in sounds yeah I like that hip-hop subbase so let's double click on

that and now we only want the bottom notes so we delete all the top notes and I don't want to have these all humanized so let's uh keep it pretty straight I'm just going to hit we're going to

quantize them quantize means move all the notes perfectly onto the grid and to the quick way to do that is just highlight them on hit control U so now they will all be starting on the grid but we want them to all be touching

and another way we can make all the notes touch each other is just hit theato and now they're all touching and then same thing on these ones highlight all them control U and then Legato let's hear that just want to make sure that Lo note

isn't too high yeah bit High it doesn't sound very nice let's go down there we go just went down an octave there okay that's very loud sub so we're going to turn it [Music] down and we want to side chain it let's

side chain R compressor open that up side chain on input from pick I'm going to turn up the frequency here to 1K and then bring that down [Music] okay now that's being side chained to the kick drum and maybe we can do a little bit of

side chain to the piano too I'm just going to copy that side chain from The Hip Hop sub pasted here we don't want it to be that deep I'm just going to bring down the ratio [Music] I think we can probably use a pad to

back up this piano and just give it a little bit of uh like Ambience so I want to layer it with the pad sound um let's make a pad I don't think we've made a proper pad before so let's

open wave table and we can leave this EQ pretty much like this we don't want the low end in there and uh yeah everything else we can keep okay so at the moment this will sound like this which is actually quite a nice

sound it's just sine waves but let's try adding let's try change it to a triangle wave quite like the sound of that okay so for a pad sound you want to kind of choose make your envelope a lot softer

so we talking long attacks like this and then we want the sound to Decay down long release and then we also want some filtering happening [Music] here okay and we can control that filter with the second envelope so let's have like maybe a bit

of a long attack on that one and a long Decay similar shape to before um but we want to control the filter frequency of that and just a little bit not that much maybe like a little bit of movement

maybe we can use an alfo to also control the frequency we go to Matrix we can add alfo one to that just a little bit turn off re-trigger and bring down the rate quite a [Music] lot there you a bit

[Music] quicker it's just going to give it a little bit of movement there you go I'd say about those [Music] settings maybe we can add some Unison some classic unison and now let's add a bit of Reverb to

that sound Reverb a b quite a long Decay let's do like 9 seconds here bring down the size a bit see how that sounds [Music] bring down the volume of [Music] it and I just want to try different

[Music] waveforms actually think the S Wave is nicer it's more Lush [Music] and I'm going to filter out more of the high end I don't want it to become so [Music] bright okay now um I think what we need

for this is some more rhythmic stuff more rythmic synth sounds so let's uh make a new channel here let's let's name stuff so we know what it is need just kick and that's drone that is our tum that's Shaker one

Shaker two Shaker three this is going to be rhythm syn this is our and our pad and sub okay for our Rhythm Sy we just want I think what I'm going to do is just 16th notes just like

that and we're going to grab wave table actually I want to use a guitar sound let's search for guitar and we'll just go to Sounds here and the one I'm looking for I think is the electric nylon see how that

sounds I like that maybe we can bring it down an octave [Music] I going to make it more um bit tighter not so [Music] long that doesn't do anything so I think what we can do is use something called a tremolo here just

search for trolo and go to all and and just double click on this actually an autopan preset we make the down ramp and set to 16th notes here then all that's going to do is control the volume based on this

shape so what we get is this instead of [Music] this let's listen to that [Music] I like that we can also try adding um another note to this so that it makes it into like a two note chord

uh what's that called [Music] diad I think I prefer it as one node we can also try using this on a drone sound so just listen to this we open this up [Music] let me get that [Music] sound which is cool but I like

[Music] how how it was filtered I want to keep that sound in [Music] there so maybe we can use this tremolo on a on a different pad sound Let's uh try something else here let's use a different um let's try one of

[Music] these see how this sounds it's going to turn it down try this one try this one just got to pitch it up to B I like that one let's try to put the tremo [Music] on you just bring down the amount

[Music] okay so what else do we need for this um I think we can have some more like mid-range percussion so we got the Tom in there but what about like a kind of a clap sound I'm going to add a new midi

channel here and then I'm going to make a sort of a rhythm I'm just going to turn off this highlight scale and just use the note C here and I want to make like a yeah let's try that sort of a rhythm

I'm just going to Loop that over there and now we're going to find let's find like a clap [Music] sound something with a bit of weight on it and let's listen to [Music] that okay so we can try and um Pitch

this down I think a bit deeper would be nice let's try that okay and I'm going to introduce a new um part of ablon here um and that is going to be called uh chains so in Ableton if we hit

click on a device and hit contrl G going to group it it then you have these instrument racks so if you click on this button it opens up this little view this is like your chain list here so what we

can do is we can duplicate this if I just uh right click that and hit duplicate we've got two chains now and this is basically just a a copy of of this sound we can have a different sound

I choose maybe something like that clap we now have two different claps on the same channel using the same midi and so if I play them together I can silence one of them or that one or both of them you can solo

one um you can mix so you can have uh turn down the volume of one I want to just move this play head a bit over there and so now we can start layering different sounds together until we happy

with the sound that we have here so I think I want like a deeper sound to go with this maybe um snare with a bit of weight in it like that the easy way to do this is to just click and drag it into this list

here now we've got a snare in there [Music] too I'm going to make this a bit shorter I don't like how long it is we can bring down the sustain and the decay [Music] just try mixing these a bit

[Music] better and I want to try adding a little delay to this just to give it a tiny bit of Bounce yeah just bring down the feedback and the dry wet [Music] [Music] [Music] try adding um something a bit more like organic

sounding like a Kahan I've got this in deep organic percussion some Kahan [Music] sounds that one's got a bit of depth to it let's try adding that [Music] one can you hear that's added a bit of weight to the clap

[Music] [Music] maybe we can add um some more organic drum sounds like a bongol loop or congol Loop or something I'm just going to add a new audio Channel and here I've got some coner Loops uh let's go

let's try that one and see how it sounds um it's in F and we're in B so we might need to move it I think if we move it up to the FP that'll be the fifth of our key so it

should fit see how it sounds [Music] we can just try by ear listening to this and seeing when it sounds nice I'm just going to start pitching it [Music] I think at plus two that hit over here this one sounds nice to

me I think if I change [Music] these they sound nicer there so I'm going to have a a mixture here of different pictures let's listen to this [Music] [Music] part and this [Music] one yeah it sounds nice like that so

maybe this can be our Loop just going to duplicate that all the way across then we can turn it [Music] down the long Noe has like this weird slide in it so I think what I want to do is make

this whole Loop a bit more tight and what we can how we can do that is it's actually pretty easy we can select all of this and set it to beats mode and then we want to preserve the

transient head it to this forward arrow and then turn this down and you'll hear it gets tighter so now we have a really nice tight Conger Loop doesn't have those like really long tails with the slides in them so I'm going to yeah let's see how

this sounds [Music] piano is a bit quiet let's turn that off [Music] okay so we got a nice little Loop here I think I'm going to save it quickly um name of that let track three select all and save and then we're

going to take a break and um then start arranging it probably add more Melodies and stuff to it too but I think this is a good starting point to start very out the arrangement hey see you in a bit okay

guys we're back and as you might see um I did a little bit of a change um went for lunch and came back and sat down and I just really wasn't feeling the chord progression that we had written um so I

decided let me try and write something thing a bit different and I came up with these chords and so you can just copy them or we can delete those notes don't need them um so the chord progression goes

like this we've got the G got another G and then and then a d so these chords are not really like standard Triads where we have three different notes we have two different notes in in this chord so we've got two

G's and we've got a D um and then on the next chord we're kind of walking up to the next note which is the A and we got another a here and then we got the is the c yeah

C and then on the last chord we got Just Three B's there's no actual chord happening here it's just um the simplest of harmonies you can get we got three B notes and I think think it just it's

very simple but it has a lot of emotion I feel if we just listen to [Music] that and then I just copied that down to the pad [Music] and then onto the [Music] sub okay and then the other thing I've

done is I I looked for a vocal because I thought it' be fun to work with vocals in this session and so I've got this uh sample pack here called Lauren Lemont vocal hooks an amazing Pack full of vocal

hooks it's even got like full top lines and um yeah so I found a few phrases and hooks the first one that I found is this [Music] Oney I of mind and then the second half has got some harmonies in

it knowing that she gone and by her side I can't get the out of my mind a really really nice vehicle um and that just comes from this one and so all I did was just drag it in

there just like this and then you got to set the BPM correctly so here we type 123 it says here this is a 123 vericle so now you can see it pretty much lines up with that one and we need to get it into key it's

in G minor currently so I just pitched it up four semmit tones 1 2 3 4 and then that sounds like this it's a little bit high pitched so I'm going to change it to complex Pro that preserves the

[Music] forance and then there's this long Gap here so I just found another vocal to kind of fill in that Gap and and so I found this phrase here uh is this real and that's in c minor so I have to pitch that down one

semitone just search is this real [Music] is so yeah that's uh I just cut out the first phrase that one and then did a little fade over here pitched up one uh or pitched it down one sem time

and then we get [Music] this okay and maybe we want to do a little bit more of a fade [Music] there okay and then on this one I found another vocal to fill in this section which is I don't want to love you

I don't W to love you this [Music] I really beautiful and um that one I just had to pitch up two semmit tones and it sounds like [Music] this okay and um I'm just going to delete this over

here so then all together with the new cords we've got this Loop nothing else has changed it's just the cords and we've added a vocal you could uh you can easily follow along with that um let me just delete all the old

cords and then let's listen to [Music] it I out of my mind is this real every time KN that you going by I [Music] I okay so now we've got a lot more to work with and uh working with vocals can

be really fun and it can also Inspire some new ideas and I can already hear where I want this uh track to go so let's follow the same Arrangement technique that we did in the last song we're going to

duplicate this cross and then we're going to make a kind of B section so this to me sounds like the a section with the vocal then I can kind of Imagine taking the vocal out and having some sort of lead come in so just listen

to this maybe what I'll do is uh take out the kick for a little [Music] bit I get the I don't want to love [Music] [Music] you okay so yeah I can hear something pretty epic and awesome happening in

there um let's see let's try and write something to go with that kind of like hearing a melody in my [Music] head let's um let's just find a sound to work with for now uh let's let's uh find something

maybe that can Inspire us we click on sounds I'm kind of hearing a let's try melet know I've gone through these before but I think maybe this track will suit to [Music] melet what I want is the B from

[Music] an interesting sound let's try both of them see what happens [Music] going to try some chords and see how that sounds I don't really like it no let's keep searching maybe we can find [Music] uh search by lead and snappy

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] maybe something like [Music] this just kind of following the so if we look at the chords we got the top note and I'm following that it's going from this D down to the C sh and

then down to the B we got this D C and now I want to move down to the B and I think this a note then needs to move down that's move it down to here [Music] when to hear it sounds like to move this

[Music] up and I want to find some cool um delay for this so let's use the Echo and I want to really long feedback see how this sounds maybe like 80% or something filter it out a bit [Music]

[Music] I think that's a nice uh layer could even do this turn these second ones off and then it's just have an even longer feedback [Music] and let's um let's build on this so let's layer that again and let's search for another

sound um lead Snappy [Music] maybe we can make a rhythm out of these notes you do like let's just turn this hech [Music] off and then do the same thing here duplicate that all the way [Music] across and do this

[Music] maybe we can start here [Music] I kind of want to fill in these gaps [Music] and let's copy that one over here and now we've also got this part over here which I feel like giving me a bit of

inspiration to try something like [Music] may we can even move it up [Music] further and then keep on doing this [Music] here we here we can reverse [Music] them okay but not a huge fan of the sound I think uh I need to find

something that's more inspiring so let's make our own sound and we can go to uh wave tap [Music] and I'm just going to go with the swaave [Music] again make a little bit [Music] Plucky maybe we can try different synth

for ones let's try analog analog is nice because it has a noise generator in here okay so it's a little bit less VIs usually um intuitive uh the envelope sections you have to click on the amp to see the amp

envelope so here we can make it a plugy sound and then the filter envelope you click on here and you can see the filter envelope you first have to turn down the filter and then you can turn up the

envelope and mount here to modulate [Music] here we can add some noise just make it a bit brighter by turning up this color turn down the amount let's maybe try an LFO here we turn on the LFO and what do I want the LFO to do

well we can um we can assign it to elements like what should we assign it to can maybe assign it to the panning so that it pans left to right here we can turn do this now it's moving

around the filter we could assign the LFO to here to the frequency good match and turn on the second alfo and then we should be able to use the second alfo for oh why is that not there well ignore the second LFO for now

another thing is viata might be nice turn this on now it's got a nice like wobble to it and maybe bit of delay turn it up a [Music] bit okay let's hear how this sounds now if we go from the vocal into it

[Music] I don't want to love you [Music] so it might be nice to have like a different note over there what I what I just did so that when it like loops around um there's a bit of a variation

let's just feel how that sounds [Music] and that little note up there sounds really nice wonder how it sounds to have that up there [Music] too that sounds really nice what if we move these up to here or this one goes to here

[Music] I like [Music] that maybe we can open up the pad here to love you [Music] also I open up the filter [Music] here I don't want to love you [Music] oh yeah one thing I want to change here is

right at the [Music] end I think it was nicer to stick to the original yeah this sounds [Music] yeah I think that's [Music] nicer yeah okay so we got a really nice Loop here now let's uh let's hear the

full thing and see if it all makes sense sure that I'm paraly I can't get the out of my mind is this real every time that you by I mind I don't want to love you n [Music] hey really

nice um yeah let's keep on arranging this and then we'll get into more details um I think from here we can probably keep a bit of the groove going and um slowly like fade it out so let's take all of these shakers and just

copy them across here and uh we'll take out the kick we'll keep everything else in we'll go like I turned these off earlier just didn't like how they sounded I feel like maybe if we EQ them a bit take out some of the high end

it'll sound nicer let's do this well we also need to take out that low end let's move them over here and maybe we can use them in the breakdown [Music] maybe um we can keep this going and uh

just Loop this section like that [Music] keep the pads going in there so what I want is to basically start fading out the drums and fading this all out out a bit um so we can put an EQ on here have

a look at the we need to EQ out the low end from that a bit okay so from this sound I want to kind of start filtering it down I'm just going to grab an auto filter [Music] let delete the pad there

[Music] yeah let's duplicate this pad across and see how this sounds [Music] [Music] maybe we can brings this in here prob I bring in The Congos maybe that should go here let's delete that the other sound maybe this think it's time to use this Loop

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] leave maybe we can bring the vocal back in here every [Music] F to [Music] this every time knowing that you're gone and by side I can't get the out of my mind I don't want to love you

okay and then um maybe here we can bring in this melody and like start fading it back up and then we're going to drop into that Melody basically back into this section let's just copy this whole [Music] section and paste it there

and we're going to do a big buildup here in this section let's just start putting some locators so we can see what we doing this is drop one and drop 1.2 break down break down vocal and then we going to start building here

build [Music] and so we can copy this Rhythm synth across every night that I'm paraly I can't get the maybe bring the piano back in here every time knowing that you're gone by her side I mind I don't want to love you got to

snare all him [Music] so maybe we shouldn't do this Loop like this over here should just have a and have just repeat it just like that [Music] now we can play with the [Music] synth can open up the Decay on the amp

and the filter just like this [Music] maybe we can repeat this [Music] again KN ialy I can't get the [Music] make it a bit more delay [Music] take out the path okay it's starting to take shape um let's maybe have a section where we

hear everything maybe we bring everything in together so we got the pad and we get the full vocal in here maybe in the buildup we don't have the full vocal um we can [Music] [Music] have he we can make like a delay tail

that just runs through there I'll show you a cool way to do that let's just delete the vehicle there so let's make another delay here and on this delay we're going to delete this automation bring it all the way down to

zero and then just click here and drag it up we have it at about 40% actually let's bring that bit closer to the vocal then what we can do is we can freeze the vocal using this button this

Infinity button so if I turn that on over there then you'll hear this now this will just continue on indefinitely until you turn this back off [Music] sounds pretty cool so let's play with that we can um just add a new Lane for each of

these oops if you ever break the Automation and it goes gray then you can just click that button it'll fix it um so yeah let's uh add a new Lane for each of these and then on this one maybe it gets a bit loud let's just

do this I think maybe I'm going to take it off ping pong turn it off there of my I don't want to love [Music] you I'm going to open the filter a bit and see how that [Music] sounds want to love you

[Music] let's get some more Rises and stuff in there okay that can get annoying if it just keeps on going on and on and on so let's let's freeze that or let's print that out to audio so I'm going to

introduced you to something called resampling here resampling is basically just taking some audio and recording it to another Channel pretty simple all we need to do is make a new audio channel so just control T here hit record make

sure that no other channels are recording because you don't want to overwrite any other channels then just choose resampling and now whatever you play when I hit record it'll record it to this channel but all we want to record is the

vocal so let's just solo that and then just do [Music] this I don't want to and I'm going to let it just run all the way through to yeah bar 97 and then when that's finished we can actually start manipulating the audio

and doing something interesting with it you'll see how powerful resampling can be okay now I'm not going to use this anymore we don't need it and I don't need the beginning of that I just want it to kind of fade in

like [Music] this I don't want to love you [Music] let's keep the sub [Music] gr now that we can actually start pitching this up and make our own kind of Riser with it and here if you just go

into envelopes choose a clip transpose transposition maybe from about here on we start to pitch that up we can pitch it up say 12 semmit tones over time give it a bit of a Bend so it's exponential and then this is how that'll

sound [Music] [Music] okay um so that sounds kind of cool maybe a little bit edmy with the way it pitches up so much um but maybe we can do it a bit later on we don't do it straight from there maybe from here so

it's a bit of a quicker move can also try pitching out less like going up four or seven semi- turns or something [Music] [Music] I think that sounds pretty nice the other thing I want to do here is add some more

drums um cuz it's kind of not any different there than it is here so let's come in here and we're just going to make a new channel I'm going to add um maybe an offbeat ride just something to give it a

bit of bit of energy so yeah let's go into here and we're just going to go through symbols and then ride at the bottom and just want our classic ride here and let's just turn off highlight scale so we can easily find middle C C3

over there and we can just Loop the section let's listen to this [Music] okay I also want oh let's give it a bit of release there you go so it doesn't cut so un [Music] I know what I add um maybe another

Shaker or uh just some more energy basically on the 16th notes let's see what it sounds like to add another one of the Shakers that I've made here [Music] see something like that maybe [Music] let's try um one the Shak is from this

pack [Music] I'm going to try moving these onto the downbeat see how that [Music] sounds I think I'm just going to not use them or maybe we can just make them a bit shorter and use them like this print on the

[Music] sustain see how it sounds to have them on 16th note [Music] bring down the velocity of the first one [Music] yeah I think that adds a nice uh kind of character to the highend there you go that's quite nice so now

this section feels a lot more energetic [Music] maybe we can use this vocal again here see how that [Music] sounds or over here that one see how that sounds I don't want [Music] to I don't to know oh yeah that

works I don't want to know I is this real every time that you gone I can't get the I don't want to love [Music] you feel like this needs to just continue here sounds good is [Music] this let's keep on going with this I

don't want to love you I don't want to love oh this [Music] is I don't want to [Music] love I don't want to love you is is real or we need to move [Music] that maybe we can have the sh

[Music] there is this real [Music] oh okay now we've got a bit of consistency with a vocal KN I true that I'm paralyzed I can't get the out of my mind is this real every time knowing that you're gone

by her I can't get the of my mind I don't want to love you let's keep building that [Music] [Music] [Music] up I don't to I don't want to know you I don't want to know [Music] you I don't want to know

you I don't want to know you [Music] is this real I don't want to know you is this real every night okay we're almost done I think uh all that's already left is just call this drop 2.2 um is an intro and an outro and maybe

some drum fills and a little bit more effects and I think we'll do that in the next session I'm going to take a short break now see you in a sec okay we're back and uh in typical fashion I've gone and changed something

off camera um I was just noticing that when I was listening to it quickly that the Rhythm This Groove was not big enough it wasn't really coming through on this drop here we just listen to it so I added another layer which then

brings that Groove out [Music] I you can hear how that like really adds a nice bit of flack a bit of smack to the to the groove and brings it out um so let me show you how how to

make this um all right so all I did was I duplicated this CH this rack here the one that we already had and then we and just delete all of this stuff we don't need it and the two samples that I used one

was this Tom one shot process number six so if we go into uh deep organic percussion here you just search Tom 06 this [Music] one and so I've added that can just drag that into this sample here will then sound like this

okay so let's have a look at what I did to it uh first of all I pitched it up four semitones so here you can go plus four and then I added some release to it so we just need to go here and just turn

up the release okay and uh nothing else to this one um the second sample that I added was this kahon flam just search K kahon which one was it 01 okay so we just go and drag this one

down here and if you have a look at them both of them have been turned up to 6 DB okay and then I added a bit of processing to it so the first thing is Ott you can go over here and choose Ott

put that over there and we're just going to turn the time up to get rid of that breathiness okay and let's keep on looking what we did so next thing was overdrive so overdrive at 38% with 43% Drive

we just overdrive and that will bring out that tone in it just bring move this down a bit and a bit less here bit less [Music] Drive okay and then the delay looks a bit different so I'm just going copy

this delay so you can see it over here oops this delay copy it up to here just comparing the two this one's a little bit more filtered down it's at 36% so that sounds like this what else have we done to it

I think that's [Music] it not sure why it sounds so different here double [Music] check that one's plus four the flam Let's uh check this one bring that up four C [Music] times I think the volume is different

here [Music] too and maybe the volumes here might be different just check those that's -2 and - 8 check this one yeah they're different yeah the volume is - 8.5 and -2- is 8.5 and this one is supposed to be minus

[Music] 12 it still sounds to me like there's a bit of [Music] high end in this one that isn't in this one double check [Music] this might be the overdrive setup it's just use my one that I copied over

[Music] here oops need to copy it up [Music] here where is that high end coming from see sometimes uh these things are good to run into because that's when you start learning like what these slight differences that are making such a big difference to the

sound I think it's coming from this that sound and in this one we're not really hearing that sound that much ah I think it might be the the length of it or something let's see or is it a different sample lookss like

a much smaller sample just see just read the file names quick Theon flam 01 this one is H klam processed o1 flam let's see where is it ah that would be that would be why a different flam I'm not sure where

I found that other one I think maybe that was an old one that I Pro into these ones okay so all of that all I need to really do probably is just turn this down a bit now we

[Music] have yeah it's pretty much the same okay so listening to that I to okay so that's how I made it I'm just going to delete the other one and then stick with this one and um yeah sorry for that long-

winded uh process of making that that thing um maybe I'll try and edit that down or maybe it's important to see all of it I'm not sure yet anyway let's go into into uh creating our intro and outro all right so how long is this

track at the moment 3 minute 40 so yeah we can probably do another minute or two of an intro here let's just insert some space um and let's try and make an intro like maybe we can have that

much so here's going to be intro and this is going to be like a little Bridge thing let's take uh all of our drum samples and maybe our Rhythm synth and just place them here turn KN off [Music]

yeah then maybe bring in that Rhythm syn [Music] here maybe we can start fading in this drone over here just turn an auto [Music] filter we can do the same with the other drone oops [Music] [Music] and maybe here we can filter out the

kick drum a bit I just reverse this and then turn that up a bit and then okay I want to kind of tease the piano over here bring that in there and oh we need to turn the pad

[Music] [Music] on hey what we can do is just use this cord over [Music] here yeah and I'm going to fade this piano in I'm going to do with the utility I'm going just turn up the volume slowly that when we get to here it's at

full volume pretty much maybe we can fade this rhythm syn in grab that and and just fade it in through this section [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] supped to bring in the sub here and can have the sub in but maybe

the sub can just be a bit quieter in this section so let's take this utility I'm going to select just this area and then use these little arrow these boxes and just drag it down a bit that's going

to turn it down like like minus 2.5 [Music] DB and we can take this and go there this can also - [Music] [Music] [Music] 2.5 hey so I want to put in some drum fills here like let's put a drum fill in

over there I might take all my shakers out here that every night I that I out of my mind is this and I don't want this vcle to just come in out of nowhere I think I want to

hint at it coming in so let's use resampling again I'm going to make a new channel I'm going to hit record turn on resampling and I'm just going to record a short section of this oh we have these both armed so turn

that off and delete that one okay so now I've got this I want to turn that into like just a really long Reverb let's take this Reverb and I'm going to turn up 100% wet and big long Decay bring down the size a

bit and now it should sound like [Music] this right let's freeze and flatten that freeze and flatten that's going to turn it into uh audio basically bounce in place there you go so now I got this long piece of audio and I just want to get

that tail then what I want to do with that tail is I want to reverse it that it swells up so all we need to do is hold down shift and hit R and let reverse that and then let's hear what that

sounds like might want to turn it up a bit [Music] iy I out of my mind okay so I just want to have some sort of like drum fill over there I have this whole pack of uh afro fills here

which is perfect for this stle and so let's grabb like a Conger and maybe one of these I love that one use that one and we need to make sure that it's in key so I'm actually going to drag it into a part of

the track where it's kind of busy and just make it really loud so I can hear it and then move the pitch up and down until it sounds really nice [Music] [Music] like there it sounds in key to me so I'm

going to go [Music] that and I want to compress this so that the tail doesn't Fade Out as much that's a bit more um bit more consistent let's use Ott here and turn up that time again see how that that sounds maybe a

bit less of an amount we could probably take out the subie low end from [Music] that [Music] I I out of my mind is this [Music] real see if a sweep off to that or a crash might sound

[Applause] good maybe something like that but just really quiet and I'm going to take out a lot of the sound of the mid-range make it really thin like all the way up here so to It's not taking up a lot of room

in the [Music] mix Let's uh make an I'm just going to dupc replicate that and then add like a crash sound to it um from this pack symbols crash use that one turn off warping every night every night

[Music] every I get out of my mind is this [Music] real describe another coner [Music] fill let's put that one over here and on this one I want uh let's just hear how it sounds make sure that it's at the right speed we just need to

change it to [Music] 122 okay we can probably warp this a bit and get it perfectly on the grid [Music] let's try a few different [Music] ones I like the beginning let's maybe just use that [Music] duplicated [Music]

ni yeah maybe the ending of that one put it in timing here okay that looks good see how that sound [Music] okay let's pitch it around [Music] okay about there sounds nice to my ear and I just want to EQ it a little

bit leaving a bit of that sain because sometimes it feels nice it kind of gives it a bit of weight and a bit of uh quality sound and I want to put on a delay on that nice and

filtered even try filtering out a bit of the L high end here see how that sounds [Music] I think we should aim to get that a it is in key okay there we go okay and now um let's grab this again just for a bit

of I think this should be a bit [Music] louder I'm going to make it a bit tighter too I'm going to turn on Beats mode here Reserve transience forward arrow and then bring that [Music] down maybe we can put this over there

[Music] I well now I'm hearing [Music] this I don't [Music] to let's go there I'm just going to paste it there I don't [Music] to maybe I'll put that fill again over [Music] here no I don't think I like

[Music] thaty I can't get out of my mind maybe that'll go nicely there or not there uh at the end of the [Music] buildup G by I of mind I don't want to love you [Music] can even start to pitch this

up do something like this [Music] I don't want [Music] to oh now I'm thinking it might be nice to hear this whole melody in the buildup but just maybe on a different synth or like really filtered version of it let's

just see how this [Music] sounds I don't want to love you a [Music] [Music] I I don't [Music] to I'm going to side chain this [Music] I don't want [Music] to okay so let's uh let's try this on a

different synth over here in this build up like on a sine wave maybe let's try this Operator just bring down this envelope okay I'm also going to turn this pitch envelope which is going to basically make the pitch quickly drop

down can choose the Decay have uh really fast like 50 or 40 mise seconds [Music] maybe give it a bit of overdrive overdrive is a lovely [Music] plugin spread it out a [Music] [Music] bit let's turn up that that level over

there that's just going to modulate this one it's uh the topic is called FM frequency modulation so it's basically taking frequency of this oscillator and applying it to the pitch of this oscillator um I think you can read read

more into it online but um this is what it sounds like just a touch of that sounds nice and then maybe a bit of Reverb or of delay maybe bit Reverb here [Music] I [Music] I I just going to try pitching these all

up in [Music] octave play this decay [Music] [Music] to [Music] I don't want to [Music] know I want to know [Music] you I want [Music] is I don't want to love [Music] you is this real [Music] okay let's uh duplicate

this and now you probably just want to take out the vocal here [Music] and begin filtering this lead out I'm going grab an auto filter and just start filtering it [Music] down maybe take out a shakeer [Music] I'm going to that

take out the base here and we can also Fade Out that big Stumpy drum Groove I'm just going to kind of bring that down a bit here and fade it out [Music] [Music] let's take this drum fill over here and

put it on this one I'm going to put it uh over here and then I'm also going to put the rash and wide noise over there [Music] [Music] put the sweep [Music] there turn this down a bit [Music]

I'm going to copy the EQ from this wide noise and put it on this one as [Music] well similar [Music] and then we can filter these ones out [Music] [Music] here every time [Music] oh I think that's it for effects and um

yeah now we're just going to throw in a little bit of a master and um that'll be the end of this track so let's limiter we've done before just want to get it into the busiest part of the

TRU probably there so we're going to push it [Music] up okayy so that's a bit of limiting I also want to try and saturate the mix a bit Yeah grab a saturate before that and let's start with my - 6 in the output

and 6 DB of Drive [Music] [Music] [Music] okay um how loud are we [Music] get think the mix is getting pretty loud uh how I always check it is I use Miners and uh this is a plugin you can

just Google Min meters by direct I think it's like 10 bucks and you uh can have a look at this Lu reading Lu fs and typically or this kind of track I'm shooting for about - 7 - 8 somewhere around there and so if I

play this you can see H about - [Music] 7.5 let's see if we can just try and boost the high end just to touch and see if that sounds nice [Music] I be honest I don't think everybody needs

[Music] it yeah I think as far as the moning goes this is pretty much all I want to have on that I want to just add stuff for the sake of it maybe uh add a glue compressor before the saturator to

smooth the overall signal out a little bit and with the glue compressor you can um have a longer attack which willo make the drums and all the transients come through a bit bit more uh and bring this down

[Music] [Music] I I don't want to love you okay guys I think that's it for this track so let's play it through and see how it turned out 3 2 1 [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] every night I sure that I'm

alive I can't get the thought out of my mind is this real everything time KN that you're gone by her side I can't get the out of my mind I don't want to love you I don't want to love

[Music] you this this real [Music] I don't want to love [Music] you is this [Music] real every night KN I true that I'm paralyzed I can't get the thought out of my [Music] mind this is real every time knowing that you're gone

by her side I can't get the thought out of my mind I don't want to Li [Music] [Music] I don't want to know I don't want to know I don't want to know [Music] you I want to know you

this is real I want to love you this is [Music] [Music] cool like the way that turned out hope you guys enjoyed that and thank you so much for watching