How To Create Easy Chords With MIDI Effects Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar - video Dailymotion

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How to make a track in Ableton Live 11 Lite: creating easy chords with MIDI effects

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00:00 Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.

00:05 So in the last video I showed you how to add a bassline to the beat.

00:08 Now we're going to add some more musical elements and continue building up the layers

00:12 of the track.

00:13 In this video I'll be adding some chords using two different sounds, making use of

00:17 Live's fantastic MIDI effects and also recording in a melodic part from a hardware synth.

00:23 Things are getting serious, let's get into it.

00:25 So because we want to add some more parts we need to create some more MIDI tracks and

00:29 you can see we've already used up two of our MIDI tracks already.

00:32 So what we can do is just create some more.

00:34 So we just go up to here, create and insert MIDI track.

00:39 We can also do that with shift command T as well.

00:43 So there we go, we've got two new MIDI tracks.

00:46 So I want to look for a piano sound now.

00:47 So first I'm going to click on the arm recording button on this channel here and we're going

00:52 to use this search function.

00:54 It's a really really useful feature of the browser.

00:56 So if we're in the sounds category and we click on here and then type in piano, you

01:02 can see that any presets that have piano in the title will come up here.

01:07 So let's go to piano and keys and let's try this grand piano sound.

01:14 Double click on it to load it into the track.

01:16 There we go.

01:23 Now the bass line I played went like this.

01:29 Okay so the key signature of this track is A minor and it's just all the white notes.

01:35 Very very simple.

01:37 Now I want to play some chords and a chord is defined as when you play more than one

01:41 note at the same time.

01:42 And one of the simplest chords is a triad and this is often called a stack of thirds.

01:47 We have the first note, the root note, we go up a third and then a fifth.

01:54 So this is A minor.

02:01 Now what's brilliant about Live is there's actually a MIDI device that can do that for

02:05 us without having to play the notes.

02:07 So it's really good if you're not that familiar with playing the keyboard.

02:10 Let's go over to the MIDI effects category here and go on to chord and I'm just going

02:16 to click on this triangle here to bring up some of the presets.

02:20 And the one that I'm going to choose is this one.

02:22 It's called House for the Go.

02:24 And all I have to do is just double click on it and it will load it up for me just before

02:29 the piano device.

02:30 So if I now play the keyboard, it's playing those chords for me.

02:40 Fantastic.

02:41 And you also might be able to hear that the volume of the chords is changing and that's

02:46 because the keyboard I'm playing is velocity sensitive.

02:50 So if I play very softly, it's quiet and if I play very hard, it's much louder.

02:54 Kind of what you'd expect from a real piano.

02:57 But for this style of music, I'd rather that it was more of a constant volume.

03:00 So again, there's another MIDI effect we can use for that and it's called Velocity.

03:04 I'm just going to scroll down and we're going to select this one, Fix 127.

03:08 So let's double click on it.

03:12 So whatever velocity I play on the keyboard, it's always going to be the same volume.

03:16 Now I can hear that's already a bit loud.

03:18 So I'm just going to take the volume down.

03:22 So let's try jamming something onto this third scene here.

03:31 Okay, we can use Capture again.

03:40 I quite like that first riff that I played.

03:44 It's captured it all but it's just looped that last bar.

03:46 So let's just drag the loop brace back here and see what that sounds like.

03:58 Okay so let's quantize it.

03:59 Again going up here, Quantize.

04:01 We could just do Command U.

04:04 And let's not forget to apply that groove as well.

04:15 Okay great, so that's really working for that kind of more funky section there.

04:19 Now I'd quite like to find some chords that are maybe a bit more mellow and for that often

04:22 pad sounds are really good.

04:25 So this time I'm going to go up to the first scene and let's go over to this MIDI track

04:31 and let's look for a pad sound.

04:33 So I'm going to go over to the sounds again and there's actually a sound category for

04:38 that called Pad.

04:40 So let's just listen to some of those.

04:45 Oh that's really nice and that sounds like it's actually got a chord kind of built into

04:51 it.

04:52 Maybe a chord device which is really good.

04:53 So let's drag that over and again I'm going to bring the volume level a little bit down.

05:03 So what we have here on the left hand side of this device are things called macro variations

05:08 and you can see these are actually preset chords.

05:10 That's a major, minor, major 7th, minor 7th or even no chord at all.

05:18 So this is one of my favorite chords.

05:20 It's a minor 9.

05:25 So let's just try playing that with the first scene here.

05:36 Okay so as you can see that's quite tricky to play but I've actually created my own chord

05:41 device preset and I want to quickly show you how I created it.

05:45 So I'm just going to go to the user library here and if you just go to presets and MIDI

05:50 effect rack you'll see it's here.

05:52 Skis, minor 9.

05:53 So let's just go over here and I'm just going to double click on that.

05:58 Now you have to make sure that no chord is selected on the pad device but now if I play

06:02 this.

06:09 So let's have a quick look at my effects rack.

06:10 I've set the chord device here so these are the settings for the semitones.

06:17 I'm also pitching it down to semitones so I can just play the appropriate key and I've

06:22 also added a velocity device here not fixed at 127 like the other velocity preset but

06:27 it's got a lower limit of 86 and I'm just going to adjust the filter cutoff on this

06:32 pad to make it sound a little bit more mellow.

06:41 And let's just try recording something in.

06:42 I'm going to record it in manually this time so we've still got our counting as one bar.

07:01 There we go.

07:02 You can see it's recorded it in nicely.

07:07 Let's quantize it.

07:10 And one great feature I wanted to show is the fold function as this will focus the clip

07:15 by only showing the notes you've recorded or programmed in.

07:20 So let's apply the groove again to that and let's duplicate that down to the second scene.

07:34 Just playing through the scenes.

07:43 Okay so now we've got the chord parts in I want to record a melody and for this I want

07:48 to use one of my hardware synths my Korg Minilogue.

07:52 So up until now we've just been using MIDI tracks now we're going to use an audio track.

07:56 So I'm going to click on this track here, click on arm recording and what we need to

08:01 do is to select where we want the audio to come from.

08:04 So if we go back to the preferences here this is where you can set which inputs are active

08:11 depending on which sound card you're using.

08:13 So click on input configuration and I'm going to be using these inputs here.

08:21 Okay so now I can select input 14 which is where my Minilogue is coming in and let's

08:28 just play something now.

08:35 You can see we have an input.

08:37 So let's record this on the first scene here and we'll just record it into this clip and

08:42 then we can kind of jam something down and then edit it afterwards.

09:06 Okay I quite like that part.

09:07 So let's just put auto on now and let's just solo it so we can listen back to it.

09:20 Now another great thing about Ableton Live is the fact that you can quantize audio in

09:25 the same way that you can quantize MIDI and you can see in this clip there are these little

09:30 kind of white marks and these are called pseudo warp markers and what it's done is identified

09:37 the transients which mean the peaks in the audio signal and it's added a marker there.

09:43 Now what we can do if we select all so do command A and then command U to quantize it's

09:53 then quantized it all to the setting we had which was 16ths and even better than that

10:00 we can now apply the groove and let's play it.

10:09 Now this is called warping and with warping there are some different settings according

10:13 to the type of audio that you're trying to warp.

10:15 Now the default setting I've got here is beats but this isn't a beat this is a melodic part

10:20 so I would suggest selecting the complex mode just to get a better quality.

10:26 So let's just play it now.

10:37 Great really happy with that I'm just going to duplicate that part down there.

10:51 Okay great so the track is really taking shape now we actually have two distinct sections

10:56 in the next video I'm going to show you how to use a device in live called Simpler to

11:00 play a vocal sample.

11:01 (gentle music)

How To Create Easy Chords With MIDI Effects Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar

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