How To Produce A Bass Line With Automation Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar - video Dailymotion

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Tutorial using Ableton Live 11 Lite with Ski Oakenfull - part of the Music Radar series

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

00:06So in the last video I showed you how to program some basic drum patterns into clips in Session

00:10View. Now let's start adding some other musical elements to build up the layers of

00:14the track. In this video I'm going to program a melodic bassline which will act as a foundation

00:19to add some more parts on top. Let's go!

00:24So before we get started, one thing I want to mention is about going into the red or

00:27clipping as this can cause the mix to become distorted as we start adding more layers

00:32to our song. If I just adjust the track volume and turn it up, you can see it goes into the

00:38red on the master channel here. So we don't want that, we're going to bring that down

00:42and that's going to give us a bit more headroom when we start adding tracks.

00:49Okay so now we've got the beat, we're going to look for a bass sound. So we've just been

00:54working on this one drum track here. I'm now going to go over to this MIDI track and

00:59I'm going to set the record arm on so we can monitor this channel. I'm also going to go

01:04back to the first scene so we can record into the adjacent slot. Okay so let's look for

01:09some bass sounds. So I'm going to go to the sound section here and open up bass. There

01:16we go. And in the same way as we did with the drums, as we're flicking between the sounds,

01:30we can audition them at the same time. We can do that either by clicking on the sound

01:37or just using the up and down arrow keys as well. Now I quite like this organ bass, sounds

01:43very very housey. So let's make sure we're selected on this track, double click and you

01:52can see that it's just loaded in. Okay so just so you can see the notes that I'm playing,

02:00I'm just going to bring up a thing called the virtual MIDI keyboard, there we go. So

02:04I'm just going to play along with the beat and see if I can come up with an idea.

02:14Oh quite like that one there, that was really good. Now you may have noticed that I didn't

02:23press overdub and record anything into a clip. But there's a fantastic feature in Ableton

02:28Live which is called Capture. And what Live is doing is actually capturing everything

02:33that's going on whether you hit record or not. So we just have to click on this button

02:37here and you can see that it's come up amazingly there. Now it's a little bit out of time,

02:47it's not quantized but I'm sure we can fix that. And we can do that just by pressing

02:53command U, there we go. And remember we set the groove for the drums, well we can apply

03:00that groove to this bass line as well. Now I don't think we want any of these other parts

03:09that I recorded in, we just want these two bars here. So I'm going to do the similar

03:13thing I did before, I'm going to use the crop clip function. So press control and click

03:17to bring up the menu and crop clip, there we go.

03:30So I think we can duplicate that clip to the next clip slot just by pressing command

03:37D. But it might be quite nice for this scene here to create a slight variation of the bass

03:47line. So let's bring back the keyboard again and this time rather than using capture I'm

03:55going to try recording directly into the clip. Now what's very useful for this is to give

04:00ourselves a count using the metronome and we can do that just by clicking here and setting

04:06the count into one bar. We can also actually change the sound of the metronome, so we can

04:12change it for example to the wood sound, a particular favorite of mine and we can also

04:16change the volume of our click as well. So let's just put that on. So let's try recording

04:24in a slight variation of that bass line. I played a slight wrong note at the end but

04:31never mind. Okay so this time I'm going to change the quantize settings and so rather

04:53than quantizing to the grid I want to change it to 16. So let's go to the quantize settings,

04:59there we go and let's set that to 16th and have a listen through and see which part of

05:07this MIDI we want to keep. Okay I quite like this middle section here so I'm just going

05:14to set the loop brace so it just loops around the section I want to keep. There we go so

05:33it's four bars. Great. So let's do the same thing with the middle section. So I'm going

05:44to do the same thing, let's apply the groove and control click and crop the clip. So we

05:56can also adjust some of the parameters of this sound to change the timbre. So if I just

06:00double click on the track we can see that this is the instrument here and there are

06:04various parameters that we can adjust. Now that we've got two sounds, we've got the drums

06:08and the organ, I just want to solo this sound so I can hear what it sounds like by itself.

06:13So if I click on the S button here, this will solo that sound. Now we can change the

06:20filter cutoff for example and the FM setting, I really like that. Now we can actually record

06:37those parameter changes into the clip as it's playing. We're going to press the overdub

06:42button here and that's going to record it into the clip. And you can see that little

06:58red dot there indicates that we've recorded in something called automation which we can

07:02actually look at. If we just double click on the clip now and then we go over to the

07:08envelopes tab, you can see that parameter change has been recorded into the clip. Let's

07:17take it out of solo now. Now I'm just going to lower the bass sound a little bit just

07:24so it's balancing nicely with the drums. And now we can trigger these scenes. So we're

07:32building up the sections. Okay, so we've got a great starting point now with the drums

07:39and the bass. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to build on this by adding

07:42some chords to the track.

How To Produce A Bass Line With Automation Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar

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