Ableton Live 11 - How To Melodic House [Beginners Tutorial Ben Böhmer]

[Music] hey guys i'm bound to divide your tutor for today's video brought to you by production music live today we're going to be making a melodic house loop that sounds like this [Music] okay first of all let's just make sure that we're in our arrangement view by clicking on this button up here or hitting tab on our keyboard the first sound i want to make is a drone sound and we're going to basically just place one note down on a midi channel so let's just highlight a portion of this over here and hit ctrl shift m and we're going to be working in d major so if you set your scale to d major here you can see all the nodes that we're going to be working with and we're going to be placing our first node at f sharp 3 over here and this is going to be our drone node and if you look at the d major scale that's the third note in the scale the major third okay next up we're going to be loading up a sound um if we just click on sounds here we're going to be in this ambient and evolving category and we're going to search for dark swarm double click on that and that loads it into this midi channel over here and if we play it that's how it sounds so i'm just going to turn that down a bit by dragging the slider over here down [Music] and i want to change the tempo of my beach here so i'm just going to go to the top here and click and type 124 and then we can just zoom in a bit by clicking hovering over here until this changes to a little magnifying glass clicking and dragging down so that we can see the loop that we're going to be working with so at the moment we can see this is four bars long i think that's a bit short so let's just click and drag this out so that we make it eight bars long okay next up we're going to start writing a melody i always find it's it's easiest to write the melody first and then uh build the harmonies around that melody so i'm going to highlight four bars over here and we are going to grab operator for this and we're going to actually make our own sound uh it's just going to be like a simple sawwave kind of pluck sound so if we click over here on instruments we can see operator over here we double click on it and we're just going to place a few notes down so we can hear the sound that we're making and our first note is going to be placed at d3 over here [Music] and then we're going to count three 16th notes so if this is divided into 16 the length of this will be 3 16 notes and then going up to f sharp [Music] and then going back down to d [Music] [Music] so we can just highlight this and hit ctrl d to copy that over again and then i want to take the d down so if we copy this whole thing over ctrl d and then move the d down to an a [Music] and then i want to change the last bar over here so that we have a bit of a change in the melody and we're going to go up from the f we're going to change this to an a and then we're going to bring this a up to an e and then it's going to go down dune so we're gonna go and change this to a d and this one to c sharp [Music] and now this will just loop back around [Music] okay so let's set up our sound now we're going to change this first oscillator to a saw wave and we're just going to bring down the frequency over here because it's going to be very loud to start out with so i'm just turning this filter down and i also want to turn down this drone over here it's a bit starting to annoy me a little bit okay then we're going to add a second oscillator but before we add the second oscillator we need to make sure that these are not uh fmming each other so you can change the way that the oscillators are set up at the moment you see they're all stacked on top of each other and what that means is that if i start turning this up this oscillator is going to start modulating this one so we don't want that we want them to just basically be running in serial so i'm going to click on this little uh icon over here and just change them to that setup over here and then the second oscillator we're going to add some noise to it so we're going to choose noise white and we're just going to turn that up a bit you won't be able to hear it clearly until you open this up and you also can't hear it because of the shape of the envelope is doing this plucky sound so we need to just boost that up so we grab this little square and then that just sets the sustain now we can hear it and we're just going to bring that frequency back down and the volume of this can come down okay then i want to give this a little bit of like a plucky feeling so i'm going to bring down this level over here and the same thing with this one and i'm just going to give it a bit more release like maybe two seconds okay so now it's that's causing the notes to kind of overlap now it almost gives like the illusion of kind of like reverb sometimes it can be nice to use release instead of reverb to kind of let notes decay out over time okay then i just want to grab some delay and we just i just clicked up here and type delay and then go to all results and we're going to bring that down a bit the dry wet and we're going to make this ping pong [Music] i'm just going to bring this filter i'm going to click on this point and just drag my mouse down so it makes it a bit more of like a band pass and i just want to drag it up so that there's not so many lows in it let's maybe go into our filter over here and just go to the envelope amount and i'm just going to tap on my keyboard the up arrow and just see how it sounds when we start increasing this envelope amount i want it to be a little bit brighter but not too bright i think eight percent sounds good to me okay next up we're going to be writing some chords and you'll see you'll hear how like the melody kind of starts coming together when we start changing the bass notes around it and all the other harmonies too so let's make a new midi channel we're going to hit ctrl shift and t for a new midi channel and then i'm going to use operator again for this one and it's just going to be a very simple sound we double click on operator here and we are changing it to a saw wave and i'm just going to literally bring this down to like 900 hertz or something and now we've just got a saw wave going into a filter and that's pretty much going to be the base of our sound it's just going to be a very simple pad and then we're going to add some reverb to it afterwards so let's just highlight this section and we're going to make a midi clip covering this entire thing over here okay and then our notes our base notes are going to go from g which is the fourth note in our scale and we're going to be moving down to the d so when we move from the g to the d it's going to feel like quite a big resolution uh because we're moving from the fourth which is quite a powerful note in the scale down to the d so it's going to feel like a big movement but it's also going to feel like when we when we land here on this d note it's going to feel like this big sense of coming home in resolution especially because we're in a major scale that's going to be even stronger because we're going to have a big like major chord and these are just a bit high so i'm just going to highlight them and hold shift and drop them down to g1 and d1 here [Music] so you can hear it already gives it that really nice warm uh coming home feeling okay so these are our basically our mid bass notes and then we're going to add some more bass notes below that we're just going to highlight these hit ctrl c and ctrl v and then we're going to hold shift and hit down and that's we've just created a copy of these notes one octave down so [Music] now you can if we open up an eq over here eq8 uh we can now see that there's this fundamental note that's going to come up over here and then we have another note a bit higher so it's kind of covering all our bases okay then the next note we're going to be adding is an f sharp so let's just click here and we're going to drag it all the way across and let's just hear that okay that's a bit low so we're gonna add that up one octave higher highlighted hold shift and press up okay so if you've recognized these chords by now then you've got a good ear they're from ben burma's father ocean and there's nothing wrong with borrowing chords from songs as long as the you know the final piece doesn't sound like the original song um so it's it's a very common thing for musicians to take chords out of other songs and adapt them into their own songs next we're going to just be adding some reverb so let's just go to hybrid reverb over here i'm going to search hybrid and we're going to bring the dry weight up okay now because this is our pad we don't want all these fundamental notes in there i'm going to just high pass them a bit with this over here i'm going to change it and then i passed it up to there [Music] and i'm just going to bring down this pad's volume okay and then we're going to get all of our bass back by making a nice warm analog bass sound for this so i'm going to hit ctrl shift t new midi channel and i'm going to just hold ctrl and drag this midi clip down i'm going to go into it and i'm going to delete everything but the base notes and then we're going to go into analog which is an instrument over here open up analog and let's just solo this and hear the sound okay so that's more or less the sound that we're going for we just want to kind of filter it down a bit and i also want to um change the second oscillator to be playing a fifth up perfect fifth so here we're gonna go and change the octave plus one and then the semitones over here are going to be plus seven and we're just going to grab an eq so that we can see this visually it looks like all my bass notes are in the right place we've got a nice fundamental here sitting in the sub range let's bring down the frequency over here now i don't like how the beginning has this like really strong attack to it so i'm going to just change the envelope amount here from four gonna try bring it down just by tapping the down arrow sounds good to me and then i also want to give it a little bit of attack okay i'm going to bring the frequency down to 200 ish so let's just turn that down and i want to just turn down the second oscillator a bit let's try bringing this envelope back up a bit [Music] and maybe bring up the decay too so it kind of doesn't it's not so plucky but it's just kind of the the frequencies are slowly fading out just turn up the decay here and if you look at this frequency over here you'll see one note is kind of sticking out quite a bit and i kind of just want to bring that down a bit so it's a bit more in line with all these falling notes i'm supposed to sub a little bit here [Music] okay let's share them together okay i think we can bring down the envelope amount a little bit [Music] let's just bring up the volume a bit [Music] [Music] okay now we're kind of getting this um almost like a buildup of frequencies around that f sharp so i think if we pitch this f sharp up one octave hold shift and hit up arrow [Music] yeah it sounds a bit better up there and i've just turned up the volume of it and let's just try and reduce that f sharp note on the pad a little bit more i'm going to go up and find it which is this one you can hear that kind of ringing out quite hard so i'm going to just reduce that a bit [Music] okay so now i want to double the length of this loop i'm going to just hold alt and click at the top here to close all of them and then i'm going to highlight everything and duplicate it and then i want to add like a string or something that's just adding to the harmonies and changing things up a little bit so we're going to hit ctrl alt t for a new midi channel i'm going to make a new midi clip ctrl shift m and then we're going to go up here to sounds and let's look for strings um and then the second stellar strings the one i want to use okay so we're going to be making a melody over here we're going to be starting here at d3 and just hearing that [Music] okay so we're going to go up to the e over here [Music] and we're going to place another note down here at the a [Music] and then if that loops around it has really a nice resolution when it comes back to d yeah very nice okay i'm just going to bring down the volume of the string [Music] because i still want the other sound our main pluck to be at the front of the mix okay so let's just uh rename everything for good measure so we're going to hit control and r on the first channel and this is going to be our drone i'm going to hit tab again and i believe that was our pad no that's our melody uh so that's melody and then here is our pad hit tab again bass and string and i'm just going to grab this loop brace and drag it out so that we can hear the full section okay guys so if you're enjoying this tutorial so far uh feel free to check out productionmusiclive.com you can support us by enrolling in a course or checking out some of the awesome sounds on there also drop a comment leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you're finding this helpful okay now i just want to quickly change the color of these generally i like to make my base a color that kind of stands out so i'm going to use this kind of like pinkish color and then the rest of my sounds over here i'm going to highlight them all by holding shift and clicking on the first and the last one right click and then i'm going to make this one like this bluey kind of color and then i'm going to highlight all of these and right click assign triangle to clips and then i'm going to group them all by uh by hitting shift and clicking on the first one and then clicking on the last one and hitting ctrl g and then we'll just rename this our instruments and minimize that and then we are going to find our kick so i'm going to just use a kick from my sample pack on production music live which is kiko seven that's probably my favorite kick and then we're just going to place it on this audio channel and we're going to duplicate it out on each beat so i'm just going to highlight the feature and hit ctrl d three times and then highlight this section again and just copy it out until it fills out everything okay it's a bit loud and it's going into the red over there and distorting so we're just going to bring down the kick okay that sounds good and i just want to side chain everything to the kick so i'm going to double click on instruments here and then i'm going to go and find a compressor i'm just going to double click here and then just search for a compressor and double click we're going to expand this out enable sidechain and take sidechain input from the kick okay so what this is going to do is whenever the kick hits all the instruments are going to get turned down briefly in volume and then it's going to allow the kick to come through a bit more clearly so you can see the waveform of the kick in here but nothing compresses not doing anything because this little threshold is sitting above the volume of the kick so if i just drag this down [Music] you can hear that's a very exaggerated example but we can just bring it up a bit [Music] and i want to just go to this eq and turn the frequency amount here i'm just going to make it 700 [Music] and that makes it so that we're only really listening to the high end the clickiness of the kick and that gives us a much sharper point to work with so we can bring down this threshold again and then we can bring up the release to around 50 50 milliseconds [Music] just going to play with this a little bit and that's quite a nice sounding side chain i think okay next up we're going to make our clap and we're going to make this out of two layers so i'm just going to hit ctrl shift t and i'm going to use midi channels for this so i actually want two of them i'm going to click on this midi channel and hit ctrl d and then i'm just going to place them in a group by highlighting both and hitting ctrl g and then we're going to rename this our clap group ctrl r to rename okay so now i'm going to make some midi clips here i'm just going to double click here that's a quick way to add a midi clip and i want to place my clap on every second beat so we need to place a note at c3 over here uh on the two and on the four 1.2 and 1.4 [Music] i'm going to drag that out and then we're going to hold ctrl and drag this one down so now we've got midi clips set up for both of our claps the first clap we're going to use is again from my sample pack we're gonna be using clap six [Music] just turn that down a bit and then the problem with this clap is it has a really nice tone i think but it's not like sitting at the front of the mix it needs something a bit drier to be layered with it so i'm going to use this clap o2 over here on the second one so we'll just click on this midi channel here and double click on club 2. [Music] now you can hear if i turn this off it's kind of giving it a lot more presence so i'm just going to turn this down a bit and then we're going to set the volume of this by toning down the whole channel okay i think that sounds good next up we're going to need some hats so let's do ctrl shift t for a new midi channel and we're going to use a hat here from deep premium volume 4. we go into hats over here and it's the first hat so we're going to just make a new midi clip over here i'm going to double click and make sure it's set to 16th notes and then we're going to go to c3 here and we're going to place a midi clip on each 16th note all right double click on this hi-hat over here [Music] and we're just going to drag that out across this entire thing okay so i want these to be nice and quiet in the mix i'm going to turn them down [Music] and i kind of want them to be bouncing around a bit so i'm going to click on controls over here and then go to random pan and i'm just going to turn that up until it sounds right [Music] yeah i like it at 15 and i also want to give it a bit of bounce so i'm going to use a side chain to make the hats kind of bounce around bounce around the kick i mean i'm gonna go to instruments over here this group that we have i'm gonna hit ctrl c on the compressor and then just paste it over here [Music] okay so i don't want the sidechain to be as deep so i'm gonna bring up the threshold of it but i would like it to be a bit longer so we can bring up the release maybe to about 70 milliseconds let's set it at eight so now if i solo that you can hear there's a bit of bounce in there in these hats okay next up we're going to add a offbeat hi-hat and we're going to go into my midnight punch over here and i'm going to grab an offbeat hat i think i like this one so i'm going to grab this one and drag it onto there and then drag this out [Music] okay it's a bit loud so we're going to turn that down okay and i want to just high pass this a bit so i'm going to click on the search bar here and type eq then go to all results and double click on eq8 and then just change this first one to the high pass [Music] and i'm going to drag this out of it i think i want to add a ride next so we're going to hit ctrl shift t for a new midi clip and we're going to go into d premium volume 1 over here and we're just going to find a ride dry 002 this one and i'm going to double click and create a midi clip [Music] and we're going to double click on dry o2 place a note at c3 wherever that is there it is and now we just need to make a nice pattern with this i'm just going to turn it down because it's going to be very loud okay so let's see i think it's quite nice sounding to have them kind of following the pattern of the melody so i'm going to drag this out next we're going to do the same trick as we did with the hi-hats it's going to controls and add some random padding [Music] and i want to high pass this a bit so we can we don't have to use an eq to do that when we're using this simpler we can go into this little section over here and we can change the filter to the high pass filter and just bring down the frequency okay so now it's nice and splashy and i want to make it even more splashy by adding some reverb to it so i'm going to search high bread over here and go to all results add the hybrid reverb and we're going to change this algorithm here to shimmer which is like this bright reverb and if i set if we solo this and set it to 100 wet we can hear it okay i'm going to change this blend here now we can now we're hearing just the shimmer algorithm and we're going to go into the eq here and just boost the high end even more and then bring down the dry wet okay so that's going to add like this nice gentle noise at the top of the track and kind of fill it out next up i just want to add a little drum fill at the end of this or halfway through this loop just to kind of introduce the um the strings so let's just go here and we're going to search 909 snare i'm just going to grab here we're going to go to samples we're going to grab this hard snare i'm just going to drop it here at the bottom and that's going to automatically make a new audio channel for me and place it over there and then i just want to place it right at the end and i think i want it to hit twice so i'm going to just shorten this and then hit ctrl d and i think we can add a crash to so let's just search 909 crash and we're going to drag that to the bottom here and just turn this down quite a lot and let's uh add some delay to this crash so it kind of rings out a bit longer so delay and we're going to make it ping pong and give it about 80 feedback okay i don't want the dry weight to be that much so i'm just going to bring this down a bit and let's make it so that it's we change this to the one here so the delay is a bit quicker there we go that sounds nice to me okay i think the base on this could be a little bit louder so i'm just going to go into instruments here and i'm going to go to our base and just turn up the volume here [Music] okay that's sounding nice to me okay so that's pretty much our loop done we're just going to quickly do some naming and coloring to organize it all so the first channel we're going to hit ctrl r and name that kick the next one's already been named so we're gonna hit tab twice to go to the next channel and this is our closed hat so i'm just gonna name it chh for closed hi-hat and then this is our open hi-hat ohhh and our right snare crush and now we're just going to give these all a nice color i'm going to make them all the same color i usually use green um but i don't know if it'll match this so i'm just going to make it like a nice purple and then i'm going to highlight them all right click and assign track color to group tracks highlight them all again and hit ctrl g and name this group drums okay lastly i'm just going to put a limiter on the master so that we can hear it at our maximum volume without clipping i'm going to go up here and search limiter and we're just going to turn up the gain until we see this needle over here dipping down just slightly okay so i really want to hear this uh section loop around again so we can hear that nice string result so i'm just going to highlight this section and hit ctrl d and drag this out and now i just want to remove this crash over here okay lastly i just want to add some automation to this melody because automation is it plays a huge role in the style of music you know you can't loop this melody throughout the whole track without anything changing uh so we're just going to click on this button here to enable automation mode and then we're going to go into our filter frequency over here and we're going to play with that by bringing it down and turning it up so i'm going to click on that and then you'll see this dotted line appears and i can place a point there and by dragging this up if i just hit play we can hear that opening and closing so i'm going to start it off a bit quite a bit more filtered out so let's drag it down to like 800. and we're gonna let this filter up over here and then maybe at the end of this one it can rise up a little bit more and go up to about this let's just hear that [Music] okay i like that but i'm going to just delete this point so that it kind of fades out before that next bar stops [Music] okay so you can see i just kind of randomly did that while i was listening to it um if you're making your own track i suggest spending quite a lot of time on these automations because they can really bring life to the track uh but let's listen to our final loop [Music] okay i hope you enjoyed that if you did please leave a like comment and subscribe and consider supporting us by visiting us on productionmusiclive.com and purchasing a sample pack or course thank you and goodbye

Channel: Ableton Tips

Views: 32,842

Keywords: Ableton Live, Ableton Live Tutorial, ableton live 10 tutorial, Ableton, Ableton Tips, ableton tips and tricks, abletontips, PML, Ableton Live Beginners, Ableton Tricks, Ben Böhmer Ableton, Anjunadeep, Melodic House, Melodic Techno, Lane 8 Ableton, Yotto Ableton, Production Music Live, Melodic House Beginner Tutorial Ableton

Id: E3KyRXRASE8

Length: 40min 3sec (2403 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021