How To Generate Chords Automatically in Ableton Live 11

even though i have limited music theory and i'm far away from a classical pianist i realize that i know ableton well enough that i can create tools that obey the rules of music theory i want to show you something [Music] what's up guys and welcome back to another episode of inspired by my name's will and i make an assortment of music under the moniker hush child this video is sponsored by district so make sure you stick around so i have a few more words on our sponsor later in the video okay i want to make this video as to the point and digestible as possible so going forward we're going to cover a few things we're going to touch upon how we can create major and minor chord progressions especially helpful when we're trying to find a chord progression around a certain sample and i'm also going to show you how to create more humanistic chord progressions as well as give you a couple of handy racks that you can download from the patreon below so let's just jump into it so one of the things that i want to touch upon just in case you're not familiar is the c major scale because that's where most of our theory is going to come from in this video that's from c down here to the c above the octave right [Music] so if we start on c that's called the root note if we move up four semitones we get the major third and if we move up three semitones from that major third we get the perfect fifth in the c major scale these are white notes that are equally spaced from each other so the first thing that we want to do is create a major triad what i want you guys to do is go to midi effects and type in chord or just drag this chord folder down ahead of the instrument you have of choice and what we're going to do is firstly leave this shift 1 position exactly as it is that's gonna be our root note with shift two we're gonna pitch it up for semitones now we've got our major third and with shift three we're gonna pitch it up seven semitones and that creates our perfect fifth so now when we press c we get that major triad that you heard me play before the problem with this is once we start moving it up the keyboard we're not really going to get any progressions that we're going to want to use so let's change that now let's go to midi effects and let's grab scale i'm going to drag scale in and if we open up that folder we actually get different scale options so bear that in mind so you can experiment in your own time for today what we're going to do is just grab the major scale and we can drag that on here so what this scale device is doing is setting any of the nearest notes in keeping with the c major scale the c major is here in bass and we'll be changing this later [Music] it's way more tasteful [Music] and we can even go to shift 4 and hold shift and press down one and that's going to give it an octave so we get a slightly bigger chord [Music] this is really exciting especially when you're trying to figure out a chord progression around a sample i'm going to go over here to splice i'm going to go into my settings and choose loops and then i'm going to choose c major just for ease just for now then back here in my loops i'm going to choose a sample at random let's choose this let's just try something at random i'm going to start with c [Music] let's see if it's a flute i'm going to go into splice and i'm going to change this to f major and we'll just choose the first sample that's here this loop is a little bit ear piercing and frankly quite horrible so i've turned it down a little bit let's go down to our chord midi device and let's just set this to what we're on f major so we're going to set this to f notice how all the chord shapes start to change i'm going to set it to f keeping everything else the same see if we can create a chord pattern on this i'm going to bring the octave lower because our lead instrument is higher let's try out a progression here we go i just want to say for the record that this isn't a universal rule of thumb sometimes you'll still need to play around with the chord until you find something that suits the sample of your choice and some of the samples will say that they're in f major or particular key but they have some rule breaking notes meaning that they might have some accidentals that slip out of that scale for just one or two beats of the entire loop cool so it works for major i want to show you how we can do it with a minor scale even faster and i want to keep adding to the humanistic experience of these chord progressions check this out for a minor chord progression all you need to do is just come to shift two and then pitch this down one semitone that takes your major third to a minor third and we're still keeping that minor triad but of course you also have to change your chord progression so to do that just go to minor and drag in the minor chord progression [Music] i also want to show you this if you've seen my previous episodes you'll know that i created the strum rack as well you can place the strum rack between the chord device and the scale device and now what that allows you to do is also roll those notes for a desired length of time [Music] let's try a random sample out for size we're going to go to our splice settings we're going to go to g minor and again we'll just choose the first sample in here this is fairly slow so let's speed this sample up and we're going to set the base to g minor let's see what we can come up with okay so the final point and what's especially cool is to speed up your workflow what you can do is select all of these things and then assign them to a group and in that group you can set macros the cool thing about macros is that you can assign these to the shift placements of your chord features or change the scale options or even assign strum or note length or even velocity if you want to as you're seeing in the time lapse on your screen now i've already created this so you may as well have it as a download all you have to do is be a member of my patreon from there you can download the automatic chord progression effects rack or the strum effects wreck from the link below and on that quickie note i hope that's dissipated some of the doom and gloom around music theory i'm absolutely addicted to the tools that we're looking at in this video the practices that make my life as a musician much more palatable and stress-free and that's why i use distrokid i've recently released new music which you can find in the description and i did so through the use of district kit but one of the main reasons i enjoy using distrokid is the fact that they have so many tools that allow me to promote my music from mini videos to hyper follow to even promo cards this joe kid has everything that you need all in one place and i genuinely think it's one of the easiest ways to release and promote your music on all the platforms if you want to start releasing your music with district make sure you use the link in the description below because you'll get seven percent off your entire year so there we have it guys i hope today's video squashed some of their anxiety and doom and gloom around music theory as always you can download the strum effects rack from my previous episode over at patreon as well as today's pre-made chord progression rack as well i absolutely love chatting to you guys in the comments so if you made it this far in the video do let me know and fill me in to what you want to see in future videos if it was helpful give it a like and as always if you're new here make sure you subscribe hit that bell icon as it truly helps out this channel to continue its growth and as per i thank you so much for stopping by and i'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] hey

Channel: Will Hatton

Views: 2,103

Keywords: how to generate chords automatically in ableton live 11, how to write chords in ableton, how to write chords no theory, no theory chord progression, how to make chords in ableton, how to make chords in live 11, how to write chords in live, generate chords live 11, chord tutorial for ableton, hush child, will hatton, chord progressions for live 11, chords for lofi beats, chords for lofi hiphop, create chords easy in live 11, create chords quick in ableton live 11, live 11, Fl

Id: gYbeLbNaBfg

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ATthewillhatton]

BONUS TIP: If you set up a new midi track and select "all ins" and set it to the chord trigger track, record arm both and you'll get all the notes in the piano roll! - - If you can't be bothered to recreate all this I added the "Chord Progressions Genie" and the "Strum" FX Racks to my Patreon!