How To Make Chords In Ableton Live 10

hi everyone it's nat from studio hacks here and in this video i'm going to teach you how to create your own chord progressions in ableton live you can make your own chords so easily you don't need some midi pack have you seen those annoying ads the midi pack the midi back it's just seriously it's just like a set of chord progressions anyone can learn this really easily and i'm going to show you how right now [Music] okay what i'm about to show you will work in any digital audio workstation any version of ableton live and it's really simple so if you don't know what midi is it's just a communications protocol to trigger sounds on virtual instruments and all a chord is is three or more notes played at the same time so that's all it is really so what i'm going to do is first grab a midi track you you'll get two midi tracks these are for your virtual instruments i will find a virtual instrument that is included with every version of live let's go to instruments here and let me just go to the instrument rack i know this is included in every version of live and we'll just grab any sound here let's just grab some kind of piano or key sound let's just grab this electric piano i've just dragged that onto the first midi track and that's loaded up that virtual instrument so to create a chord progression without a midi keyboard you're going to need a blank midi clip so i usually select a region by just clicking and dragging and then if you right click you have to have right click enabled you can also you can select insert midi clip shift command m on a mac will do that but you can also just go to the create menu and select insert midi clips right here so now you can grab on the top there this is a blank midi track double click on it and you should get this piano roll down the bottom this is the midi editor and you'll see we have a keyboard going up and down here if you want to hear the instrument on this track when we click on these keys simply click this little headphones icon now we can hear that now we're going to draw in some notes i just tap the b key to get a pen and we can draw in some notes or i can double click in an empty region here and it will create a node if you want to learn uh more about chords this is a really good website i'm not affiliated with this website in any way but this will just tell you the notes that make up basic chords so you have three note chords which are either major minor or diminished so you'll see here in a major chord for a c major c e and g so we can just go back to ableton live and you see you have little you got a c note here so these white notes are c d you'll see when you hover over the note it'll tell you what it is d sharp is that black note so c e and g and i can i can extend those notes out by grabbing the side grabbing them all by dragging a box and grabbing them sideways that's a major chord now if we wanted to um if i wanted a d major chord grab them all drag them up now that's starting on d so once you've got the basic chord that you you can just drag it anywhere and then that bottom note the root note becomes the new uh basis so it's now d major now if i just go down a bit we've got minor chords here so you'll see that a c minor chord is c e flat and g so c e flat so we've got it doesn't show the flats here um it says d sharp but d sharp is the same as e flat so in between the e and the d if there's a black note it'll be either e flat so it's flattened by a semitone or d sharp so if you get the if you can't find e flat that's because it's just the d sharp it's the same it's the same note that's a minor chord then you have seventh note chords there's a diminished chord they they sound kind of cool it's kind of like uh nefarious sounding ominous we have major seventh chords these are a happy chilled out [Music] this is a major seventh i'm not gonna go through all the types of chords here there's dominant seventh minor seventh you can just try these out for yourself you can just look at these notes type them in and they'll give you the chord progressions now this is how i make hip-hop beats and instrumental tracks i start out with a simple chord progression so i'm going to make this track 140 beats per minute let's make this a little bit more hip hop sounding a bit more pop sounding by throwing a filter on it let's go to the audio effects and the eq 8 i'm not sure if eq8 i think it's included in every version of ableton live okay so if i want to i can actually make this a minor seventh this is what a minor seventh chord sounds like i gotta make that minor so now i have my minor seventh chord you can even do something cool here you can just rename this clip by right clicking and selecting rename you can call this minor seventh and then you can save that clip you can just make all the chords up on this top track and then you can drag them in but this is what i do let's get a bit of a click going so i'm going to copy and paste that [Music] now we can start changing these notes by just dragging them up and then i'll copy that chord again and i'll just drag it up [Music] i can copy and paste bits and pieces of this i'm just going to muck around and experiment you can copy and paste entire sections of this chord progression so i've just got a nice little chord progression here i don't know if this is going to work out but this is how i start building tracks from scratch so i've just copied this top line this top chord progression and popped it on a secondary track and i've gone in and i've just deleted all the high notes and i've just got the low notes left and i've just dragged a bass instrument onto that and then i've just done a super quick little drum track there and you can see that using that chord progression you can easily make the start of a track you can change the sound um you can grab anything you want because it's midi you can change the sound afterwards you can just drag that onto the track and it will replace the instrument for you [Music] so you can see if you can learn to make your own chords your own chord progressions it really opens up your ability to start making tracks if you want to learn how to make a complete track from start to finish i've been a professional music producer for 15 years i've just released my ableton live starter kit which is a free 3-part course a crash course in ableton live and it also includes a sample pack i'll leave the link in the description of this video for you to grab that it's totally free and that will give you a massive head start in producing high quality professional sounding music in ableton live i trust you found this content valuable and if you haven't already make sure you subscribe to the channel for future music production videos thank you and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Studio Hacks

Views: 47,053

Keywords: How To Make Chords In Ableton Live 10, ableton live 10 chords tutorial, how to draw chords in ableton, how to play chords in ableton, ableton tips, midi chords, ableton live (software), ableton live, ableton live 10, how to make chords in ableton live, how to make chords in ableton, make chords ableton, ableton chords, ableton chord generator, chord progression ableton, ableton live 10 tutorial, chords ableton, ableton chord progressions, ableton chord, ableton tutorial

Id: nWp48hs8rpw

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020