How To Make Chords In Ableton Live 11 For Beginners | ABLETON LIVE 11 TUTORIAL

i know i know i know i know a lot of you producers struggle with music theory i'm making chords and all that stuff um so in this video that's what we're gonna do if you're a brand new beginner we're gonna be having a look at how to actually make a chord progression from scratch so no scalar two no captain chords nothing like that we're just going to be diving straight into ableton so we might as well get started so diving into ableton you can see that i've actually created a midi track with a piano in there so i'll just drag this addictive keys vst onto an empty midi track and i'm just going to double click and make a new midi clip now this is called the piano roll and this is where we can obviously make our chord progressions our melodies anything we want and today like i said we're going to be making these chord progressions so i'm going to give you a quick rundown of what's what in here just before we start so i'm not going to cover everything but i'm just going to cover the most important things so over on the left over here we've got some settings where we can turn the loop on and off we can change the length as well of how many bars our midi clip is going to be so i'm going to keep that on four um and then in ableton 11 we've got this new feature over here which is the scale feature we can choose from our scales the major minor we've got a whole bunch of modes as well over here that we can mess around with i'm just going to turn that off for now and we've also obviously got our start position times our end times etc etc all of this section over here is more or less midi manipulation so we can half time it we can double it up in speed we can reverse invert legato duplicate randomize and sort out all this velocity stuff now we do have a couple more tabs but i'm not going to be getting into them in this video so i'm going to give you three formulas there's the major tried formula which is a 4 3 a minor triad formula which is a 3 4 so it's just the other way around and lastly the diminished formula which is a 3 3. now what do all these numbers mean well if we want to make a c major chord i'm going to pop my thumb on ac and we can see obviously over here and uh what was the major triad chord formula it was a four three wasn't it so we want to do is count up four notes chromatically so one two three four okay so that's four semitones now what was the rest of the formula it was a four three wasn't it so we want to do another three semitones away from this e now one two three there you go and that is our c major chord consisting of a c e and a g let's have a look at one more quick example let's go to a g major chord so i'm going to pop my thumb on a g and i'm going to apply the formula 4 3 so let's count up four notes one two three four one two three and that gives us the g major chord so it's really simple you can take this anywhere on any key and as long as you apply that 4 3 formula you're going to always get a major chord all right so even if we're in a black key one two three four one two three that's our f sharp major chord so let's have a look at the minor triad formula now remember what i said about the minor triad that formula had three four so it's just in reverse so if we want to find an a minor chord we're gonna pop our finger or our thumb on a and we're gonna count up three semitones one two three i wanna count up another four semitones one two three four and then we have our a minor let's try finding a c minor so i'm gonna pop my thumb on c and i'm gonna do a three four again one two three one two three four c minor chord and again guys just like the major chord you can take this any way you want all right you don't it's just not like it's not limited to only a few keys you can take it on any key around the keyboard and if you apply that four three formula for the major chord or a 3 4 for the minor it's always going to work there's no doubt about it and lastly i want to go over the diminished chord which was a 3 3 again three semitones and three semitones so if i wanted to find out a c diminished chord thumb on c count up three notes one two three count up three notes again one two three and hear that really high tension you can really hear that's a unsettling chord isn't it it's something that a lot of producers sort of stay away from because they hear this chord and they don't think of it as a nice chord they think it sounds a little bit too dark and a little bit too uh stressful to use but if you know how to use diminished chords right they can actually be really handy so that's all the formulas right we've got the four free formula which is the major the three four formula which is the minor and then we've got the three three which is that diminished chord so let's actually go on and plug some chords in well i want to plug a major chord i want to do let's start with a c major chord and you guys need to remember i already know music theory so it might be a little bit easier for me uh but feel free to watch this over and over again uh if you don't get it or if you've got any problems drop a comment down below and i'll try my best to help you guys out so want to make a c major chord so we got c that's four semitones away and that's three semitones away so all we have to do is i'm just gonna hold that chord and i'm gonna just click just double click actually uh just to create these midi notes gonna select them all and i'm gonna drag them out simple simple brilliant cool so where can we go from here because um you know this is now again where a lot of people get stuck and you're like i don't don't really know where to go with chords well it's actually really easy you need to know your skills in order to really make chord progressions however ableton does have this scale feature and it can help it can be of big help um but if you actually learn the scales on top of your head this sort of renders a little bit useless if you play the keys and stuff like that but if you don't play the keys it's all good that's why we're here i'm trying to teach you guys what you actually need to know in order to create a chord progression so we've got our first chord which is a c major let's go with another chord let's go with uh an f major now so we locate our f and we can see it's highlighted blue isn't it because we're in the key of c major we can see that our scale is showing us in the key of c major as well over here and it's highlighted blue so i'm going to pop that there and what comes next was we've got one two three four because i'm doing an f major chord one two three [Music] and then we have an f major chord so i'm gonna drag that out and then let's go to a six chord we're going to play it up here i'm going to drag that out and again that is one two three one two three four to make that a minor chord guys if you are having a little bit of trouble keeping up with me um don't worry i'm gonna explain everything in a little bit more detail as soon as i finish this chord progression off so uh don't worry i'm not leaving you guys in the dark or anything over here so uh i'm gonna put in a last chord let me go to uh maybe a g major chord so i'm gonna do that and that there you go let me just move this down over here and move that down over there there you go perfect so if i play this whole chord progression let's have a listen to it [Music] so you can hear the chord progression and it's really basic is it a chart topping chord progression um probably i mean it's a it's a one four six five chord progression which is a really popular progression but um as it sounds right now as it stands right now it's no it doesn't sound that good so let me explain the logic behind how i got here all right um now every chord that you can think of belongs to a specific key it can actually belong to multiple keys and this whole thing sparks up the debate of what key am i in am i in c major am i in a minor am i g major et cetera et cetera we're not going to have a look at that in this session because that's going to get a little bit too deep and i can't be asked for that headache right now so um how do we go about finding the right chords well this is really easy if we take the c major scale i'm going to play c major scale for you so i'm going to put my thumb on c c major scale is really simple c d e f g a b and c so it's all the white notes c to a c all the white notes that equals the major scale or c major scale at least um now every one of these notes in the c major scale c d e f g a b and then back to a c and so on and so forth we can create a chord on we can create a major chord in some of them and we can create a minor chord on some of them so what you need to remember is the one the four and the five of a major scale so the one being a c what's a four of c major one two three four okay so f is the four and five are all major chords so again one four and a five of any major scale not just c major of any major scale is a major chord now what are the minor chords the two and the three and the six are minor chords so that's two three and six are minor chords so let's find out what the second third and the sixth degree of the c major scale is one two three so we've got two and three already here that's the d and the e four five six and an a so we've got d e and then a so we can build minor chords on these so we know how to build a minor chord right is say what a three four if you said a three four good stuff if we build a uh d minor chord that formula three four put a thumb on d one two three one two three four really easy okay we could do the same thing with uh the e as well one two three one two three four again super easy so again just a quick recap on the first degree on the fourth degree and on the fifth degree they have major chords belonging to them all right and the one the four and the five of the c major is c is the one f is the four g is the five right one two three four five yeah the two three and the six are minor chords the d is the two e is the three six is the a two three four five six and that sort of leaves out this fella the b so on the seventh degree one two three four five six seven it's always a diminished chord all right and that's for any major scale not minor scales we're not getting confused with minus girls only four major scales so how do we make a diminished chord what's the formula it's a three three right one two three one two three and there's that ugly high tension chord that probably not a lot of people want to use in their music but like i said if you know how to use it you can definitely make good use of diminished chords in your tracks so what about minor keys well this is where it gets interesting because we've got three types of minor scales right we've got the natural minor scale which is going to be the one that i'm going to be referring to we've got the harmonic minor and the melodic minor the harmonic and melodic we are not going to be having a look at those today all right let's get in a little bit um too in depth and i don't again really want to confuse you guys too much so natural minor does the information from this whole major scale theory to the minor sort of translate no it doesn't all right let me explain why remember i told you that on a major scale the one four and the five are major chords the two uh three and the six are minor and the seven is a diminished well on the whole minor aspect the whole minus side is completely different all right so the one four and the five of any minor scale is a minor chord all right the two is a diminished chord and that leaves the three the six and the seven which are major chords so i know that's a lot of information to uh digest and i don't want to show you guys a in-depth example of that because i don't want to confuse you too much i've always told um anyone that sort of asked me about music theory or any of my students or anything like that i always say to him look learn your major scale theory first and then understand the minor scale theory because we want to learn obviously the natural minor the harmonic and the melodic minor so always learn your major scale theory first and the minor side sort of just fits in becomes much easier to learn over time so hopefully you guys are actually still with me um because i know it's a lot of information to digest and if you are getting some value from this video make sure you like you comment you subscribe to the channel as well it'll be much appreciated all right let's get back to it so you can see i've got my four chords here right one two three and four now if you look at the length of these chords i've actually got the length going from one to two and then the next chord starts on the two goes to three and then three to the four and then four to the five right and uh this is because i changed that length the midi clip bar length over here so by default ableton will have that at one so you can change that to a four bar or an eight bar so if i change it to an eight bar just as an example uh we'll see that obviously this whole thing doubles up now and this allows us to obviously copy and paste our chords over and sort of invert them and make them slightly different so they just um don't sound too repetitive basically so i'm going to leave it back to four for now now as i mentioned they go from one to two two to three three to four four to five okay now what i see a lot of beginners doing is they would either continue this chord progression um but keep on changing it over and over again they don't have a some sort of uh consistency going throughout their chord progression um or they would just have these four chords looping over and over again so we've either got on one side people that are just literally looping over and over again these four chords all we got on the flip side of that people use this one midi clip as one chord progression and then they think that they need to add another midi clip with a different chord progression and again another midi clip with a different chord progression and so on and so on and so forth i'm not telling you guys to you know get really creative and start learning all this crazy stuff uh what i usually do is i sort of have my length that round about eight bars and if i've got my main progression what i'll do is i'll just literally copy and paste it over and i would adjust the second half ever so slightly all right that way it gives the listener some sort of fresh sense of um you know just new sonic's moving or a new chord progression moving and most of the time i just invert my chords now what do i mean by invert the chords well you see how we've got the one chord the second the third and the fourth right if we can see there's a big jump between the one and that chord the second chord and there's another big jump between the second and the third chord so we want to actually make these a little bit more closer together just for a closed voicing now is this a rule do you have to do this no you don't of course you don't need to do it um it will just make the chords just uh seem a little bit more easier to listen to so if i actually done that on the turnover on the second half all right and then i'm gonna a b them so you can hear the difference uh let me put this one down and i'm gonna put these two uh down as well that's great and i'm going to pop these two down so on this side we've got our normal root position chords and on this side we've inverted some chords and you can see that i've just grabbed the top notes or the top two notes forever and just brought them down an octave and we can really see the difference right it's got huge jumps got huge like gaps in there if that makes sense so this chord is way lower than this chord etcetera etcetera but over here it's more maintained it actually looks pretty cool so i'm going to play that for you and let's have a listen back to it [Music] an inversion do you hear how much closer this chord progression was over here right sounding much more closer and just much more like with it if that makes sense and again the timing is still the same right because remember we're going five to a six it's only being held for again one bar isn't it so five to the six six to the seven seven to the eight eight to the nine and then obviously back to the one now if i was to do this chord progression properly i would most likely drop these two down i'll drop these down as well and maybe i'll drop this one down like that and then maybe on that last chord over there on the turnover because obviously we want to keep the second part different so if this is part b that turnover is part b and this is part a we've got something basic happening from chord to chord to chord to chord and then we've got part b which is chord to chord to chord to the last chord which is slightly different it's a different inversion now if you guys want to learn more in depth about inversions and stuff like that i've actually got a free music theory for producers course so i'm going to pop the link in the description below make sure you sign up for it's completely free there's no strings attached to anything i believe there's like over 40 videos and i go into music theory specifically designed for producers to get you guys a better understanding chord progressions and how scales work and all of that stuff so i really given proper in-depth uh explanation of everything in that course so make sure you go sign up for that course as well so let's have a listen to our chord progression so do you see how this gives a nice little finishing right it doesn't sound the same as this it's the same chord but all i've done was move that b1 octave up and it just sort of gives it a nice little change now we can select all of these and we can obviously half time reverse them invert them we could do a bunch of stuff over here and i'm going to leave that up to you guys to just experiment with um i don't really use this section too much because i like to play a lot of my stuff in i don't really again i don't really pencil in too many melodies either if i do pencil in i sort of play the chords on the keys first i know you can't see the keys but my keys are over here i'll play them in and then i'll pencil in um so yeah i don't really use that part so that is everything about making chord progressions so if you guys learned something make sure you like this video hit that subscribe button comment down below um and i'll catch you in the next one see you guys soon [Music] you

Channel: NXISEWOLF

Views: 6,290

Keywords: how to make chords in ableton live 11, how to make chords in ableton, how to make chords in ableton live 10, ableton live, ableton live 11, ableton 11, ableton 11 tutorial, ableton live 11 tutorial, chord progression ableton, music theory for producers, ableton 11 new features, new ableton 11, chord progressions in Ableton, how to improve as a music producer, nxisewolf, manny nxisewolf, ableton live tutorial, ableton, how to write chords in ableton, ableton scales and chords

Id: UYkgv-vTPAQ

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021