How To Make Progressive House with Ableton Live 11

[Music] hey guys jules here with ableton tips and today we're going to be making this progressive house loop okay so let's just make sure we're in arrangement view by hitting this button over here or tab on our keyboard first thing i want to do is just make our drone note which is just how i like to start all my songs so we're just going to go to our first midi channel over here and highlight from 17 up till 25 that's 8 bars and i'm going to hit ctrl shift and m and we're going to be working in a sharp minor today so let's just place our notes here on a sharp three and just drag it out across the whole midi channel and then we're going to find a sound called descending dreams so if we go into sounds here and i'm just going to expand this a little bit here so we can see what we're reading and we go to descending dreams it's in ambient and evolving double click on that and let's just hear that [Music] okay that's good and i'm just going to turn down the volume here by dragging the slider down a bit i just want to add a little bit of reverb to this so we're going to search hybrid and because we're in sounds that's not going to work so we have to go down to all results and then we can double click on hybrid reverb and i'm just going to change the algorithm to shimmer here and turn the dry weight up to 100 and that's kind of pushed it out to the sides and it's just a bit better for the final mix down okay next up we're going to make our arpeggio and before we do that i just want to change the tempo here to 124 bpm so you just click up there and you can type 124 and then we're going to make another midi clip just by doing the same thing before highlight ctrl shift m and then we're going to grab operator so just type operator and we're going to actually design the sound ourselves but let's first put down a few midi notes um just so that we can hear the sound while we're designing it okay so i'm just going to zoom in over here so i can see the notes more clearly and we're going to place a note here at a sharp three at the moment it's just a normal sine wave uh that's fine let's just make the first part of our melody okay so the first part of our melody is going to go like this [Music] and then we're going back down to the a sharp and we're going to go up to f here and then down to the d sharp and then up to g sharp and then we're going to place another note here at a sharp and i'm just going to zoom out over here and we're going up an entire octave here to the next a sharp so that sounds like this and then back down to the g sharp and then dropping back down to the a sharp and then we're going up to c sharp over here down to the a sharp to the c and then down to the g sharp okay but we want to add another note down here because this is kind of like the bottom of our arp which kind of has its own rhythm that if you focus on the art for long enough you'll start picking up this rhythm if i just mute these you'll hear the rhythm over here so i've just hit zero on my keyboard to mute those and i want another note over there so if i had to loop the section then you'd be able to hear the melody or the rhythm okay um so let's just re-enable these and then we can hear it okay i'm just going to mute this string here so we don't have to listen to it the entire time um so now you can see it's being looped over and over again but i don't want it to be completely the same every time so i'm going to turn off loop here and then we'll just look at the same way that we saw it before which was we're seeing it in these full eight bars over here and i'm just going to copy this over four times so i just highlighted that all and i hit ctrl d and that's how you just duplicate and on the last note i'm going to bring this g sharp up here and then we're going to duplicate this entire section over ctrl d and then on this last little section over here i'm going to take this c sharp note and shift it up to d sharp and that's going to sound like this on the last one so you've got two small variations this one happening over here and then this one okay so let's design a sound for this now instead of just using this sine wave we're going to change this to a saw wave and let's bring down the frequency a bit let's bring the filter down to around 600. [Music] and then bring the envelope up a bit we can get it sounding nice and bright and let's just bring down that volume bring down the resonance a bit okay then i just want to change the filter here to prd which is just a different model and that gives us the ability to add some drive to it and so i want to give the filter a bit of drive okay then we're just going to shape the envelope of the first oscillator here we're going to click on envelope and we're going to bring down this little box over here we're going to give it about 900 milliseconds of decay [Music] and let's give it a bit of a bit more release [Music] i just want to hear those notes slightly overlapping a bit and then we're going to go into another oscillator over here we just need to make sure that we set it to serial mode so that these oscillators are all coming out independently they're not modulating each other so we're just going to click over here and change the algorithm by clicking on this one okay so now i just want to thicken up the sound a bit by going to another oscillator and just pitching this down one octave by changing the course to 0.5 and i just want to lay this in i'm going to change it from a sine wave to a saw wave [Music] and we're just going to slowly turn it up until we can hear it [Music] okay that's good and i also want to add a little bit of noise to it so i'm going to click on this oscillator add noise white [Music] okay so next up we just want to try and spread this out a bit and we can turn on this this pitch envelope too because we want a bit of pitch attack so i'm just going to turn on this button over here then that enables this pitch mode and i'm going to bring down the decay because it's going to otherwise it's too long i'll show you what i mean so let me just turn up the pitch envelope to 100 here and now you can really hear that pitch happening but i just want a really short pitch decay right at the beginning so i'm going to bring this down to like 13. [Music] and that just gives it a bit more attack and then we're going to turn the spread up to 100 so that's nice and wide and then lastly i want to add a little bit of movement using this lfo so if we turn on the lfo uh currently you'll hear it's mapped to the pitch so you'll hear this but we don't want it to do that and we can change the destination here by turning off a b c d and turning on the filter and then the envelope is going to be modulating the filter up and down so now if i play that [Music] and turn off this little button here this r to tonal free trigger we'll hear the lfo now closing and opening the filter [Music] as long as i turn up the amount a bit okay it's a bit quick so i'm going to slow it down [Music] and we don't want the amount to be that much i'm just going to turn that down bit [Music] okay then we can go here into time and we can also add a little bit of random panning to just slightly pan the voices around every once in a while [Music] okay i think that's quite a nice setup and now we can just add some delay to it so we're just going to search delay and we're just going to bring down the dry weight a bit and turn on ping pong [Music] and then lastly some hybrid reverb and i'm also going to be using the shimmer um algorithm just because i really like the high end of that if i make it 100 weight you can hear what i mean if we compare that to the normal one very different sound [Music] and we can take out some of the mid-range using this eq over here so i'm just going to drag this up [Music] okay so i'm happy with how that reverb sounds now i'm just going to bring down the dry wet [Music] to around 35 there okay we also need to eq this um just because we've added noise and stuff and a bit of distortion there's going to be a lot of muddiness happening around here so it's going to grab an eq 8. then just have a look at this you can see all of this noise and stuff happening down there i'm just going to cut out some of that with this um low cut drag it up to here [Music] okay next up is the baseline i'm gonna hit ctrl shift and t and we're gonna make a another midi clip this time i'm just going to do it halfway um and then we'll just loop it so i'm just going to hit ctrl shift and m and then we're going to use operator again for the baseline so let's just open operator and now we're just going to place some notes down before we design our sound so i want to go down all the way to the base regions so let's try a sharp zero yeah that sounds quite subby and we're gonna make like quite a rolling kind of progressive bass line so i'm gonna be using lots of sixteenth notes here i'm gonna place a note here on this first sixteenth and then just hit ctrl d a few times and let's while we've got these four down let's first make the sound because it's kind of hard to you know create a vision for the track if you don't have the sound right with when it comes to the bass line that's fine okay so i'm just going to change the first oscillator's wave to a saw and we're going to bring the filter down to around here and i'm just going to solo this quickly so we don't have to hear everything else every time and then we're going to go into a over here and we're going to go to the envelope shape and just drag this down so it becomes a bit more plucky [Music] just like that so decay of 566 is probably fine okay so then we're going to go into our filter and just add some envelope amount here [Music] let's add a little bit of drive to it too so we're going to just change this from clean to prd and then give it a little bit of drive [Music] that sounds like enough to me okay we're going to click on the envelope again here and we're just going to bring down the decay of the filter let's bring up the envelope amount even more and then i'm going to go and just change the algorithm by clicking over here to serial and go into this oscillator and pitch it up to 2 so it's one octave higher and change it to a sawwave and then we're just going to turn this one up and i also want to add some spread to this i don't want it to be just dead down the center i think 100 is fine and now we can listen to these all in context with each other okay so now we can make our baseline i'm just going to turn on the metronome so we can kind of fill out a groove and so it's going to go let's turn down this operator a bit [Music] and then we can go do do do do do do do do do okay then let's uh copy this over down to the f sharp so just highlighted that all and then hold ctrl and click and drag and then let's hear it [Music] okay so now we can make a little bit of a change over here let's drag out this note so it's just a little bit different we don't want to repeat the exact same pattern every time otherwise it's going to get a bit you know tiring to the ear and then let's make these ones sixteenths and then we can go up to the g sharp over here and just duplicate this by holding ctrl d and we can make this pattern kind of follow this same pattern over here so i'm just going to actually drag this hold ctrl and drag this down here then this one matches this one so we've got like an a b a b maybe we should make it like an a b a c might be a good idea uh we can do that by let's say just dragging out one of these notes or something [Music] okay and then we're going to drag this mini clip across as long as loop is enabled here we can drag this over and i'll just duplicate it and then i'm going to increase the entire length of this by 2 so i'm going to hold alt and click on one of these arrows just to close them all then drag or highlight all of this and then hit ctrl d and then expand it all again and what i want to do in this repetition is just change the bass line slightly so i'm going to drag this note on this one up to here so i go like this [Music] uh and then we can maybe drag this one up to here [Music] so now i've just got a bit of change between this first section and the second section okay so i'm just going to quickly name these and recolor them just for organization sake so we're going to click over here and hit ctrl r and name this pad and this one can be melody or arp and then i'm going to hit tab again and then this is going to be our base and then i just want to color my base a nice pink color over here and we're going to make the up and the pad this little bluish color select them all and right click and hit assign track color to clips you can close all of these and group them by selecting them all and hitting ctrl g and then we can rename the group instruments and now it's time to add some drums to our loop okay so we've provided this uh progressive housebeat free sample pack in the description you can go and download it now for to get the same drum sounds as me and we're going to grab our kick over here which is going to be this kick and we're just going to drop it onto our timeline on this audio channel and i'm just going to zoom in over here and place a kick on every beat so i'm just going to highlight this section and hit ctrl d and highlight this whole section and hit ctrl d until we have the entire loop covered and i'm just going to turn down the kick a bit [Music] okay that sounds good and let's add some side chain to it and the reason for side chain is we just want the instruments to all be ducking a bit when the kick hits so that we don't have the kick being masked by all the instruments so it's going to search for a compressor here and we're going to expand this and enable sidechain audio input from our kick and then we just have to drag this line down below where we see these kick wave forms [Music] i'm gonna bring up the frequency here so we're only taking the input from the high end of the kick and we get a nice point to work with instead of this you know long kick [Music] so you'll see the shape of the waveform changes as i adjust this frequency [Music] what i'm looking for is a nice point and that looks good to me so i'm just going to bring this down [Music] bring up the release a bit [Music] okay that sounds good then next up i'm going to go back into our sample pack and we're going to add this low percussion loop [Music] and these are just going to add a bit of groove with the bass and the kick so i'm just going to create a new midi channel a new audio channel here below this one by hitting ctrl t and then we can drag this drag this low perk loop in here [Music] and yeah we just need to turn that down until we can just hear it over the kick a little bit [Music] and that's just adding a nice bit of groove to it and i'm just going to drag this out so that it loops through the whole section okay next up we need to add our clap and we're only going to bring the clap in on the b section of this drop the first section is not going to have any clap so we're going to add a new midi channel we're going to do this with midi so i'm going to hit ctrl shift and t i'm just going to highlight two beats over here and i'm going to hit ctrl shift and m and then we're going to place a note here at c3 and we're just going to drag it on on this 1.2 we're just going to drag it all the way across and then we can drag this all the way across and that places a note on every second kick for us you can see here it lines up with every second kick [Music] okay so now we can double click on the midi channel here and we can just take this clap and drop it over here and then you can hear the clap playing if the clap doesn't sound right you can always just check that your note is on c3 and not another note because this will either pitch it up or down okay let's just bring down our clap a bit [Music] and just while we're doing that i'm going to turn this pad down even more okay next up let's add some hats and we're just going to use the stock 909 hats that come with ableton for this and we're going to process them a bit to fit the mix nicely uh let's add another midi channel ctrl shift t and a quick way to add a midi clip instead of hitting ctrl shift m you can just double click and it'll add a clip the size of the whatever block you're zoomed into and we are going to do the eighth note hat first so we've got to add a note here and highlight this and just hit ctrl d and another note there and that's just the you know the offbeat hat so we're going to search for 909 hi-hat go to all results oops 909 hi-hat and we're going to grab this open hat and just drag it uh we just have to double click on midi over here and then we drag it onto here and we can hear this hard enough it's too loud i'm going to turn it down [Music] it's also a bit too thick and full especially for the style so we're going to high pass it a bit we don't actually need to use an eq we can click on controls here and we can just go to this filter section over here and change the filter to a high pass filter and we can bring down the frequency to let's say around three kilohertz [Music] sounds good to me i'm just going to drag this out [Music] okay it's also a bit long than the hi-hat so we can just shorten it here using sample and we can change it to one-shot mode and just drag this point down [Music] and now it's just cutting off a bit strangely so we can use the fader to fade it out a bit [Music] okay that sounds good to me let's add our 16th note hi-hat pattern now so we're going to hit ctrl shift and t for a new midi clip and i'm just going to double click here to add on midi clip and we go to c3 and we're just going to double click over here and add notes to every 16th and highlight this and do that again ctrl d drag this out all the way to the end i'm gonna grab our closed hi-hat and place it over there way too loud we're gonna bring that down [Music] i'm gonna do something similar to before we're gonna go into controls and we're just going to change this to a high pass filter and bring it down [Music] turn it up maybe a bit more [Music] okay and then we can add a bit of random pan to this over here [Music] and i'm also going to steal the compression from here the side chain compression i'm going to hit ctrl c and then just hit ctrl v over here and that's just going to make our hi-hats pump a bit a little bit which can feel quite nice [Music] probably want this to be a little bit longer the release when we bring it up to around 70. i'm just going to bring this threshold up a bit [Music] if i solo that you can hear the compressor if i turn it off and you can hear that bounce that it adds i'm also going to sidechain this to our open hi-hat uh just because it's a bit more natural you don't really hear in you know in real life it's impossible to play an open hat and a closed hi-hat at the same time so if we just take this compressor here and hit ctrl d we can just change the audio input on this second one to the open hi-hat and we can bring down the threshold a little bit and also bring down the release quite short and now every time i open the hi-hat place this will also duck away okay let's just hear our drums now next up i want to add a bit a few snares here and there just to give it a bit more of like that warehouse-y dance floor kind of feeling so let's uh go back to our sample pack and we're gonna add this snare over here we're gonna i'm gonna add it into the instruments group just because i want them to be side chained so i'm just going to hit ctrl t in the group and grab a new channel here new audio channel and let's just drag this onto the audio channel and see where it might fit i think over here somewhere [Music] yeah that sounds good to me and i want to add a little bit of delay to it so we're going to search delay here i'm going to change this to one and ping pong and bring down the dry weight a bit and let's just hear that [Music] yes that sounds pretty cool we could probably add a little bit of reverb to it too so i'm just going to grab hybrid reverb again and i'm going to leave it on dark hole because i want it to feel like a whole reverb i'm also going to go to the eq and just take out most of the low and mid range because i don't want that to get all muddy [Music] bring down the dry weight to about 30 okay and then i want to repeat that over here at the end but i want it to be slightly different so we're going to use a different sample here i'm going to go back into the free sample pack and sorry the free sample pack and we're going to grab this orchestral snowfall and i'm just going to hit ctrl t for a new channel and we're going to place this right here at the end just make sure that warping is correct okay that's fine and let's just hear that [Music] and let's just drag that down a bit [Music] okay so it sounds a bit strange to me to have a drum fill without a crash so i usually like to add a crash or some sort of effect after that i'm gonna hit ctrl t over here and i'm just gonna add this effects effect hit over here and let's just hear that i'm gonna turn down the volume on it [Music] okay i quite like that volume and i'm gonna turn off warping just because i don't like it when effect sounds are warped they don't need to be warped because they're not rhythmic um and i'm gonna add some delay to it so let's just search delay and i want this to like really like ring on for ages so i'm going to set it to quarter notes so just change that to 4 over here i'm not going to use ping pong i'm going to bring down the dry wet a bit and turn up the feedback pretty high to like 80 and let's just hear how that sounds [Music] okay and then we can add a little bit of energy to the second half by changing our open heart a bit at the moment it's really short so we can take this fade out and just slightly adjust it to make it a little bit more open and to do that we need to turn on automation mode so it's just this little button up here make sure it's blue and then i can adjust this fade out so if i click on it there'll be a little red line that pops up over here we can click there and then we can create a point and then we can click here and create another point and drag that point up and i think we actually sorry we need to bring drag that point down and you can see that hat has opened up a bit and let's just hear it [Music] yeah so that's opened up a bit if you compare these two sections you can hear it's gone a bit longer okay so now i just feel like the arp is playing a little bit higher than i would like it to and i'm going to try and bring it down an octave so i'm just going to open this up and we're going to go into the midi over here i'm going to copy highlight both of them and then click in here and hit ctrl a and then hold shift and hit up sorry and hit down and then it drops it down an octave i'm going to turn up the volume here a [Music] bit [Music] and then i also want to do a little bit more to this harp in terms of automation we're going to go into the frequency over here and we're just going to do a little bit of automation work i'm going to click on frequency and i'm going to just do this by ear i'm going to click and create random points while i'm playing it [Music] and then i'm going to add another oscillator i think to this just because i want the b section to still be a bit more different and i think mixing in a new oscillator would be kind of cool so we're going to go back here to this level and we're going to automate this and i'm going to change this wave first to a square wave to square d and then you'll hear if i start mixing this in it gives it a bit of a different character so now because i've clicked on here i can automate this and i think we could probably fade this in from about here and then get this to turn up across this section so let's just hear how that sounds [Music] i think that's a bit much to come in that high over here i'm going to bring it down [Music] bring this down a bit [Music] i also want to increase the reverb amount a little bit over here [Music] and and the delay i'm going to add a little bit more delay just turn up the volume a little bit [Music] and then we're just going to turn up the hi-hats a little bit more both of them it's add this while we're listening to it [Music] okay we can we can't really hear this low perk anymore so i'm going to turn that up a touch [Music] and we can turn up the snare a bit more [Music] okay i just want to repeat these snares over here i'm going to highlight this section and just hit ctrl d so that we can hear the snare over here and to change it up slightly i'm going to drag this snare across and have it landing on the last kick so that this snare feels just slightly different so you've got like a an a b an a and a c kind of pattern over there okay now i'm just going to go into the master and add a limiter so that we can just push the volume up a little bit more before we have our final listen so i'm going to go to the limiter and just turn up the gain a little bit [Music] until i see this needle start moving [Music] and i'm also going to add a little glue compressor over here just before the limiter and we're going to turn on soft clipping and we're just going to turn up this makeup gain until we see that little light uh go yellow a little bit there we go just a little bit and that's also gonna kind of act like a limiter so now i've got two small limiters happening and we've got a little bit of loudness out of this loop okay so let's have a listen to our final [Music] loop thanks for watching the tutorial guys i hope you enjoyed it if you did please leave a like a comment and subscribe to the channel you can also support us by visiting us on productionmusiclive.com thank you and goodbye

Channel: Ableton Tips

Views: 14,100

Keywords: Ableton Live, Ableton Live Tutorial, ableton live 10 tutorial, Ableton, Ableton Tips, abletontips, PML, Ableton Live Beginners, Ableton Tricks, Progressive House, Ableton Progressive House, Matt Fax

Id: 5t-t-BF4tZs

Length: 41min 20sec (2480 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021