How to Write Chords & Melodies in Ableton Live 12 - Beginners Tutorial

hi my name is Boris and in today's video I'm going to show you how to write Melodies In Ableton it's fairly basic what we're going to be talking about here and after today's video you should be able to write Melodies yourself easily before we get into it if you like what we are doing on this channel make sure to subscribe youve got more videos on live 12 coming up and if you'd like to learn chords and Harmony check out our music theory for melodic hous and technno course all right so let's get started so what we have here is a simple melodic house loop I will play it too and then we'll recreate the cards and the melody all right so if we take this clip here with the pad and we put it on a piano and we do the same thing with the ARP which is the m we get this right as you can see this is not going to be a complex Melody let's just get started I'm going to make a brand new Medi clip if you don't have these tracks set up like this you can just go into the library and search for piano maybe grand piano actually and if we go into the instruments tab uh maybe we can drop this one any grand piano will do sounds fine if you want to make it a bit softer you can just search for velocity double click it and you can just decrease the out High knob here which is going to decrease the velocity of your incoming Medi notes if you want to play this instrument you need to have the truck armed so clicking this button right here and you can play the mini keyboard or if you don't have the Mini keyboard you need to press this button and then you can press keys on your computer keyboard from a to L so I'm pressing a g and K so I'm just going to double click in one of these slots here if you're not in this view make sure you have switched from the session to the arrangement by clicking one of these buttons or just pressing Tab and I'm going to double click here the piano roll is going to open and you can also open it up and close it here okay so first of all let's change the length you want the clip to have eight bars so I'm just going to type eight here instead of one under Loop length and make sure the loop is enabled here okay so now you see that the grid is very narrow and we can make it wider to more easily input our notes we can just right click and set it to one bar for example okay so now any note that we input here is going to be one bar we have folded the piano row here into the scale and we have the c major scale selected you can un un folded here by unclicking scale if you don't have the scale notes highlighted you can just press this button right here and it's going to highlight them in purple we are just going to stick with the c major scale so you can leave it as it is and we are only going to work with the nodes of the scale so if we're not going to be using these Black Keys let's just disable them by clicking the scale button and we're just left with the white keys okay so the progression is fairly simple we have three chords we have one cord stting at D we have one chord starting at F and we have one chord which is C the Tonic If you don't hear the notes that you're inputting make sure this button is selected in order to build your Chords it's very very simple all you need is just skipping every other note and you can make it even easier because now you have to double click to add a note you can just press the b key and your mouse is going to turn into a pencil and you can just Skip One Note click and add the f boom add the a so now what we have if we go back into the regular cursor this is the cord that we have and this is the D chord now I have a really cool cheat sheet that I'm going to show you which is going to tell you if this chord is a minor card the major card what kind of cards do we have in the c major scale okay so as you can see the cards in the c major scale look like this and you can see that between the notes it's not always the same distance so here we have three empty notes Here and here only two between the first and the second note that's what makes a cord major or minor and we can fold this scale so that it's a bit easier to see that all these chords are basically just skipping one note of the scale between each note so we folded the scale so we can see how the chords are constructed we're basically skipping one note to construct a Triad and in the c major scale three major chords are formed so the first the fourth and the fifth and we have also three minor chords which is the second the third and the six then we have the seven which is the diminished chord we're not going to be using that one at all so just don't worry about it for now feel free to screenshot this so when you're writing it's very handy to know whether your card is a major card or a minor card basically the distinction is that the major card is going to sound happy and the minor card is going to sound sad and the diminished card for you probably is going to sound a bit funny at first okay so the D is the second so you probably know by now that this is a minor card the f is the fourth so this is the major chord and the C is of course a major chord because we are in the c major scale so here are our three [Music] chords let's space them out a bit differently I'm going to maybe disable the preview take these and use the right arrow to move this and I'm going to take this one and also move it what I'm going to do now is just deselect everything thing go to this tab here and press Legato we have extended all these cards over the entire [Music] clip it's basically much much slower now because we have a longer Melody to play Okay so let's take these chords for now and put them in octave lower so we're going to select them all and press the shift key and the down arrow and now we're not playing C2 but D2 starting from this note so this is going to sound a bit lower and we're going to build some more interesting sounding cords than this you can use your scroll wheel to move here or you can scroll here by clicking and dragging this area and if you want to zoom in and out you can just drag this area right here the kind of ruler we're going to add a base note to the first cord you can take this note click on it hold control and drag it down onto D1 so it's going to sound a bit Fuller now we're going to do the exact same thing for the second chord so clicking this one holding control and dragging it down and I'm also going to do the same thing with C so calling C putting it down here and you can this way create more interesting chord variations so let's listen to what this sounds like sounds quite Grand it's not a necessity to keep every note so we can maybe disable this F because we already have it as a Basse note here so let's listen to it now I'm going to make this note a bit shorter so I'm going to click on it hold the end of it and just drag it this way and now we're going to do something more interesting we're going to use this note here and so we're not skipping over one note so we're kind of going against the rules here but that's what you can absolutely do and this way you create more interesting chords so let's hear what it sounds like and of course if you want to play you don't need to play it from the start you can just play it from this part here so if you click on the ruler here under the loop brace you can basically preview it from any moment pretty much in time so this already sounds much more elaborate I'm going to do the same trick so just add a Basse note from C2 to C1 and I'm going to take the E move it an octave up so not going to copy it just press shift the up Arrow let's hear what this sounds like this sounds very Grand and in order to make the timber a bit more interesting we can also move it one step down and then we can also make this note a bit shorter and add a note here so we're repeating the note here and the last thing that we're going to do here is expand this option right here if you don't see it make sure you click this button right here you can expand this basically click contrl and a or command and a on Mac and you can drag this bar here to set the velocity so the higher the velocity basically the louder the notes are Maybe let's stick around 100 and bear in mind that I've taken a velocity device and I've put it before the ground piano beforehand and I've already lowered it to 74 so if you want to do this without the velocity then this is going to be much lower maybe around 50 so let's preview the entire sequence that we've made it's a very long progression so I'm going to make the tempo a bit faster for this preview [Music] okay so let's go back to the default Tempo and I'm going to close this and let's write the melody I'm just going to double click an empty slot so we still have the c major scale selected that's perfect we can fold the velocities we can right click and set the grid first of all let's set it to quarter notes here and we can also make the loop a bit longer maybe let's not go into eight maybe let's set it to four uh so I'm doing what I'm doing is just clicking this this one and pressing the up and down arrow until I get four so the simplest Melody would be maybe just playing the C note because this note is going to fit with everything here so we could play just the C note let's play it but this is incredibly boring so let's go back I'm just going back with control and z or command and Z on Mac so let's trite the sort of arpeggio here we're going to start with G3 and go back to C so let's hear what this sounds like we can duplicate these two notes over the entire clip so just pressing command or control and D after selecting these and let's hear it and I want to move around the top notes so let's go down here let's go two steps down here and here I want the melody to kind of turn around to go back to the G so I'm going to go down one step just like we're doing just descending the top notes and then I'm going to go back here and then go up so it goes up and lands on the G here so let's hear it once again let's try that again let's uh double click and an empty Med slot and let's increase the length to four but this time let's go into eight nodes and let's do the exact same thing so going from G Toc and I'm going to duplicate this and do a bit of a different pattern I'm too high so I can select all the notes controll or command and a and then shift and down arrow let's go two steps down and let's go down here as well and then turn around this might sound a bit too loud so maybe we can lower the velocity is here it's not exactly the kind of Rhythm that we're looking for in order to do the Rhythm from the track we need to right click once again and set the grid this time to 16th notes and we're going to be moving around the notes a bit so let's delete these notes once again okay so we're going to be adding a bit more of an interesting Rhythm and so this is the area that we're going to be working with let's first create the Rhythm and then we'll move around the notes so let's do a sort of dotted Rhythm which means that we're going to be skipping over two 16 notes Here skipping over two skipping over two and skipping over two and here we're going to be just skipping over one so let's hear the Rhythm now and let's take every other note I'm just holding shift to do that and I'm dragging them into G so let's hear it we can also extend these notes selecting all of them dragging the right end and we can duplicate this entire thing and we can do the same thing as before so just downwards three steps down and then doing a turnaround at the end and this is also going to sound a bit harsh so maybe let's lower the velocity and hear it and if you want to make the base pattern it's also very easy and we can take the chords progression that we've made put it onto the base track and just delete all the higher keys so we're just left with the Basse notes and let's just check whether we're playing in the correct octave let's go control and a so to select everything command and a on Mac shift arrow and up okay sounds good enough let's play everything together now [Music] and if you'd like to view both Clips at once you can just click on the ARP and hold control and go to the pad click on this one you have to of these enabled and you can switch between which of these is on top with these ribbons at the top the only reason why the pad is sort of in the same space as the ARP is that the synth is using a different octave so if we put it down by otive we can see it that it overlaps like this okay I hope you will find these Melody writing techniques useful make sure to check out our music production Academy with start to finish courses on making tracks in various genes and if you'd like to learn more about Melody writing see our music theory for melodic hous and Technic course all links you will find in the video description make sure to subscribe and click the notification Bell if you enjoyed this video leave us a like write a comment and I will see you in the next ones [Music]

Channel: Ableton Tips by PML

Views: 3,635

Keywords: Ableton Live, Ableton Live Tutorial, ableton live 10 tutorial, Ableton, Ableton Tips, ableton tips and tricks, abletontips, PML, Ableton Live Beginners, Ableton Tricks

Id: oU21nmTC63A

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024