Making Your FIRST Song in Ableton Live 10 (Using Default Ableton Plugins/Instruments)

here's what we learn how to make in this video [Music] hello there my inspirations my name is inspir as per before we get into the video I just wanted to take a quick second to announce that my first ever EP dreamland is coming out November 3rd I believe that's one week after this video is released if you like what I do and you want to support my work consider checking that out okay so the goal of this video is to teach you how to make your first song in Ableton Live 10 I've made something similar in the past but admittedly it was a bit outdated so I wanted to take some time to more or less remake that video with some newfound knowledge and teach you how to make your first song from scratch I'm setting some ground rules for myself I will only be using default Ableton plugins just the stock instruments audio effects that come with Ableton know third-party plugins whatsoever also I'm gonna do my best to use instruments and audio effects that are new to Ableton Live 10 compared to Live 9 that way I can actually make this video be a little bit different and again more modern and up to date so without wasting any more time let's jump into it and learn how to make our first song you'll see here before me I have an empty Ableton session this is just the default layout when you open up a new Ableton session file new live set I'm gonna hit the tab key on my keyboard to switch to the arrangement view from here by default you'll see two MIDI tracks and two audio tracks to sum it up short and sweet MIDI tracks are where we're gonna draw in our notes that instruments can play audio tracks will be used to place samples first things first I like to set the BPM of my song just kind of give a rough ballpark estimate and then from there I can kind of alter it to my liking for now I'm feeling maybe something around 80 bpm the lower the number the slower the song the higher the number the faster next I want to start by making some chords this is just a personal preference I like to start with the chords and build from there to make some chords I first need to make a MIDI clip to do this I'm going to left click and drag for however long I want within a MIDI track in this case this is 17 bars long to make the MIDI clip I'm gonna right click on my highlighted area and select insert MIDI clip you see this piano roll pop up if you don't be sure to double-click your MIDI clip from here I can click right about here my cursor will make this symbol which allows me to click and drag upwards to expand the piano roll I can press the B button on my keyboard to switch to the draw mode you'll see this pencil pop up and I can draw in some notes but if I hit play the spacebar nothing happens that's because I don't have any instrument assigned so what I need to do is go over into my Ableton library and pick an instrument to do this I'm gonna go under instruments and select my instrument under these drop-down menus a new instrument - Ableton Live 10 specifically is the wave table so let's pretend I want to use the wave table instrument to do that I'm going to left-click and drag and drop onto my MIDI track I'm gonna go back into my piano roll again by double clicking and now if I hit play quick tip if you want to hear the sounds of your notes as you click on them say for example you can do so by clicking this button right here by default it's grayed out click it it turns blue now every time you draw on a note you can hear that sound just something to consider great so at this point I can now start to make my chords writing chords I feel like is out of scope for this video that's more or less a topic for another day but for now I'm just gonna whip up some quick notes just to get the point across okay so I've gone ahead and created a chord progression that I'm happy with for the sake of this video a few things that I did was that I just made some chords they hit every bar so for at the end I have them hitting every half bar and I also changed my BPM what I'm trying to get across here is that nothing's necessarily locked in stone stay in my BPM I can change that any time if I'm not necessarily feeling it also get creative with your chords you don't necessarily have to have them hit every bar you can change up a pattern maybe have them hit every quarter maybe you can have them hit in fifths in fact yeah that's something I kind of like so I'm gonna keep that so yeah I made it so that these are fits so now five chords hit in every bar and then at the end here I actually changed that pattern and I did a quarter followed by needs the takeaway here I think is that while music theory is important and good to know also the rhythm is very important too just because you have something that sounds nice doesn't mean it's catchy and potentially vice versa so this is a chord progression I'm happy with and for the most part I just want this to loop one thing you can do is you'll notice there's a bar up here I can click and drag I'm going to move this to the left and I'm gonna drag this right end over to the end and actually for now I'm just gonna go ahead and delete this end bit this tail it's not really needed so one thing I can do is I can right click this bar and select a loop so now I can press play and you'll notice that it loops through this MIDI clip now again here's another thing that's kind of out of scope of this video is just straight up sound design that's kind of a beast in itself so for the sake of again moving this video along what I'm gonna do is just use a preset that I like you can find presets by going under instruments and then under any of these subcategories so for example maybe I like the wave table it's new to Ableton Live 10 at which point I can look for some sounds that I like okay I found a preset that I like under mallets Fizz bells sounds pretty good to me now let's give our tracks some bass something to go underneath these chords to do this I'm gonna go ahead and copy this MIDI clip and paste it onto a different MIDI track and now that we have two layers of our song I'm gonna go ahead and rename these tracks just to kind of organize our project a little bit so over here this Fizz bells track I just want to rename that I'm gonna right-click and select rename I'm gonna name this flux and then this number to track the MIDI I'm gonna rename that to bass and I like to color these accordingly just again for the sake of organization right click and I can select a color and for now I'm actually just gonna go ahead and delete these two audio tracks just left click on them and press the delete button okay so now on to making our bass I don't want any hordes for my base I just want one single note to play and the note that I want to play is actually gonna be the roots of my chords so I'm gonna go into my base layers MIDI clip and just delete all of the notes in each chord except for the bottom I just want the last note on the stack this is the root and playing this alongside of the chords should make a sound that I am pretty happy with now I need to assign a bass instrument to my MIDI track I think maybe this one will be good let's try this out so one thing happened there that I'm not particularly happy with one thing you should always keep your eye on is the volume level of your master track the master track is the overall sound so what you hear when you press play all of the layers combined if you look down here there's a layer called master if I hit play right now there's kind of an issue this went into the red this is called clipping so basically he went over the desired threshold and we don't want that some ways to get around clipping are to adjust the volumes of your layers or to EQ them accordingly which we'll get into in just a minute but the point is I think this base layer is just a little bit too loud so I could either lower the volume of this base layer or I could look for a different instrument which I think I'm just gonna do anyways okay so I found a base that I like but this one actually is more or less just a sub base this is under operator base base sine like now this is defined as a sub base because it only takes up such low frequencies and I actually kind of like that so I think I'm gonna keep it now if you'll notice if I hit play again I'm clipping a little bit and actually it looks like my plucks are pretty loud to you so I kind of want to lower the volume of each of these tracks and then I'll EQ them so they fit in later but in order to lower the volume of your tracks just go over here where you see this zero click and drag and you can lower it I'm gonna keep this to about negative 2 decibels essentially just a little bit quieter I'm also gonna do the same with my bass maybe lower just a little bit I am still clipping but that's okay not to be worried I'll be sure to clean up the mix a little bit to make sure that's fine okay so this layer of base covers a lot of the low end frequencies but now I also want to cover some of the more mid-range it's nice to have the rumble of the sub base but I also want another layer on top of it so to do that I'm gonna rename this layer to sub base I'm gonna copy it paste it rename the second layer to maybe a mid base for this one I want to find another instrument something that maybe sounds a little bit grittier kind of hefty okay this one sounds kind of good at least for what I'm trying to do for my own organization's sake and also for some other reasons I'll get into it a little bit I want to group these two together to do that I'm gonna click right here hold the shift key and then select my other MIDI track at which point I can right click and select group tracks this creates a group so the two tracks are now bundled together I can now rename this to bass now what I want to do is EQ my layers a little bit EQ essentially lets me cut off certain ranges of frequencies that the sound takes out and if you do it right it can make your layers fit together like puzzle pieces to find e queuing we can go under audio effects and go to EQ I'm gonna use an EQ 8 for the sake of this video you can left-click and drag your audio effects and drop it onto your MIDI track so this is all my layer of sub bass and for now I only want to listen to this track to do that I'm gonna solo this track by left-clicking right here at this s button now if I hit play I only hear this track if you look down here you'll notice that this is the audio waveform of this track and for the most part I really only want frequencies below I don't know something like a hundred maybe 150 for this sub bass I'm gonna click one of these drop-down buttons and select this guy right here this creates a low-pass filter where I can set the frequency cutoff range I can do that by left clicking and dragging this little circle or by moving this frequency knob what this says is anything above 188 Hertz will not be played it'll just be cut out of the mix and so I'm gonna do what I said and more or less just go about 100 maybe 120 you can hear the difference if I toggle this low pass filter on or off [Music] you should hear some frequencies being cut out there when this low-pass filter is active I'm actually gonna change some of these notes a little bit by the way so I raised these notes over here by an octave because it didn't really sound good with the sub bass is too low now I want to do the same thing with my mid-range bass so I'm gonna solo this track and add an EQ filter onto it now I'm going to create a high-pass filter so the opposite of a low-pass filter cuts off anything below it I'm gonna set that at about where my sub bass cuts off so in this case maybe a hundred and eleven issue I also want to create another low-pass filter this time I'm looking for one maybe around 400 this is all really subjective it kind of depends on your specific mix I'm gonna go ahead and lower the notes by an octave again do you make our bass really stand out in this mix I'm actually gonna put another EQ on our bass group as a whole and then put a low-pass filter at about 400 so just really make sure that it's cutoff right there and then I'm going to put an EQ on our layer of plucks put in a high-pass filter at that same exact cutoff so it's more or less saying anything below 400 belongs to our basis anything above belongs to our plucks [Music] okay so I'm pretty happy with that now let's throw in some drums into the mix to do this I want to make another MIDI track I can right click in this empty space and select insert MIDI track next I'm going to go under drums drum rack and drag that on to that MIDI track I need to make a MIDI clip and then now if I left click on this MIDI track you can see this grid of squares this is where I can drag in drum kick samples to be played let's look under Ableton's default drums to see what there is go under drum hits let's go for some kicks and just find a sample that I like I kind of like this sample but I don't really like the end of it but that can be fixed so I'm gonna drag this into our drum rack and I'm gonna move these start and end Flags just to the parts that I want maybe have it fade out a little bit that sounds nice so now I can go into my piano roll and you'll notice that my sample is right here so I can draw in a kick pattern so this is what I drew up [Music] some things you can do here to spice up your drums are to add in some audio effects onto your kick layer so maybe an EQ if you go to EQ a drums able to provide some good default kick each cueing another thing we can do is sidechaining this makes the volume of other tracks dip every time this kick plays you can do that by going to audio effects compressor and drag that on to let's say our overall base layer now you'll see there's a compressor if I select this arrow sidechain and then go to drum rack let's actually rename that to kicks now you'll see that it is side change to the kicks I can click this button right here and move this knob to somewhere around here now if I hit play our base is being side chained and we can see that by clicking right here the orange bar represents the volume so every time this kick plays adjusting this circle right here is a way of adjusting how much you want it to actually sidechain let's say that's a good level of ducking what I can do is copy this compressor and paste it onto our pluck layer it really makes our kicks shine it kind of pops through the mix next let's add in some snares to complement the kicks let's right click insert MIDI track add in a drum rack and then find some snares under drums drum hits and let's go to snares now I actually found two samples that I like so let's drag them both into this drum rack and then make a MIDI clip and let's draw them both in whenever I want to snare to play a point is what I'm trying to say here is you can actually stack the samples you can play them at any point maybe even on top of each other let's rename this two snares and I'm actually gonna group my kicks and snares together and call this percussion just for the sake of organization now the snares are kind of bland there's some things you can do to spice them up including maybe adding in some of the cueing which already sounds a little bit better maybe we can add in things like glue compressor maybe to make it a little bit less harsh knowing your audio effects and what they do is another element by itself more or less for the sake of time let's pretend this is good enough I also want the other layers of my song to be sidechain - my snares let's do the same thing we did for the kicks but this time a sidechain to our snares layer in fact let's just copy this compressor and paste it right next to it it's time switching the side chaining audio from kicks to the snares let's maybe have it duck a little bit more it seems good to me let's copy this paste it on to our plucks at this point you can also add in things maybe like some high hats or some cymbals let's make another MIDI track with a drum rack on top of it let's find some high hats I found some high hats I like at which point I can draw in a pattern of high hats that I want ok let's say that's a pattern that I like let's also add in some cymbals I just made a very simple pattern like this [Music] seems good to me let's also EQ this one like we did for the other layers of the percussion and maybe adjust the volumes of each element so maybe the high hats are a little bit too loud maybe these are also a little bit too loud maybe let's also add in some reverb okay so I'm pretty happy with that maybe let's also add in another layer of chords to complement our plucks I'm just gonna copy and paste what I already have for the plucks onto a different MIDI track let's try and find a different instrument that we might like for that I found a pad layer that I like under operator pad and glaciar voices I'm gonna rename this to wide pad let's group these two together I'm actually gonna get rid of the sidechain on each individual layer and just put it on the overall group let's add in another pad just for the sake of making the mix just a little bit wider I found this pad that's kind of interesting again under operator pad this time it's called still sky maybe I want to lower the volume of this just a little bit but as you can more or less put together at this point I'm just kind of adding elements on top of each other just stacking layers but maybe let's also add in a different layer maybe I want to add in melody so let's add in a layer of leads I'm picturing my leads to be something xylophone II so I found this brushed bail hit spell I guess under operator mallets let's drag that on and now let's get to writing on melody okay so I whipped up melody real quick here and I'm gonna do the same thing for what I did with these pad just more or less stack a lot of layers that I'm happy with that I kind of want to work together in ok so I have a few that I'm happy with i stacked guitar I guess sitar guitar over here and the FM one short lead and this is what it sounds like [Music] melodies are another thing I'm chalking up as more or less something I can't cover in this video they're kind of a thing of their own but the one tip I will give is to stay in key and also again as I mentioned before with the chords music theory is important but also so is rhythm you have to kind of balance the two I'm gonna group these together as I did before with everything else and I'm gonna get to balancing each of these I like how they sound together but maybe not at their current volumes I'm gonna throw some audio effects on our overall group maybe an EQ again maybe some compressors for the sink of side-chaining but I'm actually gonna lessen up on these ones just because they're the leads and I want them to kind of lay overtop the whole mix but I still do want a little bit of sidechaining in there maybe I can add in some reverb maybe some delay of sorts maybe a glue compressor at the end of it all to kind of tie everything together [Music] and at this point I'm noticing certain elements or maybe getting drowned out for example our symbols so it's at this point where you'd kind of go back and tinker with everything on just the volumes again nothing is ever really set in stone as soon as you make it you're allowed to go back and adjust things ok so I just went back and I added another layer of plucks I adjusted some volumes just a little bit of tweaks here and there so we have a nice loop here and that's fine and dandy but to turn it into an actual song we need to extend it maybe actually it has to be a full length song so 3 minutes or so point is that can't really just be 20 seconds so I'm gonna move this loop right here I'm just gonna I'm just gonna left click and drag and I'm gonna copy this and paste it over here at which point maybe I want to delete over this as well so now let's make a transition maybe a quick quick intro that kind of builds up and plays into this little loop that we made maybe I want to copy over the pads for example I'm just kind of paste them over here maybe I want them to be able to fade in one thing I can do unable to ten is switch to automation mode by pressing a at which point you'll see a lot of these red lines appear let's automate the volume of our overall chords group track I can do that by left clicking the volume and you'll notice this red line appeared I can automate this which means I can change its value over time and so maybe I want it to slowly fade in one thing I can do is left-click and select an anchor point right here and then let's set another one at the beginning now at this point I'm gonna left click and drag it down and you'll notice that I've lowered this to negative 10 decibels now if I were to hit play and watch the volume over here it's currently changing over time some things you can do from here are add in some more breakpoints to adjust the automation you can hold the Alt key and that selects this entire line I wish want you can left-click and drag and that creates a slope so let's have it slowly fade in let's do the same thing with our melody actually want to copy and paste this over here except I only want it to come in right about here but I'm gonna do the same thing with the volume I'm gonna automate it another thing that can be potentially is automate a low-pass filter so let's add a low-pass filter right here maybe I just want to cut off something really high like sixteen thousand what I can do is I can click this knob and automate that as well so if I were to set a breakpoint right here and then maybe right here I can have it be lower I can essentially have this EQ filter automate over time let's get rid of some of these layers and then finally let's wrap it up by adding in a transition sound effect let's right click over here and insert audio track let's go over under drums maybe find a ride this one sounds pretty good to me something long let's drag it on to our audio track let's double click it and actually hit this button right here this reverses the sample now if I were to hit play now it's sounding a little bit weird and that's because it's warped one thing I also want to do is unclick this button right here it says warp now let's zoom in and drag this right over here and so now I have a very basic transition sound effect but I feel like it's coming in maybe a little too soon so let's drag this over by left clicking the end over here dragging it and let's hit the a button to leave automation mode at which point when I hover over this sound effect you'll notice there's four squares that show up on each corner let's left-click this one and drag it in this controls the volume of the sound effect so essentially it's slowly coming in it's fading in over time I can move this little icon right here to change the slope of the line finally let's right click insert audio track let's add in one more ride a simple sound effect at the beginning of this loop so it kind of rises up into this reverse cymbal but then it also crashes as soon as this loop starts this sounds good to me let's make sure this isn't warped as well [Music] must maybe lower the volume of this real quick and I think that should do it that's you know the very basics of making your first song what you do at this point is more or less just take what you just learned and kind of extend that to make an entire full length track you'd then also have to export your song which you can which you can do by going to file export audio and video and then you'd also have to make sure that your track is mastered that's another process in of itself but there you have it that's pretty much it that's the basics of making your first song I hope you enjoyed the video I hope you learned something consider checking out my new EP coming out November 3rd very excited for them to come out and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: InspirAspir

Views: 1,286,163

Keywords: Ableton, Ableton Tutorial, Ableton Live 10, Ableton Live 9, Ableton Live 10 tutorial, Ableton Live Tutorial, music, music production, music production tutorial, music production for beginners, how to make music, music tutorial, ableton music tutorial, ableton live, music production software, music production tips, music production training, DAW, marshmello, marshmello fortnite

Id: cGUdDgKdEg8

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 27 2018