Tutorial using Ableton Live 11 Lite with Ski Oakenfull - part of the Music Radar series
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TechTranscript
00:00Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.
00:06So in the last video I showed you how to program some basic drum patterns into clips in Session
00:10View. Now let's start adding some other musical elements to build up the layers of
00:14the track. In this video I'm going to program a melodic bassline which will act as a foundation
00:19to add some more parts on top. Let's go!
00:24So before we get started, one thing I want to mention is about going into the red or
00:27clipping as this can cause the mix to become distorted as we start adding more layers
00:32to our song. If I just adjust the track volume and turn it up, you can see it goes into the
00:38red on the master channel here. So we don't want that, we're going to bring that down
00:42and that's going to give us a bit more headroom when we start adding tracks.
00:49Okay so now we've got the beat, we're going to look for a bass sound. So we've just been
00:54working on this one drum track here. I'm now going to go over to this MIDI track and
00:59I'm going to set the record arm on so we can monitor this channel. I'm also going to go
01:04back to the first scene so we can record into the adjacent slot. Okay so let's look for
01:09some bass sounds. So I'm going to go to the sound section here and open up bass. There
01:16we go. And in the same way as we did with the drums, as we're flicking between the sounds,
01:30we can audition them at the same time. We can do that either by clicking on the sound
01:37or just using the up and down arrow keys as well. Now I quite like this organ bass, sounds
01:43very very housey. So let's make sure we're selected on this track. Double click and you
01:52can see that it's just loaded in. Okay so just so you can see the notes that I'm playing,
02:00I'm just going to bring up a thing called the virtual MIDI keyboard. There we go. So
02:04I'm just going to play along with the beat and see if I can come up with an idea.
02:14Oh quite like that one there, that was really good. Now you may have noticed that I didn't
02:23press overdub and record anything into a clip. But there's a fantastic feature in Ableton
02:28Live which is called Capture. And what Live is doing is actually capturing everything
02:33that's going on whether you hit record or not. So we just have to click on this button
02:37here and you can see that it's come up amazingly there. Now it's a little bit out of time,
02:47it's not quantized but I'm sure we can fix that. And we can do that just by pressing
02:53command U, there we go. And remember we set the groove for the drums, well we can apply
03:00that groove to this bass line as well. Now I don't think we want any of these other parts
03:09that I recorded in, we just want these two bars here. So I'm going to do the similar
03:13thing I did before, I'm going to use the crop clip function. So press control and click
03:17to bring up the menu and crop clip, there we go.
03:31So I think we can duplicate that clip to the next clip slot just by pressing command D.
03:38But it might be quite nice for this scene here to create a slight variation of the bass
03:47line. So let's bring back the keyboard again and this time rather than using capture I'm
03:55going to try recording directly into the clip. Now what's very useful for this is to give
04:00ourselves a count using the metronome and we can do that just by clicking here and setting
04:06the count into one bar. We can also actually change the sound of the metronome so we can
04:12change it for example to the wood sound, a particular favorite of mine and we can also
04:16change the volume of our click as well. So let's just put that on. So let's try recording
04:24in a slight variation of that bass line.
04:47I played a slight wrong note at the end but never mind. Okay so this time I'm going to
04:51change the quantize settings. So rather than quantizing to the grid I want to change it
04:55to 16th. So let's go to the quantize settings, there we go and let's set that to 16th.
05:04And have a listen through and see which part of this MIDI we want to keep.
05:22Okay, I quite like this middle section here so I'm just going to set the loop brace so
05:30it just loops around the section I want to keep. There we go so it's four bars.
05:43Great. So let's do the same thing. Let's apply the groove and control click and crop the
05:51clip. So we can also adjust some of the parameters of this sound to change the timbre. So if
05:59I just double click on the track we can see that this is the instrument here and there
06:04are various parameters that we can adjust. Now that we've got two sounds, we've got the
06:08drums and the organ, I just want to solo this sound so I can hear what it sounds like by
06:12itself. So if I click on the S button here this will solo that sound.
06:20Now we can change the filter cutoff for example and the FM setting. I really like that.
06:36Now we can actually record those parameter changes into the clip as it's playing. We're
06:41going to press the overdub button here and that's going to record it into the clip.
06:51And you can see that little red dot there indicates that we've recorded in something
07:00called automation which we can actually look at. If we just double click on the clip now
07:06and then we go over to the envelopes tab, you can see that parameter change has been
07:11recorded into the clip. Let's take it out of solo now.
07:20Now I'm just going to lower the bass sound a little bit just so it's balancing nicely
07:25with the drums. And now we can trigger these scenes so we're building up the sections.
07:38Okay so we've got a great starting point now with the drums and the bass. In the next video
07:43I'm going to show you how to build on this by adding some chords to the track.