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Composing & Arranging: Step Sequencing

Lesson 12 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

Composing & Arranging: Step Sequencing

Lesson 12 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

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Lesson Info

12. Composing & Arranging: Step Sequencing

Lesson Info

Composing & Arranging: Step Sequencing

Next up we're going to take a look at steps sequencing and basically we're gonna work and the clip for you on the grid and then a little clip grid and we're going to start by making a middie track and brand some a drum rack ofsome hats and see what we've got in the way of hats don't need chimes here because they're nice though this is a smooth jam we could put some chimes on they're looking for a certain kit it's my garage hats ok, cool okay, so I have essentially brought in a drum rack full of high hats um there are about one hundred one hundred high hats and here should be enough for what we're working on a mme that's a lot to choose from, so uh so I have hidden the envelope and the launch uh part of of the clip and I've gone and I'm going to arm my headphone monitor again and I'm just going to start during three steps sequencing so I think what I'd like I'm thinking I'm going to start by just I like to say I usually start by programming a quarter now so I'm like so if so I'll put th...

e put the first note on the grid and then I might duplicate that across and I could select all of them if I won and shift arrow will change the length and aiken to command one to make the grid smaller for command to to make the grid bigger so I'm gonna bring it down into a shift down arrow and that will let me take it down to the next grid size because they just want to shorten that and I'm going to go ahead and hit play on this that's pretty hard sound but I'm so to select all of these sounds you can actually click on the piano note and the piano role there I like that soft one and I think I'm actually going to dio halftime things like that she's like an up down like a high and a low sound so I'm gonna make the grade a little bit bigger and I put another sound and and I'm going to duplicate that and I'm just going to use the arrow to push it over and then I'm gonna use the arrow key tio take it down and that's pretty cool um I'm I feel like uh that is a good sort of introductory rhythm to a song if I were to be playing some, um riffing on some ideas they're building some chords or something I wouldn't mind using that is sort of like an introductory sort of rhythm it's a lot I just enjoy playing along to rhythm like a little more groove here than just ah click track mentoring him kind of thing so let's start off by making something simple like that um and another thing you can do, which is really cool is actually take you can extract grooves from audio clips, and so one thing I've been doing recently is actually come into my packs and when I go back to these awesome kj sokka beats and you see, here are some baselines looking for one sixteen when seventy bpm, we're about one fifty, so this will probably work. Okay, so there's a drum loop that's kind of cool, so what I'm gonna do is gonna pull this and on a double click on the clip and I'm actually don't need don't even need to do that. I can actually just control, click on the clip and say select the extract groove so it is extracting the group from this audio clip basically it's going to take the velocity and rhythm information out of that and it's gonna put it in our group pool. So let's, go over here to our group all, and I can actually grab that and drag it into our many track where we've got some high hats and it will actually take that same rhythm and some of that velocity information from his live drum kit recording and put it into a middie clip for us, so I'm actually just going to go in and select a mme some of these hits on the down beats and shift him around so that's pretty cool I I could even say oh, that would be nice with or let's try that out with the the rhythm already made so this is a much larger lube so I'm just going to pace that end and then I could put it here and another one here it's a little bit busy but I like that a little bit better change the song so all of these air selected and I can bring down the velocity of all of those in the group so I might start um and I might start building some chords off of that now that I have some other other salins um so we could also do have a similar approach with writing with writing a melody um now one thing so we'll go ahead and will create a middie track well on operator lead poor shortly okay? And so one thing I know is I'm in I mean, um in c minor on this jack so I'm actually going to go over to to my push set my skill to see minor and if I'm step sequencing in here, one of the one cool trick for step sequencing is that you can actually full if you activate this full button, you can isolate the notes that your work king with so one trick that I use sometimes is I'll actually play in a full couple octaves and record that and then I will fold the track so that I have to actives of notes that air within the scale and then I'll program in notes around that so I'm just going to go ahead and record a clip and so that was basically to actives of c minor and are really weird sound so I'm gonna go over here actually going toe just going toe change it tio a normal operator with a solider a quick so that's what that should sound like now and when I go back to full screen okay and I'm gonna fold it and I'll start by placing my first note in she'll be can use a pencil you can it draw and uh bring up the doctor on this slow higher so I can use the pencil and if you go to the end of the note with the mouse, it'll give you a little bracket and you can extend the note that way tio oh my go and if I want I can either duplicate the loop and the clip or I can just extend the length of it if I want to make four bars and you can use the same techniques for penciling in the melody for penciling in the melody of uh the melody you could use the same techniques for penciling in the melody or step sequencing inability as you as we did with the drums and we talked about folding the envelope or folding the clip so that it just shows notes that you've played you can also invert the mini so for example, if we same way make a loop ah ok, so we've got a couple of our loop quantum ah ok, so we've got a little melody here we can actually select all of those in its and if we had, uh invert ah wei and we're working with sort of a almost an inversion already so I had a similar effect when we reverse it so one thing I might do is duplicate that make set the loot brace tio eight bars instead of four ah ah ah ah and that I'll give you a little more sort of vamping and riffing and that same zone of notes um and kind of up and down sort of pattern you can also reverse the middie too so we could take this and if we had the reverse button ah, just to fix that double new I can actually go into operator and I can say can limit the voice the one and only play one of the time and those notes that are llegado ah ah ah so that would be a reverse version let's go back to clips ok, so talk a little bit more about so now we have like a couple little things going not super sold on the melody that we've we've got so far so I might actually just I would probably just, like, run this the's high has, ah, and get some simple patterns going. So I like all of those, except for one note, so I might at this point, I probably go in a museum in, and I might try bringing it up. She we all need synchronization. Think the keyboard command for that, his command, you that was quite enough, so shift command, you will tell us how much I'm going to say. Quan ties to an eighth now, so we've got a little, you know, a bar, a rift there, melody, lead.

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