How To Produce A Bass Line With Automation Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar - video Dailymotion

Music Radar

Tutorial using Ableton Live 11 Lite with Ski Oakenfull - part of the Music Radar series

Transcript

00:00Hi everyone, welcome back to this video series on getting started with Ableton Live Lite.

00:05So 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 the track.

00:15In this video I'm going to program a melodic bass line which will act as a foundation to

00:19add some more parts on top. Let's go! So before we get started one thing I want to mention is

00:26about going into the red or clipping as this can cause the mix to become distorted as we start

00:31adding more layers to our song. If I just adjust the track volume and turn it up you can see it goes

00:38into the red on the master channel here so we don't want that we're going to bring that down

00:45and 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.

00:52So we've just been working on this one drum track here. I'm now going to go over to this

00:58midi track and I'm going to set the record arm on so we can monitor this channel.

01:03I'm also going to go back to the first scene so we can record into the adjacent slot.

01:07Okay so let's look for some bass sounds. So I'm going to go to the sound section here and open up

01:14bass there we go and and in the same way as we did with the drums

01:26as we're flicking between the sounds we can audition them at the same time.

01:35We can do that either by clicking on the sound or just using the up and down arrow keys as well.

01:39Now I quite like this organ bass sounds very very housey so let's make sure we're selected on this

01:48track double click and you can see that it's just loaded in.

01:57Okay so just so you can see the notes that I'm playing I'm just going to bring up a thing called

02:01the virtual midi keyboard there we go. So I'm just going to play along with the beat and see if I can

02:06come up with an idea oh quite like that one there that was really good. Now you may have noticed that

02:22I didn't press overdub and record anything into a clip but there's a fantastic feature in Ableton Live

02:28which is called Capture and what Live is doing is actually capturing everything that's going on

02:34whether you hit record or not. So we just have to click on this button here

02:38and you can see that it's come up amazingly there.

02:46Now it's a little bit out of time it's not quantized but I'm sure we can fix that

02:50and we can do that just by pressing Command U there we go.

02:55And remember we set the groove for the drums well we can apply that groove to this bass line as well.

03:10Now I don't think we want any of these other parts that I recorded in we just want these two bars here

03:15so I'm going to do the similar thing I did before I'm going to use the crop clip function so press

03:19ctrl and click to bring up the menu and crop clip there we go.

03:34So I think we can duplicate that clip to the next clip slot just by pressing Command D.

03:37But it might be quite nice for this scene here

03:45to create a slight variation of the bass line.

03:50So let's bring back the keyboard again and this time rather than using capture I'm going to try

03:56recording directly into the clip. Now what's very useful for this is to give ourselves a count using

04:02the metronome and we can do that just by clicking here and setting the count into one bar.

04:08We can also actually change the sound of the metronome and so we can change it for example to

04:13the wood sound particular favorite of mine and we can also change the volume of our click as well.

04:19So let's just put that on.

04:24So let's try recording in a slight variation of that bass line.

04:32I played a slight wrong note at the end but never mind.

04:49Okay so this time I'm going to change the quantize settings and so rather than quantizing to the grid

04:55I want to change it to 16th. So let's go to the quantize settings there we go and let's set that to

05:01sixteenths and have a listen through and see which part of this midi we want to keep.

05:26Okay I quite like this middle section here so I'm just going to set the loop brace so it just

05:30loops around the section I want to keep there we go so it's four bars.

05:42Great so let's do the same thing let's apply the groove and ctrl click and crop the clip.

05:55So we can also adjust some of the parameters of this sound to change the timbre.

05:59So if I just double click on the track we can see that this is the instrument here

06:04and there are various parameters that we can adjust. Now that we've got two sounds we've got the drums

06:08and the organ I just want to solo this sound so I can hear what it sounds like by itself.

06:13So if I click on the S button here this will solo that sound. Now we can change the filter cutoff for example

06:22and the FM setting. I really like that now we can actually record those parameter changes

06:38into the clip as it's playing. We're going to press the overdub button here and that's going to record it into the clip.

06:45And you can see that little red dot there indicates that we've recorded in something called automation

07:02which we can actually look at if we just double click on the clip now and then we go over to the

07:08Envelopes tab you can see that parameter change has been recorded into the clip.

07:16Let's take it out of solo now.

07:21Now I'm just going to lower the bass sound a little bit just so it's balancing nicely with the drums.

07:26And now we can trigger these scenes.

07:36So we're building up the sections.

07:38Okay so we've got a great starting point now with the drums and the bass.

07:42In the next video I'm going to show you how to build on this by adding some chords to the track.

How To Produce A Bass Line With Automation Using Ableton Live 11 | Music Radar

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