Hey, my name's Micha, and I make music as Keychee. And in this video I'm gonna make a track in Ableton Live.
So let's start.
So here we are in Live, and this is my default set. And if you open Live's Preferences
under the File-Folder tab, you can hit Save here, on 'Save Current Set As Default.'
So this way your current set will be loaded each time you fire up Live. And this is my starting point
so this is my default set.
There's a Drum Group here, and within that Drum Group I have an Audio Track and a MIDI Track.
And within that MIDI Track there's an empty Drum Rack, as you already guessed, I usually start with drums.
I also have some effects here on my Master channel but I'll come back to them later once the track is there.
So let's load a drum-kit, I have this preset here in my Favorites and I'm gonna drag n drop here.
And it loads my drum set for this song. It has 2 kicks.
2 snares.
A closed and an open hi-hat. This pans to the left. And I have a tambourine.
All those sounds come from my library here on the Drum Section, on the drum hits
they are all my individual drum hits, and if I go then there and browse them,
for instance the kicks here, and then drag n drop it here, and then assemble a set.
I never use any presets, I always go for the vibe of the moment, and just design my set that way.
So I set my tempo to 99 BPM here, I'm gonna enable the metronome and record a drum clip here.
So let's make the notes a bit longer now, so we can see them better.
And I want to lay out some of those snares with my tambourine
and I'm gonna press here on my computer keyboard to get the pencil tool and pencil them in.
You hear this snare now has tambourine hits layered, and this one too.
Now I can show you my Drum Group here. Within that Drum Group I have an Effects Chain
and if I switch that off...
you can hear the difference.
It makes my drums way more prominent and stand out.
The first device here is a third party plugin.
It's essentially a filter that does a little bit of the high frequencies with a comb filter
to make the cymbals a bit wider.
But mainly I use it for this knob here. It adds distortion.
Then I have an EQ Eight - an equalizer where I lifted the bass a bit and lowered the high frequencies.
And lastly there is a Compressor. I set this to 50% on the Dry/Wet to achieve something called Parallel Compression.
So half of the signal is actually the unprocessed dry signal and the other half is the compressed signal.
And now I want to add some more elements to the drums
to make them sound more natural and give them some texture.
And I'm gonna use a drum loop for that.
And this one here.
I'm gonna drag n drop this to my audio channel and then I'll click it to see the waveform,
and you can see the left and right channel look pretty different.
And let's have a listen. So make this a loop and stop this one.
So this is the left channel.
This is the right channel.
And I prefer the left channel. It has more room sound to it. So I'm going for an audio effect.
Utility. And choose the left so you only get the left channel. I'm also gonna grab an EQ Eight.
And filter out some of the low frequencies. And also some of the high frequencies can come down.
Let's hear them both together.
OK, now I've got the drums and I want to add some melodies to this, so I set up a MIDI Track
with a synthesizer, and it is this one here:
Looks like that. And I created a sound within that that I like.
And after that is a guitar effects emulator.
I'm very into guitar effects as I play guitar myself and I like these distortion units. I have a lot of them here
to choose from and I'll choose this one. It gives my synthesizer a screaming sound
like a distorted guitar, looks like this.
And with that I'm gonna record a clip here.
So let me solo this here, and directly here on the track we can see this device, the equalizer.
And the default mode would be stereo. But I go for M/S and that means Mid/Side.
And you can toggle here between Mid and Side and equalize the mids and the sides separately.
So if you imagine sitting in front of a pair of speakers, on to the left, one to the right,
and the paths from the sound give you an impression that they're coming from left and right, so from your sides.
And the parts of sound that are coming from in between the speakers, right to your center, that is the mids,
that's usually bass and bass drum and such. And the reason I'm doing this
with this sound is it has a lot of reverb to it. And reverb is mostly in the sides.
And therefore I could go here to the sides and emphasis the reverb by bringing it up,
and then I can in the mids bring down the higher frequencies and get rid of some of the body of the sound
and therefore really fine shape the sound.
OK, now I'm gonna add a second melody to this. I've set up another MIDI track
with a third party plugin again, so it's this one here, again a synthesizer, and I've set up a sound l like within that.
And additionally I set up 2 Return tracks. The first has a rather long Echo device in it.
And the second has a rather short Echo device in it.
And by the way, if you place all your effects within the Return tracks you should set the Dry/Wet to 100%.
Let's listen to the sound without any of the Return effects.
And now I'm gonna send this to the first Echo. Sound like this now.
And I'm gonna record a clip here.
And now I'm gonna go to my envelopes and toggle this here and now arm my envelopes.
And now I can go for Mixer and choose the second sound. So this one 'Sound B.'
And now with the pencil tool I can toggle this with B on the computer keyboard,
I can draw in an automation here.
Solo this so you can hear it better. Now you see this one gets automated here...
and sends it to Return B.
So now it's time to add some bass, and I'm gonna use one of my favorite device presets for that
from Live's core library.
It's called "Hip-Hop Bass," this one here. I especially like this because of the overtones and distortion dials here.
And this is what it sounds like without any applied, and you should really listen to this on your headphones
on full-range speakers.
And now I can add some overtones to it. And distortion. So high frequencies get added
and I really enhance this bass sound.
And I'm gonna record a clip here.
So I'm quite happy with what I created so far, but I think the song needs more variation,
so I'm gonna create 2 more parts. See you in a bit.
So now I created those 2 new scenes. Part 2, Part 3 here, let's have a listen.
In part 2 I have a drum loop playing and it's filtered with this equalizer.
And I automated Band-1 here when the toms are playing so I get back those low frequencies at that point.
And the I right-click on the clip and set 'Convert Drums to MIDI Track.'
And that generates a MIDI clip for me in a new MIDI track. And then I shifted this to my drum-kit here,
and then deleted this, it was just temporary. And then I made some little adjustments
so the kit can play along with this.
Then I recorded a new bassline and added those to a new melodic instrument, let's have a listen.
And this synth 1 is again a third party plugin with the Guitar Rig to give that drive.
And Part 3 has again, a drum loop and a kit playing with the MIDI clip.
Another sub bassline and those 3 melodic instruments. Let's have a listen here too.
Now I have here a synthesizer free that's not playing at the moment. Let me solo this group here.
This synth 3 shares a lot of the frequencies from Synth 2. So Synth 2 needs to come down when Synth 3 is playing,
and I achieve this with sidechain compression. So on Synthesizer 2 I put in a Glue Compressor.
And here, I can toggle this and activate my sidechain compression.
And in 'Audio From' I choose Synth 3.
So when Synthesizer 3 is playing this compressor gets triggered and brings down
the volume of Synthesizer 2. Let's have a listen.
And when I stop this, Synthesizer 2 comes to the front again.
So I have all my parts now but I want to create a remix of Part-1, and I'm gonna use a Drum Rack for that.
But first I created an Audio track and called it "Resample," where I resampled all the individual parts of Part-1
like the drum loop and a MIDI kit, the synthesizer, the sub-bass and the second synthesizer.
And then I created this MIDI track here where I have a Drum Rack, and then I could just drag n drop
the sounds to the individual drum sounds, for instance this first drum sound here,
I have a little chop of the drum loop.
Another chop of the MIDI kit.
Plus an additional sound that sounds like this.
And then I could...
do this.
For instance here I have a vocal chop and again, little chops from the beats.
And this is a longer process to really design a kit like this, and then I can finger-drum this, a bit like that.
And now I'm gonna create an arrangement out of that.
So now I've finished with my arrangement, let's have a look at what I've done.
So I started with Part 1 here. Then comes Part 2. And then Part 1, that's the finger-drum remix.
I recorded that on the fly, and then Part 3 and Part 3 again.
I also added some audio effects here and there.
But now I want to talk about my Master effects I mentioned in the beginning.
If I switch this chain off you can hear the difference.
This sounds flat, and also the Master is clipping.
And if I switch it on.
You can hear the difference.
That makes my mix stand out, brings it to the front.
And I achieve this with this compressor, this has a very subtle setting.
A Saturator, that gives a bit of warmth.
And a Limiter that prevents any clipping.
And this whole Master chain has very subtle things to give me a very mild effect.
And to maintain the original feel of the mix, but it gives me a sense or preview of how this
song could sound in the end.
And the very next thing I would do now is I would disable this chain and bring down the volume
so that it's not clipping anymore and send this out to an external studio.
And they would then fine-tune each and every frequency to turn this into a finished product.
You really need some neutral ears for that.
So that's it, that's my approach on making music with Live, and I hope you enjoyed it, and you like it. See you next time.