Hi! In this beginners tutorial I’m going to show you how to make simple house drum patterns. Here’s what we’re going to make today: If you'd like to learn more about making music in Ableton make sure to check out our updated 4h+ course - "Making A Track From Start To Finish". It's covering all the basics you need to get started. We’ve prepared a free sample pack with sounds that we’re going to be using here, so download it before we get started - that way you can follow along. It’s on our freebies page under the name...

  Sometimes you simply have a melody on your mind and your trying to figure out what chords to play along with it. Now this tutorial offers a simple approach taken from our MELODY Course, showing you how to do that: Finding chords for your melody, steps to follow: Try to transpose the melody to a scale you know well. Try to find your bass notes first. Start with the root note (of the scale). Many progressions start or end with the root note (tonic). After finding a fitting bass progression, build chords on it. A basic chord is built from the...

Contents covered in this video: Workflow:00:30 Producing without strong musical ideas02:25 Focusing too much on sound design at the beginning04:16 Not organizing your DAW properly Mixing:06:00 Mixing solely on monitors in a non-treated room07:30 Tweaking samples instead of choosing the right sounds08:42 Using effects without knowing what they do09:45 Not mixing in stereo11:31 Too much stereo enhancement13:22 Not dealing with clashing frequencies14:58 Not dealing with transients on drums Mastering:17:18 Too much master processing19:00 Not taking advantage of monitoring tools   Join our MIXING COURSE (from start to finish)      k-pizza I’m a music maker who likes to share his experiences with...

1. Doing all the compression/limiting on the master While master compression and limiting is great for making a track loud, too much of it will kill the dynamics of a track. You can often achieve more natural sounding results if you compress in stages. Try grouping or creating bus tracks for different kinds of instruments and compressing them. A common example is putting a compressor on a drum bus to even out the volumes of drums before the master. Try also dealing with transients on loud drum hits (like kick and snare) before the master (for example by limiting them)...

In this Sound Design tutorial, Francois shows you how to make the Stephan Bodzin Moog-style Bass/Lead sound with Arturia Mini V3 in Ableton from start to finish. Its important to notice: Arturia Mini doesn't have too many built-in audio effects, so we are creating the raw sound source with the MINI V3 and then we add a bunch of Ableton Live built-in audio effects to shape the sound.    Resources / Files:  Get our Melodic Techno Sound Pack for Arturia Mini V3 Get this project file: Analog Moods Drum Samples are taken out of Deep Premium Vol. 2 - Drum Sample Pack....

1. Mixing on monitors in a non-treated room Before you start mixing a track you need to be able to hear it in enough detail. The problem with studio monitors is that often producers buy them before investing in room treatment. With bad acoustics you’re not going to hear your track the same way you would in a treated room. If you can’t afford room treatment a temporary solution could be to buy good studio headphones. With headphones you’re not dependent on your room’s acoustics. I recommend that you still use monitors to check what your mix sounds like on...

  1. Mixing / Sound designing too much in the beginning phase of making a track This is my biggest mistake. Too often I find myself tweaking synths or samples instead of writing the music. Mixing and sound design are very time-consuming and too much of it kills my inspiration. To battle this problem I resample drums and save presets from my previous tracks or collect sounds that already sound nice. I save them all in one folder and do the same for presets. That allows me to have a folder with ready-to-use sounds. This way I don’t have to...

In this session, Francois shows how to make a stephan bodzin type bass and lead with Arturia Mini V3 and Ableton and goes through different techno production and sound design techniques. Contents: Overview Analog Bass Sound Design Lead Sound Design Bells / "Rhodes" Reverse Swells Checking the Drums (powered by Deep Premium Vol. 2 Drum Samples) Shakers + Phasing problems Lead 2 - Top Melody Playback   Resources / Files:  You can buy the Ableton Live Project file here  If you'd like to dig deeper into Harmony Theory, check out our course: Harmony & Chord Progressions   Learn more about producing...

1. Compressor: Transfer Curve View The ”Transfer Curve” view is the second view in Ableton’s Compressor. It’s confusing to a lot of people, so I thought I’d explain it. Remember what an y=x graph looks like? The display in this mode is very similar to a graph, but instead of the x and y it displays input volume and output volume. When the Ratio is set to 1:1 no compression is happening - the compressor doesn’t affect the volume at all. That means that no matter how loud the input signal is, the output level is exactly the same. That...

In this tutorial, we are designing a Melodic Techno Club track with Ableton Live and NI Massive. Its a very groovy style and we are focussing heavily on perfecting the drum groove and drum / fx sound design.   Tutorial Table of Contents:0:00 Play Part of the Track2:30 Introduction4:20 Closer Look at the Drums and Effects18:10 Bulk of Audio & Vocal FX21:00 Bass23:40 Instruments Group37:10 Groove Analysis40:20 Play Full Track   Template:  This project file for Ableton & Massive: "Melodic Techno Giants" Ableton Project   Sound Packs: Additionally you can get the sounds and more Massive presets with our latest pack Boiler Production 2...