Music Production & Songwriting in Ableton Live: Learn to Write Music in Any Genre

1. Introduction to Harmony: Cyths, guitars, pianos, flutes, orchestras, it doesn't matter what it is. All of those are the harmony part of your song. And guess what? They all work the same way. That's why in this class, I'm going to break down how to write harmony in music. In this class, you'll learn how to make a harmony part for any genre of music. Whether it's an acoustic piano ballad, an EDM banger, or an Indie rock song, all harmony parts work the same way. And once you understand how harmony works, you'll unleash a floodgate of creativity. I'm Benza Maman. I have a degree in music composition, and I've been working behind the scenes in the music industry since 2010. I've written and produced songs for countless artists, and I've had the privilege to work with the writers and producers of artists like Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Luke Combs, and Many More. Recently, I've even got millions of streams, views, and some viral videos of my own. And I can't wait to share this decade of knowledge with you. We'll cover how to write your own harmony parts, no matter the genre and we'll cover the wide array of harmony sounds available, as well as making them hit just right in your production. So if you make a trap beat, a pop song, or an orchestral movie score, it doesn't matter. You'll have the tools and techniques under your belt to be a virtuos. Harmony is my favorite part. And mastering harmony means that you've mastered the art of taking people on an emotional journey through music. This class is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge to take your music to the next level. Whether you're just starting out or trying to refine your skills, I'm here to guide you every step of the way. And don't worry. We'll keep it engaging and straightforward with plenty of practical tips that you can apply right away. I use Ableton Live, but the tools and techniques that I teach in this class can be applied to any music production software. The assignment for this class is to follow along and write a harmony part of your very own. So if you're ready to learn how to take people through an emotional journey in music, then let's dive right into the colorful world of harmony. 2. Harmony Unveiled: Welcome to the Harmony chapter. And I'm going to be honest with you. Don't tell the drums and the bass, but harmony is my favorite part of music. I love bass lines. I love beats, and I love drums, but harmony is what speaks to my soul the most. So what is harmony? The way that I'm breaking down music is you have drums, bass, harmony, and melody. Now, drums are drums. Bass is bass. Melody is going to be your lead vocal. And then harmony is whatever else is going on. So if you're the Beatles, harmony would be like pianos and guitar. If you're the weekend, harmony would be synth. If you're Billy Ils or Harry Styles, you might have a combination of synths, guitars, keyboards, all of the above. But all of those things, I'm considering harmony. It's whatever is playing the chords of your song. It's whatever is not the drums, the bass, the sound effects, or the lead melody. So harmony is what speaks to me the most because I'm a piano player first. So I like sitting down at the piano and playing some cool chords, and then I'm like, Oh, yeah, when I find something I like there's a song. So that's my process. That's not going to be everybody's process. But let's dive into some other examples of what harmony is. It's the middle of your song. It's the emotion of your song, because for me, the emotion really comes from the chord. You can have the same melody harmonize with major chords or minor chords, and that difference is really setting the vibe, setting the tone. And it has so much to do with the character of your song. Because you could have the same chords be strummed on a guitar or played on a really moody sounding 80s synth. Those will give your song very different characters, and they often will even define the genre of your song. Oftentimes, the harmony part is the most noticeable part of a song besides the lead vocal. If you have that guitar part that really catches your ear or that little piano part or that synth melody that really catches your ear, oftentimes people really do notice the harmony the most. A lot of songwriters start their songs by just jamming on the guitar, playing a synth, playing a keyboard, or maybe you're going to rap to a really cool loop that you found. Whatever it is, a lot of inspiration starts from the harmony. So once you have harmony, next usually comes melody, and then you can start making an entire song. Of course, there's no rules. You can do this in any order. Harmony is often in the C two to see three range, but of course, there are no rules. Your Harmony parts can live in all the ranges or in different ranges or whatever you want. But as a general, very blanket statement, if you have no idea where to start, the C two to see three range is often a good place to look. Now that we've done a little overview conceptually of harmony, let's dive into the actual music. I'm so excited for this chapter, so let's dive right in. 3. Chord Patterns: Set the Vibe: Can't talk about harmony without talking about chords. So let's talk about chords. The most common harmony is the four chords that make up most of the pop songs that you've ever heard. We'll go over that in a minute. Chords really set the mood. They really set the vibe. You can use triads, just a simple chord or modern jazz, huge chords with lots of extensions. If you're still getting used to chords, you can use the one skip one method for beginners. Remember, harmony is when two notes play together, two or more notes. So when you have one note, there's no harmony. When you have two notes, suddenly, there's harmony. If you have three notes, you have a chord. And if you have five notes, you still just have a. Piano is a really good sound to test out your harmony, to test out your chords. Sometimes you're using a really cool synth in Ableton that has this amazing arpeggiator and all this stuff. But it can sometimes be deceiving too is the harmony part you're playing cool or is The Syth really cool. Because obviously, if you like what you're hearing, you don't need to question it and you used to just run with it. But sometimes I've gotten distracted in the past with, Oh, it's a really cool sound. And then later when I'm working on the song, I'm like, You know what? It just doesn't seem like it's emotional enough. And I go back to the original chord I was playing really wasn't that emotional to begin with. And I just got distracted with the cool sound, which still sounds cool and even cooler when the chords themselves are better. So I recommend trying out your chords on a piano sound, but that's also my bias as a piano player. Cords can be big. You can have huge inversions of chords, and that's still just a chord. So we'll go over all of that in this chapter. Chords can take up space. You can use pads. You can use blockchords, and you can add rhythm to your chords. So chords are an essential part of making music. So let's go ahead and look at some chords. To me, that's just really nice. I could listen to that all day. I really love these chords. And these are just some chords. It's just a vibe. It's just something that I played on the piano that I really like. You can tell here these are four note chords, and none of these notes repeat. So they do have an extension beyond the regular triad. So let's go ahead and break down what these chords are. Here we have an F, an A, a C, an E. So this makes it an F major seven chord. We are split up. This would be an F major seven in the same octave, sounding like this. Which still sounds good. I decided that I wanted to have this sound more open, so I put those two notes up in octave, and it sounds like this. Doesn't sound better or worse. That's just a creative choice that I made. Next, we go to a D minor seven chord. We have a D here, A, F, and a C. With all of these chords, I did the same thing. If you bring these notes down in octave, you will see the D F, A traditional order for the D minor chord, and then the C, which is the seventh, so we have a D minor seven. Next, if we pull these two notes down, we can see our C major seven, C, E, G, and B. Finally, we have our E minor seven, which is E, G, B and D. And you bring these notes up, and here we go. Chords usually want to change on the downbeat, but sometimes you can have your chord start playing. The next chord can start playing a little bit before the downbeat. And that's what we have going on here. They're playing the second chord and the fourth chord, start one eighth note before the next downbeat, which gives a little bit of swing to this. Just gives a little bit of groove. Let's listen to what it would sound like if they all started on the downbeat. There's nothing wrong with that, but I just prefer how it sounds having them start on different beats, and this is a common chord pattern that I will do, where the first and third chord out of a four chord pattern are on the beat, and the second and fourth chord start a little bit before the beat. You can start on this eighth note here or you can even start here on the four. This might sound better for a different song. So for me, the sweet spot is really this eighth note right here, and that's why I chose this. Now, these are just block chords. They're just chords. That's all that it is. We're just playing the chords. An F Mazor seven, we're playing an F Mazor seven. Sure, I got these two notes up in inversion, but that's all that this is. There's no more secret wizardry going on here than just a piano, playing some chords. And to me, this is music enough. This sounds great, and I am totally happy living in this space here. So a totally valid way to make a harmony part is just to play some chord. The sound that we're using is a piano, but you could use any Cynthan Ableton. You could replace this piano with any sound that you want, and Hads are often a good place to look for just playing block chords. Drag this sandman here instead, and listen. So pads can be a great place to look when you are just trying to mess around with some block chords. Playing just some chords might seem really simple, but a lot of the time, I will just play some chords on the piano that really speak to me that I really feel. And then I start writing a song to that, and that's good enough for me. So you can listen to some of your favorite songs. And here, what are they doing? Are they just playing some chords? Is there a more complicated thing going on in the harmony part and start tuning your ears to harmony. And as we progress in this chapter, we'll explore different harmony patterns. 4. Vamping and Rhythmic Chords: Energize Your Harmony: Lesson is all about rhythmic chords. We talked about block chords, which is just having just playing a chord on a sound and just letting it ride with some long notes. Those are block chords. Now, let's use those exact same notes, but add some rhythm to them. So just adding simple rhythm to your chords suddenly has a whole different feel. Now this has more energy to it. You could maybe see this as, like, a buildup part or a building type section in the song could use this more vamping style piano. You could use this same pattern with a synth to have a Syth be triggering Let's try this sinth here instead and see what this sounds like. So just adding some rhythm will drastically change what your harmony part feels like. You can draw in this rhythm. You could go to these original chords here and say, Okay, we're going to pick eighth notes as a rhythm, and we're just going to draw in eighth notes here. Boom, here we go. And then you'll just copy these over. You'll select them like this and just copy them over. And there we go. We have eighth notes. And this is exactly how I made this part. You just draw in the notes, and you can copy them over. You could also play the part in this way. You could choose quarter notes to do a different note value. Doesn't have to be eighth notes. It's just an example. You can see what this sounds like. That sounds cool, too. So, there's a lot of different options here, and you can just go into program mode, just, you know, see what 16th sound like, see what 32nd notes sound like, and just explore with having a different rhythm. And you can combine rhythms. And you can play parts with combined rhythms. You can program parts with combined rhythms. Once you have your chord, the notes that you want to play, you can start diving in even further to, how would you make those chords come to life rhythmically if you don't want to go for just the basic chord sound. Here are some other rhythms that I played with the same notes. You'll notice if you can play and program that you might tend to do certain kinds of ideas when you play and tend to do certain kinds of ideas when you program. I certainly find that the case for me, which is why I like to do both because I explore different sides of my creativity here. If you can't play the piano, no worries at all. You can always come up with every single thing that I'm doing simply by programming. And what we've done here is the chords are still changing on the main beats. Here's the first chord, here's the second chord, this changing on eighth note before the downbeat, third chord, fourth chord, changing on that eighth note before the down Bee, but they're shorter chords. They're about one eighth note long each of these. They're not perfectly in time. So if you liked how that sounded and you wanted to program them, what you would do is just take the time to just move everything off the grid a little bit and finesse it to perfection. But we have this more complicated rhythm of this eighth note starting here. We have another eighth note starting here, but that eighth note doesn't start on an eighth note. That eighth note starts on the 16th note before the two. Now, I'm going to say that again just so that's absolutely clear. We have two eighth notes here. Although this eighth note doesn't start here, which would be the start of the second eighth note. It starts one 16th note away to give this kind of sound. So you'll start to notice similar patterns. This is kind of the similar pattern to the moon rhythm. And if this were to hit here, this would be the exact pattern of the Momiton rhythm. If that hit here, too. So, we're starting to recycle some of the rhythms that we've already worked with, and I tend to gravitate towards playing this kind of a rhythm when I play the piano. So this is just the same notes that we started with our blockchords, not played in these vamping kind of way where each it's every single eighth note or every single 16th note. It's a combination, although you can see them. I am only playing eighth notes, but they're coming at different times. So you can take your chord, and you can start composing like we were doing here with just combining different rhythms. Here's eighth notes. Here's a quarter note. There's 16th notes. You can try having the quarter note start to play on the third 16th note. You can start moving things around and find a part that sounds good to you. And this is where harmony starts to be a lot of fun. You can even just drag things kind of randomly if you don't know what you're trying to go for or if you have a specific vision in mind, you just take the time to execute it, and you can see what we came up with. And now you can add some rhythm and some life to your chords. Hopefully, this can show you how to start playing with harmony in case you don't just want a block chord, but maybe you want mostly just a block chord. And then at the very end before the next chord comes in, you want to do a little something, add a little bit of character. This is a great method to use, and I spend a lot of time just detailing and finding the perfect harmony part for my songs. 5. Plucks: Add Pizzazz to Your Harmonic Patterns: This lesson, we're going to talk about plug and plug are a very specific kind of rhythmic chord pattern. Plug are short decay rhythmic chords. They can just be two notes, not a full chord. You can use synth, electric piano, guitars sometimes have that plux sound when they're strummed in a certain way and there can be orchestral plux a string plug, very Pitzcato string sound. Plug were very popular in the tropical house genre, where they had some sort of Marimba synth pluck thing that would hit. Here I have some plug that I made for a different beat. So as you can see here, these are just essentially some rhythmic chords. I have chords playing eighth notes here, and they're at different rhythms. They're kind of sparse. There's a very empty sounding rhythm, which is cool. The thing that really makes this a plug is the sound, the kind of sound that it is. Here I have this nexus synth, but like we said on the slide, this could be a variety of different sounds. Like we said in the slide, we could have an orchestral pizzicato plug sound. So plucks are essentially in the rhythmic chord category. And if you have one of the sounds we've been exploring, a specific plucky synth sound or you have some orchestral plucky sound or a muted guitar strumming in a kind of muted fashion can have that same plucky feel. And the idea there is that it has a very short decay. The end of the sound is very short, so that the sound is just kind of like a stab or a pluck, essentially. And plugs are really great to use in all sorts of different genres. And it's really a subjective choice when you want to go for this kind of sound. The rhythm can be virtually any rhythm you want. You could do very simple, very sparse, do like one plug at the beginning of every bar and have it be very open. You could plug consistently for eighth notes, whatever you want. Or you could do a pattern like I did, which was kind of sparse but had a little bit of a groove to it. So there's no right or wrong ways to do plugs, and I highly encourage you to use them in your music. 6. Arpeggios: Unleash the Power of Sequential Harmony: Let's explore arpeggiators. Arpegiators play your chords note by note. They can sound magical, fast and high. They can do different patterns. Claire D Lun, that piano piece, if you're familiar, is all arpeggios, but it's an arpeggio played really on the piano, not using an arpeggiator. And then there is the arpeggiator, which is Ableton's synthetic arpeggio maker. Let's go dive into what arpeggios sound like. So an arpeggio is essentially taking the notes of a chord and playing them sequentially. So instead of playing this, you're going to play this. This is an arpeggio going up with those exact same notes. You could have an arpeggio going down. You could have an arpeggio going in a non linear pattern. And everything in between. So arpeggios are essentially just playing the notes in your chord one by one in some kind of pattern, either linear, non linear, jumping around a little, walking to each other, whatever sounds good for your song in that moment. I've arpeggiated I played this on the piano, our whole chord synquts up in some simple eighth notes. You can arpeggiate at any rhythm. It could be eighth notes. You could do 16th notes. You could do even slower. You could do quarter notes. So arpeggios can be virtually any order of the chord, and they can be any rhythm that you want. You can also use some in between notes that are not totally part of your chord if you want to. If you're walking from one note to the next, you could throw in an intermediary walking note. I would still consider this an arpeggio if you wanted to keep this pattern going. So sometimes you have your chord progression and you want to just add some movement and add a different flare to this section. You could try having an arpeggio section. In this song Claire D Lun going from a completely classical side of things, Deb C goes from these big chords to this fast arpeggio, which has a really cool contrast sound. And it's a really, really cool arpeggio that just has a very magical sound to. And going from block chords into arpeggios could be a really cool thing to try in a song. Or you could have your whole song be arpeggio. Maybe you find some chords that you like, and you think it's just a little bit boring. Having them just be block chords. You can try playing them or programming them out in an arpeggiated sequence. Maybe you don't want to play or program them, but you do want to try some arpeggios. You can go ahead and go to the Midi effects and grab the arpeggiator. We showed you this on base, but now let's go look at what it does to some chords. Here we have eighth notes, and it's going up. Oh the arpeggiator takes into account exactly where notes are starting. So for the purposes of this, maybe let's have everything start on a nice quantized beat here. And it's just playing the notes of our chord in sequence. What we can do here, we could go down. We can go up and down. We can do different patterns. Again, a different pattern. So this starts to get you to see how you can really arpeggio in any kind of way that you want. You can also go faster. And you're not limited to just one octave. You can play these same notes up multiple octaves. Even faster. I love arpeggios. It's really some of my favorite sounds in music. And you can arpeggio by finger picking a guitar that's playing note by note that is inherently arpeggio. You can play it on the piano or any other instrument, and you can use block chords and the arpeggiator in Ableton. Obviously, since that Claire Dune song is my favorite song, clearly, I love arpeggios, but I play them all the time. And I always find a place in my music where I can find at least a little bit of that arpeggio magic because like I just said, it really sounds just magical. 7. Riffs: Memorable Harmonic Motifs: Probably heard of ifs before. So let's talk about what a if is. Now, a if is a harmony part, like a guitar riff or synth if or something. It's a harmony that has its own melody to it. So it's a complicated harmony part that has its own story and its own rhythm baked into it. It's not just block chords, and it's not just an arpeggio of something or some pluck. It's actually a melodic and harmonic story on its own. Rifs are what you want if you're writing pop music. They're the catchiest things you can do because not only hopefully is the vocal, the lyric getting stuck in your head, but then also the main if is getting stuck in your head. They're usually hummable. Some people call them an under lick. You can listen to Stay by Kid Lori and Justin Bieber has a really great lick Day Tripper by the Beatles. You can go to Tik Tok by Kesha, some iconic ifs that once you hear that, you know the whole song. You don't even need to hear any of the vocal. You already know the song. If can be a melody that walks into a chord, so it's still outlining a chord progression. Got a more intricated thing than just playing the block chords. You could have chords playing, but then they have passing tone. So each chord walks to the next chord. And a if is when chord your guitar part, your piano part, it starts to feel like a real part. It starts to feel like something that actual musician would be playing. And if you really think about it, if you have a full song that has drums, bass, vocals and harmony part of some kind, the bass is playing one note. The vocal is playing probably a different note. So in a way, if you're trying to make a chord, if you're trying to harmonize those two notes, you might only need one note in the middle that's making a chord out of everything. And when you can start thinking of music this way, it's like, Oh, it's not just like an A minor chord and then a singer singing some A minor stuff and a bass playing A minor stuff, it's like, Wait, the bass could be playing the A. The singer could be singing the C. Maybe my if or my harmony part is just going to play the E. Then you start getting very specific, and you start understanding how you can be intentional with every part. You don't need to layer in multiples of the same note, although you can across different parts if that's what sounds the best. But you can also start being very intentional with exactly the right note that harmonizes everything else. So here I have a riff, and it's essentially a melody, a memorable melody that's outlining some chords over this beat. So this is something that is memorable. It's basically a melody part. It's outlining some chords, and it's something that a singer could sing over. So if you had this in a song, you could just hear this part, which would maybe come in the intro, and then the singer comes in or the rapper or whatever. And then you probably just by hearing this melody, could already tell which song this is about to be. So this is one example of a quick if that I just played. Let's go into listen to some of those other if examples to further show you what I mean. So stay has a really solid if. And that's the riff. B, um, boom, but, um, boom, Ba, um, boom, da da, da, da. And so it's an interesting melody that's outlining a chord progression that gives harmonic context to the song that the singer can now sing over. I do the same.Ting I told you that I never would I told you I changed. Even when I knew I never could that I can't nobody else as good as you. Honey you stay. His stay Hell. They get bonus points because the singers basically singing the riff. Like, so now not only have you heard this catchy melody, the singers basically singing that same melody. So you are, for sure gonna walk away from this song with that melody in your head. Think. Wake up. I waste this stuff. Realize to that. Oh, sent feel like now the singers moved on to do something else, they're rapping or whatever they're doing. But the if is still playing in the background. It's not as prominent, but it's still there. So, this if basically plays through this entire song, and the chorus of this song is the vocal version of the if. So after you've heard this song for, like, 3 minutes, you've basically heard the same melody for, like, 3 minutes straight. So it is for sure going to get stuck in your head. This is a really great if because it outlines a chord progression. Let's go ahead and listen to Staying Alive, which also has a really great riff. Mm hm. Just by hearing that, you know what song it is. Bom, bom, bom, don't, do, do, do. So that's just a really, like, funky if. And just hearing that you can tell this is staying alive by the BGs. The vocal doesn't mirror the if in this case, but it's still a great if to study. Let's go to Day Tripper. A Got it. For the first 20 seconds, 17 seconds of the song, it's just the if. There's no vocal happening. Yes, the drums start building and all these exciting things happening. But the if is just the main thing that we're listening to here, and it carries through most of the song. So, the if is this melodic and hummable catchy thing that is the whole beat. The whole song is the if, and it's outlining a chord progression, but it's not as obvious as it's a whole chord. It's playing what is hopefully an interesting melody to listen. So if you're writing pop music, Rifs are the holy grail. Rifs are the gold mine. That's what you really want because pop music is all about memorability and catchiness. And if you have a if that can play through the whole song, after hearing that for, like, three, 4 minutes, for sure, it's going to get stuck in your head because you've just been listening to it straight for, like, 3 minutes. That's really the key to catchiness is to listen to something over and over and over and over again. That's why the hip makers of today who understand that will have a riff and then try to sing that same if to do the maximum catchiness that you possibly can. Of course, music is about way more than just catchiness. It is about emotion and expressing a feeling and artistry and all of that. So it is not necessary to make music with riffs. And I do sometimes when I write a good one, but sometimes I don't find the perfect if for my song, and what supports the song better is just to block some chords or maybe an arpeggio. I still follow the emotion of what I'm doing. But if you happen to write a really amazing if, then you may just have a hit song on your hands. 8. Melodic Harmony: Crafting Emotive Patterns: Let's talk about melodic harmony. Melodic harmony, you could consider part of the Riff family. I have its own category because the way I think about it is different. Instead of playing a melody on a synth or a piano that someone would then sing over or whatever, I play chords and then find passing tones to walk to the next chord. Let's take a look at this. So this is Baha, da da, da, da, da, da. That's a melody. So what's happening here is that we're playing a melody, so that's in the if category. But how I approached this was not oh, okay, what's a really cool melody that someone can sing to or really cool guitar part or synth part. It was just these chords. I wanted to just make these cords a little more interesting. So in the pockets, I just put these passing tones. Now, these ones walk up into the next cord. These kind of leap up and walk down. There are no rules of how you can do this. This just sounded good to me, but essentially we're walking up in a step wise motion, we're jumping and then walking down in a step wise motion. Yes, technically, we're jumping up, walking down, and then jumping down again. You'll know what sounds good. But what's happening here is that we have chords, and then we have some notes in between that are making them a little bit more interesting. So we're embellishing the chords. This is the kind of thing that a musician will probably do. A producer might just program the chords and leave it alone. A musician will probably add a little bit of flare, a little bit of something. And that's great. Depending on the full context of the song, of course, the harmony part is just to support the lead vocal and everything else that's happening. So maybe in between notes are just too busy in the big picture. Always take the big picture into mind. But for the sake of this, here we have we just embellis them and make them sound a little bit more interesting. 9. Pedal Tones: Sustain Your Harmonic Foundation: Petal tone is not necessarily an entire genre of harmony parts, but I just wanted to make sure that you know about petal tones, and you can have that in your producer Arsenal. A petal tone is a long sustaining high note for drama and tension. So let's go ahead and see what that means. Here we have our piano part that we're familiar with. And we're going to add our pedal tone. This is what it is. It's just a long, sustaining note that just rids. You hear this a lot in orchestral scores or anything you want it to sound like really epic. You just have one high note that doesn't change over the chords. So let's listen to these. It just holds the drama. It just holds that mood. When you have the one note of sustaining over everything, it just feels epic. So the pedal tone is really that simple. Just find a sound. It could be a synth. It could be I'm using this orchestral sound, but it doesn't have to be. It could be anything that can hold the long sustaining note up top. It's usually high, and you just find a note that sounds good over every chord. And there you go. It's really good for breakdown sections, intro sections. You can even have it over a beat. I couldn't let myself not tell you about pedal toone so I just wanted to make sure that you know what they are. They're very simple, they're easy to use, and I highly recommend you try them. 10. Piano Harmony: Create Rich, Expressive Layers: Now that we've explored some different kinds of harmony parts, let's explore some kinds of harmony sounds. Well, start with the piano, which is my personal favorite sound. There are acoustic pianos, electric pianos. This is where I like to start all my songs, but I am a piano player. Piano is very honest with the harmony part, because if it sounds good on the piano, it's probably going to sound good on any other kind of synth, too. And if it doesn't sound good on the piano, maybe you'll find a super interesting sound that can make your basic chord come to life, and that's happened to me many times. But a lot of the time, it's worth finding something that does sound good on a piano because those tend to also sound good on every other synth. I like spending time on the piano because if it can't sound good on the piano, then I need to maybe rewrite the part and, like, spend the time to find that really cool chord or whatever it is I'm looking for. Instead of just cycling through a bunch of sounds to find a really interesting sound, because yeah, sounds are half of the battle, but wouldn't you rather just have a really cool part and a really cool sound? So let's listen to some different pianos. We have the piano that I've been working with So this is a kind of cinematic sounding piano. There's also electric pianos. Let's put these down in Octa. Upright pianos. Celeste. More electric pianos. Whirl it, sir. Electric harpsichord. Or like an old honky tonk sounding piano. So there are a lot of different piano sounds from electric pianos to acoustic pianos. Ableton has its entire electric synth is dedicated to electric piano sounds. So I highly suggest that you spend some time with this electric synth and go through these presets and listen to these amazing electric pianos. We also have this grand piano sound here in Ableton. With pianos alone, there is a whole world of different sounds. I really love the sound of a really high bell like electric piano with an arpeggio. That sounds very magical, but I also love the sound of a really low deep chord on an electric piano that feels very warm and full. The piano itself has obviously the full range, that sounds amazing in different ways. And I highly recommend that you spend some time getting to know the different qualities of the different pianos available so you can know what's right for your songs. 11. Guitar Harmony: Strings to Paradise: Lesson is all about guitar. So guitar is clearly one of the most quintessential harmony instruments, and it has been the bedrock of a lot of genres. So of course, we're going to talk about guitar as harmony. Guitar is cool. Guitars just have a mysterious, energetic quality to them span all sorts of different genres. Guitar is very versatile. Guitar also doesn't take up too much space, which is really cool. Unlike a piano, playing chords on a piano really fills up a lot of space, which is maybe exactly what you want. But sometimes it's nice to have those little stringy bits which are filling up the harmony but not filling up too much space. So guitar can be really cool for that. Obviously, if you're strumming a guitar, it takes up more space. There's electric guitars and acoustic guitars. So let's dive right into guitars. Here we have a guitar Ai, which is a mini acoustic guitar. If you wanted to record this into Ableton, you would obviously set up a mic, find a good distance. You would want to record this general area, plug in your mic to your audio interface. You plug in your interface to your computer, you'd make sure that if you plugged it into port one on your audio interface, that in Ableton, on your audio track, you selected port one to record from. We've gone over recording, doing multiple takes and setting everything up, lowering the buffer size several times in this course already. So I'm not going to do that again now. I'm just going to show you some different styles of guitar. If you do have any questions about recording, please go ahead and rewatch any of the recording lessons that we have already done. So, guitar, you can obviously strum a guitar. You could strum with a pick. You can strum with your hand. You can arpeggiate the same chords. Finger style it's called. You can play finger style arpeggios with a pick. You can also play a if on your guitar. So you can play a melody. You can play a chord. You can arpeggiate the chord. You can strum the chord. You could play a if, which is a combination of playing a chord and a melody. Mm. So you can combine playing chords with melodies and creating something like a riff. You can also do all those same things on an electric guitar. Now, an electric guitar, you might use a mic that's recording, facing an amp that you have in real life, or you'll go direct in with a quarter inch cable. If you have any questions about that, I would suggest rewatching the recording live bass lesson. You can do all the same things on an electric guitar as you can with an acoustic guitar. But what's interesting about electric guitars is they tend to be heavily processed because not only do you have the sound of the guitar itself, But you can run that through an amp, which can go through petals, which can go through reverbs and delays and compressions and all sorts of things and distortion. And electric guitars are really ripe for transforming the sound that comes straight out of the guitar with all of those modifiers. And usually the sound of the electric guitar that you really like is the sound of the combination of the guitar with all those modifiers. Electric guitar is really screaming for some effects to enhance its sound. Guitars just sound so cool, and I highly recommend if you are able to get some live guitar on your track, you should totally go for it. 12. Orchestral Harmony: Embrace Cinematic Soundscapes: Is, of course, the entire orchestral sound palette to pull from when you're thinking of different harmony sounds. There's, of course, flutes. We have strings here. We have a harp. And, of course, some brass, which will cover more in a later lesson. Not only are there a whole world of sounds to choose from in the orchestral sound palette, you can also break up your part into the whole orchestra having different sounds playing different parts of your chord. We'll talk way more about this in a later lesson. But for now, we can just listen to what these different orchestral sounds sound like together. Maybe some flu, too. Ableton has some great string sounds, both synthetic and real sounding, and I highly recommend that you go in and look for some string presets to really give your track some vibe. You can, of course, go to the samples here and we'll look for some brass samples. And if you have Ableton Live Sweet or you've downloaded Ableton'sOchestral patches, you'll have even more samples to pull from and some additional instruments from the instrument rack, where you can play with orchestral sound. If you don't have those packs downloaded, no worries. You can always use samples or always download the pack at a later time if you decide that now is the time for some orchestral sounds to make it into your music. 13. Brass Harmony: Bold & Powerful Statements: Bass can fit into the orchestral family, but I wanted to do a separate lesson on Bass just because there's more to brass than just the orchestra. You can have a saxophone, a trumpet, trombone, a horn. So different sounds become available. There's also big band and even jazz music. So here I have a brass part that I made. So brass can have a really heroic sound to it. Here's a different brass instrument. You could layer them. Ableton has some brass sounding presets here. These are more Synth brass, but Synth brass has a lot of really cool sounds. No, no. And nothing is cooler than finding a saxophone player to work with in real life, like, a real saxophone player. You can just add so much soul to your music. Bass has some real power, some real soul, some grooviness. It's got it all. So I highly recommend that you incorporate some brass into your songs. 14. Vocal Harmonies: The Human Voice: Let's talk about vocal as harmony. So say you have a choir or an a capella vocal track or like an A Capella group or something, your harmony is not going to be a guitar or a synth. It's going to be actual voices. So voices can be the harmony that supports the song. So you could have a choir be the backing track. You could have a small choir, a big choir. It could be a capella. You can have pentatonics. They're an A Capella band that do a capella covers of songs. Billy Eilish has when the party is over. That is just her voice in the background. Bobby McFarn, the guy that's like, don't worry, be happy. That whole song is just his voice. So there's a lot you can do with just voices. Let's go ahead and listen to this harmony track that I made. This is a choir. It's not a real choir. It's actually a choir sample synth type thing from the composer Cloud. And what they did is they did record real singers that then I'm now triggering when I'm playing these notes. So this was actually sung just not like this, but that's sort of neither here nor there. Basically choir synth or these hums that I did. This is me just humming. Here is me humming with an effect on it that's called a tremolo. This is me humming with a tremolo, which is an effect that makes things, well, sound like this. Mm hmm. This concept is not revolutionary or crazy, but it's just important to keep in mind that, yeah, voices, a capella, choirs, or even a single met you could do, like, a riff with your voice that then you sing over. There's a lot of opportunities here. There's a lot of possibilities, and I just want you to remember that there's this whole world of using the voice as harmony in your tool belt as a producer. 15. Synths: Crafting Futuristic Harmonic Textures: This lesson is all about sense as harmony parts. So obviously, there is analog sense. Those are the old school sense, the real tangible sense that you could actually play in the real world. Obviously, we have now the software versions of those sense. You have future sense which only exist on a computer. A lot of these are used in modern music. There is pads which are very dreamy, soundscapy sounding sense. You have pluck, you have tropical sounds. There's really an endless world of scenth from bases to leads to chords and everything in between. So here we have our same chords, and we have different scenths that are playing them. Here is a preset scyth from serum. So, this synth is really unique. It almost has a flute like quality or something. So this is a synth that sounds nothing like an 80 synth or a dub step synth or a house based synth. This is a synth that has completely its own character. Here's another synth. This is from Analog and Ableton. That has a completely different quality than the last Syth. Here's another Ableton synth. This one's a pad, and you can hear that more dreamy quality to it. And here is a rhythmic synth. Y Y Y Y Y. So you can hear how this is a pretty complicated sound. It has different parts to it. It starts, and then it kind of has like a womp wow to it. And then at the end, it has, like, a snake tail or something. Y Y. Y Very cool and very modern sound. Finally, we have our if here that's being played by a different scinth from serum. Y. Y Ableton obviously has a whole wide variety of sense just waiting for you in the instruments tab. So Ableton is very Syth heavy being a music production software. That's kind of obvious. But there are so many different kinds of synth. When you say synth, it doesn't mean you're talking about one specific sound or one specific genre. So Syth really encapsulate almost the whole world of music just within themselves. 16. Samples: Expand Your Harmonic Palette: Okay, now we're going to talk about samples. And samples really just blow the whole world open because not only are there every single category we just talked about, but every single category we just talked about can be a sample. And you can sample literally anything. So let's dive into samples. You can have orchestral samples, vocal samples, synth samples, guitar samples, piano samples, and literally anything can be a sample. So samples are everything. So I pulled in some different loops here from some sample packs I have, and let's go ahead and listen to these samples. Or this sample. Or this one. Or even this one. So just pulling in some sample loops for your harmony is music made easy. We got a drum loop. We got a sample loop, and we're there. We have a whole song, basically. So you can make music very quickly this way. You can use this in combination with some other scents and sounds that you use natively. You can play your own sound, add some loops. You can just use loops, really, whatever you want. And remember, you can also create a mini track here. Go to your sampler, go over to samples, and you can drag any of these sounds into your sampler and make a whole part that way. Maybe you want this toy piano box and you pull that in here, and then we can go to our chords we've been using. And maybe this part calls for some kind of arpeggiator. You can go into samples. Remember this trick to just type in BBM and it'll pull up all the things that are too specific BPM, which tend to be loops ready to go. You don't want to drum loop in this case, but Mm hmm. Cook Cu And here's a guitar, L ready to go. For a long time, I was a little resistant to samples because I was like, I'm a musician. I want to play my own parts. I usually start my song by playing the piano or playing the guitar or something that is my own part, finding cool sent. But I now totally embrace and welcome using sense in my practice because you can add an idea that's just, like, already ready to go that maybe you wouldn't even thought of. And you're playing some cool chord. You pull in this sample. I ads this whole new dimension. So I recommend being a modern creator. Combining all the different skills that you have available to you. If you can play, play, but you can also sample. And if you can't play, then totally embrace the sampling world, totally embrace the programming world. Samples can be super, super inspiring. And some of my favorite songs that I've written are actually just based off of a really great sample that I found and just use that. So I highly recommend you incorporate samples into your music. 17. Sound Design: Shape Your Unique Harmony: So let's talk about sound design. We've talked about using different sounds for your harmony parts in Ableton, but now let's talk about making your own unique synth. So we're going to learn about waves, osciators, pitch filters, routing, and effects. Let's go over here and hop into operator. If you pull in an instance of operator, it'll sound just like this. What's happening here? This is just a blank default template of operator. And we have what's called different oscillators here on the left, and oscillators are what generates sound. Right now, these are all off. If we were to turn this oscillator off, there would be no sound at all. So we have one oscillator here, and the oscillator comes in the form of different waves. Let's go ahead and dive into what these different waves are. We have a sine wave. We have a saw wave. We have a square wave. So as you can see, we have a variety of different kinds of all these waves, and you may have also noticed that this view here is changing with the different waves. So another option that you have in operator, which is kind of cool is you can draw in your own custom wave. After you have your wave decided and you find a sound that you want to start with that you like, the next step is to go to a filter. So here we have a filter. Right now, it's not very active. Here we're pulling down where the filter cutoff point is, and obviously, when it gets low enough, you really hear the change. If you click on the filter kind, you can switch this from low pass to high pass to band pass to all the other options. So we can switch this to a high pass and show you what that sounds like. This is cutting the low frequencies. If you don't know what sound you're going for, low pass is generally my go to, although it really depends on the specific kind of sound you're trying to make. But I'm just showing you the path here of you generated a sound with an oscillator. Now you're shaping that sound with a filter. So the frequency cutoff point is what frequency here is being cut off by the filter. So if you pull up an EQ, you'll be able to see more visually the same frequencies. So 18.5, this is ten K over here. This is 22. So 18.5 is basically like, all the way to the right. Now, if you go over to 700, that's around here. So you can tell, oh, okay, when I move this down, we're cutting all of this information here. There is a lot of information there. If you go even lower, you don't even hear it. So it's helpful to use these EQs to kind of give you a visual representation too, but of course, it's all about how it sounds. So at the end of the day, you really just need to trust your ears. And you can move up the resonance. But here, we're distorting now because I peak the resonance a little bit too much. So this is the general workflow. You have an oscillator. It goes into a filter. You might want to add some spread to give some wideness. And now what you might want to do is add a second oscillator. By the way, there is no recommended workflow if you want to add your oscillators first and then filter later or any order that you want to do. I make sounds in all sorts of different orders, just depending on what I'm going for. So in this case, we've put a filter on. We do the spread, but I still don't feel like this is the right sound. So here I would go to add another oscillator to see what we can do. Kind of organi. Not cool. Not very cool. We're detuning this a little bit. So here we're messing with the pitch of the second oscillator, meaning that they're not perfectly in tune, which actually can sound pretty cool. We can try this LFO, which will give things more of a wiggle kind of a sound. And lastly, we can go to this routing function. So all of these different configurations are a different representation of these oscillators and how they are routed together. Here, we have A goes to B, goes to C, goes to D. Like that. If you wanted them to go in tandem, you would maybe choose this option. Here's flipping on its head. So you can pick different routing which will give your sound a different feel. So let's go ahead and explore this sound that I made using operator. So here we have our first oscillator, and it's a sine wave. We have a second oscillator that is also a sine wave. So once you have your oscillators and they're routed, and they're going to their filters, you can start messing with the envelope. Or perhaps maybe you'd want to mess with the envelope first thing. It's really up to you. So let's go ahead and turn off Oscillator B here, and we're going to click over from oscillator to envelope, and the envelope is another tool to shape your sound. So the envelope you can think of is the shape of your sound. It really is. So it's like here, when you have this very open envelope, you have the most open and big version of your sound. If you were to move this all the way down, it's gone. You just have this little pluck because all that's happening, you have this amount of sound, this tiny amount of sound. The space in between here is your sound. So here, super tiny pluck, here, a bigger sound. So, you really want to worry about the attack, decay, release. And those are the beginning of your sound. This is the attack. The attack is how long after your sound is triggered, does it take to get to where it's trying to go? So, for example, if you have a very slow attack, it'll sound like the sound is ramping up. So if you want a kind of ramp up sound, you'd want a slow attack like this. Let's say you wanted a pluck kind of a sound. The next part of this is the sustain. So the sustain is this middle part right here, and if you want it to be a sharper sound, you would want a smaller sustain. Next is the decay. You can change the decay by moving the decay parameter or by moving this parameter. The release can sound really magical if it's very long, but it also can sound kind of messy or it can sound very short. The release is a little bit of, like, the pedal of a piano. It's a little bit of, like, that after sound. You notice how we have our notes playing here? And even though there was a pause, we kept hearing the sound play, even though there was no delay or reverb on this sound. It's because we had a long release. So a long release can give your sound a little bit of that, like, space, delay, echo reverb feeling. And I find that it does have kind of a magical quality sometimes. So let's say you wanted a smaller sound like this. Now we can turn our second oscillator on and do a similar envelope. Let's go ahead and explore this other sound that I made an oscillator. So here you can see we have a sine wave because I really like how sine waves sound very smooth and subdued. And here we have our envelope shape. It takes a little bit of time to get there, but then it's kind of more of a pluck because this really just peaks at the beginning and slowly falls down. We have a second oscillator with a similar envelope and also a sine wave, but it's much quieter. Here we're going to this filter shape here. The cutoff is in the middle. Same with the resonance. We have a little bit of spread. I'm pitching it down an octave. There is no LFO. We're doing a standard routing, and I moved up the tone to about 70%. Most sins will have pitch control, which you can do here or a global transpose, which you can do here. This even has a pitch envelope if you wanted the pitch to go on a certain journey. It's starting up and going down, so it has, like, this laser sound. You could do the opposite. And that's kind of cool. It starts low and goes up, which has, like, almost a little video gamey kind of sound, but, like, still futuristic. So the pitch envelope can add a little bit of character to your sound. Maybe you just want something not so dramatic. And you can maybe move this down. And I actually think that sounds pretty nice. Studying some of your favorite Ableton presets is also a great way to learn sound design. No matter what synth you're using, if you find a preset you really like, pull up a default template version of that same synth and then recreate your favorite sound. That's honestly exactly how I learned, and I think that's one of the best ways to get really hands on with sound design. 18. Live Recording: Capture Authentic Harmonic Layers: This lesson is all about live recording. So let's dive into live recording. You need your audio interface. You got to make sure your preferences are good. There's obviously MC versus DI. There's headphones. You might need to tune your instrument, and you probably want to play to a metronome, and then ultimately, you might want to comp your takes. So, for live recording, you're going to need an audio interface. And the interface will have different inputs. This particular interface has two different inputs, which means I can have two LR chords which plug into mics, or two ox chords, quarter ince cables, which plug into instruments like electric basses, guitars, or electric pianos or one of each. Some interfaces have many more inputs. This one only has two. Next, we have our phantom power button, which if you plug in a vocal mic and you can't hear any sound, it probably needs phantom power on. Then we have our master volume and our headphone volume. Finally, in the back, here's where I plug into my speakers, and here is where I plug into my computer. So with the audio interface plugged into the computer, now we got to get our mics plugged in. So you want to take your XLR cable and plug it into your audio interface. Next, you need to take the other end and plug it into your microphone. So, obviously, a microphone can record your voice, but let's say you wanted to record an instrument. Here we have our guitar, and we want to record facing the sound hole, but maybe a little bit of the 12th fret over here. So combination of this general area, starting with about this width apart is a good place to start. And from there, you can tweak to get it just right for your song. Maybe you're recording a piano and you'll have maybe two microphones. One near the base, the left of the piano, and one near the high, the right of the piano, and you'll sort of move them around to see where is the best sound come from. There's a whole art to recording, and every instrument needs its own TLC, its own attention to detail to find where the best mic placement is. Once you have your mic placement, you're going to want to plug in your headphones. Now let's hop into Ableton. So we're going to create a new audio track to record onto, which is Commander Windows T to create a new audio track. And we're going to go up into our settings, go to audio and make sure the input is our audio interface. We definitely want the input to be the audio interface. The audio interface is going into my computer. So if the input was, say, selected Benzas MacBook Pro Microphone, then we wouldn't be picking up the audio from the mic. So it's very important that you select audio input device is the audio interface. You usually want the audio output device to be the audio interface. L. But for me because I'm screen capping my computer for the purposes of teaching this course, I have it selected to this multi output device, but you would probably want to select your audio interface. Next, we jump down to sample rate. Because I'm screen capping for a video, I'm at 48. If you're recording for music, you probably want 441. You jump down to latency. And remember, 2048 is the highest quality that you can listen to, but the most latency. So when you're recording, you probably want to try a lower latency so that there's no delay in your recording. If I can help it, I don't like to go lower than 256 when I'm recording a microphone because sometimes when I am too low here, it compromises the quality of the recording. Now that this is all set up, if my microphone is plugged into the first port, then I want to make sure that I select here number one. If I need phantom power, I'm going to turn that on now we see that this is a healthy volume. It's jumping around every time I'm talking. We tap it, and it really spiked. So we want to make sure we have number one selected here. We don't want to do one half because that will record into only one side. We want to select number one. If we had a microphone plugged into number two, then we would want to select number two. But in this case, we have a microphone in number one. That's what we want to select. You hit Record Enable, you hit in for in monitoring, and now we are ready to record our guitar. So now we have our audio track enabled. I've selected in. It's record enabled. I'm listening to just my headphone so that the microphone's only gonna pick up what I'm going to record. And let's go ahead and record some guitar. So I get my guitar ready. It's in a general good position, and I'm going to hit record. And we can seeing we can probably record. This is a little bit hotter so I turn up the input. That's good. Now we can jump over into Ableton, create a new audio track underneath. Now we're going to select the last part of our loop here and drag it to bar five and pull it left. That way, when we click on this and paste it right here near the end, when we drag back, we have our previous take. Again, our take before, again, our take before that. And you can see this is our first take here. So you can command or Windows E to cut the excess here because we don't need it. We can keep our record track and just turn it off and unarm it. And now we can go ahead and listen to our different takes. So here you could create a comp track where you could combine your different takes. Let's say you like this part of this take, but you like the first note better of this take, then you could combine the two of them in your master comp track to have the best of both worlds. Obviously, here, you may want to tweak the timing a little bit. Maybe this note needs to be louder so you could cut before and after it and turn it up here. And you could spend the time to line things up perfectly to the bead if you wanted. You could do that by cutting the individual notes, turning off the grid, and moving them. You could do that by clicking in here, opening up this warp few. Let's say you wanted to move this note, you'd create a Warpoint on the note before and a War point on the note after because you don't want to move those around, but you do want to move this one around. So then you click on this note. And when you move it, because you created these other Warpoints, it's not changing where those notes are hitting. And you can take the time to edit your part to make it feel totally right. You don't want to take all the live feeling out of it, but you just want to have it be an enhanced live performance. Let's say you had an instrument that you want to go direct in. You have a quarter inch cable, and you would plug one side into your instrument. And you would plug in the other side into your audio interface. You could maybe have a microphone plugged into input number two and your instrument plugged into input number one and record both of them at the same time. If you wanted to do that, then when you went to Ableton here, let's go ahead and create a new Track Commander Windows T for New Track, you would have two options to choose from. Now, it would be important that you knew which input was coming into which because if this was selected on number one, and you wanted to actually be recording your microphone with plug into number two, then you wouldn't be recording your microphone. So this is very important that this is correctly correlated with whatever input you want to record. Next, you would go to in, you would turn this on. Maybe you want to tune your instrument. You would bring a tuner on and you could play a note here. And you can move it around, make sure. And then once your instrument is properly tuned, you could go ahead and record, and that will work in the exact same way. Here you would go ahead and comp this in the exact same way. You could create new tracks. You would drag the last take to an even bar line. So if you needed to drag something left, you could you could drag it all down, create a new mini track, paste it at the end of the loop so that if you drag to the left, everything will be perfectly in time. Now, this loop actually is a bit too long because we have three takes here that are really half the size of our loop. So maybe what we would want to do is change our loop to be a little smaller so we could audition these takes this way. And there I think we have a winner. Obviously, you would want to edit your recording if you needed to, but you can record with mics. You can record with direct inputs. You can even plug in a MIDI keyboard or a beat pad, and those will sync automatically to your synth or drum racks in Ableton, and then you'll just be able to play your part right into Ableton's synth. You can also use Ableton's keyboard to trigger the Syth, as well. So let's go ahead and pull up a Syth here to play with our MIDI keyboard. Now I'm going to arm sinth. But remember, this track is also record enabled. Luckily, there's nothing here. But what would happen if I hit record is we would start recording over this. So if this track was here and I hit record, we would start erasing our guitar part. So it's very important that you are intentional about what tracks are record enabled. So let's go ahead and say, we want to play this synth. Let's actually find a different synth. That's pretty cool. That's kind of like a stranger things, vibe. So let's go ahead and with our mini keyboard plugged in, have record enabled on our synth and then record. Now, because of the nature of this arpeggio, the exact start time of the note is pretty important. So I would actually go ahead and edit this so that these notes are starting on the exact right time. And maybe we want these in octave lower. Let's say you want to use a different sound that requires more actual playing. Go drag that sound on here, turn this loop on. Oops. According Av was missed. Easy. You have a mini keyboard that's just playing the Syth, and you can play whatever you want. Remember, if you don't have a mini keyboard or a beat pad, but you do want to play your Cythan with this key icon selected this keyboard, it turns your computer keyboard into a mini keyboard so you can actually play on your keys. There are lots of different ways to record, and I highly encourage that you find a way to get some live feel into your music. 19. Classic Orchestration: Mastering Timeless Layering Techniques: Going to talk about a classic orchestral layering technique that I think is so useful for music production. This goes under the theory that less is more. You want to start with one harmony part then only layer when necessary. You can layer in different octaves. You want to break up your chord. And the idea is that you want to treat all your instruments as one sound. So let's explore what that means. Here we have our part. And so let's listen to this flute part, which is the whole chord with the embellishing notes all in one sound. So this is pretty obvious what this is. This is a chord and some embellishing notes, and that's all that it is. So, what am I talking about breaking up the chord? What you can do is that you can have different sounds play different parts of your chord in such a way that they're not overlapping. So what am I talking about? Here we have our low brass sound. And if you listen to this We're just playing the base notes of these chords. Yes, we're playing this F, and we're playing this G because these chords were not in first inversion. Fifth of the chord was at the bottom. So this is actually the base note. So we have this brass playing the base. Next, we have these strings which are playing the fifth and then playing the octave up from the base. Next, we have this solo string sound, which is playing the third. Honestly, I kind of want to turn this one up in volume just a little bit. And here we have our third with our embellishing notes, which is basically what I would call the melody of this part played on a harp. So altogether, these are playing the same part. So now we have our same chord with our melody that we had here with our flute part, but it's broken up into all of these different sounds. And this is what classical orchestration is. Classically composers would write something on the piano and then would break up each of those different notes into different instruments in the orchestra. And that's why an orchestra will have 40 strings and a huge brass section and a huge woodwind section. It's because the chords are the notes on the piano, you can play like a ten note chord on the piano, but that could be ten separate violins. For example, you can obviously layer your sounds. You can have multiple multiple instruments playing the same note. But this idea of breaking up your chords into different sounds to get a completely new, unique and powerful sound. This specific breakdown of orchestration was just one example. You could break down these chords into only using brass, only using woodwinds, only using strings. But I just want to get the ball rolling in your mind's eye of how you can play something or program something in one sound and then break it up into different sounds. And you can do this with synths, as well. This doesn't just have to be exclusive to orchestral sounds. You can also take this same concept and use different synths. So let's paste these parts here into a series of different sounding synths. This has a very different vibe, but you can start understanding how you can find sounds that have complimentary textures and while using two different sounds to create a third new unique sound. I love using this layering technique because you can really get some interesting sounds by just combining some ordinary sounds together to create something that's truly unique. 20. Modern Layering: The Sky is the Limit: Let's dive in to modern layering. To contrast the classical orchestral layering, by the use of technology, there's a new style of layering that has emerged. In the past, you were limited to how many musicians you actually had in your orchestra, or you were maybe limited to how many tracks you could use on an old console. But now you can have really as many tracks as you want, as many sounds as you want. So there's obviously some new and improved layering techniques. Let me show you a very classic synth layering technique. We have our Synth here. And a very classic way to layer these days is you just create another synth and just drag the same part over it and just duplicate it, but with a different sound. You can do that again. You can go into your third duplicate and you could select the empty space, command or Windows eight, Shift Down arrow to change the octave. So we're layering the same part, but in different octave. Here we can even do it again with a third sound. Maybe you'll pitch that last term up an octave. In a way, this is easier than the classical orchestral layering because you're not going into the part and deciding, okay, which parts should have this no, which parts should have the third? You know, what are we doing here? You can really just duplicate your same track into, like, as many senses as you want and just change some of those sens. Yes, it's cool if you have different octaves going on. You can have some an octave higher, some an octave lower, and you just combine various sounds until you're happy with how it sounds. This is a great way to get a really big and powerful sound or just a really unique sound depending on what you're going for. This is, for sure my go to when I'm layering something. I'll have a sound, and I'm like, Okay, that sounds pretty cool. This is not quite what I want. Just duplicate the sound and just, like, mess around with a different synth and say like, Okay, what if I add, like, this kind of a scyth? Or a more textury scyth or, you know, maybe more of a saw wave synth if the original one was a sine wave or whatever it is, you can start exploring, just duplicating it and just see what it sounds like. Pull in a random preset. You can spend a long time designing your first sound and having a really clear idea of what you want your first sound to be, the core sound. And then you can just, you know, drag in some presets and just see how those enhance your sound. And you can also tweak the volumes. So the first sound that you spent time on might be the loudest, and then you duplicate it, but you turn down the volume of the duplicate so that the first sound that you made is still, most of what you're hearing, but just have some subtle textures or some subtle sounds that are filling out the space or whatever it is. So you can tweak the volumes and just explore with different presets or take the time to design your own unique second sound or third sound or whatever you want. But I highly recommend trying to layer your sounds. Even if you think you're done, just try to layer it and see how it sounds because a lot of the times I have found that layering just makes things sound better. 21. EQ, Compression, Reverb: Ableton's Essential Tools: After you have your harmony part dialed in, it's time to talk about the processing, the EQ, the compression, and the reverb that you might want to use to enhance your sounds. Since harmony parts can vary from orchestral sounds to choirs to synths to guitars to an intimate piano, there's such a wide variety of what a harmony part can be. There is a wide variety of how you will process them. And there's no way to give a blanket statement about what will work for everything, but I'll give you perspective and some ways to think about harmony part. In general, for a regular song that has drums, bass, harmony, and vocals, the harmony is from a mixed perspective, the least important part. So you need your drums to cut through. You need your bass to cut through, and you need your vocal to cut through. And the harmony part really takes a backseat to everything else, because 100%, you're going to be able to hear it. You don't have to worry about that, and the ear is naturally so drawn to harmony, there's no concern that you shouldn't be too concerned about, is it loud enough? People will it's usually a supporting role for all these other parts. There are some sort of general things that I tend to do in a lot of songs, and I will usually high pass my harmony parts, maybe take down some of the his. Depending on the genre, if it does have drums, bass, and vocals, I will have some decent compression on the harmony because I don't want it to cut through too much and some reverb on it, you want it to sound like it's in a room of some kind. So let's go ahead and listen to this piano part and see what I might do to process. So let's say I had a baseline in this song, I might want to high pass this piano. A general rule with high passing is you don't want to change the sound unless, of course, you're doing some sound design thing and you know for sure you want this sound. If you're not sure, you probably don't want to change the sound. So you want to high pass it to a point that you aren't audibly changing when it sounds like. If you really can't tell around 100 hertz is generally a good place. So if you just can't tell what you're hearing or whatever, you can just say, Okay, I'm gonna ipass around 100 hertz. What we're doing here is we're leaving room for our bass and our kick drum to really cut through. This is more applicable to some genres than others. Next, we'll go to our compressor, and here is where, you know, really, like, a lot of different sounds will have this a lot of different settings that you're going to want to use. But you could try going to 20, going to 20, so it kind of quick release, slow attack might work. This is something I would maybe try on this. Maybe a slower release. And maybe some makeup came. So depending on the rest of the elements in your song would really inform the kind of compression that you would want, because the way that I perceive it as we'll go through in future lessons, the amount of compression really helps to glue the whole song together. So when things are alone or soloed, I tend to prefer the uncompressed version of the sound because they're more dynamic, depending, of course, on the sound. But when the vocals in the mix and the bass and the drums, that's when you can really tell. Oh, this compression is holding this piano back in its own place and letting everything else cut through, but in a way where I still can hear the piano. That's the desired effect that I tend to go for and will dive into that in future lessons. So let's say this piano wanted a little bit of its own reverb. Here you could send it to ascend that you have some rever bond. Let's jump over to the synth track and just process this as a completely different example. So here are going to paste our same settings from the piano track just to give us a head start, and we're gonna turn on the CQ and see how it sounds. And remember, the most important thing with processing or mixing is really volume. So this is just too loud. Turn off that other sound. And I decided this was too loud because to me, the drums were too quiet. So when something sounds too quiet, there are two ways to get there. You can turn up the quiet thing or turn down the loud thing. But oftentimes in music production, you want to think about, Oh, the drums are too quiet. Let's turn everything else down. You want to get in the habit of turning things down because you can only turn everything up so much. And all that matters is the ratio between things. So if you have everything that's too loud and you're peeking and you have no more headroom and it just doesn't work, you can get into trouble. So I recommend thinking about things in the way of turning something down in order to hear whatever was too quiet as louder. So here our hundred Hertz sounds fine. Let's check out this compressor. Oop, we're distorting a little. Let's turn this down. Actually, we're distorting out a serum. So sometimes sometimes it sounds good, sometimes it doesn't. Try this back up. And again, the compression is kind of hard to hear without everything else in the mix. So let's say you're generally happy to how the sounds and then you want to send this to a little bit of a reaver. The general idea here with reverb is that you want a room reverb that you're sending every sound to kind of. You might not send your vocal there. You might not send your bass or your kick drum. And yes, your snare might have its own reverb. But every other element of your song, probably wants to sound like it's in the same space, whether you want that to be like an intimate club or literally outer space or, like, a magical cave or wherever your song is taking place, you want to have a consistent reverb that you're sending a lot of your elements to so to simulate the effect of recording a live band in the same room. Even though you might be making, like, fantastical dance music that's supposed to take place in outer space, you want everything to sound like it's in outer space. So what you'll do is you find I tend to use this Valhalla reverb, but Ableton's reverb is amazing. So let's go to Ableton'sRverb, and we'll look through different options here. You could try this small room, wooden room. Maybe we'll try, like, a medium room. And this will be this medium room will be our room reverb. And so to hear what it sounds like, let's send this track all the way to really get a full understanding of what the reverb sounds like. That sounds okay. Let's audition some other ones. Actually, I think I maybe like our medium reverb the best. Generally, for your room reverb type sound, you don't want a huge reverb. You kind of want something that's a little discreet that is almost felt more than it's heard. That way, we can have our sound here. And we're just sending it a little bit to this reverb, so it kind of has the same space. And then if we send a lot of different elements of our song to that same reverb, they'll all kind of gel a little bit in this way that it's not super audible. Unless you do want a really echoy like, reverb kind of song, in which case, you can send everything to a bigger reverb. And there are totally songs where that's very appropriate and genres and songs where it's not. So that's sort of up to you to decide. One thing that I will do with my reverbs, and you can do this with Ableton's EQ is I will EQ before the reverb, and I will do this here at around 300 and here at around 7,000. So my reverb is really only taking up this space here because I don't want a lot of high end in my reverb because that can get very distracting and competing for the vocal and the top end of the drums. And I don't want a lot of low end of my reverb because that can kind of sound muddy. So this is the sweet spot to my ear where I like to hear my reverb, and I usually start with an EQ like this already on. Wrap it up. This is nice because even if you have a giant reverb, it's still somewhat contained. And this doesn't have to stop here. You can process your reverb even more. You can put this on after the reverb. You can really shape your reverbs, and I encourage you to do so because oftentimes reverb have a lot of different qualities. So there's a quality that you really like, but then maybe some other qualities that are not exactly what you're going for, and they're taking up a lot of space in your song. So I encourage you to have your reverbs on sense. Therefore, you can really shape them and to take the time to find, Oh, okay, yeah. I actually really just like hearing it here. I don't like hearing it anywhere else. Then, of course, you can turn it down. Or keep it big and change the settings. So the last thing I want to show you is potentially taking out some high end in a sound. If I did a move like this, yes, it is a sound design choice at this point. We're changing a little bit how this sounds. But depending on the genre, sometimes you do kind of want to take down some of the high end. This can be a trick that allows the vocal, the drums, and the bass to cut through a little bit more. Processing really takes a lot of massaging into place. You might take an E cue and move it around a little bit, try to see, Okay, is this where I want it? Is that where I want it? You might set it somewhere, move on, come back, and change it. Same with compression. I'd be like, Okay, this sounds like pretty good. You move on, you come back, and then rev there's no way to really tell you how to compress or EQ or put Reverb on just any song without hearing it. But there's some general rules and ways to think about things that harmony is largely a supporting role for the rest of your song. That is, of course, if you have a full song of drums, bass, vocals, everything else, if you're just a piano balad and a vocal, or even if you were just a classical piano song, that's completely different story, then of course, it is the lead instrument. This is just to help you with some general ways to think about things. But remember, of course, each individual song will require its individual treatment. 22. Harmony in Ableton Unleashed: Ableton has some amazing different harmony options. So now I want to go ahead and explore what those are. Every instrument here in Ableton minus the drums, is here for a harmony part. Of course, they also have bass, but all of these here are great options for harmony, depending on what you're looking for. You can go into analog, you can go into collision. You can go to electric, for the pianos, operator, the whole world of samples, tension, and wave table. So Ableton is really well equipped to support you in finding the right harmony sound, especially because not only do they have these amazing scents, but they have amazing presets. You can find some chords that you like. And just go ahead and cruise through a whole bunch of different presets and see what are you looking for? And the idea is that this will really just save you time unless you have a specific vision, and you're like, Nope, I want some synth keys, and I know exactly what I want them to sound like, and I want them to sound like this. I often have somewhat of a vision, but it's nice to really just audition some other things because sometimes you find something that you weren't expecting, but that actually sounds way better than what you thought. So there's a lot of different ways to do harmony in Ableton. You can design your own sound. You can use a sample or a loop. You can use a preset, whatever you want. And there's no wrong way to do it. Harmony really is my favorite part, but that's just because I'm a piano player and I'm a sucker for some cool chords on the piano. And that's usually how I start all of my songs. But it's so much fun to explore different sounds in Ableton and just see what is this rhythmic pad sound like an analog, you know? Like, what does this weird wave table preset sound like? And sometimes you'll try, like, a bass preset on a harmony part, and then it'll sound super cool. So don't ever think that you need to, like, use only keyboard presets for harmony parts. Try everything. Try things that you think might be a bad idea just to see what happens because through exploring and through just trying different things is when you can really find some of the most unique ideas. 23. Third Party Plugin Showcase: Used some third party plugins in this chapter, and I want to go through each and every one so that you can decide if it's something that you're interested in using yourself. So, obviously, we have Keyscape here. This is our piano. It's by Spector Sonics, and it is my favorite piano Synth. I think technically, this is Syth slash Sampler Hybrid where some real pianos were recorded. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but I know that it sounds absolutely amazing from these really grand piano sounds to quirky, honky tonk, broken down, unique sounds to some electric pianos and everything else. These really incredible piano sounds. We, of course, have play, which is the composer cloud full of all these amazing orchestral sounds from brass sections, string sections, woodwinds. They have world sounds, choirs, voices, guitars, sins, absolutely everything. This is a little pricey at $20 a month, and I got this primarily to score some videos and score some short movies. But suddenly, once I had access to these sounds, there was no going back. And I love incorporating some orchestral sounds into all of my music. Omnisphere by the same company that makes Key Scape has an amazing Syth called Omnisphere, and Omnisphere just has tons of different presets of all different kinds of synth and synth bass and really everything. So Omnisphere, as well, is a little pricey. But if you decided to buy one Syth, I would maybe recommend that it was Omnisphere just because within that, you have so many different options. We have Nexis, which used to be you might go to. I don't go for Nexus too much anymore, but it does have some really incredible presets, and it's especially good if you make EDM. We have serum, which is the most popular synth for making your own sounds. It's also the best synth for making really crazy dance Dub steppe, future based, like, house based. It's like all the electronic music crazy sounds are often made in serum. We also have our Pro Q three, which is my favorite EQ. We have the Renaissance compressor, which is my favorite compressor. And we have Valhalla Vintage reverb, which is my favorite reverb. It's not necessary to have any third party plug ins to make music. You can make some incredible music with the Ableton Stock sounds. But I do want to give you an honest picture about what professional producers are actually using because a lot of my friends in the industry who are producing and writing songs, they will use a lot of third party plug ins. I don't want you to be disadvantaged by not knowing that they're out there. But that being said, is not necessary. And especially when you're starting out making music, it's totally enough just to explore with all the Ableton sounds. And as you get a little bit more seasoned, and you're like, Okay, I'm pretty good at making sounds in Ableton. I like these sens. But you keep hearing these other sounds, you're like, you know what? Like, how are people getting these super crazy sounds? Like, it's taking me a lot of layering and stuff in Ableton. Is that what people are doing? And then you can try the free trial of some of these other sins, and you're like, Oh, okay, it's actually easier and quicker to use serum than wave table, for example, and you might eventually be like, Okay, I can make really great music using wave table, but maybe I want to, like, bite the bullet and dive in and go and try serum. And that is probably the best order of operations. So I would recommend getting really comfortable in Ableton, and then once you feel like you have a handle of things whatever is the weakest link of your production, if you're like, Mm, I just feel like I'm not good at compressing or something, maybe try to buy a different compressor, and then that can help you solidify and make the best music that you can. 24. Learn from the Masters: Study Iconic Harmonic Parts: As with everything, the best way to learn how to make good harmony parts is to study your favorite harmony parts. So you want to study your favorite songs, and you want to notice. Okay, for this specific listen of your favorite song, just listen to the harmony. Don't really focus on the drums or the bass or the vocals or whatever else. Really try to listen. How many instruments are they using? How much layering are they doing? When are they layering? Which octave is the main harmony sound? And then you want to try to play those songs on your instrument or recreate them in Ableton. So you can just go ahead and listen to your favorite songs and really identify. What are the harmony parts? So here, it started with guitar. Then we had one synth come in. Da, da, da, da, and then we have another wiggly synth that's kind of doing a similar melody, but in a more wiggly, kind of ghostly kind of sound going on. So we have three different harmony parts here. It's Opposite songs. And notice how it started with the guitar. So you feel like the guitars there the whole time. But during the section when the vocals and the drums came in, that's becoming the main focus. So you listen to the vocal when that's there, you listen to the drums when that's there. But you remember that the guitar was there to begin with. So even though it's not the focal point anymore, your ear fills it in and you keep finding it in all of the pockets when the other sounds are not playing. B. I set does Delta t d. They. Do you like it? So, here you would listen to the whole song and listen, like, what does the end sound like? Apris faun Oh, Blossom. So here you can tell that it layered a little bit and is a little bit bigger in the end. This is a very common theme where you'll start kind of small, and as the song grows and grows, essentially just keeps layering and layering and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's a very different kind of song here. So this has a guitar part and a keyboard part. Two harmony parts. Sake Bascom China Keyboard cut out. Steal your manslo. Little girl from Sweden dream of silverscrem poco. And if you want these kind of dreams, it's telephonic. Keyboard back in. Itza. Its out the word and sound breezing. Sicker than the rest there is no dump. Here there's some ooze in the background. The drums are hitting harder, so everything's kind of playing a little bit harder. The guitar has slightly different more heavy tone to it, and we've got some ooze. So this song, again, layered. If you really want to do this study, I recommend that you really listen to these songs all the way through and understand them or is this jumping through quickly so you can get a feel for how these things work. Here's our iconic riff. Be ****** up, if you can be changed. I knew I never could on it. I can't. I know body. It's good. And this also has some chords that are hitting. Boom, boom. Very kind of discreetly in the background, but it's adding powerty to these downbeat. So there's two harmony parts you had again. There's the main if and then these supporting chords that are hitting here. Honey, you stay you stay I change. I told you that I never would told you I changed. Now that main if is layered up in octave. I knew I never could on it. Nobody else as good as you, honey, you say When I'm away from you, I miss it such the reason man thing I told you that I never told you, I as Even when I knew I never could case. This is going to, like, a chord part where the if is not playing, and we just have these big chords, and it's gonna build up to the final drop where everything kicks back in. I never you on you. I never Wood. So it's so important to study your favorite songs. If you don't actually go and recreate them, which I do recommend that you do. If you don't want to take the time to do that, at least listen to them a few times and either write down or get really clear in your mind, what are they doing? What is the harmony in their songs doing? A lot of those had two harmony parts. There was the main idea and then a supporting part. So that might be something you want to try. You have your main vibe, your main if or whatever it is. And then you have some supporting chords of some kind. And clearly we saw a few of the guitar and keyboard or guitar and synth combo. So that might be something interesting for you to try, depending on the kind of music you want to make. 25. Learning Activity Lay Down Your Harmony Parts: Congratulations. You've made it to the end of the Harmony chapter. I am so proud of you. I'm so excited. Harmony is my favorite part of music, and I have an awesome learning activity where you can put your new harmony skills to practice. So go ahead and pull up the Harmony learning activity. Here you'll find three different drum loops that are waiting for you to write different harmony parts to them. Like always, we have the BPMs here on the right. You can do whatever BPM you want, and I encourage you to either record your own harmony parts or go into Ableton sinth or samples, drag some parts in, and write harmony parts to each of these beats. If you're able to, I would say program one part or play it on an Ableton synth, record another part for a different beat, and then use a sample or loop for the third beat. And I'll catch you in the next chapter. 26. Congratulations!: Congratulations on finishing this class. I am so proud of you and I can't wait to listen to your class project. You can say hi to me on Instagram or Spotify at Benza Maman. And if you like this class, please check out my other music classes on Skillshare.