Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on Harmony in music Production. My hope in this course is to
be able to give you a lot of unique approaches to
harmonic concepts within the music
production environment. So what this course is not is a course on
chord progressions, arrangement for
strings and orchestra. Instead, my hope is to give you some unique and niche
production concepts that specifically
relate to harmony. So for example, bending
notes between chords, using things like auto filters, arpeggiating chords, doing chord stuttering
effects, this sort of idea. The hope is that you
already have some sort of foundation in terms of
harmonic knowledge, and I'm hoping to give you
some unique ways to be able to apply that knowledge within the music production
environment. So if you're someone
that already has a basic understanding of major and minor chords and how to arrange them within
a chord progression, and you're hoping
to take your music production one step further, then this course is for you. I would say that this course is an intermediate level course
because I'm not giving you all of those
fundamental concepts of how to build major
and minor chords, how to build chord progressions. I've already done that in
more piano based courses. So if you're hoping to
supplement that theory, I have that available to you, but we're about to get a
whole lot more granular on the music production side of things within this course. There is going to be a class
project within this course, and it's relatively simple. You're going to
take some sort of progression that you've
already been working on, perhaps already within
one of your own pieces, and you're going to
apply two to three of the tricks available within this course to that progression. So maybe you're
using the standard house cords, bending
between them, and creating stutter
effects to help elaborate the progression you've already been working with. But before I go into
too many details on the class project,
keep in mind, there is a full class dedicated to outlining all of the details for your project, so make
sure you check it out. Many of the harmonic
tricks within this course I use very frequently
within my own productions. In fact, many of
these techniques I had to kind of discover on my own or through very different
sources on the Internet. So my hope is to compile
them all together so that you have
plenty of tricks to be able to work
with yourself. There's going to be tons of fun nuggets of information
within this course. I can't wait to
share it with you, so you can start to apply
it to your own productions, whether that be within hip hop, electronic music, pop, or whatever style
you're working on. I truly believe
that stylistically, these concepts are
going to be able to bleed between any style fusion of styles as you see fit. So I'm looking forward
to helping you on this music production
journey through harmony. Let's jump into the first
class. I'll see you there.
2. Class Project: For this project, you're
going to take two to three of the harmonic tricks that I've given you within this course, and you're going to apply
them within a small loop. This loop might be
four to eight beats long or even four
to 8 bars long. It's really, to some extent, stylistically dependent and
also based on how long you want to make the loop
and how comfortable you are as a producer already. Now, it would be great if you could try out all the techniques and then narrow things down to your favorite two or three. But even just having gone
through this course, you might already have
a pretty strong idea as to which techniques
resonate most with you. That being said, I want you to also within the
course description, write about the techniques
that you've used, why you've used them, and what you like so
much about them. It's, in essence, a sort of journal entry so that you
can show yourself what you appreciated from this
course and then apply those within your music
production style moving forward. At the end of the day, it's very important for you to
have your own style. And unless you start to ask
yourself these questions of what do I like and
why do I like it? In terms of production
techniques, then you're going to
have a harder time settling into your
style as a producer. So that's why I want
you to start to ask yourself these
questions early on. Now, this doesn't
have to be perfect. Just make sure that
you're trying to apply some of the
techniques that you like. We're not going for
academy awards with this. It's just so that I can give you some feedback as to what
I think you did best, as well as areas of improvement. Now once you've
recorded your loop, you can upload it
to platforms like SoundCloud or even Google Drive, anything where you can supply
with me a public link so that I can easily access the material and then
give you some feedback. Again, make sure
that you're taking your time with this project. It's not about rushing it, but rather having some
fun along the way. Of course, if you have any
questions along the way, please feel free to
reach out to me and ask. I'd be happy to give
you some more feedback and information as you need it. So I hope you have fun
with this class project, I'll catch you in
the next class.
3. Scale Mode & Generating Chords: Alright, so before we
start to dive into all the great details
of what we can do as some fun harmonic
tricks as producers, I want to first
update you with what Ableton has accessible to people that aren't very
familiar with the theory of harmony or even scales
for that matter. So we're going to jump
in. We're going to talk about Scale
Mode and how you can automatically generate
chords. Let's dive in. So one thing that you'll notice up at the top of Ableton in this area up here is that we have this Scale
Mode that we can turn on. Hit the little sharp
and flat button, and then you're going to
tell it what key you're in. For now, let's go to F minor. F minor is not an easy key
or scale to work with. It has four flats. To a beginner student, this might not be an
easy key to work with. But let's say you want to
create a song in F minor. Well, we're going to hit
F. We're going to select minor from this
incredibly huge list. You're going to mostly be
working with major and minor. But if you know
about jazz modes, those are available octatonic
scales, pentatonic scales, harmonic minor, harmonic major, which doesn't get
used very often, a bunch of different types
of scales and modes. We're going to hit Minor.
So we're in F minor. Next, I'm going to
highlight a region. I have a Roads keyboard sound. If I hit Control Shift M, we're going to create
a little mini clip. I'll pull this up a bit. And now, something to note
over here is that there's all this purple information
on the left side. This is showing me all the
notes within the scale. So this A flat, this B flat, not the B natural, the C, the D flat, not the D. So anything
that has purple, whether it be the
tip of a black key or an entire white key, those are notes
that are available. Now, if you don't want to
see all these white notes, you would just hit scale so that all you're seeing are
notes within the scale. So now, as I go
through and play, There it is our F minor scale. I want to be able to see all the little chromatic
notes in between. That's just the view
that I'm used to working with. You can also hit fold. This is always going
to be an option. Fold is just going to take the
information that you have. If it's very spread
all over the place, let's say we have this
and this and this. It's going to just
take the notes that you're working
with and fold them into a very visually
appealing view. But if you want to
later add notes outside of the first view you selected,
it can be quite limited. So what I'd recommend is
I used to hit fold so that I could see the MIDI
information a bit chunkier. Instead, go to the left side where the little
magnifying glass is, click and then drag
left or right, and you can zoom in it that way. So let's say Control
A and delete for now. The next thing is
this highlight scale. Like, if you don't
have this turned on, what you'll notice is
that you still have the purple on the keys showing you what the
scale notes are. But with highlight scale, it runs all the way
through the MIDI. So anything that's purple is going to be an appropriate
note within that scale. Now when we want to create
chords automatically, we can go down to
this generate section down in the bottom
left corner here. So first things first,
we're going to set our root to something that
we want to play around with. Generally, you start with
the root chord of the key. So notice we're up in F
minor. We set that before. Our first chord is
going to be an F chord, and we're going to
for now, actually, we can just create four by
hitting this little plus sign, two, three, four, if
we give a listen. We have four of these cords. I can now take the second chord. Let's zoom in a little
bit and change the root, let's say to B flat, and then change the
inversion so I'm reordering the notes so
they stay close together. You'll notice that when
the inversion was up here, everything just
looks like it leaps from here up to
here quite a bit. But we want to make sure that the notes stay close together, so I will invert down
to second inversion. This third cord I don't
even know or care. We're just going to
go let's say D flat, bring down the inversion
until it works. And then on our last chord, let's go Let's go C. Okay, so we have something now
that sounds like this. Now, what you'll notice
on the left side here is there's these little
interesting patterns, and in this case, we've created four chords, so
there's four of them. What gets kind of
confusing, for example, is if I highlight one of
these chords and change, for example, any one of these, it starts to split my cord
up four different ways, which is a little bit confusing. So what I'm going
to recommend you do is delete three of these, select any one of them, and then if you
drag up and down, you will change the
type of chord voicing, so they might get a
little bit jazzier, they might just get a
little bit more dense. So let's listen with
these two chords randomly change the first and the third. It
sounds like this. So there's lots of room to
play around with this stuff. I would say really what you
want to make sure of is that this inversion is
set properly for each chord so you're not leaping around all
over the place. I think one of the main reasons you
would use something like this is to smooth out the
way you approach Harmony, is to make sure that
you don't sound like an amateur with your
chord progressions. So go through, create
your chord progression, and then make sure that you have the inversions set properly. Now, it's also important to
note that up at the top, where I had set things to minor if I want to access
certain chords, like, for example, in F minor, there's a C minor chord,
but maybe I want C major. You need to understand a little bit of music theory because the C major chord is hidden within the harmonic minor scale. And even just changing
it on the spot is going to change the chord
progression we just played. It's going to have
some E naturals now, which will set up some
different chords. Give it a listen. Now, what you'll notice is that it
did change the purple, the way that things look, but it doesn't actually
change the chords. You would have to now go back into generate recreate
some new chords, and it'll recreate
it within this key. But, for example, the
last chord C minor, you'll notice this E flat is not sitting on
the purple note. So you could also just go
through and adjust and make sure is everything
sitting on a purple note? If it is, then I'm being
true to F harmonic minor. So it ends up
sounding like this. Okay, so that first ord kind of got ruined you might want
to play around with that. But you'll notice
that this is now something quite a bit different. We have this G, B flat, C and E flat. At best, this is like a
rootless version of an F cord. You're going to get some
really interesting results as you get playing around
with these different shapes. But right now, you'll
notice there's two patterns over here, right? We have two of these rectangles. So if I highlight a cord
and slide one of these up, now it splits it into two cords, one based on this shape, one based on this shape, all fitting in that same
amount of time. The long and short
of this is that there's lots of
room to experiment, but set the key up
top based on what key you want your song to
be in C major, F minor. Open up this generate menu once you've created a mini clip. Again, remember that's just
going to be highlight area, Control Shift M,
and you can also do a Control L to loop the area if you want to
listen over and over. And then once you're
in this area, you're going to
generate the chords by setting a root and then
setting an inversion. So really your
options are to hit this generate button to
then create the chord, or if you hit the plus button, you'll create two
instances of that chord, each half the length. But again, you could extend
this out up to three or four. So you're getting sort of faster durations of these chords. So those are the basics.
You set the key, you open up generate after you've created an
empty midi clip, you set the root,
you generate that, and you set the inversion
and make sure that your inversions are keeping the notes relatively
close together. This is a foundational
starting approach. It's not going to
teach you a whole lot about music theory
unless you're actively looking at what's happening and trying to decipher
what's going on. I don't think for me
this will ever replace my intuitive responses
within harmony, having practice various
chord progressions and wanting to move to certain things at the touch
of the keys as opposed to penciling things in or using little dials to generate them. But I think for beginners, this is a very fantastic
tool to get you started so you can start to
build harmonic confidence. So for our next
class, we're going to talk more about inversions. I'm going to give you
a fun Inversion Hack, whether you're using
this generate tool or playing around with
the MIDI yourself. I think this next class
and how we discuss inversions is going to be
helpful, so I'll see you there.
4. Inversion Hack: For this class, we're going
to keep things short. I'm going to give you
a small inversion hack that you can try out.
It is very simple. I'm starting with this
because I think it's one of the most important things to start with straight
out the gate. Inversions and voice leading are very important in harmony. We're going to talk
about how you can easily achieve it using
MIDI information. Let's jump in. Alright,
so I'm up here now, so we have a little bit more
space in our MIDI window. I'm going to create
a chord progression, and let's say it's E flat minor, and then E flat minor with D flat in the base, E flat minor. With C in the bass, and then something like
a B flat seven sus four. It doesn't matter
if you're like, what the heck is
he talking about? It's just a nice
sounding progression. And I've turned down
the velocity on each chord a little bit.
It sounds like this. So here's the hack. Right now, by the time we consider these top notes and then these notes, you can see things have
shifted down quite a bit. So one thing we can do is take some of the low
hanging fruit here, highlight it and press
Shift and then up. And that's going
to raise things up into a slightly tighter area. Another thing you
could do is highlight all these repeated notes
as well, too. Shift up. This looks nice.
Like, if you look at the range from here to here, our top note has
never budged and our bottom note is
down only one semiton. It's almost in an exact
range all the way through. It should sound similar, but now all those bottom
notes that we're moving are moving in the middle of the chord.
Let's check it out. Now, the range is quite high. Control A, shift
down is going to select and then move
it down one octave. Now it might be a little
bit on the low side. So what you'll notice
is that there's this compromise of how high
do I want the part to sound? How low do I want
the part to sound? And what do I want
the inversions or the reordering of the notes
to be to achieve that? If one was too high and
the other is too low, let's try this
again where we take this information now and
raise it up in octave. So we're in that middle
area between the two. Okay, now we don't get that
satisfying da, da dum, dum, moving down to the B flat, but it still sounds like
it's in a nice tight range. Now, keep in mind what we're doing is inverting the chord, taking some notes from
the bottom and moving them up an octave or
taking notes from the top and bringing them
down an octave until we have a reordering of the
notes that makes sense based on voice leading. And voice leading is like this. Think about, like, a
choir actual voices. And let's say, in
the first chord, we have the note B flat. In the second chord, we
have the note B flat. And this happens through
all four chords. Look, we have a B flat in
each of these four chords. So if you're singing B
flat on the first chord, why should you change the note you're singing
on the second chord? Let the other singers change
their notes if they have to. There's a lot of
repeated notes, though. This note here
repeats three times. This note E flat here
repeats four times. So really, it's this idea
of taking singers or different voices and leading them to the next note properly. Voice leading, we
are being smooth and efficient within the
movement of those voices. Now, this example was
a little bit cherry picked because there
wasn't a lot happening. It was like E flat and then E flat with a D flat in the base, E flat with a C in the base. The movements
weren't really big, but we could try to exaggerate those movements. Let's try this. We have E flat minor
up to A flat minor, down to D flat major, down to C B flat
major. Let's try this. It sounds okay, and to
any beginners listening, you might say, The
chords sound nice. But to anyone
that's been playing or producing music for a while, you'll notice things
feel leapy and we don't want these leaps
happening too much. If my guitar is uptop and
my keyboard is down below, but my keyboard keeps leaping up into this range
of the guitar, things get a bit conflicted
and it's harder to separate those instruments a bit more within their own space. So I would start by
saying this. Which chord do you like the most
in terms of its range? Maybe it's tonality. Is it smoother down low? Is it more bright
and brittle uptop? Let's just give a
listen one more time. I actually really like
these last two chords. They're sitting in a nice smooth spot for this instrument. So why don't we take
this chord here? We're going to bring the
top note down an octave. This chord will take the
whole thing down an octave. That's too low. Let's take
the bottom note up in octave. And now we're in a
nice tight range where notes aren't moving too
much. Let's give a listen. I really like that, but again, when you highlight the
whole thing, you can bring it up in octave
with shift up. Or if we go back
to where we were shift down, this
will be too low. But that's the basic
idea. This was not a super tough concept. The idea of taking a few
notes and then shift up until you find a rearrangement of the notes that you like. Did you notice that when
we had the chords leaping versus when we used inversions
to smooth things out, it just sounded better. But not only does
it sound better, it leaves more room
for other instruments. So instead of trying to
EQ things all the time, arrangement of notes
is super important. And you might have
heard at some point, it's more about
the way the player plays or the way the song is arranged than digging into EQ and compression straightaway. There's a lot of truth to that, so this is a great example
of how rearranging notes can save you from trying to do all these EQ things
down the line. If I have this
progression down here, and I say to myself, It
sounds kind of muddy. Let's EQ some of
that low end out. Well, maybe it's just that the notes are in the wrong spot. Bring them up. Now
they're in a great spot, maybe arguably a bit too high. So you take some of those
top notes, chop them down. Sounds quite nice. And again, you can create different
sort of melodies based on what top notes are selected
within this process. Is it a melody? No, but
it's like a counter melody. It's some extra little tune kind of hidden within the song. So that's it for this Inversion
Hack. It's pretty simple. It's very effective, and
it's a great starting point. Notice I didn't touch the
generative tool for this. We're not using stacks
and inversions. It gets really confusing really quick because
you will select your chord and you'll use the inversion button
to change it. But the root is still set
to a different chord, you get some really
wacky results. So for now, I would
say stick with either generative or with doing things more by hand
or on the keys, you could probably find
a hybrid approach, but I promise you, you'll be sort of swimming upstream a little bit,
trying to accomplish that. So that's it for this class. In our next class,
we're going to talk about bending cords. One of my favorite techniques.
I'll see you there.
5. Auto Filter: Alright, let's get
talking about how you can use Auto Filter on your harmony so that you're sort of bubble wrapping
your percussion elements, almost creating a bit of harmonic percussion
in its own right. It's going to make more sense as I dive into it,
so let's jump in. So what I've done is
set up the session. So we have drums, our MPE keys bending like
they had before, and an octave higher version
of the same keyboard part. The original keyboard
part sounded like this. Up an octave sounds like this. And our drums sound like this. What I'm going to do is delegate
the kick drum so that it affects the lower
keyboard part and the snare so that it affects
the upper keyboard part. And how I'm going
to do that is I'm going to go over
to Audio Effects, and I'm going to pull
in the Auto Filter, which is right up near the top. Auto Filter will bring it
onto both keyboard parts. I'm actually going to mute this top keyboard part for now, and I'm going to bring
down the filter. So we're just hearing a
muffled version of this part. So let's say around 230. You can bring up the
resonance a little bit. It's going to kind of give a
bit more of a whippi sound. I'll show you what I'm talking about once I've set this up. But the important thing
here is that you click this little triangle to open up the external
side chaining. So we have external, and our source is going
to be from our drums. It is going to be
specifically our kick. So every time the kick happens, something is going
to happen with this auto filter and that something is determined by
this envelope knob over here. Do I want the filter to pull down every time
the kick happens? And how much do I
want it to pull down? Or do I want it to pull up? In this case, pulling
down is going to go from muffled to a
non existent sound. Pulling up is going to open
up those upper frequencies. So it sounds like this. Listen with the resonance up. You'll see what I mean
with that whippi sound. We can take that same filter. I'm going to hold control and duplicate it over to the
upper keyboard part, and I'm just going to change
the input to the snare drum. So now it's maybe bring the
frequency down a bit more. You don't have to open up the envelope all
the way, either. You could have it just partial. So with the drums,
you'll see that these harmonic elements are sort of highlighting the
kick and highlighting the snare so that they
have harmonic qualities. They're representing
chords, but we're not hearing chords all the
time. It sounds like this. Now, if you've ever heard
my music as Cesar's Palace, you will recognize that this is a sound I use very frequently. We're bending between chords, and we're using this
auto filter sort of like a gate where anytime
the drums happen, we're hearing this sound,
but it's gradual over time, and it's also working through
a frequency spectrum. And speaking of
gradual overtime, if you click around
this envelope button, you'll see that there's
attack and release. If I really open up
that attack, Wow. Instead of bow, it's Wow. It kind of slowly opens up. We can do the same thing
for this bass drum part here. Barrel, Bo. Barrel. Wow, wow, wow. Well ow and Wilson for you. So check it out. So it sounds better with a
little bit of an attack, not like perfectly zero. Sort of playing around
with that a little bit. Another thing you
can do is you can flip the type of
filter you're working with and start with it really high and have the
envelope pull it lower. So now we have together. It just creates all
this liquidy goodness. I always say it's kind of like bubble wrapping
things a little bit. It feels like the kick
and snare are sort of wrapped with this whoa around it, this little bubble wrap. That's just how I
think about it. You can think about
it however you want. But the idea is we're
pulling in an Auto Filter. It is being triggered to
some sort of a source, generally a kick
drum or snare drum. You can do this to
anything, though. You could have a synth being
controlled by a vocal part. You can really get playing a in terms of control and
hierarchy of instruments, we have side chain compression, which we haven't talked
about in this course, but it's one way for
an instrument to tell another instrument
to get quieter. But this is kind of like the
opposite where it's like, I have only high frequencies, and then when another
instrument plays, this is joining in with some
of those lower frequencies. So it's just a way
to be able to tuck everything together and
sort of smooth things out. But again, it sounds kind of liquid in the way
that things move, especially as you play
around with this resonance. Watch what happens when
I really pull this up. Why. It's pretty substantial. So while this isn't me teaching you major and minor chords, it's a production
course after all. Something you can
do that's really fun with harmony is this. You can do it with melody, but it doesn't work as
well, I promise you. It has to do with the range of the melody being
quite often higher. And these really fun
sounds that I like to play around with do need
a bit of low content. Also, melodies
move around a lot. So our filter might
not always be affecting the melody
the same way. So if the melody
moves up really high, but I'm trying to pull down and sweep into low frequencies, that's not really going
to change anything. But with chords,
if you voice lead them properly and
invert them properly, what you'll end up having
is a pretty narrow range. So this auto filter is
always working within that same relatively
narrow frequency spectrum. Another thing
that's fun on these newer auto filters is the drive. You can really pull that sound
up so it's very present. And again, we can pull this down pretty
low. Check this out. I love these sort of sounds, back with the drums. Now. Put that in our other synth.
I'm going to pull it back. I prefer the low pass version. I'm going to pull it quite low, maybe some pretty
high resonance. But we're still flipped for our envelope let's
bring that back up. Now, these sound pretty similar. And at this point, I could
just have the kick and snare, the full drum part, affecting
one of these synths, and it would sound
about the same. What I like about splitting this low and high version is that I can pull
this up a bit, and now we have now two different elements
working with one another. Lastly, let's get a
little bit crazy. Let's bring in a high
hat part and get a third keyboard part to be
responding to the high hat. It's going to be a little
bit of a quicker flick in terms of that tut tut
that's happening. But if I go over to
my splice sounds, pull in a high hat, I don't really care which
one it is for now. We're not focused too much
on perfecting the drums, having something
that is functional. Wow. Okay, we have a basic part.
Let's bring the keys in. This is the higher
keyboard part. Another thing I could consider is just for some
differences here, I could take the
notes and do a bit of that inversion trick
just so that there's a bit of a textural difference
to these chords here, and they're working with
different inversions. Again, the Auto
Filter, in this case, is drums, but now it's
set to the high hat. If we listen to it by itself, we can hear a bit more
of that steady pulse. Maybe we want to try
the high pass version. What's cool about the high pass version is now we're hearing the high end of the chord that's happening up
around here consistently. So it is filling out
the frequency spectrum a little bit more.
Altogether, we have. It's already starting
to feel like it's, like, a functional song. There isn't really
a melody happening, but we have drums
and all this stuff that's really hard to
explain happening around the drums until you've
kind of gone through step by step and
used this approach. So Auto Filter and the way
that it can work with harmony, I think is a seriously seriously seriously
untapped resource. We got to stop every ten years thinking that
pitching up vocals to chipmunk vocals and
pitching them down to demonic sounding vocals
is some new technique. Let's start using
new techniques. Let's use MPE. Let's use Auto Filter, and let's create something like what happened
with Dub Step, where we were just
using LFOs all over the place Ben it
was this new sound, and people went crazy. I'm not saying Dub step
is the best genre ever. I'm just saying, at the
time, it was quite unique. Whereas now I think
these Auto filters, which I'm reluctant
to even share this information because it's such a big part of my sound. I think these are up and coming, so get used to how these can
work to benefit your sound. So that's it for this
class on applying Auto Filter to your
chords in our next class, we're going to talk about
our peggiating notes. I'll see you there.
6. Arpeggiated Chords: Alright, let's get talking about our peggiation something that works particularly well when
we're talking about Harmony. Let's dive in and
talk about a couple of different ways that
you can achieve it. Alright, so we're going to
continue where we left off, which sounded
something like this. I'm just going to bring that
high hat down a little bit, so it's a bit more subtle.
Now, this isn't mixed. This isn't mastered,
but it's got a pretty cool compositional
starting point. Let's take one of these parts,
maybe the high hat part, so we'll mute the kick and
snare influenced keys, and only the high hat influenced keys are
going to be heard. Sounds like this. Now, I chose this particular
part because arpeggiating this
low part here. Now. First of all, I like the
way it sounds already, and I don't want to change it. But secondly, you're going to hear a little piece
of an arpeggiators, and then it's all going
to be gone in between those kiktrm hits because the high hat is more consistent, we're hearing a more
consistent sound on this keys part down below. So what is arpeggiating? Basically, it's when
you're holding a chord, we're moving up individually between the notes of that chord. We could have it do, do,
do, do, do, do, do, do, do, arpeggiating higher,
do, do, do, do, do, do, lower or do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, up and down, down
and up, randomized. There's lots of
different versions. So one way that you can do this is by taking the
MIDI information, and just doing it by hand. What's cool about this is you can do it exactly how you want. So I could have ascending,
maybe up and down first, but then maybe purely
ascending the second time. Now, I'm short one note here. I could also consider E
flat was my first note, so I can go all the way
up to that note here and just make sure that
I'm keeping E flat, G flat and B flat
as all my notes. You could even start to
do some shift up shift down so things are really
moving all over the place. I do a lot of sort of baroque, bach inspired harpsichord parts within my electronic music, and this is a fun
way to kind of go about it so you
can customize it. So it has a bit of a sort
of baroque sort of sound. So let's do this for each chord, up, down, up a bit more. So on this chord here, I'm making sure that I have
four squares here, like four little
pieces of the grid. Fours work well in music. I know that I'm working
with 16th notes. In that case. Boom, boom, boom. And then this note here, if
we bring it up in octave, is here, this one's too low. I'm just going to cheat
and bring this one over here, boom, boom, boom. I will delete that in a moment. And again, I'll
bring this down to the bottom note and
pop it up in octave. And then for our last chord, same deal, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, and then this last note
here pops up in an octave. Sounds like this. You can see it gives a very
different sound. This is actually too
low. But you can see it gives a very different
sort of sound. I want to play around a little bit more with the auto
filter using this sound. Now that I've changed the
part, I might want to kind of customize
this experience, this effect a little bit more. So that's our harmony
up top, right there. That's covering all of
our high end information. This is covering quite a
bit of that mid stuff. And then down here,
we have the lows. So it's interesting that
our harmony is rhythmic, but it's also sort
of contained within low mid and high environments so that you're really
filling out the spectrum. Let's give a listen. So
there's quite a bit happening. If I turn off the Auto Filter, That is our customized
arpeggiated part. But let's go back
to where we were. This was up in octave. I think also technically
it was inverted slightly. I took these down in octave. So this is where
we had left off. I'm going to go over
to the left side here, and I want to make sure
you can all see this. But if you go up here, you'll notice that we
have MIDI effects. You're going to
select midi effects, arpeggiators and drag it onto whatever sort of MIDI information you
want to arpeggiate. So, boom, we've dragged it on. And here is our arpeggiators. So right now it's
set to eighth notes. You can see that down here,
and it'll sound like Now, it's bending because that
MPE is still in here. So I just want to take all that MPE information and delete it. And then once that's
done, we're gonna give it another listen. Okay,
so it sounds like this. If I said it's a 16th notes with this little
rate knob down here, we'll get closer to the
sound that we had before when we were customizing
the 16th no grid. Now this sounds pretty
nice. We can also set it to down as the main style. Now, I could set it to up down, which is similar to what we had. Or you could set
it to up and down, which now repeats the top note. Something to keep in mind is that what makes this
work so well right now is that each chord has
the same number of notes. So you can see we
have three notes, three notes, three
notes, and three notes. If I have four notes on
one of the chords, like, let's say this first one
has an extra E flat. See how it changes the pattern
quite a bit, one, two, three, four, one, two, 341, two, three, one, two,
three, two, right? So it's going to create full
strum through all the notes. So if there's four notes,
it's doo doo, doo, toot. If there's three,
it's do do toot and then doot back down
to that bottom note. So all that is to say, I would recommend
have all four notes, have all three notes, whatever it is, try to be consistent unless
you're looking for some inconsistencies in the way that the arpeggiators sounds. Now, one kind of fun
trick is to have, for example, your
lower keyboard part. So I'm going to take
this midi information, lower it down one octave. We could have this ascending
with the arpeggiators. So this is going up.
And then this one here, which is the higher part, we're going to have these
notes coming down. Give a listen to
these two together. Another thing you can do is
play around with the gait, which is how long each
sound is it doo doo, do, do, do, do, do do or dun
tint, dun tun tun, dun tun. Is it taking just a little
piece of that attack? So we can bring down the
gait to, let's say, 20%. Let's go really low.
Like, you can see, if I extend this out,
everything's bleeding together, right down to 1% in this case. I think both might sound nice
down at 1%. Auto filters. Maybe in this case, we could change one
of the auto filters. I know this is a bit of
the context of this class, but this stuff is
just so much fun. So if we go here
and we set this to Lopes And from here, you can just play
around with the way the arpeggiators work
with the Auto filters. This for me is a big part
of my style as a producer. I'm not saying you have
to produce like this, but I'm just showing you how
these informed decisions of what is the range
of my instrument. Do I want it as it is
already quite high to repegiate up past that
range? Probably not. I might want it to be a
downward arpeggiation. I like to reegiate
mostly by hand. It's rare that I use
the arpeggiators tool. It is a great tool, but most of the time I'm
going to arpeggiate by hand. Another thing to consider
is that in Ableton, we also have this
generate section, which is going to allow you to really play around with
the shapes of cords, to play around with the
way things are lineated. So whether you prefer to do
it all by hand or if you want something very consistent and really easy to work with, you can play around with
that arpeggiators tool. So it's not a particularly
tough concept. It is an arpeggiators. On piano, when we play notes strumming up through
the notes of a chord, we call this arpeggiating
or arpeggiation. And our peggiator
does that for us. So in our MIDI tools, we have our peggiator
which will plunk before your instrument,
and that way, the MIDI information going to
the instrument will sort of strum up through or down or up and down
through those notes. But again, I prefer
to do it all by hand in case I want
some variation, and I want to customize how that variation works.
So that is our class. On our peggiating chords, our next class is going to
be a Vocoder harmonized. This is a bit of
an overlap between some vocal production
and harmonic production, but I thought this would be
a natural time to introduce vocoders as they are
very harmonic based. I'll see you in that next class.
7. Vocoder Harmonized: Alright, next up, let's
get talking about a Vocoder being
harmonized so that your vocal part is wrapped in this rich harmony giving your
vocals a much bigger sound. Let's dive in. So while this
is a trick that could be put in a vocal
production course, I think it also perfectly
overlaps with harmony. So what I've done is created a very scratch vocal part.
It sounds like this. A taste. All I've really done is add some really basic meldin,
some auto tuning to it. There's no other effects outside of anything UAD straight
into the system, so maybe a bit of compression,
but nothing too crazy. So we're going to
work with this, as well as the part we already had from before,
which sounded like. Okay. So what I want to do for vocoding is have a simple
synth sound to work with. We don't want anything for
the most part, super complex. I like to work mostly
with sawtooth waves, keeping it really simple, holding the chords
similar to what you're seeing in the MIDI
information up above, and outlining the main
harmonic progression. In this case, our chord
progression is in E flat minor. It's a 14 flat 75, E flat minor, A flat minor, D flat major, B flat major. So I need to keep
those chords in mind. I'm going to go over into the instruments
category up over here. I'm going to pull in analog. Analog is super
simple, super easy. And I'm going to call
this Vocoder, synth. We're going to have
one oscillator set to a sawtooth wave. So as I play, it's a
very simple sound. We're also going
to make sure that any ADSR settings are
very much when I press, it's on, when I
let go, it's off. So this should work
fine. Instead of copying this information
down because there's some MPE bending information, I'm just going to
replay out a part. Let's arm it, set our metronome. I'll even solo it.
It sounds like this. Very clunky on that last chord. I'm working around
this mic stand. So let's just pencil that in. Boom, boom, boom.
That was the B flat. So there's our This is D B flat. We could throw in an A
flat and an F. Okay, we don't have to make
this one dominant. We can get rid of
that. And I'm going to into the quantize
setting, set it. So the end is also
quantize, boom, boom. That's looking nice and square. So right now, I don't actually want to hear
this synth part. What I want to do is duplicate my vocal part and
put a Vocoder on it, which is under audio effects. So you go Audio
effects, scroll down, and you'll see here
we have Vocoder. I'm going to pull
Vocoder onto my vocals. So I have the main vocal part, and then I have this
vocoded vocal part, and it's going to get its pitch information from
our keyboard part. So vocal synth down here is where we want
that to be coming from. So we're going to set
this to external, and then from here, we're going to find
our keys part, which is labeled vocal synth. And now this keyboard
part, we can mute. If I solo this vocded synth, we'll name it now
as we're going. We have a basic
vocodd vocal part. So, again, this is the
layer that goes as. With the main vocal part.
So some main things that I like to play
around with would be the attack and release, mostly the release, and
then also the bands. 20 bands is pretty clear. You see if I set it
to, like, eight bands, we're getting no
intelligibility. We're getting no clarity. So if I set it to,
like, 36 or 40, It almost sounds too
much like a real voice. So around that 24 28 sweet spot gives us a pretty
standard Vocoder part. So this is where we can play with the release a little bit. See, when it's way up,
everything blurs together. So the idea is when the
release is set lower, the overall sound will be a
little bit more intelligible. Now, I think this is
off to a good start. It's a little bit
sort of mid heavy. I might sort of scoop the mids and then compensate by cranking
up the gain a little bit. I'm just going to
pull in a utility and add even upward
of maybe 10 decibels. S test. And you can play
around with fitting the Vocoder part
with the vocal part. But you can see this
works really well because it's harmonic
information. It's sort of wrapping a chord progression around the vocals, like creating a robotic choir of sorts so that the timing is exactly the same as
the original vocal part, and we're following the main harmonic progression
of the overall song. For the record, I
usually collapse this non used vocal synth part. Let's listen to it in the
context of everything else. I'm going to get rid of
the main vocal part, and then I'll bring it in as we go through a couple loops. Sound. So from here, I would
probably group these vocals, call it something
like vocal group with the vocoded part and
the regular part. Group. What is that?
Let's get rid of that. And also, I haven't
even really done any processing on
the main vocal part, let alone the vocal scent. There's lots of room for
EQ decisions, compression, but for now, just a really
sort of quick and easy fix. We're going to put on a Q eight Bring up the
air a little bit. There's some buildup
around here. And then bring up
the volume overall. But you can see it
really starts to sort of wrap the sound of the vocals. So it's hard to
tell sort of where the vocals end and
where the synth begins. And there's all
these other synths happening harmonically through
this Auto Filter trick. So when you put it all together, it's a really fun sound. I like to quite often use
a Vocoder on vocal parts, but I will also use
ferment shifting and isotopes vocal synth and other layering approaches to get a really thick and almost
overproduced vocal sound. That's what I like.
It depends on the genre that I'm
working on, though. If it's something
like jazz or folk, you kind of want
to steer clear of all this digital influence, but, hey, maybe
that's your thing, and maybe that's something
unique that you do. So with the other synth
parts muted, we have text. Let's bring them in one by one. Text. So. Something I should
have mentioned is this part here, this
auto filtered part. When you have the
resonance peaked up quite a bit and
it's scanning through, the envelope is pushing it through the
frequency spectrum, you can get a buildup
of certain frequencies, especially in that zone. So if it's moving from
100 hertz to 500, you're going to notice that
area is a bit built up. Now, the sound, that sort of bubble wrapped sound we like, but we may want to
bring in something like a dynamic EQ to watch for these areas of buildup
and then adjust accordingly. So we have right around
this 250300 hertz, this feels really built up. We also don't need all this
super low end information. So now things are a
bit more controlled. We still have a nice
rounded low end, but at the same time, we don't have this
huge build up, and we still get the
character of that wow, that sort of bubble
wrapped sort of feel. Again, altogether, now we have sound So it's
sounding pretty cool. I mean, the vocal part
is really elementary. It's me singing, This is a
test because this is a test. So that is how you
harmonize a Vocoder part. You could try playing the synth as a melody with the same melody
as the vocal part. It's not going to give
you that classic sound that we so often have where the harmony is being sung by these robots almost
behind the vocal part. And again, isolated,
it sounds like this. Sz. Sand. By itself. Test. So you put it together, and
it's a really rich sound. So you have a vocal part.
You're going to duplicate it, and this is where you
put your Vocoder. We want this to sound affected, but affected by what? Create a keyboard
part that you're now going to send
into the Vocoder. And again, where we sort of set that up is in the
Vocoder itself. This little side section over
here is set to external, and then you say what Synth or what instrumental part is
influencing the Vocoder. In other words, the
modulator signal. So what we're going to
have at that point, is some note information
being fed into the Vocoder so that the
pitches I was singing, it no longer considers what those pitches
are. It doesn't care. The only harmonic or
pitched information this Vocoder is going
to spit out comes from, in this case, our Vocoder synth. Once you've set up the
Vocoder synth to outline the main progression with what
I would call a safe sound, something like a sawtooth wave, not a lot of motion,
not a lot of filtering, something that's very clear, you're then going to mute that vocal synth so that
it's not heard by itself. If I unmute it, listen, so here it is right now
with everything as is, yes. And then. Not only does it clutter
the mix, but this synth, again, is not meant
to be very musical. It's meant to just be very safe. It's meant to have a
simple oscillator, a simple waveform that works
well with the Vocoder. So by itself, this
might sound okay, kind of moored fstang
sort of sound, but it's not the sound that we want to hear because
it's going to overlap with the
Vocoder in a way that it will mask the Vocoder. So that's it. We've
added a small vocal part to our little mini song, and we've vocoded it with the main chord progression from this section of this song. In our next class, we're
going to talk about Chord Stutters.
I'll see you there.
8. Bending Chords: Alright, let's get talking
about bending chords, a technique that I
first heard aditat use, and I hadn't really
heard too many people using this technique before. I think Danny Alfman
sometimes will take a chord on violins and
have it sort of wind down. He also does this with choirs, but as someone who
loves Danny Alfman as someone who loves aditat, there's something about
this harmonic bend that really speaks to me, and I'd love to share
that technique with you. There's two ways we're
going to approach it. Let's jump in. Alright, so I think
for now, I'm going to stay up here because
this is going to be a very midi based class where
I'm working ti quite a bit, and to condense things down into this range is going
to be pretty tough. So we're going to keep things opened up a little bit more. So let's say I want
to bend my chords. I have this chord
progression from the last class where we
inverted things to this point. Let's just listen and
see where we left off. Okay, it's a nice
little progression. If MPE was available, we would be able to
select a note and bend our pitches between
different chords, but not every CIT is going
to have this available. Notice there's no bend sound on this particular
road's keyboard. So what we're going
to do is switch over to a sound that is MPE compatible so that we can start bending between
our different pitches. So I've switched over to drift. This Syth is native
to Ableton 12, and it's one of those
sounds where right out the gate the default is a
pretty aggressive sound, so I turned it
down a little bit. But you'll see when
I go to MPE now, I click a note have
these little black bars. From the halfway
point of the note, I'm going to bend it
up to that next note. And you'll notice
I'm playing with it. It's like, two point something,
one point something. Just hold Alt. It'll snap it right to where
you need it to be. This note here, starting from here, we would go
up to that note. And then from this
top note we are down to here from
this middle note, we are down to here, and then from this
note, the third note, we are down to here. Now, I talked before
about voice leading and how a choir would have
someone singing a note, and then if the note
is in the next chord, they would keep singing it. But think about what
our options are. If this continues through, then this note here
is going to have to go all the way down
to this note here. And that's just
like a really big bend around this middle note. It's an option. You can do it. But I'm just having
all the sort of notes bend down to the
next appropriate note. At the bottom here, our note is repeated, but
these two move up. This is more of an
example where I could keep the bottom note repeated, but move these two up to
the appropriate notes. Let's give a listen and
see how all these bends sound. It sounds quite nice. I would maybe consider making the bends a little bit quicker. So taking this and moving
it maybe over to here. Again, holding Alt
is your friend here. It snaps it to the time grid. It snaps it to the pitch grid. It's just going to keep
things nice and squared up. So we're creating a bit of a faster bend a little
bit later in each note. This one is the one not
moving so we should be good. Let's give it listen.
Sounds pretty cool. And it's relatively
simple if you're using MPE and a synth that
is MPE compatible, like the new serums, some of the newer native
instrument stuff, and a lot of the
stuff that comes integrated into the newer
versions of Ableton. Now, let's say you don't have MPE and you want to be able
to create this sort of sound. It's going to take a bit longer. It's going to take
a little bit more knowledge of music theory, but we're going to give
it a try. Let's go. Let's say I bring in
a synth like serum and let's say it's
not MPE compatible. So the other approach
we could have is to use the pitch bend wheel and consider the range
of the pitch bend up and pitch bend down so
that we're achieving all these bends through multiple lanes that
create one cord. So, in other words, if I create an open midi clip here,
duplicate duplicate. This will be our top notes, and any bending they need. These will be the middle notes, and these will be the bottom. So instead of consolidating
it all nicely, like within one
little mini clip, we're going to separate
it because right now, if I pitch bend from this chord, for example, all those
notes will bend equally. But remember, sometimes
we want one note to hold, and then we might want
another note to bend. So I need some of this
individual separation. I'm really showing
you this approach, even though it's much clunkier, just in case you don't
have access to MPE. If it makes you feel any better, this is what I did in the early days for
many years when I was trying to create that sort of at attat or Danny Elfman sound. This is what I was
doing. So using a bit of music theory
is going to help. This isn't a course
on music theory, so I'm going to kind of assume that you understand
a bit about chords, but let's go with some
really basic chords. This is not going to be the most flattering
sounding example. Let's say we have C major
to start and it holds. And then let's say our
next chord is F major, which still has a C in it,
so we'll keep it there. My next chord is
going to be G major. Let's say I bend down to a B. So I'll be bending down a
semitone to achieve that sound. And let's say our last
chord is another G major. I'm going to bend from this C up a tone to D. So the
root of C major, the fifth of F major, bend C down a semitone, bend C, up a tone. So down a semitone up a tone. Let's take a look at
our range over here. We want it to be down one
semitone and up one tone. Now when I go back,
I hit envelopes, which is here, and then I'm going to be looking
down over in this area. So I hit envelopes, select MIDI Control and pitch
Ben's already selected. Out of this list, it's
at the very, very top. So just watch out
for that. I know you can't see it
because of my video, but it's at the top of the list. So we said it's C, C, down a semitone. Which again, the full range of the pitch wheel
down is what we want. And then from here, it's
going to be up a tone. Now, there's a bit of an
issue that popped up. Once I have all this set, you'll notice it does
some squirly stuff around this pitch here and
around this new pitch here. Every time that
note re triggers, it's like it's resetting
the pitch bend wheel. And we can actually see
that in serum. Watch here. It's like, all over the place, and it keeps resetting very much outside of what
we're seeing here. So what I would do
here is just extend this note C, all
the way through, and then So we could even just have this
note holding the whole time. So it holds, it holds, it bends down, it bends
up. Let's give a listen. If you do want each note
to impact individually, you're going to have
to kind of trick the pitch band wheel a bit. So if we have something
like this, you would do something like this, where it's sort of resetting
really quickly the pitch. And then up here, you
would do the same thing, something almost not
even noticeable. You can get really
granular with this, but you just have to re trigger
it so that as it resets, it bumps back down to the extreme range of
that pitch bend wheel. So this sounds better to me with the impact
of each chord. But keep in mind, if you're
getting these weird resets, I don't think Serum
used to do that, but now it is anyway, and
that's all that matters. Maybe not every
Synth will do this, but if you are getting
this weird little reset every time the note re triggers, just do a little quick
sort of up down on the pitch band wheel
to sort of reset it, again, represented
over here and up here. Now, for this second part, I'm going to set my
first note to E, and it's going to move up to F and then up to G and
then up to G again. Now, I should also mention
you could just use, like, portamento or glide and
then overlap the notes. That's another very possible
way of doing things. To show you what
that would be like, it's just harder to
have more control. I consider it more of like
a performance thing if I want to play a keyboard
part with bends. But if I go in here and overlap my notes just a little bit, the last one here isn't going to work because it's the same note. You can't bend to the same note. We're going to set our
portamento section to always and turn
up the portamento. So you'd have to
actually figure out how far in front of
this second note, you would need to re trigger it. So, you would actually bring
the second note here so that by the time the glide finishes or the portmanteu finishes, now the pitch is established
from this point. It gets kind of messy. But for now, what we're going
to do is take our E and duplicate a few times. Again, the notes that
we're going for are E F, G, G. It'll complement the
notes that we had from before. So I'm going to keep this as EEE E. So I need to bend
this up a semitone, and then this up
three semitones. I can automate the pitch bend wheel so that it's one
and then it's three. But that's not going
to fix this because once I've pitch bend up one, I'd have to, like, reset it back so you feel the bend up three. It's kind of confusing.
It's not even worth going through all
the trouble to show you because at this point
it's the wrong solution. So here's what you'd want to do. We want to be bending up to this F. So I'm actually going to
do something kind of sneaky. I'm going to take this E
and pull it up to an F, and I'm going to pull the pitch bend wheel
down all the way. So it's down one semitone. So it'll sound like
it's on E. Now, as it returns back to
the normal position, it'll sound like it's
on an F. So first, let's just deal with
that first little pitch. So my pitch bend wheel
is down negative one, as I go over here, once
I go into my envelopes, again, I'm going to
set MIDI control. I'm going to set pitch bend. I'm going to start it down 100%, and then bend it up. So this sounds like an
E, and when it bends up, this is going to bend up to
an F. So for my second note, I'll set it to F so that as my pitch bend wheel
returns to flat, we're hearing just
the straight solid F. And then from F to G, we need to bend
up two semitones. And we're already set
to two. Now the reason why I did it this way is
because I can't pitch bend up and then pitch
bend up again unless I'm doing like partial pitch bends, and then the math gets really. So we're starting from
a negative point, bending up to a neutral point, and then bending up
further from there. So this is up to semitones. If we go back to envelopes, from here to here, our F becomes a G. Now, again, we're getting some
of that squirreliness. So right out the gate,
I'm going to sort of trick it a little bit by the
tiniest little pitch bend. And it's doing it again here, so we will just do these
tiny little corrections. And again, it wants
to flip down there, so we'll do that
here as well, too. Boom. And they're
pretty unnoticeable. If you drag them down
like a really nominal amount, it's pretty
unnoticeable. So it sounds like this. You can see how it's starting
to pull together. We have one more
part that we need. We started this on C.
We started this on E. Let's start this one
here on G. So we're going to play a couple
of Gs, G, G, G, G, So we had E up to F. C stays C. So G is
going to go up to A. I'm just trying to fill in the notes for what we
don't have in our chords. Our first chord didn't have a G, like our C major chord,
and our second chord, F major didn't have an A. So I'm going to pitch bend
G up two semitones to A. And then on our last chord, G major, we already had Gs. So we actually need
Bs. So, same thing. I need to pitch bend
up two and then pitch bend up another two. I could go up four and then
cut the difference 50%, try to find the exact pitch, and then up another 50%. But I think starting
negative two, pulling up to neutral, and then from there
pulling up another two is going to make the
result a little bit more easy. So we're back into serum. We are opening it up so that we have negative two plus two. Perfect. We're going
back in two envelopes. I'm going to start
things off down here. And again, we're going to
get ahead of this and do this little tricky thing here
just to reset that note. So this is holding,
and then we are going up from a up another
two semitones. Again, we need to re
trigger that here, and then again one
more time here. Let's make sure it
sounds like it's moving up a tone, up a tone. I don't love that we have to kind of finagle these
little pitches here. I probably just need them
to be a little bit shorter. So now it sounds
something like this. The little tiny bends
that, like, recorrect, you can make those more
subtle, but for now, I'm just going to
play the three parts. Together, actually, those little things
sound kind of nice. So check it out. It's like
a little attack almost. One thing I forgot to
mention, actually, is I should start
this on an A and not a G the pitch bend wheel is set to negative two, right? So we have this negative. So
this is going to sound like a G. It's pitch bending up to
this neutral no pitch bend. So A, it's the note
that is represented. And then up tone from
here brings us up to B. That's where we're
pitch bending last. So let's give it a listen with
those three all combined. Let's check it out.
It sounds good, but it took about ten times
the amount of work and time. It's very customizable, but you can see, you have to
start thinking of, like, negative values pulling to neutral and neutral
values pulling up. It gets pretty confusing, and that's just with
pitch bends up. You can also bend notes down. It works either way.
Really, it's up to you. But those are the two main ways I would go about
pitch bending chords. You're not always pitch bending an entire chord.
It can sound okay. But we want to consider what are the notes in my first chord? What are the notes
in my second chord, and which notes want to
bend to which notes? It's not going to be
always the case that a C major chord can bend up all notes equally
to a minor chord. In fact, it can't happen. You could have a
C major chord and bend all the notes
up to F major, but again, you have
this leapy feeling. So how can we use inversions between our chord and
bend the pitches, these would be the approaches. So use your MPE or
split up things and do pitch bend
wheel automation for each individual voice. That's it for this class
on pitch bending chords. The next class,
we're going to talk about using an Auto
Filter on chords. Bending chords and
using Auto filters is a huge part of my sound as an
electronic music producer. This is really the stuff
that I like to dive into. So I'm giving you the secret
sauce straight out the gate. That being said, there's
going to be a few things you can do with this
Auto Filter trick. I'll see you in that next class.
9. Chord Stutters: Up next, let's talk
about Chord Stutters as a fun way to add a
rhythmic element to your chord progressions. Let's jump in. Now,
at this point, we've added a lot of
different vocal effects. We have arpeggiators and
auto filters and vocoders. For me to add this stutter
effect could be overdoing it. I'm going to try
it out on a group. I've taken the four
main keyboard parts, and after hitting Control G, they've been grouped into
what I've called all keys. We'll set it at a
different colors so it's a bit easier
to see the group. A chord stutter is essentially just kind of playing the chord but chopping it up in terms of the audio turning on and off. An easy way to do this
is through automation. I'm going to start
off by showing you an automated approach, and then I'll show
you how Autopan can give us a similar approach. So right now, these four
keyboard parts sound like this. One thing we can do
is automate this on off switch of the group. So as soon as I click
that on and off, you'll notice that it
says Mixer, speaker on. This is what it's
about to automate. Let's say it's on for
two, off for two. I can highlight this
area, control D, D, D, D, D, and if I just hold D, it'll take me all the
way through to the end. Now we have something like this. Now, this chord
stutter is so fast, and it's so frantic
that we're having a hard time hearing
the arpeggiators. We're having a hard
time hearing any of the auto filter effect
that's happening. What if we just sort of make
it a little bit less fast? Let's try it like
this. And then we'll duplicate this automation,
and now it sounds like this. Sounds right, but I'm
not sure that this is the part that we
actually want to stutter. I'll show you a little bit more about how we can make
the cutter happen. Then we'll apply it to a synth that might make a
little bit more sense. So this on off switch up here
was a great starting point. We can also add a utility which can go
to negative infinity. In other words, it can go
all the way down to volume or up to 35 decibels, a pretty significant
amount to the upside. Now what we're going
to do is we're going to automate the gain, which is ready to automate because I've clicked
this gain knob, and we're going to do the
same thing where we pull down the volume duplicate it and get that stutter
effect, trying it this way. Sounds like this. Antast
Nothing too crazy. But what's cool about
this, even though it does the same thing in
terms of turning this button on and
off, basically. Also, I'm going to get rid
of this little node here. Is that we can ramp
things up a little bit. So it's not just on and off, but rather sort of on and
then off fading back in. You can fade out.
You can fade in. You can start to
customize how you turn on and off these cord
stutters. Sounds like this. Okay, not our best
piece of work. Let's try it the other
way where we are now automating downward
on that second half. So sort of a on
and then fade out. That works fairly
well. But again, I don't think this
is the part we want to be doing this too. So all keys is
going to be muted. Let's take this really
simple Vocoder synth. Let's just call it Synth test. And we're going to
try it out with this more simple
sounding synthesizer. Starting off with the on off
switch for that channel. Let's go really wide with this. This isn't so much of a stutter, but just to show you, like, you can really get chunky with this. That works really well
because it kind of accents the vocal
part quite a bit. But I could also
double up the speed. Just Again, I'm just
automating this button. You can see it turning
on and off as well, too. If you look here,
just take a look. Let's delete all of this. We're going to keep it on, and we're going to do
the same thing with the gain knob.
Trying it this way. Again, with our little fade, there's no reason to use this gain knob if you're
just going to be on and off. Automate the button,
I would say. The gain knob works really
well if you want to fade out, fade in, these sort of things. A We can even just fully ramp down for
that whole duration, which would sound
something like this, duplicating it over. Here we go. The By itself. And look what this knob
over here is doing. Like, it's working overtime to give us this sort of sound. So this was all done
through automation, but what's really
cool is we don't actually need to automate. We can go into audio effects, and we're going to
pull in our Auto pan. And as I pull that in, Autopan is going to move
between the speakers. It's going to make
a sound, sound like it's in the
left speaker and then the right speaker and maybe only a little bit
or maybe very wide. The way it does that
is by increasing the volume of one speaker
and then decreasing. And as this is decreasing, the other one is increasing. So the phase is sort of
out of phase, right? One speakers up as
the others down. The other is now up as
the original one is down. But what if I could
sync the phase, so they're both oscillating
up and down at the same time. That's where this
phase knob here, if we set it to zero, you can see it's
not sort of doing this blue goes up as
orange goes down, right? Orange being right
and blue being left, but rather with the
phase, either at 360 or at zero, it
doesn't matter. It's going to sync them both, so they go up and down
at the same time. Now it's more like a
volume sort of automation. And if we listen to it,
it sounds like this. This is actually pleasantly
surprising because it kind of works with the
swelling of the vocals. You almost can't
even hear it because the vocoders a bit Synthi and this is the same synth
part. But listen again. By itself. Now, right now, it's set
to Hertz at 1,000 Hertz. Let's hit this little
note button down here, which will set it to a
note value either 16th. You can go eighths.
You can go triplets. There's lots of different ways that you can approach this. I like to set it to
eighths or 16th usually, and then you can also change
the type of waveform. Right now, it's a sine wave, but we could have a pop sort
of sawtooth wave where it's impacting each beat or quarter beat or
whatever it might be, which would sound like this. Do you recognize it? Do you
recognize the shape of this? This looks like when
we were automating the gain knob to sort of ramp down and
fade out over time. So this sort of chord
stutter effect, the sawtooth I really
like was 16th notes. I set the amount all
the way up to 100. As you pull it to zero,
you get the full sound, so you can choose how much of that pulse is added to
the original sound. You could also automate it. So, for example, you might have let's try
something like this. You might have a A section
where the cord is holding, and then in the B section, you're going to have
that stutter effect. So we take the amount. We're going to automate it over time so that it starts at zero, and by this point,
it's up all the way. And maybe we have no drums and that's
where the drums kick in. So really elementary, but
here's how it sounds. So you can really play around
with these cord setters. They can represent
different sort of textures for
different sections. You can automate them over
time. You can play around. So we have sine waves, sawtooth waves, triangles, which I haven't shown you,
that would sound like this. Or triangles, which I haven't shown you, that would
sound like this. Kind of similar to
the sine waves, but a little bit more pointed, a little bit more sort of aggressive on each
of those peaks. At the end of the day, though, if you want more
customization, you can, again, automate the gain of a utility or if you want a
really basic function of just on and off, you can automate
the on off switch for that particular channel. Now, if you have a
sound that you like with the autopan, for example, if I hold control and drag
that up to my vocal group, I can apply this to
numerous things. It doesn't have to just
be a harmonic trick, but it works really
well with chords, which is why it's
in this course. But check it out
if I apply it on the chords and the vocals,
it sounds like this. Now, you would want
other elements coming in and to really beef
up that second section. But whether you're going
from a solid sound to a stuttered sound or
stuttered to a solid sound, you can do this
through automation suddenly or gradually over time. So those are the main ways that I would create chord stutters. Again, you can play
around a little bit with the generate section for
the MIDI information. I think the rhythm setting can give some pretty cool results, but to me, it still
doesn't feel as controlled. What I've
already shown you. So it's really about how much do you want control
over things or how much do you want to
just sort of play around experiment and
see what pops out. Now, the next class I've named
the repeated Cord trick. It's very similar to this, but I approach it a little
bit different mentally, and we're going to
bring in a harps chord sound to show you that. One of my most listened to songs is called a
dominant Tonic Stirred. Uses this trick, and I'm pretty sure because it's
a kind of unique sound, it's part of the reason
that song did so well. So I want to share
it with you so that you have that trick
available as well. I'll catch you in
the next class.
10. Repeated Chord Trick: Let's talk about the
repeated chord trick. We're going to bring in a harpsichord sound
to show you this one. It's a simple trick, but it gives some great
results. Let's jump in. Alright, so let's work
with a sound that has some pretty punchy
attack harpsichord, being a plucked
string instrument has some solid attack to it. This is the sound that I most
often use this trick with, but a lot of synth
sounds that have a solid attack like plucks or just general keys sort of categories for presets is a
great place to check out. So let's open up our
MIDI information. And remembering that
our chord progression was E flat minor, let's start with one of those. I think here it turned
to a flat minor. I'm just going root position. For now, we can always invert
the chords later as needed. And then it was a D flat major, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then at the end, we had a B flat major,
boom, boom, boom. Oh. So these are chords. I've made them four note
versions of the chords, but this is basically what
we're working with here. I'm going to extend
each chord out, and let's just make sure
that the basic version of this chord sounds okay
with the rest of our song. So it ends up sounding
something like this. S. Okay, so here's the
way I approach this. So first of all, again, we probably want
to make sure that our range isn't quite so
wide on these chords. A pretty simple fix would be to bring this note
down an octave. If I bring this down an octave, it's actually going
to be this note here. So you'd want to
bring it down to the next note available
in the chord, in this case, E flat. And for this note
here, I'm going to make it a dominant seventh chord. Actually,
no, let's do this. Let's bring this up to D
and this up to B flat. So it's a first inversion
B flat major chord. This looks much more
consolidated in terms of range. So here's how I would do this now that we have our inversions. Set. And let's listen to
the range one more time. It doesn't sound too
high, it doesn't sound too low, so
it's doing fine. So I kind of think of this
ta ta ta ta ta ta, ta ta, eight sort of
subdivided beats or eight 16th notes as the pulse when I'm making
rhythmic decisions. So it's da DTT D that that. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So it's kind of hard to
explain this approach, but I'm thinking like, da, da, da, da, da, in slow motion, kind of working through what
I want that rhythm to be. And then when it speeds up, you get something that's
much more musical. Now, this isn't now
that I've heard it, a rhythm that I actually
want to commit to. So let's kind of play around
with it a little bit. And the other thing
worth mentioning is shortening these
gives a great result. Actually, that
sounds much better. Let's work with that. So we
have this ta ta ta ta ta. We're going to do that
on each chord, two, one, two, one, two. Honestly, I could just
take this and just kind of duplicate it
over all the notes. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Oops. And then highlight all this and make our short
notes pretty similar. So now it's ing. Now, you can achieve this with the automation of turning
on and off your channel. You can achieve this with gain, but it's not quite the same
because it's going to turn on and off the sound no matter where it is within that sample. So harpsichord, when I play
it gets quieter over time. So I'd be turning on and off that little fade out by
replaying the chord. You're able to get
punch on each of those that is equal to
the last chord stab. So it's these really
punchy sounding chords that give a whole lot of rhythmic quality
to your track, and we're doing this
through the use of harmony. So I really like integrating rhythmic and harmonic
qualities together. So, sort of the same idea
with that auto filter, finding ways to
take the chords and giving them a bit more
motion or rhythm, as opposed to just holding some string parts
that float around. That can sound great,
but to always approach harmony like that
can be quite boring. So unless you're playing a keyboard part that
you really like, what are some fun production
techniques to really get some rhythmic qualities
attached to your harmony. Auto Filter is a great start. But these repeated chords, to me, are another
great alternative. Let's try one other rhythm. We're going to try
the same thing here. I'm going to undo quite a bit, just so that way
we can kind of get back to these basic chords here. We're going to play around
with this rhythm and then superimpose that over
these other three chords. I'm going to pull down the
midi information a bit so you can see the whole
thing a bit better. The same thing applies. It's the rhythm applied
to all the notes. So whether you just saw the
bottom ones or all of them, it's just a little
bit more visually open for you at this point. So let's start with
one this time, one, one, two, one, two, one, one, two, So that that all these little that's sort of me extending the
note in my head. So that da, da, da, da, doesn't really show
all the main beats. That that that's just the way I do it
doesn't really matter. It's kind of corny.
But we're going to shorten these same
way we did before. I don't know exactly how this is going to sound with
all the shortened notes, but I know it's a rhythm that I'm going to be
pretty happy with. Here, we can just
duplicate these over a bit of a process,
but that's okay. Overall, it's actually
still quite quick. So I'm just holding control as I move these
note groups around. Command, if you're on
a Mc, whatever it is. So here goes. Sounds like this. Space. Tax. So what can sound
really cool is sort of fusing the long full part
with this more rhythmic part. If I was to go and
pull in a utility, we could have this sort of down all the way, so it's text. We probably want
it to start a bit earlier to get a bit louder. Text. So it's almost like a
little, like, ramp up. If you have other
things like risers and white noise and all
this stuff happening, you can bring in this
little rhythmic sort of chord flick or chord
repetition into the held section or into the full section minus any
of that extra automation. So now we have Oops. So now we would have
a So I like to use, whether it's the cord
stutter technique or the repeated chord technique. I like to use these
as little fade ins, even just on a tit tit. I can sound really great if you have, like, a
snare part going. I tick, tick, tick, chick, i, i into some drop or
into some chorus. You can have that same
rhythm with your chords. And that would sound
something like I'm going to give you a really
basic example here. But let's say we
have something like 234, five, six, seven, eight, I think that should
be long enough, just in case it's not, we'll do it on this
chord as well, too, 234, five,
six, seven, eight. And then I'm going to
really quickly create another drum part that is
not the main drum beat, but we're going to pull in
a different snare sound. Snares. Yeah, something small. This works pretty well. I'm just going to delete the other
sounds. We don't need those. And from this point
here forward, two, three, four, I just have to make sure that
this rhythm makes sense. I think it does. I think
it should line up. One more thing we have
to do here is pull in a utility so that we can gradually increase
this over time. I'm not doing a huge
fancy production here. I'm not adding reverb and delays and automating, all this stuff. We're just going basic for now. So it sounds like this. Oh, so I have to move that over here, and it looks like
it's only this half. And yeah, I got it wrong. So what we're gonna do is
we're going to divide by two. That divided into a weird spot, so we're going to move
that over poo poo, boom. Now it's over here. So you can just see visually
that this stuff here looks pretty similar to how it's chopped up here. So
it sounds like this. Tast So we have this happening with It's like creating harmony with the
snare drum almost. The harpsichord has so
much percussive quality to it that it really does
complement that snare sound. Again, altogether, we would
have something like this. Sz test. Maybe the drums don't
kick in until later, but this is the basic idea. And then maybe the
harpsichord here, I think we could bring
that down and No, no, not down an octave. Definitely not. Te Okay, so this is how you're
going to be able to repeat chords to either
build transitions into sections or
to create tons of rhythmic interest within the
chords that you're playing. Just make sure that the
sound that you select, whether it be harpsichord
or a plucked synth sound, has some good attack to it, because the whole
reason we're doing this approach and not
just turning on and off a channel or automating
some gain or something like that is because we want to re trigger the
sample each time. And this is a great
way to go about. So that's it for this class on the repeated Chord
trick. Super easy trick. You're just thinking
about replaying every note of the chord over and over to a rhythm that you enjoy or alternatively doing
that same trick as part of a transition to help you smooth out one section
going to another. In the next class, we're
going to talk about a simple concept
called rolling off. We're going to roll
off low frequencies. We're going to roll
off high frequencies. Chord Roll offs is
our next topic, and I'll see you in
that next class.
11. Chord Roll offs: Alright, so let's dive
into what is most likely the most simple class
within this course, which is talking about
chord roll offs. We're going to use
some EQ to make space for other instruments
within our track. Let's jump in. So at this
point, we have a lot of parts. We have our vocal part,
which is also vocoded. We have a stuttery
harpsichord part, and then we have
all of these sort of auto filtered
rhythmic chord parts. And we want to start
to think about how we can fit all of this
stuff together. Out of the lows and highs
of the auto filtered part, I would assume the lows
are going to sound better. But let's pull in an EQ eight
and try out a little test. Having it soloed, if
we go down to one kilohert about one way down the EQ spectrum here, we're
going to give a listen. I realized that when I
chopped something up earlier, this midi information
went crazy. So let's give a
listen to this all keys part with a filter. Let's say down around 500 Hertz, we're going to keep it
a little bit muffled, so it would sound like
this. That's the low end. Let's try switching our filter just to listen to the high end. I much prefer the low end. It is quite muddy. I'd probably want to balance it out
a little bit more, but for now, this
should be fine. It gives us some
good low content. So the important thing
to note here is that I'm using these high pass
and low pass filters, sometimes called low
cut and high cut. Am I letting the lows pass through or the
highs pass through? Am I cutting the lows
or cutting the highs? So this one here, you
can see I'm cutting out the highs or I'm letting the lows all of this
information pass through. This one is a low cut filter. I'm cutting out the lows or letting the
highs pass through, hence high pass or low cut. So, whether or not I've
done any extra EQing, just rolling out the low end, leaving more space for the bass, and rolling out the high end, leaving more space
for the vocals and the other chord parts, this is a great starting point. The vocals, I'm not
really going to touch right now they
are our main element. We want them to shine through. And the harps chord
part, I would want to get rid of some
of the more low content, leaving room for it
to shine up above. But again, if I play it solo, I can already tell you the high end is going
to sound sweeter. Here's the highs.
Here's the lows. We already have enough low
end, muffled information. It's not muffled,
but it's occupying quite a bit of the base
territory that I would want to sort of have the
harpsichord covering the high end and the other keyboard parts
covering the low end. Now, it's safe to say that the harpsichord part and the vocal part will probably
overlap a little bit. You can use things like
dynamic EQ or something like sooth or track spacer to make it so that when
the vocals happen, the harpsichord
gets scooped out of whatever main frequencies are
being used by that vocal. I'll show you quickly, it's a little out of context
for this class, but at the same time, I think it might be
important to see. So I like to use track spacer. It works fine for
this sort of purpose. We are going to have track spacer side chained
to the main vocal group. And if we take a look, now,
first, I'm going to go in. I know that they
usually set the attack a little bit slower
than I would like. Let's go, one millisecond. And it's going to sound
something like this. Most of this low end
information is untouched. Anyway, I might leave
some of this high end shrill sort of airiness
Shrill is a bad word. I'd say more airiness of the
harpsichord uptop untouched. So all this middle
stuff is what's being influenced
by track spacer. You'll really notice
when I crank this up all the way or bring
it down all the way, what track spacer is
doing. Give a listen. Sneeze sneeze. And you can still hear that tiny little top end of
the harpsichord, but you're not hearing
much else from that harpsichord whenever
the vocals are happening. So another thing
to mention, like, if I was to duplicate
the harpsichord, but not the vocals.
Watch what happens. So text. And then nothing, 'cause there's no vocals happening here. So the full harpsichord
can now ring out. So this is a great
way to sort of manage the hierarchy of
different instruments or in this case, the vocals. Vocals need to be upfront in the mix. They need
to be intelligible. They are the storytelling
element of the track. But if anything else is
conflicted in the same range, you can use a bit
of track spacer. This is incredibly heavy handed. I would bring it down
considerably, something like this. So text. Now we have the
harpsichord up top, the auto filtered
sinth down low, and we did that using
these high passes and low pass filters. Altogether, it sounds like this. So you can see that with
this basic vocal part and three different
harmonic approaches, Auto filters, Vocoder, and some sort of
studdtered synth, we have something that's
layered enough to really feel like it's thick enough
to be a full production. It's not long enough. We haven't created
different sections. It's not mixed or mastered. But as a starting
point compositionally, there's quite a bit
happening here. Alternatively, just for
the sake of testing, we can flip things so that the
harp chord is only playing the low end and that we're only getting the high end content from the Auto filtered synth. Soundst. To me, that buries the
vocals quite a bit more. One, because I'm not track spacing this set of
autofiltered synths, but there's just a whole lot of high end kind of dancing around and it's
distracting from the vocals. Now, when we had this flip, it was a bit different
because there's not quite as much arpeggiation
kind of distracting us. There's not as much
high end content sort of sustaining throughout based on those Auto filters. I think it's this one here
that's pretty sustained. And if I just turn
off this EQ here, that's always
happening up above. But when I have the
EQ set this way, so we're mostly hearing
low frequencies, the role of these synths
is slightly percussive, but just filling out warmth on the low end and giving a little
bit of rhythmic interest. So we have this low end
mixed with this high end. We'll turn it down
a bit, and then we have the vocals
that are also going to be high end and telling this harpsichord to
squash down a little bit, just the frequencies that are conflicting while the
vocal parts happening. Put them together. This. So it's a little bit
too full right now. There still needs to be
quite a bit more balance, but I wanted to show you
that if you're working with multiple chord sort of
ideas or chord layers, consider rolling off high end or low end frequencies so that they sort of fit together
like a bit of a puzzle. For example, if you're
creating a trap beat and you want the high hats
to be incredibly present, you might not want
a whole lot of harmonic content to be
happening up in that area. If you do have some harmony sort of sizzling
up in that top area, just roll it off
so you can't hear it leaving more space
for those high hats. The main point here
is you can start to combine tons of different
harmonic approaches as long as you're puzzle
piecing everything together so that they fit
within the frequency spectrum. So like I said, it
was a simple class, but it's something
I felt I had to go over because I've given you so many different techniques that if you start
to stack these, it's not going to benefit you. It's not going to sound twice as good every time you
add a new layer. At some point, it gets too
complex, too over layered. So what I would say test some of the different layers just
hearing the low frequencies, and then only hearing
the high frequencies, and then kind of see
which one sounds better. You might get lucky in
that sweet spot of, well, this one sounds better,
low and this one sounds better high, so
those are the roles. Sometimes this synth might sound good with the
low frequencies, and this one might as well, too. So now you have to
start to carve out specific frequencies so that they're able to work
with one another. So that's it for this
class. The next class, we're going to talk
about one of the most classic house music
chord tricks, the rootless minor nine chord. We're going to get using
that chord tool in Ableton. Can't wait to show
you that trick. I'll see you in that next class.
12. Chord Tool: Okay, we have a lot of layers that we've
been working with. I'm going to really pare things down to show you
this last trick. It is the house
music chord trick. We're going to work with
some rootless chords. Very jazzy sounding. You don't need to be a jazz
pianist to make it work. I'm going to give you the
shortcut. Let's dive in. Okay, so at this time, I'm going to consolidate everything into thin little layers
and just mute them all. We can even group all
these groups and just say, old stuff, in case we want
to bring some of it back, but visually, now that
is all tucked away. What I'm going to do is
bring in a synth sound, and it doesn't really have
to be anything too specific, as long as it doesn't already have multiple notes within it. So sometimes you'll get a
synth that when you play a C, you're actually hearing a C and a G or maybe a full chord CE GB, which is essentially kind of what we're going to be doing. You want to make sure
it's just single notes and generally not too
thick or muddy sounding. I'm going to use an
instance of electric, which is native within Ableton. We're going to listen to
a couple of sounds and pull one in Dan piano. Alright, it sounds terrible,
but we're going to use it. For the sake of what
we're doing here, this will sound fine. So when I hit different notes. Hearing the individual
notes being played. We're going to go
over to MIDI effect, which in this case, is
just above my video here. You're going to select it, and you're going to
bring in the Chord Tool. And this is going to go
in front of anything else that you have within this bottom little
rack space here, and you have six different ways to be able to shift your note. The type of chord we're going
to be playing is a rootless minor nine with
the seven assumed. Uh, sounds super
fancy. Let me explain. Let's say I have an
A minor chord, A, C and E. I'm going
to get rid of the A, which makes it rootless, and I'm going to
play one note up, which is the nine
and one note down, which is the minor seven, a tone above the A and
a tone below the A. This gives us four out of
the six notes available, and then we're going to play
A and E a fifth down below, bringing that root back in. When I said the
seventh is assumed, what I meant is generally
in jazz harmony, if you're playing
a nine on a chord, any of the lower
extensions can be assumed. So if you have one, three, five, that's your major
chord or minor chord, you add the nine, you can
also choose to add the seven. It's very much something
that is available to you. So we have, instead of ACE, we have AE GBCE. So from this bottom A, we are down 12 semitones from where our
chord initially started. So we're going to set this
first shift to negative 12. Second shift, the second note or the second lowest note
was down five semitones. Then we're down two semitones, up two, up three, and up seven. Wow. So that is the
AEGBCE that set of notes, but now I only have to play one note to achieve that sound. This phaser is intense.
Let's turn that off. So it kind of has that house or even some drum and
bass or UK garage, like disclosure sort of sound. It sounds really cool
when you do octave jumps and also pitch bends. So you get parts that
sound like this. So between the pitch bend and me jumping octaves
using my thumb and pinky, you can get some
really cool sounds. If we take our drum beat and
just duplicate it over here, I'm going to play a little
sort of housey part with it, and then I'll show
you one more trick afterward. So it
sounds like this. One, two, three, four. Okay, so that's our basic part. It's not my favorite
part in the world. It's passable. It works. But what's cool is if
you duplicate this, we're going to call it base, and we're gonna pull in
some sort of a base sound. Let's go with serum. Good old serum. And we're just going to pick
a basic bass sound. We now have a
foundation that follows this harmonic movement
just as single notes. Now, it's important to
mention that I duplicated it. We actually don't
want the chord tool on the duplicated version. You could also just create
a new midi track and just duplicate the
MIDI information down. But let's say we have
something like fuzz base, pretty simple base
to get started. And I'm actually going
to set it so it's a more simple low pass filter. We're going to bring that down, so it's quite smooth and bring the volume
down and blended in. So some subtle issues
with the pitch bending, but at the end of the day, this still sounds
pretty awesome. I could even just get
rid of the pitch bending altogether and just sort
of move between the notes. But it might just be
a matter of either using the pitch bend
through the MIDI control in Ableton or through the pitch bend automation specifically
within serum itself. Lastly, you also want
to bring that down in octave so it
sounds like a base. That's gonna bug me. So let's
go in and let's solve that. When we go envelopes,
MIDI control, this pitch bend, again, it does some weird things when notes
re trigger, but that's okay. It's easy to fix. Boom, boom. Each time these
notes re trigger, we just kind of do like a
little palette cleanser for it. It sounds like this. You could maybe even go an octave lower. Let's see how low we can go. And what's cool about
this is you started with a chord using
the Cord tool. I'm jumping around to
almost nonsensical notes. I don't even really
need to stay in key. This sounds good no
matter what you hit. You can be as
chromatic as you want, and it tends to work quite well. Duplicate the MIDI
information down into a bass part and then
lower down the notes, and you end up getting something that with the right
type of beat, I don't think this is
the right type of beat. But if you have the
right type of drum beat, then you get something
quite passable for house or UK garage, and then you throw some vocals
over top and you're set. Now, to be clear, you don't
have to use this exact chord. It's just used a lot. You could go with
a major version. So instead of, and I would consider writing
these numbers down, negative 12, negative five, negative two, two, three, seven, you would go negative 12, negative five minus one, and then you would go up
to up four, up seven. That would sound like this. Now these are the major
equivalent of what we had before. They are major nine
cords, rootless. And again, this
seven is assumed. You could even go more basic. You could go down 12, up five, and zero, so that's root fifth octave, and then you can build
up four, seven, and 11. So it's a root fifth octave, and then third fifth seventh
of a major seven chord. That would sound like this. That, to me, almost sounds a bit more video
gamey, but it works. So you can play
around with not even using all of these
different sort of knobs. You could have zero
and four and seven, a basic major chord. Or 03 and seven, a
basic minor chord. But it's going to sound better
with these jazzier chords. Think about this.
You're listening to an old record and there's a chord you've never
played before. It sounds great. Maybe it's
that minor nine chord. And you take that little sample and you bring it
into your sampler. Now, any pitch that you play on your sampler is that
chord moved around? It's not diatonic. It's not considering what key are we in? When should this chord be
major? When should it be minor? It's just always that quality. It's always minor nine, and
you're moving it around. That's part of what gives
this drum and bass house and UK garage sort of sound is going to old
disco and Soul Records, finding that chord, and
just simply re pitching it. And the Cord tool is a great way in Ableton to
be able to achieve that. One thing I'll also mention
that's really cool is I've reset everything back to
that minor nine sound. The strum can be really fun
to play around with instead of you end up getting
something like. You can really overdo it. But chaotically,
it kind of works. Now, you can also
strum the notes up, which is to the right or down, which has even more of a
video gamey sort of sound. You can crescendo
into each strum. So it's getting louder
as the strum progresses. Now, tension works with strum. So instead of just strumming
down or up through notes, you can determine how fast
or slow the strum sounds. And then, again,
crescendo is how loud you progress over
time within that strum. So here's tension sat
negative 100. Moving up. Almost no strum at all.
So when we're at zero, that feels appropriate, but
a little bit higher up, but a little bit lower down. We get a faster strum and
a little bit higher up. We get a more separated
sounding strum. So feel free to play around with all the little settings
within the chord tool, but the main thing I wanted
to show you is how to create some fun jazzy chords and
then just plunk around, like, just to show you just
to truly prove this, if I was to just move over
some midi information here, I'm going to open it up, and I'm going to play a random part. So, E, I don't even care
what the notes are. This is probably
a bad, no choice, same with this, same with these. But hey, we're just literally trying to create
something really simple. And then let's maybe do two of those just so we have
a nice even section. I don't know how
this is going to sound. We're gonna go for it. I'm gonna turn off strum.
It sounds like this. Okay, so yes, it sounds bad, but in the context of a beat and supporting it
with a baseline so it feels like a more
intentional part, we end up getting this. Okay, so it's this little Didop
that sounds kind of weird. Maybe we just move
these over a bit. I don't know if this
is going to remedy things straight away,
but it could help. Let's give it a try. So you make some
small adjustments from what was a random
starting point. I would still adjust from here, but you can see there's not
a lot of adjustment needed. You can hear what
still sounds off, but it's a very
forgiving approach. So that's it for using
the Cord tool in Ableton. It gives a fantastic
resampled sort of sound like you've stole a sound or a chord from
an old disco record, and you're re pitching it
within your house production. In the next class,
we're going to talk about combining different ideas, which we have done throughout, but a bit of a summarization of what we've
talked about within the course and combining these different ideas that
I've given you along the way. I'll see you in that class.
13. Fusing Ideas: All of the stuff
that I've shown you within this course was
meant to be combined. Why don't we start
something fresh? I'll explain a couple of ways
that I'm combining ideas. It'll be very similar
to what we've already talked about, but again, a bit more of a
summarization and a slightly different
approach. Let's jump in. So I think what I might do
this time is I'm going to use the Auto Filter approach,
but with a drum loop. So I'm not sending
just a kick drum or just a snare drum to
trigger the Auto Filter, but rather filtering
the signal going into the Auto Filter so
that we can play around with only high
elements or low elements. If that's confusing,
don't worry. I'm about to show
you. So I'm going to delete everything
we've done so far. I'm going to create drum
loop as a new audio track. Again, I'm deleting everything. You get to see start to
finish what we're doing here. Over on the left side, you can't quite see this because
of where my picture is. It doesn't matter.
Even in Ableton, you won't be able to hear
what I'm previewing. It's just a weird
thing with OBS, the screen recorder
that I'm using. But I'm going to go
into drum loops. We're going to pull in
something pretty basic. Th should work. So we have something like this and it's probably going
to be quite loud. So let's lower it
like 10 decibels. Okay, not the most
fantastic beat, but for the sake of what
we're doing, it will work. I like to make my beats yellow and then assign
track color to clips, so the clips are all
yellow as well, too. We're going to pull
in two synth sounds. So let's go over into serum. We're going to pull in those. And I'm also going to
bring in an instance of contact for my harpsichord. Now, in serum, I'm going to find a basic keys or
sort of plucked sound. I like some of these
plucked sounds, let's go through and try
out a couple so we have. This one here is not polyphonic. You can see it's set to mono. But it sounds quite nice.
It's almost what I want. I think polyphonic is
gonna be too thick. So we're gonna go with this
sound PL down picture, and then we're gonna pick
out one more serum sound. Maybe this one will be intended to be a
little bit higher up. So I'll put my keyboard
up one octave. Again, we can go over to
pluck Check out a few sounds. Hmm. I don't mind that. And then for Contact seven, we have a harp chord sound. So we'll get playing
around with that. So first, why don't we create a chord progression?
It doesn't really matter. Let's say we're in D
minor, so we have. This is a really
interesting sound. Now, you notice when I just
play it by itself. That pulling down is a
little bit off putting. But if I go and play
it quite quickly. It doesn't have too
much time to go all the way down through that
pitch modulation, just a little bit to give
it a bit of character. Now, the same way
with the harpsichord, we can play this that
that that that that da and create some sort of rhythm by repeating the full chord. I'm going to do that,
but I'm going to change the top note as I go. So watch the little mini
keyboard just below me. It would be something like You can see that top
note moving around. So we're going to play around
with something like that. So this is using that
chord repeated technique. So let's go for it in,
one, two, three, four. The rhythm is a
little bit sloppy, partially due to latency, but we're going to go in and clean it up with
some quantization. Okay, I want to make
sure that they're all the same length for now. There's only a couple
that got elongated, and then we're
going to highlight everything and shorten
it up even more. That might also
sound really good on the harpsichord.
Let's try that. So we have this really
rhythmic element happening with the harmony. This is all on D minor, so something to consider is that I'm not really creating
a chord progression, but more so a little counter
melody up above our chord. Our next sound, this one,
maybe this one. You know what? Actually, let's try this.
We're going to have this same rhythm on
all three tracks. We're gonna use this as
our top end information. So this guy and this guy
we'll do that trick. I've already sort of just cut my losses with
this low part. It sounds fine. But for the sake of combining
different ideas, maybe this is where
I would want to duplicate this and
create a bit more of a progression with the lower sounding
harmony with this sort of repeated if or Ostinato or whatever you want to
call it happening up above. So organizing things
just a bit as we go, it would sound
something like this. Oh, and one more thing is, I want to make sure
that I'm actually changing this sound
probably to more of, like, a keys sound or a pad sound, something
pretty simple. This champion Bass, by
the way, is amazing, this I love that sound. We're gonna try to play
around with that one. It might be a little
bit too abrasive, but let's go for it. Okay, so that was
super loud apologies. We're gonna take that down
like ten inch decibels, just for the sake of getting
it nice and low for now. So I'm going to quantize things, just make sure that
everything is nice and tidy in terms of
the midi information, and we are going to
be auto filtering this longer synth part. So let's go into
our audio effects. We're going to go up to Auto Filter and drag
that over to what I will call held chords.
You know I mean chords. We're going to pull
our filter down. We're going to open up her
envelope for now all the way. We're going to also
side chain things. Here's where it gets
interesting. We're going to side chain things to the drums. But right now, the kick,
the snare, the high, everything is side chaining
this particular sound. So if I hit side chain Filter, I'm going to just for now, solo the held chords track. And if I hit this little
headphone button, give a listen. This is the signal going into the Auto Filter and watch what happens when I change
this frequency here. So I can also change
the filter type so that only the kick drum is channeling the Auto Filter or only the high end information
if I flip the filter. Let's try out both
and see what works. So starting with sounds right. That kick drum is giving
a lot more motion. Let's keep it nice and low, at least sort of
filtering and keeping the low sort of smooth end of the track in place mixed with. And and finally, so looking at this
cord information, it is a bit widespread, where towards the end, we
have this extra low note. It's just a duplicate
of this note G. You could maybe replace
that with the fifth. So another note in the
chord is the lowest note. But when you're
creating your baseline, which we haven't done right now, you'd want to probably
try to remember that that low note there
was the G. And now, something else that's kind of
crazy that I haven't shown you is that if we set
on the Auto Filter, the harpsichord, in this case, labeled Harpsi as the input, now the filter goes, Wawa, it's going to follow
that same rhythm, but with a bit of this sort of flicking motion of
the filter moving. It would sound
something like this. Now, you'll notice it's
not moving very much, even though this envelope
is cranked up all the way. So this SC gain, the side chain gain, we're going to push
more signal into the auto filter so that it's more sensitive
and responsive. Check it out. That feels right,
right around there. Again, some EQing
needs to be done based on this resonance peak here. Sounds great, but it's
creating a buildup around this 300
Hertz sort of area. Altogether, we could
also flip the high pass. It's hard to hear, but what
it sounds like is this. So you can hear it scooping through these frequencies being influenced by the drums or being influenced by
another keyboard part. We're considering these sort of variations of what I've shown you, which is
like, for example, using the Auto Filter in different ways or
even not really being too concerned with
a chord progression with these repeated chords, but instead moving
the top note around. And then you can even stutter more finite if I did something like this and sort of pulled in each so
they're not fully long. So again. And sometimes it's
fun just to take a few randomly or almost randomly and just sort of double them up like this,
something like this. And then right at the end,
maybe we'll do another sort of roll of sorts,
two, three, four. Oh. Extend that out
a bit, two, three, four, grab those, shorten
them a bit, and now we get. What's cool about
this is that we're hearing when I add all
these extra little notes, the filter, I don't have
to change anything. That filter is getting
information from the harpsichord. So when I change the
harps chord information, my filter is going to
respond accordingly. Lastly, just to show
you one more time, I could get rid of all this
information except for, let's say, the harpsichord, I'm going to delete all
the upper end information. Again, this isn't a
chord progression. It's just one chord anyways. We're going to go
over to MIDI effects. We're going to pull
in the Cord tool. And again, one
more time, we will take the cord tool
and we're going to set it to negative
12, negative five. Negative two plus two plus
three and plus seven. And now we already
have our rhythm set, but I'm going to bring
it up one octave. And another thing
I might want to do is just sort of take
off the reverb, which is, in the case of this sort of repeated part,
it's happening so fast. There's going to be a lot
of overlap with reverb. You could pull it down.
I'm just going to turn it off entirely,
and it sounds like this. And then you can
play around with it. Let's say I want this to be down two and this to be, like, up to a G. So those little glitches
sound really cool with this chord tool and everything else that's sort of
being put together. So really, this class is
all about you feeling free to combine these ideas
in new and unique ways. I bet if you found even
one or two unique ways to fuse these ideas together, you would start to acquire
a sound all of your own that would be quite separate from a lot
of other producers. Everyone seems to be following the same formula these
think outside the box, use some techniques
that other people are not using as much. There's a lot I could have
shown you in this course on harmony and harmony
within production, but I wanted to show you some of these sort of golden
nuggets that I found over the
years that sort of make my style stand
out a little bit, but at the same time, something that you
can play around with that's going to sound
fresh and not overly done. Also, my hope is to give you some information that might
be a little bit harder to find on something like
YouTube or in other courses, something a bit more niche. So that's it for this
class on combining many of the different ideas
together that I've shown you
within this course. I hope you had a fun time within the course next in
our wrap up video, we're going to talk about
some proper next steps, give you a proper
congratulations and farewell. I'll
see you there.
14. Outro: Thank you for taking
this course on music production focused
around harmonic tricks. By now, you can really see what I was talking
about in terms of this not being a course
on how to make chords, chord progressions, and then arrange them for
strings and orchestra. This is really more
on the digital forefront of tricks
that you're going to be able to apply to modernize the productions
that you're working on. These tricks aren't going
anywhere anytime soon, so make sure that
you study them in great detail so that you
can apply them in the days, months, or even years to come. Now don't forget there is a class project for this course. So do be sure to go back and check out
the class where I've outlined all of the details
for this class project. Submit it to me so
that I can give you some feedback
and so that you have a pretty good
understanding of what tricks resonated
with you the most. After all, identifying
those tricks that you liked the most
and applying that within your project is really going
to be a great way for you to see how your style is evolving as a modern
music producer. Don't forget to apply these
techniques to a bunch of your productions so that
they become second nature. Even if you decide to
apply some of them just to see how they work
within a production, the idea of applying the
trick, applying the trick, applying the trick
over and over, is going to make it
second nature to you, so that way you really
understand when and where you want to use it
within your own productions. That being said, I feel pretty
confident that a lot of these tricks are going
to find their way into your productions to stay. So feel free to sift through
the courses that I've created see if any
others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out
as a musician. So thank you so much for taking this course. I hope
you had a great time. Congratulations on finishing it. If you're taking this course,
that means you're taking your music production
very seriously. I can't wait to create some more music production based courses for an audience like yourself. Please let me know if
you have any feedback or any future courses you
would like to see. It's been a pleasure
teaching you in this course, and I'll catch you
in the next one.
Josh Cook, A Sound Experience
