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Hey!
Have you ever felt uninspired, staring at a blank Live project, about to call it a day and go do something else?
NOT ANYMORE!
In this tutorial, I will show you how to take advantage of Ableton's Groove Pool as starting points to create random melodies, drums and pretty much anything else...
Hopefully by this time you're familiar with Ableton's Groove and Swing functions, if not... Stay tuned, I will cover that later on another post...
The timing and “feel“ of each clip in your Set can be modified through the use of grooves. Live comes with a large selection of grooves, which you can find under Packs/Core Library/Swing and Groove.
Grooves can be applied to both audio and MIDI clips. In audio clips, grooves work by adjusting the clip’s warping behavior and thus only work on clips with Warp enabled.
But what If I told you...
You can use these not only to apply swing, quantization and timing to your clips... But as midi clips to kickstart your creativity and get random but impressive results!
Buckle up! Because I'm about to change the game for you...
This hack is pretty simple, but works all the time and can give you pretty sick random combinations and rhythms.
Drag and drop any clip from the Groove Pool onto an empty Midi channel
There are tons of options to choose from... My favorite are the Latin Percussion ones, because they work perfectly for Melodic House & Techno and Tech-House.
I'm gonna go with the Bolero melodico Shaker-106bpm.agr for this...
Adjust the octave to a more friendly one
When you drag the groove into the Midi channel, the midi information will be on C1 by default, that won’t work for what we are going to do next, so I recommend you select everything (Cmd+A)(CNTRL/A) and move the midi information to C3 or C4, that would be a good starting point.
Shorten the loop size and Click on Legato
Next up, we’re going to make the loop length shorter, this is for less randomized results, but whatever works for you, Next click on Legato to make the midi notes larger, since this is a groove we are using, naturally the notes are really short.
Add your favorite synth, one shot, percussion, anything you want!
For this step, I’m going to be using Serum along with Evolution Of Sound's Explorations Soundbank but feel free to use whatever comes in mind, since we already have midi information such as notes, velocity and groove... Anything you put on this channel will give you a different result! Try and experiment with different resources!!
Change some notes around
Next try moving some notes here and there, since the original midi is just one single note playing over and over, try and move things around until you find a cool melody
I came up with this...
And just like that, we have an idea we can now develop into a full track!
We have a few grooves and swings on Live’s catalog, but the combinations are endless!! Try and experiment with this technique to get the creative juices flowing... Here's a track idea I developed from that melody...
There you have it!
Hope you add this trick to your arsenal and hopefully you’ll never stare at a blank Live session ever again! Get creative!
Feel free to hit me up on Instagram @leimantourmusic
Abrazo!