Point Blank Online School brings you weekly fresh nuggets of music production advice courtesy of our team of pro producer course developers and tutors… This week Ski Oakenfull takes the reigns

“Taking inspiration from Deep House don and Freerange Records label boss Jimpster, I wanted to have a go at recreating a musical pattern I heard recently on one of his tracks.

I loved the way the rhythm of the pattern lay on the off beat, so I set about trying to figure a way to achieve this in Ableton.’’

One of Live’s major assets are its fantastic Midi Effects, which when combined together in series, can perform some powerful Midi processing. So for this project I used the following Midi devices:

Arpeggiator
This allows you to hold down any number of keys, and have Ableton build up a Rhythmic pattern (Arpeggio) using these notes. The important thing in my example is that I had to set the rate to ‘free mode’ to get that offbeat rhythm.

Chord
This allows you to play a single note on the keyboard, and have Ableton add extra notes allowing you to build up chords. In this example I programmed a Minor Triad (+3 & +7)

Scale
This basically allows you to play any notes on the keyboard but force the output to play only notes from a specified scale. This was used to take the output of the Chord device and force it to play only notes in D Minor.

My aim for this project was to be able to hold down one note on the keyboard, and get Ableton to play the entire pattern. To achieve this I used the following combination of Midi Devices: Chord (playing 5 notes) -> Arpeggiator -> Chord (playing Minor Triad)  -> Scale (playing Notes from D Minor)”

This tutorial is an excerpt taken from our new online Electronic Music Composition course (EMC) developed and taught by Ski. You can also watch more free tutorials on our sample course page.

Download the Ableton Live Rack

The technique demonstrated in the video can be applied to any style of dance music, and could potentially trigger any sound or sample. Ski has offered up the Ableton rack that he has created as a free download so you can get stuck in, start experimenting, and having some fun with it. Head here to download the rack.

Free Samples

Here’s another batch of high quality, royalty free samples, this time put together by our friends at Original Music. This week’s pack includes over 400mb of loops and samples from their Offbeats Accents pack. Bass drums, hi hats and cymbals and loops at 67.5bpm and 135bpm…it’s all here. Click here to grab the samples and enjoy!

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Ableton, arpeggiated, Deep, Freerange, house, How to, Jimpster, Live, production, ski oakenfull, tutorial