Download the Ableton Live 7 techno beat project (.zip format) to play around with this example track

In the techno beat live set provided above, you’ll find several samples:

• kick.aif: this is a clean, punchy kick that works well for techno. It has a nice click at the beginning, followed by a punchy sine wave that bends in pitch after a few milliseconds
• snare.aif: this snare has punch and smack to it, with plenty of high-frequency content
• open hh.aif: a very short, minimal sounding click that works nicely for anything minimal
• boink.aif: a high hat and a cup type of sound.
• blip.aif: a synthesized little hit with high and mid frequency content
• tom.aif: a clicky, synthesized tom, very techno

These samples came from SampleMagic’s Minimal/Tech House sample and loop library.

Here’s a quick tutorial of how I made this beat:

1. Create a new Drum Rack Instrument by dragging it from “Live Devices” into the clip/device drop area
2. You should see a grid of 16 squares in the new Drum Rack. Navigate your samples directory with one of the File Browsers, and drag your drum samples into the grid squares. Note: you can select multiple samples and drag them into the drum rack at once, they will be automatically placed in order.
3. If you want your drums to be velocity-sensitive, (which is a must for writing expressive drum paterns) then you will want to select each drum except the kick (either by clicking on a square or selecting it in the Chain List) and set Vel (on the right side) to 50%. The reason I don’t like to set the Vel on the kick drum is because the kick is your constant, you may not want to accidently make the volume of one note louder than another.
4. Now you’ve got a nice drum kit to work with. The typical house or techno beat has a 4/4 kick drum, so go ahead now and create a clip by double clicking an empty slot in the drum rack track, and then double clicking on the newly created clip.
5. Before you start creating any notes, make sure your clip has its Groove set to “Swing 16″, and the global groove amount set to anywhere from 20 or so to 70 or 80. This will make your clip play back with a lot more swing, and this is essential for creating a “groove” feeling. See the image below for where to find the global groove amount:
   
6. Create a Kick drum note on 1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Play the track so far by pressing space bar, and listen to your simple beat. Now click on the clip and hit Cmd+D or Ctrl+D for PC users. This will duplicate the clip.
7. Now let’s add in some snare in this new clip. on 1.2 and 1.4, add a snare drum note. This is the simplest of all house beats.
   
8. With each new duplicated clip, begin to add in more samples in between the kicks, making it however simple or complex as you’d like. By adding new clips to the drum rack for each new variation, you make it easy to create a progression that will fit into a track. It should start out simple and grow more complex as the song goes on.
   
9. Now that you have several different clips of different beats, you can click record and then trigger each clip and let it play for 2 bars or so, then click the next, then the next after that. This will create a recording of your beats, which you can view by pressing Tab to switch to the song mode.
10. That’s it for now. Good luck! Oh, and if you have any of your own tips, post them here in the comments.

Related articles

• Sonic Transfer: How to build a kick drum
• Sound On Sound: How to synthesize a snare drum (advanced tutorial)
• Tweakheadz: How to write original drum tracks

1. Jailbreak your iPhone with ZiPhone (download for Windows and Mac)
2. Download Masayuki Akamatsu’s akaRemote (download .zip here) and upload it to your applications folder with Fugu (Alternatively, use the Installer app that comes with ZiPhone, and find akaRemote under the “Network” category)
3. Install i3L Midi Bridge software for Mac OS X (download .dmg here) This will allow you to intercept the controller data being sent from the iPhone
4. Open akaRemote on your iPhone, and go to the configuration page. Double tap the series of numbers after “Host Address”. Change this to the ip address of the computer that will receive the MIDI data. On most home wireless networks, it will be something like 192.168.0.X, or 192.168.2.X on other routers. I don’t know if this will work without a wireless network router.
5. Open i3L and then run akaRemote on your iPhone. When you press buttons and move sliders in akaRemote, you should see corresponding activity in i3L’s buttons and sliders.
6. In Ableton Live’s preferences, under “MIDI Sync”, you should see “Input: from i3L_v0.2 1″. Turn on Track and Remote.
7. In Live, hit Command + M (Ctrl + M for PC users) to access the Midi Map mode. Now click any button or slider that is highlighted in blue. Now press a button in akaRemote on your iPhone. If everything is correctly configured, you should see a number appear in a box over the blue highlight. This is the MIDI CC number of whatever button you pushed.
8. Hit Command + M again to exit Midi Map mode. Now press the buttons that you have assigned and they should activate the ableton live buttons.
9. Awesome!

In this short video, I demonstrate how to load an audio file into the Simpler instrument to create a monophonic “human flute” sound. This technique can be applied whenever you need to create a playable instrument from a single recorded tone.

View movie

If you aren’t confident enough to record melodies from a MIDI keyboard or even your computer’s keyboard (a nice feature in Live for when you’re on the road with no MIDI controller), I find that the easiest way to write melodies with the pencil tool (Command + B for mac users, Ctrl + B for windows users) is to write in your melodies step by step. If you recall the formulas for major in tones (W = whole step, H = half step) (W W H W W W H) and minor (W H W W H W W), then you can use the Fold feature of Live’s clip view to hide the notes that are not included by one of these formulas. Notice in the first image, we have one octave of notes stacked up on top of each other in two different scales, F major and F minor.

All we need to do is create one of these stacks in a MIDI clip, and then duplicate it once or twice. Just select all the notes, then hold down option (mac) while dragging the notes up one octave. This should create a duplicate of your notes, but transposed up one octave. Do this again for the octave below. Now when you click the “Fold” button located at the top left of the clip view, all notes that are not in the clip are hidden. Note in this second image that at the very left, there is a stack of notes that form the scale of F minor. After that, I randomly double clicked to create new notes all over the grid. I set my synthesizer’s polyphony to 1 so that it can only play one note at a time. So no matter what notes I drew, they were all in key. As long as you have the fold view enabled, you can now draw notes anywhere and it will still sound pretty decent.