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.

After creating a melody, you may want to turn this into a progression. Note the third image to the right, use it as a reference for the following instructions.

1. Turn on the launch view (it’s the button with an L on it). Set the Follow action to occur at 2 bars (see image for reference)
2. Duplicate your newly written melody (Cmd + D or Ctrl + D)
3. In the duplicated clip, select all of the notes, make sure the fold button is turned off, and hit the down arrow key twice. This transposes the whole melody down a whole step
4. Duplicate the clip again, and move the notes down two steps again.
5. You should now have a nice melodic progression. When you play the clips in the session view, the launch mode will automatically play the next clip in the track after 2 bars. In the audio demo below, I set the final clip to 4 bars just to make it a little more interesting

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Melodic Patterns, Ableton Live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Writing melodies with ease in Ableton Live”

1. jtomasrl says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 9:26 am
   
   

   nice tips but i need to know how many keys are required on a midi controller to use with ableton live i dont know if i need 25keys, 49 keys or 61keys how many you recommend?

   Thanks… nice website

2. sascha/hdrs says:
   February 26th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
   
   

   jtomasrl, that is totally up to you. the best would be of course 61 keys but it all depends on how much space you have on your desk. As for Live, there are no restrictions about what keyboard you are using.

3. Tyler Hart says:
   April 2nd, 2008 at 9:27 am
   
   

   Thanks!

   No MIDI keyboard in this studio so this was very helpful

4. levi graham says:
   May 20th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
   
   

   this is gonna sound silly .. but ive just learned how to use Ableton .. i just started to use it for house music instead of Reason .. do you have any links for how to write beats and other parts of dance music? .. if this is listed, forgive me, lol .. thx! … .. .

   adios

5. Here's a Tip says:
   August 4th, 2008 at 1:07 am
   
   

   If you go to all the trouble to make these… why NOT post a link to the project file for download, or the MIDI clip.

   Doy!

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