War March

This was the very first song - and really the very first thing - I did in Live 11. I was browsing all the native instruments and I found this Upright Bass sample that I fell in love with. I instantly dragged it in and quickly wrote an ominus thumping bassline in C Major. To keep in line with my style and make sure things are never too simple, the bassline alternates between 4/4 and 3/4.

Looking for what could go along with this warlike vibe, I found a Horn Synth and tweaked it to make it sound more foreboding, and gave it a slow resounding melody. Then I added a high-pitched strident synth, and layered the bass again but with overdrive to have an intense climax.

Sounds pretty badass if you ask me!

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Blusey Jazzy Vibes

After that experiment, I wanted to make a full song in a genre I’m more familiar with. I’m always playing Blues on my guitar, so I decided to write a Blusey song with Jazz elements (or is it a Jazz song with Blues elements?). It alternates between a 12 Bar Blues and a Jazz ii V I mostly in the key of E.

In contrast to War March, I aimed to make this song upbeat and happy and nice. Since the last project I’d worked on was Trigon Eternity, I was eager to try using a simple retro square wave synth in Ableton, but I didn’t want to it sound like the same thing again, so I layered the square wave synth with an electric Rhodes-style piano.

It’s a mix that works really well in my opinion! The roughness and sustain of the square synth complements the smooth reverberating electric piano very nicely.

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Desert Vibe

I was a bit exhausted of thinking so much about music theory, and I wanted to learn the audio manipulation aspect of Ableton Live, so I decided to make something I had never done: a song using only built-in samples, and no MIDI instruments!

I listened through pretty much every single sample that comes with Live Suite, and made a list of all the ones I liked or could work with. It was actually quite a big list, so I split these into two different songs!

I started by laying down the basic drum groove, and overlaying more elements to create a more intersting and rich rhythm. I split this song into A/B sections to give it some structure and movement, using different beats and slightly different samples in each section. The groove had an African/Desert vibe and the default vocal samples did not fit at all, so the only “third-party” samples I brought in were vocal stems from Tinariwen, a great band from the Sahara Desert.

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Sample Song #2

The next Samples Song starts where the other one left off; literally, it starts with the train deperature sound at the end of Desert Vibe.

I wanted to take the concept a step further with this one. Instead of just doing a little mixing and chopping with the samples, I went all-in: chopped, re-ordered, reversed, and stretched them, and changed their pitch and tempo, etc. On some of them I added effects like overdrive, reverb, and delay. Both as a learning experience and to see how far I could go with just these few samples.

Like Desert Vibe, it’s split into A/B sections. For the A section, I took a fast jazz drum groove and slowed it way down, and added a ton of drive to a snare, to give this song a darker feel. Using only a couple of orchestra stab samples, I stretched, reversed, and changed pitch to make an entire melody out of it. For the B section, I took a single piano chord progression, and did all the same techniques to create completely different progressions.

I pretty much exhausted all the built-in samples I liked, so the Sample Song series ended here for now. It was a ton of fun to make them, and a cool new way to view music-making!

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