Collective Ableton Loop Project: Song Completed
After quite a rough road of sorting out random loops sent in from my blog readers & twitter followers, I’ve finally completed the process of turning it into a song. The greatest challenge was editing & processing each loop in a way that not only made the parts work together, but also sounded like something I might write.
The next step was creating scenes in Ableton to make sense of which loops worked together & which didn’t. This way I was able to create different “movements” for the song. The best approach I found for creating scenes was to start playing individual clips & adding part 1 by 1 until things sounded good. Then I would use the shortcut Command/Shift/I to get ableton to collect all the paying loops into their own scene. Each of these scenes had a different mood, so it became my job to figure out how to best transition form one scene to another.
I dragged another song into Ableton’s arrange window and added locators at different sections of the song to give me a head start on how to structure the song. Once I got a few minutes into the track, I was able to abandon this structure & rely on my own arrangement instincts. Copy, Paste & duplicate were friends through this process.
I used simple delays and volume fades to introduce or cut certain elements throughout the song. I even used EQ & delay on the master track in a few locations. As the song was already pretty complex, I wasn’t too interested in doing anything too crazy effect-wise.
Below are links to all 5 videos documenting my overall writing process. Although nothing is perfect, I’m pretty happy with the results. There is also a link to download the full songfile with all the samples & loops so you can either reverse engineer what I’ve done or use the raw loops to build your own track from scratch. This is completely free but if you find my work helpful, donations are appreciated.
Enjoy!
happy music making!
Jason
With that said, if you are benefiting from these posts, you will absolutely love my 2 bestselling books:
The Mental Game of Music Production
The Process for Electronic Music Producers
You can also Check out the: Ableton Courses & Instruments
If you are looking for personal guidance with your music production or Ableton, you can set up a free chat with me to go over exactly what your best next steps are to create the best music of your life. If it seems like a good fit, we can move forward from there. https://musicsoftwaretraining.com/private-coaching
Happy music making!
Jason
Excellent work Jason,
I imagine there was quite a few hours spent putting it all together. I particularly like the way you customize a sound to make it work..
Thanks for allowing us to contribute..
Paul