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Composing & Arranging: Genre Hacking

Lesson 15 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

Composing & Arranging: Genre Hacking

Lesson 15 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

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Lesson Info

15. Composing & Arranging: Genre Hacking

Lesson Info

Composing & Arranging: Genre Hacking

I call this like my genre hacking technique and basically there's been times when I'm like, man, what kind of rhythm is that? Is that a triplet rhythm or, you know, how did they make this this part, or why is this so effective? And one day I was playing around, and I think I had some tracks warped and live like some full songs, and I was looking at it on the grid, and I thought, wow, this would be a really easy way to sort of take a lot of the thinking out of, well, I could creating this song and do and do so I basically just started re creating some of the rhythm of the song in the grid, and I realize this is an awesome sort of education tool. So, one, one way, that one metaphor I've heard artists use is that when you're learning to draw your, you're not learning to draw your learning to see also, and there's, a technique that that some illustrators use that to draw the negative space is because a lot of times what we're focused on, maybe there's a distortion there, um, and there's di...

fferent parts of songs that guide your attention and are distracting, so you don't realize that it's, all these other pieces working together that are making work so it's really awesome, sometimes to just take ah, piece of work that you really appreciate and to remake it so I'm going to bring in a track to the grid and we'll take a look and we'll start recreating some of the rhythms and take a look at some cool ways to do this okay, so I'm going to say that project and I'm just going to start a new one so this is ahh this is a song by an artist named hettrick and this is from one of his new albums that's pretty cool. So harry oh, that sounds closer. Some must set the one here. I'm work from here straight. Yeah, so one thing I will do is bring it over here and I put it on the grid returned to the arrangement and you can start to recreate, so I'll go in here. Uh, right now we have a middie file and I think I'm going to I'm just going to recreate some of these he's from this drum rhythm, so I'm going to highlight an area of about eight bars. The key command shift command m will create a middie track in the arrangement for us so once but first you have to highlight the area so you highlight the area shift command m and that creates a middie track right there in the arrangement that's a super helpful uh wait to write it out so I think what I'll do is just grab a drum kit that we already have maybe there's some cool might as well use these congress, okay, so I'll start with you, I'm just going to start with looping this tube our segment and what I'm looking for now is I'm listening to the original track and I'm watching the cursor those little rhythms he's got in their crazy, but so one thing we can do is I can bring this up and you can actually see the rhythm of these little hits, these little hand drums that air in here. So what I'm going to do is go into my many club and if I click so that one's cool that's like this sort of snare sound um, that one looks like it's on that's on this one's off a little bit, maybe not, and then there's another hit here and you can just basically can just go through and duplicate the's hits and you can gain a better understanding of the rhythm. So using the zoom features, too, to get tied up on the track and also lining up the mid eclipse with the audio that you're trying to understand is a great way to start pulling parts out and extracting some some new ideas for yourself, so yeah, and you can do this, you can recreate the thing, start start to finish a lot of times I might be trying to understand something and I'll pull it in I'll sort of hackett and get it and then I'll take that and remix it and make it into my own thing and just use the idea you can adapt the groove and live also has some really cool um some other really cool features for sliced committee where you can actually we'll slice too many you can slice it up into different audio samples but you can also extract midi music notes like and harmony and trump's now so let's just for for giggles let's see what happen that's when we convert this teo a new drum drums anonymity track so I just split that up this little tube our peace and I created a drum track for that. So so it picks up a lot of the polly rhythms and these are the sort of default six oh six drum sounds so it's a lot different than that sort of hand drum percussion uh but it does make a pretty good approximation of the rhythm and it's also a cool way to take another look at you know how things are made and you know when you're remixing you can also transpose or just or flip things around and just be creative but this is a great way to get some idea started it's a really cool way to throw paint the last thing I'll talk about is derivative and original works, and, um, I think that there's a there's a big difference when, you know you could you could totally just copy a track and or or make another trap track that's exactly what the world doesn't need in my opinion, because it's, just, you know, more of the same, and this is this is a frontier of of possibilities, and I think that for me, I feel like, really cool things happen when I sort of step into the void and experiment, and I don't know what's going to happen and that's really exciting as an artist to so are as when you're when you're creating stuff. For me, it is when I'm just discovering new things. So, um, you know, uh, it's fun to its fun and effective and a great way to learn to pick things apart. But, um, it's equally awesome, too, or even better to just try something completely new and and go and venture into the land of unknown. So, um, yeah, but that would be my bit on hacking genius.

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