Sample Packs

In Ableton you have the ability to take the groove of any audio or MIDI clip and apply it to the groove of your own clips.  This is useful in many situations.  If you stumble on an old breakbeat and really like it, you can drop it into the groove pool and extract it. Here’s [...]

In our last discussion we covered the fundamentals of working with Impulse – Ableton’s unique drum sampler.  Today we’ll expand upon that and show you how to route the samples within Impulse to multiple tracks. This is ideal when you have drum samples that need some individual effects processing like Equalization or Compression.  Typically, you [...]

Understanding the nuances of Ableton (or any DAW) takes time and effort but is well worth the reward.  In today’s article we look at Ableton’s Impulse drum machine and dive into exploring its features.

There are many things you can do to give a sequenced drum groove more of a realistic feel.  Among them, is the ability to ‘choke’ your hi-hat samples so they emulate how a real drummer switches between an open hat and a closed hat. Choking is the use of triggering one sample to cutoff another [...]

In today’s article we’ll take a look at how to create a quirky Dutch House synth for your next club banger!  We’ll be working out of Ableton’s Operator, which is a powerful soft synth capable of producing many quality sounds. Have a listen to the sound we’ll recreate: dutch_house_finale

Creating a harmonious kick-to-bass relationship is often the hardest thing to get right in a mix.  This has a lot to do with both parts commonly sharing a lot of the same frequencies.  Without some TLC, the typical end result is either a bass that drowns out your kick, or extreme spikes in volume where [...]

The Nintendo coin drop (as we like to call it) is an iconic gaming sound.  Recently, these type of classic, arcade-ish sounds have become a cool way to spice up your electronic productions.  Go on YouTube and search the phrase Nintendo remix – you’ll see exactly what we mean.

The ‘Dubstep snare’ is a punchy, over processed sound that really hits you in the chest.  Big time artists like Skrillex and Koan (amongst others) use this type of snare sound all the time.  There are many of ways of creating it, but we’ll take a simplified approach that will get us in the ball [...]

Today we’ll jump right into creating a tasty Electro bass for your next banger.  We’ll use Native Instruments Massive, but essentially you can create this sound with many different FM synth engines.

With technology advancing at such a rapid pace, we now have access to more resources than ever before.  The Internet has provided a medium for connecting the world, and in doing so, it has changed so many things about the way we create and produce music.