This is a wonderful technique for anyone using Ableton Live that does not have a lot of experience wit or understanding of music theory. The ideas shared in this tutorial are probably the best advice a beginner could get!

 

There are probably too many tutorials out there trying to show you a good way to go about creating chord progressions if you don;t understand music theory. I say this because many of them do not really approach it in a way that is truly understood by the viewers, or does not provide the reasoning behind the steps taken throughout the process. This video tutorial is a little different, in that it shows you a little trick to help you work with only relevant notes when programming your MIDI. Find the notes that work well together first, and then move forward. It doesn’t teach you theory, but it also doesn’t confuse you either.

It starts off by selecting all of the notes in an A Minor scale and drawing in one note for each note into the piano roll. Once the notes are in place, they are copied up an octave or two to provide a wider range to work with. After this is done, the notes are dragged back to a point before the beginning of the track. Now that this is complete you simply click the Fold button, which hides all of the unused notes in the piano roll. This basically gives you a snapshot guide of only the relevant notes, makign it much easier for you to begin building your progression from, because much of the confusion and frustration involved in not knowing music theory stems from note selection, and whether you are staying in key or not.

Now all you need to do is begin picking notes to play together. As you will quickly see, it is a much easier process to find good combinations to work with when all the notes available to you are in the same key. It also helps to copy and paste the patterns you create for one note across to the other notes you intend on using to make the process of programming you MIDI go quicker and avoid mistakes.

Hopefully this quick tips is helpful to you! If you have any requests, feedback or just want to say hello, send us a message and become an active participant in the fastest growing Trance music production community in the world. Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab 

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