From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music

Tips and tricks for using Push 2 during the production process - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music

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Tips and tricks for using Push 2 during the production process

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- [Instructor] There are many ways that you can use Ableton Push during the production, mixing, and recording process. I'm going to show you a few ways that I like to use Push now for creating different variations in my drums as my project is going, and then recording that all into session and then the arrangement. What I'll usually do is I have my drum track with some of my favorite samples in this first track, and then I have clips that I'm working with so the ideas in their kind of raw form, and as I'm working with them, I can kind of play them in real time to arrange them. So, we're going to come back to this house session that we've been working with and in session, I can trigger the clips. So, I'm gonna go and go in here. (techno music) And then, going back into... We're now out of session, we're in this first drum track. I can hit Duplicate. It's going to duplicate, and then I can go in and just add more variations as the track is playing. And this is also a good way to audition so, I can find my sound, and then when I'm ready hit Record. (techno music effects and music) Quantize on the fly, hit Duplicate again, So, you can see I'm just going through and building parts. Let's go and add that little clave in there. (clave rhythm with techno music) Quantizing as we go too, and, if we want to take some drums out, like for example, if this were in a live session and we're performing live, we could drop the kick by hitting Mute. (techno music without kick) So now that kick is muted. And then we can bring it right back in by hitting that again. (techno music with kick) We could also solo, and then bring everything right back in. Same with notes, if we have a synth on any of our tracks it's really easy to go in and just add notes, and melodies, and chords and trigger them on the fly, drop them out from your mix. So, it's almost like in the production process, one of the things I like to do is, with Push, be really spontaneous, and almost jam out and add a lot of different variations, and just record all of what I'm doing using that duplicate especially for drums, to go in and add different variations. And then I feel that it really captures the spontaneity and energy in a track, and I think that that's something that's really important as you're working, we can really often get caught up over-editing our MIDI and going crazy with little audio edits, but I think that capturing some of that initial first energy can be really important and can really lead to some great tracks. So this is just a small tip of some ways that I'm using Push in the production process. If you're a Push owner, I encourage you to keep experimenting with this device. It's really awesome, and it can really lead to some great results.

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