Understanding MIDI EFFECTS "Chord" + "Scale"

Chord and Scale effects within abletons effects can be SUPER useful tools when trying to come up with ideas. Many musically uneducated producers can sometimes feel like they LACK ideas when it comes to tracks. They may understand the specifics of effects and sequencing, but general musical skills just arent up to par with educated musicians. Understanding the MIDI CHORD & SCALE effects can turn you into a seemingly musically educated person in seconds. This is great for spawning great ideas, or finding that nice chord JAB you were looking for a in a nice techy track. Many producers who dont understand this effect tend to have many one note melodies going on, but if you understand this tool, you can be making chords in no time.

Lets start with the chord effect. First of all, drop in a new midi track. Then, put in an instrument of your liking, preferable something with less resonation for the purpose of understanding this tutorial. In the future, you can use nice long voilins or even pads to make spacy chorded sounds. After you have put in the sound, just before it in your rack, toss in a CHORD midi effect.

Now you will see options for up to 6 extra notes to create chords off of the one you are pressing on your midi keyboard. This is pretty simple to understand, and not very useful unless you have an understanding of chords. When you turn on one of the shift options, it adds another note depending on how far your shifted that note. A shift of +1 semi tones will add another note one half note above the one you are pressing (example white key to the nearest black key). You can play around within this to find some nice chords on your own. The little box below each shift button determines how loud you will hear that note when compared to the original note you are pressing, incase you want less dramatic chord. Also be sure to play around with the built in presets that come within this midi effect to find nicely made chords with excellent velocities already there for your disposal.

Now, lets go on to the next step. If you dont understand chords, this next step can be SO useful. Even if you do understand chords, it is impossible for you to know ALL of them, so you can build your knowledge chords by using this.

Start by SHUTTING OFF THE CHORD effect for now, we will get back to it.

Go into midi effects, and drop in a SCALE effect in between your CHORD & INSTRUMENT, like this -
It looks like a small sequencer right? Think of it a little bit like that, where as from left to right are keys within ONE OCTAVE of your midi keyboard (ex. C to C). For some reason there are 13 squares (not 12) up and down. I dont know why this is, but the top one does not get used.

Lets look at the options now within this. The BASE knob is for the BASE of your grid. It will not change sound, only the VIEW that you see the grid. If you are making a track in C, its good to leave it in C to see the whole range of C-C. The transpose will transpose the actual SOUND in semitones up or down based on how far you move it. If you have a midi keyboard, the range and lowest note options are not really useful.

Now, what you are telling your controller to do, is to CHANGE what note is actually being played. You can only have 1 square activated per vertical column. So now, if you were to select note C in column 1, 2, & 3...then press keys C, C sharp, & D....they will now all play C. This makes it so, if you were to build a chord, you cannot press a WRONG button. This can be nice for improv jamming.

Now the key to this feature is to use the built in presets that come with ableton. Just click the little arrow below the SCALE midi effect within your browser to see the options. You will see options like MAJORS, MINORS, PENTATONIC, etc etc. Just drag on of those on top of the scale effect within your effects rack, and it will be preset to that chord. Start touching all over your keyboard, and you will notice that ANY note you hit will be in that correct progression.

Now, go back to your chord effect and turn it on. Toss in a nice preset for the time being. Now play your midi keyboard. You will hear AMAZING chord sounds in a perfect chord progression based off of what your are playing on your keyboard.

Just play around with all the parameters until you get something you like! If you want, you can even put an arpeggio before all of this, but I will get more into detail about that in another blog.

Enjoy making chords & chord progressions!

Peace!

FroBot

Using Midipipe to have better control over clip transpose (or any parameters) in Ableton

There are a few options within ableton that just seem stupid in my opinion. One of them being the fact that you cannot define the parameters of the transpose button within clip view, nor can you individually map different buttons to different clip transpose buttons. When trying to make music more quickly and efficiently, it is essential to be able to change a clips KEY to match the rest of the music. Not only your melodies and basses, but its also important to tune all of your drums too. Now, if you want to mouse over the transpose and do it every time, that is fine...and this tutorial will be of no use to you. But for those of you improving, or wanting to save a little bit of time when dealing with many samples, this method will help you.

There are 2 problems with the transpose. One being that you can only GENERALLY assign a knob to CLIP VIEW transpose, and not each clip. There is nothing you can do about this. But what is nice, is that if you have another button that highlights tracks for you...like clip view (i have one on each channel of my VCM 600)...you can then control the transpose of that particular clip. 2 buttons instead of one. You may ask, "Why do you need midipipe then?" That brings me to problem 2. For some reason, when you MAP OUT the transpose, you have no control over the distance variable of the transpose (like you do with most options within ableton). Dont ask me why, but that is how it is.

So what I have done is determined the parameters of the transpose within midipipe, and then my knob correlates with it.

Since moving a sample too far from its original state using BEATS warping mode (maintaining its key but speed only changed) sounds bad, I like my parameters to go -6, +6....because within a whole octave of sound...there are 12 notes. 0 being the middle, -6 is a half octave down, + 6 is a half octave up. This way, you can always find match the key of a sample, yet it doesnt go as far as +48 - 48 like normally set in ableton. This is VERY VERY handy, and I use my transpose button on EVERY sample when improv jamming.

So how to do it. Well open up midi pipe, and make sure you have your ins and outs all set up correctly (look at my tutorial about mapping the VCM 600 w/ Launchpad to get more info, and omit the channel routing part, that will explain how to set up midipipe). Once you have that set up, toss in a CONTROL SPLIT. Now you need to know what midi channel and CC value the knob you are going to use for your transpose is. Just go into ableton, jump into map mode, map it to the transpose button, and remember the channel and cc value.

In the control splits SOURCE menu, select the CC value of the knob you are using. In my case, is is CC #20. Looks like this -



After that, click the box that says scale, and define the distance as MIN 55, MAX 71. That will send it at -6, +6. If you want a larger distance, just change the parameters to lower and greater distances correspondingly. Its some weird math, 127/48 or some shit like that. Best approach is to just change it, then move the knob within ableton to see how far it moves.

Anyway, after that, then click the bottom box that says "ONLY SPLIT ON CHANNEL"...and then set the channel of the knob that you are using. In my case, since its on the right side of the VCM 600...channel 13. Yours will be different.

You should be good to go. You can use this method to change the parameters of any midi knob within ableton if you like, although ableton does do a pretty good job at making most of them easily editable within their own mapping system. This is just one they either forgot, or figured people are all using a mouse...and omitted. I dont like to use the mouse for this, and think its one of the most important buttons when improving. Hope this helped!

Peace!

FroBot