Friday, August 7, 2009

How I made a pop song using Ableton.

This is a song I recorded over the last 3 days. It started out just being a basic guitar riff. I wanted it to be structured: verse, verse, chorus, verse, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus. It ended up being three minutes long. I forgot to change the default bpm from 120, but it sounded fine so I left it in place. There are only two guitar tracks on this song. One track for rythm and just one for lead. I usually use at least three guitar tracks, sometimes as many as five. I recorded the guitar parts in only a few takes, probably seven or eight takes total for both tracks. I used one of the Ableton synths for bass. I put a appreggiator on the bass to give it the tight rythm. Also used two other Ableton synths for a total of three synths. I'm no keeyboard player but I'm starting to get more comfortable playing them. Besides anyone can play them if they are just programming them to play midi. I think if I can do a few more well structured songs like this that I'll start writing lyrics. Hopoefully one day I can get someone with a decent voice to sing over them. This song is very much a pop song, the way the synth plays the bass give it a pop song feel. I might record it again with my Fender American Jazz Deluxe to see how it sounds. And I might take out the sawtooth synth. The sawtooth kinda annoys my ears a bit. This was my first real song recorded on Ableton Live 8 Suite and it is a huge improvement over Live 7. I used the Ableton synths, usually I'd use Bass Station but it was causing Ableton to temporarily freeze up so I stopped using it. The chords are C, G, Am, C, G, F for the verse, F, G right before the chorus, then C, G, Am, F for the chorus, the bridge is Am, F, Am, F, G, G. I made the drum track using drum racks in Ableton, I just used the Nanopad to get a feel for what I wanted then cleaned it up a bit and added the ride for the chorus. Other than that there is not much else. I hope to use this as a music diary to keep track of how I made a song and to help me look back for reference.
Here is the link to the song on Reverbnation.

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