Saytek: House and Techno Chord Stabs in Ableton Live
In a lesson that certainly delivers, Mixmaster resident Saytek shows you how to create House and Techno chord stabs in Ableton Live.
Saytek is on fire right now. With global recognition for his live production shows and a signing to Carl Cox and Christopher Coe’s label: Awesome Soundwave he is making waves across the scene. With a teaching style that is easy to understand and full of game-changing advice you need to get involved with his workshops.
Here are some of his insights taken from the full lesson:
House and Techno Chord Stabs in Ableton Live: Producer Insights
- Offsetting stabs from the beat can help to add variation to your track. Also play around with double timing and moving around your chords.
- Creating a question and answer between two different chord stabs can help to keep your track clean but interesting. Using deactivate to mute notes means that you can easily go back and change things if you don’t like where things are going.
- A great music theory hack for finding the notes in a minor scale is:
- Input all of the white notes in one octave from A to A and then transpose them up or down to the key of your choice.
- Next you can duplicate this scale across more than one octave by highlighting the notes and using Shift + Up to give you a range of octaves to play in.
- Fold the notes. Now any note you play will be in the key of your choice and you can start to build chords.
- Filter Delay can be a great way to add delay to your stabs. Adjust feedback, delay time and the filters to sculpt your sound.
- You can create chords in Ableton Live’s stock instruments such as Wavetable and then use the freeze and flatten function to use them in Simpler.
Full Tutorial Description
- Using unusual loop timings to add movement to your chord patterns.
- Writing chords in Analog synth.
- Hacking the minor scale.
- Filter Delay audio effect,
- Echo: Analog Triplet Dub.
- Automating filter cutoffs.
- Grand Piano stock instrument.
- Fixed interval chords.
- Using freeze and flatten.
- Programming chords in Simpler.
- Using chord samples
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