This week Sonic Academy presents something a little bit different with an all-new course from Berlin-based House and Techno producer Christian Vance showing us How To Make Leftfield Techno.
Working in Ableton Live 10, Christian creates a complex, evolving, and downright awesome track that emerges entirely from using just the ‘Amen loop’ and one single bar long note.
Without a single note actually ‘played’, Christian crafts this next-level track using Ableton’s intelligent MIDI effect racks, triggering sequences which in turn trigger others giving endless random outcomes ready for sculpting and editing in whatever way you want.
With patience and invaluable knowledge of how to really make the DAW work for you, this course is packed full of tips and tricks shared by a true professional and will help make complex sounds super accessible to those without a music theory background.
Above all else, Christian shows us just how much fun can be had once the right tools are in place to generate beats, sounds, and feed your creativity.
Make no mistake, this one is a real eye-opener. Get on it!
Great tutorial so far. Where can I get the original amen break sample you use in your project? I’ve downloaded the resources, but the samples in there are already processed. Or is it not included for copyright reasons?
Using latest Live 10 10.0.2 here and there’s no “Others” sub-folder inside Midi Effect Rack.
A Random folder is showing up directly under Midi Effects as shown in the picture below but no .adg files
in there, just .adv ones. So can’t find the Random MIDI Fill.adg in Live.
Using the Suite here, and Random MIDI Fill.adg is really not showing up in Live, performing a search with the full name leads to blank result, just using “random” & “includes all results” won’t bring anything matching Random MIDI Fill.adg either… Weird…
Thanks for reply. I’m using 10.02 Suite and Midi Effect Rack just has Arpeggio, Experimental, Random Sequencer.adg. Great tutorial BTW. I could use the sequencer I guess.
Great tutorial. I been using the funky drummer break instead. Some great tips on getting creative here. Would like to ask though any artists to listn to that use this “leftfield” type sound?
To be honest, there is no actual “leftfield” sound but more of an openness in the scene to explore hybrid styles, different approaches etc. There are many familiar elements but they struggle to be categorised and therefore music retailers, record shops and the press etc have really started to refer to a few strains of music as “leftfield”. I would recommend anyone from Aphex Twin to Jon Hopkins, Lone or Skee Mask and Hodge etc… there are artists more on the melodic tip, some super restrained, much broken beat etc is being heard but in a more “worked” way. I guess it’s about coming at the music from a different angle to arrive in a slightly different destination.
First of all… really interesting course… but I have a question about ANA 2 in particular the bass preset. You said that you picked up the bass sound from ANA’s presets but I don’t have those BA… DK sounds. Are they from a presets library? and if yes… which one?
@lunalberto thanks for the kind words! It’s been a busy weekend but I will look into the actual preset this week. Feel free to drop me a line on here during the week and we can locate it. Glad to hear you are enjoying it.
Random-Midi-Effects-in-Live-10 (140.7 KB)
