First off, this past two weeks I’ve been getting overwhelmed trying to dive in the deep end with YouTube tutorials on Ableton. I had just been searching ‘Lo-fi hiphop tutorial ableton’ and this gave me some results I found difficult to understand. The Ableton software is cluttered with all kinds of things you can do, and I felt confused when using it because there was so much I didn’t understand. Nevertheless, I kept trying to find something that would fit the bill.

While following one of these tutorials (not worth linking), I had tried googling around to understand why Ableton’s single-sound sampler, called ‘Simpler’, wasn’t playing a sound. That led me to a reddit post where I found this recommendation for an all-encompassing beginner tutorial video.

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Listening to this comment was by far the best Ableton-related move I’ve made in the last two weeks. The long size of the video felt intimidating to get started with, so I set aside a large chunk of time tonight of a few hours to watch it and follow along. The quality of this tutorial is great and it’s meeting me at my absolute-beginner level instead of me getting lost trying to keep up. Also to my taste, he doesn’t waste time making jokes or being overly formal, it’s just a no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point teaching about the software.

It seems the producer has a how-to-produce platform called Beat Academy. Maybe I’ll look into that afterward because I really like the way this first tutorial is taught.

I learned a lot of different buttons / things about the Ableton interface. Nothing specific to lofi hiphop whatsoever which is fine. This tutorial is amazing because it’s very clear and straightforward about how to use the tools. It feels like it’s teaching a man to fish, rather than just giving me some chords and a drum beat to copy like a lot of the other tuts I’ve seen.

This experience also provides kind of a template for some of the other pursuits I’ve been interested in playing around with, like photography and graphic design. The strategy of experimenting with the tool first for fun, then hitting some limitations, and then seeking out and watching a longer, high-quality introduction designed for beginners seems like a winning formula that is likely to keep things fun and moving forward.

The highest-impact thing I learned from the video, aside from various smaller tips, was how to use Simpler at least on a basic level to play with samples. I was able to import a sample I grabbed from Splice (basically a subscription-based sample library — got a subscription when I took the class during my sabbatical) and then warp it. Warping cements your sample to the specified bars regardless of the tempo of the original sample. This allows you to change the tempo and have the sample speed up or slow down while staying on beat which is necessary to make sample-based music.

(Here’s the sample I started with, so you can compare it to the tracks below)

Simpler offers a few different ‘modes’ to set your sample once you’ve imported it. The default is ‘beats’ which I think is intended for drum loops. When I had it on the ‘beats’ setting the quality was lacked. For the below snippets I used the ‘complex’ mode which is apparently very CPU intensive but preserves the quality of the original sound. It seems Ableton recommends using complex mode on only one track at a time. So I’m not sure what I’ll do as I plan to incorporate several samples at a time. Maybe looking at videos where other producers make sample-based beats will help me see what they do.

Simpler also lets you slice samples and play the chopped pieces. I didn’t do any of that here, just warped the sample so that when I upped the tempo, the sample would speed up with it.

Lastly, I recorded myself saying talking via the laptop mic (Ableton allows you to record from any external input; I used my laptop mic but you could use a real mic, or, I believe, a hardware synthesizer), then ‘warped’ that sample. I manually added individual warp markers at key points in the sample’s waveform, then dragged those slightly to make my voice speak at the spots I wanted it to.

Here’s three different experiments I made using the same beat, with some changes among each. Ableton has this unique thing called the Session View which lets you try out different ‘clips’ for instruments to see how they play with one another. That made it easy to swap out different instruments to create the snippets below.

Ironically, even though the original sample had more of a lo-fi sound, I didn’t end up making lo-fi at all… I set a tempo of 145 bpm (beats per minute) and came up with a breakbeat-type drum loop that I liked.