Shifted MIDI Notes in Ableton Live

Posted on | June 25, 2007 | 1 Comment

Ok, what fun did I do the last hour? While working on DNA Tones, Part Three, I had a set of tracks playing the same MIDI clips — it’s one of those power-techniques to have multiple instruments playing the same lead, bass, and others. Heavy rock bands have known about this trick since the early day power chords.

Anyway, what I started doing, see image, is to deliverately shift the notes in the various same MIDI tracks, some would play now and then a couple of semitones above, or below.

This made a very interesting arrangement, sounds like some of the instruments are jamming now and then, and then falling back into line.

I just had to remember to cut the midi clips here and there — they were looping, so if I pushed one note up, it could have caused problems earlier in the total mix of the tracks playing.

You could also place one of the arpeggiator plug-ins into one of the tracks with same midi info as let’s say a bass line, with pushing it up one octave, and this way also get all kinds of interesting variations using the same MIDI data.

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