Bypass Writer's Block: A Sampling Technique (Ableton)

[Lanz the joiner]

I have discovered a method for creating nice-sounding riffs, by recycling melancholy classical piano music. I use Ableton but it should work with any DAW that can convert audio to MIDI notes.

What I like so much about this technique is that it:
- requires virtually zero inspiration; and it bypasses the blank canvass stage
- requires no knowledge of music theory
- transforms samples so that they are unrecognizable; it produces original content
- allows me to focus on tweaking the synthesizer instead of coming up with a melody
- produces melodic results I wouldn't otherwise come up with

Here is how I go about it:

1. Drop a slow, expressive and melancholy classical piano tune into Ableton, and select a section that features some nice moody, powerful chords.
2. Right-click on the clip and 'Convert Harmony to New MIDI Track'. Once it finishes, you will have extracted the melody, timing, and velocity information from a professional pianist's performance. Yay! Ableton doesn't have a perfect ear, so some sections will be more accurate than others. You can try to correct them, or you can just use the bits that sound right.
3. Use the MIDI data to trigger some synths. I have had good results with Operator, Absynth, and Dune 2, but I think any polysynth will work.
4. Once you've come across some nice sounds, bounce to audio. I like to bounce down more than once, using different synth settings.
5. This is your source material which should be enough to form the backbone of a track - you can create loops, reverse, stretch, add effects, chop. I particularly enjoy chopping it up into chunks, and then adding them to a drum rack and jamming out riffs that way, so that each sample is set to 'choke' the rest. That's probably the most copyright-safe way to go, too.

Here is an example of this technique in action for which I used the chopping option at step 5:
- The source audio is Sehr langsam - Etwas bewegter - Erstes Tempo, composed by Robert Schumann and performed by Imogen Cooper, which is track 15 on the Schumann & Brahms: Piano Works album.
- This is some of the bounced converted harmony. It is playing the Dune 2 synthesizer; some simple wavetable synthesis.
- Finally, here is me hitting my drum pads which are triggering slices of the converted harmony, over a drum-beat I threw together in 30 seconds.

This is an example of the technique being used to create loops instead:
- Source audio is Gnossiennes No. 5 by Erik Satie, performed by Anne Queffélec.
- The bounced audio section is playing a couple of presets on Absynth 5.
- For this one I just took a couple of loops from the bounced audio, and threw a quick beat behind it. Link.

Clearly these aren't full-track material - I just came up with them to demonstrate the technique. But by my own standards, they are good results for an uninspired session, and they allowed me to experiment and learn about features of soft-synths.

[DJDoubleYou]

Pretty cool, well written post, tnx!