2 replies to this topic

[dylab]

I want to make some italo house style acid lines and use the old chords as a starting point

basically piano riffs like this


so any help appreciatted

my pitch is shit house so it'll be weeks before I figure it out

[Spectrum]

As I eluded to in the random camera lens thread, I've picked up a bit of work lately transcribing half a dozen 90s dance tunes (though alas not this particular Moby track) for the purpose of being remixed, which has included a number of hammered piano riffs.

My secret is to:

1) determine the track's native BPM (completely manually, mind you, against the DAW metronome - tweaking the sequencer's tempo until it's locked in).
2) then lock the pitch of the audio track to the tempo
3) run the sequencer at half speed (ie. from 138BPMs to 69BPM) so the melody's audio is playing slower and precisely an octave lower
4) jam along on the MIDI controller keyboard set to a piano patch.
5) create a right-hand piano track and a left-hand piano track separately to aid in composition as well as ease of mixing, and one can always merge the two later for convenience sake.
6) push MIDI notes around so they line up with the zoomed-in audio waveform, if need be, and that is assuming a quick quantise doesn't fix it. Generally these riffs are pretty tightly quantised with zero velocity variations.

Still not getting it? Try halving the temp again (eg. from 138 to 69 then down to 34.5 BPMs), and focus on getting the rhythm of the notes spot on, then push the notes up and down into the correct key as required.

Finally, transpose the MIDI notes back up an octave, pop the sequencer back to its normal playback speed, and 'nextisthenextisthenextisthe-E!'


Again, I get this is gonna be a total brain strain if you're struggling to pick notes by ear, but I can vouch for the 'half-speed/down-an-octave' trick making lighter work of it.

[dylab]

this could take a while