How to Make Organic House with Ableton Live and Built In Plugins

Hi guys!

This is Julian with Ableton Tips and today we’re going to be taking a look at an organic house beat using the new Deep Premium Volume 6 sample pack from PML.

I'm going to be basically explaining my thought process for building this beat and getting that really organic, groovy feel using these really awesome samples.

1. Basic Drums: Kick, Claps

We have a really nice, soft, acoustic sounding kick. I did no processing to it at all - I've just loaded it here into simpler and then sequenced out the beat.

The most important thing about this kick would be the way that we've placed these ghost kicks:

We’ve got a double kick at the beginning - if you just pay attention to these lower velocities, you'll hear that they add a really nice bounce to the kick groove.

Next up we have the clap.

I really didn't do much processing on it. It was quite important to the groove of the track to add these ghost hits with the lower velocities.

You'll hear it has this bounce when you have all the little ghost hits:

2. Percussion Elements: Djembe, Bongo, Snares, Toms

The percussion group is where I spent most of the time on this track.

I was trying to fill in all the little spaces that we have available with different types of percussive sounds that are taking up different ranges in the frequencies.

Besides my main Shaker Loop, we have Claves taking up space at the high end along with our Hihats.

We have the Djembe which is lowered into the lower mids.

Then there’s the Bongo, which sits in the mids.

We also have some Snares that are also using up a bit more of the higher mids.

All together they like they take up quite a lot of space in the mix.

Let’s listen to the percussion group:

3. Lead

This type of melody is quite a defining characteristic of a lot of the organic house that you hear. The reason for that is that it's written in Phrygian Dominant.

I've got scale mode enabled and we are in G Minor - there's a note that's not in the scale - but it doesn't really sound wrong.

It sounds almost arabic.

In this scale there's a lot of semitone relationships, and it’s very useful to use them if you’re looking for this sound.

As for the sound design, we’re using Wavetable with the “Sync Digital” oscillator.

We're sweeping through the wavetable using our envelope.

Towards the end of the note we have this feeling of width opening up and almost like a detuned texture. What i've done here is I've used Unison for that and got it on “Shimmer” mode with two voices - and then when i've automated it - as we reach the end of the note, the amount of detune increases

4. Background Arp

This instrument is a Wavetable preset called “Basic Harp” - which is tweaked quite a bit.

Essentially, we’re still using Chord and Arpeggiator to create an entire arpeggio from a single note.

5. Sub Bass

We’re also using a sub bass which we are creating with Operator and using the Saturator to increase the drive and add some nice harmonics.

Here’s the final result:

Feel free to watch the full Youtube tutorial for detailed explanations on specific elements of the track!

That's it for this tutorial! I hope you enjoyed it.

All the sounds that were used in the track are included in the “Deep Premium Volume 6” sample pack. You can check it out here.

Another very useful pack for this genre is Organica - we’ve made it specifically for Organic House producers. It’s also available through our website.

Good luck with your organic house production!

- Julian

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