Quick Tip 6: DaVinci Resolve

Replace green screens with ease on DaVinci Resolve.

Meet Bhanu Pratap Gill

Ideas to finished music, Bhanu, a guitarist wanted to turn his ideas into fully produced songs. We helped him build on his ideas and now he's a professional music producer.

A Quick Guide To Understanding Tripod Heads (Part 2/3)

Check out part 2 of 3 part series of our quick guide to understanding Tripod heads and the various ways you can use them during your shoot.

Transform your Music with Polyphonic Pitch Bends!

In this article we’ll be learning how make expressive pitch bends and glides like never before, without using a hardware MIDI controller!    

With the addition of MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) Live 11 has opened out endless possibilities of musical expression both inside the software as well as when using hardware controllers. One such feature we like using is polyphonic pitch bends.

Check out this video to learn how we can transform melodies, harmonies, and rhythms using the polyphonic pitch bends.

Please note that MPE features including these polyphonic pitch bend expressions are available only for certain instruments of Ableton Live (notably Wavetable and Simpler).

Try this out!

As a fun exercise to get you started, follow along with the video and start with a 4 or 8 bar musical section and work on editing individual layers similarly. Be careful to avoid disharmonic clashes between your parallel layers. One way to do this is by listening to adjacent tracks as you are working on one. In the video, I was listening to my bass as I was editing my harmony clip.

Link your music in the comments if you try this feature out! Also, let us know your thoughts or questions regarding this feature by replying to this post.

Happy Learning!

Meet Preeti Gehlot

Learning through interactions, Preeti tried many online courses before joining us, through our courses she was able to interact and get feedback from her trainers directly helping her achieve her music production goals.

Song Structure Writeup on Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) 

Song structure refers to how a song is organized, using a combination of different sections. A typical song structure includes a verse, chorus, and bridge in the following arrangement: 

intro —  verse — chorus — verse — chorus —bridge — chorus — outro. 

This is known as an ABABCB structure, where A is the verse, B is the chorus and C is the bridge.

As an example, I have chosen Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) and have done a break up of this song into different sections as I have perceived it.

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is a song by the British new wave music duo Eurythmics. The song is the title track of their album of the same name and was released as the fourth and final single from the album in early 1983. The song became their breakthrough hit, establishing the duo worldwide. Its music video helped to propel the song to number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and number 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100. It was the first single released by Eurythmics in the US.

This song is in the key of C minor and the tempo is 125 bpm.

This track is largely built from alternations between Verse/Chorus and Break Sections, with lengths that are (mostly) multiples of four or eight bars. Even though the song has a very repetitive structure, it is different from other tracks as this one opens with the Verse/Chorus itself and this is repeated throughout the entire song.

Song Structure:

The intro of the song begins with an arpeggiated synth melody and a floor on the floor beat which leads straight to the Verse/Chorus of the song. This is followed by Break 1 and only the first half of the Verse/Chorus is played. Next, we have Break 2 which then directly jumps into the Bridge Section of the track. An Instrumental solo on the Cello and the Second Half of the Verse/Chorus follows the Bridge Section. Then, we have Break 3 and the repetition of the Verse/Chorus with slight variations to the beat. The Verse/Chorus keeps repeating over and over until the Song finally slowly fades out to an Outro. In order to understand the song structure better, the timeline below shows the flow of the song in a simplified format.

Quick Tip 5: DaVinci Resolve

Check out this simple yet cool trick to white balance your videos on DaVinci Resolve.

Ableton Quick Tip: 06

Check out this simple trick Ableton's Sampler to create new and interesting sounds with your audio samples.

Meet Vineet Braganza

Getting better one step at a time, Vineet has been a part of multiple programs of ours. We helped him achieve his production goals by setting up processes and short term goals. We couldn't be more proud of the progress Vineet has made and we're super excited to hear what he has planned.