Ableton Tutorial - Deep House Arpeggiated Chord Pattern Generator

This is a tutorial video demonstrating how I achieved an Arpeggiated Chord Pattern Generator in Ableton Live.

You can download a free instrument rack of this sound by going to the 'Free Sounds' section of this site.
It will appear very soon as part of the Online DJ Mag Tech section. I will post a link as soon as it is published.

But for now, here is the video and accompanying text.

Taking inspiration from Deep House don and Freerange Records label boss Jimpster, I wanted to have a go at recreating a musical part I heard recently from one of his tracks.

I loved the way the rhythm of the pattern lies on the off beat, so I set about trying to figure a way to achieve this in Ableton.

One of Live's major assets are its fantastic Midi Effects which, when combined together in series, can perform some powerful Midi processing. So for this project I used the following Midi devices:

Arpeggiator
This allows you to hold down any number of keys, and have Ableton build up a Rhythmic pattern (Arpeggio) using these notes. The important thing in my example, is that I had to set the rate to Free mode to get that offbeat rhythm.

Chord
This allows you to play a single note on the keyboard, and have Ableton add extra notes allowing you to build up chords. In this example I programmed a Minor Triad (+3 & +7)

Scale
This basically allows you to play any notes on the keyboard but force the output to play only notes from a specified scale. This was used to take the output of the Chord device and force it to play only notes in D Minor.

My aim for this project was to be able to hold down one note on the keyboard, and get Ableton to do the work for me. To achieve this I used the following combination of Midi Devices:
Chord (playing 5 notes) -> Arpeggiator -> Chord (playing Minor Triad) -> Scale (playing Notes from D Minor)

This technique could be applied to any genre to music, and could potentially trigger any sound or sample.. I hope you can experiment and have some fun!