Using grooves in Ableton to tighten your mix
4 min readONE of the most important things to consider when sampling sounds and tightening the feel of your track is ensuring that timings are correct.
In this regard, Ableton has one of the best solutions of any DAW: Grooves.
You are able to take a sample and extract a groove from it, this involves the computer calculating the volumes and accents as well as the swing and feel of the sample.
In many live instrument performances, the beats and notes aren’t exactly quantised. Particularly in swung genres, they are ever so slightly delayed or rushed allowing for a groovy feel.
In a lot of electronic music, everything is tightly quantised, and dare I say it, boring. You can really spice up the feel of a dance track by adding grooves and swing to the sounds to really make it stand out.
Future house is a genre that works as a great example for this, whether you like it or not, the feel of it is especially funky.
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Likewise, if you are using a sample with a swung groove and then program in straight, quantised sounds over the top, it will feel like they aren’t playing with each other and suck away the impression that the sounds are working together.
To solve this, you want to extract the groove from the sound you want and apply it to the other main instruments. One key thing here is choosing a feel and sticking with it across your sounds. I have experimented with combining various grooves over each other and it can lead to happy accidents, or more often than not, messy timings.
It is especially important to make sure kick drum tracks (or any featuring the kick) and basslines are quantised to the same groove.
So let’s get started.
Extracting grooves from samples/recordings
The main other way I use grooves is from Ableton’s library of grooves. Many are available in Ableton’s core library under the folder Swing and Groove.
To apply them to sounds, you can just drag and drop them into the timeline onto individual samples or apply it to the whole master track.
For a full overview, there is no better resource than Ableton’s manual … here’s the section on using grooves.