How to Create Organic Percussion & Textures in Ableton Live: Point Blank Techtorial

For this tutorial, Point Blank demonstrate how you can add gorgeous textural percussion to your tracks, giving your song a more organic feel.

Much like the percussion used in Maya Jane Coles’ excellent, ‘Something In The Air‘, Point Blank Course Developer, Chris Martin, will take you through the steps to create something similar in Ableton Live, using only the DAWs in-built plugins. Follow on below to see the impact that using simple instances of panning, reverb and delay can have on your beats and take them to the next level.

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To demonstrate this technique, Chris loads a “found sound” into Ableton Live’s Simpler which he wants to start processing. To begin the editing process, he drops in Ableton Live’s Echo which enables him to turn a single hit into a rhythmic pattern, before adding Grain Delay – a plugin that’s great for creating unusual pitch effects. To add more movement to the sound, Chris adds Live’s Frequency Shifter to the chain, followed up by a phaser to boost the colour on his percussive hit. Taking things further, he resamples his percussion sound and creates some stereo width using Ableton Live’s own Delay.