Developed by a team of producers and sound designers including Sound Oracle, Mic Checkmate and Michele Darling, this collection of sounds puts everything you need for making beats in one place. Drum Racks are packed with percussive hits, bass and melodic samples so you can work on tight-knit ideas for groove and melody together. And more than 100 Instrument Racks offer a huge sound palette to create a range of moods – from weighty bass and smooth electric pianos, to icy pads and sharp leads.
Melodics ™ is the best way to build your musical skills. Free to download, play 60 free lessons for 5 performance minutes a day to start building your rhythm, timing, and muscle memory immediately. Then subscribe for unlimited access to premium lessons, including exclusive lessons from acclaimed artists. Play as you learn! Melodics ™ is the best way to build your musical skills. Free to download, play 60 free lessons for 5 performance minutes a day to start building your rhythm, timing, and muscle memory immediately. Then subscribe for unlimited access to premium lessons, including exclusive lessons from acclaimed artists. Play as you learn! That includes 'Ableton Live 10 Explained' and 'First Song with Ableton Live.' Those three videos will give newcomers a good introduction to just getting your first song into Ableton. I also recommend watching 'Ableton Live 9 Explained' because the tutorial flow is different than 'Ableton Live 10 Explained.' I got some emails about it, and a little 'coupon' thing from Ableton for more lessons, but I really can't say Melodics seems worth paying for at Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. More from Ableton: Loop. Watch Talks, Performances and Features from Ableton's Summit for Music Makers. Thanks for sharing your preferences regarding future news about Melodics. Sign up to our newsletter. Enter your email address to stay up to date with the latest offers, tutorials, downloads, surveys and more.
Plus there are 182 audio loops for chopping up and creating new grooves and melodies, as well as almost 100 MIDI clips for reworking into your own beats, and showing you what the kits can do.
Beatmaking flow with Push
The Pack is set up for sparking ideas and keeping you in your flow – especially with Push. Drum kits and Instrument Racks come with processing and effects chains that sound great right off the bat. Eight Macros are carefully set up for creative tweaking and sound design directly from Push; take your bass booms from pure to gritty in just a few tweaks. Instruments also make use of expressive Push features like pad aftertouch.
Pack contents
- 102 Instrument Racks – including bass, keys, leads, pads and effects, designed for Live’s native synths or multisampled from analog gear
- 27 Drum Racks – from crisp drum machine rhythms to lo-fi samples, with tweakable Effect Racks
- 97 MIDI clips & 182 audio loops – premade kit patterns and audio loops and phrases to slice, rework and spark ideas of your own
- 15 Effect Racks – creative chains set up for using the eight Macro controls to maximum effect.
- 5 demo sets – Live sets that showcase some the Pack’s creative potential
- Samples provided by MVP Loops and MSX Audio
Learn finger drumming
Practice your finger drumming skills with Melodics, a standalone app that offers a great way to learn and refine your playing. Melodics have created a free set of lessons based on BMaul’s video performance, using the sounds from the Beat Tools Sound Pack.
You’ve heard that practice makes perfect. But what exactly is good practice, and how does it work to create tangible results?
In terms of music, we can think of practice as a constant balancing act between artistic expression and scientific rigour. To help us understand this, there are two concepts that are useful to examine — one from neuroscience (myelin) and one from psychology (flow). Both of these concepts come together to form an actionable process known as deliberate practice.
Myelin
If a ball was thrown to you, the chances are your hand would instinctively try and catch it. If you’ve done this plenty of times before, it wouldn’t feel like you had to think about catching the ball — you’d just do it. This is because it’s a learned response. Your brain has already linked a recognizable situation (a ball hurtling towards you) to a corresponding response (catching it).
In making sense of this, it’s helpful to imagine your brain made up of both behavioral and perceptive neurons. New patterns are grown in each set of these neurons when recognizable situations and responses are linked. When your brain encounters new situations, it has to create a new perception-and-response behavioral pattern. The more you encounter and use these new neural patterns, the stronger they become. This is a process called myelination; where your nerve cells insulate themselves by producing a fatty protein called myelin. Myelin allows electrical impulses within the nerve cells (in other words, thoughts) to transmit progressively faster and more efficiently.
Myelin is a bit of a double-edged sword, however, because the same process is applied to both good and bad quality inputs. So even when you are not doing something right, myelination can strengthen neural pathways that lead to the formation of bad habits. To help mitigate this, slowing things down in order to overcome mistakes is very important. When practicing music, this can feel very frustrating, when all you want to do is to speed things up and be able to play what you hear in your mind as soon as possible. Like any kind of growth, it’s usually a gradual process, but practicing with this higher degree of precision ensures that you’re growing myelin in the right places.
Flow
What does the research on happiness by a Hungarian psychologist have to do with practicing music? In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi outlines a theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow — a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation.
You’ve probably experienced a flow state yourself before, through any number of activities like running, writing, reading, or indeed music. Although you may not have realized at the time, you may have achieved flow when your ability matched perfectly with the particular activity at hand.
The diagram below explains this concept well. If a task is too challenging, the result is frustration, while if it’s not challenging enough, the result is boredom. The channel in the middle represents the point where the challenge and your ability meet.
During those moments when we are able to work within this flow channel, we actually have less brain activity because of our high degree of focus. There’s a feeling of the task flowing from our bodies and mind effortlessly — hence the descriptive term flow.
The interesting thing about this model is that the flow channel is different for everyone. We each have our own unique balance which changes according to the activity at hand and also over time as we improve and need to challenge ourselves further to reach that flow state.
Deliberate Practice
What if we were able to use our understanding of neurological and psychological processes like myelination and flow, to develop new tools that optimize the way we practice?
Technology plays an increasing role in how we can learn and develop new skills. Melodics is an application designed to help new musicians learn to play MIDI instruments with confidence, and uses the ‘Deliberate Practice’ method of learning we mentioned before. Drawing heavily from the findings of human performance psychologist Anders Ericsson, this method involves slowing things down, zooming-in with focus and purposefully building up a desired result step by step. Interestingly, although these ideas are often used in sports and athletic training, they work equally well for building muscle memory and developing musical skills.
Deliberate practice is implemented into a typical Melodics lesson by dividing it into the following steps:
1: Orientation
It’s important to get familiar with the music you’ll be practicing or performing. In this step, students listen to the piece of music they will work on as a whole and orientate themselves to the finger placements.
2: Chunking
Most people only think of goals in terms of the big vision. While you certainly need this big vision to stay inspired, it can be more beneficial and motivational to have multiple extremely short term goals. For this reason, Melodics uses a process called “chunking” where a song is divided into small steps or components which can be practiced and memorized separately. These steps can then be linked together in increasingly larger groupings.
3: Focus
Melodics’ Practice Mode encourages a learner to zoom in with focus and play with time, by first slowing the action down and then speeding it up. Slowing down helps you to focus more on errors you make, creating a higher degree of precision. Working this way helps mitigate the risk of creating unhelpful neural pathways in the myelination process while bolstering the useful connections required to build long term muscle memory.
4: Evaluation
In this step, the student picks a part of the song they want to master. After an initial attempt, they evaluate the gap between their target and their ability before trying the section again. Detecting mistakes is essential for making progress. This error-focused element of deep practice makes it a struggle, a process of ‘brain stretching’ which although likely to be slightly frustrating, ultimately leads to growth.
5: Repetition
Repetition is the crucial part of practice that is often neglected or forgotten. It is essential to practice everyday. Even a short burst of deliberate and focused daily practice will lead to better results than large infrequent practice sessions that don’t have a structure and focus.
Ableton Melodics Promo Code
When learning any new skill, maintaining the motivation to persevere and practice regularly is extremely challenging. Whether using an application like Melodics or simply working on your own, following the principles of deliberate practice can help make this process more enjoyable, relevant and effective. In time, with continued effort, what may have seemed insurmountable on your first attempt will eventually become habitual.
Melodics Ableton Push
Original Text: Rodi Kirk | Director of Product & Education at Melodics
Melodics are currently offering readers of this article two free courses containing daily warm up and practise exercises. To find out more, follow the link to their web page below:
Ableton Melodic Steps
Please note – new users are required to sign up and download the free Melodics app in order to redeem this offer.
Ableton Melodics
A version of this article appeared on melodics.com