Bitwig Note Grid - Easy Chord Progressions with Pedal Tones

Tutorial | Dec 31, 2024

In this video, I demonstrate a technique for creating melodies and chord progressions using a note grid and virtual instruments, allowing for the layering of sounds with minimal input by playing single notes and adding static pedal tones. This approach enables improvisation with one note to generate complex harmonic textures, which can later be refined or altered. The method is versatile, suitable for various music styles, and emphasizes creativity and experimentation to inspire new musical ideas.

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Summary #

Maybe you don't watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

In this video, I wanted to share a technique I use to create melodies and chord progressions when I'm feeling stuck or out of ideas. Sometimes, experimenting with a combination of sounds and playing multiple sounds simultaneously can be more inspiring than working with a single track. For this session, I decided to use a polymer synthesizer set at 120 BPM, although the tempo isn't crucial for this exercise. I'm playing in A minor, which simplifies things since it only involves the white notes on the keyboard.

I began by creating a note grid. This serves as a foundation for my experimentation, where I input all the notes I'm playing on the keyboard. Initially, I started by duplicating the notes and transposing them an octave lower, effectively adding a bass note to my melody. I further enriched the sound by introducing the fifth interval, transposing it up by seven semitones. The perfect fifth is a versatile interval that works well with both minor and major scales. For variety, I also experimented with a fourth interval, although it sounded a bit dense at that moment.

Additionally, I played around with a pedal tone—a static note that remains constant throughout the chord progression. This pedal tone can sometimes create dissonance or become the third, seventh, fifth, or unison note in a chord, depending on the situation. It adds an intriguing layer to the composition and can result in unique harmonies as you play around with key combinations.

To enhance the depth, I doubled the fifth an octave higher, which contributed to a cinematic or EDM vibe reminiscent of artists like Deadmau5. With these elements, I crafted a dynamic pad sound that acts as a backdrop. My method involves pressing just one note, yet achieving an intricate soundscape by layering and arranging multiple notes and intervals.

Having established this foundational layer, I moved on to create a bass track using another polymer synthesizer. By utilizing a note receiver, I linked it to the chord track so the bass followed the chord progression automatically. I personalized the bass with an arpeggiator, step modulator, and effects like unison and stereo enhancements, all while maintaining a monophonic base.

Next, I added an arpeggiated lead layer. Once again, I employed the note receiver and blended effects such as reverb and delay to enlarge the sound. Adding rhythmic and percussive elements like a kick and hi-hat through the clip launcher helped shape the groove. I adjusted these elements to complement the evolving chord and melody structure.

Finally, I wrapped everything up by grouping the drum elements and applying effects such as compression and sidechain to integrate the components more cohesively. Throughout, I experimented with various settings to make subtle tweaks and changes to the overall arrangement.

This method highlights the power of starting with simple inputs—just one keypress leads to complex, layered outputs, helping to bring musical ideas to life efficiently. By incorporating this technique, you can freely explore and craft rich, multifaceted compositions without being bogged down by technical constraints. I hope this approach inspires you to get creative with your musical productions. Thanks for watching, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

Transcription #

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00:00] Yo folks, welcome back to the last tutorial of 2024.
[00:00:04] So sometimes you want to create a track
[00:00:07] and you want to create a melody or chord progression
[00:00:11] but you run out of ideas, right?
[00:00:13] So you play around with certain sounds
[00:00:16] and combinations in here and there.
[00:00:18] And I found that sometimes more inspiring
[00:00:21] to have actually multiple sounds playing at the same time.
[00:00:25] So I'm going here for a polymer
[00:00:27] and I'm going for let's say 120 BPM for now.
[00:00:30] It's actually not important.
[00:00:33] And I'm using here a virtual keyboard.
[00:00:35] So we can see what I'm doing on the keyboard actually.
[00:00:39] So I'm pressing here some notes.
[00:00:42] (upbeat music)
[00:00:45] Right, so that's what I'm pressing on the keyboard.
[00:00:48] And we are playing now in A minor.
[00:00:50] So these are all the white notes on the keyboard.
[00:00:53] So pretty simple.
[00:00:56] So it's kind of nice to have your sound
[00:00:59] that inspires you in some way.
[00:01:04] So now you try to come up with some kind of melody
[00:01:15] but I found it more interesting to actually play with chords.
[00:01:19] So what I'm doing now here is I create a note grid
[00:01:24] and I really do this sometimes or most of the times
[00:01:27] because it's just pure simple.
[00:01:29] So here I'm just passing through all the notes
[00:01:32] I'm playing on the keyboard, right, note in, note out.
[00:01:35] That's okay.
[00:01:36] But then we just duplicate this here
[00:01:37] with just control and drag.
[00:01:39] And then I'm playing let's say one octave lower.
[00:01:46] So we play two notes now.
[00:01:49] This note and this note.
[00:01:53] (upbeat music)
[00:01:55] Very simple.
[00:02:01] So we just add an additional bass note.
[00:02:05] On top of that, we play the fifth of it with the transpose.
[00:02:11] Let's go seven here.
[00:02:17] (upbeat music)
[00:02:20] (upbeat music)
[00:02:22] And this kind of works because the fifth
[00:02:36] or the perfect fifth is always seven semitones higher.
[00:02:40] And it doesn't give you any sense of the scale at all
[00:02:43] because it's perfect or it's a perfect interval.
[00:02:48] It's basically present in the minor scale
[00:02:52] and also in the major scale as well.
[00:02:54] Also, of course, if you want to go for the fourth,
[00:02:57] this is plus five.
[00:02:59] This also works.
[00:03:01] (upbeat music)
[00:03:04] That's a bit too dense here at the moment.
[00:03:09] But this also works.
[00:03:11] And we can also play here instead of transposing something,
[00:03:17] we can play a static note.
[00:03:20] So this note never changes.
[00:03:21] And we type in here a four.
[00:03:24] This is our pedal tone.
[00:03:26] You probably heard of this.
[00:03:28] It's basically a static tone that gives you the sense
[00:03:30] of the scale because it just plays the same note
[00:03:34] throughout all the chord progression.
[00:03:38] (upbeat music)
[00:03:40] This is this note you're on top.
[00:03:41] (upbeat music)
[00:03:43] That's a bit too far away.
[00:03:46] So let's go to A3 here.
[00:03:48] (upbeat music)
[00:03:51] Okay.
[00:03:57] So it gives you a sense of dissonance sometimes
[00:04:00] or you create accidentally some chord progressions
[00:04:03] because sometimes with certain combinations here.
[00:04:06] (upbeat music)
[00:04:08] This pedal tone sometimes is the third in the chord,
[00:04:15] sometimes it's the seventh in the chord.
[00:04:17] Sometimes it's a perfect unison.
[00:04:19] Sometimes it's the fifth.
[00:04:21] So it depends on which note you are pressing.
[00:04:23] This pedal tone takes a certain part
[00:04:25] in this chord progression or in this chord,
[00:04:29] which makes it interesting.
[00:04:30] And you can play around and can find
[00:04:31] so certain combinations that sound good.
[00:04:36] So we have now here a static sound in there.
[00:04:38] So we have now one, two, three notes.
[00:04:44] (upbeat music)
[00:04:46] Maybe, let me think,
[00:04:53] maybe we should also play here this fifth,
[00:04:58] but also an octifier.
[00:05:03] Let me see all this one.
[00:05:04] (upbeat music)
[00:05:13] And this gives you already some kind of cinematic sound
[00:05:16] or let's say EDM, dead mouse kind of EDM style thing,
[00:05:21] chord progression vibe.
[00:05:24] And it also kind of creates chord progressions this way.
[00:05:28] It's most of the times just stacking fifths
[00:05:30] and yeah, sevenths and thirds and so on.
[00:05:33] So nothing fancy, but yeah, it gets creative with it, right?
[00:05:39] But here we just use it to actually use it on the fly kind of.
[00:05:44] So you can improvise on the keyboard.
[00:05:47] You don't need to press five notes at the same time.
[00:05:50] You just press one note
[00:05:51] and you have the static note in the middle, this pedal tone.
[00:05:55] And you can then create dissonance and release
[00:05:58] with certain key combinations.
[00:06:01] So with this here,
[00:06:02] we have already a nice pad sound for the background.
[00:06:05] (upbeat music)
[00:06:08] (upbeat music)
[00:06:11] And all I'm doing is just pressing one note.
[00:06:22] So here this is what I'm pressing on the keyboard.
[00:06:25] (upbeat music)
[00:06:27] Right, so you can play around with this
[00:06:36] and you already get a sense of the chord progressions
[00:06:39] or yeah, it's maybe not the best chord progression,
[00:06:43] but you can record it to another instrument track
[00:06:46] and then refine it or change it
[00:06:49] or make some fancy things on top.
[00:06:52] So what I like to do is to actually stay in this mode
[00:06:58] for a while so we can create here maybe another polymer
[00:07:05] and say this is the bass, right?
[00:07:08] So we can receive the notes here from the chord track,
[00:07:13] from the note grid and maybe go in here
[00:07:17] and say, that's the bass note here, right?
[00:07:20] So we switch this to channel two or maybe to channel 16.
[00:07:24] So to make it more special.
[00:07:27] So this is the bass note here.
[00:07:28] This is the lowest note all the time.
[00:07:32] So on the second one, we just use a channel filter
[00:07:36] and say we only want to receive your channel 16.
[00:07:39] Right, so we get here the,
[00:07:43] maybe make this a bit quieter.
[00:07:45] The bass here, we can add an arp.
[00:07:50] Make this monophonic because it's a bass sound.
[00:07:58] (upbeat music)
[00:08:01] Maybe make this five steps long, something like this,
[00:08:10] or maybe three steps and the last one here
[00:08:13] gets one octifier, right?
[00:08:14] Sounds like this.
[00:08:15] (upbeat music)
[00:08:18] Can also say we want to use unison here,
[00:08:24] which makes it stereo.
[00:08:25] (upbeat music)
[00:08:29] But then we have, you know, stereo bass.
[00:08:31] It's not so good.
[00:08:32] So we use this here, remove fundamental.
[00:08:36] So we remove the lowest partial of this wave table.
[00:08:40] (upbeat music)
[00:08:43] So we remove basically the bass
[00:08:46] and then we bring in here the sub oscillator.
[00:08:49] 50% and maybe sign and zero.
[00:08:52] (upbeat music)
[00:08:54] So now we have a monophonic bass again
[00:08:56] or the lowest partial of the saw
[00:08:59] is now monophonic and the rest is kind of spread out
[00:09:02] or stereo, the tuned.
[00:09:04] (upbeat music)
[00:09:07] Nice.
[00:09:10] We can also use now here an FX choose.
[00:09:13] We can put some more fancy things here on top of the base.
[00:09:18] Maybe a reverb or maybe a delay, I don't know.
[00:09:21] (upbeat music)
[00:09:25] (upbeat music)
[00:09:28] Okay, and we also want to have here a step modulator maybe,
[00:09:33] playing kind of a pulley rhythm, five steps,
[00:09:36] opening up here the kind of modulation.
[00:09:40] (upbeat music)
[00:09:43] (upbeat music)
[00:09:46] So we have a nice lead sound with some,
[00:10:03] yeah, with some chord progressions in there
[00:10:05] or the chord progression in there
[00:10:07] and the rest of the song is following along, right?
[00:10:11] So we have a bass now, we can also create here,
[00:10:14] let's say an arp on top of that, polymer.
[00:10:19] We pull down here, the note receiver.
[00:10:26] We play all the notes, arp maybe use here up and in.
[00:10:31] We need also here a bit of unison.
[00:10:38] We move bass, opening up the filter, saw.
[00:10:42] (upbeat music)
[00:10:45] Right, also your step modulator that opens up the filter
[00:10:56] or maybe the modulation amount.
[00:11:02] I like to do this here instead of the filter directly.
[00:11:06] (upbeat music)
[00:11:08] So we have this kind of sound,
[00:11:34] we can remove more of the bass
[00:11:36] and of course we need to add a bit of reverb and delay.
[00:11:41] (upbeat music)
[00:11:46] (upbeat music)
[00:11:49] (upbeat music)
[00:11:52] (upbeat music)
[00:11:54] (upbeat music)
[00:11:57] (upbeat music)
[00:11:59] (upbeat music)
[00:12:02] (upbeat music)
[00:12:05] (upbeat music)
[00:12:07] (upbeat music)
[00:12:10] (upbeat music)
[00:12:12] (upbeat music)
[00:12:15] (upbeat music)
[00:12:42] So now we need to add here maybe a V8 kick.
[00:12:45] Get a sense of the rhythm, of course.
[00:12:49] So here's the clip launcher, bam, bam, bam.
[00:12:55] Want to modify this here with the EQ5,
[00:13:01] push this into a clip bar
[00:13:03] because I like clip bars for some reason.
[00:13:05] (upbeat music)
[00:13:10] (upbeat music)
[00:13:13] (upbeat music)
[00:13:15] (upbeat music)
[00:13:18] (upbeat music)
[00:13:20] (upbeat music)
[00:13:23] Cool, maybe hi-hat V8 hat, kinda like it.
[00:13:28] (upbeat music)
[00:13:30] (upbeat music)
[00:13:33] And we use here some kind of the off beat.
[00:13:39] (upbeat music)
[00:13:42] And expressions, so we open up here the decay.
[00:13:46] (upbeat music)
[00:13:49] (upbeat music)
[00:14:01] (upbeat music)
[00:14:03] (upbeat music)
[00:14:06] (upbeat music)
[00:14:08] (upbeat music)
[00:14:11] (upbeat music)
[00:14:13] (upbeat music)
[00:14:16] (upbeat music)
[00:14:19] (upbeat music)
[00:14:20] So that's that, we can then just record this here, maybe.
[00:14:25] (upbeat music)
[00:14:28] [MUSIC]
[00:14:56] You can see, this is what I'm playing on the keyboard, so very simple, right, so you can find certain combinations that you like.
[00:15:03] [MUSIC]
[00:15:25] Maybe...
[00:15:27] [MUSIC]
[00:15:36] I don't know.
[00:15:37] [MUSIC]
[00:15:41] Oh, it's actually...
[00:15:42] [MUSIC]
[00:16:07] And if you want to record the output of this here, right, you can also do this.
[00:16:12] And what I like to do then is most of the times here to use actually a sample and hold before I record this.
[00:16:25] [MUSIC]
[00:16:28] Bam.
[00:16:29] Also here.
[00:16:31] [MUSIC]
[00:16:34] And then you create a new instrument track called Rack.
[00:16:41] Input is then, of course, here the chords, the note grid output, then you record it.
[00:16:48] [MUSIC]
[00:17:12] Right, then you have here a note clip that you can use, you can change it to make some, you know, small little nuances here and there.
[00:17:19] Maybe change the chord progression at all, add some chords, add some notes, remove notes, whatever.
[00:17:25] But it all starts with your keyboard and you play around on the keyboard and you have full control over the bass
[00:17:32] and, you know, how the chord progression progresses over time and so on.
[00:17:37] So it's pretty neat and I do this all the time, not only for EDM here, also for all the other things.
[00:17:46] [MUSIC]
[00:17:50] Let's go down there.
[00:17:52] [MUSIC]
[00:17:55] Something like this.
[00:17:57] And then maybe we put this here into a group called as drums.
[00:18:03] Maybe also use a clap, clap V9, clap V8, clap.
[00:18:10] Let's start with V8.
[00:18:13] That's okay.
[00:18:15] [MUSIC]
[00:18:19] Maybe make this a bit shorter, how long is an eighth note?
[00:18:26] Quarter note, 25, too short probably.
[00:18:31] Let's use this one here, this is 250 milliseconds, 250 milliseconds.
[00:18:38] Oh, 50 milliseconds.
[00:18:41] [MUSIC]
[00:18:44] And this is G0.
[00:18:48] [MUSIC]
[00:18:50] So we can push here the bass.
[00:18:52] [MUSIC]
[00:19:02] Cool.
[00:19:03] And then we use an FX3 on top and we use a compressor.
[00:19:12] I choose a normal one.
[00:19:15] Attack, release is, what was it again?
[00:19:24] Let's go for 250.
[00:19:28] Yes.
[00:19:30] This is the bass.
[00:19:32] Make up.
[00:19:34] [MUSIC]
[00:19:38] Awesome mid.
[00:19:40] [MUSIC]
[00:19:47] And top.
[00:19:49] [MUSIC]
[00:19:55] Maybe here I use 125.
[00:19:58] [MUSIC]
[00:20:03] And then also use this here, minus five.
[00:20:10] That's okay.
[00:20:12] Clipper.
[00:20:14] [MUSIC]
[00:20:19] We get rid here of this peak.
[00:20:21] [MUSIC]
[00:20:41] Okay.
[00:20:43] [MUSIC]
[00:20:51] And then we probably want to duck here all that stuff with the note side chain.
[00:21:01] So we get here the kick drum in there.
[00:21:12] [MUSIC]
[00:21:22] Also on the bass.
[00:21:26] And on this one here, which is the arp.
[00:21:30] [MUSIC]
[00:21:50] [MUSIC]
[00:22:00] [MUSIC]
[00:22:20] That's a bit too long here.
[00:22:22] [MUSIC]
[00:22:32] [MUSIC]
[00:22:42] [MUSIC]
[00:22:52] [MUSIC]
[00:23:02] [MUSIC]
[00:23:12] [MUSIC]
[00:23:22] [MUSIC]
[00:23:32] [MUSIC]
[00:23:42] [MUSIC]
[00:23:50] Okay.
[00:23:51] Yeah, that's it.
[00:23:52] So I want to show you basically this quick trick with the note grid here.
[00:23:56] I'm not sure if I showed this already.
[00:24:00] But yeah, that's how I do it sometimes.
[00:24:02] And you can, you know, diverge on certain points here and choose different settings to choose different scales.
[00:24:10] And yeah, but the main idea is good in my opinion.
[00:24:16] So you just press one note and you get multiple instruments playing together.
[00:24:21] And you get a sense of how it sounds in the end, right?
[00:24:25] You can manifest your idea.
[00:24:28] That's it for this video.
[00:24:30] Thanks for watching.
[00:24:31] Happy New Year and see you next time.
[00:24:35] Bye.