My first track is a reimagining of Pachamama by Luude. The idea behind this was to get the track’s stems so I could trigger each part of the song when I wanted, and also to get a version without any drums. This turned out to be more difficult and time consuming than I thought it would be.
I used two different ai stem splitters to get a good version, gaudiolab and fadr. I tried lots of different free ones to finally find two that nearly worked. If I was to do something like this again, I would pay for an AI stem splitter, preferrably LALAL AI. Usually when I tried the stem splitter they didn’t work, either the page didn’t respond or the splitting was done terribly. However, with the two that did work, there was still an issue. All the separate tracks were different lengths, which meant I had to splice up the track and create my own parts. The final track is a mix of the two different stems.
This is how the stems came like.
This is how they ended up after I spliced them. This arrangement is the way I wanted the track to sound. The way I did this is to make all the separate parts different clips. I wanted to trigger the bass (the light blue track) with the push as well, however the bass comes in halfway through the bar and only lasts half a bar. Session view works by playing the clip at the start of the bar, therefore it never came on in time and wouldn’t work.
This is how the track ended up looking in Ableton’s session view. I only used the “instrumental” track and the vocals as there are only bass, vocals, drums, and a synth in this track. I am playing the drums, and none of the bass tracks matched up with the rest. In the chorus part of the song, both the different bass tracks doubled up what they were playing, which sounded really bad and meant they were unusable. How this worked is there were three parts of the song I chose to use, an intro, the main part, and a breakdown, this is shown in the three instrumental clips. I only used the first three vocal clips, the second and third ones are the same vocal line, however the third one matches with the second instrumental and matches up timing-wise. I used the second vocal line as a build-up, and only vocals and drums were present.
This was my first time practicing this track, and the first time I have used a push while playing drums. I have a lot to work on, the intro drums could do with some work, and I need to be able to transition between the build up and the chorus.
This is my second attempt at playing this track with a push, this time I played the full track with only a few mistakes. The transitions need to get smoother, specifically between the intro and build up and between the main part and the breakdown. My drumming in the main part needs improvement as I struggled to keep up and some of the fills sounded quite out of time. The intro goes on for too long, it would be good to shorten it. The track is a little bit too long in general and it drags in the first main part of the song. The stops in the main part of the song are intentional, it would make sense if you could hear the song as well. The instrumental and drums cut out for 2 bars, and then I trigger the instrumental to come back in using the push controller and the drums come back in with a fill. There is still work to be done but it is coming along quite nicely.