ONE 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.

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

Here we have a nice jazz snare sample, which uses brushes to create a nice groove. I like this and want the rest of the track to have this feel.

If you double click on the sample, you get the sample analysis window at the bottom. You can see that some of the hits aren’t exactly on the grid lines. This is the “groove” we are trying to capture. Likewise, the offbeats are accented, so extracting the groove will capture that too.

Right click on the sample and look down to the extract grooves menu option. Click on it and the process will start.

Depending on the length of the sample, this could take some time. Generally you only need to have a few bars analysed unless there is a major evolving groove. Once this is done, nothing will look like it has changed, don’t worry, you will have a new option for other sounds now.

In this case, I decided to mix genres and grab a reggae guitar sound from a sample pack. This has a similar feeling groove but I want to tighten it up further. If you double click on the new track (or the one you want to apply the groove to) you will get the sample viewer.

In the control section, you have a bunch of different options to play about with. These include transposing and performance options. We are looking for the grooves menu. Open it and the name of the Jazz sample should be there. If you forgot to extract the groove in the previous steps, it won’t appear. This menu will include all of the grooves you have extracted in that project, as well as any stock grooves you might have applied from the Ableton library.

Once you select the groove, you will see the transient markers apply in the sample window (the little orange tabs over each peak) these will have adjusted to match the timing of the jazz groove. You can then manually tweak them if you desire. Once happy, click Commit.

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.