This quick tutorial is intended for beginners and it covers a basic technique to create a Deep House beat in Live.

It explains how to produce a simple chord progression and how to use that chord progression to create the bass-line and the arpeggio.

You can follow either the video tutorial or the written article below. They differ only in the technique used to generate the chord progression. The video tutorial uses the Midi Chord Effect, while the written post goes over the whole chord structure. Your choice.

Video Tutorial

Chords

STEP 1 - We start with the basic D# minor triad (D#, F#, A#). The chords are triggered every 3/16:

It sounds like this:

STEP 2 - Extend this to four bars and add the progression D# – C# – G#:

It sounds like this:

STEP 3 - Extend the Minor triads to Minor 9th chords by adding the 7th and 9th of each chord. Now we start to get that old-school Deep House sound.

It sounds like this:

STEP 4 - Now take the second and third note from each chord and move it in the upper octave. We end up with a voiced Minor 9th chord:

It sounds like this (I’ve also added some Reverb):

Bass

STEP 1 - The bass will follow the same pattern of notes triggered every 3/16:

It sounds like this:

STEP 2 - It will also follow the root note of each chord hit. So extend the clip to 4 bars and add the D# – C# – G# progression:

It sounds like this:

STEP 3 - We’ll play C#1 instead of C#0. This little trick creates a nice contrary motion between the chords and bass-line:

It sounds like this:

STEP 4 – We add some extra notes at the end of the first, second and fourth bar to create a nice transition between the root notes:

It sounds like this:

Arpeggio

Once we’ve established our main chord progression, what follows is a very simple way to create a nice arpeggio using these Minor 9th chord structures and the Arpeggiator Midi Effect in Live. All we need is a nice plucky sound, preferably with a short release as we’ll use a high rate for the arpeggio.

STEP 1 - Create a new clip, four bars long and insert the same chord progression D# – C# – G#. This track will play each chord throughout the whole bar as we’re looking for a continuous arpeggio sound:

It sound like this:

STEP 2 - From the Midi Effects folder in Live, drop the Arpeggiator effect. Now set the Rate to 1/16 and the number of Steps to 1:

It sounds like this:

There you go.

Hope you got something out of this. Let me know if you have any suggestions or requests for future episodes in the comments below. Finally, if you found this post useful, don’t forget to share it!

Check our latest course for Live 9: Deep House Explored