> Step by step

2. Instant music-making with the CM MIDI Construction Kit

1 Let’s write an upbeat 80s pop loop with the C major scale. Load Beat.wav in a 126bpm project, loop it, then create MIDI tracks named Bass and Melody. Load them with Bazille CM and Dune CM, with presets 02 Basses - Ark Sawker Punch and 110: Synth Stabs RH. Put Reverberate CM on the Melody track, set the Bass and Melody track levels to -14dB and -18dB, and put D16 Frontier on the master bus.

2 Now create four-bar MIDI clips on the Bass and Melody tracks, and import MIDI Construction Kit » C » Major Template.mid alongside those clips. Don’t play it, though – it’s for use as a visual guideline only. It features sustained notes on only the notes of the C major scale. We’ve included tons of scales in this format, and we’ll use them throughout our tutorials.

3 How you use these clips as a guideline depends on your DAW software, but here’s a method for Ableton Live: Select all the notes, copy them, then paste them into the Bass MIDI clip starting at bar 5 – this is outside of the clip’s loop points, so we’ll never hear the notes. With the small blue headphones icon ( just upper-left of the piano roll) enabled, click each note from C3-C4 to hear the C major scale.

4 In Ableton Live, you can click the Fold button to hide all notes that don’t have a MIDI note already, so now we’ll see only the notes in C major – perfect! To provide a foolproof backing for our melody, program a bassline using only the root note, C2 – a repeating pattern of one eighth-note then two 16th-notes will work.

5 Repeat steps 3-4 to set up the C major template on the Melody track and draw in your own melody. When you’re done trying it out, program our pattern above – we’ve turned off the Fold function here in case you’re using a different DAW. This melody uses all seven notes of the C major scale, so you can hear the scale’s full range of tonality, and how it sounds against the root note, C, in the bass.