One of my key goals with AAEAA: get better at mixing and layering together multiple guitar tracks in Ableton. Today’s Sunday Guitar Practice post represents my first attempt in Ableton to do just that. I’ll include the mixed down track here as well as a few explanatory screenshots below.

While this track might not sound like much – for me, this was a big win — I hit record on 4 separate tracks, one at a time to create 8-measure loops. Once I’d captured the initial tracks, I trimmed down each layer to just the 8 measures I wanted to keep. You can hear the first loop kick in around the 32-second mark in the above track. I then used Ableton’s session view to turn on each track as a loop, layering in each track one at a time.

Switching to arrangement view shows the full view of when each different loop was playing for the final recorded mixdown that you can hear above.

A few extra details and lessons learned making this track:

• I’ve been wanting to practice more with a metronome, and this was a fantastic chance to do that. Track was recorded at 127bpm using a metronome.
• All tracks were recorded running USB cable directly from my amp to computer.
• The guitar tone was created by using a tone preset (“Year 2290”) from my amp, Fender GTX-100. I used the amp’s “tap” feature to set the delay to exactly 127bpm – this was almost like having a reinforced, extra strong metronome, as the delays from the amp audibly synced up with the repetitive beep of the metronome helping me play on the beat as best I could. If you listen closely to the track, you can certainly hear that my timing isn’t perfect — but from my experience I can tell you: this track was a huge step in the right direction for me… I still need more practice playing with a metronome.