Everything so far has been one hand at a time. Playing with both is mostly a matter of giving one hand something it can do without thinking, so your attention can go to the other. This section builds that up in steps and ends with a 16-bar take you can download as a MIDI file.
Start this section in the interactive courseStart with the left hand doing as little as possible: one root per bar, held. The right hand plays the arpeggios from section 10 above it.
Learn each hand on its own first, then put them together slowly. If it falls apart, the left hand is usually the one to simplify.
The left hand plays in the lowest octave of your keyboard, the right hand above it. The lit keys show both.
Swap the jobs round: the left hand plays a steady rhythm and the right hand holds a chord for the whole bar.
Octave bass from section 9 works well here. Once it runs on its own, the right hand only has to move at the bar line.
Now both hands play rhythms that don’t line up: left-hand roots on the beat, right-hand stabs on the offbeats. The hands take turns, which is easier than it sounds.
An approach note in the left hand on the last step leads into the next chord, as in section 9.
A bassline in the left hand and a lead in the right is the fullest thing one player can do on one keyboard. Keep the bass simple (roots on the beat) and let the right hand improvise.
When the hands clash, drop the left hand to one note per bar and build back up.
With one keyboard and two sounds, a split sends the low keys to one sound (a bass) and the high keys to another (a lead or pad). A layer plays two sounds from the same keys.
In Live, put two instruments in an Instrument Rack and set each chain’s key zone: the bass chain on the bottom octaves, the lead above. Many hardware synths have a split or multi-timbral mode that does the same with two MIDI channels.
Split where your hands naturally meet, often around middle C.
Good ideas tend to turn up when you aren’t recording. Live’s Capture MIDI button, next to the record button, turns what you just played on an armed or monitored MIDI track into a clip, even though nothing was recording.
A practical setup: a drum loop playing, a MIDI track armed with a pad or lead sound, and the key of the track in mind. Jam, and press Capture when something works.
Then tidy it: quantise with an amount below 100% to keep some feel, delete the stray notes, and loop the best two or four bars.
The jam room here works the same way without Live: pick the project’s key, play over the loop, and use the 16-bar take below to save a MIDI file.
Sixteen bars, both hands, over drums and pads. Bass roots on the beat in the left hand, a lead in the right: motifs, answers, gaps, landing on chord notes at the changes.
When it finishes, download the take as a MIDI file and drag it into Live. Put the low notes on a bass and the high notes on a lead, or the whole thing on one instrument, and edit from there.
Do it in A minor first, then take it to a key picked at random.