Off the Grid: Mad Zach Makes Deep House with Push and Live

Deep House is all about the groove. As cliché as that might sound, it’s true - and pretty easy to demonstrate when we look at quantization. Take a genre like electro - have a quick listen to the quantized, stiff timing of Kraftwerk’s classic “Numbers”:

Now, compare that to the loose timing and funky, swinging percussion on the recently-reissued deep house classic “Midtown 120 Blues”, from DJ Sprinkles:

Ableton Push and Live have a few tools for setting up a groove like this - in a new tutorial video prepared with Beatport and Create Digital Music, musician Mad Zach runs through a few options. Watch below and learn how to extract a groove from an audio clip, apply a groove to a MIDI clip, and then go off the grid to put your own loose timing on individual notes:

Learn more about deep house and groove from Mad Zach at Create Digital Music.

Watch a live, one-take beatmaking performance on Push from Keychee.