When you think Radiohead, you think grooves, right?
Okay, I think no one said that, ever. But sure enough, someone has gone and extracted the weirdo time signatures and rhythms from classic Radiohead tunes and made them a downloadable, free pack of grooves for Ableton Live.
Now, if at this point you’re saying you’ve never used the groove extraction feature in Ableton Live, this could be a great excuse to learn.
Explanation:
for this pack I extracted grooves from every song of every radiohead studio album & consolidated them into a collection of .agr files you can apply to any track in ableton live. to be clear, this pack won’t make you sound like radiohead. it will, however, allow you to humanize, swing, & otherwise alter the timing of your tracks based on the songs of one of the best bands of modern times. what’s more, the various overlapping time signatures of these songs can serve to apply a polyrhythmic feel to your tracks’ rhythms & velocities. if you aren’t using live 9.7.1 or later, these may crash your session.
You could use the same feature, by the way, to tap out or play out a groove on an unrelated instrument, then apply it to your synths. It’s one of the most underused and interesting features of Ableton Live, so I do hope people explore it.
Check out the free download and a quick and easy guide to getting started with this and other grooves in Ableton:
http://patches.zone/radiohead-groove-pack-ableton-live
Side note: my own casual and very much not-a-lawyer perspective on this is that it’s probably not likely even under hugely broadly-written US copyright law that extracting a groove is illegal, partly because what you apply it to is likely to be too different from the source material in other aspects. (Okay, my opinion there isn’t wholly uninformed: standing legal precedent in the US where this is strictest doesn’t cover the groove of a track, since that would change all other material and would make no direct use of the original file once the groove is extracted. An actual intellectual property lawyer is free to disagree however.)
Now, I assume this will put everyone in a great mood, once you change all your house music to Radiohead: