Ableton Live Lite for Beginners - (How to make music with Ableton Live 10 Lite)

Before I get into this video, I just wanted to take a second to promote the official Inspir Asper Discord server. If this video confuses you in any way and leaves you with any unanswered questions, feel free to click the link in the description below where you can join a welcoming community that can answer any of your questions in real time. Feel free to stop by the Hangout Chat with some really interesting people. I try to get along once a week or so, but there are a lot more people who are more active than that. That being said, let's get into it and learn how to

make

music

in Ableton Live Lite.

The goal of this video is to teach you everything about Ableton Live Lite, what it is, why you should use it, and most importantly, how to use it. some timestamps of some important parts of this video, feel free to click whenever you want, but before we learn how to use Ableton, I think it's important to know what it is. Chances are you got Ableton Lite by purchasing some type of

music

hardware. Say, for example, a keyboard or a launch pad, Ableton now comes in four different versions. We have a nice, light standard introduction. I'm focusing on the latter for this video.

I highly recommend that you take some time to research the differences between the different versions of Ableton. You can find out more by visiting the Ableton website where you can compare the different versions so you can

make

your own call. This video we are focusing on the Ableton light that you see here in front of me on my screen. I have Ableton Live 10 light. If you downloaded it, if you open Ableton Light, you should see a screen like this. I know this interface can be a little intimidating at first if you're new to this, but the goal of this video is to break it down so you can understand it.

I'm more familiar with the feel of the software, so before I start making music, I'd like to take a little time to walk through the interface of this software. I'm not going to go through all the buttons in Ableton, that would take too long. However, for a long time I will point out which ones I think are the most important. Things you should become familiar with. Let's start in this top left corner of Ableton. Generally, this series of buttons in the upper left corner adjust the tempo of your song. In particular, you have this button that initially says 120, this is your BPM or beats per minute in general, the lower this number, the slower your song will be, the higher the number, the faster, if you are ever confused about what makes a button, don't hesitate to click. on it and look in the bottom left corner of Ableton, this is your information, see this little panel here it gives you a brief description of what you're selecting so hopefully you can get more information about it, for example this button that It says 120 this. is the tempo of my project as I read this, it shows me that I can drag it up or down to adjust the value or click and type the number, so if I want this BPM to be, let's say 128, I can left click on this button type. on the numbers 1 to 8 and press enter, my BPM is now a bit faster or alternatively I can left click and drag up or down on this button to adjust the number in a different way, say which I actually have one of my BPMs. to be 97, great, you'll see this is the case for most buttons in Ableton, that you can type them in manually or you can left click and drag up and down to adjust the value.

This is my time signature for those of you. For those who have some knowledge of music theory and want to adjust their time signature, feel free to do so here. If you're not very familiar with music theory, I would recommend leaving it at 4 for this button here with a black and white dot. my default metronome is grayed out, which means my metronome is off. If I were to left click on this, it turns yellow, now it means my metronome is enabled. I can verify this by going here to the top center of Ableton, where there are are these series of three buttons this is to stop playback and four chords if I were to click on this play button and then this stop button every time. finished, my metronome was running at 97 beats per minute and a 4/4 time signature alternately, if you get tired of clicking the play button and the stop button, you can press the space bar to start or pause the reproduction.

If you have a good rhythm, you can set your BPM by playing at a certain rhythm, maybe you are listening. to a song and you feel really inspired by that bpm, you can listen to it and then play and no matter how fast you play, Ableton will automatically calculate your bpm, the more you play, the more accurate your BPM will be as it tries to calculate the rhythm that you are playing by now I want to keep my Ableton session at 128 beats per minute this circle button is your record button if any track is armed for recording which I will get to in a moment you can press this button and then Ableton will start listening to whatever input you have set , at which point you can start recording, maybe say a

live

instrument or potentially your voice.

On the left side of Ableton we have our library, this will give us a number of sounds and instruments that we can drag into Ableton to use to make music here you will find things like but not limited to samples, so these are any of your audio files , instruments, these are virtual sounds that you can drag into a MIDI file that can play audio notes. effects that you can add to any layer or track to manipulate that layer's sounds, third-party plugins, anything you've downloaded in an installation that wasn't initially part of Ableton, and generally anything you need to drag into Ableton, if it's not a file on your computer, it's going to be found here in this library, and finally, for now, the last thing I'm going to cover before we actually learn how to make music is this main window here, this is your session view or your arrangement. view you can toggle between the two by going here in this top right corner and clicking on one of these two buttons, the one that is yellow is the one that is currently selected in this case this is my session view if I were to click this button I'm Now in my arrangement view, alternatively you can press the Tab key on your keyboard to switch between these two session views now, which you see here in front of you, it's perfect for

live

performances, maybe you're having a jam session and you want to play some sounds. maybe you have a loop pedal, here you are making some music, what this allows you to do is loop sound effects or MIDI clips where you can then repeat them continuously and more layers on top, each of these columns represents a layer in

ableton

.

By default, you start with two MIDI tracks and two audio tracks, which doesn't really mean much as you can remove them at any time by clicking on their column header and selecting delete or adding them again by right-clicking here and selecting any of them. insert audio track or insert MIDI track unfortunately in Ableton Lite you are limited to a maximum number of 8 MIDI and audio tracks combined, the different paid versions of Ableton give you more tracks in addition to many other things, but in the light yes, you are limited to a total of 8 within each column, you will notice that there are a series of boxes.

This is where you can add a MIDI clip below your MIDI tracks. You can do this by double clicking inside one of the boxes or by adding a sound effect below your audio tracks, you can do this by going to your Ableton library, finding a sound effect you like and dragging it to one of these boxes, you can Double-click any MIDI clip to open its piano roll, at which point you can drag it up by hovering over this horizontal bar. Here you can draw notes and then any instruments you've assigned to your MIDI track will play those notes.

If I wanted to draw notes, I can press this pencil button up here in the top right corner and then I left click anywhere on my MIDI clip. If I click this button again, I'll go back to my cursor mode where I can then select certain notes and move them around by left clicking and dragging them or maybe just deleting them. When you press the Delete key, a shortcut for this button is the B button on your keyboard, so here on the left, the vertical part of this piano roll is the piano, these are the pitches of your notes, for example, if will draw on this note.

Right here this is a G and the horizontal component of my piano roll is time, so if I wanted to change the duration of one of my notes, I can hover over the left or right side of my note. Let's click and drag now by default. this will snap to any grid you have set up. I can change the length of this grid by right clicking and selecting fixed grid and then choosing my length, so for now I'm at 1/16 of a bar if I wanted to change that. to say 1/32, now I have a more precise grid, so I can fit this note to one of these lines or I can select it as something longer, maybe say half a measure, so now my next closest fit is complete .

Right here you can copy and paste notes by highlighting them and pressing any of the shortcuts on your computer, which will duplicate the notes that you have selected wherever this vertical line is, you can move this line by left clicking anywhere, so if I wanted to paste my notes say here boom just hit the paste shortcut on my computer and i have copied these notes now this mini clip is done and it has notes and that's cool and everything but if i were to press play nothing happens actually there are two reasons for this. When in session view, MIDI clips do not play automatically.

Ableton doesn't know which of these scenes you are trying to play. Scenes are an instance of a sound that you can play every time you are looping. You can make them play automatically. comes in and theoretically locks a certain grid, so if you're doing a live set, maybe again you're playing, if you have some kind of hardware, maybe a button you can press on a keyboard or a launch pad , you can then cycle through each instance of a scene on each of your MIDI tracks or audio tracks and again, unfortunately, you're limited to a total of eight scenes.

I'll demonstrate more of what I mean in a moment, but let's find out why we can do it. You don't hear any of our sounds. Our notes don't sound. The reason for this is because we haven't assigned it to an instrument. Ableton doesn't know what sound to play for each of these notes. You can fix this problem by logging into your library. under instruments and looking at this catalog of instruments provided in Ableton Lite, these are just a series of folders where you can look and maybe say oh, I want a guitar sound. What you can do next is drag any of these onto your MIDI track.

It's worth noting that you don't actually have to go to these folders; you can use the root file right here as your instrument considers these as different categories of synths and then within those, Ableton has provided a number of different presets using that synth. Browse through these sounds by left clicking on them and navigate using the arrow keys until you find something you like, so I actually like this guitar palm legacy, so I want to make some music with this , so what I can do is leave it. -click and drag this and drop it on top of my MIDI track so that now this MIDI layer is assigned to that instrument.

You can see down here, if I click on my MIDI track, I could see this guitar palm legacy if I did. Adjust these knobs to my liking, they will actually change the sound, but now if I were to press play again in my Ableton session, still nothing and that's because it still doesn't know what scene to play in a way to hear the sounds it has created. in this session view you can go and press the play button next to your MIDI clip, so one thing you noticed is that I actually only drew four notes, but it kept repeating and that's the beauty of session mode is that it just repeat whatever. has placed it above here, if I didn't want it to repeat, I could double click inside my MIDI clip and deselect this loop button, so now if I press play on my MIDI clip, it won't repeat anymore, let's turn it back on Now, one thing to keep in mind when you press play is that you should notice that there is a green bar down here that moves while the sound is playing.

This is the volume indicator for my sound. The left half represents the left side of your sound and the same for the right. The right side represents the right side. Think about having two different headphones and this sound is in stereo. In fact, you can adjust whether the sound goes left or right.rampage. By moving this knob, if you were to press play, left click and drag this knob, you should hear. how the stereo changes if you're not listening with headphones, that may have been hard to hear, but trust me, the sound moved from left to right as I adjusted this knob if I wanted to adjust the overall volume of this track. also known as gain, I can do this by moving this arrow by default, it starts at zero and if I were to move this knob down, I am turning the sound down, these numbers represent the decibels below my original value, let's copy this MIDI clip by left clicking and by selecting copy or using the copy shortcut on your computer and pasting it inside this second MIDI track, let's assign it a different instrument, this sounds good, drag it here and then let's also press play on this MIDI clip.

I don't really hear much change and you know what's happening is both tracks are playing at the same time. You should notice that the triangles to the left of these mini clips are both, which means that every time I press play, both clips are playing. If I look here under my second MIDI clip, near my volume indicator, you should see this number that says minus fifteen point nine compared to my other MIDI clip that says minus one point three three, this is the highest volume it reached the last time he played. This track and this negative fifteen tell me that this mini clip doesn't actually sound very loud, so one thing I can do to hear this change from my second MIDI track is to turn down the volume of the first one or alternatively I can press this button right here.

This s button means I'm soloing this track now. If I were to press play, no matter what I do, this will be the only track I'll use. Listen, I can stop sewing at any time by clicking this blue button again. It's also worth noting that these yellow buttons within this MIDI clip represent whether the track is active or not. Yellow means this track is on and it will play if I turn it off and gray that means this track is off you won't hear any sound, lastly I would like to point out this button under the s, this is my recording arm, this tells Ableton, hey, this track is ready to record, so in order to record any sounds like I mentioned earlier that when I click this record button I need to have a track armed to record;

Otherwise, Ableton won't know which of its layers you're trying to record and tells Ableton, hey, this guitar or hard-picked instrument is ready to receive recording input. Then I would need to configure where I receive my input from, maybe I will receive my MIDI input from my computer keyboard for example, or maybe I don't even care what form of MIDI I am receiving if it receives any MIDI input. whatever, then just record it if you were to go here in the top right corner of Ableton and click this keyboard button. This allows me to use my computer keyboard as a keyboard in the musical sense, so now I can play it like a piano.

You should notice that after putting together a track to record, these buttons that used to be square are now circles, this means that if I click this button, this particular scene is where I will record my MIDI input and turn it into my MIDI clip, like this that now if I solo this layer and play my MIDI clip I should hear my recorded input, at which point you can adjust the MIDI notes to your liking, maybe you want them to be more precise, you can highlight your notes, right click and select quantize this. will snap them to the nearest grid.

You can change the size of the grid to fit you by going to the quantize settings, say quantize to this current grid or something of my choosing. You don't have to do this, just point out that it is An option in Ableton Live sessions is that you can only play a scene from a particular layer, so in this case, on the compact guitar layer in Maya, I have the MIDI clip which I copied initially and then I also have my entry recorded. play this MIDI clip and then switch to the second one, so what you'll notice is that the guitar I chose with my heart changed from this initial MIDI clip, which I know is hard to hear since this other one is a bit overwhelming, I changed here to my other MIDI clip. the one I had recorded and you should have noticed that it actually fits the proper grid for the tempo of my song, it wasn't immediately the second I pressed play, the number on the left represents how many times your MIDI clip has been looped. has been activated, the pie chart represents how much time this MIDI clip has left until it ends, and the number to the right shows how long this MIDI clip lasts.

You can see that based on this recorded layer, it's quite long, it's only been activated once, and it's this long. longer until it ends, while this MIDI clip here was triggered four times since it's only four measures long. You can bring your sounds to life by adding audio effects to any layer in Ableton. You can do this by going to your library and accessing the audio effects for these. What are all the audio effects that are available in Ableton Lite? The best way to learn what they do honestly is to just add them to a layer and just play with them and listen to how they affect your sound, for example if you wanted a reverb. on this guitar I can left click and drag the reverb and drag it to my MIDI track, let's hear how this reverb sounds just on this guitar layer in any audio effect, you can adjust the settings to your liking by adjusting these knobs, let's say for example , I.

I have an EQ 3. I can also drag this here on my MIDI track. It's worth noting that audio effects are processed from left to right, so in this case this reverb will affect my sound. In this case it makes it a little humid. It sounds like we're in a cave and then my EQ is going to affect my sound, which I'll go into in just a second, whereas if I move this all the way to the left, as you can see here now, my EQ takes over. manipulates the sound and then the reverb is applied to the rest and the equalizer manipulates the frequencies of your sound, so if I wanted to cut the low ends, say for example I don't want really low frequencies, I can do that by manipulating these knobs.

I think teaching you how to use each of these audio effects is a little outside the scope of this video. I don't know if I have time for that, but tweak your sounds until you get something you like if you want. to add, say, maybe a drum loop for example, you can add a MIDI track, you can go to your library under the drums and select the drum rack, add it to your MIDI track if you look down here in the part bottom left, this creates a grid where each of these small sections of the grid you can assign a sample and a sound effect.

If I were to expand this drum hits section of my drum library, I can look at different sound effects, maybe let's say, for example, a kick drum sound effect, find something I like and any sound. I like to be able to left click and drag to this grid, maybe I want to find a box, so now I can make a MIDI clip like I normally do and I can turn on these sound effects on my piano roll so I can draw a pattern . of my kicks, let's sell this layer of drums so I can hear what I'm working with.

I can change the length of my MIDI clip by going here under this loop button that we modified earlier. I can change the duration. This is in bars, so maybe. I want it to be four times as long, just kidding, we're going to set it to be too long, so now let's stop just that and see how my drums compare to the rest of my song. Now I drew these notes anyway. I really take this very seriously, so maybe let's make this sound a little better, so I think you can start to get an idea of ​​how you can turn this into making music from now on.

It's as easy as adding the different layers that If you want maybe a base layer, maybe some chords add different instruments like a piano, some vocals for each scene you make, then you can activate different clips or sound effects to change your sound, so I think that covers at least the session view. The basics, you get the point, let's move on to what I tend to use Ableton more so for the arrangement view. Remember that you can toggle the arrangement view by pressing the Tab key on your keyboard. Arrangement view is now used to layout your songs.

This tends to be more usable from a production standpoint, if you really want to create a full 3/4 minute long song, whatever it is, you can layer the layers horizontally, you can arrange them and then stack them on top of each other. the other vertically if you choose as an example, let's add a MIDI track. I can draw a MIDI clip on my MIDI track for as long as I want, let's say I want it to be four measures long, at which point I can right click and select insert MIDI clips since we are now familiar with this and what this It means, we can move through this a little faster, let's add an instrument to our sound, let's say I wanted a pad, for example, I found this noise muted orchestral pad under the analog pad boom I don't know, that's just something I want do.

I can draw on my MIDI clip like I always did, let's say maybe I wanted to make a chord for my pad. I can just draw on my notes like what I had done before, one thing you'll notice when you press play, is that in fact my session layers are still going on at the same time as my arrangement view, this can make for some really musical combinations. interesting. Let's say you have an established arrangement that you already know you like, but maybe it's missing a layer, a little synth that you don't have right, you can play your arrangement view and then, on top of that, play around with your live session, for example.

Now I'm just going to put my solo on. pad, you may have noticed that I drew a scale here on the left, this doesn't appear just by clicking some button. I drew these notes manually and moved them here, this is just a little trick I like to do to keep the rhythm. the same scale, since I know some of you might ask about that, so for example, say if I wanted to make a pad layer, what I did here was draw on my MIDI clip like I had done before I drew my notes and I assigned an instrument that I liked, in this case I chose a preset called Sadness Pad under the analog pads.

What you can then do in an arrangement view instead of the session view is actually stack these layers together, so if I were to add another MIDI track, then we can say I don't know how to copy this MIDI clip and maybe I'm looking for have some type of base layer. One potential thing you could choose is to remove all notes except the bottom notes, their roots. your chord, then maybe you can move on to listen to a different instrument that you like and you can continue stacking layers as much as you want again, just keep in mind that you have that eight track limit, at this point you can choose to stack your layers maybe you want to duplicate some layers, for example this chord layer, you can move your MIDI clips to trigger at different times, maybe you can shorten the duration of MIDI clips, you can also draw on more than one MIDI clip on a particular MIDI track and You can then lay out your song horizontally like this and this is, in theory, how you would create a full track.

If you're happy with what you have, you can upload to the audio export file. and this will allow you to manage the settings for exporting your final track. This will play what's in your Ableton session and turn it into an actual audio file that you can then send out and put out into the world. Do whatever you want with it. settings that you might be interested in or the length of your tract, for example, in this case, this is only going to represent 8 bars, so the entire length of this MIDI track, if I want to say, maybe spans the second MIDI track that I would have. to raise this to 16 which ends here you have things like your sample rate honestly if you don't know much about it just leave the default settings might also be best but at that point you can click this export button and it will export your song and that should do it, that's it, it's just the basics of how to make music and Ableton

lite

or at least how to navigate the interface a little better, hopefully that taught you something.

Got some of this again, if you want you can join my Discord server by clicking the link in the description below where you can ask questions if you have any. There is an active community there. I'd love to answer your questions there. I'm very knowledgeable, I try to do everything I can to be able to interact with you personally one on one and overall it was a lot of fun. I appreciate you watching, I hope you learned a lot. See you at the next one.