Ableton Live 11 #1 Tutorial for beginners

hi my name is thomas foster and this is the first episode of a multi-part tutorial for ableton live 11. this tutorial is right for you if you're an absolute beginner as well as if you have previously worked with another doll and want to get started with live 11 quickly please subscribe to my channel so you don't miss any further episode of ableton live 11. have fun after opening ableton live 11 the first time it should look like this on the left side we have here the browser and from the browser we can take some sounds drums instruments or audio effects and bring them or drop them into our arrangement we can close and open the browser and here we have our main window but there are two views there is the session view and the arrangement view the session view is probably good if you are in a live situation in the studio i work most of the time with the arrangement view so let's change to the arrangement view you also can use the tabulator tabulator key to switch between these two views so let's stay with the arrangement view whatever you select in your arrangement you will see here in this window there is another nice window that you can open with this arrow here that's the information window so if you for example go here on this button you see immediately this is the link on off button if i go here i see this is the draw mode switch but now i show you the most important button in a button live 11 and this is for sure the play button if i click on the play button the first time we immediately see that the locator the cursor is running from left to right in our arrangement and we see here the bars and the beats and we also can hear the beats by clicking on the metronome so one two three four two two three four that's exactly the four beats we have in a bar and why do we have four beats in a bar because we are here at four to four what is good if we want to make pop music hip-hop music electronic music most of the time we have 4-4 here on the left side we see the bpm the beats per minute what means beats per minute at the moment we have 120 beats per minute that means if i would start counting now one two three four five six seven eight and i would do this exactly for one minute after one minute i would have exactly 120 beats and that's why it's 120 beats per minute 128 would be great if we would produce a house track a techno track would be maybe at 140 but i would rather go for a hip-hop track so let's go down to something like 95 bpm let's listen to this i push the space key one two three four that's great that's exactly what we want now let's zoom in a little bit to zoom in because we want to see exactly the first four bars from here to here to zoom in we click in this dark gray area click with the mouse and now we move down all right and now we see exactly four bars maybe we make it a little bit bigger if you want to zoom out just move up with the mouse and you also can go from left to right to scroll on your screen but now we go exactly to see the first four bars from one to four i make now a selection from one to two exactly not something like this or that exactly from one to two and now i click in this blue area by with the right mouse and now we say insert empty midi clip and now we generated first clip over one bar now we want to load a drum sound in your browser on your left side you have some categories like midi effects audio effects we go to the drums and we want to load a drum rack here is the drum rack we could load it directly from here but the faster ways to load it already with the sound and here you have all your sounds and if we scroll down a little bit then you should see the for example the 808 the most famous drum machine created in the 80s but you still hear it in hip-hop tracks and sometimes also in house tracks if you want to hear the sounds of the kits you could activate here this headphone [Music] and then you hear some demo examples how this could sound alright let's take the 808 core kit and move it on top of our midi track after loading you see it here in this area here the 808 core kit this is your drum machine we can listen here to the sounds by clicking on this little arrows here if you activate the recording for this track you should be able to play it on your keyboard if you have a keyboard a midi keyboard connected to your computer but don't worry if you don't have a keyboard i show you how to generate the samples with the mouse i just want to show you in a short way how to record something i can play now the sounds on my keyboard i click on recording and here we go [Music] so and here's my recording and if i double click it i also can see it and edit it here but that's not what we want so i activate this clip and erase it because we go now to the first clip and select it now we see all our drum sounds here and we want to hear this one bar in a loop this here is the loop so let's move it to the left side to bar one and make it shorter exactly one bar you also can do this here with the numbers so at the moment we start at bar one and the length is one bar so it ends at part two to activate the loop you have to click this button here and what does it mean to activate the loop i show you we're just listening to this one bar in a loop there's a faster way to activate this loop for the one bar let's move the loop over here again you select exactly this one bar you can do it by clicking on this clip or exactly by selecting from two to one if you want to select the clip you have to do this here on the upper side of your clip where you get the hand symbol if you want to make a special selection like this you have to do it in the lower part so let's activate exactly this one bar we press command l and now we select exactly this one bar here all right now let's click the space key to start ableton and now we click on the metronome because we don't want to hear it anymore we place the first bass drum here at the line where it says bass drum with a double click exactly at the first beat now we hear it that's the first bass drum and what do we see here this is exactly one bar and in one bar we have four quarters four beats at one two three and four and at the moment we have a grid of 16th that means that every bar has every beat has 4 16 and our bar has 16 16. we can change this by clicking with the right mouse key here where it says quit there were 16 and now we can go for example to for a fourth a quarter and now we see exactly four beats let's start working with this four beats here and we create a snare with a double click on two and four let's listen to this [Music] now we want to change again to 8th you can do this by right clicking here or you can do it with command 1 or command 2 to go up and down with your grid so let's go to 1 8 and let's place another bass drum here at one three [Music] it's not so interesting right so we can move the bass drum now with our arrow keys on our keyboard if i click on the left the bass drum goes to the left side if i click on the right it goes to the right side so now we can listen to the different positions like this [Music] wonderful let's change the grid again to 16th and find a more interesting position [Music] i like this one let's place another bass drum and move it to the right that's good for now let's add a hi-hat i double-click here where it says close hi-hat on the f-sharp and because i want to place a hi-hat on every 16th means four per beat there's a faster way to do it we just create the first hi-hat and the first height is now selected you see the blue line is telling me that this hi-hat is selected and now with command or control d we can add more hi-hats at the right side [Music] and you see how extremely fast you can do it once you select this one hi-hat control or command d and now here we are [Music] let's add another bass drum i select this bass drum i say ctrl d or command d to duplicate it and now with my arrow keys i can find the perfect position now i want to create something special that i would call the machine gun effect i want to add some notes here on the last hi-hat to do this we zoom in so we go to this gray arrow click down with the mouse and now we zoom in to make it big and now we go up with our grid with ctrl 1 to 16th we erase this hi-hat and sorry we go to 64. and now we should see them now we double click here and with duplicate means control d we add some more heights [Music] i like that so at the moment we just generated one bar but maybe we want to have more we want to have four bars to do this you click here at the right upper corner where you get this symbol of the mouse and now we move it to the right to get three more copies let's deactivate the loop that's wonderful i like it next thing we do is let's add a conga to do this we go back to 16th here i'll choose 16 and let's add the low conga here and the mid conga maybe here or here [Music] and a low one here [Music] okay now we want to have some variation at every second bar so we want to make our loop bigger at the moment it's one bar i want to have two bars for this we use the duplicate command i click one time on it now we have two bars and the second bar is a copy of the first so what can we change first i want to erase this bass drum it's enough to have it at the second repeating and i want to erase the repeatings of our hi-hat wonderful maybe these fast hi-hats here are too loud to change the volume of our hi-hats we can use the velocity because normally the velocity is changing the volume sometimes it's also changing the sounds but in this case it's okay to use the velocity so uh how do we change the velocity i give you some a simpler example i make here a new clip and here we add some snares and now i change the velocity by clicking here if you don't see the velocity you can activate it with this button here and now i bring the velocity here down and here up so you see how easy it is to change the velocity here okay that's exactly what we want to do now at our beat we want to take these three hi-hats and bring the velocity down maybe it's like this that's nice okay so maybe you want to send this project to your friend or you want to continue working on this tomorrow so we have to save it that's very easy we go to the file menu let's go to save live set and here on the desktop my first ableton 11 project here we are this creates a folder and in the folder you have your project that you can open with the double click whenever you went once and you can send this to your friend but maybe your friend does not have a button 11. so what do we do we have to create an audio file for this we select exactly the range we want to make to an audio file maybe we make it a little bit longer because of the tail the reverb tail here at the end and now let's select everything beginning at 1 until somewhere here and now we go here to export audio we want to export the master that's right here you can create a normal file that you would need if you want to upload it to spotify or itunes or whatever to send it to your friend maybe mp3 is better because it has not so much megabytes and it sounds also okay just for listening mp3 is fine maybe we make both vaf file and mp3 you also can directly upload it to soundcloud if you have an account there but for now vaf and mp3 is okay and let's say export and let's call this audio that we have not a misunderstanding and now let's take a look to our export here it is here the mp3 that you can listen and send it to your friend or here the raf file that you can upload to spotify or itunes my name is thomas foster and this is my youtube or facebook channel thomas foster music production which is all about music production here you will find tutorials on the most important daws or music programs the most important plugins and i'll show you how to produce the current sound of the charts and the clubs if you have any questions about this video or more generally about music production just write me in the comments i'll answer all your questions of course i'm also happy about the simple feedback or suggestion for another video do not forget to subscribe to my channel to not miss any of my videos at this point i say thank you for being there always stay creative cheers

Channel: Thomas Foster musicproduction

Views: 195,214

Keywords: musicproduction, ableton, tutorial, learning, Drums, Bassdrum, Kick, Snare, Clap, Conga, Midi, Clip, Insert, Duplicate, Kit, Render, mp3, Grid, machine gun, Export

Id: xUDU6NFmXbQ

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020