Ableton Live 11 Beginners Tutorial - QUICK & EASY!

all right so you guys are brand new to ableton live 11 but you don't know where to start don't worry in this video i have got you guys covered what's up guys my name is manny and welcome back to the channel if you are new here consider hitting that subscribe button for more videos just like this alright let's get started every time you open up ableton you'll come to this screen here and this screen is called the session view and if we hit tab we can quickly switch from session view to arrangement view now i will be showing you the basics of session view in this video but let's actually look at a couple of things in ableton's preferences first the very first thing you want to do is make sure that your audio in and out is set correctly so if you have an audio interface head over to the audio tab and make sure you select your interface for both input and the output we can also find the sample rate the buffer size and our test tone in the audio tab as well now ableton's colors sort of remind me of the old windows 98 ui so we can actually change ableton's theme to something a little bit different we can choose from five themes but if you do a quick google search you can find some cool custom themes for live as well and lastly i just want to go over the link tempo and midi tab and we are going to be having a look at this midi section here if you are using a midi keyboard or controller you can select it under the control surface drop down menu we can also set the input and the output for our midi controller too alright so now that's out of the way let's actually start in the top left hand corner of live 11. so this first button link allows you to synchronize stuff like tempo your start stop commands phase across multiple applications running on multiple devices but as a beginner we don't really have to worry about this just yet straight after that we have our tap tempo this will allow us to literally tap a tempo in so if i click a few times it will pick up a specific tempo the faster i click the faster the tempo will become and this is extremely useful if you're listening to a song on youtube or spotify and you want to work out a rough tempo of that specific track you're listening to then we have our global tempo this will just change our project's tempo then we have these nudge down and nudge up these are used in more of a live environment they allow us to temporarily slow down or speed up our project to help with external synchronization so if i put my metronome on and keep the current project at 120 bpm if i press and hold this nudge down we can hear that our metronome slows down and as soon as i release the nudge down it will automatically snap back to the global tempo same thing with nudge up press and hold temporarily increases the tempo and if i release it it comes back to the global tempo then we've got our time signature and our metronome now on the metronome you'll notice a little drop down menu here and if you click on this you will open up some more settings for your metronome such as countdown different sounds for the metronome and also rhythm as well and lastly we have this global quantization and this works alongside launching clips within the session view so it's more of a performance store than anything but we will definitely come back to this one later in the video this little arrow will show and hide your browser and we can quickly find specific sounds by using this search bar too so continuing down we have our collections now as you can see i have my collection sorted for different genres i like to produce but you may not see all these colored tabs here and that is because you need to right click a vst or a sample pack or a sound or anything else that you can think of and add it to a specific collection you can also rename your collection by just right clicking on it click rename and there you go continuing on we have got categories and we have a few different options here this is where you can find all of your sounds effects units templates groups etc etc don't worry about this i'll show you how to use some of these in a sec and then below all of that we have our places section where we have access to all of our downloaded ableton sound packs our user library and our current project files now i have a custom folder here where i keep all my drum samples if you want to add a folder just like this click on add folder and locate the folder you wish to add lastly below that we have these two little wiggly lines and this will open up the groove pool but we don't need to worry about this for now let's navigate to the top we have our follow button this will allow ableton to follow our project when in arrangement view then we have this arrangement position this just shows us where our track is on the timeline in bars beats and 16th notes next to that we've got our play stop record and that's pretty self-explanatory and this section we are going to skip over just for now but they are super powerful tools but we will get back to them following on we have these buttons the only one that you need to know for now is this loop button when activated this will loop a specific part of your track and you can actually use these loop markers to choose the part of your track you want looped we got our draw mode to draw in midi notes or automation and we have our computer midi keyboard button here so if you don't have a midi keyboard yet you can actually use your laptop or computer keyboard to play in chords and melodies and stuff like that we've got key mapping which allows us to map out specific keys on our laptop or pc and lets us control certain parameters within ableton so if i enable key mapping and i click on this play button maybe i want to map this play button to the number five on my keyboard we can see that it's mapped to number five now every time i press number five this will now play the track then we've got midi mapping this allows us to map our controls on our midi keyboards to certain parameters in ableton and it allows us to control stuff like panning volume and other things right from our midi keyboard and this is our cpu load meter it shows us if our cpu is going to explode and in live 11 we have this little new drop down menu where we've got a few more settings and this little empty box is our overload indicator it will turn red when things start getting pear shaped all so that's actually most of the boring things covered so let's actually have a look at what we can actually do in the session view so the session view is a great place to jot down ideas you can actually just use it as a sketch pad and just sketch out different musical ideas here before transferring them over to the arrangement view but the session view is also a very powerful tool for live performances too but let's see what we can do in here the very first thing to know is that we can create either an audio track or a midi track just by right-clicking on this background you can also see that we have a third option here as well to insert a return track but we won't be looking at that in this tutorial so what's the difference between audio and midi tracks well audio tracks allow us to use audio so stuff like drum loops one shots melodic samples etc etc and they also allow us to record in our own vocals or instruments too [Music] now if i double click this audio file we open up a basic sample editor and get a bunch of options we can pitch stretch and mangle our audio file all from this editor here [Music] a midi track allows us to use virtual instruments whether they are native or third-party so if i wanted to load some drums in to midi i would first create a midi track and then locate our virtual instrument and drag and drop it in onto the midi track you can see that a drum rack has now been created at the bottom and it's filled with pre-programmed sound so we can actually record right away if we wanted to however you can load an empty drum rack and drag and drop your own sounds in it by going to instruments drum rack and dragging and dropping it in there are a couple ways of actually programming your drums in and the first way is to double click and create a new empty midi clip then we can manually pencil in our drum beat [Music] the second way is to record in using a midi controller or the keyboard on your laptop or pc and that's exactly what i'm gonna do to do this make sure the track is armed by pressing this button here and because we are working in session view we want to actually record a new midi clip in so make sure that you use this record button instead of the main record button [Music] now you can definitely tell that my drums are not properly in time don't worry we'll fix this soon i only use the kick in the clap and we can see the midi notes here we can also preview the rest of the sounds in the rack if we just click on these notes but if you don't hear anything make sure this little headphone sign is enabled now let's get back to fixing those terrible out of time drums so we can fix the timing by quantizing the midi notes so you can right click a note and then choose quantize to snap it into place or you can select all by command a or control a and quantize everything to your current grid by using command u or control u now your grid determines how much and where the quantization will go so if i right click and go down to fixed grid we can actually choose the grid type we want the smaller the fraction the more flexible our grid is allowing us to make finer adjustments so let's see how sensitive our grid becomes on a 30 second timing compared to a quarter note so we can tell that's a huge difference right now if we right click and go to quantize settings we can actually change our quantize to whatever we want we can also change the beginning and the end of our notes and we can also change the amount of quantization here as well so as i mentioned before i recorded these drums in but we can also pencil or draw more notes in if we wanted to so if i want to program some hats in i will locate them and i'll just double click to create a midi note or i could just hit b and switch to draw mode and sort of just brush them in at the bottom we can adjust our velocity of our midi notes and we can actually click here to bring up a new feature in ableton 11 which is the probability and this is a roll of the dye sort of parameter meaning that if i select this single hat and change the probability to 50 this one specific hat has a 50 chance of playing in my midi clip you can do this for any sounds in any midi clip [Music] you can also resize the midi notes as well but i'm actually going to be showing you that with a different instrument so i don't need to create a midi track as i've got an empty one over here let me just locate a vst i want and record in something [Music] all right that's cool and if i command a or control a if you're on pc you can select dual and press command or control u to quantize or as i previously mentioned we can change the length of our notes beginning and the end we can also shift notes up and down zoom in and out we can jump octaves adjust velocity and so much more and another new feature in ableton live 11 is this scale button so if you don't know much about music theory you can just set your scale and pencil in your melody and using that scale feature will make sure that all of your notes are in the same key as each other and we also got some more controls here like double tempo half tempo we can reverse and invert our midi and we can choose to duplicate and so much more if we select the second tab we can automate specific things but more on automation a little bit later lastly the third tab which is brand new to ableton live 11 that's mpe mpe stands for midi polyphonic expression and think of mpe as midi but on some serious steroids mpe allows us to be more expressive when we play and it can also introduce a sense of realism in our music as well there are some mpe controllers out there such as the roly seaboard for example but unfortunately i don't own one but that doesn't mean that we can't use mpe functionality within ableton live if you have a vst that has mpe support we can actually still use it and if you don't don't worry ableton provides us some mpe ready devices for us to play with so we got three different things happening now drums piano and this bass now in session view we can add to our current idea by loading more sounds in a horizontal way but if we are done with our idea we can actually start a new section of the track by working in a vertical manner so if i wanted to make some sort of intro i would maybe want the piano and the bass so holding option or alt and dragging the midi clips down we can copy and paste them now we have two different parts to our track we can trigger these parts separately by coming over here and pressing the play button [Music] or we can also trigger random midi clips for some inspiration too now remember this global quantization that i was talking about well this sort of comes in handy here it basically adjusts our trigger time so if i leave it on one bar it will move from one section to another section pretty smoothly and it will have that one bar quantization count if i change it to a 16th i can do stuff like this but again even though this is super cool it's more used in live environments now this little section here is our i o and i o stands for inputs and outputs but i'm actually going to skip over this because i don't want to get you guys too confused with how ableton roots its audio we don't need to know this just yet but as you get more and more comfortable with ableton you might want to actually look into this because you can do some crazy things with the i o section now beneath the i o section we have our sense and they allow us to run multiple sounds through the same effect in your mix so this is a great way to save some cpu for example instead of putting reverb on all of my tracks individually i can actually set up a return track and have my reverb on there increasing the send or increase the reverb from the return track [Music] and then lastly we've got some super basic controls down here our display showing our peak level of the channel a channel fader to control the volume our pan pot left and right mute solo and arm and this little meter is our channel cpu load if you don't see this head over to the right and you'll see these little smaller buttons and we can click this c to display it the rest of these hide and show certain things in ableton such as our i o send and returns the mixer track delay and crossfader all right so how do we move our track from the session view to the arrangement view well that's pretty easy there are a couple ways of doing this and the first way is by recording in so head over to your arrangement view by pressing tab press record and once recorded press this little small icon here to activate it within the arrangement view or the second way which is easier in my opinion is to just hover over your first scene click and hold and while clicking and holding press tab and place your music in the arrangement view now once you drop this in click this button to enable it in the arrangement view again once i've moved into the arrangement view i stay here for the remainder of my session and this is where i can start to arrange our song to give it a little bit more of a structure we can also select one of our midi clips and loop it by dragging out the top right hand corner we can duplicate by using command d or control d if you're on pc and we can zoom in and out of our timeline as well we can deactivate a clip by pressing zero on it or we can just move it around anywhere we want now on the right hand side over here is more or less exactly the same thing as session view so we can mute solo arm your tracks and do all of that cool stuff and if we right click on one of these tracks we can actually access a bunch of other settings too one of the new ones in here is this link tracks but as you can see it's grayed out to use this just hold shift click two or more tracks you want to link and then go ahead and link the tracks together and this allows us to edit multiple tracks at the same time so we can cut we can change the fades we can do a whole bunch of cool things here now let's have a look at this toolbar up here this little plus sign is overdub mode this will allow you to add or record more notes in to your current midi clip so i've got a midi clip with some chords i enabled the overdub feature and i hit that record button now you can clearly see that we have added a few new notes in into our midi clip without overwriting our previous idea then we've got automation arm and re-enable automation which just re-enables any automation and is also used to override any current automation as well capture midi is pretty cool if you're not recording and you're just jamming out on the keys and you play something that you really like you can just click this capture button and it will just literally do that it will capture what you've just played so it's almost like ableton is always recording and lastly is the record button for our session view let's talk a little bit about comping now and in my opinion this is probably one of the biggest additions to ableton live 11. comping allows us to loop an area of our track and record different takes over and over again once we have our multiple takes we can then choose the best parts of each recording and add them up into one main take giving us a really solid recording that we are happy with which is pretty cool so let's quickly have a look at automation as well if you press this button it will enable automation mode we can choose to automate specific parameters in ableton to make them change over time so if i load a filter on my base melody i can automate the filter cutoff like this and if we want we can actually automate the resonance too [Music] right so you've got your track ready and you want to export it and upload it to soundcloud or your youtube channel all you have to do is go to file export audio video and this little pop-up will appear we can change a few options here such as the sample rate the file type and bit depth once you have your settings dialed in hit that export button and choose where you want to export your song to now guys ableton live 11 comes with a host of new features and devices we can actually play with i've only just literally scraped the surface of what we can do and also i didn't really want to scare you either especially if you guys are beginners all right so if you guys did love this video make sure you subscribe comment like and thank you guys so much for watching i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: NXISEWOLF

Views: 25,131

Keywords: Ableton Live 11 tutorial, ableton live 11 beginner tutorial, ableton 11 tutorial, ableton tutorial beginner, how to make beats in ableton, ableton beginner tutorial, Ableton tutorial beginner, Ableton live 11, Ableton live 11 review, ableton tutorial, ableton 11, how to use ableton, how to use ableton live 11, easy ableton tutorial, is ableton easy to use, ableton live, ableton, ableton how to make a beat, ableton live 10, ableton live 10 tutorial, ableton live tutorial

Id: sAjpnyfm_Dw

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/havacanapana]

I am having a hair tearing last four days I have ableton live 10 lite on a windows 10 desktop . I also have it on a Surface.

Last week I started having problems with playback to my soundcraft signature 12 mtk mixer. I have reinstalled ableton Re certified ableton . Re certified the computer with ableton. Reinstalled asio audio drivers. Multiple multiple times I have spent hours with Microsoft and reinstalled windows 10 pro, also did a reset on the computer. I have spent hours with Harmon customer service.

I have swapped out the usb cable. Tried numerous usb ports. I have done much the same thing with the Surface.

Both were working with only occasional problems up til last week. No neither machine works

I am afraid it might be a physical malfunction of the mixer. Is there a way to test the usb connection and function on the soundtrack mixer?