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

before we get into this video I just wanted to take a quick 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 live time feel free to swing by hangout chat with some really cool people I try and get on maybe once a week or so but there are plenty of 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 all about Ableton Live lite what is it why you should use it and most importantly how to use it I've made some timestamps of some important parts in this video feel free to click around at your leisure but before we learn how to use Ableton I think it's important to learn what it is odds are you probably got ahold of Ableton Lite by purchasing some sort of music hardware say for example a keyboard or a launch pad now Ableton comes in four different versions we have sweet standard intro and light I'm focusing on the latter for this video I would highly recommend you take some time on your own to research the differences between the different versions of Ableton you can learn more by going to Ableton's website where you can compare the different versions so you can make your own call this video we're focusing on Ableton light you see here before me on my screen I have Ableton Live 10 light downloaded if you open up Ableton light you should see a screen that looks like this now I know this interface can be a little bit intimidating at first if you're new to this but the goal of this video is to break it down so you get more acquainted with the feel of the software so before we get into making any music I would just like to take a little bit of time walking through the interface of this software I'm not gonna go through every button in Ableton that would just take too much time however I am going to point out what I think are the more important ones things that you should get familiar with let's start in this top left corner of Ableton in general these series of buttons in the top left corner adjusts the tempo of your song notably you have this button that initially says 120 this is your BPM or beats per minute in general the lower this number is the slower your song is the higher the number the faster if you're ever confused by what a button does feel free to click on it and look in the bottom left corner of Ableton this is your info view this little panel right here gives you a short description on what it is you're selecting so hopefully you can learn more about it for example this button that says 120 this is my project tempo as I read into this it teaches me that I can drag it up or down to adjust the value or click and type in the number so if I wanted this BPM to be let's say 128 I can left click on this button type in the numbers 1 to 8 and hit enter my BPM is now just a little bit faster or alternatively I can left-click and drag either up or down on this button to adjust the number in a different way let's say I actually one of my BPM to be 97 ok great you'll find this is the case for most buttons in Ableton that you can either 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 out there who have some music theory knowledge and want to adjust your time signature feel free to do so here if you're not too familiar with music theory I would recommend leaving it at 4 for this button right here with a white and black dot is my metronome by default it's grayed out so that means my metronome is turned off if I were to left-click on this it turns yellow it now means my metronome is enabled I can verify this by going over here to the top middle of Ableton where there are these series of three buttons this is for play stop and four chord if I were to click this play button and then this stop button whenever I'm done sure enough my metronome was ticking along at 97 beats per minute and and a time signature of 4/4 alternatively if you get tired of clicking the play button and stop button you can press the spacebar to either toggle playing on or pausing if you have good rhythm you can set your BPM by tapping along to a certain pace maybe you're listening to a song and you feel really inspired by that bpm you can listen to it and then tap along and however fast you tap Ableton will automatically calculate your bpm the more taps you give it the more accurate your BPM will be as it tries to calculate the rate you're tapping for now I want to keep my Ableton session at 128 beats per minute this circular button is your recording button if any tracks are armed for recording which I'll get into in a little bit you can press this button and then Ableton will begin listening to any input that you have set up at which point you can begin recording maybe say a live instrument or potentially your voice on the left side of Ableton we have our library this will provide us with a series of sounds and instruments that we can drag into Ableton to use to make music in here you'll find things such as but not necessarily limited to samples so these are any of your audio files instruments these are virtual sounds you can drag onto a MIDI file that can play notes audio effects which you can add on to any layer or track to manipulate the sounds of that layer third-party plug-ins anything you've downloaded at an installed that wasn't initially part of Ableton and more generally anything that you need to drag into Ableton if it's not a file from your computer will be found here in this library and finally for now the last thing I'll cover before we actually learn how to make music is this main window right here this is either your session view or your arrangement view you can toggle between the two by going up here in this top right corner and clicking one of these two buttons whichever one is yellow is the one that's currently selected in this case this is my session view if I were to click this button I am now in my arrangement view alternatively you can press the tab key on your keyboard to swap between these two now session view which you see right here before you is perfect for live performances maybe you're having a jam session and you want to loop some sounds maybe you have a loop pedal here's kind of grooving out making some music what this allows you to do is loop sound effects or MIDI clips where you can then continuously repeat them and more layers on top of that each of these columns represents a layer in ableton by default you start off with two MIDI tracks and two audio tracks this doesn't really mean much since you can delete them at any time by clicking their column header and selecting delete or by adding them back by right-clicking over here and selecting either 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 provide you with more tracks in addition to plenty of other things but in light yes you are limited to a total of 8 within each column you'll notice there are a series of boxes this is where you can add in either a MIDI clip underneath your MIDI tracks you can do so by double clicking within one of the boxes or by adding in a sound effect under your audio tracks you can do so by going to your Ableton library finding a sound effect that you like and dragging it on to one of these boxes you can double click on any MIDI clip to open up your piano roll at which point you can drag it upwards by hovering over this horizontal bar within here you can draw in notes and then whatever instrument you assigned to your MIDI track will then play those notes if I wanted to draw in notes I can either press this pencil button up here in the top right corner and then left click anywhere in my MIDI clip if I click this button again I will go back to my cursor mode where I can then select certain notes and either move them around by left clicking and dragging or maybe just by deleting them by pressing the Delete key a shortcut for this button is the B button on your keyboard so over here on the left the vertical part of this piano roll is the piano these are the pitches of your notes so for example if I were to draw in this note right here this is a G and the horizontal component of my piano roll is the time so if I wanted to change the length of one of my notes I can hover over either the left or right side of my note let's click and drag now by default this will snap to whatever grid I have set I can change the length of this grid by either right-clicking and selecting fixed grid and then choosing my length so for right now I am in 1/16 of a bar if I wanted to change that to say 1/32 I now have a more precise and grid so I can snap this note to one of these lines or I can select it as something longer maybe a say a half a bar and so now my next closest snap is all the way right here you can copy and paste notes by highlighting them and pressing whatever the shortcuts are 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 right here boom just press the paste shortcut on my computer and I have copied these notes now this mini clip is made and it has notes and that's great and all but if I were to hit play nothing happens there's actually two reasons for this one being in session view MIDI clips don't automatically play Ableton doesn't know which of these scenes you're trying to play scenes are an instance of a sound that you can play whenever you're looping you can make it so that these automatically come in and in theory lock to a certain grid so if you're performing a live set maybe again you're jamming out if you have some sort of hardware maybe a button that you can press on a keyboard or a launch pad you can then toggle each instance of a scene under each of your MIDI tracks or audio tracks and again unfortunately in light you are limited to a total of eight scenes I'll demo more of what I mean in a little bit but let's figure out why we can't hear any of our sounds our notes aren't playing 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 by going into your library under instruments and looking through this catalog of provided instruments 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 then do is you can drag any of these onto your MIDI track it's worth noting you don't actually have to go under these folders you can actually use the root file right here as your instrument think of these as different categories of synths and then within them Ableton has provided a series of different presets using that synth you can navigate through these sounds by left clicking on them and navigate using your arrow keys until you find something that you like so I actually kind of like this guitar palm legacy so I want to make some music with this so what I can do is I could left-click and drag this and let go on top of my MIDI track so now this MIDI layer is assigned to that instrument you can see down here in the bottom if I click on my MIDI track I could see this guitar palm legacy if I were to tweak these knobs to my liking they'll actually change the sound but now if I were to hit play in my Ableton session again still nothing and that's because it still doesn't know which scene to play one way to hear sounds that you have made in this session view is you can go over and hit the play button next to your MIDI clip so one thing you noticed is I actually only drew in four notes but it just kept repeating and that's the beauty of the session mode is it just repeats whatever you have laid out on top of here if I didn't want it to loop I could double click within my MIDI clip and deselect this loop button so now if I hit play on my MIDI clip it no longer loops let's turn that back on for now one thing to note when you hit play is you should notice that there's a green bar down here that moves as the sound is playing this is the volume indicator of my sound the left half represents the left side of your sound and same for the right side represents the right think of having two different earphones and this sound is in stereo you can actually adjust whether the sound is going left or riot-- by moving this knob if I were to hit play left click and drag on 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 that the sound was moving panning from the left to the right as I adjusted this knob if I wanted to adjust the overall volume of this track also known as the gain I can do so by moving this arrow by default it starts off at zero and if I were to move this knob downwards I'm lowering the sound these numbers represent the decibels below my original value let's copy this MIDI clip by left-clicking and either selecting copy or using the copy shortcut on your computer and pasting it within this second MIDI track let's assign it a different instrument this sounds good let's drag it onto here and then let's also press play on this MIDI clip I didn't really hear much of a change and you know what's happening is both of these tracks are playing at the same time you should notice that the triangles to the left of these mini clips are both which means whenever I hit play both of these clips are playing if I look down here below my second MIDI clip near my volume indicator I should see this number that says negative fifteen point nine compared to my other MIDI clip that says negative one point three three this is the highest the volume reached the last time you played this track and this negative fifteen tells me that this mini clip actually doesn't get very loud so one thing I can do to hear this change of my second MIDI track is to either lower the volume of my first or alternatively I can press this button right here this s button means I'm soloing this track now if I were to hit play no matter what this will be the only track I will hear 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 it will be playing if I turn it off and it's gray that means this track is off you will not hear any sound lastly I'd like to point out this button below the s this is my recording arm this tells Ableton hey this track is ready for recording so in order to record any sound as I mentioned earlier by clicking this record button I need to have a track armed for recording otherwise Ableton won't know which of your layers it's trying to record and it's telling Ableton hey this hard picked guitar or instrument this is ready to receive recording input I would then need to set up where I receive my input from maybe I'm gonna receive my MIDI input from my computer keyboard for example or maybe I don't even care about what form of MIDI I'm receiving if it receives any MIDI input whatsoever then just record it if I were to go up here on the top right corner of Ableton and click this keyboard button this allows me to use my computer keyboard as a keyboard as in the music sense so I can now play it like a piano you should notice after I armed a track for recording these buttons that used to be square are now circles this means if I click this button this particular scene is where I'll record my MIDI input and I'll make this as my MIDI clip [Music] so now if I solo this layer and if I play back 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 closest grid you can change the size of the grid they snap to you by going to quantize settings say either quantize to this current grid or something of my choosing you don't have to do this just pointing out that it is an option in Ableton Live sessions you can only have one scene playing from a particular layer so in this case in Maya hard-packed guitar layer I have the MIDI clip that I initially copied over and then I also have my recorded input I'm gonna play this MIDI clip and then switch to my second one so what you notice is my heart picked guitar switched from this initial MIDI clip which I know is hard to hear since this other one is kind of overpowering it switched from here to my other MIDI clip the one that I had recorded and you should have noticed that it actually snaps to the proper grid for the tempo of my song it didn't just go immediately the second I hit play the number on the left represents how many times your MIDI clip has been triggered the pie graph represents how much longer this MIDI clip has until it's finished and the number on the right shows how long this MIDI clip is you can see that by this recorded layer it's fairly long it's only been triggered once and it has this much longer until it's over whereas this MIDI clip over here got triggered four times since it's only four bars long you can spice up your sounds by adding audio effects to any layer in Ableton you can do so by going into your library and going under audio effects these are all the audio effects that are available in Ableton lite the best way to learn what these do honestly is just to add them onto a layer and just kind of play around with them and hear how they affect your sound for example if I wanted a reverb on this guitar I can left-click and drag reverb and drag it onto my MIDI track let's hear what this reverb sounds like on only this guitar layer in any audio effect you can adjust the settings to your liking by tweaking these knobs say for example I have an EQ 3 I can drag this also down here onto my MIDI track it's worth noting that audio effects process from left to right so in this case this reverb will affect my sound in this case it makes it makes it a little bit wet kind of sounds like we're in a cave and then my EQ will affect my sound which I'll get into in just a second whereas if I move this all the way over to the left as you can see right here now my EQ takes place it manipulates the sound and then the reverb is applied to the remainder and EQ manipulates the frequencies of your sound so if I wanted to cut off the low ends say for example I don't want any really low frequencies I can do so by manipulating these knobs I think teaching you how to use each of these audio effects is just a little bit out of scope of this video I don't know if I have time for that but tweak around with your sounds until you get something that you like if you wanted to add in say maybe a drum loop for example you can add a MIDI track you can go under your library under drums and select drum rack add that in to your MIDI track if you look down here in the bottom left this creates a grid where each of these little sections of the grid you can assign a sample a sound effect if I were to expand this drum hits section of my drums library I can see different sound effects maybe say for example a kick sound effect find something that I like and whatever sound I like I can left-click and drag into this grid maybe I want to find a snare so now I can make a MIDI clip as I normally do and I can actually trigger these sound effects in my piano roll so I can draw out a pattern of my kicks let's sell this drum layer so I can hear what I'm working with I can change the length of my MIDI clip by going over here underneath this loop button we messed with earlier I can change the length this is in bars so maybe I want it to be four times as long just kidding let's set it to be too long so now let's unsolo that and see how my drums compare with the rest of my song now I kind of drew these notes in willy-nilly I wasn't really taking it super seriously so maybe let's make this sound a little bit nicer [Music] so I think you can start to get a feel for how you can turn this into making music right from now on it's just as easy as adding in the different layers that you want maybe a base layer maybe some chords add in different instruments like a piano some vocals for each scene you make you can then trigger different clips or sound effects to kind of switch up your sound so I think that kind of covers the session view at least the basics you get the point let's actually move on to what I tend to use Ableton more so for the arrangement view remember you can toggle the arrangement view by pressing the tab key on your keyboard now arrangement view is used to layout your songs this tends to be used more so from a production standpoint if you actually want to create a full 3/4 minute long whatever what-have-you song you can lay out your layers horizontally you can arrange them and then stack them on top of each other vertically if you so choose as an example let's add in a MIDI track I can draw in a MIDI clip in my MIDI track for however long I want it to be let's say I want it to be four bars long at which point I can right-click and select insert MIDI clips since we're now acquainted with this and familiar with what this means we can kind of move through this a little bit faster let's add an instrument onto our sound let's say I wanted a pad for example I found this muted one noise orchestral pad under analog pad boom I don't know that's just something that I want to make I can draw in my MIDI clip like I always had let's say maybe I wanted to make a chord for my pad I can just draw on my notes like I had done before [Music] one thing you'll notice when you press play is in fact my session layers are still going on at the same time as my arrangement view this can make for some really interesting musical combinations let's say you have an arrangement laid out that you already know that you like but maybe it's missing one layer one little synth that you don't quite have right you can play your arrangement view and then on top of that mess around with your live session for now I'm just gonna solo my pad you may have noticed I drew in a scale over here on the left this doesn't just show up by clicking some button I manually drew these notes in and move them over here this is just a little trick I like to do for keeping in the same scale just since I know some of you might ask about that so for example say if I wanted to make a layer of pads what I did here is I drew in my MIDI clip like I had done before I drew in my notes and I assigned it an instrument that I liked in this case I chose a preset called sadness pad under analog pads what you can then do an arrangement view as opposed to session view is actually stack these layers together so if I were to add in another MIDI track I can then let's say I don't know copy over this MIDI clip and maybe I'm looking to have some sort of base layer one potential thing you could choose to do is maybe delete all the notes except for the very bottom notes their roots of your chord then maybe you can drag on to hear a different instrument that you like [Music] and you can continue to stack layers as much as you'd like again just keep in mind you do have that eight track limit you [Music] [Music] [Music] at this point you can choose to stack your layers maybe you want to duplicate some layers for example this layer of chords you can move your MIDI clips around so that they trigger at different times maybe you can shorten the length of the MIDI clips you're also allowed to draw in more than one MIDI clip on a particular MIDI track and then you can lay your song out horizontally like this and this is in theory how you would then create a full length track if you're happy with what you have you can go up to file export audio and this will allow you to manage the settings to export your final track this will play what is in your Ableton session and turn it into an actual audio file that you can then send out and put it into the world do whatever you will with it certain settings you may be interested in or how long your tract is for example in this case this is only going to render 8 bars worth so this entire length of this MIDI track if I want it to maybe say encompass the second MIDI track I'd have to turn this up to 16 that ends right here you have things such as your sample rate honestly if you don't know much about it just leave the default settings too might be for the best but at which point you can click this export button and it will export your song and that should do it that's pretty much it that's just the very basics of how to make music and Ableton lite or at the very least how to navigate the interface a little bit better hopefully that taught you something hopefully you've got something from this again if you'd like to you can join my discord server by clicking the link in the description below where you can feel free to ask questions if you have any there's an active community there I would love to answer your questions there super knowledgeable I try and get on as much as I can so I can personally interact with you one-on-one and overall just really good time I appreciate you watching hope you learned a lot I'll see you in the next one

Channel: InspirAspir

Views: 1,262,000

Keywords: Ableton Lite, Ableton Lite tutorial, ableton lite 10, ableton lite vs intro, ableton lite vs standard, ableton live 10, ableton live 10 tutorial, ableton tutorial, ableton live 9 tutorial, how to use ableton live, ableton live for beginners, how to use ableton live lite, music production, music production tutorial, how to make music, launchkey, launchpad

Id: 7QKY3wFEx7g

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2019