How to Use Ableton Live 11: Comprehensive Beginner Tutorial

hey it's luke from edm pro today we're going to be looking at ableton basics so if you've just got a copy of ableton and you still got no idea what anything does or maybe you just want a refresher of those basic fundamentals then this is the video for you by the end of this video you'll know how to navigate and understand where everything is in ableton and you'll also have the tools to start creating your own loops as well if you're looking for more of a guided step-by-step approach to learning music production then check out our edm foundations course that is the one for you all right so this is what ableton will look like when you pull it up something similar to this at least i've changed a few colors in mind bear in mind but the first things first we should navigate over the top here and click on this little live button go to your preferences and just make sure that your audio is routed so you can actually hear what is happening so let's say you've got a scarlet 2i2 just make sure you want to select that in your audio output and also your audio input i'm just going to keep mine as they are next thing to note is that at the top here where it says file this is a really important one as well so we can start a new live set we can open live sets we can save and we can export so these are really important functions that you will use a lot the rest of these you'll sort of become familiar with these functions and the shortcuts of using them the only thing to take in mind in here is this help function so if you hear me say anything throughout the video that you don't quite understand what it does then feel free to just search it up here and see where it is so let's say i say duplicate you can search that up here and it'll show you exactly where it is and the shortcut to it as well great so what are we looking at well this is called the session view in ableton and you can see that there's these vertical columns in the middle i can click on these and they highlight this kind of represents what you'd expect from seeing like an analog mixing desk or a hardware console you've got these vertical channel strips this is sort of like a mixer view in ableton but also it's its own unique feature we're not going to be diving in too much of what this is right now but just take into account that it's here and that all the tracks are represented vertically and you can see over here these little vertical lines are highlighted representing that we are in session view but if i go over to here these horizontal lines then now we're in the arrangement view and we're going to be diving in and starting our producing journey in this arrangement view makes it a bit more visual first thing i want to take your attention to is this little box down the bottom left here it's called the info view if you can't see it just hit the question mark key that's the hot key but you can also just hit this little arrow here and the info view tells you information on anything that you hover your mouse over which is really nice so if i don't know what something is let's say over here on the track it says the track name and it tells you a bit about that uh over here is the play button and it tells you some shortcuts and what you can do to play in different ways so this will be your best friend when you're learning the door it makes the process a whole bunch easier so you can see this little thing is highlighted and wherever i click this thing highlights on the grid line that is closest to where i've clicked so this thing is called the insert marker we can also click and drag and that will create like a highlighted section and i can highlight beyond multiple tracks here and i can click on multiple tracks and you can see as well when i click on a track it highlights the whole section so we have four tracks here right now and each track behaves separately to each other and this is how music is made so we start to build up elements on each track let's say i want to put a big kick drum here and a bass line here and a synth here we start to layer these elements up and build a loop which we then turn into a track later the next thing i'm going to introduce here is how to navigate around the arrangement view so if i want to let's say zoom into this section right here well if i move my mouse up and let's follow my mouse then you can see that it turns into a little speaker icon if i keep going up then it turns into a magnifying glass if i keep going up after this it goes a little double arrow and then back to a magnifying glass well i want to go down and click the magnifying glass around where the numbers are and this will help me to zoom in and out so if i click you can see there's this black line here well and if i drag down it'll start to zoom in towards that black line and if i drag up it'll zoom out towards away from that black line and then if i drag left and right you can see that it scrolls to the left and right and this is my favorite navigation mechanism on any door that i've tried i love ableton's navigation because it's so easy to just click and drag and move around and keep in mind where you click along the top here which is called the beat time ruler it's going to drag into or it's going to zoom into that point so if i want to zoom in to where this highlighter region i click above that highlighted region here and then sort of drag down maybe i can move it over as well so on the topic of the beat time ruler at the top you can see all these numbers right these numbers represent bars and if you zoom in you keep zooming in you can see these numbers start to appear there's more of them now so each number is one bar and if i zoom in even further you can see the bars they get divided into four so there's four beats per bar and there's one number per bar as well bars are like our standard unit of how we measure music everything is measured in bars and beats so taking this into consideration and just making sure that you can see all these bars up here that makes it easier to not get lost and be too far zoomed in or too far zoomed out you can see that okay i've got these bars at the top i've also down the bottom here got a time ruler this shows you how long this segment is in terms of time so this is 40 seconds long because we have this little 40 here if i zoom out you can see that this is two minutes long here okay so this is all well and good now we know how to zoom we understand how to highlight and click and we can click on each track we understand that all these tracks are behaving independently of each other we zoom we know where that beats and our bars are and we're not getting lost because we know we have the time ruler down the bottom here as well so the next thing is understanding the transport functions which is play stop and record well i don't actually use these transport functions up here they're a little bit superfluous what i'm going to do is actually just use my spacebar instead so when i hit space it plays from where i've placed my insert marker so let's say i want to play here a space and i hit space again and it stops i hit space again and it plays back from the insert marker again so i can play and stop and this is how we sort of play sections in ableton i can click here and play and then click here and listen to this section and listen to this section of course there's no music going on right now but it will become relevant very soon the next one is record and i do use this button up here so just keep that in mind this record button up here is the one that you'll be pressing most of the time the last thing to take our attention to before we start making some tunes is this number up here this is 120 this is the tempo or the speed of our track it's represented in beats per minute and i can click and drag down to make it slower and you can see that time ruler there is changing as i'm doing this as well i can also drag up to make it quicker and finally if it's highlighted like it is now it's like in a gray color then i can type in 128 and hit enter and type in my number there i can also hit this tab button if i want to tap my tempo in but i'm going to go back to 128 and lastly this little button here is our metronome and you'll notice that it highlights yellow when i click it that is a pretty common recurring theme in ableton when you click stuff it highlights yellow and when you click it again it's not yellow and that means it's off so yellow usually means on and for the lack of a better word not yellow means off so once i click this and i hit spacebar now you can hear the metronome going so the next part is this box here this is an important box that we use all the time where all of our sounds come from where all of our instruments come from where all of our big kicks and heavy bass lines all come from this is the browser section so we have a few categories in here they're kind of self-explanatory i'm going to briefly describe each one over the course of the video you'll start to become familiar with which ones you want to use so first of all the most important ones are the drums the instruments the audio effects and maybe the samples as well the plugins is where we'll have our third-party plugins that you'll install maybe you won't have any right now but that's okay because there's some great stuff included in the ableton suite package so drums this is where all of our drum kits lie we're going to talk about drum kits and how you can use them but you can click on them and audition them so you can listen to how they sound like we've also got drum hits at the top and if i click this little arrow it'll show me that there's a whole bunch more drum hits and different categories which i can use as well which this is good because maybe you just want one hi-hat well you can go to the hi-hat section of this drum hits and then just choose one sample rather than having a full drum kit so we've got all of our one-shot samples in here we're just going to play once once you trigger them and then they're going to stop and we'll have all our full drum kits down here as well next is our instruments this is things like synthesizers and samplers they generate sounds in the door we've got our audio effects here which are used for processing things like reverb and delay so this tab is our samples we have a whole bunch of samples here which is just a great use to just click in here and maybe you want to click at the top here in the search bar and just look for again a hi-hat oh if i spelled it correctly and then now you've got all your hi-hat samples and you can just search through and grab a hi-hat for use so yes like i just said this top bar at the top is the search bar and this is very very useful you'll be using this all the time just click up here or hit command or control f and then just search in the thing that you're looking for and it'll come up our places down here this will start to become more populated as you get more packs but pretty much any folder that you want to add to this little bar you just click this little button add folder and it will pop up you can just navigate it and click it in here and now i've got this is where all my third party you know this the samples that i've downloaded or purchased come from so i just put them in the sample folder and ableton just knows where to look and it can find them easily great so let's pull in some audio and start chopping it up and making a loop okay so i've gone through my samples and i've found this drum loop here sounds like this and uh something you could search up to find something like this that's just like drum loop or hip hop or break beat or something like this try and use these kind of functions if you want to find something like this and i'm just going to drag it into this empty space here so you can see that it's made a track for me and it's colored it as well so let's start looking at how we can manipulate audio well i'm just going to zoom in here and i can also drag from the corner of this track and it'll make it a bit larger so i can see it nicely so what ableton has done here is if i look at the top left 113.36 that's my tempo this was automatically set by ableton because there was nothing else in my project and i've dragged this in and it's gone okay you probably want to be in the same tempo as this so i'm going to adjust your tempo for you i'm actually going to change this to just 113 and hit enter and let's have a look at the different functions we can use to manipulate audio so audio is really nice because it's visual you can see everything in front of you i can see these peaks i know there's going to be a peak here it's going to have some sort of hit there and then another one there and it's yeah it's nice and it's all happening right in front of you there's no guesswork so the first thing i'm going to do is highlight a section well once i highlight a section if i scroll to the top to where this bar where this title is you can see my mouse turns into like a hand icon well now i can drag this section around so let's say i drag it there and now it's moved to there well that's great but now i've got a big gap here so what i can do is one of many things well i can click this and i can hit command c just like the regular copy function and i can click over here and hit command v to paste it and now we have this loop which is like chopped up so we can drag little sections of audio around we can also click the ends if i go to the top left corner of this audio box you can see my mouse turns into this little bracket icon and that just means i can change the start and end point of this so the start point is there maybe i want to shorten it or maybe i want to shorten the end same way i can do that so if i wanted to go back to the original audio clip i had i could just click this and just drag out from the edge and that's what it looks like right i'm going to hit command control z to undo that so this is the section that i pasted if i was to go like this it would go back to where it originally was before i copy and pasted that what i actually want to do now is to loop this section so it continually plays in a cycle i'm just going to zoom out and you see this little thing at the top bar here that's our loop bracket or our loop brace so if i grab the edge of this and drag it in and grab the end of this and drag this here then now it's going to be looping right well not quite to activate it i actually have to right click on it and hit the loop button i can also highlight a section and hit command l and that will loop that section no matter where it is so if i highlight here then it's going to put the loop brace around it and loop it so now when i play it's going to keep playing so what i actually want to do is make this a little bit more consistent and i'm gonna grab this and if i hold option or on mac or the relevant key on windows if i hold and drag you can see there's a little file icon with a plus and that means it's going to duplicate this section or copy it over into wherever i want to so i can just like keep doing this and it's just going to make copies of it all the time right so that's fun as well let's zoom in a little bit so it's easier to see and talk about some of the other functions within audio well if i zoom in even further you can see that there's these little things on the edge of each clip and these are called fades if i go to the edge of this in here you can see this little fade fading in here so if i click and drag this you this will fade the audio in slowly over time rather than just a smooth cut if i go to the end of the clip there's the same thing i can click and drag this little fade icon here and that's going to smoothly fade out so when we have two clips that are touching each other what happens is a cross fade automatically occurs this is ableton smoothly transitioning between the two clips to create this all i need to do is grab the fade from the right hand side clip and drag it over to the left and keep dragging and it will create a crossfade so other things we can do in audio is highlight a section and delete and that's pretty nice i can also highlight a section and click r and that's going to reverse that section which is pretty cool too and there's a few other functions that i can change when i double click the clip this pulls up what is called the clip view i can resize this clip view here and i can change between the clip view and the device view down here i've got a few functions in here that are worth taking note of if i want to transpose or pitch the sample up and down there's the knob here that i can use to do that [Music] if i want to change the gain or the volume of each specific slice i can do that here by the way if you want anything to reset to its default value all you need to do is double click and it will go back to zero there's warp functions in here so what warping does is i can stretch the audio let's just copy this over here and if i hold shift and hover my mouse icon over the edge of this clip holding shift it actually stretches rather than just revealing the rest of the clip it stretches it out and this is only possible if i have warp turned on i've got my different warp modes here which i'm not going to go into and i can also loop it's not going to loop the section that you have here it's actually going to loop when you get to the end of this audio clip here as well so just like the top here as well where we can zoom in we can do the same thing here whenever you see these numbers and this magnifying glass you can zoom in and drag around so you can see this is the whole clip and i've just trimmed this little section of it so let's say i have this and i want to extend it out well if i click and drag and highlight this whole section i can right click and there's a whole bunch of functions i can cut and copy and paste these are things that we've done already i can duplicate if i hit this that duplicates the event and i can also use command d to duplicate and command z to undo let's see what other things we can do well this is a really useful function it's called consolidate and the shortcut is command or control j if i hit this what's going to happen is it's going to turn all of these separate clips into one clip and this is really really useful so let's say i'm happy with this little loop that i have right now i'm going to consolidate it and now what i can do is hover over down here where it says loop click that and then just drag from the edge and that's just going to continue looping this so now i've got this endless loop here which is really handy so again just take note that there's this matrix here if i drag in this bottom portion of this audio clip then it's going to highlight the clip if i drag in the top portion you can see the mouse icon turns into the hand and i can drag it around so bottom for highlighting things like deleting and copying and pasting and the top for moving around and so i can highlight this section then move it around by using the bottom and top sections of the audio clip alright so i'm just going to quickly touch on the mixer over here and then we're going to talk a little bit about what are called midi tracks so over here in the mixer section you can see there's this yellow button and remember yellow means on so if i'm to play this and if i'm to hit this yellow button it's going to turn it off you can see the audio is still there but it's not coming through there's also this little number here that's at -6 or it might be at zero for you this is the volume of each track separate so i can bring down the volume [Music] and also bring it up over here this c stands for center and this is the panning so if i drag this down it goes to the left and up goes to the right again double clicking will bring it back to its default position we also have this solo button here this s and when this is blue this means that this track is the only one that you can hear no matter how many other tracks there are this will be the only one what you can do is hold command or control and click other solo buttons as well and that means that these couple tracks that you've soloed are the only ones that you can hear and then once you click off that then you can hear everything again so muting and soloing is different but similar and it's good to wrap your head around both concepts so i can also click on tracks and hit the delete button and that will remove them i can right click on tracks and hit the rename button and rename it something a bit more useful when i right click on tracks i can also color them to what i like and if i've colored the track then i can go down here and click assign track color to clips and that's going to color the clip as well i can also drag to reposition tracks so let's say i want to drag this at the top here and so i have the drums at the top i think that makes a little bit more sense for me and let's use one of these midi tracks to create a bass line so to use midi tracks we need instruments so let's go to the instrument section in our browser and select some sort of bass preset that we can use to create this bass line so each instrument has a little arrow next to it and you can click this arrow and it will show you a whole bunch of different presets so operator is a nice synthesizer i'm going to click this one and go into the base section and have a look for something that says sub and in fact i can just go into this search bar and just type in sub and i think this one sub sign base looks good remember you can also audition them so a midi track in essence is different to an audio track because we don't have this visual audio file in fact there's no audio that's been created already we trigger things like instruments things that create audio with notes so if i'm to highlight a section of my arrangement i'm going to just highlight a one bar section you can right click it and go insert empty midi clip and now this piano roll pops up and the piano roll is how we input notes in this grid here if i double click anywhere it's going to put a note in and if i double click again it'll delete it if i double click and move to the edge of the note i can drag it to make it longer i can also click and drag around the middle of it to move positions and i can again hold option to duplicate notes around and i can highlight multiple notes and delete them if i hit b this pulls up our pencil tool and we can sort of click around to make notes i can highlight them again and delete all of them if i want to and a few other functions over here which i'm going to go over right now so i've got this base patch loaded up sounds like this and what i'm going to do is input a few notes that go along with this drum pattern [Music] okay so let's click over this track and just make sure that you've double clicked this or dragged it onto your track like this and it will show up here so when i click on this track you can see this sub sign base patch is here don't worry about all these knobs they'll become familiar soon just to make sure that i'm on the right track if i click over here you can see it disappears i click back here and it's there so once it's here you can start putting in midi notes onto the timeline and it'll start to trigger that synth so there's this little headphone icon here and if you click that it'll highlight blue and you can sort of you can click these notes along the piano roll and see what it sounds like so i want something a bit lower i'm going to scroll down [Music] i think that's a good one so i'm going to start on c1 and i'm going to click halfway between 1 and 1.2 and see how that goes i'm going to maybe extend this out a little bit as well so this would be a good time to introduce the grid as well and the different grid settings that we can choose so if i right click on the grid you can see here it says adaptive grid and fixed grid so right now we're in the fixed grid 16th notes let's choose the eighth note fixed grid and go from there so now i can just sort of click around and see how that goes too so i want one a little bit lower here that's going to be a bit longer as well so i can double click there and sort of drag down until i hear the note that i want and then just extend this out and let's see how this goes maybe i'm going to drag the start point here and let's see how this sounds okay so that sounds good i'm just going to click from the edge of this clip here and drag out and this is going to automatically loop this clip like we have with the audio clip as well just make sure this loop button is selected and these are the main two differences between audio and midi so the midi is triggering something which is generating the audio you can see that audio is here being generated and this is pre-rendered pre-recorded we can see it visually and it can be manipulated so the next thing i'm just going to double click on this midi clip again and hit this button it says duplicate here and what that does is it actually duplicates the length of this midi clip so it was one bar before and now it's two bars you can see there's a one and a two representing each bar this is great because i can make slight variations which make the loop a little bit more interesting so let's say i wanted to add a note in here this note sounds good to me and then i'm just going to shorten this bit and so they don't overlap with each other so now we can see there's a slight variation in the second bar compared to the first i'm actually going to duplicate the loop one more time and now the loop is four bars long and we can make a slight sec different variation over here and maybe maybe just bring it back to where it was in fact so now the bass line is going through making a slight change in the middle so now with the loop going i really recommend you to experiment with whatever you want to do if you want to add new audio or midi tracks you can right click here and hit insert audio track or hit command t and the same with the midi track you can insert a midi track here or hit shift command t and you can just use these audio and midi tracks to keep layering sounds on top so to give you another example i'm going to delete this loop that we have here and start layering a few sounds together to make like a house rhythm so i'm going to go into the search bar up here maybe i'm going to go to samples here and type in kick and so this kick sounds nice i can just grab and drag this onto the track that i want so that's well and good i might just bring down the volume of it a little bit if i want more than one kick i can highlight this section and hit command d or right click on the timeline and do duplicate here and then i can highlight this whole section and hit command d again or i can hold command d and it's going to keep duplicating which is a really nice feature so now i've got a kick drum on each beat i'm actually going to mute this one at the top here and let's have a listen to these [Music] right so it's a little bit slow because now we're making house remember so i'm going to bring the tempo at the top here to 128 and hit enter that's a bit better so the next thing we need for house is a clap so i'm just going to search in clap and find something like a 909 clap is great and i'm just going to click and drag and drag onto our timeline and then again we're getting we're getting a little bit quicker now what i can do is just shorten this tail because the the long tail is a little bit annoying i don't want all that empty clip there i'm just going to shorten that and then just highlight from the first bar until the third kick drum and then just hit duplicate and what's this what this is going to do is going to duplicate the clap onto every second kick drum which is what we want for that house fundamental foundation [Music] and with house we have our open hat i'm going to insert a new audio track and drag an open hat open hat let's just search for that [Music] great that sounds good and the open hat is between each kick drum so we can go like this and hold option this time just to do it a different way and just place one between each kick drum so now i've got my four hats in there i don't really want to have to drag each time so i'm just going to select from the first to the second bar and then hit command d a few times i'm just going to duplicate that over and great now we have the foundation of a house track i'm going to grab this sub sign from the top and drag it down and then let's just change the notes around so it sort of fits this house vibe now because we were doing hip hop before now let's do a little bit of house so maybe let's just touch up some notes here i'm going to copy this one here and let's see how that sounds and maybe delete all of these ones oops and you can also when it comes to the piano roll if i just highlight a section of the piano roll you see these little markers highlight everything in there and then i can just hit command d i'm just going to duplicate that as well and i think it's i think it's a little bit loud so i'm going to turn it down at the mixer here great so far so good uh once you get to this stage i really recommend again experimenting so right now i'm going to look at my first note here i know from my first note here that i'm in the key of c so all i need to do is go into my samples again and i'm just going to type in let's say chord c some sort of c minor chord perhaps great so maybe let's we can just drag this one in and see how this goes so i've noticed it actually sounds a little bit weird and this is because ableton automatically warps all of the sounds to try and get them in tempo with your track when you bring them in all i'm going to do in this case is double click this clip and go over to where it says warp and just unclick the warp button and it's going to make it sound a little bit less digital sounding finally using loops when you're just starting is a great way to learn the foundations of how rhythm and groove works so i'm going to show you an example and i'm actually going to click here this time and hit command t and that's going to insert an audio track between these two here and i'm going to go over to my samples and look for percussion look for percussion and maybe a percussion loop [Music] so this one is a samba percussion it's in 100 bpm but if i drag it in you can see that it automatically warps to my track and if i hit play let's have a listen so you can sort of experiment with using different like percussion loops and sort of just drag them in and have a look that's pretty cool remember all of our audio editing functions so i can delete this section because it's past the end of the loop let's say i want to delete this section as well start tidying things up and i can go in here and i can solo this one [Music] and i can drag little clips around so maybe i want to drag this here instead or and i want to delete this one and let's say i want to drag this one over here and i'm just doing this more or less randomly and let's just have a listen and see how this goes remember i have to unclick the solo button if i want to hit all of them together so i think i'm going to delete this little end section and maybe sort of put this thing here instead and this is just a really fun way to get you started just use a few different percussion loops we need some sort of bass line and some sort of synth or chord or piano or melodic elements so now we can just start experimenting and i really urge you to experiment and see what you come up with so the final thing that i'm quickly going to touch on is using these drum racks that we talked about here if i go into the drums section well we can use these drum racks or these drum kits in our tracks and program what we want from them so let's say i'm going to use this one called a 909 core kit this is a really classic kit for house and i'm just going to drag it onto an empty section of the timeline and it will make a midi track for me so this is midi and we're going to be programming in the drums so if i highlight a section and right click and make a new midi clip then you can see on the piano roll there's actually a whole bunch of different percussion instruments that are all labeled so we have a bass drum and our rim shot and our snare drum we can sort of just listen to what they sound like and we can start using this to layer on top of what we already have as well so let's have a little go here [Music] i'm just going to mute this percussion track here as well [Music] so maybe i'm gonna get some closed hats this time and sort of just place three here and then just duplicate them across i'm actually going to duplicate this loop because i want it to go twice as long and then i'm just going to make this repeating every two bars and maybe even i can put a right in there and i'm just gonna i'm just hitting command d to duplicate them across every beat so i've got all these things going now if i want to change the volume of each sound i can click on the thing that i want to change so this ride is a little bit loud i can click on it and then just bring the level down so these closed hats maybe i want to bring them down i'm going to i'm going to reduce the decay of them that'll just make them a little bit snappier you want to bring the crash level down as well now i can add my percussion back in and see how that goes so feel free to experiment with all these things use the kits in here and you can drag on different kits as well once you've already established your things in here and see how they change completely drastically from kit to kit they sound different each time [Music] you can just experiment with using different samples as well in audio tracks and using instrument presets to generate things like bass lines and melodies chopping up loops in audio and just continue to layer these loops until you have something that you like this is how we become familiar with the program and its users i'm just going to touch quickly on these audio effects these audio effects can be dragged onto any tracks along here not just the audio tracks they can also be dragged onto the midi tracks they process and change how the tracks sound so i can add things like reverb all i need to do is just drag them onto the track that i want so i can drag them onto each track if i want and let's say i drag it onto this one now you can see that this piano chord has a whole bunch of reverb on it so processing is for another day but just know that you can use these audio effects there's a whole bunch of presets in here which i recommend exploring but you can just drag them onto any track that you want and start processing and changing the audio material so let's say that you've got something that you like and you want to export it so let's say i want to export this section all i need to do is go up here to file i can also save it here and remember we have export here you can just leave the settings as they are hit export choose where you want it to save and it will export that project into a audio file for you so that's it for today i hope this has helped you grasp the fundamentals of how we navigate and use ableton how we can set up different audio and midi tracks and start experimenting and building loops of our own and just having a little bit of fun with it if you enjoyed the video today remember to leave a like or subscribe to the channel i'll be making more stuff in the future so until then thanks for hanging out and i'll see you next time

Channel: EDMProd

Views: 10,965

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Id: Lt3Ih0tSepI

Length: 39min 39sec (2379 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021

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