learning new software and trying to make music at the same time can be frustrating and intimidating which is why I'm putting together this crash course video guiding you through the essentials of Ableton Live 12 so you can hit the ground running making the music you want to make right away and then at the end I'll cover some of the most frequently Asked troubleshooting questions that beginners often ask when using Ableton Live now we're going to be using Ableton Live 12 throughout this video but all the principles and tips I'm going to be sharing with you can be applied on earlier versions so let's get started now Ableton Live uses two main environments to work in your Arrangement view which is a pretty standard linear view of your project and arrangement of the song from left to right with the tracks that you're currently using and working with in your project on the right hand side and then you have your session view which you can get to by hitting the tab key on your computer keyboard and these are the two main windows or environments that you're going to be working in now we're going to stay in the session view for a moment because this environment is what makes able to lives workflow unique what I mean by workflow is the process in which you are creating your music so I like to treat this session view as a way to just throw colors to the wall and see what image arises by just being inspired from one idea to the next let me show you what I mean all right so direct your attention to the center of the screen here in the session view you'll notice that there is an audio track here and a midi track so anything that pertains to recording audio or playing back audio you're going to need an audio track for that and anything that pertains to recording midi such as triggering instruments uh thirdparty plugins and things like that you'll need a midi track for and then you'll notice that each of these tracks have these little slots here well these are called clip slots and from here on out I want you to think of these clip slots as ideas ideas could be anything it could be a chord progression it could be a riff that you record it could just be a drum Loop anything but think of these slip slots as idea containers okay so we have a bunch of these idea containers and you notice that the audio track has some squares in them and the midi track has some circles that simply means that this track is record enabled and on standby to record or capture an idea so focusing on the midi track let's just choose a random clip slot and by clicking the circle we're going to go ahead and start to record or capture an idea now you'll see right here on the bottom that it's currently recording so if I inputed any data or information using my external MIDI controller you can start to seeing the keys and the notes that I'm playing on my midi device being recorded So that click that you heard as I was recording this idea is our metronome it's our count in and anything that pertains to the tempo time signature and your metronome can be found in this upper leftand corner here here we have a tap function that allows you to just tap in the temple that you're vibing with 1 2 3 4 and then that will set your project Tempo to that and this is your project Tempo you have your time signature here and here's your metronome or click and then you can go ahead and set all the settings for your click just by clicking the drop down menu here I normally give myself a one bar count in or you can set it to four bars if you're recording in the kitchen and you have that llama that you really wanted to sample in the living room it's up to you I can now double click that clip that we just created and I can play that back by just clicking the now play button located on the left hand side of that clip won't hear anything because as you can see we haven't even gotten to where the notes were recorded yet so I can edit that and trim that down by clicking over here to where I see a bracket formulate and then drag that over start right here at this bar so that when I trigger this clip it'll start right there so you notice when we play back this clip on this mini track we hear no sound and that's because there is no device no instrument loaded on this mini track so to find a instrument we can head over to our browser and this is one of the most essential Tools in Ableton Live because it's where you're going to access your instruments plugins audio effects Medi effects even third party plugins and and specific files located throughout your computer that you want to instantly get to so that you can hit the ground running when it comes to creating now I can head over here and browse the Ableton Live library that comes loaded when you install the program I can browse through the drums the instruments audio effects or if I know specifically what I'm looking for I can head over here to the search field which is really really powerful and just type in what I'm looking for in this case base so I can then filter that search in my audio effects my instruments and then I can actually dial in and be a little bit more specific with my search and this is particularly with Ableton Live 12 by click in the filter window and look for any characteristics of a bass sound that I'm looking for and so that's how you can filter out your searches you can also use a tool that's called similar to and this is going to give you sounds that are similar to that sound that you've located if I click this it'll now just focus in on all the sounds that are quite similar to the sound that I was looking for making it actually a lot easier to explore and experiment with sounds that are similar to the one that you came across as you can see here the graph indicates how similarish that sound is to the one that you were looking for and as you continue to scroll down you'll notice that the sound becomes less and less similar this could be really helpful if the sound you're looking for is kind of what you want but you want to explore other options really really cool so for right now let's go ahead and drag and drop a drum rack loaded with some drum sounds onto this mini track track so I'm going to head over here to drums and I'm going to look for the 707 core kit and I'm going to Simply click and drag that over to my existing midi track I can also click this instrument and drag that into the session View and that'll create its own midi track with the device already loaded on there so for the sake of less confusion I'm just going to hit delete and now we have this drum rack loaded all right now that we have an instrument loaded onto the midi track so that we can trigger it with our midi device let's go ahead and create an idea so I'm going to go to that tap Temple button and just get a general feel for a temple that I'm looking for one two 3 4 all right it's around like 90 bpms let's turn our metronome on and choose a empty clip slot and just start [Music] recording hit stop when I'm done and double click that and here is the information that we recorded as you can see now we have these colored squares that coordinate with the notes on our piano roll which coordinates with the notes on our midia device so now we can go ahead and audition by clicking the headphone icon here and listen to the notes and play back now I played this by hand using my MIDI controller and if you're traveling or don't have a midi device to actually trigger this you can actually use your computer keyboard to act as a midi controller as well and you can access that by simply heading over here to the right hand corner of Ableton Live and clicking on your computer keyboard as midi device icon now your computer keyboard will now become a midi controller that you can use to trigger this device so when I double click this idea recorded I can go in here and look at the notes and actually move them around so that they fit to where I want them to be and if you you notice you have these gray lines well that indicates the subdivisions in the bead and those are your grid lines your grid markers and that helps with adjusting the overall timing of your midi performance because you can click and then nudge that to the nearest grid marker so that it's always in time you can adjust that by right clicking into this midi region and adjusting the grid so that if you have it fixed every quarter note that means that when you nudge this using your computer arrow keys it's going to s to the nearest quarter note so you can make small increments or dramatic increments depends all on you you can also just bypass all the grid together if you just hold the command key after clicking your note hold down command and you're bypassing the grid Al together this could be really helpful if you're trying to create some unique adjustments in your timing and there you go let's select all of them together and adjust the timing all together this is quantizing we're we're going to quantize the notes so that they all in unison adjust to the nearest grid marker that we want so I can either select all the notes or just simply hit command a to select all of them and in earlier versions of Ableton Live by hitting your quanti settings if you just go to quanti settings a dialogue box will show up giving you the options and choosing that but in 12 your quanti settings are now located here on the left hand side and so you you can go ahead and choose whether to snap it to the nearest current grid or say I would like to snap to the nearest 16th node and then down here determines the amount or the value now I played those notes in real time meaning heard the metronome played with my mini device let's talk about drawing in our notes so we can add some additional notes by just double clicking anywhere in the region and we'll add that note there you can also access your pencil tool by hitting B on your computer keyboard or clicking on the upper right hand corner here and that pencil tool now allows you to simply draw in a note depending on your current grid settings so if I had this set to let's say every eighth note and I draw in a note it'll take up the grid settings length of time and if I just draw to the right I can go ahead and add those notes but sometimes it gets tricky because you can kind of go all over the place so I'm going to hold the option key when drawing in and that's going to prohibit me from drawing any other notes other than the one that I want now that covers the Bare Essentials to recording or drawing in your midi performance in the session View using an external controller or your computer keyboard now I want to take a step back and see why working in the session view in Ableton Live can be a very cool unique approach to creating your music so focusing your attention right back to the session view let's double click this clip slot let's check out the beat we have now I've raised the temple up to 125 bpms I'm going to trigger this clip and now I want to create a couple variations with this clip let's say this will be our verse one beat I can duplicate this that means it's going to copy the same exact pattern and what I can do is add a bit of variation to the second one and say add a crash here and maybe add an extra snare beat here and an extra kick drum pattern there now that's kind of cool that might be a cool drum fill or whatever the case may be but let's say I want to extend that and go from a one bar Loop to Four Bars well you just simply click the loop bar on the top and hit command D to duplicate now we've got two bars do it again now we got four bars so I can remove that cross [Music] symbol and now we only hear it at the turn of every four bars but now we can go back and forth between each of these ideas and you notice the rate in which they cycle between one another is in the next downbeat of the next bar and you can adjust that if you head right back to the top leftand corner where it says one bar here that's your Global quantization this allows you to determine at what rate do you get to change from one idea to the next so if we had it at every eighth note that means that the next eighth note we'll switch from this idea let me give this another color here from the blue clip to the brown one so I'll leave it at one bar because this makes it a lot more seamless as we go from one bar of the idea and it moves and transitions to the other one at the next downbeat of the next bar so I continue working in the session view building layer of idea upon layer of idea upon layer of idea I'll start with the drum bead or riff or chord progression and then just use that momentum to build into the next sound or next idea until all these loops and clips are playing together and creating this overall vibe that really draws me in and then I take that Vibe and transfer it over to the arrangement view so that I can then structure out my Arrangement and song So couple key things I want to show you throughout that process Okay so we've got a couple more tracks loaded on top of that drum beat that we started off with I've got some keys a base and some pads to just come up with a general Vibe [Music] here again just following through the same steps that we've been going over in this video something to keep in mind is that your session view also doubles as your mixing view as well this is where you'll have overall control of the volume and balance of all the tracks that you're working with you can adjust the volume just by clicking the fader to increase it up or down you can pan that track left or right here and you can mute them by turning the speaker on or off here over here in the session view you'll notice that you have these circles A and B and these are your sends and they correspond with the return tracks located on the right hand side A and B and this is essentially a way that you can send audio and have it return to this track here and you can place an effect on there now this is really helpful and useful if you want to send multiple tracks through one effect it's a great way to save up CPU resources and it's also a great way to have a unified Dimension or effect on multiple tracks so if I wanted to send this drum beat over to this return track which has a delay on it I simply just increase the amount I'm sending to return track a and if you want more return tracks simply just right click in the session View and hit insert return track now you'll see a return track C appear you'll also see a new knob show up down here you can individually solo them and so on so now that we have all these tracks if I wanted to manipulate the actual Sonics or maybe add effects to the track I can do so by simply going to our audio effects folder finding a effect that I would like and click and drag that to the track so I'll click this Auto filter drag it onto the bells here I'll solo that and now we can apply the filter to this truck and the way Ableton Life Works is that the effects are routed from left to right so we start off with our instrument and our instrument is going to be affected by this filter here and so if we incorporate another plugin such as this EQ drag and drop that now the filter is going into the EQ and so on and so on you can click and rearrange the order just by moving the plug-in order and the Order of plugins do have an effect on the overall outcome result so keep that in mind but now I want to incorporate some audio into this and so now let's head back to that audio track that we started off in the very beginning and now what we're going to do is incorporate audio we want to either we can record audio onto this track and it's the same similar approach as we did with midi I can record enable this track get over here to our input output section and determine the external input if we're using our audio device whether it's a sound card that comes installed with our computer or an external device that we're using to connect our microphones or instruments to so here I can determine or configure that click here go to our settings and choose the audio interface that we want to use now that I have that selected I can go to the next drop- down box and choose the actual input in this case input one and you can see here the volume in the Vu metor interact so I can go ahead and simply record audio onto one of these clips hey here's me recording some audio and now there's the actual audio recorded hey here's me recording some I want to now incorporate Some Loops or just some audio files from my browser into this current project so that's where we head back into our browser and you'll notice that the bottom section here of the browser right underneath where it says Places You'll see various amounts of folders with different titles on them now you're not going to see these on your Ableton Live browser window because these are dedicated bookmarks on my hard drive of locations of files that I want to instantly have access to so that I can incorporate those sounds right into my project without having to Fumble through my hard drive and browser I can just use Aon lives places think of it as a way to bookmark specific files in your hard drive that you can have instant access to if you want to add a folder in your hard drive simply hit the add folder icon and then browse through your computer to locate files that you want to incorporate you can have as many places as you want and it just really makes browsing for files that much easier so I can head over here go over to find some drum loops and let's incorporate them let's grab a couple here I'll hold shift and drag them onto the audio track I can also just drag any audio file onto the session View and that creates an instant audio track with that clip or file already on there in the session view as well so here now I can incorporate this audio with the overall vibe that we're creating and I can just flip through some of the different audio tracks to see which one really Vibes the [Music] [Applause] [Music] best all right I like that one and so I can double click this now and the same parameters that we had with adjust adjusting our midi we can do the same thing with our audio whether we've recorded it or Incorporated it into our project now similar to how we adjusted our midi performance whether we drew it in or recorded we can also adjust our audio whether we're recording it or incorporating a loop or any type of audio file in there you can simply just double click your audio clip and go ahead and click anywhere or highlight over one of these existing Transit markers on the top and adjust and move your audio to the grid marker just like we did with our midi and so this is essentially a way to quantize and adjust the timing of your audio uh you can also head over here to the main window and this gives you the ability to change some of the parameters such as the overall gain of that audio clip and your [Music] pitch you can adjust by semitones on the left and slightly Dune on the right you can also unwarp this piece of audio and this will allow you to play the audio in its original raw state so if I play it now you can hear it's a lot slower because the original Tempo that this audio was created in was a lot slower so warping gives you the ability to elasticate that audio so that it can snap and change to the Project's Tempo that you're currently working in so I'm going to hit the warp button back on and now it is going to stretch back into the time of our Tempo now underneath warp you have different options of how to warp or basically how Ableton life is going to treat the warping of that selected piece of audio there are different modes here beats is usually what you would gravitate towards when you're using uh maybe any a two or four bar percussive Loop such as what we're dealing with here tones and textures is something you would probably select when you're time stretching or adjusting the timing of pads or maybe ambient things like that and then the repitch option allow allows you to adjust the actual pitch of the audio to fit the time of the project so it's literally pitching up the drums so that it fits in time with the project if the tempo was slower the drums were actually pitched [Music] down now then you have complex and complex Pro these are the ones to use that will maintain the best Integrity of the audio as it's being elasticated for your project so you've got an initial vibe here going on with these five tracks and so what I'm now going to do is transfer over to the arrangement view so that I can take these elements and then structure them out into an arranged song so let's say with all the clips that are currently triggered and playing that's just our main Groove now for you it could be up to 25 tracks or maybe just two tracks that cause you to be like yeah this is it once I'm ready to actually head over to my arrangement I can simply hit the tab to toggle between session and me Arrangement View and then we're just going to pick a random ROM place here in our Arrangement view so let's just say bar 9 and then I'm going to hit the record button located on the very top of our transfer bar this is going to allow me to record all the clips that are currently triggered and on standby onto the arrangement [Music] view now that's just one method I can record all the current clips that I'm playing on there and it's still great out because we're still currently jamming out and rocking to our session view workflow and so we can also just click that file or that clip hit the tab button and drag that over to our Arrangement view as well if we want to just manually place them in there or we can do the same process and kind of jam or just perform live our Arrangement so for instance I can hit the stop button here on the right hand side the master fader which will cancel or stop all the current clips that are being triggered and we can just record a jam session so to speak so I can hit the record button on top and let's start with implementing the [Music] [Applause] clips once I have an arrangement either by performing it live or simply just sending all the clips that are currently playing into the arrangement view we can access the arrangement view by simply hitting the back to the arrangement button here located on the right hand corner and now we're currently focusing in on our Arrangement that means we're no longer working in our session view um all the clips are still there but we won't hear anything to the actual playhead moves towards our regions in the arrangement View and since they were clipped base performances in the session view we can now just simply drag these clips all the way to the beginning of our Arrangement or all the way throughout our track and so be just arrange based off of this so I can just say hey let's work backwards let's wait for the actual wave or pads to come in right at bar 17 let's not even have the drums come in till like another two bars and we'll do that over here let's say let's not even have the base come in till maybe at bar eight so now we're already starting to arrange our ideas together into a [Music] structure and so you can kind of get the idea here is that you've got these ideas that you've created from the session view you've transferred them over into the arrangement view now giving you the ingredients to kind of bake or uh create that structure that you might be looking for and once we're in the arrangement view it's as simply as adding or continuing to add to the production from the arrangement view as well so let's say I would like to add an additional sound at that new course that we created can go back to the browser find some additional Sounds here let's say that tambourine Loop click and drag that now into my Arrangement View and a new audio track will be created with that region there I can now move that around or duplicate that since it's already set to a loop mode and now now gets Incorporated in that part of the arrangement you can also record directly into the arrangement so same process here let's go to an instrument here I'm looking for let's say piano and keys um and then I'll go to acoustic and then I can open this up and now let's use this piano and I'll click and drag that into the arrangement View and that creates a midi track with the instrument already loaded and I can now simply just record anywhere in this Arrangement so let's say at bar 9 I like to record a cool little Melody line on top of everything that's [Music] there and this is the same principle that you would apply when recording audio into your Arrangement view create an audio track arm it and then choose the input that you're using from your audio device and simply just record directly onto the arrangement and this is my process of working in Ableton Live I'll use the session view to really just be a sketch pad and a blank canvas to just throw colors on until I get this General Vibe and then take that Vibe over to the arrangement view so I have a basic structure Bird's eyee view or a skeleton of my Arrangement and then I will use it from that moment on to really add all the nuances and details to get the song finished now I've gone ahead and shared with you my workflow and my process of creating while using Ableton Live but this doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be your process if you want to start off in the arrangement view first go for it or if you want to start in the session view that's cool as well there is no right or wrong on how you're using the program it's all about knowing how to use the tools you have on hand so that you can create the music that you're excited about making and so if you want a more detailed explanation of the overall program of Ableton Live Well I've got a video that walks you in full length detail of every aspect of Ableton Liv's workflow and you can access that video by clicking the link below in the description box now I'm going to spend some time going over some troubleshooting questions that people often ask when using Ableton Live for the very first time so when you're ready to export your audio simply go to the arrangement View and find the loop bracket which is located on the top here and indicate where you want to start and end the export so for me me I want to start at bar one the very intro and then the end of my song will wrap up right over here at the end of bar 38 so that indicates that this track is going to be exported for this whole duration then simply head over to file and then go to export audio then you can double check yes bar 138 that's right um you can choose the settings of what sample rate you want it to be exported at the bit rate you want it to be exported at the file format here and that would be it you can also do a MP3 bounce of this as well and if you have video incorporated into your project you can also turn that on and Export the video as well well how do I record automation meaning I'd like to actually change some of the parameters such as like the volume of a chck or maybe even something on the device itself well you can simply just right click any parameter and hit show Automation and then you'll be shown the Automation in the arrangement View and you can just draw in any changes you want that pertain to that device so if you want to automate the volume you can simply just draw it in or record it by hand by simply just hitting the plus button and recording it and then making that adjustment [Applause] yourself and that's how you can record or Draw in automation so that when you play back that specific point in your Arrangement it will automatically change that parameter to the settings that you just drew in now sometimes when I'm using my computer keyboard to trigger some items like a drum rack I don't hear anything why is that the case well if you have your computer keyboard triggering your drum rack it could very well be as you can see here that you're triggering a space that just has no sounds in it so use the z letter on your computer keyboard to go an octave down and the X letter on your computer keyboard to go an octave up going two octaves down will make sure that you're highlighting and triggering a cell that actually has a sound located on there and also as you're starting to become familiar with using Ableton Live I'd strongly recommend that you go ahead and head over to the edit window or the edit menu and take a look at all the short key commands here on the rightand side these are essential functions that you're going to be using when editing in your Arrangement View so if you can just commit some of these to memory such as your cutting your copying your editing or slicing a region all these are found here so when you want to split a region or consolidate it fit it to the time range all this can be done just by analyzing all the short key commands here in your edit window committing them to Memory um it'll be really functional in just secondhand nature as you start to continue using Ableton Live and use it as your primary Daw for making music now if you wanted to control something in Ableton Live with an external MIDI controller you can simply go to the right hand corner and hit the midi box and anything that's highlighted in blue can be assigned to external MIDI controller and then you'll see the controlling option up here you can set the parameters and then once you click the midi box again you can now just control using your external midi device same principle for using the computer keyboard as a remote just go to the upper right hand corner hit the key now anything highlighted in Orange allows you to map to your computer keyboard this makes for a more hands-on experience of creating music using Ableton Live Now how do I go about warping long pieces of audio so that the timing of that audio fits the tempo of my project well there's three simple steps when it comes to warping think of it like this step one find your downbeat step two set bar one beat one here and step three warp from here so here is the raw audio file of a whole song that I have I'll trigger and play it now what I'm going to do is just move this playhead so that I position it to the downbeat so the downbeat doesn't necessarily have to always start at the beginning of the sound it can always be anywhere you want so let's just say that the downbeat for me is going to be right over here so here's the downbeat the beginning of this piece of audio and now what I'll simply do is just right click on that playhead and choose set bar one beat one here that's going to let Ableton Live know from here on out do the algorithmic calculations and figure out what tempo this is going to be so there you go it's now going to analyze the track and warp it the last step so that it's warped correctly for the timing of the project is right click that same warp marker where Bart One Beat one was at and then choose warp from here and now it will snap to the current tempo of the project know is you now you have somewhat of a suggested BPM based on the calculations that the original Tempo is set to 150 our current Project's at 120 so it feels and sounds a lot slower and garly so you can change from beats to complex [Music] Pro or you can go ahead and now change the tempo of your project to match closer to the original Tempo everybody know I miss you and it also means that anything before the downbeat will also now be warped in time as well now I hope this crash course into Ableton Live has been encouraging and inspiring in any way and getting you moving into getting those ideas you have in your head onto the software ready to share with the rest of the world and I'm excited for you to take your next step forward with using this software now if you're looking for professional guidance and mentorship towards producing music well then I would love to draw your attention over to beat academy.com that's where I'm investing a lot of my time and energy pouring into aspiring artists and music producers and helping them producing better music by leveling up their music production skill set I've been producing music for a living for the past 21 years and I've had the privilege of working with some of today's biggest artists Justin Timberlake kigo Gwen Stefani Jason Derulo Kelly Roland and have done music for video gaming um TV film and all that is wrapped up into my experiences that I share with beat Academy members that I come along side and help them in reaching their music goals so if this is something that you're interested in and you're serious about wanting to pursue your passion for making music then I definitely want to encourage you to visit beat academy.com be sure to subscribe to this channel so you can stay up to date with more free content that I'll be putting out and helping you level up your music production skill set thanks for watching and I'll see you soon