Building a Beat with MIDI in Ableton Live

1. Introduction Maylee Todd: Hi, welcome to Ableton Workshop for beginners. My name is Mai Todd. We are going to get into it. So, I am a musician. I've been making music, composing music for many years. I build multimedia shows using Ableton. I used to have a show called Virtual Woom where you walk through a large volva, you lie on the ground and you take projections on the ceiling, and you do this all in Ableton. I also have another show where I cracked an EEG headband, which reads your five Brain waves. And that would run through Max for Live and be projected all the brain data on a screen behind me as I performed and play my synthesizers live using my brain waves. And, of course, I've composed a few records now in Ableton, Acts of Love that came out in 2017, Mu, which was an avatar project with science fiction songs and 2. Reminders for learning new software: Hi, welcome to Ableton Workshop for beginners. My name is Mai Todd. We are going to get into it. In this session, we are going to work in MIDI. MIDI means musical instrument, digital interface. We are just using information just to compose. So we're going to talk about the interface and what some of the functions do, and then we're going to build a beat. And just some gentle reminders for you. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be done. If you can walk and talk to me in a language I understand, you can learn this software, give it two days of repetition, and you will learn it. My mother always says, patience and perseverance, and I will bestow that quoton to you. Patience and perseverance is the name of the game for learning software. Do not forget it doesn't have to be good. 3. Intro to Interface of Ableton Live: Can see here that we have two Mi columns and two audio columns. Okay? We're not going to worry about these audio columns right now. We got a reverb column. We have a delay. We have a main. We'll get to those in a second. We are in clip view, and if you hit Tab, that puts you in arrangement view. So if you're familiar with logic or garage band or if you edit in film, use Final Cut or use Adobe, you're probably used to a left to right sequence of events. But for now, we are going to build in this clip view. So the very first thing we're going to do is we are going to look at our MIDI column here, okay? MIDI musical instrument, digital interface. I'll say it again, musical instrument, digital interface. In here, we're going to self monitor, so we keep it on auto. This is to mute the column. We're going to keep it live. This is to solo the column, and this is to record in the column. So that is just sort of the basic functions right here. We're going to go to the top left here. We have a few things, but I'm going to mention the ones that we're going to work with. We have tab tempo, so you can tap your BPM this way. You can also actually plug it in aca this. It's in four or four time. You can also this is your metrodm And, um, something that is worth it. If you don't hear, I'm going to actually push this into my external headphones. There we go. So we can hear the metronome, which could be I think that you might have an issue you might have. Great. Great. Perfect. Just want to make sure that audio works. All right, great. And then 1 bar, we have 1 bar. We have none. We have a few options here. That will come into play, but for now, we're going to keep it on 1 bar. We're going to keep on cruising. We have our sharps and flats. We are in the key of C. This is major, and I'm going to skip through. We have our play. We have our stop, and we have our record function here. A few things here that I'm going to skip. We have a looper. We have here our marker, which we will use. This we'll fire up. This is key control Control K. Also, this is a shortcut, MDI, everything turns blue. We will have that we'll deal with that in a second. Here we have some instruments, sounds, and some effects, et cetera that you could use. 4. Creating MIDI Drums, Keys, Synths in Ableton Live: Do. We're going to just very much start with some basic drums. So we're in four, four time. We're gonna go with 120 beats per minute. And we're going to throw in some drums into this mini column. I'm going to go with something kind of simple. I'm gonna go with the eight oh eight core kit. So there's two ways to bring these drums over. I can double click. There they are. They all showed up. We're friggin' stoked about that. Or you can drag and drop it in. Two ways to do it. Drag, drop it in or double click. So here we go. Boom. Great. And I'm just manually with my fingers pressing play on each one of these instruments here. We have a few things, gains, tones, stuff like that that we can mess with. But for now, we're just going to keep it very, very simple. I think with learning, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be done. Let's keep things as simple as possible, right? Alright. So we want to plug in our drums. We're going to boots and pants this, right? If you look here on these clips, when I bring my instrument over, you'll see that these now these squares have turned into circles. So that means that they are now recordable. Alright, so check this out. I'm going to double click on this blank clip here. Then as you can see, down below, there's a few things that show up. We have all of our kits, right? Boom, our whole kit, eight oh eight kit is here. Now, I'm going to select some of my drums. I can use the pencil at the very top, right? It makes my cursor into a pencil. That's one way to do it. And the other way to do it is just by pressing B. So when I press B, my cursor then becomes a pencil. There we go. And now I'm going to play. This is turned into a play function. Great. So we have 1 bar in time, Great. And then we're gonna boots and pants it. So boots and snare. Kick and snare. Kick and snare. Great. Pretty simple. That is my basic drum beat. And there are some things you could do. You can, like, add high hats if you want. Great, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Excellent. Great. We're gonna move on. So that was your drums. That's one way to get that drum in there. So the next thing that I want to focus on is now I want to bring in another instrument. So I'm going to go to instruments. I'm going to look, what do I want to do here? I think I want to put in some keys. Maybe a pad. I'm going to click on PAD. Maybe piano keys. We're zipping around here. Analog. I'm gonna go down to my analog zone. Ooh, we, look at all these jammers here. Maybe some muted keys. So if you notice, when I hit the muted keys, it just looped just to give me an idea of what that sound would be like, what that texture would be like. And if you notice here, I muted that loop, which is still playing the headphone loop there, just muted it so we can have a bit of a chat here. And I'm going to bring this into the column, my second midi column. I'm going to tap on my midi column, make sure it's highlighted, and there's two ways to bring this instrument into the column. One is to double click, and the other one is to drag it over. So I'm going to double click. There it is. Great. There's my instrument. And I'm also going to now make instead of what I did prior to this, which was double clicking, right, on that spot. We're not going to do that. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to actually play my laptop like a keyboard. Great. So what you want to do is you want to go to the top right, and there are keys there. You want to fire that off. So it's yellow, so it's selected. And then you're going to press the keys on your keyboard A to L on your keys, your not a piano. I'm not talking about a midi controller, but on your actual laptop. These then become your Alright, so we're ready to rock. We have our metronome that is on, which is yellow indicating that it's on. It's at 1 bar. We love that. Great. We're at four, four time. One, 20 beats per minute. We have our drums that will be fired up, and now I'm going to press record. Here we go. Two, three, four. Stop. Alright, so I'm going to show that again. What I'm basically doing is I'm playing four notes, each. I'm playing all my white notes. However you want to play them, right? So we'll show it again. It's gonna count in for 1 bar, and then it's going to record. One, two, three, four. Stop. Great. So I played it a little differently this time, but you get the idea. There are two ways to make mini notes. One of them is by plugging them in manually, as we did for the drums. The other way is to play it out on the keyboard, as I did just like. So, so we're going to continue on our path here for MIDI. We're not going to use these audio tracks. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete them for now just to keep things real simple and easy, right? There's a few ways to bring in another track. You can go to create, insert MIDI track, and a clean track will come up. Or you can kind of something a little sneaky and fun is you can duplicate one of these tracks, okay? So I'm going to just delete this, and I'm actually going to duplicate this track and the exact same thing that I played. And you know what? I think I just want to add swap out the texture. So I'm going to swap out the texture. So as you can see, it's changed, right? I'm going to solo it so you can hear. As opposed to And then together. Spacebar. I press Space Bar to stop or the stop at the top. Those are two ways to stop. So you may notice now there are a few ways to actually play what's happening here. You can either play at the top, or you can play in these little cells here individually. Now, the way Ableton is set up is that when those cells and clips are green, it means that they will play as soon as you press that top play here or your space bar. So for example, all of these, one, two, and three are green. So, boom, all of them are going to play. There's also a play function over here. 5. Arranging, FX, Exporting in Ableton Live: Use it where I start arranging a song in this way, right? So I'm going to show you kind of the quick and dirty way to make a tune. So what I'm just going to do just for time's sake and learning's sake is I'm just going to duplicate a lot of things here. So eight oh eight drum kit core. I'm going to duplicate this a few times. One, two, three, and four. Muti key, I'm going to duplicate it as well. It has the same name here as my SNH muted key. But I assure you it's a different instrument, for sure. So, these are the same things. Right? What I'm going to do now I'm going to start arranging a song, reclipV, okay? I don't know if anyone does this. I don't know if this just me, but this is how I've been doing it. So I go to my main and I'm going to go to Control sorry, Command R, if you're on a Mac. And I'm going to put this as my intro, right? So I'm going to start titling things. I'm going to head down to the next. That's two. And this is going to be my verse. I'm just going to put in V. And then here, I'm going to write in chorus. Let's keep it consistent. And here, I'm going to write in my Outro. So this is just for today's sake. You can make bridges. You can make obviously, you can make a longer song if you like. But for today's for all intensive purposes, we are going to make this very short and sweet. So these are really just the same things copy and pasted four times. Now this is where the arranging comes in. So I am listening to my tune. I feel like I need a little bit more variation. I think for my intro, I'm going to delete my kit here. Right? And then I have my muted keys. You can delete it or by clicking on it and pressing Delete or you can mute it by clicking on it, right clicking and going to deactivate clip or clicking on it and pressing zero to deactivate or reactivate. So it's deactivated. I'm going to zip on over to my piano muted, and I'm going to press zero here. I'm going to deactivate that clip as well. So my intro is just going to sound like this. I'm going to get rid of my metronome as well. Great. My drum beat, I'm going to move down to my next cell here. And you can see my actual drum information is gone. So there's a few things to pay attention that are worth noting. Down here, we have our clips. So this is our mini notes here. This is where you kind of land and you plug in all those notes. And then on the right hand side here, there are, again, the instrument that you're using that you can change and shape to however you see fit. So I think for myself, for this drum beat, I think I like what we have so far. I'm gonna keep it. I think I'm going to mute this here for my verse and just keep it to this very simple, very, very simple. Muted piano. And then for my chorus, I think everything is gonna stay in, but I'm going to change up a few things. So in my drum for my chorus, chorus is here and this line that's firing all of these clips up, this here, my drums. I have my bass. I'm gonna add a hand clob just to really fire it up. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. There we go. And maybe a rim shot, you know? Let's see what that sounds like. Great. I love that. And then for my outtro, I'm going to keep it really, really simple. I'm just going to go with this muted piano. So I'm going to mute these two components. So my verse is drums, great. We're loving this. Sounds good. I like what I see here. Great. So my intro. I'm going to just actually bring this down just a little bit more just so you get a good sense of kind of the deals here. So intro. Great. I'm going to go to verse. Now let's talk about the timing. So I mentioned earlier before this bar, right? There is none, and then also there is 1 bar. I am keeping it at 1 bar. So what happens here is we have a looper on each clip, there is a looper here. There is a start point, and then there is an endpoint. And so what is happening in Ableton is it's just playing this loop over and over again. Same thing with the muted keys here. This is 4 bars. My muted keys, my drums are 1 bar. Keep it simple. So you do the math. You know, the 1 bar is always going to be in 4 bars, right? But once you start doing other complicated rhythms like polyrhythms and stuff like that, it's just going to be a little bit more trickier in terms of, like, timing and stuff, so something to be aware of. Now, going back, so I know my 1 bar is gonna fit in my 4 bars of my piano loop. And now I want to switch between my intro, my verse, and my chorus. So I am the 1 bar at the top left here, what happens is, if I put it on none, check this out. I'm playing my intro. And say I hit my verse, it's just going to go straight into that verse. But if I have a 1 bar, it will anticipate it will wait until a bar finishes, and then the next bar, it will play the verse. Does that make sense? So, for example, let's say we start here the intro. Great. And now I'm going to hit my verse, and then it will start on the one that bar. Perfect. D D, D, D D, great. And now I'm going to go to my chorus after this segment. Nice. It's my chorus now. Great. Now let's go Outro. Beautiful. And stop. Great. So this is a very quick and dirty version of making a mini beat. Very, very quick. Of course, songs have more variation in them. Of course, you can make your verse have completely different chords in them. Your verses and your choruses, your intros and your intros, they don't have to be the same loop. I'm just doing this just so you get an idea. But you can change it up. You can play different different notes and different chord progressions, of course. But this is just kind of a quick way just to get used to building it. So what I highly, highly, highly suggest this very quick lesson is to repeat this again. And anytime that I pause before I give you the answer for something, I want you to think of what that answer would be just so you start getting it into your brain of where things are. Start thinking about this. In a way, like a scientist, almost, so you can start learning and understanding the language. Um, now, you can see here there are these sends. We have A and B sends, so you can add effects. The default is the reverb here and the delay. Those are the defaults. So what I like to do is turn up my A all the way at 100%. And when I click on the reverb, anything and everything that you need to see when you click on a column is always going to be down here. So let's look at the effects. This is dry and wet reverb. The wetter the reverb, I just always put it at 100%. Obviously, the more you're going to hear that effect, right? So for my drums, for example, let's just say I'm going to solo it by pressing this S just so I can hear. I'm going to play the verse drums. Alright? And I'm going to click on this reverb, and I'm going to turn up. You don't have to click on the reverb. I just want to keep it there so you can kind of see. And you're going to start to hear that reverb a lot more, right? Same thing with the delay. So my delay is going to be B. I'm going to turn it up 100% here. I'm going to turn my reverb down, and I'm going to turn up this sense. So you can start to hear the delay. We got a bit of, like, Yeah, D D. So it gives it a whole other rhythm and feel now. This is kind of the fun part about arranging is the effects, really, use the effects can create these groups as well. So down here in Ableton, you can also seem this is my volume, as you can see here, these sliders. I'm just going to turn it down. There are things that you can you can modulate and just syncopate. For example, let's hear that example. I leave this to your preference. But remember, you know, it's very, very, very fun to explore and absolutely go through the steps to get the work done. Very, very important. So we got a bit of a different vibe here. I'm just going to put it back on the original I'm going to take down the how much this delay is feeding into this column. The reason why I am throwing reverb and delay, they have their own columns, and these are return sends. The reason why these columns exist here is because you can actually put on your column, let's say, the drums, for example. You can go down to audifxO the left hand side. You can put, let's say, like a phaser. Either you can drop down the menu and find a specific phaser or you could just kind of use their default vasor and there's two ways always to use these things. One is to double click, and the other one is to drag over. So I have my eight oh eight. I'm going to double click. And as you can see, my phaser flanger has shown up. So let's see what that sounds. Let's hear what that sounds like. Great. I'm going to actually just for now, turn off my delay. I'm going to mute, which you can at the top right corner of any of these instruments, any of the instruments or the effects, you can mute them by disarming them here. And then I'm just gonna turn this up just to get, like, a real idea of what's actually happening. Right, so you hear a little bit of variation. Now, what if I want phaser, not just on my drums. Maybe I want them on my Muta keys. Maybe I want them on all of them. This is where the return sense comes into play. So I'm just going to delete this for now. On this reverb column, reverb and delay are kind of like the standard for most folks, but say I want to make I want this phaser flanger on everything. I'm going to put it here so I can either it kind of gives you both. If you want to add, you can stack affxs, right? Again, you can mute it or you can completely delete the reverb. And then I'm going to rename this. We have APaserFlanger, so it renamed itself. This is now A. Great. Okay, let's play. Great. I'm not hearing anything, of course, because my return sends is A, so now I'm going to boost up. I'm going to boost up the feedback a bit, just so you hear a little bit of that. Let's hear some weird variations. There we go. Not as impressive. Let me tell you. And the reason for putting stuff in return sense is just so you don't overload your computer, as well. So if you're putting on multiple effects on each and every column, and let's say you have a bunch of columns, not three, but you have, like, eight columns, and you're just throwing tons of the same effect on each column, there's really no need to do that when you could just throw it in the return sense. That makes the most sense to do it that way. Saves you some computing power and saves you a lot of time and so on and so forth. So we have our tune here. Right, I am going to show you one more thing here. Um, I don't necessarily want to click on with my mouse or my pad here, my intro. Get rid of this. I actually want to use my keyboard, okay? My keys here on my laptop. So on the top right here, we have key. You can click on it, and everything turns orange. So what happens is your computer, your keyboard, then becomes a bit of a controller, a commedia controller. And so I'm going to click on my intro. I'm going to make this number one. So I'm going to tap on that clip. I'm going to press one and you can see a one appeared. Verse, I'm going to click on that two. Chorus three Outro. Four. And the same way to get into a key command or a midi is the same way to go in is the same way to go out. So you can either go to the top right and press this key, but I'm going to go Command K. I'm going to get used to the shortcuts. So here we go. Here's my tune. Great. And, like, I'm aware that I have to anticipate that 1 bar. Gonna let my verse jam out for a bit. Great. Here's my chorus. Awesome. And my outtro Spacebar to stop. Excellent. So that is my first clip. All my clips, my tune in Just Using MIDI, MIDI alone. And again, there's multiple ways where you could use this clip few. For example, I got my drums. It's playing this, but maybe I want to fire off this. And maybe I want to fire off this. Now they're playing at different times and get a little chaotic. So I just suggest to follow this sequence introverse course Outro. Just follow the sequence of an arrangement. You can get more complex in time. We are going to bounce down in Arrangement view. I'm going to press tab to get myself in Arrangement view. The other way to get into Arrangement View is going to the top right and clicking on those lines there. So I'm going to record what I just did, okay? When I press record. When I press play at the very top, remember this. It's going to play whatever things are fired off last. So I press play. It's playing these other bits, right? It's not playing my intro sequence, then my verse, then my chorus, then my outtro. So what I want to do is I want to fire off my intro. Great. Now I see that this one is ready to go. This line, this sequence of events is ready to go. So, here we go. Let's record it. Six, seven, eight. Great. My intro is recording. I see it in my arrangement view. I love that. Great. I'm gonna go to my verse. Wait for the bar to end, and then great, my drums come in. And here we go. I'm going to do a double chorus. Nice. Right. And then after the sequence, here we go our Outro. And you can press Stop or Space Bar. And then when I press tab and go on the other side, I can see here that my tune has been recorded. This is something else that you must remember in Ableton. There are two extremely random things I do believe about the software, and this is one of them. One of them we experienced here when you have to, like, double click on this clip to make another clip, right? In here, you have to in order to hear the sequence, what we're hearing is this side, clip view when I press Play. We're not hearing this grade out arrangement view side. So in order for me to hear it, and there's clearly more things happening here, I need to you must click on this orange flag. The flag goes away, and now you're able to hear your tune in arrangement view. I love what I hear and I love what I see, and I see what I love. Great. And that is my whole tune right there. Thank you so much for jamming out. Lovely. And now what we're gonna do, I'm like, joked about my track. So now I'm gonna go to File, and I'm going to export. And, yes, you can render the main. So this is the main here. Down here. All those tracks are the main. The other options that you have, you have individual tracks, you have selected tracks. So you can select them what ones you want to export out. Okay. And then most stuff is typically you'd be on a default, and I would kind of keep it that way. For today's purposes, I would say, just not to overload yourself. I would just encode MP three. So let's keep these files relatively small. You can keep it on and do a wave or IFF or flack. But truly I think like for now, this is just a personal preference because I don't know how much space your computer has, as well. And then I'm going to Export. And thank you so much for watching this video. Beginner Ableton MIDI. And MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.