This Ableton Live tutorial will look at music production for beginners using
Ableton Live 10 lite now Ableton Live Lite is a free daw or digital audio
workstation and it's included with many pieces of hardware and it's even
included in some music production software bundles welcome to Simple Green
Tech I'm Radio Zane and on this channel i do audio tech tips tutorials and
reviews to help you unleash your creativity now like I said earlier today
I'm looking at Ableton Live 10 specifically the Ableton Live lite
version of Live 10 if you're new to music production or digital audio
workstations but you have a copy of Ableton Live Lite that's come with some
hardware or software that you purchase and you're wondering what it's all about
then this video is for you now here's what I'm going to go over in
this Ableton Live tutorial first I'm going to quickly go over some of the
differences between Ableton Live lite and Ableton Live 10 standard and then
I'm going to show you how to set up your audio interface and your MIDI controller
and after that we'll do some audio recording and some MIDI recording using
virtual instruments after that I'm going to show you how to add some effects onto
your tracks and then we're going to have some fun by bringing in your own loops
and beats into the session view and using that to create music and then
finally I'm going to show you how to export your tracks so you can send them
to your friends or upload them to the internet or whatever it is you want to
do with them so let's jump in to this great free daw so first I want to quickly
go over the differences of live lite vs. Ableton Live 10 standard which is
the current version as of this recording with live lite you get all of the same
workflows instruments and effects as the standard version of Ableton Live however
you can only have up to 8 audio and MIDI tracks this is still manageable for
creating music and just like the standard version you can use Ableton
Live lite like a traditional DAW and record and edit on a linear timeline or
you can start to build songs using the session view the instruments and the
effects that it comes with are great you can also add third-party plugins to
Ableton Live lite so really the biggest difference is the
track count now let's open up Ableton Live Lite and quickly get our audio
interface and MIDI keyboard set up so you want to go up to options and then
preferences and then go over to the audio tab click on that and in driver
type you want to change that to ASIO and then in audio device click on it and
find your audio interface in the drop down menu you shouldn't need to adjust
anything else in here so that's it for the audio interface setup now let's go
over to the link MIDI tab and then in here you want to go to input and click
on where it says none and your MIDI keyboard or MIDI controller should show
up here there are also some pre-configured control surface mappings
if you click on the control surface drop down menu and bring down the menu here
and if yours is in here you can click on that as well and once you're done that
we can close this out and go back to the main window Ableton Live typically
defaults to the session view which is this view here we're going to come back
to that in a bit but right now let's change it to the arrangement view which
is more like a typical DAW so you want to click on this button over here that
brings us to the arrangement view if you've worked in any other audio
production software this should look fairly familiar to you I'm going to
click over here to close the browser for now we'll bring it back up later but I
don't need it right now so right now we're going to look at recording audio
into Ableton Live Lite so go down to one of these audio tracks here if for some
reason you don't have audio tracks pre-loaded then you can always go up to
create and then go to insert audio track and depending on what input of your
audio interface you plan on recording you can click here to change it to input
1 2 3 4 whatever input you have you can even have it as a stereo input with 1
and 2 feeding it so select your input I'm going to choose
input 1 once you've selected your input arm the track for recording by clicking
on the circle button right here and it should turn red when it's armed to
record and now you should see your levels in the little meter on the side
if you're happy with your levels you can now record if you're recording guitar or
something where you want to keep Beat recommend enabling the metronome by
clicking here there's also some options that you can choose if you click on the
little arrow down I like to do a count in of one bar now let's hit the record
button and record some audio if you're happy with your take you can disarm the
track from recording by clicking on the little circle again and we can now move
on to recording MIDI so let's open our browser again by clicking over here and
then on the far left you want to click on instruments I'm going to click on
instrument rack and as you can see there are multiple options to choose from but
I'm going to select a bass you can either drag and drop this into the
header of a MIDI track over here and you'll see it load down there or if you
are clicked on a MIDI track already you can drag and drop it into the bottom
here so now we look our MIDI track is armed for recording already which is
good now all we have to do is hit the record button to start recording
once you're done recording you'll have a MIDI clip in your timeline here once you
double click on it you'll see that your piano roll opens up at the bottom here
and you can adjust your notes down here you can move them around you can adjust
the velocity if you like or if you click on the little pencil tool up here you
can even draw in more notes if you really want to and you can move your
clip around on the timeline however you like and you can duplicate it by either
holding down control on your computer keyboard clicking and dragging or by
right clicking copy and then right clicking paste now let's look at
bringing an effect onto a track on my guitar track that he just recorded I'm
going to add an audio effect you can bring in third-party vsts if you want
you just need to set your VST plug-in folder and the preferences or you can
use some of the many plugins that Ableton Live comes with so for this I'm
going to use an Ableton plugin click on audio effects over here on the left and
I'm going to go to audio effect rack then amp simulation and then I'm going
to choose one of these presets here I'll just drag it over on to the header of
the track and now you can see all the controls down there let's hear what that
sounds like
Alright it's not the greatest song as I just quickly whipped it up on the fly
but let's say I don't mind that amp simulation sound so we'll leave it like
that you can have more than one effect on a track just find another effect and
drag it down into here and now we have two effects and you can keep adding more
and more effects down at the bottom there
you can even rearrange the order that they're in by clicking and dragging it
to the front like that now we have our compressor in front of our amp simulator
now let's move on to the session view with some of your own loops and sounds
this is a lot of fun so I'm going to start a new project for this if you need
to add your folder where all your loops and samples are you just easily click on
add folder and then find wherever it is on your computer and then click on
select folder I already have mine added here Ableton does come with its own
library of sounds so you can use those right out of the box so I want to start
out with a drum beat so you can audition sounds just by clicking on them alright
let's say I like this one here let's drag that over onto a MIDI track like
this now I can play it and while I'm playing that I can audition other sounds
now let's say I like that one I'm gonna drag that over here alright so I have a
few samples loaded into my tracks here and I want to start creating a song out
of using these so what I'm going to do is hit the record button and start my
drum beat like this now let's start to add some of these other parts
okay well let's say we just made a whole big session like that we had all kinds
of stuff and we wanted to play back what we just did here go back up to your
arrangement view by clicking here and you'll see that all these clips are in
the arrangement now and if you want to listen to the session that you just
recorded you click on this red button here then you can listen back to that
session that you just played around with
and obviously you can add more loops in there and change around however you like
and let's say you're happy with this and you want to send it to some friends or
upload it to SoundCloud or wherever you'll need to export this into an audio
file so go up to file then click on export audio and you'll want to make
sure that you're exporting the master that way you get all of the sounds in
here and you have a couple of options for the file type you have your WAV file
plus some others in there and also your mp3 so you can actually click on mp3 and
export it as wave and as mp3 or you can turn off wave and just export it as mp3
or just export it as WAV whatever you want I'm just going to export it as an
mp3 once you're ready here click on export find wherever you want to save it
click save and that's it click up here to check out some great free VST
instruments or click down here to see what YouTube thinks you should watch
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for simple green tech I'm Radio zane and we'll talk soon