Book Image

The Music Producer's Creative Guide to Ableton Live 11

By : Anna Lakatos
Book Image

The Music Producer's Creative Guide to Ableton Live 11

By: Anna Lakatos

Overview of this book

The Music Producer's Guide to Ableton Live will help you sharpen your production skills and gain a deeper understanding of the Live workflow. If you are a music maker working with other digital audios workstations (DAWs) or experienced in Ableton Live, perhaps earlier versions, you’ll be able to put your newfound knowledge to use right away with this book. You’ll start with some basic features and workflows that are more suitable for producers from another DAW looking to transfer their skills to Ableton Live 11.2. As you explore the Live concept, you’ll learn to create expressive music using Groove and MIDI effects and demystify Live 11’s new workflow improvements, such as Note Chance and Velocity Randomization. The book then introduces the Scale Mode, MIDI Transform tools, and other key features that can make composition and coming up with melodic elements easier than ever before. It will also guide you in implementing Live 11's new and updated effects into your current workflow. By the end of this Ableton Live book, you’ll be able to implement advanced production and workflow techniques and amplify live performance capabilities with what the Live 11 workflow has to offer.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Live Concept and Workflow
7
Part 2: Creative Music Production Techniques with Ableton Live 11
15
Part 3: Deep Dive into Ableton Live

An introduction to MPE

MPE stands for MIDI Polyphonic Expression, and it allows you to add more feelings and movement to your music. We can add bends, slides, and pressure to each individual note we play (even if the notes are forming a chord!).

Figure 12.1 – Using MPE in Live 11

Figure 12.1 – Using MPE in Live 11

What does this mean exactly?

Let’s say you have a chord recorded and would like to change the pitch of the chord toward the end of the notes. For this, you can easily write the pitch change into an automation or modulation envelope (either by automating the device’s pitch parameter that is playing back the chords, or using modulation through clip envelopes). However, when you do this, the pitch change will be applied to all the notes within the chord/clip. What if you wanted to pitch down the root note of the chord but pitch up the top note? Well, that is one of the things that MPE allows you to do. With MPE, we can control multiple parameters of a single...