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

Using hardware synths with Live

Connecting and using external synths with Live is super easy and super fun, in my opinion, as you are expanding your tool set for your music-making projects.

There are different ways you can manage external devices with Live, but we will look at the easiest and most convenient way: using an External Instrument device.

In this example, I will use my Moog Minitaur, one of my favorite synths:

Figure 14.22 – Moog Minitaur synthesizer

Figure 14.22 – Moog Minitaur synthesizer

Let’s see how to set this up in this section. First, we need to connect and configure the synth, so let’s get started.

Configuring Live’s audio and MIDI preferences

To configure Live’s audio and MIDI preferences, do the following:

  1. Open the Chapter 14.2 project file. (Everything is already set up, so you can follow along.)
  2. I connected the Moog to the computer with a USB cable. This synth supports MIDI over a USB cable, so I can send MIDI...