Hi Everyone,
Really struggling with Ableton Live 9.
It's not easy or intuitive at all. I feel I need a degree in it to work it all out.
QUESTION 1: HOW DO YOU MANUALLY CREATE BEATS USING THE MIDI KEYBOARD?
Currently I am doing the following and getting stuck at one point. I'm so close!
1. Check Midi is responsive with yellow light in top right corner
2. Create Midi Track
3. Go to "Drums" and select a sound
THIS IS WHERE I GET STUCK
4. You can PLAY the sound but ONLY a specific section in a grey highlighted box and thus only ONE part of the Midi keyboard. This is where I feel VERY frustrated as obviously I want to play the whole Keyboard!
QUESTION 2
How do I use the Computer Keyboard on Ableton Live?
Midi - drums
Re: Midi - drums
What you've loaded is a 'Drum Rack'.
A Drum Rack allows you to drag and drop sounds and instruments into each of the slots. Each slot is a chromatic note from a keyboard.
There should also be Drum Rack kits available that already have an assortment of sounds loaded as a starter. Then if you want to change a particular sound you can either Hot Swap or just search in the browser for a replacement.
To use qwerty keyboard, make sure the keyboard icon on the top is activated. Then home row is the C major scale (asdfghjkl is CDEFGABCD) and some of the letters above are the 'black notes' of the keyboard.
On your qwerty, the letters 'z' and 'x' are octave up and down. If you're hitting asdf and they blink in the wrong parts of the Drum Rack, try moving up or down an octave using those.
'c' and 'v' are for note velocity. If you want them to be as if they are hitting the from very softly, hit c a few times. If you want it to be as if hitting hard then hit v a few times.
The bottom of the Ableton Live screen will give info on what octave and velocity you are currently at.
Learning anything new can be tricky. The learning curve of Live is steap at first but smooths out very very quickly. It just takes messing around with Live a lot to get the basics down. In the process, you sometimes come up with ideas you'd never have thought of if you knew the program really well.
A Drum Rack allows you to drag and drop sounds and instruments into each of the slots. Each slot is a chromatic note from a keyboard.
There should also be Drum Rack kits available that already have an assortment of sounds loaded as a starter. Then if you want to change a particular sound you can either Hot Swap or just search in the browser for a replacement.
To use qwerty keyboard, make sure the keyboard icon on the top is activated. Then home row is the C major scale (asdfghjkl is CDEFGABCD) and some of the letters above are the 'black notes' of the keyboard.
On your qwerty, the letters 'z' and 'x' are octave up and down. If you're hitting asdf and they blink in the wrong parts of the Drum Rack, try moving up or down an octave using those.
'c' and 'v' are for note velocity. If you want them to be as if they are hitting the from very softly, hit c a few times. If you want it to be as if hitting hard then hit v a few times.
The bottom of the Ableton Live screen will give info on what octave and velocity you are currently at.
Learning anything new can be tricky. The learning curve of Live is steap at first but smooths out very very quickly. It just takes messing around with Live a lot to get the basics down. In the process, you sometimes come up with ideas you'd never have thought of if you knew the program really well.
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marlonzuri
- Posts: 65
- Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2017 9:03 pm
Re: Midi - drums
Amen, I came from Logic (Logic user for about 5 years) and have been using Live exclusively for a little over a year. At first I thought I would never learn it however after a while I got used to the workflow and started figuring everything out. So glad I made the switch, as great as Logic was, Ableton is just on a different level, never going back.yur2die4 wrote: Learning anything new can be tricky. The learning curve of Live is steap at first but smooths out very very quickly. It just takes messing around with Live a lot to get the basics down. In the process, you sometimes come up with ideas you'd never have thought of if you knew the program really well.
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snakedogman
- Posts: 852
- Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2007 11:04 pm
- Location: the Netherlands
Re: Midi - drums
If you want to play drumsamples up and down the whole keyboard (which isn't all that "obvious" at all), load a Simpler device into a midi track and use that instead of the Drum Rack. You can drag any audio file into the Simpler and it will play over the whole keyboard. Live is quite easy and intuitive. That doesn't mean you can operate it flawlessly without bothering to read the manual.