How do you create guitar chords entirely from Ableton Midi?

[Funk Bear]

Can you build guitar chords in ableton live 11 solely by using the midi and your own laptop keys? No jargon, please

[slow.robot]

what do you mean by “guitar chords”? like, automatically create guitar style voicings/inversions somehow?

[Funk Bear]

Yes. Literally just 12 bar stuff to play along with. I've found one video where a guy goes through chord voicins and inversions on a 'vertical keyboard' in midi, but do you do this for guitar? I dont have a guitar to plug in so I'm stuck with the software only. Where are the tutorilas on this? I wasn't expecting something so basic to such hard going!

[slow.robot]

I guess I don't understand the difficulty...if you're just looking to play these kinds of chords, you just need to familiarize yourself with how they work, and they shouldn't be hard to recreate. if you're playing them live, it might take a bit of practice, but unless you're trying to do jazz chords, it shouldn't be too bad. keep in mind though that instruments of different types have different restrictions and different strengths/weaknesses (e.g. on guitar, you can play two separate notes which are actually the same pitch; a flute is mostly monophonic, etc.).

if you're talking about programming into the sequencer it becomes incredibly simple--you just program in the chords you want, and you can easily transpose just by dragging them around.

playing guitar-style chords isn't any different than playing any other type of chord--you just need to learn the voicings you want. depending on the style, you might want to start by recreating barre chords and getting comfortable with those, then branching out.

[DunedinDragon]

Yes. Literally just 12 bar stuff to play along with. I've found one video where a guy goes through chord voicins and inversions on a 'vertical keyboard' in midi, but do you do this for guitar? I dont have a guitar to plug in so I'm stuck with the software only. Where are the tutorilas on this? I wasn't expecting something so basic to such hard going!

There's nothing particularly hard about recording guitar, but you have to have the right tools just as the person in the video had. The constraint you placed on it is MIDI. To do MIDI you have to enter the notes and tell Ableton what instrument you want played with those notes. There are some General MIDI instruments you can designate but those are very synthetic sounding generally so most people would likely use some form of guitar virtual instrument plugin to play the notes properly. Ableton does provide some guitar plugins unter the Instruments plugin Instrument Rack. You assign those to a MIDI track and then enter your individual MIDI notes. The fact that you don't have a guitar isn't relevant if you're doing MIDI because guitars don't produce MIDI anyway except some special guitars that are fairly expensive.

I occasionally create some guitar MIDI tracks but I use Native Instruments KONTAKT and have a few libraries I purchased from them for doing strummed acoustic guitar, picked acoustic guitar and some electric guitars. I use those as plugins on my tracks to construct and play the guitar phrases and it's very easy and can be done completely from your mouse and keyboard.

[Funk Bear]

Thanks. Are these KONTAKT plug ins free? Do they load directly into Ableton Live 11, or is it adifferent program? Have you a link you could post? : )

[DunedinDragon]

The ones I'm talking about aren't free. You can download the free version of Kontakt player to use them, but you have to pay for the library. Here's the ones I use:

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/p ... tric-mint/
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/p ... -acoustic/
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/p ... coustic-2/
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/p ... -acoustic/
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/p ... -sunburst/