So, in spite of my warning, you’ve decided to take the plunge and Learn music production through Ableton with me. OK, you asked for it, you got it. Prepare to open your wallet and go down the deepest rabbit hole you have ever been down.
For starters, I recommend that you find a way to get Ableton Live Intro as a bundle with other hardware or as an inclusion with other software. For example, Ableton Note for iOS includes a Live Intro license and can be purchased relatively inexpensively. If you’re feeling extra fancy and are are extremely committed, you can buy an audio interface such as the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 which includes a license for Ableton Live Intro.
As mentioned in the first article in this series, we’ll be learning the following:
Part 1: Orient yourself by learning how to make simple beats in Ableton Lite, we’ll cover:
- Switching from session to arrangement view in Ableton and setting track key / BPM for a project
- Making a bunch of simple 3-track beats with drums, synth, and bassline by
- Creating an Intro section and build it into a full beat section
- Using the drum kit for kick / snare / hat
- Add some sounds to the beat for bass and a topline
Note that I will give you less and less detailed instructions the further along we go in this lesson and in future lessons to encourage you to push yourself and learn how to do these actions without me helping you. As you learn with me, you will probably have to go back to previous instructions to figure out how to connect the steps on your own. This is for your own good, if I make it too easy, you will not learn. However, if I’m making it too hard in a specific part, let me know by emailing [learninglive at ourfriendgus dot com] and I’ll help you out and will help others out too by updating the instructions.
I plan for these tutorials / lessons to come every 1-2 weeks, so don’t feel rushed to get through them!
Ableton Basics
Ableton is an extremely daunting piece of software to use when you’re just starting out. It has two modes of song writing:
- Session View
- Arrangement view
You can quickly switch between session and arrangement view by pressing tab on your keyboard or by clicking the straight-lined-up bacon icons on the top right of the program UI the horizontal bacon is arrangement, the vertical bacon is the session:
I use the arrangement view 90% of the time and for this intro exercise, we’ll just be using this non-default view for our projects. If you see columns for your tracks click the lines (bacon) or press tab on your keyboard to get on the same page as me.
Before we continue, I would like to cover a few Ableton keyboard shortcuts that if you accidentally press them will give you a hard time when you’re starting out.
- Pressing Tab will switch between session and arrangement mode. We’ll mostly be using arrangement mode for this intro course.
- Pressing shift+Tab will switch between audio/midi mode and devices mode in the devices section on the bottom of the screen.
- Pressing m on your keyboard will turn Ableton into MIDI mode which allows you to use the keys on your computer as a virtual musical keyboard: if this mode is enabled, you will see the keyboard icon in the top right of Ableton become highlighted – you can press m on your keyboard to exit this mode:
- Pressing a on your keyboard will turn Ableton into AUTOMATION mode which allows you to create automations (don’t worry for now about what these are). This icon, with the diagonal dots and lines stands for automation mode:
What IS important for you to know is that when you are in automation mode, you will see lines on your tracks and on the right of the UI and you will see lists of parameters being automated. Press a to exit this mode – if you are in midi keyboard mode, pressing a will not exit this mode, so make sure the keyboard icon is not highlighted if you’re experiencing issues.
Track key and BPM are in the top left of the Ableton UI and will determine the beat and highlighted notes while you compose your track. For now, we’ll set the BPM to 120, because we’ll be producing a basic house track (which I am led to believe you can’t properly skank to but we’ll get to other genre’s another time). We’ll also set the key to the most boring key, C Major, because it’s the easiest key to write in and is the sound of pop music.
Making some simple beats
For this section, I’ll be using the free Vibrations pack, download it from here.
Creating a drum beat
By default, Ableton will create two audio and two midi tracks for you to compose with. Highlight a 16-bar section of the top midi track, right click, and select insert midi:
If you want to save time and are an achiever, you can alternatively press ctrl+shift+m on your keyboard to save time when doing this step. I strongly recommend you get in the habit of using keyboard shortcuts because these will save you hundreds to thousands of hours over the course of your journey.
Next, because we have downloaded the Vibrations pack, we can now search for the pack and highlight it in the Ableton browser by pressing Ctrl+F and typing “Vibrations” in the search bar or clicking the search bar and typing in “Vibrations”:
If you aren’t seeing what I’m seeing, click the packs section from the places bar on the left of the screen and search will constrain its results to that “place”:
Open the vibrations folder from the pack you downloaded earlier and drag the atlas kit to the top track in the song arrangement:
Double-click the midi clip we have inserted and you will see the midi appear on the bottom of the screen, if you don’t see the midi appear, you can press shift+tab to change between midi and devices in the clip view.
Next, we’ll be changing from a 16-bar loop to a 4-bar loop by dragging the top loop indicator on the clip from 16 down to the end of 4:
Finally, click an empty area of the arrangement view and then click back on the top of the midi section to zoom into the four bar loop we just created:
Now, in the clip view, you will see just a four bar section of MIDI:
Place a kick on every beat for the first bar of the loop’s midi:
Now drag a box around those first 4 kicks with the box extending to the second bar and click ctrl+d to duplicate those 4 kicks to extend from the first bar to the four bars of our house beat:
Now if you press spacebar or click the play icon, you will hear a familiar drum beat from the house genre with the kicks.
Next, add a snare sound on the second and fourth beat. In my example, I’ll just use the provided snare, you can also use the rimshot:
Duplicate the snare or rims just as we did with the kicks so they’re going through the entire beat:
Now when you play the track, you’ll have a simple house beat with snare and kick. Let’s add some hats to give the beat more drive and a cymbal on the end of the fourth bar with all of the other sounds deleted (by dragging in the midi clip) to give variation on the beat’s turnaround section:
Click play and you’ll hear the full beat. Wow, now you’re getting somewhere, eh! Next, we’ll split up the full beat to turn it into sections that build on top of each other. Start by clicking the fourth bar on the midi clip and pressing control+e on your keyboard or right clicking and selecting “split”;
Again, I recommend you get in the habit of using the keyboard shortcut (control+e) instead of the mouse because it is much faster and will save you effort over time. Do the same thing on the 8th bar so that we have 3 different midi clips:
You can right click on the clips to change their colors so that they’re easier to see in the project:
You can also press control+r to rename the clips – I’ll call them intro, more, full beat:
This is a great time to point out that you can click the headphones icon to enable “preview / listen” when notes are inserted or played:
Turning this on during this phase will make it easier for us to understand the sound that we’ll be selecting and removing from our basic beat. After you have auditioned the parts to remove, it can be a good idea to turn this off so it doesn’t distract you later when you are finding more variations with the song playing back.
Next, we’ll remove parts of the full beat in intro and more to build up to the full beat. Doing this will make the song easier to mix for DJs. Click the dark / light keys to select a full row of midi notes – this is the section below the headphone icon:
I’ll remove all of the snares and all of the hats from our intro section by clicking the key and either pressing 0 on the keyboard to mute the notes (hats) or by pressing delete to delete the notes (snares) – I’m just doing this both ways to show you the difference:
After you have muted the hats and deleted the snares, the intro midi will look like this:
You can audition the track at this point (spacebar or clicking the play icon) and will hear just the kick in the first phase of our song. Next, select the more section and only delete the hats:
Finally, you can use the set button on the top right of the Ableton UI to set sections, “Intro”, “Build”, “full beat” on your creation.
You can rename the set markers just like we renamed the midi clips by pressing Ctrl+r for rename.
Now that you have a drum beat, it’s time to move on to adding some bass and a synth.
Adding a synth to the beat
Now that we have a drumline, it’s time to add a synth to the beat. We’ll just use simple stabs. First, select the second channel, add midi, and then turn the midi track into a 4-bar loop as we did for the drums:
Next, search for the vibrations pack by selecting packs in the places section, and searching for “vibrations” in the search bar like we did for drums. Then within the vibrations pack, select sounds > Synth Keys > Bouncy castle, and drag the Bouncy Castle Mallets preset onto the second track:
If you dragged it onto the wrong track, press control+z and undo and do it again. Now you will have a midi track with the instrument preset for the mallets loaded. You’ll want to open the midi for the instrument by double-clicking on the blue section with our 4-bar midi loop and can then input a little ditty with some sounds that are in-key for our song by looking at the highlighted keys in the midi editor and placing notes at appropriate places (we set it to C-major earlier). My riff looks like the following:
The notes follow the sequence C2 > G#1 > F1 and they hit a little off beat after the downbeat (the first drum sound). You can note that the C and F are in key and the G#1 note is out of key – these are highlighted in the note editor in purple on my screen.
We’ll next be adding a bass sound which will require us to insert a new MIDI track on our project by pressing ctrl+shift+t or right clicking the tracks and selecting Insert new Midi track:
The new empty MIDI track will show up in our tracks:
We’ll select a BASS sound from the vibrations pack (I selected Retromancer Bass), drag it onto the new midi track, we’ll insert midi as we did before, set the loop to 4 bars as we did before using the loop selector in the MIDI clip, and we’ll insert bass notes that follow the same key as we used in the top section previously (C, G#, F). After you have added the notes, your bassline will look like the following MIDI clip:
Press space bar or click the play button to listen to your beat. It should sound something like this:
If I instructed you correctly, you have created your first beat in Ableton Intro! Congratulate yourself and save the project by pressing Control+S and putting the project somewhere that makes sense for you. If you want, you can export the project by pressing ctrl+shift+r or file> export audio/video. I like to keep my projects organized by date in a special folder on my computer. For me, I’ll save it as c:\music\timers\2026\November\2026-09-06 – you’re welcome to save it in a manner that makes sense to you.
If you want to export the project to share the beat with a friend, you can press control+shift+r to export it as a wav and MP3 file which can be played on your favorite music players. I like to export unfinished versions of my projects and put them in with the project so that I can audition projects without having to open them in Live.
You can download my version of the project in a zip as week1.zip – you’ll note that I have rendered the project and provided it in the zip for so that you don’t have to open the project in Live to hear it and so that you can compare the rendered version to the project version should it not sound correct.
Exercise
Now that you have done the beat creation process with my help, it’s a great time to experiment on your own and try creating more beats with Drums, Synth, and Bass that use different sounds and rhythms. Try and make one a day for a week or two and see how you feel about it! Repetition will help you instinctually get these basics down and although it may take you a long time at first, you’ll find that if you learn the keyboard shortcuts and process for getting the steps down pat that you can bust out a beat really fast.