Category: Blog

Playing keyboards live, or honestly, performing anything where you are trying to fill the sound out often requires that you play more notes then you have fingers to play. That is why the chord trigger in mainstage is so useful. You are able to use one hand to play pads or chords that you choose and play a melody with your other. Setting up an Ableton chord memorizer is ABSOLUTELY DOABLE. Here is what you will need to get the job done.   Midi Effect Rack Chord Plug-In Instrument Rack Luckily, these are all included with Intro, Standard, and Suite versions of Live, so no matter where you are at, we are in business. If you need just a standard keyboard split with no chord triggers, you can check out my…

Let's get right to the point. You know exactly what you are going to play, exactly the sounds you are going to use, and all you need to be able to do is select each sound in order. Mainstage made this super easy for you in the past, but now because you are using backing tracks, or looking for a program that runs with a little more stability, or perhaps because you wanted to incorporate some live looping, Mainstage is no longer the platform you are using. Unfortunately, your basic needs have still stayed the same. What do you do? Well, you've stumbled upon the right place. Today we are going to talk through exactly how to set up a scrolling patch list in Ableton live exactly the way you…

One of the features I love about Mainstage is the ability to "jump to" a specific sound no matter where you are in your patch list. Today we are going to look at how to create that same functionality inside Ableton.   But first... A story A few years back I was working on a production of Guys and Dolls with a very hip group of 5th-8th-graders, who did a wonderful job overall. No matter how hard we rehearsed it, Luck Be  A Lady was always just a little bit off, and to add insult to injury we had a full band backing them up. Anyone who has spent any amount of time accompanying children singing knows sometimes you need to jump to the spot they somehow ended up at, even if it…

Creating A Patch List In Ableton Using The Chain Selector   https://youtu.be/DTXQ8F_ZMeM   Mainstage makes creating a patch list very simple. Its entire design is based around that. However, when you look at the root of what MainStage is doing, it is broken down into three parts. Part one, receive midi. Part 2, tell midi where to go based off what is selected on the left side of the screen. Part 3, allow you to switch between sounds easily from a mapped controller. Ableton has all of these features already built into it's "instrument rack". Let's take the instruments rack already intended design and set it up to make it work for our patch list by making use of its chain selector, and a single button on your controller or…

Creating keyboard splits in Ableton like you can in MainStage     https://youtu.be/iNBfTVW0mQ8   Setting a keyboard split in Ableton is a necessity. As keyboard players we are constantly required to perform musical acrobatics, playing several sounds at a time, and often covering different types of sounds and textures simultaneously. Simply because of the nature of the beast, it is essential that we can assign different sounds to different zones on our keyboard. MainStage does this using its layer editor, which is super intuitive in its design and very easy to use. Ableton creates keyboard splits by making use of its “Instrument Rack”. Today, I am going to walk you through how to set up a keyboard split in Ableton An instrument rack is where the magic happens inside Ableton. It’s…