Our course tutor Matt, has worked extensively with Ableton and it has been an integral part of his work as a musical director in the music industry. Matt has used the software package to build live touring shows for pop artists and also used it in London’s Westend to trigger the music for The Westend show, The Illusionists.

Live is fast, fluid and flexible software for music creation and performance. It comes with effects, instruments, sounds and all kinds of creative features—everything you need to make any kind of music.

The course starts at a basic level and will cover all the features of Ableton’s two views; arrangement view and session view. You will be taken through all the important shortcuts which will prove important as you develop your workflow. You will work with audio stems and samples and learn how Ableton can manipulate the audio using the powerful warping features on board. As well as working with audio, you will learn how to input midi information into Ableton to trigger the endless amount of instrument plugins available to you.

You will learn how to use Ableton’s dedicated control surface, the Push 2. You will program drum loops and other instrument loops and trigger audio samples directly from the Push 2 to create your own live set.

We will move onto more advanced features of Ableton such as the powerful automation features, audio to midi conversion and also how to prepare your arrangement to be used in session view which will allow you to improvise with your music without the constraints of arrangement view.