BACK TO BASICS PART FIVE: INTRODUCING KEYBOARDS IN ABLETON LIVE

Sometimes a keyboard part is about performance, sometimes it’s about using other techniques to make an interesting sound and then a musical part from a less-than-exciting source sample. It really doesn’t matter if you’re not one of the all-time great keyboard players. Fortunately Live has many tools that can help to build interesting parts from a single note, and the most important one is racks.

KEEP IT SIMPLER

We’re using a very straightforward sample loaded into Simpler for this exercise—mainly chosen because Simpler is in every version of Live—Intro/Standard/Suite. We made this sample in the first place, which is an advantage because it means we know what the original pitch was. We’re making a pad sound, using long sustained notes, so we can better enjoy the sound as it develops. Building a preset for a busier, snappier, part with more notes might be quite different.

We want to make a sound that works with