Alright, let’s get into Ableton Live. We’ll spend a number of posts exploring Ableton’s functionality and creative ways of using it. Now you will need some knowledge on Ableton in order to continue so for basic intros to Ableton, there’s tons on Ableton’s website (ableton.com). Now, let’s get started.

Import Stems

So, let’s begin by adding the folder where your audio files are located. Assuming you’ve got your stems organised into folders, you’ll be able to add your master folder into Ableton’s browser. This makes navigating audio files much easier. If you can’t see the browser, click on the arrow at the top left underneath the ‘Link” button. When the browser opens up, go to the left hand side and find the option that says ‘Add Folder…’ Then in Finder, find and select the folder and press ‘Open’.

You’re going to have to import songs individually so your next step is to open the folder containing one of your songs in Ableton’s browser. Click the drop-down arrow to reveal all the stems, select them all and drag them into Ableton’s main area. By default, the stems will be stacked vertically, so while dragging the stems, hold ‘Command’ to make them stack horizontally. Then drop them onto a scene with the first clip on the first channel. (You’ll notice the first 2 channels were MIDI channels but, because they were unused, they were converted to audio channels. Blank channels are also renamed by the name of the audio file you drop onto it).

The last step is to rename the scene so when the scene is activated and the audio clips start playing, they are in sync with Ableton’s global clock.

Rename the scene with all the tracks with your song name, then add the tempo then the time signature.

1st song done!

Adding Additional Songs Method 1

When adding in additional songs, it’s important to note that you may have more stems than audio channels and will need to add extra channels in. In this second example, we’ll add the stems that already have corresponding audio channels first, similarly to how we imported the first stems and then reorder them to match.

After that, we’ll create audio channels for the remaining stems without channels and then put the stems onto those channels.

It’s important to double check you’ve added all the stems in. In this case, one was missed so let’s add it onto its corresponding channel.

Because we added the stems in and had to reorder them, some of the stems are a different colour to their corresponding audio channels. This doesn’t affect audio playback but for those of you who care about a neat workspace and having all the bass stems one colour, all guitar stems one colour, etc, you can easily fix this. Select all audio tracks and then >> ‘Assign track colour to clips’.

Again, the last step is to rename the scene with the song name, add the tempo and time signature.

Adding Additional Songs Method 2

Our last suggestion to adding additional songs in Ableton is pretty similar to the first. This method is simply adding each stem individually rather than dragging them in and reordering them. You may prefer this way which is why we decided to add it. In our next demonstration, we add in each stem individually, adding any extra audio channels as we go along, and finish up with labelling our scene.

We recommend grouping stems by type, so all bass stems are on one channel, all piano stems on one audio channel and so on and so forth. This is to help reduce the amount of audio channels you have, save CPU usage and save you having to route audio channels individually. However, if you haven’t got many songs in your set, or you’ve got a really powerful machine, you could consider importing stems into Ableton, the way we demonstrated initially. But rather than adding the stems from the next songs to the same audio channel, you could group all the audio channels from the first song together and then import the second song and repeat. One advantage to having all the stems on different audio channels is the ability to change the audio levels on a particular channel without affecting anything else. We’ll demonstrate this below.

Closing Thoughts

We hope you’ve found this helpful and straightforward. Ableton can be intimidating for some so we hope this has been clear, and if anything isn’t, feel free to reach out to us at hello@renderthemusic.com. That being said, we hope you’ve learned something.

This may be sufficient for your needs but if you’re looking for more ways to use Ableton, check back for future posts!

Thanks for reading!