Load your library sounds into instruments and play them: a sample in Simpler plays across the keyboard, a handful of sounds build a kit in a Drum Rack, and you sequence a short part by drawing notes into a clip. By the end you have one short playable idea built from your own samples.
This adds instruments and MIDI to what you already know in Live. The steps for Simpler and the Drum Rack live in the manual pages linked at each one, and the MIDI sequencing has short videos.
Open a new Live Set and save it into your working folder at ~/Documents/lastname/.
Instruments go on MIDI tracks. An audio track holds recordings, played as clips. A MIDI track holds an instrument and the notes that play it. Simpler and the Drum Rack are instruments, so they go on MIDI tracks. A new Set opens with two MIDI tracks ready, marked MIDI in their names, one for each instrument. (To add another, press Cmd-Shift-T.) Dropping a sample straight onto an audio track plays it as a clip; loading it into an instrument is the other way.
The MIDI keyboard needs connecting before Live can hear it. Plug its USB cable into your computer.
Open Audio MIDI Setup, the same utility where you check your audio interface. This time look at its MIDI side: in the menu bar choose Window, then Show MIDI Studio, or press Command-2. The MIDI Studio window shows an icon for every MIDI device the Mac has found. Your keyboard appears here by name, in full color, once it is connected. An icon that is grayed out is a device the Mac is not seeing, which usually means the cable is loose or in the wrong port. If your keyboard is grayed, reseat the USB cable and watch the icon come up to full color.
Seeing the keyboard in MIDI Studio means the Mac has it. Live still needs to be told to use it, because Live does not assume what a new device is for. Open Live's Preferences from the Live menu, or press Command-comma, and click the Link, Tempo & MIDI tab.
The lower half of that tab is the MIDI Ports list. It shows every MIDI input and output Live can find, your keyboard among them, each with three switches: Track, Sync, and Remote. Find the row for your keyboard's input and turn its Track switch on. Track lets the keyboard send its notes into Live, so an armed MIDI track plays its instrument from the keys. Leave Sync off, which is for matching tempo with other gear, and leave Remote off, which is for mapping knobs and buttons to controls in Live. Playing notes needs only Track.
If your keyboard's row shows in red, Live cannot reach it: check that it is plugged in and that MIDI Studio still shows it. Once Track is on, close Preferences. The keyboard now feeds any armed MIDI track, though it stays silent until you load an instrument in the next section. This video covers the same setup:
Setting up MIDI in Live Video MIDI and Key Remote Control Live 11 manualSimpler is an instrument that plays a single sample across the keyboard. Open Live's browser, find Simpler under Instruments, and drag it onto one of your MIDI tracks. Simpler opens with a Drop Sample Here box.
Simpler is now the track's instrument, the first device in that track's chain. To see it again later, double-click the track's name: the Device View opens along the bottom of the screen with Simpler at the front of the chain. It is the same Detail View you opened for clips, switched to show the track's devices.
Drag one sound from your library onto that box. The waveform appears, and Simpler is now an instrument built from your sample. Keep your headphone level low to start and raise it as you go, since a sample can jump out louder than you expect. Play it: the sample plays at its recorded pitch around the middle of the keyboard, faster and higher as you go up, slower and lower as you go down. Simpler sets C3 as the root, the key that plays the sample unchanged, so the pitch you hear may sit higher or lower than you expect. The Transpose control in the Controls tab shifts the whole mapping if you want it centered differently.
To play it from the keyboard, click the track to select it, then click its round Arm button so the track listens for the keyboard. If you press keys and hear nothing, that arm is usually why.
The round Arm button means something different on the two track types. On an audio track, arming preps the track to record. On a MIDI track, arming tells the track to listen, so the notes from your keyboard reach the instrument and you hear it. That connection is not automatic: arming is what makes it, and the keyboard plays the instrument while the track is armed. Once you sequence a part instead, the clip plays the instrument on its own, so arming is only for playing live like this. A few notes is all you need, and you do not have to read music to place them.
Next to the Arm button is the track's Monitor setting, three buttons marked In, Auto, and Off. Monitoring decides whether the track passes its input through so you can hear it. Auto, the default, hears the input whenever the track is armed, which is what you want for playing: arm the track and the keyboard reaches the instrument. In hears the input all the time, and Off never does. If a track is armed and still silent, check that Monitor sits on Auto rather than Off.
Monitoring Live 11 manualSimpler can play your sample in three ways, chosen with the Mode switch on the left of the Sample tab. Two of them matter here.
Classic is the default, and it plays your sample like an instrument: the note sounds for as long as you hold the key, and it moves up and down in pitch as you play across the keyboard. Reach for it with melodic sounds, a sung note or a sustained tone you want to play as a line. Classic gives you the full ADSR envelope, with its controls in the amp area of the Sample tab and a graph of the shape on the Controls tab. Try the extremes: a long attack and release to make your sample swell in and fade away like a pad, all four stages short to turn the same sample into a sharp hit. Move one control at a time and listen.
One-Shot is built for hits. It plays the whole sample from start to finish every time you press a key, however short the press, so reach for it with drums, claps, and single stabs. In place of the four-stage envelope it gives you two controls, Fade In and Fade Out. Fade In sets how long the sound takes to reach full volume at its start, and Fade Out sets how long it takes to fall away at its end, each up to two seconds, shown on the sample display. Leave both at zero and the sample fires at full and runs to its end. A short Fade In softens a hard attack, and a short Fade Out smooths a clipped tail or clears a click at the end. For a clean drum or stab, those two fades are usually all the shaping you need.
The third mode, Slicing, chops one sample across many keys at once. Leave it for later. The full reference is here:
Simpler Live 11 manualA Drum Rack is a grid of pads, each pad holding one sample, each triggered by its own key. On your other MIDI track, drag a Drum Rack from the browser, found under Instruments where you found Simpler. You get a grid of empty pads, sixteen in view.
Drag a sound from your library onto a pad. The pad fills, and Live builds a Simpler under it to play that sound. Drop a few more onto other pads to build a small kit: something low for a kick, something sharp for a snare or clap, something short for a hat. Three or four pads is plenty. As you hover over a pad, the bar under the grid suggests the kind of sound that usually sits there, a kick on the lowest pad and percussion climbing from it. Follow those hints or ignore them.
Each pad answers to one key. The bottom-left pad is C1, and the pads climb from there. Play those keys, or click the pads with the mouse, to hear your kit.
Each filled pad carries small buttons to play it, mute it, or solo it, so you can drop a sound out or hear it on its own as you build, the same mute and solo you use when mixing. To swap a pad's sound, hover over it and click the Hot-Swap button to browse for a replacement. To rename a pad so you remember which sound is where, select it and press Cmd-R.
Every pad is a Simpler, so the controls you just learned are all there. Double-click a pad to open its Simpler and shape that sound: One-Shot for a hit that fires and runs, a short Fade Out to clear a click, Classic if you want it to hold. The kit is a row of Simplers, one for each pad.
Drum Racks go further, with ways to make one pad cut another off or stack several sounds on a key. Leave those for later. The full reference is here:
Drum Racks Live 11 manualRecording MIDI means arming a track and playing a part on the keyboard, with Live capturing your timing and how hard you hit. Sequencing means drawing the notes into the grid by hand, placing each one exactly where you want it. Here you sequence. You draw the notes, so the keyboard is for hearing your instrument, and a steady hand on the mouse matters more than playing skill.
Make a MIDI clip on one of your instrument tracks. Double-click an empty spot on the track in the Arrangement timeline, and an empty clip appears. Double-click that clip to open it in the lower half of the screen, in the MIDI Note Editor, also called the piano roll. A column of piano keys runs up the left side, one row per pitch, and time runs left to right. On a Simpler track each row is a pitch you can play, and on a Drum Rack track each row is one of your pads.
Think of a clip as a painter's canvas. How wide it is decides how much room you have to draw, and a fresh clip is small. A fresh clip also opens with its Loop switch on, which pins the canvas to the loop's width. With Loop on, dragging the clip's edge in the Arrangement repeats what is already there rather than giving you more room.
So before you draw a longer part, size the canvas. In the editor, click the Loop switch off. Then drag the clip's right edge in the Arrangement, or the clip's end marker in the editor, to make the canvas as wide as you want. Now there is room to draw the whole part.
When the part is drawn, switch Loop back on to make it repeat. A loop brace appears above the notes with a marker at each end. Drag those two markers to set where the loop starts and stops, which sets the loop's length. Live plays the notes inside the brace over and over, so the brace is how you choose what repeats and for how long. Spend time getting comfortable here. Resizing a clip and looping it on purpose is a move you will use constantly.
Turn on Draw Mode with the pencil button, or press B. Click in the grid to place a note on a row at the moment you want it, and it snaps to the nearest grid line. Click a note again to delete it, or drag its right edge to make it longer. Place a few notes, press play, and listen. Switch Draw Mode off when you want to select notes and drag them around instead.
The lane under the notes is velocity: how hard each note plays, soft to loud. Every note has a thin marker there. Drag a marker down for a quieter hit or up for a stronger one. A little variation keeps a part from sounding flat, a stronger downbeat here, a softer note there.
Velocity tops out at 127, an odd ceiling that comes straight from how MIDI was built. MIDI is the language your instruments speak, agreed on by the synth makers in 1983 so gear from different companies could finally play together. It carries each value, a pitch, a velocity, a knob position, in seven bits of data, and seven bits can count 128 values, numbered 0 to 127. (A byte holds eight bits. MIDI spends one of them flagging whether a message is a command or a number, which leaves seven for the value.) That 1983 decision is why your hardest hit reads 127, and velocity is only one of the values counted this way. Pitch uses the same 0 to 127 scale: middle C is note 60. Live labels the keys by name in the piano roll, where middle C reads as C3, the name for MIDI note 60.
These videos walk the whole process:
Sequencing MIDI, part 1 Video Sequencing MIDI, part 2 Video Editing MIDI clips Video Editing MIDI Notes and Velocities Live 11 manualBuild one short playable idea, about fifteen to thirty seconds. It can be a melodic line from Simpler, a beat from your Drum Rack, or the two together. Keep it small. What matters is that the sounds are your own, and you built a part from them. Save as you go with Cmd-S.
Export your idea to a single audio file at 48 kHz, 32-bit, saved into your working folder. Open the export dialog with File then Export Audio/Video, or Cmd-Shift-R.
If working with samples is the part that grabbed you, there is a whole course in it. MUS 485, Advanced Sound Design I: Sampling, Editing, and Mixing, takes sampling, editing, and mixing well past this first pass.
Links and further reading to come.