Yo, yo, yo, what’s good, it’s Loki. If you land on this video, you’re in the right place because what I do on this channel is I teach music producers how to navigate Ableton Live and how to make music.
So if that sounds good to you, I need you to stay tuned.
Let’s go.
Alright, so let’s get into this video.
You’ve seen them, now you read the title. I’m going to be showing you how to use the piano roll here in Ableton Live.
Most of you might be familiar with the piano roll in Logic Pro or even in FL Studio, but Ableton Live does have a piano roll.
So let’s go ahead and get into it.
And I’m going to show you how to use this piano right.
And so not gon na waste any time, I’m gon na get straight into it.
And then I got one bonus tip for you at the end. I need you to stay to the end to watch it.
It is very important.
You don’t want to miss it, because it’s going to help your workflow and it’s going to make everything really smooth for you.
And it’s going to make it really simple for you when you’re making music.
Okay, so make sure you stay tuned for that bonus tip.
Also, go ahead in the comments right now if you can go ahead and click down in the comments.
Let me know how long you’ve been using Ableton. If you’re thinking about buying Ableton, anything like that, and anything you want to learn about Ableton, put that in the comments. I need to get in the comments and put those things in there and tell me so I can show you
Alright, so here we go, we got the keys on the piano. is what I’m going to use for this example.
So let me show you a couple of different ways that you’ll be accessing the piano roll.
There are two main ways.
And then I’m going to show you this bonus tip.
Okay, so let’s go ahead and get rid of this because we don’t need these drums right here.
So here we are in Ableton, so this is a Session View.
If you click on this tab down, it brings you into Arrangement View.
So we’re going to be here in the Session View.
So if I go here, to my instrument on this, this piano here, if I were to double click this, it’s going to bring up this, this clip, you can call it a mini clip right here in the Session View.
Okay, so that’s one way to access the piano roll.
Right now I’m going to show you how to use the piano. real quick look, you came in here the piano right now. you see that I’m clicking on it.
So don’t leave yet, it’s not over.
Alright, so the second way you can get to it is if you were to come here in the Arrangement View.
And if you came here on Left, left click and held it out to however many bars you wanted to, and you right click, and then you would insert a MIDI clip, then that will also bring up another type of piano roll.
Alright, so how to actually use this piano roll though, because once again, you can not hear the piano, right.
So let me show you how to do this.
So let’s go to Session View.
Okay, so here we are in a Session View.
Alright, so the first thing is we’re going to go ahead and duplicate this and create a four bar loop.
Now, in order to hear what you’re going to be playing, you want to hit the not the fault. Sorry, you don’t have this headphone button here.
Okay.
And when you hit the head, start getting the sounds for the piano.
Now, if you left click and hold this, he drags her left, it’s gonna minimize notes, make it look really small, the keys and you drag it to the right, it’s going to make it really big. I like really big, so I can see what’
So the next thing you want to do here on the piano, or they use it, is if you right click, you have this fixed grid down here.
They’re called bars, but really their notes, okay, so you can choose quarter note length, right?
You can choose a half note, a half note.
Right.
And then one bar is really a whole note.
So if I were to use an example here, for you guys, and say, you know, this was a chord, I don’t know if this is a court, but we’ll see a minor sermon in March.
Right, so if you hit the play button now, right here on this top hit, this is gon na play the A minor.
Okay, and so forth.
Five notes, this is what I’m showing you.
Right.
So your whole note, right?
If we’re gon na do chords, so that’s really how you’re using this piano roll right here.
Same thing, if you come over here, in this section, you can also choose how many bars you want, which was eight, which I showed you earlier when I did the mini clip, right.
And same thing with this, you can pick your note lengths, whether it’s a bar, our whole note, you can say, a half note on the quarter note, so on and so forth.
Right?
Now, let me show you something cool, because I want to show you this.
And this is really going to help your workflow.
And yes, we are now getting into the bonus tip.
And yes, this is a short video, because I don’t want to waste anybody’s time.
And I want to show you guys how to really do this.
It’s really cool.
So here we are.
And I want to show you this because I think this is a really cool concept or something you guys can do, right?
So we can see we’ll make these eight bars, right?
These are whole notes.
Now, what you do here, because you want this to stay in sequence.
What I’m gon na do is I’m gon na click and I’m I’m going to drag this right here, over until I hit the two.
Alright, so now it’s not a bar. It is technically seven bars.
But I’m gon na come back here and let’s pull this nine, so we can keep our eight bars.
Okay, you guys can see what’s going on.
So what we’re going to do, and this is like my favorite part of this piano roll in Ableton, is I want to put this on scale.
So, I know any note that I go ahead and input into the piano roll is going to be in the scale that I chose, right.
So this is what I’m doing. Let’s, let’s use a minor, for example, because it is really easy to put that skill in.
Okay.
So here’s an A.
So we know all the white keys are going to be the A minor, right?
Back to the A.
Now what you do from this point on is if you hit this fold button right here, it’s gonna fold it in scale.
So now I’m on scale.
Now you can do two skills to scale worse, if you want.
If you want to duplicate this, hold Shift, hit the up button, and come back over with it.
Now you got two scales of a minor, really two octaves, I should say.
And now if you don’t make a chord progression, you can miss the you know, ideally, the other one would give you a chord because if you unfold it, that makes a minor chord.
So now if I hit the play button, the reason why I moved this over is so you can see this.
And then when I press play, it’s going to start from here and not back here.
So right.
And then say, and I’m double clicking this in, you don’t have to double click this, you can right click hit draw mode, just like that.
And just do that, right.
And this, click it and if you click that again, oh actually turned it off.
So write this up.
Just like that.
Ramune.
See what the next one is.
I don’t know what the next one is.
Imagine literally how you’re using the piano roll.
Okay, and say, if you’re like, I just want to do melodies.
Same concept.
If I if I duplicate this right here, same thing for melodies.
Once a duplicate, it goes pretty slow, because of the fact that I’m using the key zone.
And that’s a plugin third party.
So it’s a little bit slow, right.
And I can actually come in here and just get rid of all these here because, right.
So if I’m here, we can bring a minor just for example.
Okay, in Command D duplicate that we can make a little bit.
And then what you can do here is say you’re like I want to do quarter notes.
Let’s go quarter notes.
Maybe half notes.
This point on use, hit the play button again.
And then you can come in here and you just play with it.
Make these coordinates.
It’s really, really easy to use this, right?
And you can just keep on going.
You please.
It’s really really easy.
But that’s how you fold it right. It’s a real simple way to do it.
I hope you enjoyed this video. This was super super cool for you.
Go ahead, hit that like button. You know I’m saying hit the subscribe button. You know I’m saying hit the bell notification notify when I drop a new video.
That’s a video and that’s how you use the piano roll here in Ableton. I hope you liked it.
I’m out of peace.
No luck when you’re trying to come
