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Ableton Live: Start to Finish
Ableton Live is without doubt the greatest music production software ever created. Whether you’ve never opened it in your life or are an experienced producer looking to make the switch, this course is for you.
This complete course has 12 hours of world class tuition from one of the planet’s leading trainers, split into handy videos that you can work through in your own time.
What’s included?
This course comes absolutely packed with content for you to use and work through. Here’s what you’ll get:
- 58 videos of world class tuition in Ableton Live software
- 12 hours of content split into handy length videos
- 30 Ableton Live projects showing a track being put together from start to finish
- Huge sample pack of sounds for your production
- Personal Feedback Calls from an industry professional (Pro Version Only)
Intermediate / Advance
The Tutor
Simon Stokes is a highly accomplished music producer and a world-class tutor.
Signed to the legendary Soma Records under his Petrichor alias, he has released a string of singles and two albums to critical acclaim – Mångata (2015) and in Narisshu (2019), picking up awards such as Mixmag’s Album of the Month. He performs the world over as a DJ and live act.
He is Scotland’s only Ableton Certified Trainer, chosen by Ableton themselves as one of the very best trainers in the world, and runs SubSine | Academy of Electronic Music, Scotland’s leading electronic music production school.
100% Money Back Guarantee
We are completely confident that you’ll join the thousands of other students who love this course.
However, if for any reason you aren’t enjoying the course within 7 days of purchase we will offer you a full refund. Simple as that.
- Module 1 - Drums & FXs
- Module 2 - Sound Design
- Module 3 - Arrangement & Workflow
- Module 4 - Mixdown & Master
The first step of your journey is learning the interface and creating some great drum loops. In Module 1 we focus on your first steps with Ableton Live – understanding the layout, working with Impulse & Drum Racks and bending and mangling your beats with audio effects. We’re working exclusively with MIDI here, so every beat you create is truly your own.
- The Interface: Learn about how to navigate round Ableton Live including the browser, transport and mixer sections.
- Working in Session View: Building your ideas quickly and easily using Ableton Live’s killer feature.
- Creating a Beat: Start using Live’s powerful Impulse device to ditch the audio loops and create your beats from scratch.
- Core Percussion: Flesh out your kick drum with additional percussion.
- Creative Percussion: Time to get creative! Play around with other percussive parts to flesh out the groove.
- Drum Racks & Velocity: Learn how to use Live’s powerful drum racks with 808 and 909 sounds, plus much more.
- Working with Clips: Get taught how to manipulate Live’s clips to create interesting patterns.
- Working with Scenes: Arrange your project so you can perform it as a live jam into an arrangement!
- Extend your Loop: Learn how to flesh out your loop into an interesting and engaging drum pattern.
- Audio Effects: Learn how to use reverb and delays to improve your sounds.
- Modulation Effects: Give texture to your elements by using modulation effects to add movement to your layers.
- Filters & Spectrum: Here we focus on audio engineering principles to learn about filters and the audio spectrum.
- Saving & Preferences: Take a look around Live’s key preferences to get the most out of it, as well as how to save your project.
This module deals with sound design in all its glory. First of all you’ll learn a detailed approach to sound design with synthesisers, recreating classic acid TB-303 sounds, house pads, trance bass and lead sounds and much more.
Then we’ll look at warping, audio mangling and manipulation, how to work with drum loops and how to sample music to make edits to give you a well-rounded skillset for sound design inside Ableton Live.
- Introduction to Sound Design: Get an overview of what we’ll be covering in this module including audio manipulation and working with synths.
- Music Theory: Learn the core music theory that you need to know to be able to produce melodic music as well as dark techno.
- Drawing in Notes: Learn how to add an edit musical notes inside Live using the mouse, computer keyboard and MIDI controller.
- MIDI Controllers: Get the most out of your Ableton Live experience by using a MIDI controller.
- MIDI Mapping: Map up knobs and faders to get realtime performance control over your music production
- Synthesizer Basics: Learn about the fundamentals of synthesis such as oscillators, envelopes, filters and more!
- Ableton Analog: Get a detailed rundown of how to use this powerful synthesizer
- Classic Sounds: Recreate the legendary acid house sound of the TB-303, parts of a Mr Fingers track as well as plucky basslines and searing leads!
- Synthesizer Modulation: Utilize LFOs and other modulation techniques to give movement to your sounds
- MIDI Effects: Learn how to use Ableton’s MIDI Effects such as Chord, Arpeggiator, Pitch, Velocity and more…
- Using Audio Loops: Bring in some pre-made loops to your project ready for mangling
- Warping in Detail: Bring in samples and vocals of any tempo and use them! Learn how to warp loops, acapellas and full tracks
- Simpler: Learn how to sample sections of other people’s music on a keyboard using Simpler
- Submit Your Track: At this point we encourage you to submit your track to us so we can give you a feedback video to help you improve. We focus on what’s working, what you could add and how to do it – this is an invaluable resource!
In this module we’ll see your track develop from a vibe into a complete track. We’ll look at the arrangement view inside Ableton Live, before investigating different techniques for arranging your track. Developing your workflow for music production is crucial to making music quickly, and by the end of the module you’ll have yours dialled. We'll look at:
- Introduction to Arrangement: Understand the arrangement view in Ableton Live and prepare to move to it.
- Track Structure: Learn about how dance music is structured to be effective in clubs and on the radio.
- Starting Your Arrangement: Find out how to begin moving your clips into a structure which keeps interest
- Additive & Subtractive Arrangement: Check out both ‘additive’ and ‘subtractive’ approaches to arrangement.
- Automation: Learn how to make parameters move over time and use some of the deeper automation functions inside Live
- Recording Automation: Use your mouse, keyboard or MIDI controller to record automation
- Live Jam Arrangement: Learn how to record your full arrangement as a live jam!
- Automation Tricks: Learn some of Ableton Live’s deeper secrets relating to automation to give your tracks unique feeling.
- Adding FX: Add FX to your track to build tension and create impact where it’s needed.
- Sends & Returns: Discover the power of Return Tracks in Ableton Live and how to use them effectively.
- Buildups & Breakdowns: Create energy, tension and huge impact in your tracks by getting the buildups and breakdowns just right!
In the last module of the course, we delve into the dark art of the mixdown. Learn from a tutor with over 20 years of experience in mixing down tracks as you explore key concepts, EQing, compression, setting your levels and so much more.
Give your tracks the mixdown they deserve before your share your music with friends, DJs and record labels.
Topics covered include:
- Introduction to Mixdowns: Learn about key concepts relating to the mixdown of your track, such as decibels, best interface settings and workflow
- EQ Three & EQ Eight: Delve into the powerful equalisation tools that are built into Ableton Live 10
- Making a ‘Self Reference’: How to use your own track as a reference for improving your mixdowns, this is an incredible technique!
- EQing Your Elements: We go through every track of the included project and EQ them individually, understanding key decisions along the way that lead to a professional mix.
- Levels & Panning: Sometimes all you need is to get the levels and panning correct, and here we look at techniques for perfecting your mix.
- Sidechain Compressors: Create the ducking effect and use sidechain compressors as a tool for making space in a mix.
- Compressors: The dark art of compression is often misunderstood by beginners to music production. Get a grasp of what Ableton Live has to offer.
- Advanced Compressors: Understand all about Threshold, Ratio, Attack & Release settings on a compressor to make sure you’re using them appropriately.
- Glue Compressor: Start using this amazing compressor which is modeled on the old drum bus compressors that were so famous in their day.
- Makeup Gain: Understand why not to use makeup gain on compressors.
- Reference Track Tips: It’s amazing what you can pick up by using reference tracks. Learn how to get the most out of them.
- Making a Premaster: We look at how to render off the perfect premaster to send to a mastering engineer or to use for a self-master.
- Making a Master: How to make a quick master to share with friends, DJs and record labels as a demo.
- Submitting Your Final Project: Send your final project file over to us to get a feedback video with loads of information on what’s working, what could be better and how to achieve the best track possible.
April 12, 2026
Stoked!
Great guy, great content. Worth every penny.
April 6, 2026
Great for getting up to speed coming from another DAW
Simon is an excellent tutor, he explains everything really well and encourages you to experiment.
I’ve been using Logic Pro for a while and wanted to move to ableton, so purchased this course
After module one, I already feel so much more confident, and no doubt, fully productive once I finish the course.
Also looking forward to a mentoring session once I get through the course
April 3, 2026
great teaching and style but a lack of detail
Firstly clearly youre a great teacher and these are my favourite style of videos ive seen so far (ive seen shit loads)!
maybe i got it wrong and i assume itll become much more in depth, but this module perhaps lacked some detail. I consider myself to be very much a beginner, but there wasnt really anything in here that i didnt learn in my first few months of production. I thought maybe there could have been more of a focus on when, why, and specifically how to eq, reverb, saturate etc different types of percussion and individual hits.
obviously many will sign up to a course like this to learn the basics and get involved with ableton, but also the reason i (and maybe others) sign up to learn from someone like you rather than a free youtube course is because youre very good at making music similar to what i want to make. Every now and then would be good to know how you personally think filter, reverb, saturation whatever should be applied to a snare for example!
thanks very much i am excited for the remainder of the course!
April 1, 2026
Thanks!
Тhats really cool.
March 22, 2026
Great
Very helpful course! Great structure! Worth every penny!
March 18, 2026
Amazing content
Really happy with this course so far! I was lucky to find this course when it was offered at a huge discount so i bought it not expecting much, so i was pleasantly surprised to see it is so comprehensive. The sample pack is by far the best offered by any course or content creators, and the videos are easy to follow while offering great insights. I already knew the basics as i’ve been watching a lot of videos and introductory courses o music productions, but I learned some new tricks that i had not seen yet in any other video. The only critique i’ll give is that personally, i’ve been using one track to program my drums, as i have a limited number of tracks available, so 5 tracks just for drums seems a bit excessive to me. Considering that a lot of beginners might be following along with a Lite version that’s limited to just 8 tracks, it might be more useful to show how to produce with limited resources. For example, you could put all of your drums on one track and use clip slots to add variations, instead of having one track dedicated to the kick, one for hats etc. Apart from that, I have no complaints and i’m very excited to see what the next modules have in store
March 13, 2026
Could not recommend this enough!
I picked up Ableton during COVID and messed around making loops. I fell out of practice with it for a long time then recently fired it up again. Not being musically trained I quickly found myself hitting a wall, I decided I wanted to take this a bit more seriously and signed up to the Ableton 12 course.
It has absolutely changed my approach to music production, in such a short amount of time I learned so much and definitely made real tangible progress. For my style of learning it helped so much having clear tasks to work through . Simon guides you through each module in such a relaxed manner, and his passion for music production makes the whole thing seem like fun practice, rather than frustrating YouTube tutorial rabbitholes!
If you’re considering this id say just go for it, you won’t regret it.
March 3, 2026
Electronic Music Production with Ableton Live
March 3, 2026
Electronic Music Production with Ableton Live
March 2, 2026