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3. Different ways of programming a drum ’n’ bass beat in Ableton Live

1 There are many ways to program beats in Ableton Live. We’ll start old skool with some piano roll. Launch Live and press the Tab key to switch from Session to Arrangement view. Enter 174 into the tempo field at the top left-hand corner of the interface – a good tempo to kick off a drum ‘n’ bass track.

2 In the Tutorial Files folder (at filesilo.co.uk) you’ll find some DnBready drum sounds. Select the first MIDI track and drag Kick.wav into the empty device chain pane at the bottom of the interface to automatically create a Simpler instrument that we can trigger via MIDI to play back the sound.

3 Drag over bar 5 on the MIDI track and press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+M to create a MIDI clip, then Ctrl/Cmd+L to loop the region. Double-click the MIDI clip to bring up the MIDI editor.

4 Double-click C3 on the first beat of the bar, and drag the right-hand side of the note created so that it runs to 1.1.2 – this may not be visible depending on your zoom level, but it’s halfway between the start of the first beat and 1.1.3. Create another beat of the same length starting on 1.3.3. When combined with a snare on beats 2 and 4, this creates a 2-step pattern.

5 Double-click the title of the second MIDI track, and this time drag Snare 1.wav onto the channel strip. Add hits on 1.2 and 1.4 that last until 1.2.3 and 1.4.3, as shown. This kick-and-snare is the foundation of most DnB beats, and you could carry on building it further, track by track, to give you great flexibility for editing each sound.

6 But as with other DAWs there are other ways to produce electronic beats in Ableton Live and one is using a step sequencer in Drum Rack. In an empty project, this time in Session View, drag the top (empty) Drum Rack (from the Drums icon) onto an empty MIDI track.