Generate new musical ideas in Ableton Live

PROBLEM: Coming up with loops and ideas? Relatively easy. Arranging them into a finished piece? Less so. Any ideas?

Arranging your ideas into a finished piece of music can be tough but we can use a feature of Ableton Live called Follow Actions to help us come up with new song structures.

Follow Actions let you automatically trigger Clips in Live’s Session View in interesting ways. We’ll use this to have Live automatically create arrangements for us at the click of a button.

We’ll assume you already have a collection of loops and ideas and you’ve loaded them into the Session View. It’s useful to have multiple variations of parts as well, so ensure you have at least two or three Clips for each part (ie two or three drum and chord patterns, etc.)

We’ll then set up Follow Actions to automatically trigger a new random Clip every four bars and capture the results to the Arrangement. You can try and repeat this process as many times as you would like, to create different versions of an arrangement and then choose the best bits and combine them into your final piece.