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Comment by semtud | Hacker News Reader

New to music production but really want to give it a try. Can somebody please recommend resources/courses for beginners and which Abelton edition to buy: lite, intro, standard, suite? Also I was wondering if it is worth to buy akai mpk mini (play) to start with?

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I would start with Ableton's lessons, they're delightful.

https://learningmusic.ableton.com/ https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

Just wanted to say, thank you! These lessons are fantastic.

Buy a cheap midi controller from Akai or Arturia and they usually come with a free license for Lite, which in turn will give you a decent discount should you decide to upgrade to Standard or Suite, not to mention having a decent midi controller make use Ableton and such much more enjoyable.

I learned two things this week that may be useful to you:

1) if you buy an MPK mini - even if it's secondhand - you get a free license for Ableton Lite (this is true for basically all mainstream MIDI controllers, afaict)

2) if you have an Ableton Lite license, you get a sizeable discount on the paid versions.

So a cheap midi controller (Akai Mini et al) off of ebay will pay for itself if you're gonna buy Ableton anyway.

This course from Rachel K Collier and Mary Spender is really good:

https://maryspender.teachable.com/p/how-to-produce-music-in-...

The course follows Rachel teaching Mary (a musician but with no experience in Live), so you learn along with her. I think they might’ve done it in Live 11 so some little things might be different but on the whole I think it’s worth it.

Part of this answer depends your specific budget/financial situation. I've been an Ableton user since 2014. I bought Live 9 Lite at the time (probably came included with a midi device I bought), because I was still in undergrad and wasn't sure if I was going to stick with it. Looking at my order history, I later bought Live 9 Standard and used that until 2018 when I upgraded to Live 10 Suite (I've since upgraded to every new version of Suite on release, including 13).

My advice, if you have the budget, get Standard and upgrade to Suite later (at a discount). Suite is _nice_ but it's really mostly bells and whistles that you don't "need" to get from Ableton. Suite has a ton of included sound packs and instruments that are certainly useful but may not be useful to you.

As for the Akai MPK Mini, that's going to be entirely subjective IMO. I've bought several midi controllers over the years, and I've settled on a few key pieces that I'm happy with. The Arturia KeyStep 37 is the perfect keyboard for my desktop. It has enough range in a compact form factor and doesn't have any features I don't need (I'm not affiliated with Arturia).

If you don't already have a midi keyboard, I would suggest grabbing an affordable one!

Not Ableton Live specific, more general knowledge for music production: I can highly recommend the courses from Audible Genius: Syntorial and Building Blocks.

Keep an eye out for their black friday deal(s), usually they have a really good package deal on BF (when I got it too).

Then Seed to Stage on YouTube has amazing videos on a bunch of topics, all very much focused on Ableton Live.

akai mpk is great! On tuts and such; I really enjoy "You suck at music production" youtube channel, who happens to use Ableton. Overall with music though, imo it's often time trying out combination of effects/instruments/midi that makes for the best learning.

Good luck with the music!

If I'd be starting now I would rather try Bitwig first, I made music with Live from Live 8 until Live 11 but switched to Bitwig afterwards and, to me, it's a better DAW in general (except if you really need Max devices [look up Max4Live, it's a node-based DSP creation tool]) and even better for a beginner to get going with.

Iirc lite was free. I think thatd be a good start. Only limitation (iirc) was that it gave you only 8 channels which as a beginner should be more than enough. Has stock instruments that also should be more than enough. And there are loads of free VSTs, software instruments and effects

If ever there was a hobby/niche not lacking in tutorials it's music production. Besides maybe DIY home repair.

Get the basics of the software and basic music theory, then search your questions online as they come up.

The hardest part when I was starting was finding genre-specific advice on music production. It really took digging to get the nuggets of what felt like a trade secret. Now, though, there is a massive flood of video tutorials for just about any niche of music.

For music theory, flip through The Jazz Language by Dan Hearle. You may not need everything in there, but it will get you up to speed on contemporary music vocabulary.

This playlist is very good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVaCvJOc_A9E

Buy suite and the move if you can!

Ableton's lessons, FabFilter's youtube channel. Start with Ableton Lite and go the upgrade route. In the past, usually if you bought a budget MIDI keyboard, you'd get a selection of entry-level DAWs included with that purchase. Ableton Lite was an option for the Alesis MIDI keyboard I bought. I'd suggest going that route.

I would start with intro. Lite is only offered bundled with certain hardware products.

The biggest difference with intro is that you are limited to 16 tracks, and some of the software plugins aren't present. If you are new to music production then this should hardly matter to you. You will be able to get a good sense of whether you enjoy working with Ableton or not, and you can always upgrade later.

It's very likely that you already have some version of Ableton together with your audio interface. Make sure to register your product to see if you have any redeemable downloads.

I personally bought a midi keyboard that included some free starter stuff including a limited version of ableton mine is https://www.arturia.com/products and works well with mac osx and all the mainstream DAWs .

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