Augmenting Ableton Live: The ultimate guide to using external devices

Ableton Certified Trainer Mark Burnett has been working with Ableton products for the past 14 years. He's also an artist on Funk'n Deep Records (Soundcloud, Resident Advisor), whose tracks are appearing in the world’s biggest festivals and largest podcasts from the industry’s heavy-hitters such as Carl Cox & Richie Hawtin.

In this course, Mark will teach you ways to use software and hardware together to create new instruments and to augment the way in which you use them.

By the end of this course, you'll feel confortable expanding Ableton Live with hardware, unlocking hidden capabilities of your hardware using Ableton Live. You'll learn some great skills that you can incorporate into live sets or more creative studio work.

In detail, Mark looks at different setups:

• ways to augment hardware: taking hardware instruments and effects processors such as TR-09, MikroKorg, Dreadbox Hades, Kaoss Pad 3 and adding extra features to them using midi controllers
• ways of augmenting software: taking software instruments such as D16 Group's Drumazon VST and unlocking extra facilities and control using hardware
• new & creative ways of using these hybrid hardware/software instruments, including a crazy setup with a Microsoft Kinect to track movement, an old Yamaha Keytar (!) and a mono synth.

Mark uses a range of devices in this course, from the latest mono synths and drum machine offerings to old beat-up gear that can be reused in new & creative ways.

• Roland TR-09
• Dreadbox Hades
• Korg MicroKorg
• Novation Launch Control XL
• Korg Kaoss Pad 3
• AKAI MPD 32
• Alesis Control Pad
• Yamaha Keytar

During this course we'll be using the Push 2 and a number of Max For Live devices. There is no pre-required knowledge of any of these to get started and you'll definitely finish the course with a good working knowledge of both.