We use cookies to personalise content, serve ads, and analyse traffic.
Lesson time: (4min 20sec)
Brian Funk tours the live-instrument side of his Ableton Live set, showing how he groups tracks and plays drums and other parts from his MPK Mini.
This lesson is part of the course Live Performance in Ableton Live
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
Okay, so let me just give you a tour of the rest of my live set here. I'm going to open up some of these groups, and we're going to start with the live instruments. They're right in here.
So, you know, I put these things in groups because I don't really need to see these tracks while I'm playing live. I like to only focus on what I have here. So I put them in a group and then I close it down.
The way you put things in groups in Ableton Live is:
After a second or two, you will get a little group. I'm going to just undo that because we don't need that, and here we are with our live instrument group.
Now, the way I like to do things is I like to organize it by different sounds.
Next, I have my Launchpad effects and percussions.
If I go into my MPK Mini track, this is stuff that I can play on my MPK Mini. I have:
So I have that set up, and finally, I have a vocoder, which we'll get into as well.
I have another track for my OP1. This track is just waiting for OP1 sounds.
I have another track for my iPad, which allows me to put in pretty much any app I want and get sound through it right in here on this track.
There's another track I use for sending MIDI to external gear using the external instrument. We'll talk about how to do that in a little while.
Finally, I also have a track for my microphone.
So this is how I collect all my live instruments in different tracks.

Brian Funk is a musician, producer, songwriter and Ableton Certified Trainer. Since 2014 he has taught the Advanced Music Production with Ableton Live course for Berklee College of Music. He has played guitar, bass, drums, synths and sung in touring rock bands, and these days focuses on his solo electronic set - taking his studio experiments to the stage.Brian loves writing, teaching and sound design. He produces Ableton Live tutorials and Sound Packs, and has released free Ableton Live Packs since 2011 - over 125 so far. As an Ableton Certified Trainer he has given lessons and seminars covering every stage of the production process, and writes regularly on his blog and for other publications.Influenced by rock and roll, video games, early hip hop, punk and electronica - from The Beatles, Neil Young, Nirvana and Aerosmith to Neon Indian - he describes his own sound as 'futuristic, yet nostalgic'. In his MusicGurus course, Live Performance in Ableton Live, he shows you how he turns studio ideas into a real, hands-on live set: sampling sounds and turning them into playable instruments, running guitars and synths through electronic gear, and mixing and composing on the fly while playing live and singing. You'll come away able to build and perform your own electronic set with confidence. read more