…and if you’re a backer on my Patreon page, the template will also include the stems to my most famous track to date, called “Waking Up” (although most of you know it as the song in my Live Dubstep Controllerism video).

I’ve been studying the way some of my idols produce and perform with Ableton Live, and what I’ve noticed is that when producing, people tend to go big, bigger or just plain huge (really, just check out that Tom Cosm Megaset). And I can see why: if the machine running Ableton is good enough, once you start a serious production collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can – and there’s no way you don’t end with a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… wait, I’m getting a strange deja vu…

There’s nothing wrong with having a huge template set – it’s easier to access any ideas that you can put into it, and it’s technically impressive. However, if you’re not the type of person who likes to remember complicated audio and MIDI routings, if you like seeing all your tracks and effects on one single page/screen, or if your computer is not exactly the most powerful machine on the planet – going small and imposing technical limitations can actually prove more fruitful.

So I decided on having a grand total of 8 actually used tracks – 6 instrument MIDI tracks, an audio input/a capella track and a Selective Resample track (there are two dummy tracks for LED monitoring on the Push in User Mode and routing audio from the Master channel to the Resample channel). Each instrument track has an instrument rack with 8 macro knobs (so I’d have no more than 8 tweakable parameters per instrument, whether they’re effects or something to do with the timbre of the instrument itself) and there’s an audio effects rack on the Audio Input track as well. What this results in is a template with all tracks and instruments visible without having to scroll left or right, which is a complete drag if you’re in a live situation. This way, it’s really easy to record and loop sequences on each track – and although I use it with Ableton Push, it’s by no means mandatory (I used to use an early version of this setup with a completely different setup).

I personally use this template for everything, whether it’s performing live, writing music, producing and tweaking or just noodling and laying down ideas. As the video’s about to mention, it’s not meant to be offered as a final, polished collection (although I’ve reached the point now where I haven’t too much to add to it – it’s got everything I need to achieve my personal sound, and more). I’m giving it away to anyone just interested in live looping, or in playing around with a bunch of sounds, or willing to learn how to synthesize with Ableton devices (most of the sounds in there are made from scratch), or in need of inspiration.

So go ahead, download it! Play around, learn whatever you can from it, use it to produce, toss it away, whatever. Most importantly, have fun! Because that’s what music’s meant to be, at least in my book.