A playable iOS app for forming
musical ideas
Note is a place to start ideas, experiment with sounds and find direction. As part of your regular music-making routine, it can help you hone the skill of starting or ease into a creative headspace at the start of a session.
Get your idea out or play until you find one using Note’s drum kits, melodic instruments and synth sounds. Or create your own sound palette by recording the sounds around you into Note’s sampler instruments.
Live 12 Lite is free to all Note users via the app. A simple and intuitive way to write, record, and perform your musical ideas, it includes core Live features and introduces some of Live 12’s latest improvements, too.
Learn more about Live 12 LitePlay just for fun, or start song ideas to continue in Live. Using Ableton Cloud, you can send your Note Set to Live without leaving the app. Then keep working with all the same devices as in Note, but with additional parameters available. You can edit all your MIDI notes, and all your samples and sounds from Note are exactly the same.
Note uses instruments and devices from Ableton Live. Play synth lines with melodic presets, finger-drum beats using Drum Sampler kits, and create instrumental melodies with Melodic Sampler instruments. Use Reverb, Delay and Chorus-Ensemble to give your sounds space and depth, or play with color and texture using Saturator, Redux and Phaser-Flanger.
Not everyone starts a song the same way. Note offers multiple starting points from which to explore new musical ideas. Then develop your ideas by adding to them and creating variations.
Choose between the 25-pad melody grid or piano roll to play melodies, and play beats using the 16-pad percussion grid or single velocity pad, or connect an external MIDI Instrument via USB or Bluetooth.
Play at a tempo that feels comfortable to you, and Note will restore what you played and create a loop – no need to press record beforehand. Three different modes allow you to start from scratch, create additional clips, and overdub notes.
Quickly create variations by copying your loop and make small changes to each version. Isolate and loop a segment to hone in on the details, then bring back the whole loop to hear it in context.
Correct any timing issues by quantizing the notes you played or by nudging selected notes. Delete any accidental extra notes, or those you’d like to play in again. Change the velocity of your notes, and correct any tonal issues by transposing your notes by semitones or octaves.
Animate your sound by automating instrument and effect parameters. Simply tweak a parameter and press “add” to capture your movements.
Play repeated notes in time, or create rapid trap-style rhythmic patterns. Choose a note subdivision on the strip, then hold the pads or keys for as long as you want the note to repeat. Slide up and down the velocity pad to change the velocity.
Create your own sounds and kits by recording up to 60 seconds of audio into Note’s Percussion Sampler and Melodic Sampler using your phone’s microphone. Cut, filter, repitch or add audio effects to transform your sampled sounds.
Note comes with a collection of presets, samples and kits to play with. Sketch with them as is, or tweak them to your taste by changing parameters, adding effects, and automating changes.
Shape your sound using Live’s Chorus-Ensemble, Delay, Phaser-Flanger, Redux, Reverb, Saturator and Channel EQ effects. Add up to two effects on Melodic Sampler or synth instruments, and one send and one insert on drum kits.
Combine, duplicate, and arrange your ideas to try out different structures in Note’s Session View. You can use eight tracks with up to eight clips each, on eight scenes. Then export your audio to share with friends or collaborators.
Send your Note Set to Live using Ableton Cloud. Open your project in Live’s browser and pick up where you left off with all your sounds, samples and effects in place.
For help setting up Note and Cloud, to learn more about features and functions, or to find troubleshooting tips visit the Knowledge Base or read the Note manual.
