Blog · August 15, 2026
How to get the MIDI part you want in Ableton Live
You can describe the part you want in one sentence. A boom bap kit with the hats laid back. A bassline that follows the kick instead of holding one note per chord. Something bright over the second half of the progression.
The sentence takes four seconds. Turning it into notes takes twenty minutes in the piano roll, and by the time you can hear it you have stopped asking whether it was the right idea and started defending the time you spent.
Dawbrain writes the part instead. What lands in your Set is MIDI in a clip: your key, your drum rack, your instruments, every note editable. It is a first draft you can judge in seconds and re-roll if it was wrong.
This post is about aiming it. First what each of the five parts knows, then the single control to reach for when what comes back is close.
Drums
Write me 8 bars of boom bap drums on the Drums track.
Twenty-eight genres are built in (more on the way), each carrying its own pattern, its own pocket and its own kit voices, from boom bap and trap through deep house, techno, psytrance, garage, drill, disco, funk, reggae, samba, bossa nova, guaguanco, jazz swing, rock, rockabilly, blues, ambient, and six separate strains of drum and bass. Thirty-four patterns in total, so a genre is a starting point rather than a single preset.
The part that saves you the most time is the part you would never think to ask for. Dawbrain reads the drum rack on your track and writes to the pads that are actually loaded.
This matters more than it sounds. Ableton’s factory kits are not General MIDI. An 808 kit has a cowbell where a high tom is expected and claves where the ride should be, and most racks fill only the sixteen pads from 36 to 51. A pattern written against the General MIDI map silently plays half its voices into empty pads, which is why a generated beat sometimes arrives missing its percussion for no visible reason. Dawbrain reads the rack first and places each voice where that kit keeps it.
Two things follow from reading the rack rather than assuming it. If your kit has no hi-hat but does have a shaker, the timekeeping line plays on the shaker and the answer says so, so you know why the beat came back drier than you expected. And a percussion-led style like guaguanco, which is built from clave, cascara and congas, will decline to write into a rack that has none of them rather than hand you a silent clip.
One caveat worth knowing before you meet it: this needs a Drum Rack. An Instrument Rack has no pads and its pitches are chromatic, so a drum pattern written there plays as a melody. Point the request at the drum track and it is a non-issue.
Bass
Give me a bassline under those chords, following the kick.
Seventeen bass figures, and the genre picks one for you: a walking blues line, a boogie woogie shuffle, an octave bounce, a rolling sixteenth, an anticipated root that lands ahead of the beat, a psytrance triplet roll.
Hand it the chord progression and the line follows it, anchoring on chord roots and moving through chord tones. Without one it walks the scale, which is fine for a sketch and thin under real harmony. Chords first is the order that pays.
808s get their own treatment, because an 808 is a bassline rather than a bass sound. Ask for trap and the 808 re-articulates on the kick and snare grid instead of holding one sustained note per chord, which is what “tuned 808” means in practice. The sliding figures go further: rather than faking a glide with a chromatic run of notes, Dawbrain leaves the slide to the instrument and tells you which pitch envelope setting on your Simpler or Operator it depends on, so the notes and the sound agree.
If you already have a bass part and want the new one in the same octave, say so. It reads the existing notes and centres the new line on them instead of defaulting to its own low register.
Chords
Four bars of chords in the project key, spread voicing.
Chords are written in your project’s key and scale. Ask for a progression in a minor session and you get a minor progression, in that mode, with the sevenths read from your scale rather than from triad convention. Each genre carries the two or three roman-numeral progressions that belong to it, and you can name the one you want or let it choose.
Seven voicings change the texture without changing the harmony: close, spread, shell, rootless, quartal, drop 2, drop 3. Two of them are worth a word of warning, and Dawbrain gives it rather than letting you discover it in the mix. Rootless and quartal omit the root, so pair them with a bassline or the harmony reads as a different chord. Quartal discards chord quality altogether, which is a modal comping texture and wrong over functional ii-V-I harmony.
Three styles have a fixed song form rather than a family of progressions: blues, rhythm changes and rockabilly. Their form is the genre, so they take no progression argument.
Melody
A funk sixteenth riff over that progression, mid register.
Melodies are written from named figures rather than one generic shape. Ten of them: a bebop eighth run, a funk sixteenth riff, a blues call and response, a trap arp pluck, a garage offbeat stab, a psy acid line, a disco string run, an afrobeat tenor ostinato, a samba fork line, and a plain arch contour when you want the shape without the accent.
A figure carries both rhythm and contour, which is what makes it sound like a phrase rather than a sequence of correct notes. It also means the figure states its own degrees, so expect roughly half of its strong-beat notes to be non-chord tones. That tension is the point of the figure. If you want the safer version, ask for a melody with no figure and hand it the progression: it will favour chord tones on strong beats instead.
Chopped breaks
Chop that break like jungle, 4 bars.
Load a break with slicing on and Dawbrain will re-cut it for you. Ten chopping figures: nine drawn from the styles that chop breaks for a living, from jungle and two-step through boom bap, trap and drill, plus the plain one hit per beat.
What makes this usable rather than random is that it rebuilds the break from where each slice sat in the bar. The downbeat and the backbeat stay where they belong while the detail around them is re-cut, so the result is a chop of your break rather than a shuffle of its pieces.
The figure and the genre are separate choices here, which is more useful than it first appears. You can chop like jungle while the rest of the track stays where it is, without adopting jungle’s drums and bassline along with the chop.
Coordinating the parts
The parts get better when they know about each other, and the order is the same one you would use by hand.
Write the chords first, then a bassline and a melody that follow them.
Chords go down first. Their progression is handed to the bass, which anchors on the roots, and to the melody, which leans on chord tones. Skip that and each part is individually reasonable and collectively vague, in exactly the way a sketch sounds when the bass was written before the harmony was decided.
When it is close but not right
Most of the time the first result is in the right area and one thing about it is wrong. There is a single control for each complaint, and naming the right one beats describing the problem.
Right style, wrong pattern. Name the figure. A genre carries a default, but most genres have several, and naming one gets you a variant without changing the style around it. “Boom bap, but the broken kick and snare pattern” keeps the kit, the pocket and the feel.
Too busy, or too thin. Density. On drums it gates the ornamental voices: hats thin out first, then the ghost notes, while the kick and snare hold their positions, so a sparser beat is still the same beat. On the melodic parts it only thins. A figure is authored at the density it was sourced at, so asking for less drops its least structural notes and asking for more has nothing to add. When a figure ignores density entirely, the answer tells you it did rather than leaving you to wonder.
Nearly right. Re-roll it. The same request with a different seed gives you another take in the same character, which is almost always faster than describing the fix in words. Ask for three and keep one.
That’s close. Give me two more takes of it.
Too much going on for this section. Layers, on drums. A pattern is four of them: the kick, the backbeat of snare and clap, the timekeeping of hats and ride and percussion, and the accents, meaning the crash and the phrase fill. Ask for the ones you want and the rest drop out. Kick and hats only is the same groove thinned for a quieter section rather than a different genre that happens to be sparser.
Wrong octave. Register. Melodies take high, mid or low, and basslines take the pitch to centre on.
Right notes, played too hard. Velocity. Same notes, same positions, played softer or harder, which is the difference between a section that is quieter and a section that is played quieter.
One thing deliberately absent from that list: swing. The timing and velocity variation that keeps a part from sounding typed in arrives with the genre you asked for, because the pocket of a house beat and the pocket of a jungle beat are not one setting at two values. There is more on that, and on using these controls across a whole arrangement, in turning a loop into a full song.
Dawbrain runs inside Ableton Live 12 and is free to start: 150 credits, no card, no expiry date. Install it, ask for the part you have been putting off programming, and email info@dawbrain.com with what breaks.