How to use Ableton Live for karaoke

Ableton for Karaoke? (Updated 2020)

Ableton Live, besides being a professional digital audio workstation software used by professional musicians around the world, can also be used for karaoke for your home party (or lockdown party as the case may be). Ableton Live Lite, an introductory version with less instruments and effects, is often bundled free with musical instruments and audio equipment, and is enough to set up your own karaoke line-up. Read below to find out how. 
  
This info is provided by Ben Ang, Ableton Certified Trainer (http://learnabletonsingapore.com) and Principal Tutor of the Electronic Music Lab (http://nuseml.com). To learn more about using Ableton Live to make your own music or remixes, contact Ben at ben.ang.music@gmail.com or follow on YouTube or Twitch  or Instagram

Step 1 - Find the songs you want

Option 1: You can download karaoke versions of many songs on iTunes and Amazon music.

Option 2: If you only have the original song, with vocals and all, you can try separating out the parts with some online tools. You can upload a song at https://moises.ai/ and it works very well.


Moises separates song tracks using machine learning. It leverages the power of the same state-of-the-art audio source separation algorithm developed by Deezer Research.* https://moises.ai/
Moises gives you many options - for karaoke purposes, request for '2 stems - vocals, accompaniment'. I tried it with the Depeche Mode classic 'Enjoy The Silence' and was pretty impressed how it separated vocals and accompaniment.
(Deezer released Spleeter to help the research community in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) leverage the power of a state-of-the-art source separation algorithm. It comes in the form of a Python Library based on Tensorflow, with pretrained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation.) 

 Step 2 - Tell Ableton to NOT warp the songs

If Ableton uses its powerful Warp function on the songs, they may play at the wrong speed. So go to the menu for Options / Preferences.
In the Record/Warp/Launch tab, look for Auto-Warp Long Samples and ensure that it is Off.

Step 3 - Drag the accompaniment songs into one Audio Track in Ableton Live's Session View

You can place all your backing tracks / accompanient songs into one Audio Track, and use a second Audio Track for your Vocals

Step 4 - Set up another Audio Track for vocals

Your Audio Track for vocals should have Monitor set to Auto (see above). I'm assuming your microphone goes into input 1 of your audio interface. If you don't have an audio interface, your microphone is most likely going into input 1 by default.
You can setup a nice Audio Effects Rack for vocals with Multi-band Compressor, very light Chorus,   very light Delay or Echo, and Reverb, in that order from left to right. These will help the vocals sound better. For starters, try the Excitor Rack which is a preset under Audio Effects / Audio Effects Racks / Mixing and Mastering.

If you really want to help the singers, you can even add Autotune with the free MAutoPitch VST from Melda https://www.meldaproduction.com/MAutoPitch


Step 5 - Have fun!

And if you found this info useful, please let me know in the comments!

You can find more tutorials and info on music production and learning electronic music at

Original Post from 2009 (now pretty obsolete)

This 10+ year old post from Chinese New Year 2009 is one of our popular posts! Maybe because of COVID-10 restrictions, many of us are not visiting karaoke places, and choosing to karaoke on our own? So we updated it in August 2020, but kept the original post here below, so you can have a chuckle at what we used to say in 2009 ...

Many of you will be familiar with the world famous digital audio workstation software Ableton Live (www.ableton.com). This software has revolutionized the field of music, especially live electronic music performance and DJ-ing, and much more - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableton_Live

Not surprising then that Ableton Live is a favourite of top artists such as Sasha, The Prodigy, BT, Front 242, Daft Punk etc etc etc

This Chinese New Year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year we discovered yet another use for Ableton Live. As part of the traditional family reunions of this season, some of the senior members of the clan decided to have karaoke ... but we didn't have a karaoke machine on hand. All we had were original CDs, a laptop, a mic, and some lyrics from the net. How could we carry on?

Solution
1. Rip the CDs into MP3 using iTunes
2. Setup Live so that it wouldn't automatically Warp the samples (under Preferences)
3. Load the MP3's into Live
4. Insert one audio track for the mic, and add one of Live's pre-set Reverb effects
5. Connect the output of the laptop to the home hi-fi, and away we go!

This should work with other DAWs such as Cubase, Logic and Sonar. Happy karaoke and Happy Chinese New Year!

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