In this lesson we looked at Controllerism, mapping and how to make the most out of MIDI within Ableton live. MIDI keyboards are something that usually get overlooked as basic tools for making music digitally, however when working in Ableton they are incredibly useful and powerful, especially if you were looking at performing live with Ableton. In order to get the most out of your MIDI keyboard you have to map it correctly. Firstly its best to have a rough idea of what you actually want to control in your project. During the session I made a mock project as if I would be performing live, and arranged out a track onto session view, broken down into, drums, bass, lead and misc samples. Then once you have your project arranged you need it, you can open the mapping settings in Ableton, by pressing the MIDI button in the top right. You’ll notice the whole screen flash blue this means you can now click any button/fader with you mouse and then press a key on your MIDI keyboard and it will map that key to whatever button you have selected. In my mock up live set, I mapped it so that I had the drums on the left of the keyboard and on the far left there was a key mapped to be a group start/stop to have control over all the drums if needed. I then moved up the keyboard repeating the process for the rest of the track. One thing I hadn’t done before which was useful, is to map the dials on the MIDI keyboard and have them act as faders. This would be a life saver if you were performing live and had to turn volume down, but your computer was out of reach.