Midi Routing for External Instrument Audio - Ableton

There is a ton of people out there that have a good sounding keyboard/Synth with great sounds, but when they record it on Ableton, they have issues with audio timing and quality. Unless you are a professional it is very difficult to stick to tempo and get all the nuances right in a single take. Multiple takes and warping audio for tempo will result in degraded sound for the user who is not experienced in warping audio to tempo. 


There is an easy fix for this, all you need is to follow the tutorial below for getting great sounds from existing keyboard into Ableton and not invest more in expensive VST instrument packages. Example, I use a Roland Juno Di keyboard, that has both USB and the normal midi ins and outs and has an insane amount (over 1000 patches) of good sounding Strings, piano, guitars and synths etc.

I am going to use the existing midi in and out ports on the keyboard for this tutorial. Make sure you a midi interface to USB connector for your instrument hooked up to your PC/MAC with all the drivers installed.

Please check the tutorial on home studio setup using Ableton for the interface that I currently use. Once you have your existing Keyboard Workstation/Synth/Digital Piano connected to the PC/MAC using the midi to USB cable follow the steps below.

• In Ableton open the following 3 channels. 1 audio, 2 midi channels.
• On the first midi channel select any instrument of your choice from the Ableton Instrument rack. Acoustic piano patch for example.
• Drag and drop the external midi instrument from the instrument rack into the 2nd midi channel. 
• Set up the midi out for the external midi channel and enable audio in through your audio interface. The external instruments audio needs to be routed to your audio interface either through mono or stereo. In my case it is stereo.
• In my Audio track I set my audio to receive inputs from my audio interface through the I/O menu.

This following image shows how the routing works.

Once the routing has been done, and Ableton set up the way the instructions are provided in the steps above, you should be ready to record high quality audio from your instrument.

The best part about this method is that you can play using the same keyboard/synth on midi channel 1 and use the instrument patch in Ableton to tweak the velocity, sustain and also the timing on the midi track.

Then you should copy and paste the recorded midi track onto your external midi channel, hit play and arm/record audio on audio channel 1. The midi notes will be sent out from Ableton at whatever tempo you desire, and the audio from the external device should come back on time with the same tempo and with all the playing nuances such as sustain and velocity edits that you made.

Check my Tutorial on how to Record audio into Ableton.

Hope this tutorial helps those of you who cannot afford a professional/Session Artist to play your master composition!