Learn to arrange tracks using Color With Live’s Free Stencil Pack
Stencils are Color With Live’s original creation. They are soundless Ableton arrangement maps that show you every element in a song and where they go on the timeline.
Every stencil is modeled after a song by a major dance artist. Use them to learn arrangement while finishing productions. Stencils are waiting to be filled in with the producer’s own sounds, like a coloring book for Ableton.
Like many artists, Color With Live’s founders, Kevin Rea and Grant Hunter, essentially work two full-time jobs. One is their music. The other is Uber and all their other side hustles they need to afford a roof over their heads. But when they open Ableton after spending 12 hours in the car, they have no idea where to start.
That’s why they invented stencils. Stencils are empty, color-coded arrangement maps of popular songs that producers can study and fill in with their own sounds. They’ve just released a free pack that includes stencils of “Flip It” by Levity, Fisher’s rework of “World Hold On,” by Bob Sinclair, and Dimension’s “Once In A Lifetime.” Ableton Live users can download the pack here.
A stencil is not a recreation of a song. A recreate hands a producer someone else’s sounds, presets, and mix. A stencil is the opposite: every sound is stripped out, and what remains is the structure. Each section of the song, from the drop to the smallest fill, is mapped as a color-coded block in Ableton’s Arrangement View.
“The color coding makes every section of a song perfectly clear, whether it’s a hook, a breakdown, or a low-end cut,” says Hunter. “Once the arrangement is down, producers can experiment with sound design and processing in a road-tested framework.”
The producer supplies every sound, effect, and vocal, filling in a proven layout while seeing exactly how the pros built it. The music, and the learning, are entirely their own.
“We realized one of the biggest pain points in learning production is arrangement. The advice is always to pick apart your reference tracks, but there’s nothing visual to check your work,” says Rea. “Repetition is what makes learning click. Producers download Serum packs to practice sound design and MIDI packs to practice music theory. We were blown away that nothing like that existed for arrangement. Our mission isn’t for our stencil to be a crutch that you rely on for every song, instead something that you can learn from and then apply to future productions.”
The free pack sits alongside Color With Live’s full library of over 250 stencils across UK Garage, Dubstep, Tech House, Drum & Bass, Techno, Hip-Hop and many more. Bundles with anywhere from 5 to 175 stencils run between $30-$329.
Another part of Color With Live’s mission to educate is the CWL Video Vault, a free Ableton extension that producers can use to watch, organize, and save their favorite YouTube videos in folders such as drums, bass, mixing, and sound design. They can change the names of the folders and add subfolders under any of them. Put notes under every video, so every key piece of info is ready to reference on the next song. It runs on Ableton Live 12 beta. When the next Ableton update ships, extensions will be available to everyone with Suite.
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