A colouring book for Ableton: meet Stencils – the tool designed to help you master musical arrangement

Arrangement is one of the most important parts of music production. It’s how every artist fits their sounds together into one cohesive piece of music. And LA-based music education brand Color With Live has developed a new tool, Stencils, which helps users master the concept of arrangement.

Imagine having access to the Ableton project of a Skrillex song. All the tracks are laid out for the drums, vocals, bass, etc, and all the clips are in the arrangement view. With a stencil, the key difference is that there are no sounds in the clips. You get to fill in the sounds yourself, like a colouring book for Ableton. 

This creates room for experimentation. Simply put your chosen sounds in the associated clips, follow the instructions, such as when to cut the low frequencies, and the final product will be a complete song because the arrangement is based on a track that’s worked on dancefloors around the world. Each stencil also clearly labels drops, breakdowns, and other sections to help users get a feel for what each part looks like in a session.

“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. The advice is always to pick apart your reference tracks, but there’s nothing visual to check your work,” says Kevin Rea, co-founder of Colour With Live. “Our mission isn’t for our stencil to be a crutch that you rely on for every song, but instead something that you can learn from and then apply to future productions.”

Rea and his fellow co-founder, Grant Hunter, came up with the idea for Stencils because, like many young producers, they have to work full-time on top of working on their music. After coming home from a long day, they wouldn’t know where to start when they were staring at an empty Ableton window. Stencils allowed them to get their creativity flowing and finish songs.

Now, they have created over 250 Stencils in a variety of genres such as UK Garage, Dubstep, Tech House, Drum & Bass, Techno, and Hip-Hop. For a limited time, they are offering a free pack of three Stencils based on Flip It by Levity, Fisher’s rework of World Hold On by Bob Sinclar, and Dimension’s Once In A Lifetime.

View the full stencil library and learn more at Color With Live.

Sam is the Associate News Editor for Guitar.com and MusicTech. Thoroughly immersed in music culture for the majority of his life, Sam has played guitar for 20 years, studied music technology and production at university, and also written for the likes of MusicRadar, Guitar World, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer.