17 ms·
Show HN: Ableton Live MCP
Ever wanted to control Ableton with just your voice? Me too! I made this MCP server so I could just ask Codex to do anything in Ableton Live for me, while I was nap-trapped by my baby.
The chat messages I sent to Codex to make this:
in ableton, make a self reflective song, with audio vocals (via macos say) and chip tunes and 80's drum machines. should be a real edm banger
i want midi for everything but vocals please, with ableton devices. not prerendered audio for instruments
needs some fills
and should hit way harder after "3-2-1 i become the sound"
the vocals are squished too much (read too quickly), give them a little more length
add some dynamics, the song is basically one volume. and some pumping side chain
improve dynamics of the clap, seems a bit flat and indistinguished, want it harder after the 3-2-1 drop
introduce a new element on a new track after the 3-2-1 drop, that comes in but then recedes before the final exit
doesn't seem like the new thing has any notes
the element is a bit muddy/indistinct. perhaps it needs simplification and more space, different instrument choice, i dunno
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- wartywhoa23 5mo ago> Ever wanted to control Ableton with just your voice? Never.
- jrajav 5mo agoI guess the guidelines don't apply to you, as long as you disagree vehemently enough with the OP's basic intent.
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoNo amount of guidelines will make me lie in my replies.
- cromka 5mo ago[flagged]
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoI'm glad you appreciated!)
- myhf 5mo agoWhen disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
- cromka 5mo agoThere's was no argument in that comment, just a display of pretentiousness. Also, this wasn't name calling, just plain sarcasm. "Badass" , if meant literally, is a positive adjective. You're being ridiculous.
- markalby 5mo agois this using M4L or the LOM ?
- fassssst 5mo agoObject model
- deng 5mo ago> should be a real edm banger I'm afraid Codex ignored that one.
- windowliker 5mo agoFor me, the point of making music is making it myself. If want to have something done for me I could just play someone else's record and pretend like I made it.
- plastic-enjoyer 5mo agoWelcome to the era of instant gratification.
- brookst 5mo agoThe is the age-old music parochial thing. "Oh, he's just in a cover band, he doesn't write anything" / "Oh, she's just a composer, she can't even play the stuff she writes" / "Oh, he writes and plays his own stuff but knows fuck all about theory so it's not real music" / etc. Me, I'm having a blast with claude code, MCP, and Ableton. I'm directing harmony and asking for arrangements and variations in rhythm, mixing, and production. Don't know if that counts as "making it myself", but then I was writing music before I could actually play any instrument at all, so :shrug:
- tunesmith 5mo agoI think there's a way to define it without it either side feeling personally attacked. One of the things I like about using agents for programming is that if the spec is detailed enough, I can implement it in a number of different languages and still get the thing I intended. That means that the "art" is in the spec, not the implementation. I think the question with AI in music is when it gets to that point. What's the musical spec? What's the implementation? If the spec is supposed to be the pure distillation of my intent, then shouldn't that mean each time I engage AI to "implement" the spec, the musical output of the AI should be the same? At that point I'm all in favor of using AI for music. But when AI is used to replace a specific intent with vague intent, that's where I feel like something is lost in the human experience of human-created music.
- brandonb 5mo agoPrevious generations might have said the same thing about Ableton itself, vs playing a physical instrument. In that regard, AI might become just another power tool for creative expression.
- robotswantdata 5mo agoIf you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up Ableton MCP, you’ve already worked harder than Suno requires to make a banger
- dyauspitr 5mo agoHonestly, music generation is solved. You don’t have fine control at this point but people are unable to tell the difference anymore. There are tons of YouTube videos with blind tests between real artists and AI and people have no idea.
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoThe Matrix wants everything solved, doesn't it?
- windowliker 5mo ago>No alarms and no surprises
- siquick 5mo agoSolved !== Good
- cyclopeanutopia 5mo agoXD
- gavmor 5mo agoSuno is fun, but has absolutely nowhere near the affordances most musicians want. Being a banger is not enough.
- justinclift 5mo agoSuno's output is grating though?
- bschoepke 5mo agoWell, it's also interesting to take a rough sketch out of Ableton, render it to audio, and then use Suno to "upscale" it.
- m_ramdhan 5mo ago[flagged]
- ssalka 5mo agoThings I would use AI for in music production: 1. Generating track layouts (add tracks + empty audio/midi clips throughout) 2. Generating MIDI sequences 3. Generating Serum patches 4. Extracting stems from existing audio 5. Automating common workflows (eg sidechaining) 6. Semantic search of sample library That being said, I don't think I want a full agentic workflow for vibe-producing. Point solutions seems like a better fit for me, personally.
- dmje 5mo agoI’ve had some fun building simple instruments in the browser using AI and piping midi to Live, then munging from there [0]. The whole principle of fully AI generated music leaves me cold but AI as a sort of sidechain to the creative process seems potentially interesting. [0] https://variousbits.net/2026/02/22/building-generative-music-and-visuals-with-ai/ https://variousbits.net/2026/02/22/building-generative-music...
- corysama 5mo agoGenerating MIDI sequences https://www.muse.art/home https://www.muse.art/home
- bschoepke 5mo agoSame here! I tried all of that, have 1, 2, and 5 working. So far it doesn't seem like Ableton's stem splitter or semantic search are programmatically accessible, but I didn't try very hard. I do have Serum so maybe I'll look into its file format; that does seem doable. The MCP already enables the agent to make patches for built-in Ableton devices.
- bschoepke 5mo ago> 6. Semantic search of sample library I just pushed another tool for that! It wasn't exposed in the Live API but the implementation just issues the same queries to the underlying sqlite db that the Live GUI queries for the "Find Similar Sounds" feature.
- xrd 5mo agoDoes anyone know of other MCP servers for similar music creative tools? I'm interested in things like sonic-pi, strudel.cc and orcas. But very open to anything. I think there is a good opportunity for kids to learn using these tools, especially if I can wire it into my mycroft.ai/neon device.
- jhurliman 5mo agoVery cool! I posted my own experiments in this area a few months back, which were an iteration on an existing Ableton MCP. It’s great to see more people experimenting in the spaces of interfacing with complex applications and music production. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46428922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46428922
- bschoepke 5mo agoNice, the audio analysis M4L device is something I wanted to add next, as that would close the feedback loop and let the agent actually analyze its setup. Kind of like how giving agents screenshots of its UI work helps improve the UI.
- breakall 5mo agoYes! I want this for MainStage -- this would allow me to automate my weekly template setup for playing at my church. Each week before practicing I look up the songs in Planning Center and create a new MainStage concert file with one patch per song, and add notes to each patch screen with the song's key, etc. Automating this would save me the time of doing the busy work and get right to practicing.
- bschoepke 5mo agoInteresting use case! I'm not familiar with MainStage, but that workflow is possible with Ableton using this MCP. Codex itself can pull info from websites or other apps using its existing toolset and then push it into Ableton using this MCP.
- Footprint0521 5mo agoWe should talk! I have a cli that does exactly this, I was able to reverse engineer the MainStage concert format
- ktbwrestler 5mo agothis is awesome. Does anyone recommend one for Logic Pro X? I see a few in the wild but would love to help support if anyone is tinkering with one
- PaulDavisThe1st 5mo agoMCP for Ardour was added more than a month ago, thanks to contributor zabooma: https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/commit/d582a0b042a68ccb22c003a1ff9dd4969122d23e https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/commit/d582a0b042a68ccb22c0...
- lomase 5mo ago[dead]
- rlupi 5mo agoVery nice! Thanks for sharing.
- tim-projects 5mo agoI wish there was something like this for flstudio. I've got 25 years of loops that basically to finish them need better arrangements. Using AI to auto generate sections is what I'm missing.
- deng 5mo ago> I've got 25 years of loops that basically to finish them need better arrangements Welcome to the club. You need to learn how to actually finish a track, which is the most difficult but also the most rewarding part. Why would you use AI for that? I mean, just listen to that demo track Codex made in the above repo, you surely don't want that. There's a good book about this, published by Ableton, you can read it for free here: https://cdn-resources.ableton.com/resources/uploads/makingmusic/MakingMusic_DennisDeSantis.pdf https://cdn-resources.ableton.com/resources/uploads/makingmu...
- bschoepke 5mo agoTo be fair, the demo track was one of the first I had it make, and I didn't put much effort into it because I thought it was especially funny with the macos "say" command vocals. It's a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. If you give it more musical direction you will get more out of it.
- deng 5mo agoIt's not just that the track is garbage (the "say" vocals are actually the least of its problems). Even if AI would make a good track: why use AI for creating your arrangements in the first place? Why this resistance to actually getting good at something? I can understand if your livelihood depends on it and you just need to be fast, but why for stuff you do for fun? The book I mentioned has a good suggestion when struggling with arrangements: just copy. Take a track you really like, put it into your DAW, sync the speed and replicate its structure. You'll see that in many genres, structure is often exactly the same anyway. This can be an eye opener, and once you've realized this, you'll be able to experiment with structure in ways you couldn't do before. That's the fun part.
- bbrwx 5mo agoInteresting work and I’m really interested to see where this direction goes. One question I keep coming back to is where tools like this MCP go beyond templating, like what I already use heavily in Ableton Live. In music production, many tasks are repetitive but not identical and that’s exactly where something like this can shine. At the same time, music is widely seen as a "manual" craft. Every step in the chain from playing an instrument to a final music piece has both a technical and a creative side, and part of the process is staying curious and critical about what could be improved / done differently in the next project. That makes it an open question where automation actually adds value versus where it takes something away. Where I’d personally love to see AI make a difference is in audio engineering / post processing, which also requires a lot of creativity beside a solid fundament of experience to really excel. There’s often a big gap between a great musical idea and a polished mix or master. If AI could help close that gap and contextually help to improve on things like tone, space, EQ, and loudness would be hugely valuable. But the key for me is trust and transparency about modifications. I don’t want a black box that just makes things "better™." I’d want something that clearly explains its actions, like: "I've added an EQ to the piano on track 3 at 01:23 to open it up for the bridge so it sits better in the mix." That kind of assistive, explainable approach would feel much more aligned with how people actually would be open for an assistant to create music.
- bschoepke 5mo agoThank you, this gave me an interesting idea: while it can already set up a mastering chain for you, it is missing the full feedback loop of actually analyzing the processed audio signal. I think I'll add a small Max4Live device that enables the agent to probe the signal chain wherever it wants; from there it can write python to analyze the audio. And yea, I kept the MCP general purpose so you can use it however you want. You can use it to simply ask questions about your live set; it can see the arrangement, see all the settings of all your devices, see all the MIDI, etc. I had it "fix a discordant sounding section" of one of my songs; it was like "oh yea tracks 3, 5, 6 all had some unfortunate notes colliding"
- bschoepke 5mo agoAdded an "Agent Audio Tap" Max for Live device that lets the agent analyze any part of the signal chain and optimize your mix based on that (or just make cool visualizations!) https://github.com/bschoepke/ableton-live-mcp/blob/main/README.md#built-in-agent-audio-tap-max-for-live-device https://github.com/bschoepke/ableton-live-mcp/blob/main/READ...
- bel8 5mo agoThis is really cool! This kind of automation will allow impaired people to have access to a whole new world of creation. Blind and motor impaired comes to mind.
- maxbendick 5mo agoCareful you don't fuck up your hearing with an fx chain mistake.
- eleion_ai 5mo ago[flagged]
- netics01 5mo agoThank you for sharing!
- Daniel_Visovsky 5mo ago[flagged]
- aayushkumar121 5mo ago[flagged]
- hiayygo 5mo ago[dead]
- shinydapps 5mo ago[dead]
- GeorgeToresco 5mo ago[flagged]