The 50 Best Free Ableton Templates & Files For Music Producers

Ableton Live is one of the best DAW’s on the market. It’s used by everyone from big time producers, to small, bedroom EDM artists. But it’s hard to get a hang of when you’re starting out, and want to make the amazing music in your head, but just don’t know how. Here’s where free Ableton Project Files from professionals can really help you understand music production in more depth.

Ableton Project Files are great because you can see how a certain song or genre is made, see how professionals attempt mixing & mastering, and learn from it, to pick up the skills yourself. Ableton Live allows for easy project sharing, so the amount of templates and projects available is vast. In this article, we’ll cover the best free Ableton Project Files for music production.

Here’s the complete list of the best free Ableton project files (or templates) updated for 2022:

Contents

How To Use Free Ableton Templates in Live 10

Free Ableton templates files or project files come in the form of a music production project file. You can open this project file and, provided you own the plugins that were used in the project, you’ll be able to inspect everything to see how it was pieced together.

Templates come in a variety of genres from house and tech house, to trap and pop music, so there’s something to learn for everybody.

Adding to that, projects usually come with a lot of samples, if not a full pack of samples. Which gets us to our first point.

Sampling

If you like a sound in a track, whether it’s dubstep, edm, trap or pop, if you can find the project file, you can usually get a great sample out of it.

That means you can download templates of your favorite tracks, and use them as a small, themed sample pack, to incorporate into your own music.

Learning

The biggest reason you might want to get a template or project file, is learning. Seeing the decisions made during the arrangement, sound design, mixing and mastering, can be a great learning tool for honing your skills.

Whether you want to learn how to create a sound, manipulate it, or want to learn dubstep and techno arrangement techniques, templates can be extremely helpful.

In our list of 30 free Ableton project files, we’ve included a variety of styles, genres and types of ableton live templates. House, Tech House, Trap, Techno, Dubstep, EDM or Pop – we’ve tried to cover most of the bases.

Ableton project files are great to learn from, even if you’re an advanced producer. Seeing a production workflow, that is different to yours, and learning from it, is a great way to add tricks to your arsenal.

We personally love looking at production project templates of other producers and genres, to understand different production techniques and further develop our skills.

Ableton Project Files / Templates (Ableton Live 11 Templates)

If you’re the owner of Ableton Live 11, you might have already noticed a new tab on your browser, labeled “Templates”.

This is essentially a hub for all of your Ableton templates and project files. Ableton Live 11 already comes with a few pre-loaded, but these are best used with your own templates.

Say you are a versatile producer and work on both, larger scale audio recordings, as well as more in-the-box electronic productions. You can make separate template files, to serve as the starting point for different types of production sessions.

You could for example create a template solely for sound design, which will have pre-loaded your favorite synths and routed effects.

Alternatively, you could create a template with all the elements, plugins and tracks you use the most. Having the stuff you use on every project, pre-loaded and where you need it, upon opening Ableton, can improve your workflow massively.

You can save your most used template, or Ableton project file as the default, which can be found in your Ableton preferences.

What To Do If The Templates Aren’t Working?

There are a few reasons for Ableton project files and free Ableton live templates possibly crashing. The most common reason for this is usually if your version of Ableton Live is not the same as the one used in the Project Files.

Alternatively, you might not have a plug-in that the creator used. A lot of free Ableton project files need Serum or any other plugin you might be missing, to be able to view them fully. But, most come with frozen tracks, so you can still hear the element.

Lastly, if your Template loads in, but all the audio files are greyed out, this is usually due to Ableton looking for the samples in the wrong place. If the Ableton project files have been saved properly, all the audio files necessary should be in the same folder as the Project files.

ableton project file not working — **click on the orange/red bar to fix the sample error.**

To fix this, click on the red error at the bottom, and in the sample folder window, manually select the folder with your samples, and re-scan for them. After this, your audio should all be in the correct places, if not, either your samples are somewhere else, or the project files have been saved improperly.

How To Make Your Own Ableton Template

You might be looking to make some of your own Ableton live templates, to improve your workflow. Who knows, you might even want to share some of your own free Ableton project files.

Here’s how to create your own Ableton project file / Ableton templates:

Create your desired setup, load tracks, your favourite plugins, samples etc.
Create your music.
Collect all and save

The way to do this is very easy. It’s just saving your project, the only catch is, that you will be using the “Collect All and Save” function in Ableton, rather than just saving as usual.

Collect All and Save, basically loads all of your samples and presets, midi and arrangement, into the project folder. Additionally, if you’re sharing this project file with a collaborator, using Collect All and Save is a necessity.

Saving your Ableton project files like this gives you a nice, share-able folder, with everything necessary to open it, all included in the file (except for the plugins).

Finishing Up

Hopefully, you found something useful in our list of the best free Ableton project files. Whether you’re downloading some free Ableton Live templates or making your own, templates can be an extremely powerful tool.

Go download one, use the samples and presets, learn mixing and mastering, or just get accustomed to a new genre. Whether you produce House, Tech House, Trap or any other genre, there is a template out there that you’ll love.

That’s it for our list of Free Ableton Live templates for music production.

FAQ

Where Can I Find Ableton Live Templates For Free Download?

The best places to find and download free Ableton Project files are:

Can you open Ableton 10 projects in Ableton 11?

Ableton Live 10 project files can be opened in Ableton 11. However, if you open and save them in Ableton 11, you can’t re-open them in Ableton 10. Ableton is not backwards compatible, so save your file as a copy before opening it in a new version of Ableton.

This means you can open any Ableton project file you download in a newer version, as long as it is older. Some of the information might not come across to 11 from really early versions, like 7 or 8, but should you be able to open them.

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Tom Jankevics

Toms is a music producer & DJ, born and raised in Post Soviet Latvia. Currently based in Brighton, Toms has had over 6 years of experience with all things production and in that time, he’s done a tonne of cool stuff! He’s played multiple festivals, had experience in the field with mixing & mastering and even become a freelance journalist in the music industry.

Toms currently creates music under the alias Sovereign. Producing music that’s intimate and subtle, while full of edge and energy, the young producer combines the artistic sounds of Trip Hop artists like Massive Attack, with the energy and youthfulness of producers like Flume, Jamie XX and Yaeji. You can check his stuff on Soundcloud.

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