Ableton AI

Control Ableton Live from an AI assistant like Claude. You describe what you want in plain language, and it builds it in your Live set: tracks, instruments, effects, MIDI clips, automation, and mixing. Over 150 commands covering most of the Live Object Model.

You describe, it builds, you listen and judge. The assistant has no ears, so it handles the mechanical work while you keep the taste.

Contents

• What you can do with it
• How it works
• Installation
• Getting started
• The skill
• Using a local model instead of Claude
• Editing the remote script
• Safety
• Testing
• Architecture
• Credits
• License

What you can do with it

Ask for a sound and get it built:

Build a dark ambient pad on a new track. Slow attack, long release,
a filter behind it with a slow LFO on the cutoff. Play a minor chord.

Ask for the tedious things you’d never do by hand:

Write six clips at 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 17 bar lengths. They're coprime,
so the loop won't repeat for over a million bars.

Draw a twelve minute filter sweep with 200 automation points, then put
per-note probability on the hats so they flicker instead of repeating.

Ask for a whole piece in a style:

Lay down a Steve Reich style phasing piece. Two piano tracks play the same
short cell; make one clip a bar longer than the other so they drift out of
phase and slowly pull back into sync. Add a marimba and a vibraphone doubling
fragments of the cell at their own loop lengths, so the parts interlock and
never quite repeat.

Ask it to fix what you just heard:

The bass is too quiet and the reverb is too wet. Pull them back.

How it works

The assistant talks to Ableton through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for giving AI tools access to external systems. This project is an MCP server that exposes Ableton’s Live Object Model as a set of tools the assistant can call.

There are two pieces:

The MCP server runs on your machine as its own process. Your AI client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor) launches it and calls its tools.

A remote script runs inside Ableton itself. Ableton’s Control Surface system lets you run Python inside Live, and that script opens a local socket the MCP server talks to. This is the only supported way into Live’s API, so it has to be Python and it has to be enabled in Ableton’s settings.

When you ask for something, the assistant calls a tool, the server sends a command over the socket, the remote script runs it against Live’s API, and the result comes back. You see it happen in Ableton in real time.

Installation

You need Ableton Live 11 or newer, and uv.