The metronome sound in Ableton Live is pretty piercing and can easily bleed into your audio recordings. Especially when recording vocals. Have you ever wondered how you can change the sound to something more pleasing and less shrill? Here's how:

With Windows Explorer browse to the following folder:

Program FilesAbleton Live x.x.xResourcesMiscMetronomeSamples

(x signifies the specific version, e.g. Live 8.2.8)

It's best to rename MetronomeUp.wav and Metronome.wav to something like MetronomeUpOld.wav and MetronomeOld.wav, so you can keep these files if you want to change them back later. Alternatively you can move them somewhere safe on your hard drive.

Choose your own metronome sounds, name them Metronome.wav and MetronomeUp.wav and paste them to the folder Program FilesAbleton Live x.x.xResourcesMiscSamples

If you want to revert back to the old metronome sounds, delete your custom sounds and rename the original files by removing Old from the names. Or move them back from where you had stored them in the meantime.

By the way, once you install a newer version of Live, you need to do the same procedure for it as Live versions are not updated on top of older versions, but installed alongside each other.

Free Download

I've created my own metronome sounds and thought I could share them with you. You can get them and more goodies as free downloads under Freebies after signing up on the right.

Do you have any questions or comments? I'm curious to read them. Happy recording!

There are plenty more Ableton Live tutorials where this one came from.