Sideman

A melodic house track, start to finish

1 A melodic house track, start to finish

Ten lessons that build one track from an empty Set — 122 BPM, F minor, five and a half minutes, intro → build → drop → breakdown → second drop → outro — with Claude doing the work in Ableton Live through Sideman. Every lesson leaves a state in the Set you can check with a question rather than a feeling.

Figure 1.1: Where the ten lessons end: the whole track in Arrangement view, its seven sections named along the top.

The course is one track told twice. Two paths through one track.

Path 1 — Make a track with Claude

For musicians. You type what you want; the page tells you what Claude does, what you will see in Live, and how to check it. No code, nothing to install beyond Sideman and Claude Code.

Start Path 1 →

Path 2 — Under the hood

For programmers and the curious. The same ten lessons as executed notebooks driving Sideman’s Python client, every cell’s output frozen from a real Set. Read them, or run them against your own Live.

Start Path 2 →

Before either

• Sideman installed and showing up in Claude Code (the install page takes a few minutes).
• Ableton Live open on a fresh, unsaved Set (⌘N). Lesson 1 starts there, and nothing in a lesson touches a Set you did not build in the one before.
• Ten minutes with Start here — three prompts that show the whole idea before you commit to ten lessons.

The syllabus lists every lesson’s outcome, its checkpoint, and the tools it introduces.