Ableton Themes

Our guide to Ableton Themes, we run down the best, and how to make your own, as well as give away our own free ones. All you need to know about Ableton skins, including version 12.

Yes it’s time to upgrade from the standard grey! Upgrade your Ableton themes.

This guide was originally written for Ableton 10 themes, but I’ve updated it in 2025 to include some Ableton 12 themes I’ve made including my own Ableton Dark Mode themes.

See also: our Free Presets, Ableton Tutorials, Ableton Presets, Sample Packs.

Buy our packs at our Shopify store, use this code for 60% off: SBCOM60STWD

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Ableton Skins / Themes

Sometimes you hear them referred to as skins – this is what they were called in Ableton Live 9 and earlier. Themes is just the new word since Live 10. If you have an older version of Live, just substitute the word skins! The format has changed slightly.

Update 2025

Since I originally wrote this guide Ableton 12 has come out and the biggest theme library website livethemes.co has stopped hosting theme. Have no fear there are a couple of new ones, I recommend livethemes.app which is a good online library of users theme. But I have also made 3 more themes especially for Ableton.

Ableton 12 Themes

I made a few more themes for my own use really, I wanted a good dark mode theme for my own studio work. I made 3 – one monochrome and then 2 more variations with some color. I used the creator at livethemes.app to design these. If you’re going to design your own I would recommend keeping Ableton open and a file browser with your Downloads folder and the Ableton themes folder open. So you can preview it properly in Ableton by just downloading it, moving it over to the themes folder, then selecting the theme in Ableton.

Ableton Dark Mode

Here are my Ableton Dark mode themes:

• StudioBrootle.com Dark Mode (monochrome version)
• StudioBrootle.com Dark Mode (with yellow)
• StudioBrootle.com Dark Mode (with pink)

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Where To Put Ableton Skins (Ableton Themes Folder)

To install a theme… first, if the skin file is zipped you should unzip it to reveal the .ask file.

On a Mac… you need to locate the Ableton application (in the Applications folder) ctrl-click on it and click ‘Show Package Contents’. Navigate to Content, then App Resources, then Themes and add the theme here. Or add it here: Go to /Users/[Your Username]/Library/Application Support/Ableton/Live 12/Resources/Themes

Note: “Library” is a hidden folder. You might need to press Cmd+Shift+G and type /Users/[Your Username]/Library to access it.

On a PC… Add the theme into the Program Data folder for Ableton, some thing like C:\ProgramData\Ableton\Live 12 Suite(or whatever your versions is)\Resources\Themes (in older versions of live, the folder could be called ‘Skins’).

Note: You might need to enable “Show hidden files and folders” in File Explorer to see “AppData”.

Then load up Ableton and then Preferences (ctrl + comma) and select the theme under the ‘Look Feel’ tab.

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Best Ableton Skins

OSX DARK MODE 2020 – great for late night studio sessions – dark mode with nothing too bright on the eyes…

Flat clean Neonwave / Cyberpunk – a cool synthwave-styled dark theme.

Pastel 0.2 – really plain pastel coloured theme that is easy on the eyes. Similar to the default theme but paler/prettier.

Light cloud – I love this theme, it looks great. Different to the studio-all-nighter dark themes that we’ve mentioned so far – if you like light themes this is the one.

Spotify UI – one of the most popular themes around – modelled after the music platform’s UI – a dark mode beast with green highlights.

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Ableton 11 Themes

Most of the Ableton 10 themes we’ve mentioned before will work on Ableton 11 and 12, but here are some great Live 11 specific themes:

There’s some cool 1990s themed-themes (yes I said ‘themed-themes’ !) over on CDM, here. Also Madeleine from Sonic Bloom’s mega pack can be downloaded here, for 55 different themes.

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Free Ableton 10 Theme….

Update 2025: here’s 3 darkmode themes for Ableton 12: StudioBrootle.com Dark Mode (monochrome version), StudioBrootle.com Dark Mode (with yellow), StudioBrootle.com Dark Mode (with pink).

Here’s our Studio Brootle Red Light Free Theme we made! Download it here…

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How to make your own Ableton Live Skins

The most basic way to make your own templates is to go to your themes folder, and then open the theme’s .ask in a text editor and manually edit it by hand (a basic understanding of coding would help but it is fairly straight forward). You have to make the changes, save it and then open it in Ableton to see the changes.

OR:

You can get an editor…
Here’s a an editor for PC called Fuzz, and one for Mac called Pelt. They are both very similar – you can use a colour picker to edit the themes. These are a great way to be able to see changes as you make them.

OR, option 3, you can use the online editor at livethemes.co which is a website where they have a lot of themes. You can choose any of them and then edit them yourself and down them using their editor (you have to register first).

You can also choose from any of their other themes and then edit and make changes to them into something you like more. The five themes we reviewed above are from this site, you can re-edit them all on the site too.

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Summary

Hope you found this helpful, it’s time to ditch the grey! Change up your theme for a dramatic change to your studio time…

See our other Ableton Tutorials here.