Someone told me you have to make 100 crap songs before your first good one. Best way to get better is to just start trying to make stuff and stop comparing your work to what you listen to on spotify. You'll improve faster than you think.
That was "good enough" to teach me the basics, which at first was just figuring out how the UX of Ableton works (the intro tutorial is good for that as well). The teacher teaches me stuff about sidechains and etc but that can be learned through youtube videos. Really I should spend more of my time with him bringing in my material and working with him to tweak it.
Anyway, because there's MIDI tools like "chord builders" (literally one called "jazz for dummies") and arpegiators, it's not exactly necessary to get a keyboard. I'd just plug one of those in, bang out a few chords, and hit ctrl+d (duplicate) a bunch of times, trying to learn more about the basics of songbuilding than really making custom tracks.
But that did get obnoxious not being able to tell which keys on my keyboard mapped to notes, so I got an entry level midi keyboard recommended on wirecutter, the Arturia MiniLab MKII https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MSNIVKE/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
It's been fun and simple, and I bet it'll be even more fun when I figure out how to map the knobs to stuff and learn more about synths.
As for version of Ableton, now I'm running a pirated version until a few months go by without any big purchases, at which time I'll pick up Live Suite.
I was completely blown away by the infinity x infinity possibilities. Totally overwhelming! This tutorial is great for helping me understand the concepts, very fortuitous.
Now if I could actually sit down and make a song instead of just tweaking knobs on controllers...