10 Ableton Tips Only PROS Know About

learning how to get the most from your Daw is the quickest way to improve your workflow that means more tracks started more tracks finished and better tracks in general so I'm going to hand you over to my friend mert who's got 10 Ableton tactics to improve your workflow and there are a few of these that I'd never heard of and have since Incorporated them into my workflow now Mertz music has been supported by lost frequencies and played at Tomorrowland so he knows a thing or two about quality production so without further Ado let me introduce you to mert hey this is Matt and thank you Bill for the introduction so let's dive into 10 Ableton tips that will change your life let's go the first tip is actually very simple and every time you need to add something you just go to browser and click this odfx tab and as you can see we have all these folders here for our Ableton built-in plugins and let's say I want to add an EQ I need to click this EQ and filters folder and select an EQ from there same as the compressor if I want to add a compressor I need to go to this Dynamics folder and add a compressor from there but this is little too much clicking right if you use Ableton 10 or live 9 you could see all the plugins in one complete view so enable to live 11 there's a way to do that to do this you need to right click any of these folders here like this and as you can see there is an option called group in folder what it does is it groups every EQ every plugin by their function so let's click it to ungroup all of them and boom just like that now all of your plugins are right here in front of your screen and now you don't need to go to folders to add just one plugin to your mix tip number two using shortcuts to listen to your reference tracks I always use reference tracks to compare my mixes to professional sounding ones all I need to do is get this reference track in my Ableton project like this now I will mute this so it won't interfere with my mix what you need to do normally is you go all the way up click the solo button from the reference track then listen to it then click solo button again to unsolo it then go all the way down to your base group and mix it at a bunch of eqs and compression then go all the way up again and solo your reference track like this is too much work and we need to kill the unnecessary time that you go all the way up and down what we can do is we can assign any button in our keyboards to this reference tracks solo button you can just right click to this solo button then press edit keymap what this allows us to do is we can now assign any keyboard shortcut to this solo button in Ableton I will just press Q to assign this and boom just like that as you can see my cue button is now assigned to my first reference tracks solo button now if I right click it again and choose edit keymap when I click queue it just solos my reference track also if you want to change the key of your shortcuts you can always press another key like w e r like any key that you want and if you want to remove your assignment just click its once and press backspace just like that you just delete it your shortcuts and if you want to edit again just click the solo button and press any key just like that it's very simple now if you want to use this in our mix let's say we are mixing our Bass track here and we are zoomed in so we can't see the reference track when we play our track it sounds like this [Music] now if I press Q I will just solo the reference rack [Music] and I press Q again to hear my own mix foreign also if this reference track is distracting you or maybe you have like multiple reference tracks what you can do is you can just assign this color to your background color on your Ableton team in my case this is black I will choose black then assign track color to clips and then I will minimize it just like that it's almost invisible so it won't distract me when I'm working on my project just like that now you know how to quickly listen to your reference tracks is you go tip number three using keyboard shortcuts to make your Arrangements way faster so you created a basic arrangement with your verbs drop and pause curves and after listening to it you decided that you want to duplicate this drop section so the longer way to do this is actually selecting everything on the right side and dragging them right then highlighting the drop section and duplicate well this works but it takes a lot of time so there's a simpler way to do this you can just use shortcuts to make your Arrangements way faster if you want to duplicate this drop part you just need to highlight it and press command shift d in Mac Ctrl shift d in Windows boom just like that the timeline that I selected is now duplicated same here let's say I want to duplicate this first part I just need to press command shift d and boom it's just duplicates let's say you listen to your track and you decided that you don't really want this drop to be that long what you can do is you can just highlight the area that you want to delete and use a shortcut and the shortcut for that is command shifts backspace in Mac Ctrl shift backspace in Windows as you can see now the timeline is deleted and I don't need to drag stuff right and left finally if you want to add a section between this drop part and the postcards part there's a shortcut enabled that lets you insert silence all you have to do is highlight the area that you want to insert silence and press command I in Mac Ctrl I in Windows just like like that now there's this Blank Space over here and maybe we can add a bridge part over here add some elements maybe add a different section and I don't need to drag stuff left and right again now you can make your Arrangements way more faster using this Ableton shortcuts tip number four hiding tracks and groups enabled let's take this percussion group for example I like this percussions group but I'm not sure if I want to use them in my mix but I don't want to delete and lose them as well because I spend so much time mixing and selecting percussions for this mix so what I can do is I can just hide them and remove them from my session so they want to create some mess the way to do is is actually very simple you can just go to your browser and press this current project button over here now I will see all my project files here it may look different depending on the project that you're working on after you open the current project view you can just drag and drop this section over here to save it now I can rename it however I want but I will just rename it that perk for now and boom it saved it so if I'm not going to use my percussions group over here I can just delete it and continue to work on my mix maybe add some drums maybe add another elements like guitars piano or scenes and after that if I want to bring them back in my mix I can just select them and drag them to my Ableton project boom just like that they are here and nothing is lost now I have access to all these percussions that I created before so I can listen and decide if I want to use them now in my mix another example is let's say you created this base over here and you're not sure about using it or not in your mix so just drag this and drop it into this current project folder here boom just like that it's here I will click enter to save it then I can delete this part if I want to bring it back and put it anywhere that I want now you know how to hide anything in Ableton so your projects can be way more cleaner tip number five organizing your plugins to speed up your workflow Ableton Live 11 has this really good option to you know sort your plugins Bitcoin others what I mean by that is if you go to your browser and look all the way to the left corner you can see there is this collections tab over here and if you click edit you can see all the colors we have including red green yellow and stuff like that so what you can do is you can select your favorite colors let's say you like this green color over here if you want to add the screen color to your workflow you need to just click this checkbox over here to edit then you can right click it to rename it let's say mixing plugins for this one after that you just click done and as you can see the green color is now here so to add plugins all you need to do is go to your plugin sections and let's say you want to add compressor to this green color you just right click to that plugin and edit by clicking to your color of choice Also let's let's go to our audio effects and add this delay to the green color as well like that after you sort all your plugins it will look something like this for example I have my favorite plugins in my orange color here as you can see these are all the plugins that I use all the time for my mixes also you're not just limited to plugins you can add presets as well for example let's go to all the effects and let's go to delay and ambient spaces let's say you like this pan left preset over here you can just right click it and give it a color so next time you open up your green color Boom the preset is right over there this way you can organize your plugins and add them to your projects way faster tip number six adding elements from your previous projects to finish your tracks way faster this is a very powerful trick that I use all the time in my computer all my Ableton projects are stored in one simple folder which is this Project's folder over here there is a very simple way to reach your old projects in Ableton you just need to click this projects file and drag them into your Ableton browser like I did here before after that if you click to those projects folder you will be able to see all your previous projects in the browser and let's say you want to add the drum group from your previous projects you just need to open that project folder then go to the project version that you want to use and now as you can see all my tracks and all my groups are in here and I can reach them without an issue so here's my instrument group over here and if I open to it we can see all these little tracks that contain in this group so let's say I want to bring all these instruments group into my current project file I just need to drag it into my projects and wait a couple of seconds because it will take some time and just like that all the elements from my previous projects are right here in my new Ableton project so it's that simple I use this technique all the time in my projects and I hope it helps you too tip number seven reduce latency when you're recording or playing your midi instruments so this is actually a very simple one but it's very effective as well so I have this lead main group over here which has like bunch of plugins and all these plugins have some latencies and if I use too many plugins in one channel it can cause some big latency problems for playing the midi live so if you have like a lot of plugins and man you play your midi instruments live from your keyboard or from your MIDI controller there can be a big latency going on but to fix is very simple you just need to go to options panel over here as you can see there's this delay compensation and reduce latency when monitoring option over here if this is not checked please check this and now the latency should be gone bless the before and after if I play this lead main instruments from my keyboard right now foreign but when I press this keyboard here there's the big latency going on and now I'm going to click on this reduce latency band monitoring option now the latency is almost gone and it's way easier for me to play my midi live tip number eight using clip track to play with your samples I have these three Loops over here which I really like but I want to make them fit better in my mix so what I can do is actually I can play with their Rhythm right normally the old ways to do this let's say I want this percussion to hit not over here but over here I need to go left and drag it to the left and extend this and duplicate this like this as well well this is a little too long as well so what we can do instead is there's a clip drag option in Ableton and the shortcut for that is option shift and mouse track in mac and ALT shifts Mouse Rack in Windows so when I press it and drag my mouse as you can see like these samples are just going all the way right and left so I don't need to really play with this clip over here instead I can play with the inside information of this percussion so maybe I will add this for questions like this here and see how they sound like and maybe I will play with this over here to make it even complex and for my second Channel percussion I can cut it from here and maybe use the shortcuts to play with this fill over here so let's take a listen [Music] I didn't really like it but if you spend some time playing around with rhythms of your percussions or even with your samples you can find the perfect combination for your projects you can also use them in your instrument groups so for example I had this guitar over here [Music] if I want to play with this sample I can just cut it over here and by using the shortcuts I can play with the melody and chords in my guitar as you can see just by dragging my timings and my guitars I created this little delay thing going on in my mix so possibilities are endless just experiment this with a lot and really dive into your samples with the shortcut to create something unique tip number nine using compressed room represent in Ableton there's this very cool preset in Ableton called compressed room Reverb to edit your tracks you just need to go to your browser then write compressed room Reverb then you need to go to this all results tab enable them to find it and boom as you can see it's here and when you click it there's this basically a compressed Reverb rack over here which you can use to really bring life to your elements especially percussions as you can see they sound a little dry in my opinion so if I turn this compressor on as you can hear it adds a big Reverb on top of it and it doesn't sound that good but when you play with the room size over here and reduce the room size when we are playing the song and maybe add some dry embeds and maybe add some compression and reduce the volume to compensate the gain as you can hear it sounds Fuller now so before and after this preset is very powerful especially on percussions and drums like that yeah you can use them in your instrument racks but especially in your percussions and in your drums Channel they will make a huge difference and make them sound bigger than life tip number 10 using glue compressor to distort your drums in Ableton we have this glue compressor plugin you might say it's a basic compressor plugin but actually there is a hidden feature in this compressor which is Distortion if you look close at this right side of this compressor there is the soft clip option over here soft clipping can be used as a distortion to give some life to your drums and make them bigger than life you don't need to play with any of these knobs over here you just need to click the soft click button then add makeup gain to add Distortion to your drums for this example I'm going to group all my drums and percussions in the same group and rename them drums bus now I will add glue compressor over here then I will let utility you might ask why do we need utility to distort a sound basically when you add this makeup gain in this compressor yeah it distorts the sound but it also makes the sound louder so to compensate that we need to use this utilities Game feature let's say we decided that we want to add 10 decibels of makeup in this compressor then we need to go to this utility and add minus 10 decibels to compensate the difference in volume so let's hear some examples I will turn off this utility for now and get this make up to zero also click this soft button over here [Music] thank you by adding quartersables of makeup in this case it gives my drum some Distortion that I kinda like and to compensate that I need to go to my utility and in the game section I will put negative four decibels of gain here so let's take a listen to them in the mix [Music] foreign to my song I played around with this makeup game and decided that three decibels of makeup gain will be enough for this project right now I don't want to over distort it because it will start to sound unnatural but if you are making little bit more kind of deep house or Melody cows or radio song then you need to find a perfect balance to not over distort your drums in the mix so just experiment with this technique and see if you like it that's it well I hope you like these tips and I hope you will use them in your projects so see you later in the next one hope you enjoyed that guys once again thank you so much to mert for sharing his wisdom in this tutorial and let me know did you guys enjoy this format let me know in the comments below because it allows me to know what we should be doing on the channel how to get the most value to you so you can improve your music production skills as quickly as possible if you're interested in coaching with us then check out my music production accelerator program where we've helped our students get signed to some of the world's biggest labels and their music played and supported art festivals such as Tomorrowland now whilst the tips we've seen today are super powerful it's worth experimenting with them in your workflow see what works for you see what you can take on board and I put together some of my other best workflow tips for Ableton in this video here and there are a few absolute gems in this as well so I recommend checking that out now if you enjoyed this video please give it a like and I will catch you over at this next video where we're going to give you more workflow tips to improve the quality of your production and speed it up thank you so much for watching until next time cheers and happy producing

Channel: EDM Tips

Views: 23,161

Keywords: ableton tips and tricks, live 11 tips, live 11 secrets, ableton live production tips, ableton tricks, ableton live tips and techniques, ableton tips for beginners, ableton live tips and tricks, ableton shortcuts, best ableton shortcuts, ableton live tutorial, ableton tutorial, ableton live 11 shortcuts, ableton workflow, ableton productivity hacks, ableton productivity, ableton productivity tutorial, 10 ableton live tips I wish I knew Earlier, EDM Tips

Id: g5AnwiD_Cn4

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023