50 Ableton Live tips EVERYONE should know! 🤓

in this lesson i want to share with you my 50 top ableton 11 workflow tips i recommend going through this and applying whichever ones you feel are going to work for you into your workflow this is actually taken from my ableton live 11 for beginners course which you can check out below this video but without further ado let's get to those 50 tips on how to use ableton 11 like a pro tip number one this is bringing in stems and audio files and putting them on separate tracks i'll explain so if we grab some audio files and if you drag them in it's going to put them automatically in sequence on one track now if you're using mac you hold command if you're using windows you hold ctrl whilst you're still grabbing and dragging and it's going to if you see there put them on separate tracks this makes doing remixes much faster because you can see everything's on its own track and it's worth noting everything i say in this lesson if you're using windows when i say command press control that's it if you're using mac then just press command okay tip number two this is saving default presets for your effect and instrument plugins and this is really useful if you often find yourself dialing in similar settings for each one so if we drag in an eq8 onto our midi channel you can see here i've got saved in as my default a low cut off at 30 hertz and this is how you do it you set up your plugin however you want to you just right click and then you press save as default preset and then every time you load in that effect or that instrument it's gonna have those settings dialed in as your default okay tip number three this is similar to tip number two except you're doing it for the whole track so you can save default track settings so here we have a midi track here we have an audio track and if you know that you're going to use the same settings or the same presets rather in each of these tracks then you can just save that track as a default so for instance you might have an eq you might have a utility plug-in and you might want that every time that you load in an audio track so you can just right click save as default audio track and then if you load in another audio track it's going to automatically have those settings on it all those plugins on it if you want to revert you can just delete them right click and then press save as default audio track overwrite it and then you put it back to the factory settings okay tip number four this is another preset saving but instead of doing it for the instrument or the effect or the track you're doing it for the whole project so we can see here i've got some auxiliary channels set up perhaps you always know that you're going to want a bass channel with audio perhaps you know you want something for the vocals and you can save that as your default ableton set you can set up the colors and you just go up to file save as default set and then that is going to load up every time you load ableton now however in ableton 11 you can save various templates as well so i've got one for my production session i've got one for my mixing session and my mastering session they're all separate templates and you can just save them here and then load them in whenever you want to use them if you want to learn more about my different sessions then check out my ultimate edm mixing course to learn how to mix really truly professional sounding electronic dance music but using templates and default sets makes it really quick to get everything in place as you want them okay next tip this is freezing tracks so if you've got a synth and you want to share this project with another artist and they don't have that plug-in or if you've got effects on that they don't have or if your cpu is just running high you can freeze the tracks and you have to do that by right-clicking pressing freeze track and then what it's going to do is create an audio a temporary audio file of that within your project and then you can now listen to it and you don't need to have this plug-in it's going to use far less cpu you can copy the midi from that frozen track to another midi track and use that on a different instrument you can also copy the audio so if you create an audio track just grab some of your freeze track paste it there you've now got that audio so it's a great way to save cpu and give you more flexibility next tip is customizing the aesthetics of ableton so i like to have it so every track that i load up is just a default by white so then i can right click and customize the colors as i like and the way you do that is go into preferences go into look and feel you can also assign track colors turn that off that's what i do and you can also decide how you want the screen to look whether you want it really lights there are a few different kind of presets in there and you can adjust the brightness like that you can change how deep the grid color is as well how like contrasted it is and just get what works well for you with your monitor in your lighting in your room and use something that works really well and doesn't hurt your eyes if you use it for a long time next tip again relating to the last one is to use the zoom on the display so you can see see here i've got it zoomed in at 200 this is so you can see what's going on usually when i'm producing i'd probably have this at 130 because i don't want to hurt my eyes too much by having to strain so this is a really really useful tool next tip super useful is drawing a line in the velocity so if you've got a snare roll for instance like this and you want these snares to be getting louder from a quiet point you can just drag up the velocity control here press b to go to draw mode then hold option and just drag and you'll see it's drawing a line and when you let go it's going to have a nice even velocity slope now something to be aware of it's very easy to sometimes miss that first snare if you are using this for snares but now you can hear if that velocity is assigned to the volume on your sampler as it is by default then you're going to get this nice steady increasing volume next tip okay so something really annoying in ableton is if you click somewhere in a timeline and press space or play it always starts from the beginning of the clip and that can be really frustrating so if you hold option and press play then you can play from wherever the playhead marker is super super useful okay tip number 10 this is using the preview button in the piano roll editor so if this is turned off and you press any of the keys you can't actually hear what's being played which can be a little annoying sometimes if you turn this on you can and you can even hear if it's playing a chord as well if you grab several notes at once now i assign a keyboard shortcut to this my keyboard shortcut is p so i can just turn it on and off really quickly and you do that by pressing command k to open up your keyboard shortcuts clicking on it then pressing p and then closing those keyboard shortcuts and then boom really quick really easy and i actually saved this keyboard shortcut in my default set as well so i don't need to be doing this every time i load a new ableton project okay next tip really cool if you are using a midi controller like i have a keyboard here and you're drawing in a chord or you're playing a chord you can just hold those and then press your cursor button right and it's going to extend or decrease it by the amount that your grid is set to so that's a cool way to quickly draw chords nice little tip there next tip is if you want to select all the notes in a particular line and you can just press the button in the piano roll editor and you can see all of those notes have now been selected now if you want to view the notes of several different midi clips at once this is how you do it if you're in your midi clip whichever you're editing and then you go to another midi clip and hold command and left click on it you can now see the notes in that midi clip as well now if you want to edit some of them but they're in the same place so for instance if we move these up here so now how how do i grab those notes from the blue one underneath well you can click these little buttons up here and it's going to show you which one is in focus and then you can edit the one that's in focus okay super simple one now you can hold command and d or control and d in windows to duplicate a clip lovely like that and make sure that this padlock button is either switched on if you want to not be duplicating the automation any automation you got programmed in here say if we automate this and we don't want to copy that automation when we duplicate then make sure this is switched to red so we can duplicate and we'll see that automation hasn't been moved however if we do want to duplicate the automation we make sure that padlocks turned off boom and now the automation is duplicated as well next tip is inserting silence so this is really useful in ableton especially if you uh yeah want to add some more to your track somewhere in there so you grab the amount by which you want to insert the in silence so let's say we want to insert that much and just press command and i and it's going to insert that much silence in between now again make sure this padlock is turned on or off depending on what you want to do whether you want to shift all your automation over if you do then make sure this is turned off otherwise the automation will stay in the same place whilst you've inserted that silence this is something that really did my head in when i first started using ableton is that if you want to do a really accurate change it's quite hard but if you hold shift you can make a more accurate change and this works for automation nodes as well so if you've drawn in some automation and you can see oh i can't get it quite right let's drag that down what you can do is hold shift and then you can make smaller changes and yeah make it more accurate now the next tip is actually programming in exact digits so if you right click you can edit value and instead of kind of mucking around trying to get the right place you can type in exactly what you want and it's going to go there okay next tip is for automation as well if you hold option whilst you are dragging a line if you see here we got a node and then the line is highlighted if you hold option you can drag that and make it a curve to make uh different shapes logarithmic or exponential in terms of your automation curves okay next tip is minimizing and maximizing all the tracks at once so if you press this little button here this little triangle is going to minimize that track if you hold option and press it it's going to minimize all the tracks and conversely if you hold it and press when they're minimized it's going to maximize them all now it's worth noting that you can also grab all the tracks you want and then if you're holding option you can drag and resize them all together as well next tip that's really useful is that you can just mute clips just by pressing zero to mute or unmute them next tip is being aware of automatic track fades so if you have a drum like so you obviously want that initial transient coming through so we can see here now if you've got automatic clip fades turned on this is what happens when you load in a clip and it kills that first transient now the way you turn that off is go into preferences and you go into record warp and launch and then you just turn off create fades on clip edges there i just leave that default off next is if you've changed your warp controls at all for a loop [Music] say we've changed it to this which is weird and would sound completely dodgy you wouldn't do this uh say you changed the warp algorithm if you want that to save you can just press this little save button here and then every time you load in this sample it's going to have the exact same warp markers all loaded in place just this little button here next really cool feature that is in ableton live 10 and 11 is that you can now stretch your audio so if it's warped if you've got warp turned on and i generally recommend using complex pro fit for doing this then you can grab and hold the end of the clip and if you're holding shift it's going to stretch it like so so you can time stretch that if you want to make sweeps longer things like that so now it's going to last over twice as long [Applause] very cool tip the next thing to note is that if you don't want to be stretching things exactly to a grid or doing anything exactly to the grid you can hold command and that allows you to go off the grid you can see there we're going off the grid if you let go of command it's going to snap back to the grid now this is true in the piano roll editor as well so if you want these drums to be slightly off the grid you can just grab them hold command and then you can move them slightly off the grid like so if you want to change the size of the grid you can hold command and press one and it's gonna get finer so if we look at my grid here and if you press command two it's gonna get bigger or a lower resolution now if you press command and three it will change to triplets so then you can attach things as triplets if you want to learn more about triplets then check out my music theory for edm producers course that covers all of this stuff next is if you've got lots of effects on a track and you want to bypass them all at the same time instead of having to go and click on them like this and if you've got 7 8 9 or 10 that can be a bit of a pain you can just group them by grabbing all of the plugins in that channel pressing command g and it's going to group them into an audio effect rack and then you can just bypass the whole rack and it's going to bypass all of those plugins now it also remembers which ones are turned off as well or turned on within that rack now the next one is a really essential tip if you are using a reference track as you should to help you produce whether it be the production the mixing or the mastering you don't want it running to your master channel because you've maybe got mastering effects on there and then your reference tracks going to be being pushed through even more mastering which is going to completely ruin the whole sound of it so because it's already been mastered so what you do is you select this i o button here for the routing open that up and then instead of having it go to master just have it go to external out and then you can still hear it sounds great and it's just not going through your master channel now if you're finding these tips useful so far check out my ableton live 11 for beginners course below this video and if you dig it smash like and consider subscribing to this channel thank you very much okay let's crack on you probably already know what sidechain compression is it's when you can create that pumping effect like this with the base that's off and that's on so the kick can pop through but this is what i do some people will take the side chain trigger from the kick itself but if it's a longer kick it doesn't give you so much control over the length of the pump so what i do is i create a separate sidechain channel up here and in this channel i've got it set to sends only which means you never actually hear this signal it's just being used to trigger the sidechain compressor when i use it now this is the sample that i use i'll turn this to master so you can actually hear it a very short sharp rim shot and that's so i can get all the control on my sidechain compression from the release and the attack knobs on the compressor but make sure you set your sidechain channel to sends only and that means that you'll never hear it coming out the speakers it just is used for the sidechain trigger a quick way to test different versions of a sound that you're trying to get right without uh kind of spoiling all the hard work you've done is to create different variants in chains within that instrument so you can see here we've got a synth playing out up but if we want to test some different sounds we don't want to risk losing this one then we can just press command g and then open this up and then we can just duplicate chain like this or you can press command d and it's going to do it too and now you've got three chains all doing the same thing but then on the second one you could load in a different preset [Music] let's put a saturator on there or redux [Music] and now we can preview them in situ i'll just delete the last one because we're just using two and you can preview them by pressing these solo buttons and then when you've found the one that you want you can just delete what the one that you don't want anymore so that's a very cool way to preview different sounds without spoiling all the hard work you've already done and i do it that way instead of just duplicating the track which you could do because then you've got to okay let's let's give you an example of that if we just duplicate the track and then make the changes then you've got to kind of switch between that one and and then that one and turn them on and off whereas this way you can just use that solo button within the chains itself and it's much much quicker okay the next pro tip is saving out midi clips now if you go into your current project folder in your browser here and you say you like this arp sound then you can just drag the midi clip over into the browser and then name it as you want let's call it up sound and then the beauty of this is you can now load this into any project or on any track so if we do this and it's not only going to save the midi information it's also saved all of the instruments on there as well so that's a very cool way to take an idea from one track into another track but the beauty of ableton is you can actually go into the browser into the project itself and you'll see all of the tracks that you've created in there just like that so i can load up any project and i can just drag these in straight away now the difference is this drags in the whole track as opposed to just a clip which the first example did but it's still really really useful the next tip is about pitch bend so if you've got pitch bend programmed in into a clip like so and you want to be able to pitch bend more in whichever instruments you're in make sure you go to the global section and increase the pitch bend range to what you want i always choose 12 or 24 because that's a whole octave and it means if you do a pitch bend right down to the bottom or the top of the clip it's going to sound good because it's in the whole octave jump so let's check this one out now the next tip was going to be how you have to reset your pitch with a little node at the beginning of each clip because in ableton 10 what would happen was that you would you maybe kind of stopped your tune and it was halfway through a pitch bend and then when you replayed it the instrument would still be at a weird pitch instead of back on the original pitch so that's why i used to do this but it seems they've actually fixed that bug in ableton 11 so this isn't so much a tip as a you don't have to do that anymore kind of tip now the next tip is a personal one of mine and one i teach all my students it's creating a utility on your master channel and then a shortcut a keyboard shortcut so you can switch the mono button on and off and that is so you can check your mixing mono really quickly and make sure it still sounds good so what i do is if you press command k to open your shortcuts press the mono button i use option m just because it's close on the keyboard it's really easy for me to reach and no other control uses that so those keys so it's really easy for me to do but if you want to learn more about why this is important you can click the video that's on around this one at the moment a nice little quick tip for ableton 11 if you've got your sounds or your midi notes and you want them to be going right up to the next one so legato you can just select them all and press this legato button [Applause] much easier than kind of fiddling around trying to do each one uh separately now when it comes to groove templates you can search through the library in ableton live 11 so in grooves and you can as you know if you watch my groove lesson you can drag those onto different elements and it's going to apply that groove but you can also extract groove from elements as well so if you've got a particular vocal or a drum beat that's got a slightly different groove from the rest of your track like this you can actually right click on that you can extract groove and it's going to put it in your groove library and then you can apply this to the different midi instruments as well so we can put that on our drums we could put that on our arp and then that's going to have the same groove applied to it as the audio next tip is being able to delay the track slightly by a matter of milliseconds or push it forward slightly so if you've got a track that isn't quite in time with everything else like we have this vocal here and it's a little behind everything else we can open up this delay button here and we can just dial in a negative amount of milliseconds [Music] and it's going to play it slightly earlier and get it in sync with the rest of the music next tip is if you want to quickly toggle between the simpler in ableton and the sampler all you need to do is right click [Music] and now it's automatically loaded into sampler where you've got more controls similarly or conversely if you want to switch it back you can just right click and then you're back into the simpler again the next tip is super essential if you're using third-party plugins which you really should be if you are producing professional music and again you can check out my ultimate edm mixing course for more info on that but if you open the third party plugin and then go to another track and open a third party plugin there and it's going to automatically close the first one and quite often you want to see several at once on different channels so what i do is go into preferences go down to plug-in windows and just put multiple plug-in windows on boom and now you can open as you would expect multiple plug-in windows at the same time now there are multiple ways that you can create drums in ableton but i prefer to use midi rather than audio and this is the main reason why so if you've got your drums like so if you had these in audio you'd have to go through and you'd have to swap and edit each one every time you want to change a drum sound so you might get way through the track and realize that your kick doesn't sound quite right or your clap doesn't sound quite right but this way you can go into your drum rack find your clap if that's what you want to change and then you can use hot swap and preview new samples as you go so if we go to our drums we can preview it in situ and then choose the best drum for it and then if you use audio as well and you've got to kind of change the start place of the drum sound you'd have to go through every single audio clip that you've created and change it automatically or rather manually whereas this way you can make any changes like to the decay sustain and release and it's going to change all of the instances straight away that's why i use the drum rack for programming drums in midi rather than in audio now not only can you hot swap out samples whilst you're listening to them in situ and preview them with the whole song you can also do it with presets as well so if we look at our wavetable arpeggio here [Music] and we want to try a different preset we can just play the track press this hotspot button and then click until we find a preset that we really like another great tip in ableton live 11 is that if you are using vocals and you want to warp them complex pro is the best algorithm almost all the time to choose and then you can shift performance as well so let me give you a quick example of what that sounds like so we've got our normal vocals here so to create a different effect what we're going to do is drop the pitch down one octave and then play with the formants which creates a completely different effect for the vocals [Music] so that's a pretty cool tip using vocals in ableton next tip is dragging a piece of audio straight into the sampler or the simplet from the project itself to create your own sample so if you create a midi channel and then create a simpler like so just drag it in and say we want a bit of this vocal you can drag the whole thing in but then you've got the whole sample in there like so and you might not want that much so what i like to do is find the bit i want consolidate it with command j and then it's created its own little sound and now i've got that as a sampler that i can play as an instrument there you go the next tip is something i tell all my students and it's super important it's doing any volume automations using a utility plug-in rather than the channel fader so if you automate the volume on the channel fader like so and you want to fade in this vocal for instance yes of course it's working it's going to be fading it in but the trouble is if you then want to change your mix afterwards and you think okay well this this vocal needs to be at a higher volume or a lower volume if you've got lots of automation on that channel you then have to go and edit all of that automation to change the mix and then if you want to change it back again you've got to go back and automate all of that volume as well so my advice is honestly leave this alone with in terms of automation just use it manually when you need to change the mix if you need to automate the volume then load a utility plug into that channel and do all your automation on this like so and then you've still got that volume fade but if you need to bring those vocals up or down in the mix later you can just do it and your automation's still working on your utility plug-in this is a super essential tip please please don't be automating the volume on the channel fader okay so the next tip is using the auxiliary channels for most of your reverb most of your delay effect this is so you can treat them as separate instruments which means you can take out the low end of any reverbs meaning your mix is going to be clearer less muddy and you can have certain elements of the mix share the same reverb which is great for preserving cpu power and it also just gels everything together makes it sound like it's coming a bit more from the same space the next tip is a bit of a wild card but if you are creating music for video then you can use option command and v to quickly open up the video window [Music] just really quickly so really useful if you're making music for adverts or you're doing it for video editing stuff like that okay next really quick workflow tip is using z and x to zoom really quickly and zoom back out on sections so as you know you can grab the top bar and zoom in and out by dragging your mouse but you can just grab a section here press z boom you zoom right in press x and you zoom straight out again and my last pro tip for ableton live 11 is if you are exporting tracks and you want to export the stems so let's go to the export settings here and here you can see you can export the rendered track so that's the entire track from the master channel or you can export all the individual tracks which is great if you're sending off your tracks for remix because it's going to save all of them as separate tracks you can also export selected tracks only so if you only want to export say the drums and the vocals you can hold command select the tracks you want to export open up the export options selected tracks only choose your settings here and then press export okay the next tip is with regards to warp markers if you hold command whilst you hover over you'll notice that two appear either side of the one you're hovering over and this means you can double click and then move that one warp marker without shifting everything else that you don't want to shift the next tip and this is super powerful is if you are in session mode and using a clip you can edit the modulation as opposed to the automation and this means that any parameter that you edit is going to be being modulated independently of any automation and any other overriding settings so for instance if we choose mixer track panning we can edit the modulation and we've got modulation selected like this [Music] and you can see on the track panning here it's being modulated but if we move the track panning it's still going to be modulating it in relation to that track panning space very useful indeed for adding lots of movement into your music there you have it guys i really really hope you found this video useful as i said before this is taken from my ableton live 11 for beginners course which you can check out below this video and if you want videos like this to help you improve your music production each and every week do please consider subscribing to my channel because it really helps me out and if you like this video smash like thanks again for watching and until next time cheers and happy producing

Channel: EDM Tips

Views: 17,230

Keywords: Ableton Live workflow, how to make music in ableton, ableton live 10, ableton live, ableton live shortcuts, ableton shortcuts, ableton live 10 shortcuts, ableton keyboard shortcuts, ableton live tutorial, ableton live tips, ableton live tips and tricks, ableton live 10 keyboard shortcuts, daw shortcuts, Ableton Live 11 keyboard shortcuts, Ableton Live 11, Ableton Live 11 shortcuts, ableton live 10 tutorial, how to use ableton, ableton live 11, ableton 10, live 11, edm tips

Id: y9dWz8AAbg0

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021