Starting ableton

[Patch]

Always remember:

CTRL+J.

[Patch]

CTRL+E is a good one, so it CTRL+T and CTRL+ALT+T. I don't generatlly use CTRL+SHIFT+T.

[Razzlesnaz]

In this day of instant gratification sure the youtube searches are great but I have always found the absolute best teacher for any software is..........the manual. Get use to every little aspect of the "clip" first. There is so much in just that little screen but its really the building blocks of most Ableton workflow.

[Grav0T]

I was really slow with it, but then I looked up some YouTube tutorial series. The time I put into that was well worth it. I now have all of the hotkeys down, and I understand the different parts of Ableton.

[olisharp]

So many tips, hard to choose the best ones!!

In the bottom left corner of the screen is this interactive help box (if it's off you can enable it by pressing shift and question mark (?)) Hover your mouse over anything and the box will tell you what it is and does. I have it turned off until I need to use it to get a bit more screen space.

There's a Youtube video for pretty much whatever you want to learn (I like the Dubspot ones)

BUT - if you're trying something new, I'd recommend stopping for a minute and thinking about how you might achieve it. I've always found the first thing I try works. This way you'll align your thinking with the way Ableton works.

Get used to the keyboard shortcuts too, you'll find there are some you use a lot that will really speed you up like to duplicate, new track etc, and undo and save!

When you're saving your project, click on "collect all and save". This will gather up all the samples you use in your project into the project folder and is great if you save to Dropbox or a USB stick for collaborations. It stops problems if you reorganise your sample library too.

Take a good look at the preferences section too, there's some good stuff in here.

If you use the Live reverb, the default setting is Eco, change this to high, sounds a lot better! You can save this as a default so you don't need to change it every time.

Ableton's groups, racks, and chains are pretty handy, so look up some videos on those.

If you find there's a combination of effects you use a lot (like maybe eq + compressor + limiter + spectrum) you can group them together into a rack, then save the rack so you only need to search for 1 effect instead of 4!

The Freemasons have a great tutorial on parallel processing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avaq-FiilfI

Pay attention to the different warp modes, and use what sounds best, I think "beats" is the default.

The freeze function is pretty cool too (also freeze and flatten). If you want to re-sample something a quick way is to freeze the track, create a new audio track next to it, then copy the content of the frozen track to your new audio track, then you can unfreeze your first track and continue your work.

NB Live won't let you freeze a track when side chain compression is involved. You can get round this though. If you want to freeze a baseline that's side chained from a kick, select your baseline channel and hit ctrl / cmd g to group it (with itself) then drop your side chained compressor on the group, now you can freeze the baseline channel.

It took me ages to figure out how to do a buss (I did my mix downs in Logic until I figured this out!)
Create a new audio track
select "view in/out" (there's a small button to the far right of the screen in session view
click "in" on the monitor section of your new track.
from the "audio from" drop down select "no input"
Name the channel something like Perc Buss
Now for channels you want to route here, choose this option from the "audio to" drop down.
If you want a buss within a group make sure your audio to is set on "group"

One last quick tip to check your mixes in mono - I put a "utility" on the master and set the width to 0 to make it mono
in the top right of the screen click "key"
click on the "on / off" of your utility
press "m" on you keyboard
click on "key" again to exit key mapping

now you can just press "m" to check your mix in mono.

I really like creating effects chains with macros, and things like the mono maker, I find it adds an extra level of creativity without diving full on into Max or Reaktor programming.

Hope you like Ableton!