Best way to learn ableton
Hey guys,
I am a dj from Belgium. and i recently teamed up with a friend of mine who produces his own tracks. 
We are planning on making some kind of live show and were thinking of doing this with ableton.
Since neither of us has a lot of experience with ableton I wass wondering how, or where did you guys learn to work with it?
thanks
Youtube and the manual that came with Ableton.
Thereās the obvious Youtube search for Ableton tutorialsā¦but picking random lessons doesnāt have any flow to it. The Dubspot and mrbillstunes tutorials are good though.
A good idea is to go through the TomCosm āIntroduction to Digital Audio designā (or something like that) tutorials. Itās a series of 10 hour long videos going through the design of a track. Might not be your flavor of music, but itās a decent enough progression from nothing to a complete track using Ableton. Youāll need to register on the site, but at $10 itās worth it.
thanks guys,
I obviously tried the ableton and youtube tutorials. But Iām i bit stuck now.
Thanks for the advice, I will check it out now
No, theyāre not. All of the dubspot videos Iāve seen are flat-out wrong and lead to train wrecks, clipping, and unnecessarily high cpu loads. OP, if you do watch dubspot videos, avoid DJ Endoā¦he doesnāt have a clue what heās doing.
The Ableton manual is good. And there are videos on the Ableton website that help. Itās a full-fledged DAW and wonāt hold your hand, but you can do basically anything.
abletonlivedj.com is a good resource. In addition to Tom Cosm, look up Tarekith (tarekith.com) and Will Marshall (marshall-law.co.nz). Theyāre both very capable Ableton users with a focus on live production and DJing, though will has since switched to Traktor for the time being. One of the best things you could do is to go through Tom Cosmās megaset or willās dj template and really understand whatās going on there. I think both of them use midi remote scripting, which means that you have to be able to read Python to be able to really look under the hoodā¦but just understanding the track routing, effects, and midi assignments will get you a long way.
Other than that, the best things I did in learning Ableton was to think āheyā¦there should be a way to do this,ā play around with the software for a whileā¦and if I couldnāt figure it out, I googled some relevant terms and it usually worked. There are a lot of little tricks that you can pull off (like turning your sends into behaving like wet/dry knobs) but that arenāt obvious.
The most important thing you can do to start is to figure out how you want to be able to play your material. Do you want to use full tracks? Stems? Do you want to play a soft synth live? Figure out your requirements and start setting up your tracks first. Then, I think the best thing you can do is to make a channel strip that you like and put it in an Audio Effect Rack. For example, mine had a 4-band EQ, a gain control, a delay, the Fade to Grey effect (two filters and a stereo ping-pong delay), and a filter that I could switch b/t high and low-pass.
Then, I built other audio effect racks to actually hold effects on sends, did the trick to turn sends into wet/dry knobsā¦and it was pretty darn cool. But I was DJing with full tracks and a VCM-600. If youāre more like everyone else, the apc-40 might fit you better, and thereās no real way to replicate my setup on an APC 40ā¦it just doesnāt have enough controls. But what Tom Cosm and Tarekith have done with the APC-40 and using stems of original material is kind of impressiveā¦and there are a lot of others who have done similar thingsā¦I just havenāt looked at their stuff.
For live production and live remixing, there is no better tool out there than Ableton Live. Higher-end hardware stuff like the Elektron Octatrack can be very close, but if thatās what you want, youāre on the right track. Just a warning, though, itāll take a while to learn. I started playing with Live (as in trying to learn it and using it as a DAW) around version 4. I did some half-assed DJ sets the whole way through, but it wasnāt until version 8 about a year and a half ago that I actually sold my turntables and bought a controller for itā¦I didnāt feel really comfortable with it until then. Now, on Traktor, I still consider going back almost every day. And I probably would except for the fact that warping really does get to be a pain in the neck.
Also, if anyone ever says that liveās auto-warping of full tracks is anything but atrocious, it means theyāve never tried to DJ with the software. Itās fine with loops, but Iāve never had it find the correct tempo or the first downbeat of a full song. Itās a lot worse than Traktor in that regard.
This is partially what made ableton not fun for me. Ableton can do amazing things, but in the end hopefully itās meant to be fun. I like to be more off-the-cuff with my mixing so traktor is where I will stay for now..
To answer the OP, the one advantage Ableton has over traktor is that you can play synths, so get some synths and learn them in and out. Map a few knobs to different parameters, add some fx, see how crazy you can get it to sound (crazy as in, interesting for your genre/songs). Thereās some great ipod/ipad apps like kapture pad which can give you a lot of features not normally in ableton. For Live performance, the most important thing you need to learn is all the midi mapping possibilities, which the other people in this thread have already pointed out the best ones. Look into controllers like the APC40 and launchpad. using stock launchpad (no special scripts)Fingadruma does a nice performance.Fingadruma does a nice performance here
1+ for Tom Cosm. His Introduction into ā¦ Simply the best ableton tutorial series. There are tons out there but for the step by step show me everything way this is best. Now you could just start Rtfm but when watching toms Vids before, it actually makes sense 
Also his vids on moving from studio to live performance etc could help you much.
That Cosm set looks good. Usually the youtube videos is are on a specific thing, but if you donāt really know Ableton yet they donāt make much sense.
@nukage can you please remove the player from your sig. Itās against forum rules.
The only issue I have w/ Tom Cosms stuff is the actual style of music. The product is top notch and the tutorials ā really useful. I find the tunes a bit more abrasive than what I would play. Wonder if theyād still be useful.
if your friend is a producer, what daw did he use before?
also, say with what are you having problems, so you can get help more easily
like, you got problems with warping, routing, low volume, etc
there isnt a magic bullet when it comes to tutorials, everyone will keep his secret weapon aā¦ well, secret
but there are videos which can get you started. try youtube search āfuture musicā, some are usefull, most arent