The Ultimate Ableton Live Tips & Tricks Guide: a video where I hope to
pass off helpful Ableton Live tips and tricks I've picked up over the past few
years and wished I had known when starting to learn the software real
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any day now let's jump into this video where I teach you some Ableton Live tips
tricks and shortcuts I think every producer should know first let's discuss
all things MIDI related MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface
this is how we tell our virtual instruments which notes to play in
Ableton Live you can create MIDI tracks at any time by pressing command shift T
and you can create as many MIDI clips as you'd like anywhere on a MIDI track by
highlighting the length of your desired area and pressing command shift M you
can double click into a MIDI clip to view your piano roll
pressing the B key on your keyboard will switch between your cursor and pencil
tools if the pencil tool is selected you can left-click wherever you'd like and
draw in a note by default the note you draw in will snap to the current size of
your fixed grid and you can increase or decrease the fixed grid size by pressing
command 2 or command 1 respectively holding left-click while dragging left
or right will draw in MIDI notes fixed at the pitch you first clicked on
snapping to your current fixed grid holding left click and dragging up or
down will then change the velocity of the current notes that are being drawn
in velocity is a property of a MIDI note and often determines the strength the
note will play at these numbers range from 1 to 127 where the lowest is the
equivalent to softly tapping the piano key and the highest being like dropping
a bowling ball you can hover over the left or right sides of any MIDI notes
and left-click to extend the length of that note lastly for the pencil tool you
can left click anywhere on a given MIDI note to shorten its length the exception
being here if you click in its leftmost grid in which case you will instantly
delete the note click the V key on your keyboard again to switch back to the
cursor mode where you can move around any selected mini notes to your liking
you can select a single mini note by left clicking on that note or select a
range of MIDI notes by left clicking and dragging to encompass all the notes you
want moving notes around is as easy as left clicking and dragging or by using
the arrow keys on your keyboard holding down shift and pressing either the up or
down arrow keys will shift all of your notes by an entire octave and holding
down shift while pressing either the left or right arrow keys will shorten or
elongate your notes snapping to your current fixed grid command C copies any
selected notes and command V will paste these notes in any MIDI clip wherever
this vertical line is which can be moved around by simply left clicking in your
MIDI clip holding down alt while clicking and dragging will duplicate any
selected notes in this area of your MIDI clip you can find some useful tools some
of which I'd like to highlight are the : 2 & asterisk 2 symbols these have and
double the lengths of your highlighted notes respectively the reverse button
flips your notes around the vertical axis in the middle of where your notes
start regardless of their lengths and the inverse will flip your notes over
horizontal axis remember velocity another way to change a notes velocity
is to adjust the size of this vertical bar underneath a given note however this
can get fairly busy the more notes you have stacked on top of each other so
another way to change the notes velocity is by holding down command left clicking
on your notes and dragging up or down you can deactivate notes by pressing 0
and you can also quantize any notes by pressing command you this will snap the
start of each note to whatever quantize settings you have which you can view by
pressing command shift to you this is useful if you recorded imperfect MIDI
and want to snap it to a fixed grid finally did you know you can click on
this small headphone icon right above the keys on your piano roll to hear any
note you draw in or select whoo all right that's a fair coverage of the tips
I have for MIDI notes next let's talk about MIDI clips in Ableton Live there's
more to a MIDI clip than just the notes it holds if you look in the bottom left
corner of any MIDI clip and select this icon you can view the envelope
properties of that clip this is where you can adjust certain parameters such
as your pitch panning portamento etc copying a MIDI clip with adjusted
envelope parameters will keep the same settings on the copied clip while in any
MIDI clip you can hold shift and left-click on another MIDI clip to view
all the notes in each of these clips at the same time you can do this as many
times as you wish I like to think of this as stacking sheets of transparent
images on top of each other where each time you shift-click on a clip it's put
on the top of the stack next let's talk about automation you can change the
value of almost any knob slider number practically any parameter you control
over time in Ableton Live 10 you can press the a key on your keyboard to
enter automation mode where you get a behind-the-scenes look at all the
parameters on your layers you can click the drop down menu below any tracks name
to select any instrument or audio effect on that layer and select the drop down
below that to view any parameter on that object here you can view the value of
that parameter over the duration of your song left clicking on the red line
associated with that parameter will create a node and you can move these
nodes around by clicking and dragging creating another node elsewhere on a
track and setting it to a different value will automate that parameter over
time down alt on a line between two nodes and
dragging up or down will curve the line allowing your automation to fade in or
out simply clicking on a node itself will delete that node note you can use
your pencil tool on the automation line next let's get into freezing and
flattening if you stack a bunch of mini layers on top of each other with
complicated virtual instruments you may find your CPU is having a hard time you
can freeze a track at any time by right clicking on its name and selecting
freeze track this will keep the audio of your track in the state it was frozen in
but now your CPU doesn't have to do as much processing to play that segment of
audio you can unfreeze a track the same way you froze it if you want to make
changes to any component of that MIDI layer or if your track is frozen you can
then flatten that track this turns your MIDI layer into an audio layer in the
same way that you would export your overall final mix into an audio file for
example only just on the layer itself this reduces CPU usage as well as giving
you all the benefits to using audio files speaking of which let's discuss
all things audio track related even add a new audio track by pressing command T
from here you can drag and drop any audio file or sample onto your track
double-clicking onto your sample allows you to edit certain parameters of your
audio clip if your sample sounds warped or otherwise not correct you can uncheck
the warp button Ableton does its best to read a sample and determine its BPM but
sometimes it might not be correct unchecking warp plays the sample as it
should originally sound selecting warp and changing the segment BPM changes how
fast or slow the sample is played and we may recognize some familiar symbols here
the drop down menu determines the warp mode of your sample each using their own
fancy schmancy processing algorithms to determine how the sample is to be
interpreted you can shift the pitch of your sample by adjusting the transpose
knob where the units are in semitones or by adjusting the detune knob right below
it where the units are in sense there are 12 semitones in an octave and 100
cents in a semitone you can reverse a sample by clicking the Rev button and
lastly you can adjust the gain of a sample by moving this vertical bar
marked in decibels back in Ableton's arrangement view you can chop up your
stand by clicking wherever you want on the
sample and pressing command e conversely you can turn multiple tiny samples into
one large singular sample through a process called consolidating
highlighting the range of samples you want to join together and then pressing
command J will form one large sample you can add in a quick fade to any audio
sample as long as you were out of automation mode just press a again by
hovering over the left or right side of your sample and dragging the top node
over this affects the gain of your sample in a smooth and
easy-to-understand interface moving the middle node adjust the curve of your
fade and moving the bottom node allows you to move in between the edges of your
sample and as far up as the top node miscellaneous Ableton tips and tricks
you can press play to hear your track by pressing the spacebar on your keyboard
by default this will start playing wherever you left click and leave this
vertical line pressing space will stop the audio but if you press the spacebar
again you'll find that you start playing from the same spot rather than where you
left off if you'd rather pick up from where you last stopped playing audio you
can instead press shift space did you know you can group tracks together by
holding command and clicking on the names of the tracks you want to group or
selecting an entire range by holding down shift and clicking on the start and
end tracks once your tracks are selected you can press command G to group these
together which is perfect not only for organizations sake but you can also
process audio effects on this entire group as a whole Plus on top of this you
can even group other groups together in one large group you can add in custom
folders to your Ableton library on the left by selecting the add folder option
at the bottom if you have a directory under computer you find yourself
constantly pulling samples or instruments from for example if you
right click on any audio sample or instrument in your library you can
assign it to a group and then you can quickly navigate to your shortcut groups
at the top of your Ableton library and finally you can change the color of any
MIDI clip or audio sample by right-clicking on it and selecting the
colour of your choice and you can even do the same for entire tracks or groups
and that's all I have for this video what do you think did you learn any new
tips tricks or shortcuts are there any that you know of and
want to share feel free to help everyone out and leave a comment on this video
sharing your knowledge alright thank you all for watching I will see you in the
next one bye