Hey guys, it's Will from EDM Tips, and I'm gonna be continuing the beginner's guide
to Ableton 10 that I started last week and today we are going to be looking at
the Preferences section. Now, if you've never opened Ableton before, check
out that video that's posted there or there and that's going to give you an
overview of how it works and all the different parts of Ableton. OK, so let's
look at this preferences folder (or window). If you go up into live if you're
using a Mac and you can click on preferences there and it's going to be
something similar in Windows as well and it's worth spending the time to get this
set up just the way you like it I'm not going to go through every single option
in here but I'm going to go through what I do when I've set it up for the first
time so most of this stuff I just leave the only thing I change is this zoom
display which is really cool you can see it changes how big it displays on your
screen and when I use my big monitor which I'm using at the moment I set it
to 130 just so I can see everything a bit better I'm not straining my eyes
when I'm using my laptop I have it set to 100 or sometimes even 80 if I want to
see more stuff on the screen at once so that's all I do on this screen and you
can adjust the brightness as well which is quite cool and the different themes
so just choose the one that works best for you you can change the colors and
the hues as well if you really want all that kind of stuff but I like to have it
grey because apparently I'm boring so there we go that's how I have it set up
now audio this is really important it will default to whichever sound device
you've got plugged in it might be your internal sound card it might be your
external sound device like I've got here this audio interface and you choose the
input device and this would usually be for a microphone in this instance when I
want to use this microphone I would choose this Scarlets which is my audio
interface and then it will be able to record the microphone into Ableton for
the output device again I would choose Scarlets but because I'm recording this
into my screen capture software I've got this Telestream audio selected then you
can choose the sample rate now this seems to default on 48,000 but if you
have it 2:44 point 1000 Hertz that CD quality
that's absolutely fine some people like to put it up to 96 96 thousand Hertz I
don't really see it's that important to do that so 44 or 48 is fine and then if
you've got high quality selected then it's just going to make the pitch
conversion better when you are doing pitch shifting and things like that and
the default sample rate is high quality too then you've got buffer size and this
is really down to how long it takes from hitting a key like this or I've got no
sound selected so I'm just gonna load in a synthesizer by dragging and dropping
so let's open up preferences again the shorter the buffer size or the smaller
the buffer size the faster the sound will play after you press the key but it
takes more processor power and quite often you'll get these kind of audio
glitches so I find that 512 worked pretty well for me it's a nice balance
it still feels like I'm playing the instrument but you avoid those audio
artifacts so have little play play with that I leave drive driver error
compensation on 0 you don't need to worry about that then we go into the
MIDI window if you will and when you've got a MIDI keyboard as I have here
plugged in Ableton is great it just kind of finds out what is plugged in and it
all works automatically most of the time now also it's worth noting that most
days you have USB MIDI devices rather than the MIDI devices from days of old
but you might have like an old synthesizer or something and then use a
MIDI actual MIDI interface and a MIDI cable and this is where you'd set it all
up then you've got file and folder now this isn't a really important thing this
is really important for me at least so when you set up a set like this or a
project in the way that you want so say you know that you always want four audio
channels and two MIDI channels and you might load you you might always use an
analog synth on one of them for instance what you can do in this
references window is you can save that as your default set so every time you
load up Ableton Live 10 is going to load those settings up just how you've put
them so you might have particular effects that you'd like to use on these
channels here like reverb and delay and it's going to save that so every time
you load it up that's what you get create analysis file on or off this
means that when you drag audio into Ableton it's going to automatically
analyze it I leave this on because then you don't have to press analyze manually
so that's good to leave on most of the time sample editor this is where you can
actually edit samples outside of Ableton so for instance if I press browse here I
might go to my applications and I might choose an audio sample editor much like
oh I haven't got an installed yet because I've just got this new computer
but I'm going to install Adobe Audition and that is what I would select I would
just simply hit it like that then press open and that would be my default sample
editor temporary folder I changed this to be desktop which means that when you
start creating a project and you haven't saved us anywhere it's automatically
going to put some of the working files in this temporary folder I choose my
desktop because then I don't have temporary files clogging up like secret
places on my computer I can see there on my desktop so if I want to delete them I
can just delete them or move them into my actual project folder that I've
created on my hard drive then you've got Mac's application so if you've got max
for life then it just I'm not sure why you would select a different location
for your Mac's application and then this decoding cache I just leave that as it
is as well then we go into the library again this is very important because
Ableton factory packs and libraries are where all the sounds are stored and they
can take up quite a lot of space and if you're using a laptop or you've got a
smaller harddrive it can be quite good to actually store them on an external
location so you can just browse to you can
let's see location of user library so you can move the location of this to an
external place like on your hard drive and the user library is where your saved
effect tracks your saved instruments are going to be saved and the folder packs
they're the ones that get really big these sorry the installation folder for
packs the Ableton packs is where it gets really big so factory packs you can
download lots of free ones from Ableton comm I like to have these on an external
hard drive you can see the default here is on my internal hard drive so what I
do is I go browse then I will go to wherever I've stored them on an external
hard drive for instance it would be in my library's Ableton factory packs and
then I just you can see I've got several I've downloaded already and if I press
open there it just means move existing packs to new location well you don't
actually have to use move them to a new location because they were already there
so every time I load up a factory pack now it's referring to my external
location which is great because it means I've got more space on my internal hard
drive plugins this is where you decide how your plugins act so these plug-in
windows here I always have multiple plug-in windows on because if you're
using third-party plugins and you want to have two windows opened up at once so
you might want a pro q3 equaliser opened up next to another one this button
allows that to be the case if you have this off it will close one and then open
another and that's kind of a pain so
this is where you can turn on your third-party plugins and then you can
rescan the folder and it will then show up in your plugins list here and you can
see I haven't actually installed any yet on my new computer but that's what I'm
going to be doing shortly then you're going to record and these are the
default settings that it will record stuff for you so I choose wave because
then it can be used with Windows machines as well as opposed to AIFF
which is Mac specific then your bit-depth I leave that on 24-bit so it's
a nice high quality and then all this stuff I leave as as
normal apart from create fades on clip edges
now if you drag in an audio file like a kick for example you don't want a clip
you don't want it faded at the beginning of the kick because it's going to lose
some of that initial transient so I actually have this turned off unless I'm
doing lots of vocal chops and I want it to have little fades and then I'll turn
this on temporarily all of this stuff I leave the same then we go into licenses
and maintenance and this is simply where you have your license your license
information added so it knows that it's a valid bonafide copy of Ableton Live
and you can decide whether you want to send them usage data or get automatic
updates and I just leave that as default as well so that is how I set up my
preferences file I know it's a bit boring and a bit stale for some of you
but if you haven't used Ableton Live before it's worth just spending five to
ten minutes setting this up right okay we are going into the normal stuff on my
channel on Friday we've got a new how to make in the style of production tutorial
so join me then if you haven't already subscribed to my channel hit that like
button if you found this useful and until next time Cheers and happy
producing