12 Life-Changing Ableton Tips

Super handy! Huge time saver! Wish I knew sooner! Use all the time!

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:39 Length Clip
01:46 Search Bar
02:20 Lose Empty Space
03:20 Reduced Latency When Monitoring
04:40 Check Plugin Latency
05:06 One Thread Per Track
06:04 Shift + Tab
06:55 Grid Shortcuts
07:44 LIMBO
08:13 Timeline Warp
08:41 Clip Slip
09:18 Warp/Slip Grid Toggle

★ FOLLOW ME HERE ★

★ LISTEN TO MY MUSIC ★

★ GEAR ★

Disclosure: Most of these are affiliate links - if you buy anything through them (even if it's not the linked item) I'll receive a small percentage, which helps support my channel.

★ SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL MY TOP PATRONS ★

Fonix Studios
Cosmin Davidescu
Omar tamez
Jeff Hoffman
Haley Masters
James Dai
Cav O'Leary
Russ Creech
Patrice Breton
Curtis Chambers
Gnare
Corey Frang
rd1994
Luke Gilliam
Kaitlin Sebbage
Silas Reaper
Kristopher Charles
Daniel Coleman
Peter Vermeychuk
Nick Simmons
Tobias Gurdan

--

Thanks for watching today and a big hug to you if you share this video with someone!

[NickMirambeau]

the single most life-changing tip i learned from one of your instagram videos was after selecting midi notes in a clip, Shift+CMD+Up/Down to increase/decrease all the notes by an octave

[TjMoon]

Adding on to your point about a single track maxing out the CPU.
If you turn on 'Performance Impact' in the View menu, you can quickly see at a glance how much CPU each track is using.
Makes it super quick to identify any track that is particularly heavy on the CPU, so you can just freeze that one track.

[danysz]

To get rid of the space between clips, you can use option + arrow left. Just highlight the clip(s) you want to move and option + arrow left and your highlighted selection jumps to the end of the clip before.

[timrault]

Another good one: in clip view, use Alt + Spacebar to start playback from the playhead in the clip view (as opposed to the playhead in the arrangement view). That's very useful when you're warping a clip and you don't want to start from the beginning every time. Also just hitting S to solo a track

[kevinfrey]

Nice video. By the way: the CMD + Option + LIMBO can also be extended to SLIMBRO, where S= Toggle the visibility of the send dials and R= Toggle the visibility of the return tracks.

[davidmason]

To add to the search bar productivity; pressing cmnd+F quickly selects the search bar with without having to mouse over to the browser window!

[hughfasher]

I got so much from this. Thanks! My favorite tip is to setup track markers with the numeric keys. Hit the orange key button (top right) then click one of your markers then hit the corresponding numeric key 1-9. Now you can move the playback from any marker by hitting the numeric keys.

[sburton]

One note about the 'Reduced Latency While Monitoring' setting - there are some occasions you might not want this enabled. I found that when using the Splice plugin to preview sounds from Splice, this setting actually makes everything go out of time. Took me ages to figure out what was going on, but disabling it makes it perfectly in time again.

I think what's going on is that the Splice plugin reports to Ableton that its source is a live audio source, which means the setting disables latency compensation for the track, but in this case you really want to keep the latency compensation so the sample plays in time with everything else.

[jacobskovsbllknudsen]

Another one that I just found out today that I think is new to 11.1.1 is that, you can now switch between note, envelope and expression when you're in clip view with option+1, 2, and 3. Really handy when working with midi clips especially... Been using live since 8 and there were still a couple in here that I didn't know, specially the lose empty space one is something I've been missing ALOT! Now we just need the "strip silence" feature from logic and we're golden! :D

[giordash]

Some important ones in this video! When I first discovered Shift + Tab, I let out an audible sigh. Here are a couple more shortcut greatest hits:

Shift + Spacebar: runs playback from wherever the transport stopped during previous playback.

Shift + Cmd + D: Duplicate entire timeline selection ie. no more using the loop brace copy and paste part of an arrangement

Cmd + i: insert silence! Select an amount on timeline and this will insert that amount of silence before your selection.

You can make your own shortcuts in your Apple/Windows prefs too. I’ve got shift layers programmed for Freezing, Flattening, and Collect All and Save. Saves a LOT of time!

[AHarveySKB]

MIND BLOWN!!!! Been learning Ableton for the last two years after being “literate” in FL Studio. This speeds up my workflow immensely and maybe brings a new dimension to my producing and beat making. Thank you Andrew!!🙌🏾

[meanwhile_]

When working on a really long project with multiple movements (44 minutes, 4 movements) I used the length clip trick and also had multiple clips with different colours to signify where each movement begins and ends, making it really quick and easy to export specific movements for previewing as well.

[TheMattSwifts]

Great video man, these are the things we all need. No one needs another sound design/theory tutorial lol, we need workflow enhancement tips.

[jubeijackson]

Fire shirt and I’m so thankful for this video. Just like hearing from you. I too am a father, husband and producer and I know it takes a lot. So thank you for the time.

[irishmossdubwise]

I use a midi clip as an arrangement map. Color the sections differently, intro, verse, bridge, hook etc

[TokyoSpeirs]

That clip slip thing just changed my life. Phase-coherent editing was one of the last things I couldn’t find anywhere but protools. This lets you see the change to the waveform at the fade point in real time. Oh heck thank you

[Blutzen]

I don't even use Ableton but I'm a huge productivity nerd and absolutely live for these "things everybody should know about X program" videos, they are *immensely* useful for timesaving.

[andycordy]

Lose empty space is pure gold. Thank you. Great pace, great teaching, easy to follow.

[adammarx]

It’s difficult to express how helpful you and this channel has been to my workflow and writing. Thanks for everything you do man..

[Gizmote]

Another tip: I really like Ableton's info view, which can be shown/hidden with the tiny triangle in the bottom left. It shows you info about whatever you're currently hovering over, including keyboard shortcuts related to it. It's especially useful for Ableton beginners, but I still use it all the time. I already knew about a lot of the keyboard shortcuts mentioned in this video thanks to info view.