The One Minute Tip
With Matt Donner
Pyramind mentor Matt shares insight on quick work arounds and sound design tip that will make you life easier as a producer in Ableton Live.
Looking to speed up your Ableton Live workflow? Staying in the session view during creative time can shave lots of time from going back-and-forth between the Session and Arrange views. While the Session view doesn’t allow for audio editing, you can achieve similar effects by automating the clip itself – especially if you’re not re-ordering the audio pieces!
Here are two tips to help speed up your Ableton Live Workflow through automation in the Session view – and avoid going back and forth between the two windows!
The One Thing That Improves Everyone’s Workflow
Continuing the 1-minute tip philosophy, Matt shows us 3 different window shortcuts in Ableton live that speeds up everyone’s workflow. Believe it or not, a solid 5% of every production is spent simply moving the mouse and configuring windows to match your needs. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, over hours, that’s a few minutes and over days, that could be an hour. Save time – learn your key commands!
Keyboard Shortcuts
In this On Minute Tip, Matt walks you through a couple of really helpful keyboard short or quick key commands to help with work flow and time management. Efficiency and speed are sometimes the keys to laying down great tracks or unlocking new production idea. Use these tips and see how they work for your production workflow.
Clip Based Automation
In this On Minute Tip, Matt uses Clip-Based volume Automation to remove unwanted parts of the sound. by doing so, a repetitive 4-bar loop become 2x 2-bar loops where silence is playing in between. With clip-based automation, the effect is “on the clip” and if you copy / paste the clip elsewhere in the Session view, the volume controls move with it. Also note that this does not affect the volume of the fader on the track.
Hint hint…:)
Mixer Based Automation
In this On Minute Tip, Matt uses Mixer-Based Automation to automate both the volume in between kick and snare hits AND a delay on a snare which gives the drums some depth. This both simplifies the sound by removing extra hi-hats and allows the effects to “bloom” at the end of the clip.
This move is mixer-based so it’ll affect ALL the clips on the track. Be careful with this one – you might only want to use this pre-resampling as the automation on the mixer might not be what you want all the time!
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