The Ableton Q&A Thread

[hurlingdervish]

Is there some kind of compatibility list for MIDI controllers? , please help don't wanna buy one that don't work.

they all work.

the supported ones have bonus use with "automapping" instead of manually mapping stuff yourself

[nowaysj]

Get the apc, that is the controller that u need.

[cumbriandubsteper]

ok thanks, im abit of a noob that this sort of thing!

[scorcha]

got a question for you guys, and im not even sure if this is entirely possible.....but something i was experimenting with the other night was putting two arpeggiators in front of a synth with a patch of an 8 bit bleepy sorta sound, and drawing in one single note into the midi note editor....i noticed by dragging the note up and down it was creating some really broken, glitchy bleepity sounds (think rustie) that sounded really good, and then came to realize i could record all of this into a new audio track and sort've "play" the note by dragging up and down

what i want to know is this. is it possible to make it so where when i drag the single note it will jump or snap to a specified note? like if the single note is at c, and i drag it down to g, is it possible to get it to snap straight to g and bypass the other notes in between? hope this makes sense.....if i could sort've toggle the single note and get it to snap to 2 or 3 other notes and only those notes, i could get some pretty wicked results....

but tbh i dont think it's possible. hopefully this makes sense

[hurlingdervish]

got a question for you guys, and im not even sure if this is entirely possible.....but something i was experimenting with the other night was putting two arpeggiators in front of a synth with a patch of an 8 bit bleepy sorta sound, and drawing in one single note into the midi note editor....i noticed by dragging the note up and down it was creating some really broken, glitchy bleepity sounds (think rustie) that sounded really good, and then came to realize i could record all of this into a new audio track and sort've "play" the note by dragging up and down

what i want to know is this. is it possible to make it so where when i drag the single note it will jump or snap to a specified note? like if the single note is at c, and i drag it down to g, is it possible to get it to snap straight to g and bypass the other notes in between? hope this makes sense.....if i could sort've toggle the single note and get it to snap to 2 or 3 other notes and only those notes, i could get some pretty wicked results....

but tbh i dont think it's possible. hopefully this makes sense

first off

get a midi keyboard!!!

secondly

yea it is possible

draw the notes you want to hit in the piano roll then click "fold" and the headphone symbol

the notes that were several notes apart are now stacked on top of eachother

or

you could use your computer keyboard
(heres a little drawing of it)
w e r t y u
a s d f g h j k l

and z brings it down an octave and x brings it up

[scorcha]

^^^ big ups hurling, fold sorts it out

might be wrong, but i dont think a midi controller/playing the notes with my keyboard would really give the same effect, since that stuttery glitchy sound seems to come from actually dragging the note up and down with the headphones button enabled.

[hurlingdervish]

^^^ big ups hurling, fold sorts it out

might be wrong, but i dont think a midi controller/playing the notes with my keyboard would really give the same effect, since that stuttery glitchy sound seems to come from actually dragging the note up and down with the headphones button enabled.

hmmm interesting

[scorcha]

^^^ big ups hurling, fold sorts it out

might be wrong, but i dont think a midi controller/playing the notes with my keyboard would really give the same effect, since that stuttery glitchy sound seems to come from actually dragging the note up and down with the headphones button enabled.

hmmm interesting

yeah its pretty awesome.....probly wont sound too good with every sound, and is a weird way of working, but definetly works for this sorta thing. and by folding 3 (or however many) harmonically related notes all i have to do is draw in one 16th note and randomly toggle it up and down to the empty slots, so the bleeps sound random but are still in tune. its the act of moving it to the other slots that produces the woozy, glitchy sound. then route to an audio track and record the toggling.

[nowaysj]

Awesome u 2. Another thing you could do is put a midi filter, shoot forgot wat its called, in front of the synth, u can set your key and scale, then anything you swing that note to is within the key/scale. WERD.

[silkpantsman]

Ableton is running retardedly sluggish with my new laptop!!! Yes i should have bought a mac but i didnt have the money and couldnt do without a mobile production/djing tool much longer. Its a brand spankin new toshiba with an intel core 2 duo t6500 @ 2.10GHz, vista 32 bit operating system, 4gb of ram. Everything runs slow, playing tracks, effects paramiters , zomming in on the scrub of the track, volume faders...like everything!!! I ve tried turning off alot of the vista applications but to no avail...ive run sound thru ASIO and my sound card and still it acts gay...ive run songs on RAM and still the thing lags WTF i really want to shoot myself i bought the apc 40 around the same time as my old laptop was stolen and have been foaming at the mouth to get out and dj wit the thing...was given a gig for this weekend but my fookin laptop is bustin my balls...my fat 5 year old home pc runs ableton a treat...whats the story rory??

[86.]

vista

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm gonna say that this is most likely the problem. I run Ableton on a 3 year old Dell Dimension 3100 and I never had a single issue with Ableton, except sometimes when I flatten tracks it'll shut down.

try reinstalling XP, or go Windows 7...but from what I hear, Vista is bullshit.

[hurlingdervish]

vista

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm gonna say that this is most likely the problem. I run Ableton on a 3 year old Dell Dimension 3100 and I never had a single issue with Ableton, except sometimes when I flatten tracks it'll shut down.

try reinstalling XP, or go Windows 7...but from what I hear, Vista is bullshit.

the vista bashing is mostly hype.

i have vista and have 0 problems, whatsoever

3 gigs of ram and ableton runs like a champ with 14 tracks of heaving automated shit going on

its most likely your power setting, or background processes.

making sure that battery power is running on "high performance" because if it is on "power saver" mode you wont get 2 gigs out of that 4 gig ram

ctrl alt delete and check whats hoggin up your cpu, its probably some shit that was installed with your computer like "toshibia internet helper" or "toshiba updater"

if none of those things work, its probably a soundcard driver problem, go and download the newest ones and grab asio4all just for good measure

[nowaysj]

I've got similar spec'ed laptop and am just using the internal soundcard with asio4all drivers, that shit glitches and pops all the time. 8 is fat, no doubt.

Do a websearch for dpclat.exe or try without the .exe its a system level latency checker, for working with audio u should have very low numbers in there, without spikes. Run that, and post up what u get.

Not to be rude or judgmental, but u have legit copy of live?

[scorcha]

Awesome u 2. Another thing you could do is put a midi filter, shoot forgot wat its called, in front of the synth, u can set your key and scale, then anything you swing that note to is within the key/scale. WERD.

i was also getting some pretty awesome results throwing abletons random in front of the arps.

the vista bashing is mostly hype.

agreed. i dont have any problems whatsoever running ableton.

if youre sound is glitchy (in the bad way) try adjusting your buffer latency settings. theres a lesson in the built in ableton tutorials on how to adjust all that and get ableton set up and running properly. otherwise try googling how to set up a pc for audio production...that's what i attribute to my shitty acer with vista being able to run ableton fine

-turn off any scheduled tasks.
-reduce the amount of desktop icons and change your background picture to a solid color.
- switch windows to classic mode.
- delete all the unecessary crap programs that come preinstalled and try substituting certain applications for smaller, less taxing ones. example = foxit pdf reader instead of adobe pdf; firefox instead of ie explorer, etc
- get a program like cleanup and run that shit regular. defragment your computer regularly

hope this helps. good luck

[scorcha]

double post.

[silkpantsman]

Thanks for the help things are def gettin better ive tuned my preformance for audio in vista http://www.pc-music.com/content/tweakin ... ista-audio run asio4all and its runnin a good bit sweeter still not at the preformance level i am used to on my half the spec home pc tho. Ive run dpclat and its for the most part in the very low green but there are quite a few peaks of 1000us and the odd 2000us when ableton is not running and when it is the red peaks get much higher to like 16000us and a bit more frequent. So it obviously means that one of my drivers isnt running properly...should this be happening with a 10 day old lap top?? My ableton is legit 7.

[nowaysj]

Honestly, you should be getting like 8 - 30 on the latency checker. There is something catastrophically wrong with your laptop.

[nowaysj]

Yo friendly ableton homies -

Got a q:

So I've got a high hat sample, its not quite open or closed, it kind of just sustains for a while. I had it in a simpler in a drum rack, tried to move it to a sampler in a drum rack to do this: I'd like to use an lfo to modulate the decay/duration of the sample. How do u do that sort of thing in live?

I'm all ears.

Got another Q, but don't want to muddy the waters

[magma]

Yo friendly ableton homies -

Got a q:

So I've got a high hat sample, its not quite open or closed, it kind of just sustains for a while. I had it in a simpler in a drum rack, tried to move it to a sampler in a drum rack to do this: I'd like to use an lfo to modulate the decay/duration of the sample. How do u do that sort of thing in live?

I'm all ears.

Got another Q, but don't want to muddy the waters

I'm not actually sure you can. If any of the gurus have an answer, I'd be really interested... but I've always had to manually draw automation envelopes with Ableton... there doesn't seem to be the equivalent of the LFO generators in FL or something, which you can just apply to any parameter. You get some limited LFOs in Simpler/Sampler, but I'm not sure any cover this.

Never seen a VST doing it particularly well either.

Create clips... draw automation, if you use the draw tool you should be able to at least get decent Triangle, Square and Sawtooth shapes, Sines might be difficult. It's one of the only true weaknesses of Ableton, IMHO.

[nowaysj]

This is surprising.