The Ableton Q&A Thread

[blinx]

i have used ableton live 8 both on a dell latitude laptop and now my macbook pro. The pros for me (i am a PC Technician by day) my mac works in the home studio, works in the club and has NEVER let me down once. It screams and i can run HUGE projects. I can have anywhere from 3-5 midi devices running at the same time and it doesnt care it just works. My dell used to just shit out all the time, crash, weird midi problems and ugly/laggy asio audio drivers. The worst i have to do if my mac has any issue, is reboot maybe once to get midi to sync right but that happend only once and isnt a big deal. The difference between the pc and mac was like night and day. The fact that every serious artist i follow and or know of (minus maybe rusko i cant remember what lappy he uses) use macbook pros, because they work all the time for them as well. But its a debate that has fans on both side of the argument, alot like ford vs chevy trucks argument.

Yes, you want an audio interface, and btw audio interface is just the name used to describe the next generation of "sound cards", they are synonyms so you only need to get one device. Audio interfaces really help to make sure you have consistent and reliable sound recreation all the time, and will give a way cleaner signal to send to the club mixer (or your studio monitors) if you play out anytime. I share stages with homies that dont use audio interfaces, and instead just use onboard soundcard that his laptop has and the difference between his sound quality and mine are like night and day as well ( he is bass heavy and missing frequencies in the higher ranges... just sounds amateruish). If you want serious sounding shit buy an audio interface. I use a tascam 1641 but any AI is better then onboard sound cards no matter what.

Good luck.

[traffek]

well i am on a macbook that is a couple of years old and im am now dated. i had ableton running last night and just had drums, with effects going, as well as i built a sub. i was hitting 50%. more and more ableton is doing this to me and i cant figure out why. i even thought about switching to logic, which i should any ways but dont want to learn something new and just like what i can do with ableton.

if i was on a new macbook pro maybe it would work better, but i have 4 gigs in this thing and its a 2.1 intel core 2 duo so it should really have no problem. unless its just massive being a cpu bitch.

id have to say the only reason id use a mac at this point is because its harder to get a virus to wipe your entire system. to me its really the only difference. and what they look pretty. big deal. pc you can get a bad ass comp running everything you want. i work on macs as well. literally not even a year old and ares are ALWAYS crashing with final cut.

so its give and take.

ableton is a lot like fruity i feel. except the effects aren't as good IMO. but since i am a mac user i cant use fruity. i would build everything with fruity if i was given the option on a mac. granted i would mix down and prob take into ableton for arranging and mastering. (you can totally master with ableton just takes a bit to learn). there are some things like the EQ and Reverb which you have to set to high quality settings. watch some videos for getting HQ sound out of ableton.

as for learning. learn some theory. never have enough. every synth is different but all have the same functions. i think one of the best synths i learned on was subtractor in reason cause its so barebones and easy to look at. (love that synth and never use it now which is a sad thing). but when you see these videos for stuff like massive and everything, dont think you need it. you can get the same sounds with ableton. flying lotus made his entire album 1983 with only sounds in reason and maybe an external synth (talked with him about it and the guy who mastered it, also in reason go figure.) that album sounds beautiful IMO and he used what he had infront of him. no special VSTs and such. learn from youtube and just experimenting. just twist all kinds of knobs and add effects. dont go buy anything at first like protools. make some solid material and then look into that stuff if you feel it necessary. i like ableton for audio editing. my computer is just a dinosaur and it becomes a CPU hog.

[frankiegrimes]

I got a vocal acapella wav that I want to chop up into lots of tiny bits. If there anyway that I can do this automatically without having to drag and slice every little bit?

slice to midi function

Best way I've found is to do it by warp marker. Drop a marker for every bit you want, and then in the slice options select 'slice by warp marker'.

[jyro]

thanks guys.

Can anyone recommend some 'airy'/atmospheric synth presets for ableton? It hard to make time to produce, let alone browse every preset they have on offer

[symmetricalsounds]

thanks guys.

Can anyone recommend some 'airy'/atmospheric synth presets for ableton? It hard to make time to produce, let alone browse every preset they have on offer

that's why making them is usually quicker

if you look through the presets in whatever synth or instrument racks the presets are named quite descriptively and are split into bass/pad/etc...

[pesky]

ey up

just recently started using fl studio as a rewire slave to ableton as i like to use FL's step sequencer for my drum bits.

when i record the midi from fl into ableton as audio, i can only ever get it to record through as 1 clip/1 channel or whatever.
where as, what i want to do is have each drum hit recorded into seperate channels so i can treat them in ableton one by one.
how do i go about doing this?

thanks in advance.

[pesky]

anybody?

[bassinine]

why don't you just bounce each drum hit to audio in fl, then drop the samples into a drum kit in ableton?

[symmetricalsounds]

ey up

just recently started using fl studio as a rewire slave to ableton as i like to use FL's step sequencer for my drum bits.

when i record the midi from fl into ableton as audio, i can only ever get it to record through as 1 clip/1 channel or whatever.
where as, what i want to do is have each drum hit recorded into seperate channels so i can treat them in ableton one by one.
how do i go about doing this?

thanks in advance.

i've only ever used rewire with reason but i figure the logic would be the same. you'd need your different drum lines being piped seperately into the fruity mixer, so one for kick, one for snare etc... then setup the same amount of audio channels in ableton, in their inputs choose the respective input from fl's mixer arm them all, holding down ctrl means you can arm more than one at a time or there is an option to change that in preferences which was an earlier tip in this thread. one you have all the inputs sorted then should just have record set on ableton and then when you hit play on fl is should start recording.

[pesky]

why don't you just bounce each drum hit to audio in fl, then drop the samples into a drum kit in ableton?

because i like how i can make the whole drum kit sound in fl and i like the swing + stuff.
i just want it to record them all into ableton on seperate channels but with the same drum pattern and swing etc.

i've only ever used rewire with reason but i figure the logic would be the same. you'd need your different drum lines being piped seperately into the fruity mixer, so one for kick, one for snare etc... then setup the same amount of audio channels in ableton, in their inputs choose the respective input from fl's mixer arm them all, holding down ctrl means you can arm more than one at a time or there is an option to change that in preferences which was an earlier tip in this thread. one you have all the inputs sorted then should just have record set on ableton and then when you hit play on fl is should start recording.

i think i tried this but ill have another go in an hour or so and see how i get on
thanks for the replies.

[pesky]

ive noticed that it says "channel 1-2, channel 3-4" and so on.
does this mean to get seperate hits, ill have to route them to odd numbered channels in fl.
like kick on 1, snare on 3, hats on 5 etc.

[bassinine]

it's like that, 1-2, etc, for a stereo signal. but i don't really know exactly how to rewire it, as i only use suite 8. it's basically finding the right buttons to route each drum sample in fl to a different audio track in ableton.

either way, another random tip for the future: you can record a drum loop in fl, one that you like the swing, then drop that wav in ableton -> extract groove, and bam, can use that swing you like on any drum pattern you write in ableton.

[symmetricalsounds]

ive noticed that it says "channel 1-2, channel 3-4" and so on.
does this mean to get seperate hits, ill have to route them to odd numbered channels in fl.
like kick on 1, snare on 3, hats on 5 etc.

http://www.ableton.com/pages/rewire/fru ... s_studio_6

also can't you open fruity as a vst inside ableton? i remember doing that once.

[symmetricalsounds]

http://francispreve.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... patch.html

[Redderious]

http://francispreve.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... patch.html

Is that Will Ferrell?

[symmetricalsounds]

yeah it's from the SNL sketch

[Redderious]

yeah it's from the SNL sketch

Haha funny stuff.

? about Live mastering. Do you all prefer to master your tracks using the compressors and EQs, etc... in live? Or are Plug-in processing fx the way to go? Ive always used whats mad by Ableton, but i have never mucked around with any sort of VSTs except synthesizors so i wouldn't know too any differance between the two.

[jaimelee]

I try and do everything using what I can in Abletons given bits and bobs.
Occassionaly they just don't cut it so I have to use plugins but as far as it goes, pretty decent EQ, Compressor etc.

I use plugins to get a decent comb filter though.

[symmetricalsounds]

? about Live mastering. Do you all prefer to master your tracks using the compressors and EQs, etc... in live? Or are Plug-in processing fx the way to go? Ive always used whats mad by Ableton, but i have never mucked around with any sort of VSTs except synthesizors so i wouldn't know too any differance between the two.

completely up to you, if you know what you're doing then i daresay you could get a tiptop sound using just the ableton plugs, might need a better eq though. eq8 is alright but for surgical mastering stuff it wouldn't cut it.

[Redderious]

? about Live mastering. Do you all prefer to master your tracks using the compressors and EQs, etc... in live? Or are Plug-in processing fx the way to go? Ive always used whats mad by Ableton, but i have never mucked around with any sort of VSTs except synthesizors so i wouldn't know too any differance between the two.

completely up to you, if you know what you're doing then i daresay you could get a tiptop sound using just the ableton plugs, might need a better eq though. eq8 is alright but for surgical mastering stuff it wouldn't cut it.

I think Eq8 can get pretty precise, but let us say i am getting some bad attributes to a sound and i needed to drop some certain freqs out. If an EQ alone cant achieve this, what would you suggest? Ive heard of using muliband compressors along with eqs works wonders, but i guess that doesn't apply to me