Well folks, I was overly optimistic that the tips schedule would smooth out… For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been writing a few chapters for an upcoming book, “Your Ableton Live Studio,” and also preparing to play about 10 sets in six days at the Burning Man festival… preparation for this has been an […]
RACK THAT FUZZ!
When I get crazy with the Saturator, I usually don’t even bother trying to get the wet/dry balance right. Instead, I set the Saturator to 100% wet, and use a wet/dry rack instead. This makes it much easier to get the levels right in my experience. It also offers more sophisticated sound shaping capabilities. For […]
THE BEST FREE COMPRESSOR
One of my absolute favorite plug-ins is free, and you’re just plain crazy if you don’t have it. The Rough Rider, brought to you by Audio Damage: If you’ve got a small plug-in collection (or even a big one), you’ll find that this sucker is a fantastic compliment to Live’s built-in compressor. While Live’s Compressor […]
WAVESHAPIN’
Lately, I’ve been making a lot of aggressive bass sounds with lots of high end buzz and fuzz. For some saturation insanity in your basses, Live’s Saturator used in Waveshaper mode is pretty awesome. What scares folks away from the Waveshaper tends to be the 6 boxes in the lower right that come to life […]
COLLABORATING: (NOT REALLY) LOST AND FOUND
When you open a Set and see the dreaded words “Sample Offline” where a clip’s waveform display should be, it’s time to get the File Manager involved. There are all sorts of scenarios we could discuss here, but here’s a quick and easy tip. Sometimes you know that all files were collected into the Project […]
COLLABORATING: COLLECTING ALL
This tip might be a real snoozer for some of you more advanced users, but it’s one of those things that all sorts of folks aren’t completely clear on, so here goes… Live lets you drag in samples from all over your hard drive. Loops, drum hits, field recordings, whatever. When transferring a Set to […]
COLLABORATING: ABLETON INSTRUMENT AGGRO
If you have the Live Suite, or any of Ableton’s add-on instruments (or the Corpus effect), you have to be extra careful if you’re transferring a Set to a user that doesn’t have the same instruments. The issue is this: any set containing unauthorized instruments will be opened by Live in Demo mode – which […]
COLLABORATING: THE COMMITMENT ESCAPE HATCH
Some of this stuff about workflow and committing to ideas really isn’t limited to collaboration… it applies just as much when you’re working on your own. But here we are. So… Sometimes you want to commit to an idea by freezing and flattening, but you still want to leave yourself the option of going back […]
COLLABORATING: ANTI-FREEZE
While Freeze is a pretty great technology, expecting that it will solve all of your collaboration woes will lead to disappointment. My experience is that as Sets get large and complex, it gets easy to accidentally miss a track that needs to be frozen before you hand it off. A few thoughts to help improve […]
COLLABORATING: EDIT FROZEN AUDIO
When working with frozen audio tracks, there are some important things you can’t do, such as messing with Warp markers and adding new effects. Typically, the Flatten command is used to turn a frozen track into a standard audio track. When a track is flattened, the original track is thrown away and replaced with a […]
