Sample tips from "50 Ableton Live Tips"

1. Sample tips
© 2011 Construct Audio
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Ableton and Ableton Live are trademarks of
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About
In the full guide, the 50 tips are arranged in 4 sections:
1. Productivity : Improve your workflow in Live
2. Extra Effects : Add more tools to your inventory
3. Raise Your Game : Increase the quality of your productions
4. Advanced Effects : Go deeper into Live's features
It also includes a pack of racks to install into your Ableton Live library so you can follow
along and use the techniques quickly in your future productions.
This sample includes three tips, selected from numbers 1, 2, and 4 from above. The second
tip, 20, uses racks in the final product but they are not included with this sample.
Enjoy!

2. 13 Change Your Default Drum Rack Simpler/Sampler
When you drop a sample on to a Drum Rack, it always loads up in a particular instance of
Simpler, with a certain basic setup (volume -12dB, filter off, etc.) - settings different to the
Default Preset you may have set up. It's little-known that you can change this Drum Rack
default really easily, by replacing the settings file in your library. Then you can ensure your
drums are set up exactly how you want them straight away, saving time.
The settings files are in the library, under Defaults/Dropping Samples/On Drum Rack/:
The normal setting is a Simpler. To change it, drag the file on to a new MIDI Track and
tweak away – just don't add a sample as it will change for each drum!
One example use is adding velocity sensitivity by default, as most drums you edit you will
want some volume-velocity changes:
To replace it for all future samples dropped on a Drum Rack, just drag the Simpler back
into the On Drum Rack folder. Make sure you replace the preset that is there by renaming.

3. Alternatively, you can use a Sampler instead for more advanced features such as multiple
LFOs. Again make sure you aren't using it with any samples loaded, and store it in the
same folder On Drum Rack. If you leave both Sampler and Simpler settings in the folder,
the Sampler one will be used in preference.
For example, you might want to set up Sampler's 2nd and 3rd LFOs for some randomization
per hit, but then turn them off. This way, setting up the some humanization is just one
click away for your future drums, instead of 20:
Also note the next folder in the library Defaults/Dropping Samples/On Track View/ – this
selects what happens when you drop a sample file on to the instrument part of an empty
MIDI track. You can again choose between Simpler or Sampler, and what default settings
will be presented.

4. 20 Gated Reverb
One classic technique that has been applied to both Drums and Vocals to increase their
impact is the used of Gated Reverb. This is a strong reverb effect is combined with a gate
driven by the original signal, creating impact and width without having a long washy
reverb tail. You can do it easily with an Audio Effect Rack in Live – we'll show you how to
construct it.
Start with the included Side FX rack, as introduced in its associated tip (by default in
Audio Effect Rack/Construct Audio/Utilities/). Then add a nice strong Reverb preset on the
FX channel, at 100% Dry/Wet:
If you play with this now, you just have a back boomy reverb on the sound, and washing
out the details. So now add the key element, a Gate, after the Reverb. You need to open up
its Sidechain controls with the arrow in its name bar, and select the Dry channel from
inside this Side FX rack:
Now the gate will only let the Reverb'd audio through when the main audio is playing
above the set Threshold – if you don't hear much, lower this level.
If you are working with drums, the Attack should be set fairly fast at around 1ms, to let the
reverb sound merge with each drum hit transient. Whatever your material, the Release can

5. be played with for different effects – longer values will give more of a tail to the drum
sound, but setting it too high will undo the purpose of gating.
Check out the included Gated Stadium Reverb rack, by default in Audio Effect
Rack/Construct Audio/Processing/) – unfortunately, due to Live's rack storage, you'll have
to set up the Sidechain each time you load it.

6. 40 Multi-routed Drum Rack
When using a Drum Rack for a large drum kit you can easily become annoyed at the use of
a single MIDI clip to control all the drums. So many different sounds to keep track of! Not
to mention if you change the rhythm for one drum in one bar, you have a new clip entirely
– so to update any other rhythm on another drum requires two clips to be edited now! You
would be hard-pressed to fill up a whole drum rack before getting annoyed like this.
There is an easy way though to keep multiple drum clips on different tracks without
having duplicate drum racks and any processing you want applied to your drums. All you'll
need to create is some clever routing.
First, add a couple new MIDI tracks above your Drum Rack with Ctrl-Shift-T/Command-
Shift-T:
Then change each of the new MIDI Track's I/O settings to output to the Drum Rack's track:
(you may need to click the IO button on the right hand side of the screen)

7. Now for is the slightly confusing part; set the Drum Rack track to input from No Input
(yes, 'no input') and set it to In mode:
The Drum Rack has now stopped listening to its own MIDI clips entirely, but will take MIDI
from tracks that send to it. Thus, the MIDI Tracks you just created can cause the Drum Rack
to play. Move your original clips into one of the new tracks and they should play again:
Now you can split the MIDI between the new tracks to ease up your drum control. Copy all
the clip(s) to each track, then delete all but the relevant drums for each track. In this case,
we leave the kick and snare on the bottom track and the hi-hats on the top:
You can now vary your drums independently – for example we will loop a 2 bar kick and
snare clip over 8 bars, but have different hi-hat clips for every 4 th bar. Editing each drum
track's MIDI is still easy, as Live looks forward to the Drum Rack to show you the names of

8. the drums on each MIDI note (rather than raw note names). To quickly add another drum
track to control other drums in the Rack, simply duplicate an existing one and overwrite
the clips.
There is one drawback to this technique though; you can't draw modulation or automation
for the drums in these individual tracks. You must still do all this on the Drum Rack's
channel – which means the two will be decoupled, and if you move a drum pattern you
won't be moving its associated automation any more.
For a full tune, the set of drums can then look as complex as this:
The changes in each set of drums' rhythms are clearly shown by their blocking, and the
different sounds are grouped under useful names. The drums can still be treated as one
instrument as well, with extra processing added on the Drum Rack track.
End of Sample Tips
Thanks for reading these three sample tips. You can get the whole set plus
accompanying racks in 50 Ableton Live Tips at http://constructaudio.com/50-ableton-
live-tips/