Ableton features you didn’t know (that you probably should)

It’s time to explore some of the feature in Ableton that are hidden or less obvious. Even if you think you’ve got the hang of Ableton, you’ll find little hidden features that you wish you knew sooner.

A word of caution: there may be several smug people commenting that they already knew these features. Don’t feel put off, there are so many cool tricks and options in a DAW that it takes lots of time to learn it all.

EQ Eight allows selecting and dragging multiple bands

This may not be the most revolutionary in the list, but it is a great feature that isn’t immediately apparent. It is especially useful for finding creative EQ curves – simply make some odd shapes and drag the curve around until it sounds good on your audio.

It also works well for previewing certain EQ automations. Let’s say you are creating a build to a heavy drop, and you want the peaks and notches to sweep up the frequency range, you can preview such sweeps here, before you individually automate them.

SEE ALSO: Ableton 11 to be released soon. Here’s what’s new…

M/S EQing

Speaking of EQ Eight, it has a really cool M/S feature that you might not have tried yet. On the far right, you can select the drop-down mode and select M/S mode to further enhance the Mid/Side processing. It is great for brightening up the stereo width, while still keeping the centre stage tightly controlled

SEE ALSO: What’s the difference between Compressor and Glue Compressor

Warp multiple tracks at once

This is a key feature if you have multiple mics set up or different tracks for each drum.

You can actually warp multiple tracks simultaneously by highlighting them all before you go into the warp setting.

Cymatics have made a fantastic video guide to demonstrate this.

To get this to work you need to ensure all the clips are exactly the same length, but after that, you should be good to go.

Reverb has a quality mode that you NEED to use

This one is possibly the most obvious on the list, yet I regularly see and hear from people that never knew it was under their noses.

The Reverb stock plugin has a truly transformative control in its centre. If you look at the Quality drop-down box, you may find your Reverb plugin has been defaulted to Eco mode.

Switch this to a higher quality mode immediately and save that as the default preset.

The difference is truly insane, turning Reverb from a fairly disgusting effect into one that sounds much more up to scratch with a pro DAW.

SEE ALSO: Ableton EQ Eight, EQ Three, and Channel EQ – what’s the difference?

Utility has a M/S mode

Utility is one of those effects that just continues to be useful throughout the production stages.

While it has a pretty good width knob, it can be a bit problematic with certain sounds.

Enter Mid/Side (M/S) mode. By right-clicking on the Width knob, you can change to M/S mode and use Utility to select out just the middle sounds, or the sounds exclusively in the stereo field.

It can be great for isolating vocals which are set centre, or for further processing of your track.

One great trick with this is to make a group with a Mid chain and a Side chain (don’t confuse with sidechaining).

This allows you to split the signal into two parts (Mid and Side). You can then add a compressor onto each one to compress each individually and bring out the best of the centre and wide spaces of your track.

You can have multiple instruments on one track

Ableton’s instruments can seem like they fall short of other VST synths until you start to use the modular features of racks.

One of the best ways to get more out of your sound design is to chain multiple instruments on a rack.

The benefits of doing this are huge. For example, Operator can generate some killer sounds, but it also doesn’t have a dedicated sub oscillator, so if you want to have all four working oscillators together, you need to add another instrument as a sub.

This is easy to do, simply add it into a group and create a new chain to place whatever instrument you want for the sub.

You can also add samples in another chain to really spice up your sound design.

Quick-fade shortcut

You don’t need to spend ages manually dialling in fades with Ableton. There is a really useful shortcut to do that for you.

Simply highlight the clip for the length of the fade and hit Control + Alt + F (PC) or Command + Alt + F (Mac).

This point is also a reminder to brush up on all the best shortcuts for Ableton.

Groups in groups

If you’ve recently upgraded to Ableton Live 10, your previous workflow may never have allowed for grouping within groups. Now is the time to change that!

This feature, that has been standard in many other DAWs for years allows you to make additional subgroups for certain sounds.

For example, when I’m crafting drums, I have a main drum group and within that, groups for the kick layers, hats, and snares, each with their own processing.

So if you have upgraded to Ableton Live 10 from a previous version and aren’t yet using this feature, it may be time to brush up on all the other new things that you can use!

The beats mode when warping doubles as a transient shaper

One easy feature to miss when warping is the transient feature on the Beats mode. This mode allows you to shape the transient and gating effect of drums when warping them.

Make sure to set the loop mode to “off” before you get started here simply by selecting the arrow drop-down menu and making sure it is a single arrow pointing right.

After doing this, you can change the value next to it to to alter the transient nature of the drum samples.

This effect works with other sounds but the beats mode has its own quirks which may sound pretty rough on any non-drum instrument that has been time-stretched significantly.

Rank your effects and instruments

As a default, Ableton will list the effects and instruments by alphabetical order.

This can be useful when searching for an effect but there is another option that you may like better.

By selecting the drop-down at the top, you can change sorting to a variety of options.

Probably the best option for most will be rank, which sorts your effects based on how much you use them.

What did I miss? Add your cool tricks in the comments below!