Ableton "Misery"

Playing off my last post, titled “ableton joy”…

So, the honeymoon is over.

It’s a few things, but like: a DAW like ableton, when coming from OP-1 as the last thing you put serious hours into, ableton initially appears to do anything you want it to… But it doesn’t. Ie. Nudging clips with any ease appears to be a pipedream. You can nudge it while it’s playing in session view, but if you wanna save that for later, gotta nudge again… You can click with the mouse and shift the loop points / start point / insert silence, but you can’t seem to access these functions from push… Super frustrating, hopefully there is a cooler workaround. The above is just one of a few technical problems I’m having.

The other thing is… Have you ever looked at all the packs available for ableton suite. There is too many for me… I don’t care, how many hours should I spend listening to packs to see what is good or not to my taste? It’s simply overwhelming for me.

Anyways​, making slow progress.

Kinda just venting I guess.

Laters.

Option paralysis is a killer. A friend of mine who’s really big in major production work gave me a clone of his sample harddrive, with about 10 gb of drums that he’s curated over 15 years. I spent about 6 months, kept trying to use bits and pieces of it. In the end I buried the HDD away and haven’t touched it in at least a year. There’s just too much to deal with. It’s counter-creative having no end limitations in sight. Again, it’s why I’ve written (most importantly: FINISHED) more material in the last 4 months since getting the OP1 than I have in the last 8 years of recording tunes.


Same with Ableton. Ignore the packs. Fk em. Too much crap in there anyway. And yes, the world is promised with all the DAWs, then they crush your expectations with really stupid problems. Like Ableton not having a waveform zoom for editing. WTF. And no one-stroke shortcuts for zoom in? GTFO

I go back and forth about options… This is a “true for me”: I make fast decisions when choosing samples. It’s easy to over analyze it, however, improvising with other musicians for so many years taught me to just appreciate what other players (in this case, the sample I chose) are putting out there. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a philosophy for moving forward rather than running in place. All that said. It’s not unusual for me to go back later in a track and change up a clip or two… but I tend to use samples early, and build a lot of playing around them.

If you came from using Cubase in the late 90’s then Ableton Live is an absolute dream.

Don’t download all the packs, it’s too much of a distraction. Just download a couple you think will be handy then start making music.

Thanks for the feedback, y’all :slight_smile:

Thing is, you kind of need a daw to make something sound ‘good’ from the OP-1. Unless you like that narrow mono vibe.

@jonesy_op, you gotta roll with a track panned hard left and another hard right (stereo tricks aplenty) - once you go down that route, there’s no looking back!

@jonesy_op, you gotta roll with a track panned hard left and another hard right (stereo tricks aplenty) - once you go down that route, there's no looking back!

Tell us your stereo tricks?

There are a few options in Ableton -


http://blog.dubspot.com/stereo-width-ableton-live/

Yoof - thanks for the info, will try it!

@ludicrouSpeed - lots of good stereo tricks in this thread:


https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/discussion/507/panning-techniques

I have spent hours downloading Ableton packs, and barely use any of them. I’ve been using Ableton for years, and still never really dig into those. The acoustic sample stuff can be useful occasionally, like the orchestral or piano packs, or if you want a really realistic drum kit or acoustic bass sound.

But yeah, the never-ending options are a huge creativity killer for me. I’ve gravitated towards hardware for basically all my sound sources, and use Ableton mostly for just mixing and arranging lately.

As others have said, don’t bother with the packs. Most of them aren’t worth it at all. Make your own content, find what you need on the fly, get weird single sources of sounds and work them to death. You’ll make much more interesting stuff and have more fun.

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Thanks again everyone. Feel a lot better about ignoring the packs.

Check out Amon Tobin’s “foley room” stuff. I’m not a huge fan of his work per se, but his overall aesthetic is fun, twisting field recordings into some pretty crazy industrial sounds. There’s a cool doco on youtube that shows him recording radar dishes and stuff. Way more fun than downloading a pack that 10,000 other people also have

Thanks @millbastard

I hear some peeps get songs on the radio with garageband loops… -_- I don’t recognise them myself cause I’ve never had the pleasure of listening to garageband​ loops.

Hey, whatever works, right? Right? Kinda conflicted about it, haha.

@ludicrouSpeed it’s true apparently. Luckily, most of them have careers that last about as long as the trash they are pushing, and they die off with the next wave of short-order "musicians"


I have a real belief that people can smell a rat, even if it takes them a few listens to work it out

Haha, lil Yachty, anyone?

Funnily enough I’ve upgraded from Live 6 to Live 8 Suite a while ago and for some obscure reason I realised only today looking at the comparison charts that I could have used Live intro all along!!

Like the others say though, consider Live as an empty shell and bring your own content. Go to charity shops and buy 5-10 random LPs for not much money and spend quality you-time going through them to find that piano stab, that guitar riff, drum break, percussion or vocals to sample.

Way more satisfactory than fiddling through a sound bank with a mouse IMO.

Also don’t bother about that dude who got a hit using garage band loops. Good on him/her. Next.

Funnily enough I've upgraded from Live 6 to Live 8 Suite a while ago and for some obscure reason I realised only today looking at the comparison charts that I could have used Live intro all along!!

Like the others say though, consider Live as an empty shell and bring your own content. Go to charity shops and buy 5-10 random LPs for not much money and spend quality you-time going through them to find that piano stab, that guitar riff, drum break, percussion or vocals to sample.

Way more satisfactory than fiddling through a sound bank with a mouse IMO.

Also don’t bother about that dude who got a hit using garage band loops. Good on him/her. Next.

Good Idea to go to charity shops! My sampling heaven are the public libraries in my hometown. 20€ a year and you can get everything from dusty old to brand new music. :slight_smile:

Nice. I shall be doing this. Currently fixing up my record player.