Ableton Forum

I like the technique of using a rack with 8 instruments and 1024 samples. It especially works well with a lot of strange sounds. The vast majority of the time these strange drum sounds don't work well in a track, but when they do, they can make the track . I have a rack built from this technique: Dr...

I looove operator. It's so good for making everything from synths to kick drums and adding white noise to snares. I also love making sounds with "strange" harmonics - using custom waveforms. I love it because it allows me to use my understanding of Fourier series to make music (studied ele...

Find the audio part you want, cut and paste it into a new audio track. Then insert a simpler into a MIDI track. Drag the audio clip into simpler. It's not more complicated than that.

I've been to a lot of electronic shows and I've never seen people throw beer at the stage. Spill beer from cans put on the stage/speakers, tons. Mostly I've just seen people throw glowsticks. Favorite was watching deadmau5 get bombarded by glowsticks at Redrocks in Denver. I'm sure the big ones do h...

Equalization is more about making room for a sound by cutting the frequencies on other parts in a particular frequency spectrum than boosting a part to make it stick out. It's like if you're a teacher and everyone in the class is talking. It's a lot more effective to get everyone quiet and then star...

Perfect background drums when glitched up! I'm sampling this.

I always recommend Tom Cosm's tutorial:

How To Write Beats – 2 Hour Introduction to Electronic Music and Ableton Live

Here's a whole suite of introduction tutorials on Live's instruments, effects, etc.

Introduction Tutorials

If you turn off the effects in the return track does it go away? Do you have delay (from the little D button) set to anything but 0 on your bass and return tracks? Try playing with those? I'll offer more ideas if I can think of anything else.

Trace the source. In the export settings, select the export all tracks and then check each one for the sound. Narrowing that down will give you an idea where it's coming from. Could be a funky VST. Are you exporting at the same sample rate you use when mixing in Live? That can cause problems as well.

Create an audio track. Route the original channel and the effects channels to that audio track using the I/O. Play just that track and record the audio coming into the new audio track. Doneskies!

Beat Repeat. Or chop things up in a loop in arrangement view. Or use an automatic glitching machine (lots of advanced Ableton concepts shown here):

Automatic Glitching Machine – Create Complex Glitches Quickly (1 hour!)

Frequency sweep your guitars with +6-10db boost and a Q of 1.0. Find the frequency which sounds like it carries the bulk of the guitar's sound. Cut this frequency on your dubstep basslines. Boost this frequency very mildly on your guitars. Electric distorted guitars often sound good when primarily &...

Beat Repeat is another option. Use the variation setting. The last part of this tutorial shows it pretty well:

Beat Repeat – Using Beat Repeat to Play with Simple Drum Loops

Or build an automatic glitching machine!

Automatic Glitching Machine – Create Complex Glitches Quickly (1 hour!)

Sounds like a simple driver error compensation problem? Have you setup the driver error compensation correctly in Live? To set it up go: View->Help, then click on "Learn how to setup your audio hardware ". You'll have to physically wire the output of your soundcard to the input and then Li...

Is the driver error compensation setup correctly? This will cause your audio to be delayed and so not aligned with the beat signature in Live due to driver recording delay. You can set it up correctly by going View->Help View. The click on "Learn to setup your audio hardware"