Ableton Forum

Hey guys,

I am a guitarist who plays for an artist who has had some mainstream notoriety. Long story short, he's had industry burnout and we've decided to work on releasing an EP together and go completely independant. We've been meeting up and working out the rough skeleton of songs in Ableton. Things are moving along, but as a newer Ableton user, I don't feel like I am utilizing it to the best of my abilities. Fortunately I am moving just fast enough for him not to feel stuck, but I know things could potentially move much faster.

1st. I need to get a small midi controller that fits in my backpack (Recommendations?)

2nd. I need to find good Drum, Bass and Pad-ish sounds fast. (Sample packs or sound design devices I should dive into?) I end up scrolling thru every sound and then spending 5 minutes altering it to sort of work.

At home I have a Nord, Prophet and Moog where I have all my sounds easily accessible, as well as a push controller which I will most likely use over a VST.

Any additional educational material that has massively helped you guys, I'd appreciate!

Thanks

Everyone is different in terms of what they like and what they can recommend. One recommendation especially for Live if you want a fast way to dial in sounds is maybe a Native Instruments M series keyboard which is designed for mobile use and has a decent amount of features with the Komplete Kontrol software. It can integrate with live to allow control of transport, track volume/pan and the most important features, control of NKS enabled instruments which includes all of NIs instruments and a huge range of other 3rd party instruments (check my sig for more details).

The sound preview feature can be used to fast find a preset then when you load it, the controls are all accessible and automatable from the keyboard without any fuss.

For Drums, especially real acoustic ones I use Toon Tracks EZDrummer and you also have the more advanced Superior Drummer but EZD is all I have ever needed, absolutely love it, the acoustic kits are awesome and really enjoyable to play on Push. Electronic kits tho are very meh and I prefer just using NI Battery with the default factory kits for classic electronic drums.

Bass, depends what kind of Bass sound (synth, acoustic, funk etc). I use Trilian a bit but also Nexus and HeatUp3 has some nice deep bass sounds but there are so many good bass sounds in so many different plugins I find it hard to nail it down.

Pad sounds for me would be Omnisphere and UVI Falcon but again, I have hundreds of instruments and things like Korg M1, Air Music Xpand2 have some great pad sounds too.