Ableton Forum

So when I'm working away at a track I get carried away on a certain bit, adding different plugins, eq etc...... About half way through a track I see that the whole project is a mess, with untitled tracks, midi parts, audio clips etc....

Was just wondering how neat you keep your projects, with layout, naming conventions, colour coordindating and things?

I never bothered with it before. But, then again, I've only been using ableton for song production, and not for playing live.

Klauser wrote:So when I'm working away at a track I get carried away on a certain bit, adding different plugins, eq etc...... About half way through a track I see that the whole project is a mess, with untitled tracks, midi parts, audio clips etc....

Was just wondering how neat you keep your projects, with layout, naming conventions, colour coordindating and things?

well if u name things right, use effiently effects , sends and dont waste racks, and cpu ,



you might get more efficient, but...

thats just a personal choice, maybe u are more creative being messy, but for a job, u gotta, others will use your project, it makes it easy for them to navigate it.

for long i randomly messed but now i try to be ulta tidy, and that
worth imo spending time to find a good 'setup' and stick to it, ie as a template
default set. You spend so much less time afterwards to track where the sound
you re looking for is coming from, and create slowly cool worflow tools like recurent used
modular fx chains, routings, sidechains, or types of processing ect. that optimize Cpu/hdd/ram loads and work more efficiently in all the mess. use a lots racks chains and groups for that.

mess if don't wanna bother and be instant creative, but then make a 'creative' pause and
clean your room in a more 'technically' manner asap, or youll end up in horrible mess to
navigate in with high risks of cpu spikes at some point later, and it will be to late to get back. my 2cts

When Im in my creative phase, my project sort of looks like this..
Both mentally and visually.

i'm so bloody skatty

Rabalder wrote:When Im in my creative phase, my project sort of looks like this..
Both mentally and visually.

Ha, yea that pretty much depicts my sets/mind as well.

I'm a neat freak, so everything is named, labeled, cleaned up, you name it. I think it's more of an overall personality thing than a productivity thing for most people.

When making tracks, I've been trying to group things up from the very beginning: basslines, synths, drums, glitches, etc. That way I can easily solo these different elements as well while I work. I keep the number of measures in each clip, i.e. "drumloop_b (4)" would signify a four measure loop. As I build my track up in session view, I color code my rows on the master channel depending on how complete they are. I also keep the measure count in the master channel so that, once I'm near completion, I can preview the track by just firing down a row of green (for done) master clips. The track groups allow me to export each segment and pull back in to reprocess/remix. I think keeping things a little organized really helps me be productive; I can fire up a work in progress and quickly tell which parts are near complete, which sections I'm muddling around with, etc.
-Hamish

I'm not tidy, just organized.

I don't always label but I do tend to put things in the same order project after project. Drums, then percussion, then bass, then pads, etc... Back in the days of SF Acid 1 I got into a habit of copying loops into a project folder.

Tidy as fuck clart!

Ive found that since Ive got an APC40 and trying to get the most out of whats directly accessable from it, Ive becoem alot tidier

Before I tended to space stuff out all over the place to the pointn of actually loosing clips in some high number scene that was allwasy way off screen

Still - the APC40 while a huge improvement over what i was using before falls a long way short of really being worth the asking price IMHO, but then there aint much else off the shelf...

when it does occur i usually don't let more than 3 tracks go unnamed at a time, audio & midi bits are usually arranged in some sort of order in session or arrangement, different tracks and groups are assigned colors based on their role, and aside from eq and compression i don't toss any plugs on tracks unless i know exactly what i need/want to use.

Tarekith wrote:I'm a neat freak, so everything is named, labeled, cleaned up, you name it. I think it's more of an overall personality thing than a productivity thing for most people.

we can tell from your studio pics.. it's always spotless

A guy I've collab'd with for the last 12 years has a habit of leaving tracks full of unused samples in projects we work on. Stuff that we tried out and it didn't work.... Fucks me off no end. When I get the project on my machine, fucking all that shit off is the first thing I do!