Ableton Shortcuts and Tips I went YEARS without
I've wasted hundreds of hours not making music while making music. Finding out these shortcuts took me months.
Use CTRL+SPACE instead of space to Play from the playhead within the midi or audio clip, taking away the need to click within the arrangement at all. Using ctrl space with a selection instead of just one spot with the playhead is will play the selection once then stop
CTRL+ALT+U shows take lanes on a track that you recorded audio on. Great when you record something on loop and want to take different sections from your loops and it doesn't clutter your arrangement.
Quite similar is shift space. Which lets you play from where you stopped.
Double clicking on most knobs and sliders will reset them to default or hit delete
Ctrl Shift w Toggles a Second window.
Zero Deactivates or mutes whatever is selected.
CTRL+SHIFT+D to duplicate the selected time across all tracks. This is great because it not only duplicates but also inserts itself creating space.
TAB to get to session view
SHIFT+TAB Toggles the Device and Clip View
Ctrl Shift U lets you edit the time grid it will snap to and the quantize percent
When renaming items use tab to move to the next one
CTRL+ALT+F - Creates a Fade or Crossfade. Keep in mind when crossfading it will always push the second clip to the right if the selection includes the second clip.
CTRL+SHIFT+M inserts a MIDI Clip
CTRL+3 toggles a triplet grid which is very nice for make some more unique drums
In Session View You can duplicate only the playing clips and put them on a new row below
CTRL+UP/DOWN arrows keys halves or doubles the loops length
UP/DOWN arrows move the loop by the loops length
LEFT/RIGHT arrows nudge the loop left or right
CTRL + dragging copys notes while in the piano roll and you can add notes by double clicking if you aren’t in the draw mode
Q Hot Swaps audio effects
Bonus to that, you can drag and drop audio files to replace current audio
all of these shortcuts are from a cheat sheet that I decided to make its free to download full quality. Its got three levels so its not daunting to learn and its sorted by most useful to least useful.
