Blog | Worship Tracks: 5 Most Common Ableton Pitfalls

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Ableton is an incredibly powerful tool, especially in worship music. Churches of all sizes around the world are using it during live services for a variety of purposes. It enables keyboardists to run synth patches, pianos, and other instruments. It can be used for complex automation of keys patches, tracks, and other instrumentation during a worship service. And of course, it can be used as a simple click track and guide. The capabilities of the program are pretty much limitless.

However, given the complexity of the program, many churches are misusing Ableton and it’s features, either harming the sound quality of their tracks or simply not allowing them to realize the full potential of the DAW.

Common Ableton Worship Track Pitfalls

Before I begin, I want to specify that I use Ableton almost exclusively in Session View when it comes to worship tracks. Most of these points aren’t correlated to the scene setup you’re using, but I feel it’s necessary to mention it in order to clear up any confusion when describing where to find certain things.

This list is by no means an exhaustive review of Ableton worship pitfalls, but it is a summary of some of the more prominent issues I notice in worship pastors’ and music directors’ use of the program during worship services. In no particular order, here they are!

Warping: Warping All, Warp Modes, and Warp Tempos

Ok, so that’s a bit more than “one” pitfall… But warping is an animal of its own, and it is so incredibly important. Warping tracks correctly gives you the flexibility of automating volumes in sections, changing keys on the fly, and making tracks sound the absolute best they can.

Essentially, it empowers Ableton tracks to change with the same flexibility and fluidity as instrumentalists. Improper warping practices will cause you to constantly be battling Ableton and create for a very inefficient workflow.

Let’s break these down into smaller sections:

Automating Mixer Volume Instead of Clip Volume

This is also a big one that no one really understands. This isn’t specifically related to Session View (it also includes Arrangement View), but start by clicking on a clip in Session View so that it appears on the lower bar, open up the “Show/Hide Envelope Options” box (the button in the lower left corner with the two diagonal arrows).

This will only work if you have warped your clip. You should see two drop-downs – one says “Mixer” and one says “Clip”. Let me make this incredibly clear: Never use “Mixer”…

If you change the volume using “Mixer” rather than “Clip”, you are actually changing the file and file size itself. You are literally modifying the panning/volume/reverb/delay/fade of the file itself – not modifying it with automation within Ableton only.

This will change your Ableton file size and potentially create glitches or crashes. I’ve experienced it firsthand several times.

Make sure you select “Clip” and only adjust the clip volume automation when you need to duck volumes in certain spots.

This also applies to adjusting the volume of an entire clip. Do not, and I repeat, do not adjust the volume of the clip in the “Sample” menu on the lower bar – make sure you do it on the “Track Volume” slider (you can see what each thing is by expanding the Info Menu in the lower left-hand corner so that everything you hover over is described in there).

Forgetting to Reset the Start Point After Warping

Have you ever warped your tracks to the correct meter and BPM and still found the tracks to be out of time? Chances are very high that it is an issue with the Start Time automatically being readjusted (incorrectly) after warping.

Occasionally, for who knows what reason, Ableton will chance the start time of a clip after warping to be something other than 1.1.1.

Make sure that every time you reset the start point to 1.1.1. if it auto-warps it to any strange numbers that may be even a tiny fraction over the correct start time.

Not Grouping Tracks

“Hey, can you turn down the BGVS on this track, turn off the Acoustic, and turn on Electric 3?”

“Uhhh… Yeah. Give me… ooonnneee minute. Hang on…”

If you’re not grouping tracks, you’re wasting both your and everyone else’s time during a rehearsal. Grouping tracks is helpful for several reasons. Firstly, grouping tracks makes routing audio incredibly easy, as you can group guitars/bass, drums/perc, BGVS, click/guide, and keys into separate groups. Furthermore, if you color code your groups consistently based on instrument, it’ll be easier to find and adjust things on the fly.

Grouping tracks is also incredibly important for sake of organization (the same reason as color-coding tracks). It’s easy to find things quickly and even adjust entire instrument groups’ volume at the same time.

Not Performing “Collect All And Save”

This is a tough one to describe, but lets take the example of building a live setlist:

You have several songs worth of tracks on your computer. You create an Ableton setlist for this week’s worship. You pull in the audio files to Ableton. You get to church to open the Ableton session – either on your own computer or the church computer – and none of the samples are in there (“Samples are Offline” error). So what’s the issue?

When you create a new Ableton file, Ableton actually creates two things. Firstly, it creates the Ableton .als file. However, it also creates an Ableton Project folder. Ableton likes when everything within your .als file is referencing only things within the Ableton Project folder for that session. You obviously can reference things from outside of that folder, but things get messy when you do that.

If you so much as change any folder names or locations for any folders that are enclosing materials that are a part of your Ableton session, Ableton won’t be able to find the files and you risk losing all your work. This is especially true if you are using Dropbox or Google Drive and opening the .als file on another computer than the one it was built one, because although you may share the file and multitracks for the songs, the Ableton directory will not be able to follow the same computer-specific folder path to find them on the new computer.

Whenever you create a session and pull in multitracks to the appropriate places, the last step you should take is to “Collect All and Save”. Do this by going to File -> Manage Files -> Manage Project -> External Files -> Collect Into Project, and then press “Collect and Save” in the lower right-hand corner.

What this will do is pull every sample/multitrack file that is a part of the current session and copy them into the Project folder for that particular Ableton session. This way, you will not be referencing any external files on your computer, and the only folder that will matter for your Ableton session will be the Project folder that it’s a part of.

So, you could then easily just copy that single Project folder with everything in it and put it wherever you want – Dropbox, Google Drive, an external hard drive, someone else’s computer, etc. As long as the entire folder moves, you’re good to go!