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27 Ableton Shortcuts to Speed Up Your Workflow

Whether you’re an experienced user or just getting familiar with Ableton, years of experience teaching students has shown us that learning your keyboard shortcuts can really make a difference to your workflow and free up time to experiment and create. So, with this in mind, we’ve put together a list of the 27 most useful Ableton shortcuts with some brand new ones for Ableton Live 10. Jump into our list of Ableton Live shortcuts below and remember if you’d like additional help learning how this DAW and others work, check out our courses in Music Production and Sound Engineering.

If you’re looking for a cheat sheet style mousepad to help you learn your hotkeys quicker, Check out this one by Inside Audio.

Shortcuts for Ableton Live 10 (Mac)

Essentials

CTRL + Z  – Undo (the mother of all shortcuts)

CMD + S – Save (Ableton continuously saves your work in progress but it’s always better to be safe than sorry!)

SPACE  – Play/Stop

TAB – toggles arrangement and session view

SHIFT + TAB  – Toggle between device view and clip view (what do you want to see? Your effects and synths or your MIDI editor?)

CMD + A – Select all (select all notes or clips)

M – Active/deactivate the computer MIDI keyboard

Creative

B – Draw mode (do you need to use your pen?)

R – Reverse audio clip selection

A – Toggle automation

CMD + D – Duplicate (you can quickly copy your clips/tracks/scenes/MIDI notes)

CMD + E – Split clip at selection or select part of an audio clip to split

CMD + J – Consolidate a selection into a clip

SHIFT + Drag – Stretch warped audio clip

Practical

SHIFT + Z – Full zoom out

Z+Shift-Z – Zoom in and out of time selection

S – Show all tracks

CMD + 1/2/3/4 – Adjust grid size (are you programming short MIDI notes or long ones? )

0 – Deactivate notes/clips

ESC – Abort value entry (it also lets you get out of the search engine or the MIDI map mode)

SHIFT + SPACE  – Play from stop point

CMD + L – Loop selection (highlight the background and loop it)

CMD + R – Rename selected clip/track (hit TAB and jump to the next channel)

+ / –  – Zoom in and zoom out (the magnifying glass tool can be difficult to use so here is an alternative)

CMD + U – Quantize (add CMD + A before that and you have a combo)

Delete – return to default (this works for many different features including volume faders or pan pots)

CMD + SHIFT + I  –  Insert captured scene (ideal to capture the clips that are playing and create a new scene out of them)

Now that you’re savvy in the world of Ableton Live 10 shortcuts there are some additional techniques you can use to speed up your creative production workflow. From setting yourself deadlines and organising your sample library to using templates and presets, we’ve rounded up some of our top tips for boosting your creativity with speed and power, see our full list of 9 Tested Ways to Speed Up Your Workflow here. If you’re proficient in the art of producing beats and mixing but want to learn more about building iconic brands, managing artists and events, networking and more why not check out our Music Industry Management Degree?

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** Editors note: Things have moved on significantly since this article was published 🙂 Please head to our blog homepage for the very latest updates from Point Blank.

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