I’m currently trying to start at least a sketch a day to better learn the various tools in Ableton and, on occasion, something good comes out of this practice.
Now that I’ve been working consistently for a few months, I’ve got a lot of songs of varying quality and tracking my progress of the songs is becoming more challenging and important, so I’m trying to develop some systems to better label things. I’m on OS X, so the first thing I’m seeing built into OS X is the ability to color code files by right clicking on them. In addition to this, I could actually name the various colors and give them further definitive meaning.
I’ve got decent naming convention habits, but outside of that I need some way to visually gauge what songs are good, what needs work, what needs arrangements and finally, completed songs. At the moment my eyes just cross when I look into my Ableton or Logic folder and see 50 project folders looking at me.
I’m working a lot in Ableton lately and I’ve recently purchased a plugin called NTPD which allows me to drop notes within the different tracks which offers some degree of thought retention within the projects themselves.
Before I develop my own system I thought I’d ask if someone had a labeling/categorizing workflow they felt was solid. I hate to reinvent the wheel, so I wanted to inquire and see if someone else had come up with a system that works well. Nothing really useful came up on Google, so I thought I’d check the collective brain here.
I’m a fan of trello.com for this kind of thing. Nice virtual ToDo/PostIt board, with lots of options for visual indicators, and tags/labels. Really handy for keeping track of projects stored on various bits of hardware.
EDIT: I use trellos ‘labels’ to say what hardware it’s on, the columns to indicate progress (idea -> loop -> song -> done) and the quantity of trello ‘stickers’ indicates how important it is to me.
I’ve used Trello before, but I worry that the extra step of going into a 3rd party app may make me loose track of things and/or just not do the actual cataloging initially. It’s a process that I need to do at the end of each work session.
Could you maybe post a screenshot of what a project looks like in Trello?
in iOS 17 and Sonoma, you’ll be able to do Kanban boards (like Trello) in the Notes app.
I’m not particularly organized with Ableton, but I have a few folders. One for finished projects, plus folders for ideas, in-progress, tests etc (so they don’t clutter up the rest of the stuff), and for abandoned projects.
I also want to get into the habit of somehow saving interesting loops and samples from otherwise-abandoned songs.
For hardware, I keep a paper notebook, with a few pages for each project,
filenames and project notes, by the way although you’ve already got the NTPD there are plenty of other free devices here
I find filenames to be the easiest way to make a quick comment to stand out when needed.
for example you can use 1-5 ratings for 1 means basic 16/32 bar loop, 5 means you’re in final stages:
[4]-dub01.als
[1]-dub02.als
of course you can use whatever system you want there, you can have several placeholders for style/rating or even one word notes there, but when you see the file you know what’s inside without the need to open other programs.
Look into Ableton .alc files- literally you just grab the clip from the timeline and drag it into a folder in the list/workspace on the left, and it saves the midi info plus the entire device chain (instrument, effects) with it, which you can then place in a new project/add to an existing one etc. It’s incredibly useful, and saves you having to keep hold of lots of dead-end projects that you’re keeping as they contain a few bits and bobs that you sort of want to keep for later. I don’t use it nearly enough as I keep forgetting its there, but it sounds like what you want for this scenario
I’m currently having more problems with keeping track of the “songs” inside my Syntakt before they get to the capture phase. I’m wondering if there is a discussion of that in here somewhere.
I use a excel song names are rows and columns are depending on the project but something like:
Intro, Main1, Main2, Articulation, Outro, Sound selection, Mix, Total and also Notes (a big cell where I can write my track notes)
First 5 are arrangement scores and the other 2 (except total) are more sound oriented.
So I’ll go and score each of these columns for a track and then have excel automatically calculate the final completion percentage.
So if for example I have created a quick pattern that I like the groove but the kick is not nice and I have just pasted it for 10 bars for an export it would take a low score on Intro Outro Main2, Articulation, Sound selection and Mix but a good score on Main1 (it’s the beginning so I just have like a main pattern)
Other times the sounds can be also amazing so the respective score goes there…
Moreover, all songs of the album have their own excel sheet where I just have 2 columns todo and done… just a todo list…
So when Im working on a track Im listening to exports and I take notes in this Excel, when Im back at the studio I open it up and start doing things
I’ve been trying to figure that out too. I bought a notebook and was going to try to start keeping better notes like “song title - bank a, patterns 1,2,3,4” patch names, what part is on which track, etc. but I haven’t really started yet.
So far I’ve just been making patterns on 1, 5, 9, and 13, and then I can expand them out to 16 bars if I need to using the in between patterns.
Maybe a grid based approach would work. Divide a page into a 4x4 grid, each box represents a pattern, each page represents a bank. At the top of each page it says the project name and the bank letter. Then you can use different color highlighters to color in which patterns are related and take notes on top.
I started a spreadsheet tracking project number , song name, and whether I’ve recorded it into Ableton. I probably should track scale. I should also maybe track if I’ve recorded stereo or individual tracks.
Makid is the GOAT for Live projects, it’s a life saver, wish there was a similar tool for other daws as well.
For the rest (hardware, other daws) I use a rather complicated Notion database with various filter views depending on what I’m after (status, genre, where is it (hardware or which daw, and so on). I also aide the process with miro for more visual planning
After seeing this thread again, I went back to trying out Makid and really clicked with it. It’s a very nicely built tool for the task and it offers a ton of flexibility in naming and organizing things.
Live is so fun to use that I inevitably create short sketches that may or may not be worthy of going forward with in the future. I’ve spent several days making my way through reviewing these sorts of sessions and then organizing them into “Collections” to know how to approach them in the future.
