Templates are a fantastic way to help speed up your workflow when making music, but often times, creating a template can be a long, tedious and confusing process. Through this post, I want to explore some things that I think make a good template so that you can get some ideas of what to include in your own when you set yours up.
1. Routings
Particularly if you work a lot with recorded instruments or external MIDI gear, it can be a good idea to have some tracks set up in your default template with any input and output routings already set up.
If you’re recording instruments, this could include having a few tracks set up in your session with the inputs set up for the correct inputs from your audio interface.
If you’re sending MIDI to an external synth for instance, you could also have some kind of MIDI track set up sending its MIDI to that synth, as well as an audio track to receive the sound coming from that synth. You could even use the ‘External Instrument’ device in Ableton Live to have this all happen on a single MIDI track!
2. Groups & Busses
To keep things organised, it’s a good idea to set up some pre-defined groups and/or busses that you can also use to process groups of sounds. You could have groups and busses for things like drums, bass, synths, guitars, vocals, and sound effects.
This helps in a variety of ways, but is particularly useful for keep things consistent between projects in terms of track ordering, colouring, and routing.
3. Return Tracks
Having a few return tracks set up with specific effects that you use often such as particular reverbs and delays can be a great way to speed up your workflow and also create a cohesive sound between projects.
4. Sidechain Set-Up
Particularly if you make electronic music, it’s a good idea to have your sidechain compression/volume-shaping routing already set up. This could include whatever you need to trigger the compressor or volume shaper, as well as having that compressor or volume shaper already set up on tracks such as the groups or busses that you set have set up in your template.
This set up will vary quite a bit depending on how you do your sidechaining, but having this set up in your template can save you a lot of time!
5. Meters and Analysers
Having some analysis tools such as spectrum analysers, loudness meters, oscilloscopes and phase correlation meters set up on your master or main track is something I highly recommend.
There are lots of different reasons why this is useful, but primarily it gives you different ways to analyse the sounds you’re making beyond just using your ears.
At the very least, I recommend having a spectrum analyser set up. Ableton Live comes with the ‘Spectrum’ device that you can use for this, otherwise there are plenty of third-party options such as Voxengo SPAN.
6. Limiter
To help prevent clipping on your output, I recommend putting a limiter on your master or main track. This should really just be used as a ‘safety limiter’ to stop anything from exceeding 0dBFS on the output.
You should be careful with this though, as pushing too hard into this limiter can create some serious sonic issues such as a bad ‘pumping’ sound and distortion. Always be aware that you have this on, and don’t push it hard unless you mean to.
7. Specific Sounds
If there are sounds that you find yourself using all the time, it can be a good idea to have these loaded up into your template too. However, I’d recommend not overdoing this, and don’t have too many sounds that will influence the creative output of your project. Instead, it’s a good idea for the sounds included to be more ‘utilitarian’ in nature. These could include things like piano sounds, sub bass sounds, simple strings, etc. The idea of these sounds is simply to aid in the writing process, but not steer you in a specific creative direction (unless you want that!).
8. Custom Shortcuts
In Ableton Live, you can create your own simple keyboard shortcuts for button that don’t have them set up using the ‘Key Mapping’ feature.
To do this, simply press Cmd/Ctrl + K on your keyboard, click on the button you wish to map, and then press the key on your keyboard you want to map it to.
In my own template for example, I have the ‘Lock Envelopes’ button and the ‘MIDI Pre-Listen’ button mapped to different keyboard keys, as these don’t have associated keyboard shortcuts, even though they are incredibly useful to be able to turn on and off quickly and easily!
If you want some more detailed tips and tricks for setting up your own template, check out the video below!
Matt
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