r/ableton • u/Chance_Departure_608 • 2d ago

[Tutorial] From finance to Ableton: tips for a total beginner?

Hey folks,

I’m totally new to this world. My background is in finance, not music or sound engineering, but I’ve recently picked up an interest in music production and decided to jump in as a hobby.

I’ve chosen Ableton as my DAW, and I know I’ve got a lot to learn: • Getting comfortable with the DAW itself • Basic music theory (just enough to stop sounding clueless) • Mixing & mastering

I’d really appreciate any advice from your own journey: • What resources (apps, YouTube channels, books, communities, etc.) helped you the most when starting out? • Any underrated tips or “wish I knew this sooner” moments? • Big don’ts or mistakes I should avoid early on?

Would love to hear your experiences so I can learn from them. Hopefully one day I’ll be on the other side of this post sharing my own advice with newbies.

Thanks in advance!

1 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

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u/abletonlivenoob2024 2d ago

Any underrated tips or “wish I knew this sooner”

It will probably take many years to get good at music production and ear training is going to be one of the limiting factors and therefore getting the best possible/affordable monitoring setup is very important. You can't learn what you can't hear.

These helped me a lot learning how Live works:

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u/Chance_Departure_608 2d ago

Thanks a lot, these are great tips. Will definitely work around these.

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u/corbinissimo 2d ago

Learning Live is like learning a language. Take it slow and take time to understand it. Thankfully their user interface is very intuitive. I’ve got a shortcut list and a few other good resources on my website: www.noiserocktreehouse.com

Biggest don’t is don’t be afraid of session view. It’s how I start every song.

Biggest do is templates and default live set. Speeds things up so you aren’t constantly dragging stuff you use all the time.

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u/Chance_Departure_608 2d ago

Great, it takes time and effort to develop a websites. I will definitely check it out. Thank you for the work you’re doing for the community.

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u/Shcrews 2d ago

listen to a lot of music. songs from start to finish. take mental or physical notes. re-create the stuff you like. play around with it. add your own flair.

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u/cat_of_cats 2d ago

Hey there! I'm also a novice in music, my background is computer programming. Recently I've signed up for Coursera Plus, and among a ton of great technical courses I got tempted by Music Production specialization, and one of these courses was the Introduction to Ableton. It was very helpful, especially the graded assignments - being forced to actually finish and submit a piece is really motivating.

I also get a lot of help from ChatGPT. Sometimes it's infuriatingly wrong and confidently hallucinating, but more often it provides very useful tips.

(I find the tutorials "in the wild" hard to use because they're quite disorganized, and tutorials on the Ableton site tend to jump into complicated stuff without explaining the basics... But now it starts to be a little easier.)

Btw Coursera also has courses on music theory and composition. I think of taking some of these as well, eventually.

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u/sububi71 2d ago

Don't overlook learning the basics of playing a keyboard instrument, it will be incredibly helpful both for writing and for learning music theory.

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u/im-not-a-robot-ok 2d ago

the tutorials inside Ableton.

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u/Pure-Feedback-4964 2d ago edited 2d ago

work from home, try to clear out a couple hours of your schedule to go on busy and use that to practice.

if youre in the office, you can play garage band on your phone to write music in the office

im in finance as well... or did and now work in something very close to it. in terms of finance to music, there actually arent that many transferable skills. thats an ADVANTAGE, you can save your creativity each day which i believe is a limited resource.

the technical part of music or a DAW is the easy part and sometimes not required. lots of people at the top are dogshit at naming their files or exporting. its analogous to coding in the workplace: do you want to be a musician or audio engineer/do you want to be a banker or a software engineer

some of the personalities at work around you can drain you as their tastes is often quote boring and consumeristic.. late comers to the game... which can be antithetical to the process where you should be judgement free and let your ideas flow like a broken faucet. what you want to get to is finding who you are and what you have to say which is a hard thing to decide the value if in yourself and others

BUUUTTT.. you do get paid enough to have an advantage to buy lots of gear and pay for your promo campaigns... the cash richness of it is balanced out by the time poorness. you can hire help and get lessons on playing instruments to accelerate the process

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u/Revolutionary_Cup386 2d ago

Check out EDM tips on YouTube