Hot Swapping and Saving in Ableton Live

Now let's look at hot swapping and saving within Ableton Live. You have a few options here to really help you create and switch out instruments whenever you want. You can also use Hot Swap to quickly move between presets.

Hot Swap Button

Right here we have this little hot swap button, and that is on every single device in Live.

• If I go over to Ableton now, Hot Swap lets us easily switch out our different effects, instruments, you name it. It's a very useful feature within Live.

Example: Drums

A good example is, let's say I'm playing these drums. If I want to, I can hit the Hot Swap button.

• This brings me to the window where I had these drums, and I can just pick different ones.
• For instance, let's change it now to hear what that acoustic kit sounds like.

You have all these different strange kits to choose from. Let's go with an acoustic kit again. That one's great!

Effects and Instruments

This same concept for drum racks and instruments works for your effects as well.

• Let's say I come into my audio effects. I'm going to do something like dragging my flanger.
• Now, if I hit my Hot Swap, it brings me over to the flanger here in the browser.
• If I double-click, it'll switch out that sound. Let's change it to a different one. Great!

Then I can adjust my dry/wet here to not be so intense.

Swapping Bass Sounds

As an example, I can hot swap out this bass.

• I just click the Hot Swap button, which brings me to my browser.
• Here I can pick any other sound, and there we go, we have a different bass sound!

Adding an Effect: Auto Pan

Now, let's say I want to add an effect. I'll go with something like an auto pan:

1. I want to create a kind of gating effect, so I'll turn up the amount and turn down the phase, making it just like a volume control.
2. I will sync it to 1/4 and change the shape a little.

This is how it sounds with it off, and this is with it on. This is like a dry/wet adjustment, so I'm going to turn it down a little.

Renaming and Saving Presets

Now, let's say I got that the way I want it, right?

• I can rename this effect to Fourth Gate.
• If I wanted to, I can hit what's called the Save button.

Ableton Live also lets you save presets. This is a powerful way to start building your own library of effects.

• Saved presets are now added to your user library.
• Here we have an arrow pointing to what the Save Preset button looks like.

Let's go back to Ableton:

• When I hit save, you'll notice that it went to my user library in my Auto Pan and added this new gate.

Utilizing Saved Presets

Now I can drag it in; I can add it to the bass, and I can add the same effect over into my drums, and so on.

This way, you don't have to reinvent your audio effects every single time. You can make them, save them, and they go into your user library for you to drag them in anytime you want.

With Ableton Live, this makes both swapping out presets and making your own presets very easy!