Those of you that know me, know that there are few things in the computer world I love more than good keyboard shortcuts. I collect them like absolute treasures, and you should too. It’s actually what inspired me to write this whole post on how to zoom in Ableton.
Why?
Because they are major time savers.
When working with programs like Ableton, keyboard shortcuts cut down your work time immensely. Think about this, you are working on editing a keyboard track. Every single time you need to find the next note you want to edit it you need to…
- Zoom out
- Find the note
- Zoom back in
- Edit the note
- zoom back out
If each zoom takes 4 seconds, then every time you need to edit a note, you have added on an additional 12 seconds of time to your note editing. Now if you edit 50 midi notes across your project, you have added an addition 3 minutes and 20 seconds of time to your editing, that had absolutely nothing to do with your editing.
That’s frustrating.
My prescription for efficiency has always been, “Master the process now, and make up the time later”.
A brief story before we get into our zooming keyboard shortcuts.
One of my many jobs is doing music engraving. My first engraving job took me so long to complete I almost got fired.
My second one was better, but because of my lack of knowledge of shortcuts, I considered quiting because everything was so time consuming.
Enter Keyboard Shortcuts…
My true love affair with keyboard shortcuts started when I got my first large-scale engraving job for an online music education site. It was more material than I had ever needed to complete, in a faster time than I had ever needed to complete anything. And so I decided I needed to rewrite the process rather than stress about the timeline
The first day of the project, I spent about 4 hours memorizing all of the shortcuts and building automation to perform repetitive tasks for me. At the end of my first work day, I had done nothing but practice how I was going to execute the process.
My results were exponential, however. Day two I was flying through my work faster than ever. It wasn’t because I had become a better engraver, because I was more skilled, or because I had gotten a new fancier education, it was because I used keyboard shortcuts to optimize my performance.
Over the years, my love has trickled over into Ableton, and I have seen how these keyboard shortcuts help speed up and optimize my work there as well.
—-end ode to keyboard shortcuts—-
Three Ways To Zoom
Method 1: The Z Key
Ableton 10 has included this new zooming shortcut that is really quite lovely. Select any area you would like to zoom in on and press the Z key. This will center your selection and zoom in as far as it can while still keeping the whole selection visible.
#Brilliant
Method 2: +/-
Using the plus and minus keys will zoom in around whatever is currently in focus. Click where you want to zoom, and use the +/- keys to zoom in and out. This is my go-to method for zooming.
Method 3: The overview bar
Okay, so this isn’t technically a keyboard shortcut for zooming. You’ll need to use your mouse for this one, but it bears mentioning because it allows you to have an overview of the whole clip, even while you are zooming in on one section.
There is a handy bar on the bottom right-hand corner of Ableton’s screen that shows you an overview of either the clip view, if that is what you are looking at, or the device chain. Clicking and draggin up and down on this box allows you to zoom. Even better, you can jump to another spot in the clip just by clicking on that location in the overview. I find this very handy.
Two Added Bonuses
Bonus 1:
Holding command and using the scroll wheel on your mouse will allow you to zoom in and out
Bonus 2:
Clicking at the top of the piano roll and dragging up and down will also allow you to zoom in and out.
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You’re on the move! Get out there and make something you feel proud of.
-Brett