At first I found the new browser in Live 9 a bit awkward but after using it for a few months I have to say it's actually a great improvement. Anything you add to your library (via packs, sample directories added to "Places", whatever) gets indexed. As a result the search is now lightning fast.

I often find myself searching for devices as it's often faster than scrolling through the list to find something. Try it out:

• from the Browser: select Audio Devices
• in the search box at the top type "Delay"
• Done.

 

Session view is an extremely fast way to get ideas down, especially if you're working with audio. You can seamlessly record and loop audio on the fly, overdub, etc. all without stopping playback. It may seem a bit unintuitive for those used to a traditional DAW, but it's definitely worth the time investment to get to know it.

Keep in mind that if you don't like the "recording" approach to arranging--that is, triggering clips in session view while recording them to arrange view--you can simply drag clips from session to arrangement view and then do your arranging manually.

Group tracks are a huge time saver when you've got many tracks that you want to process in the same way. Sure, you could create an Audio Effect Rack preset but then you're also using more CPU and you can't quickly make adjustments without replacing the rack across multiple tracks.

I generally have at least two groups in a track: one for drums and one for bass. As a starting point I throw some sort of parallel compression on the drum rack, and some sidechain compression or EQ on the bass group depending if it's called for.

If I'm working with vocals I often group as well. For example, let's say you've got two vocal takes of the same line and you want to create a natural chorus:

• Track 1:
• • pan hard right
  • Audio Effect Rack with dynamics processing (de-esser, gate, compression)
• Track 2: pan hard left
• • Same Audio Effect Rack as track 1

Racks (Instrument, Drum, Audio Effect) are often overlooked, especially by those just getting started. Sure, they can be somewhat intimidating--a lot of power packed into a very small pixel footprint--but once you get familiar with them they can become a huge time saver.

A few things to consider:

• Drum Racks are not limited to samples. You can put anything in a Drum Rack slot, including Live synth devices and VSTs.
• Instrument Racks are great for stacking MIID parts: a good old standby trick for producing big bass sounds is to stack 2 or 3 synth parts, i.e. one part for low, one for mid, one for high. Using an Instrument Rack you can easily stack different synths, each with their own processing as well as common FX/processing, all without the need to copy/paste the same MIDI to multiple tracks.