One of the small but persistent issues I’ve had with Ableton is the default theme. It’s not bad for daytime and studio use, but it’s completely wrong for DJing. When you’re in a dark environment like a club, you don’t want your computer screen to be brightly lit up, as this makes it harder for your eyes to adjust when you’ve been looking at something else, and encourages you to spend lots of time staring at the screen, rather than interacting with your audience. It also casts an eery glow on your face, which is never sexy.

To avoid this, people working in dark environments tend to invert the default colour scheme on their computer. Instead of having dark text on a pale background, they have pale text on a dark background. This means far fewer pixels are lit up, so there is less overall light and the text stands out more. This is easier on the eyes (and frankly looks cooler).

Sadly, Ableton does not ship with any useable dark themes. There are some extras, but they’re basically just minor colour changes: and haven’t been designed for DJing use. It’s important that the key features are picked out in strong colours, so you can see what’s happening at a glance.

Thankfully, someone has written an Ableton Theme Editor, which lets you create custom themes for Ableton. You can also download other people’s themes: there are some good ones at http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=134087&p=1060306&hilit=themes#p1060306.

There is one minor limitation in Ableton’s theme engine, sadly. The default palette of colours for clips is quite bright: which works fine when the clip names are black – but is hard to read when they’re white. There are a few colours you can use that are readable, but it would be nice if Ableton added some darker clip colours for people with white-on-black themes.

The current theme I use for DJing looks like this:

my DJ template