It helps give you more of an identity, it allows you to take the best parts of multiple sounds (and then you can resample THAT kick and use it), and in my opinion it gives you much more control over the sound that simply working in one sample couldn't.

Yes! select the sample or midi clip you wanna automate, click the button on the bottom left that looks like an E to open the envelopes tab.


one of the drop down menus that appear should say "pitch bend" and you draw it in there!



EDIT:

Now with pictures!

Ah, gotcha. I still haven't figured out all the details of using distortion plugins, so I'm used to thinking in the "going over 0 dB = BAD" mindset.

The best place to start your track is on a notepad. Think about words and emotions that you want to connect with it. "Melodic dubstep, sad, rainstorms, male vocals." Anything that comes to mind. Then write down what you want the focus of your track to be: Drums, Melody, Chords, Bass, Vocals (doesn't have to be these, but this is always a good starting point). The thing that you want people to remember your track for. If you can, start describing how you want those different elements to feel or any ideas for them that sprout from your word cloud - "dark drums, pure saw bass, huge chord swells, glitchy vox effects".

Now when you open your DAW, you'll have a perfect reference point for what sounds to grab, how to design your synths, etc.

I got to try one on in person at DJ Tech Tool's HQ here in San Francisco, and it's actually very powerful. I haven't had a chance to use it in a mixing environment, but you can feel the sub differentiate the notes. It's wild.

EDIT: Okay, it has the Dada Life Seal of Approval as of today. I'm definitely gonna get one.

The Una Corda piano in Kontakt, SoundToys' Little AlterBoy, and (once I spend the next few weeks with the user manual to really get it to click) u-he's ACE.

TL;DR Version:

1. Eliminate boring setup stuff
2. Crack on with actually creating music
3. ? ? ? ?
4. PROFIT

This was the entire mindset I had when setting up my default templates for Ableton and Maschine. I know for a fact I'm almost always going to want to use Maschine for my drums, and if I want to process the sounds separately I would hate having to spend ten minutes opening sixteen audio track, routing every pad output to Ableton, enabling monitoring on every audio track and accessing the correct audio input, labeling everything...

I think you get my drift. I'd rather just delete the groups and spend thirty seconds loading up Battery instead.

Everyone has some setup that is on almost every single one of your songs. If you go back through your completed tracks and check, I'm sure you'll actually find a few things that become apparent.

Take those and put them in your default template! If you work within specific genres and see certain groups emerge (like a "techno skeleton" and a "feels-y dubstep outline"), why not just save a template for that so you can just tweak a few parameters to how you're feeling?