4 WAYS to make your DRUMS FAT in ABLETON (stock plugins only!) | Noize London

what's up everybody its Fabio from noise and today we're gonna be taking a look at how to make your drum sound back in Ableton only using stock plugins the thing that I forgot about you Ableton use as I know last week I did exactly the same thing about the logic now what's exciting is this week I actually managed to get the Ableton push tube which is right behind me thanks to my production partner who brought it around so we're gonna be using that a lot more and I'll do some tutorials on the push beat making using it for mixing mastering and so on I'm gonna be real with you I am predominately a logic user but that's because I am an engineer and it's just so much easier for that but Ableton is king for creativity and with something like the push by its side it's pretty much unstoppable now before you go ahead and spend a chunk of your hard-earned cash on third-party plugins let's take a look at what's inside Ableton so that you can make your drum sound phat every time for those of you who don't know the glue compressor actually has a hidden feature which is not totally obvious before we apply the compressor any drums let's talk about it it's based on an SSL G bus which is an incredibly famous BCA compressor mainly used on mix or master buses now just because it's a bus compressor doesn't mean that it has to be used on a mix or master bus it sounds great on groups it sounds great on individual instruments as well but it's totally up to you where you want to place it okay so before applying anything let's have a quick listen to the drums alright now let's go ahead and add the glue compressor let's double click it's just located here in audio effects and I'm actually gonna use the push to tweak some of the settings as I go now I'm gonna start with a threshold look to get 5 to 6 DB of gain reduction what I'm really trying to do here is over compress so I can hear the sound of the compressor working if you do this too subtly it just doesn't help and your ears aren't going to pick up on what's really going on now that we have the threshold settings done let's move on to the attack and release now remember a slow attack and fast release gives more punching character whereas a fast attack and a slow release will control the signal more it's totally up to you what you want you know you've got to listen to your drums and think to yourself do I need more this or do I need more of that and experiment a little bit until you get it to where you think it needs to be so I've gone for a slow attack and a pretty fast release which is giving me a bit of character but I still feel like it's controlling it and adding a bit of sustain now at this point you can increase or decrease the threshold depending on whether you want more of the compressor effect or less okay now here comes the trick bear with me we're gonna first reach for a utility game plug-in and reduce the signal by about eight to ten decibels now what I want you to do is increase the make up gain until you start to see this clip light flash now what we've got here is clipping where we're driving the output of the compressor too hard so what happens is the compressor cuts the tops off now you have the choice of hard clipping or soft clipping hard clipping cuts it really really tightly soft clipping does it kind of gradually sometimes it can add more punch if you use it softly and sometimes it can sound more distorted if you don't so again it's up to you and the character of sound that you're trying to achieve experiment with both I think I'm gonna go with soft it sounds pretty good now on the utility plugin we want to match the makeup gain and the negative gain on the utility so we get them at the same level so let's bring that down to minus 16 roughly group the two plugins highlight them with shift command G and then what you want to do is turn this whole group on and off and check that it's the same volume with and without the compressor sounds a little bit quieter so let's add a little bit more than a utility gain that sounds about right now okay next up is e2 let's just keep this one really simple after compressing you might find that things become a little bit more dull and that's because of the way the compressor is controlling the transients now this is totally dependent on your sound so I'm gonna keep it really simple and show you the kind of EQ that I would be doing at this stage all I'm after is a low-cut and a little bit of a boost around the mid high mids to thicken it up a little bit more that definitely feels like it gave it a bit more body and presence let's be real here how many of you have just throwing the drum bass on and me like oh yeah boy that's just sound tight I'm not a very big fan of giving key plugins but just remember this is the cherry on the icing it's all about how subtly you use it so first off what we're gonna do is we're gonna change the settings so it starts off sounding a bit more neutral I feel like it's affecting the signal too much when you just turn it on so bring the drive down bring the damp up and it's bring this trim down by about 3 dB turn it on and off and see how that sounds now the settings I like are a medium Drive and then I play a bit with the transient doll I don't really do much more than that because I don't feel it needs it the transient doll is great for making things punchy and the drive is great for adding some harmonic distortion again it's up to you how much you think you might need if you want to go for an over process distorted sounds by all means go all in but I think this is enough now what we're gonna do is we're gonna adjust the dry/wet settings so we can kind of feed this in and get a nice balance between what we have before and the drum buss effect the outputs a little heightened let's pull that down also next up we're gonna apply some parallel compression now you may or may not have used this effect before but it's really great for adding sustain and more character to your drums as well as thickening them up first of what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a return track let's go ahead and name that return track I like to name it para underscore drums and then we're gonna apply a compressor directly to this channel now I want you to copy my settings I'm gonna go for a very high ratio fast attack a sort of medium release threshold all the way down and output all the way up the idea is to have this super over compressed signal mixed into the drums so let's go ahead solo this channel and feed the drums into them we'll just hit s here and then we're gonna feed the drums into the return track all the way let's see how that sounds now that they're nice and squashed let's go ahead and open that channel pull the volume all the way down and make sure it's just the drums that are so loud and we're going to slowly bring this up in volume and feed it into the original drum group sound try turning it on and off to get a feel for what it sounds like with and without the parallel compression again this should be a subtle effect so don't overdo it now let's have a quick listen to the drums before and after so with and without all the processing I think you'll be really pleased with the results I've grouped all my effects together and I've turned off the parallel drum Channel so let's see how that sounds without and then with remember not to rely on your drum group settings to make this sound good they need to sound good before they get there but these are just some tips to help you enhance them further thank you again so much everybody's been a real pleasure love seeing you all again and I'll be back on Sunday with another video here from noise peace

Channel: Noize London

Views: 365,650

Keywords: mixing live drums ableton, mixing hip hop drums ableton, mixing trap drums ableton, glue compressor ableton, glue compressor vs compressor ableton, glue compressor tutorial, eq ableton live, ableton eq drums, ableton eq 8, ableton eq tutorial, ableton drum buss tutorial, ableton drum buss review, ableton drum buss manual, ableton live tutorial edm, ableton live tutorial hip hop, ableton live tutorial part 1, ableton parallel compression, ableton live techno, mixing drums

Id: O7iGcf_JK_8

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019