Ableton 12 Audio Effect Tutorial - Roar

Roar is Ableton 12's newest audio device and easily their best Distortion yet Roar can be used for everything from subtle warmth to extreme destruction to bizarre glitching effects I'm going to teach you how to use its five sections as well as tips and tricks along the way to get the most out of this device Roar took me hours to fully grasp but by the end of this video you're going to know how to take even the simplest sound and turn it into a massive roaring Beast let's start with the input and routing most importantly is the drive knob here for anyone who's pretty new to Distortion Drive is setting the gain before the Distortion so that you can set how hard you're hitting it and the harder you hit the Distortion the more your sound distorts next to that is the tone shaping if you set to the right you're going to be emphasizing the highs and deemphasizing the lows and if you set to the left the [Music] opposite you see in this instance we really distorted the kick over everything else below that is the frequency where we're going to set the cut off for where this tone shaping is actually occurring for the low [Music] end we can get a bit more of the mids this way or we can isolate more of the [Music] kick now above that you actually have this color compensation setting what this does is after you do the tone shaping it's actually going to mirror kind of the tone shaping to rebalance things out for example here we emphasize the lows and deemphasize the highs going into the Distortion which obviously made our sound a lot darker so if we click this it's going to rebalance things to compensate the highs back up or if we did the opposite if we really smashed the high end we can rebalance that now where things really start to get interesting down here we have the routing so the single stage option just means there going to be a single stage of distortion while serial means there's going to be two stages of distortion the first one going into the second one so if you distort heavily on stage one that's going to change what's going into stage two so get stage one where you want it and then add in stage two now if you play around with the blend setting what it's going to do is you're actually going to hear more less of one of the two stages so for example if you we go all the way to the left and we're 100% Blended to the first one it's pretty much just a single stage at this point no matter what we do to stage two you're not going to hear any of it however if we went all the way to the right yes all we're hearing is stage two but the sound of stage one still goes into stage two so this will still affect [Music] things while if we're somewhere in the middle you get a bit of stage one before it go goes through stage two so you can kind of blend those two now parallel just takes the two stages and it separates them so they're both happening at the same time and neither is affecting one another and then the blend is just deciding how much you hear either of those now multiband is where things really start to get interesting it's going to take our input and it's going to split it into three bands based off these cut offs so everything below 200 is our lows right now and everything above 2,000 is our highs I like to focus on one band at a time so let's start with the lows let's add in the mids and let's pick a type we like let's leave our highs relatively clean you could even use this as a mastering tool because clipping has become really popular for mastering so you could technically Three band split this and clip each band differently midside is where things start to get really Bonkers because now we're taking the mid signal and the side signal and we're distorting them separately this starts to separate the stereo even more from the middle if things start to get too wide you can rebalance that with this blend amount you could even hypothetically use this to isolate the sides or isolate the middle then lastly you have this feedback mode now the feedback mode is really cool where you have distortion on the direct signal which is pretty much like the single routing of distortion but then you have this Distortion which is is going to distort the feedback [Music] signal I want to go into a lot more detail about this feedback but I'm going to save that till we get to the feedback mode at the end so hang around for that okay now let's bite into the real meat of this Beast the actual Distortion I'm going to do this all on a simple sound I'm going to do it on an 808 and we're going to do just one stage of distortion just so it's easiest to hear at this time this is our raw 808 now nice clean so now let's play around with different Distortion types so the amount is the amount of actual wave shaping that's occurring you get nice visual so for example this is a nice soft saturation if we increase the drive a little bit you can hear a bit more of those harmonics and the more we increase this amount the closer we're getting to say hard clipping this drastically changes the harmonics that the Distortion make depending on which type you're [Music] using the bias here allows us to asymmetrically distort the sound what does that mean well a waveform has a positive and negative cycle this allows you to distort one side of that a little bit more than the other the reason this is really nice is on something like a base you can really hear the upper harmonics added by the Distortion flutter at the rate of the root harmonics I love you can kind of hear that type of sound speaking of that type of sound the next video I'm putting out is all about achieving this type of Base texture and I showcase it in my new song So if you haven't subscribed please do to stay tuned for that below as I just showed a second ago is the actual Distortion tip you have the soft digital clip bitc Crusher diode clipper tube preamp halfwave rectifier fullwave rectifier poomi I'm sure my base heads are already thinking about how to use that one fractal trifold noise injection and shards this level knob is just some gain control after the Distortion just so you can clean things up if you start to push into the red next is the filtering section which is pretty standard but there are some fun things about it you've got the frequency cut off which is obviously going to change where the filtering is occurring and you can change if that's in pre or post so if it's in Pre with this 808 you're not going to hear too much of a difference because there's not a ton of upper harmonics unless we change to a different mode like the band [Music] pass you've got your standard low pass band Pass High Pass Notch a peak which is really nice for just adding a little bit of movement into a sound without subtracting anything ableton's morph filter which allows you to transform between low pass band pass Notch and high pass and they actually included comb and resampling so let's get some more extreme harmonics so you can really hear that and again that can be pre or post so there's a lot of ways you can use that and resampling which plays around with the sample rate which will be more obvious actually if we have less Distortion this is basically the same as changing the rate on the Redux and if you want to toggle either of them off you have on andof switches for both the Distortion and filtering so you can use just the filter or just the Distortion if you need to so really play around with these you can get some interesting sounds like for example shards has this just like random noise texture at low valys add that into another stage of distortion it's it's going to get wild so let's get some movement going in this synth let's move over to the modulation section now the modulation section works really easily where you can click any parameter pull it up in the Matrix and then assign either lfo1 two envelope follower or noise to it now to really visualize this I'm going to click this Arrow here and we're going to pop this open okay let's do some serial routing and let's use the envelope follow Now watch how it's going to take my incoming signal so let's start applying this to things I want to get some movement here so perhaps let's use the peak filter let's up the peak and let's modulate the cut off with the envelope follower I want to get a little bit of distortion from that movement as well let's map that to the envelope now in the envelope follower we can set a volume threshold too so it will actually gate under certain amounts you can see with the blue line how much more dramatic that is cuz it's only reacting to the Peaks and we can even tighten that up make it even tighter how it reacts with the attack and release there's also a filter here which is filtering what's triggering the envelope follower you're not going to hear that it's just changing what's affecting it so for example let's say I just wanted the kick drum from that track to affect the envelope follower well we're going to set that and if we want to hear that too here's a little tip I'm going to click this headphone button now we're hearing what is triggering the envelope follower the width is basically like the cue of the band affecting that envelope [Music] follower look now just the kick drum is triggering that envelope follower now that I know that let's get that kick drum to really push this shaper out crazy so now the Distortion is just hitting with the kick drum that's cool the lfos are pretty standard but they do have some nice shaping options so first you know what let's map this LFO to this frequency here so all we're going to do is find it in the menu notice how it's highlighted after we click it lfo2 and let's change the rate to something that fits the song maybe an eighth [Music] note don't forget about this blend we're going to blend this more so we're only hearing the second state so what's nice about the lfos is you can kind of sculpt them a little more so for example what if this LFO lfo1 actually changed this morph shape so we're changing the morph with [Music] lfo1 you could even do this with rate if you really want to I [Music] do lastly there's the noise which is going to act as our random modulation if you're like me and you like to do sound design where you resample as things randomize this is going to be great so let's go back to this filter I'm going to change it to the morph value and I'm going to randomize that morph position so what we're going to do is we're going to click the morph we're going to set it to the noise here and let's even randomize the position let's have some fun [Music] you could get some fun random effects from that let's speed up the raid a little [Music] too so the Simplex Mode's kind of like the smoothest noise you can hear it kind of very smoothly moving between the positions The Wanderer is a bit more [Music] chunky and it moves a lot more in those positions Simplex is smaller simpler movements w really crazy sample and hold far more Jagged and chunky if we turn this smooth [Music] down but you can smooth that [Music] out brown noise is just so Random this is like really staticky you lose the rate option and it just becomes a mess before we get to the feedback section I do want to talk a bit more about the output so you have your standard output volume to correct things at the end you have a dry wet for the whole device but what's also really cool is you have this compressor the more you turn it to the right the more you increase the compression this compressor is not a limiter sometimes it can seem like a limiter when you crank things because it doesn't go above zero but that usually has more to do with the Distortion itself clipping things so do be aware of that if you want to sculpt what's actually affecting that compressor this side chain high pass filter right here what this does is it sets a little high pass to what's hitting this compressor so that it'll react more to say transient instead of a beefy bottom end so if you're putting this on a song with like 808s you can have it so like the 808s don't really trigger the compressor and has more to do with like the snare for example now moving to the feedback section I actually want to mention something else about feedback if you ever need feedback on your music someone to help you produce your music mixing or mastering I actually offer all those services and you can find out more in the description of this video okay so feedback before we even talk about the feedback Distortion let's just look at the feedback itself for anyone who's not really familiar with feedback it's kind of like a delay but instead of it just delaying the output it actually goes back through the system again it goes back through Distortion back through filtering every time it delays so let me show you I'm going to hit play and watch how it delays [Music] out so we can change that with the [Music] rate and the amount is the amount now you can actually filter the feedback as well so you can pick the frequency and then how wide that band [Music] is here that kind of shrinks down versus that where the filter is a lot more open you can also synchronize the [Music] feedback that's sick triplet it dot it all different time values or my favorite you can synchronize it to a note so the rate in which the feedback is is the same as a note so if we want to resonate this with say a [Music] b this button here makes sure that the feedback isn't audible after the input signal has been reduced and then this will actually phase invert the feedback now I find this is actually most noticeable when you have like kind of tight screechy feedback see how it kind of changes the tamber because you're canceling out different frequencies especially when they're that tight together okay okay so that's all cool but where it gets really cool is the fact that you can actually set the routing to feedback where this set of distortion is specifically just for that feedback tail actually already set up a patch for this where we're setting this note to B and we're modulating the filter and now it start to turn on the feedback without the filter engage just the Distortion and now let's add the filter in crazy so to wrap things up you have this Global amount here so you can reduce the range of all the modulation at [Music] once or go past 100 and increase that range and lastly if you right click the device there's a high quality mode here so you can get a bit more Fidelity out of the highend at the cost of CPU so that's Ableton 12's Roar subscribe if you want to learn more my name's Kodi bye friends

Channel: Kermode

Views: 1,895

Keywords: ableton live, ableton live 12, live 12, ableton tutorial, ableton live tutorial, ableton live 12 tutorial, ableton beginner, ableton beginner tutorial, ableton tutorial beginner, ableton audio effect, audio effect, audio device, ableton audio effect tutorial, ableton 12 tutorial, ableton 12 new feature, ableton 12 whats new, ableton 12 distortion, ableton distortion, ableton roar, roar device, ableton 12 roar distortion, ableton 12 audio effect, audio effect tutorial

Id: QH0So2h9wSo

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024