Ableton All Audio Effects Explained

ableton live includes many useful audio effects and in this video we are gonna explore them all to skip to a certain effect click a desired timestamp in the description this is the ultimate ableton audio effects guide so it doesn't matter whether you're just starting out or have been producing for some time making this tutorial took me so much time so if you end up learning something from it make sure to share it with your producers friends so they can expand their knowledge too remember that not all audio effects might be included depending on your life's version all the effects are included in the top version of ableton which is ableton live suite amp is an effect that emulates the sound and character of seven classic guitar amplifiers amp uses physical modeling technology to provide a range of authentic and usable amplifier tones with a simple and consistent set of controls clean boost blues rock lead heavy and bass those are the seven types of amps click on each of them to see what they sound like so this is the dry guitar sound [Music] now let's turn on amp [Music] at the left bottom gain adjust the level input to the preamp higher gain result in a more distorted sound then bass middle and treble work as an eq to shape the tone of the sound [Music] presence knob controls mid high frequencies [Music] the volume knob is the output volume of the amp also while using blue's heavy and base amp modes it creates some additional distortion the mono button makes your sound mono or stereo [Music] the driver knob controls the amount of the dry and wet signal this is really useful if you want to blend a distortion with the original [Music] sound this one allows you to group effects into chains also you can create macros that then can be modulated is really useful to create racks that can be quickly accessed and used later auto filter auto filter effect provides classic analog filter emulation it can be modulated by an envelope follower or an lfo to create moving filter effects in the middle of this effect is the filter control panel it allows you to change filter types the strength of the slopes circuit options or the type of resonance limiting quantize which updates the filter by a certain amount of time so the filter controls frequency is the position of the filter let's check this out it's gonna sound differently depending on the filter type [Music] this particular one allows you to morph between the previous filters the resonance knob is the amount of the resonance that is being created some of the resonance limiting options allow you to add distortion [Music] on the right side we have an lfo sample and hold section increasing the amount will start the filter automation if you want to you can click this button to sync the modulation to your host tempo in this place you can choose one of the available lfo shapes also you can turn on this random modulation that also makes your sound wide or a sample and hold we're going to stick to this one the phase knob is the position of the filter in a stereo field once you increase this knob you'll notice that the sound bounces of the left and right channel making it really wide the offset knob allows you to delay the starting position of the lfo so on the left side we have an envelope follower section and this is super useful because it detects the transience of the sound and opens the filter or closes depending on the settings so the envelope knob is the amount of modulation you can go to the right side it's gonna mean the filter will be opening this side and if you go down it's gonna be closing now the attack determines how quickly the envelope follower will react the release knob sets for how long it will remain active so for the quick detection reduce the attack and for a tighter sound reduce the release auto pad autopen offers lfo driven manipulation of amplitude and padding for creating automatic panning tremolo and amplitude modulation and beat synchronized chopping effects amount is as usual at the amount of the modulation rate is a speed of the modulation [Applause] face is the position in stereo you can set it to zero to turn an auto pen into the volume [Applause] automation can click this button to invert the lfo once you sync the rate of the lfo to your host's tempo you will be able to access an offset knob this allows you to delay the lfo modulation shape you can change the shape of the lfo and make it smoother or sharper with the shape knob right here you can change the shape of the other folks while using nut synchronize right here these two knobs represent where the starting position is using the first option moves the whole lfo modulation shape left and using the second one makes it start at the beginning [Music] beat repeat simply catches the incoming signal and repeats it for a certain amount of time with the ability to also filter the sound mix pitch and decay the interval control defines how often beat repeat captures new material and it begins repeating it [Music] now every 1 8 bar the beat repeat will capture the signal and start repeating it now if we decrease that to one bar every one bar there's gonna be signal captured by beat repeat and then it's gonna be repeated [Music] as you can see this little dot here that shines from time to time shows where the sound is being captured how often you can use the offset knob to offset the capture position remember that this will also add a bit of the delay to the sound because it's capturing the sound a little bit later [Music] you can think of the grid knob as of the speed of the repetitions [Music] you can turn off triplets if you don't want them to appear in the grid knob variation controls grid size by randomizing it [Music] variation modes said how the variation will be applied the chance knob determines the probability of the repetition to occur if set to 100 the repetition will occur every single time [Music] click repeat to manually trigger beat repeat you can also automate this one to trigger with the an automation line the gate knob defines a total length of [Music] repetitions you can shift the pitch down if you want you can also decay it [Music] click the filter button to turn it on and set it according to your needs see how much movement beat repeats adds to the whole song mix insert and gate decide how the repeated sound will be mixed with the original mix both original sound and repetitions will play insert will insert repetitions when they occur making the original signal quiet [Music] and the gate will only play repetitions you can also fade the repetitions by using the decay knob volume defines the loudness of the partitions [Music] oh this is just beautiful cabinet cabinet is an effect that emulates the sound of five classic guitar cabinets you can set different cabinets to define how the sound was captured [Music] do [Music] you can also decide whether you want your output to be mono or stereo channel eq this one is pretty straightforward it's just a simple eq if you need to boost or cut something quickly this one gets pretty useful [Music] the cars effect uses two parallel time modulated delays to create chorus and flanging effects chorus includes two delays that you can either link together or not you can also use one of them only or modulate one with another this is the delay time you can high pass the delay number one [Music] you can link both delay times by clicking this button [Music] in this section you decide whether you want your delay number two to be on or off the fix means that the delay one will only receive the modulation and the delay two will stay at a fixed value and a mod means that both of the delays the delay number one and two will be modulated with the modulation section that we are going into right now in the modulation section you can decide how much cars is going to be applied and how quick the modulation will occur you could also multiply the values by 20 by clicking here [Music] feedback will be useful to adjust the length of the chorus [Music] if you want a bit different sound you can reverse the polarity [Music] also a quick tip if you right click the plugin you can enable the crisp mode this is gonna improve the sound quality particularly at higher frequencies compressor okay so finally compression a topic that seems to be pretty hard to understand by a lot of people but it's fairly simple you take a sound and make what's too loud quieter it will be easier to understand how the compressor works if we set the ratio to infinity to 1. that means the sound will be limited when it reaches a certain threshold for example peaks that are louder than minus 10 decibels will stay at the threshold of minus 10 decibels that's what the ratio infinity to 1 means take a look now as i decrease the threshold to minus 10. so after you compress the sound you need to know how quick you should stop compressing that's when the release knob comes in the longer the time the longer it will take the volume reduction to recover the quicker the time the quicker it will go back to its neutral state [Music] this is going to result in a more squashed sound and in some cases it will create some additional distortion also while compressing you want to know when you should start compressing now 10 milliseconds later 50 milliseconds later this is what the attack knob is for the time of the attack dictates how fast the compressor will start reducing the volume will it be delayed or instant [Music] so the attack set to really low it's gonna catch some transients [Music] if i set the attack a little bit higher it's gonna catch the middle of the sound so higher attack values create more of a transient heavy sound [Music] so now the ratio is some sort of conversion of how much compression should be applied based on the threshold level also the volume reduction is dependent on the attack and release setting as you can see if i set the attack to really low there's more compression because the sound is being detected earlier so now as we pull down the ratio you should see that the volume reduction is getting smaller because the ratio is getting smaller so remember the attack this works along with the look ahead this one though sees the signal before it appears so it can start compressing earlier if reducing transients is what you want then go ahead and set it to 1 or 10 milliseconds [Music] the new control adjusts how gradually or abruptly compression occurs as the threshold is approached so let's [Music] see [Music] here you can switch between different views i personally prefer this one because it shows you visually the compression you can also turn the compressor into expander which makes the sound louder instead of quieter rms mode causes the compressor to be less sensitive to very short peaks and compresses only when the incoming signal has exceeded the threshold for a slightly longer time check this out [Music] peak is like really really sensitive [Music] well rms is just dialed back a bit using rms seems to create some additional transients to the sound [Music] if that's what you're looking for you can dial back the tri-wet knob to do what's called a parallel compression [Music] so the makeup button is the automatic gain once you click it the output gain will be automatically adjusted the output section allows you to see the output signal instead of the input and [Music] compression so the dark gray signal is the original signal and the light gray one is the compressed one [Music] you can also sidechain a certain sound by turning on the side chain and sending its signal from a desired track like a kick you can also turn on eq to have sidechain triggered only by a certain frequencies of the kick also the prefix means that the sidechain will take the try signal of the kick the pulsed effect means that it will take the signal after the processing chain corpus corpus is an effect that simulates the acoustic characteristics of seven types of resonant objects if you want to add some tonality to the sound corpus is a great tool for that so in the middle section you can choose what material is gonna be used as a resonator tune allows you to tune the type of resonance to a certain key [Music] at the bottom here you can see what key exactly you're on also how much offset this is if you get some scent value you can dial this back so it's the exact pitch now the spread knob makes your sound wide it basically detunes the sound and makes it wide [Music] on the left side we have an lfo that modulates the tune of the corpus so as it was in autopan spin and face options are the starting positions so let's go back to the middle section in this place you can choose how many overtones will be created [Music] you can think of the material as of the mid to high frequencies ratio so the listening l and listening are are the positions of resonators the hit is the position at which the resonator has been hit you can think of it as a physical object that has been hit this one adjusts the pitch of resonator's harmonics [Music] brightness controls well brightness in some of the cases additional knobs are available like ratio [Music] or opening and closing this one opens or closes the [Music] pipe the decay knob sets the length of the resonator [Music] you can use the radius knob to control a tone of the resonator this controls the decay and high frequency sustain also you can apply a filter and you can make it mono or white the bleed knob mixes the portion of unprocessed sound with the processed one delay well i think you know this one it doubles your sound and repeats every certain amount of time for a certain amount of [Music] you time apply filter to it if you want to three delay modes allow you to choose between how you want your delay to change while messing with the time parameters the pitch will make that pitch shifting effect [Applause] [Music] fade will crossfade and jump will cut instantly to the new delay time try setting the delay two hundred percent wet under pitch mode and automating the time parameter for a nice pitch shifting effect [Music] you can turn on ping pong to make the delay stereo controls how long the delay will last love love love [Laughter] left and right decide how often the delay will appear you can link them or make them separate if you set the delay to 100 wet you can offset one of the stereo channels to make what's called a haas effect in modulation section you can well modulate the delay parameters rate filter time this is great for adding movement to the sound try increasing time to make that low five wobble effects [Applause] is an analog style drum processor that was designed to add body and character to a group of drums while gluing them together in a tight mix there are three distortion types and drive that changes the amount of them below we have a trim slider that reduces the input level comp lets you turn on a fixed compressor which is kind of good for adding some transients crunch adjusts the amount of sine shape distortion applied to mid high frequencies the dump control is a low pass filter which removes unwanted high frequencies that can occur after adding distortion then the transient knob allows you to add tightness to the sound or make it more squashed boom makes your drums well boom and the frequency allows you to tune the boom also dk is how long you want boom to boom boom click here to quantize to the closest note you can also preview to only boom by clicking these headphones at the end we got a driver control that you can just use to blend the drumbus into the original sound the dynamic tube effect infuses sound with the twist of tube saturation an integrated envelope follower generates dynamic tonal variations related to the level of the input signal [Music] a b and c are the different tube models with different quality [Music] tone directs the distortion to low mid or high frequencies depending on the position of the knob [Music] the bias knob sort of makes your sound broken and is also modulated by an envelope follower [Music] so [Music] i don't remember the delay effect we talked about previously this is its beefier version [Music] so the panel on the left is the same thing as in delay it just controls the type you can additionally control the input of the signal and you can invert the feedback [Music] the middle panel shows you a visual delay representation also includes a filter right here now you can also choose mid side delay mode that separates delay into mid and side signals [Music] echo lets you add reverb onto the delay and lets you do it in different places before after delay or to the feedback the decay section sets the length of the reverb [Music] modulation section is much more expanded in this case but it consists of the same elements plus an envelope follower also in this case you can choose what lfo shape you're gonna use for the modulations additional effects are built into this delay gate lets you set the gate at the beginning of the processing chain [Music] ducking allows you to sighting the wet signal with the dry one [Music] you can add noise it sounds weird just listen [Music] [Applause] at the end we have that lo-fi wobble effect eqa this is the most popular and the most often used eq in ableton and consists of eight bands 8 types each the listening mode frequency show not show option stereo left right mid side adaptive eq which results in narrowing the q at higher gain levels like just like that it just makes it narrower or wider scale which is sort of a dry wet knob if you have a certain eq shape you can just scale it down or scale it up to accentuate or just scale it down if you right click on eq you can access over sampling turn that on for higher quality you probably won't hear this but because there is an option why not to click it also if you double click the eq you can access the big view [Music] so in this section you can select whether you want the eq to affect a both left and right channel left and right channel separately or mid and side signal so if you click left and right you can click l and r to switch between eqs now we are targeting the right channel and now we are targeting the left one so we can make much fuller sound just by eq'ing two stereo channels differently also now we can switch to mid side mode this is gonna do the mid signal and the side signal separately so now we are targeting the mono signal now we're targeting the sights [Music] there's a bit of a easier control than just moving this here and adjusting the queue you can hold alt while positioning the eq band and drag the mouse up and down to reduce or make the queue bigger eq3 eq3 is a smaller version of eq8 without most of the functions with no visual response if what you want is to quickly boost or cut lows mids or highs this is a great one you can also turn on certain bands to make them quiet [Music] frequency low and high set the frequency range of low and high bands [Music] 24 and 48 sets how drastic the filter is erosion with erosion you can quickly add a noise to your sound that follows its envelope also some sign modulation is possible at the bottom you can set what frequencies how many and how loud you want to affect [Music] external audio effect this effect allows you to route signals from and to set the gain separately invert the face see peaks and set the latency this is just a routing effect that allows you to just send sounds from two and that's it filter delay filter delay is a delay but with separate controls for left right and left plus right channels filter can be applied on each of them they can be panned and have their own volume channels [Music] so let's turn on only the left input for now you can see that the delay has been created in the left channel we can set its parameters like the time like the filter options right here we can set the feedback right here and the volume right here and the same chain is being applied also to the right channel and to the left plus right channel which is we can say the middle so you can create three different delays with three different times and three different filters and three different volumes flanger flanger uses two parallel time modulated delays to create flanging effects we're gonna use the saw wave here as an example now after turning on the flanger we get the flanging effects so the reason why they're being modulated is because the lfo is already turned on so let's bring the amount to zero and now there will be no modulation thus the sound will not move so using this panel you can control delay time and feedback of the flanger increasing the feedback will make the sound more resonating while increasing the delay time will increase the length of each delay so you can manually modulate the delay time for example to create things like this also there's a high pass filter that allows you to apply a high pass filter to a sound [Music] using this button you can invert the polarity of the flanger with modulating delay time you can make this really talking kind of filter movement automation [Music] so along with this we have an envelope follower and lfo sample and hold section so the envelope follower will be mostly useful for sounds that are more dynamic like drums and scents that have more dynamic range instead of the ones that are sustained so let's apply the envelope follower to this guy first so there's not much movement but if we apply to the sound that is more like a staccato one [Music] we're getting some of the time changes you can also use an lfo sample and hold modulation to modulate this well with an lfo you can choose different shapes of the [Music] lfo [Music] frequency shifter frequency shifter allows you to move all the frequencies left or right creating odd pitch shifting effects you can use a modulator to automate the fine tune or do it yourself [Applause] [Music] it also includes a ring modulation and a drive knob that allows you to distort an incoming signal [Music] [Applause] enabling the white button creates a stereo effect by inverting the polarity of the spread value for the right channel this means that increasing the spread value will shift the frequency down in the right channel while shifting it up in the left also you can use a modulator to automate the fine tune gate the gate effect passes only signals whose level exceeds a user-specified threshold a gate can eliminate level noise that occurs between sounds for example hiss or harm in this case it's going to be a villain crackle or shape a sound by turning up the threshold so that it cuts off reverb or delay [Music] tails setting floor to minus infinity and moving the threshold up allows you to decide how much of the sun will get through the gate you can think of the floor as of the dry wet knob [Music] once the signal passes through the gate you can set how long it will stay up how quickly the gate will react and for how long it will fade [Music] return sets the difference between the level that opens the gate and the level that closes it [Music] flip allows you to reverse the gate and cut parts that are going beyond the threshold level with this one you can create a really cool ducking effect glue compressor so fortunately we've already explained how the compressor works so i'm gonna skip this part first of all the glue compressor has a really useful function a soft clipper turn on the soft clip and push the makeup gain if you use it on drums they're gonna [Music] knock [Music] glue compressor was mainly designed for use on the master truck or a group truck to glue multiple sources together into a cohesive sounding mix [Music] the range knob simply limits the compression amount so now the compression goes above 10 decibels of gain reduction if we bring the range down you will see that it will stop below the 10. [Music] grain delay the grain delay effect slices the input signal into tiny particles called grains that are then individually delayed and can also have different pitches compared to the original signal source if you're familiar with the granular synthesis this is almost it start with rising the pitch up an octave now move the frequency down to reduce the speed or the length of the grain [Music] feedback makes the output of the sound come back to the input and be affected by all the settings again so having pitch on plus 12 will create grains that are 24 pitch and then 36 and so on [Music] you can also randomize the pitch all of these settings are as well accessible through a graph here make sure to choose which parameter you want to modulate and then you can do it by just clicking this dot here and dragging it you can see that now i'm modulating the drive and feedback at once [Music] also there here default delays functions like delay time sync and beat offset the spray randomizes the position of the grains so that they are playing at different times it cannot that really smooth effect [Music] limiter limiter takes an incoming signal and cuts its volumes at a specified ceiling level in this case the limiter will limit the signal at -3 decibels in this place you can see the gain reduction limiter is also a compressor so it includes things like input gain look ahead and release you can switch between stereo and left right limiting this is going to enable you to limit left and right channels separately looper looper allows you to record play overdub and well loop the incoming signal to start simply put it on the master and start recording then play some sounds so before you start recording i highly recommend to go into tempo control and click follow song tempo because the default settings are being set and follow some tempo are kind of not working properly because they have to detect the tempo i suppose and that sometimes just doesn't work properly so follow song tempo if you need to you can turn on the metronome so if you're playing an instrument you probably can't click the button and start recording at the same time because probably you need both hands to play the instrument or you just want to have some time to prepare before recording actually so for this thing there's a quantization option so if you go here you can set how much this is gonna the looper is gonna wait before it starts recording so i like to set two bars and actually what you have to do is to enable playback this is to just start the playback in ableton and then you hit this and then you start playing something so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna also play drums to it so i wanna overdub immediately after i stop playing chords so this part here means that the looper is gonna record for a certain amount of bars i'm gonna choose four because i'm gonna have a four bar chord progression and then this is the action that is gonna do it can either overdub or play so i'm gonna set this to overdub and that's basically it start the playback in ableton and start recording [Music] [Music] so now we have a chord progression along with the drum beat now what you can do you can undo if you made some mistakes you can clear the whole thing bring it up we're not going to be doing that we can manipulate the length we can make this shorter or we can make this longer this is just going to cut the length it's not going to be speeding this up so very handy our pitch and reverse control so you can speed this whole thing up and thus pitching this up as well [Music] you can also reverse the whole thing [Music] so once you're done you can just drag this thing here that says drag me and you're gonna get the thing straight from the looper which is in this case that drums and chords loop so this feedback decides how much of the original signal goes to overdubbing so let's say i'm gonna add some vocals to it like that so this section decides when the input signal is being heard so in this case this is gonna be always hurt so it doesn't matter if i play now here along with the vocals or i just play without the vocals wait what yeah it's gonna be playing all the time doesn't matter if there's any sound on the input so now if we set this to never and i play this back even if there's a vocal on my timeline it's not being played you can't hear it so the third option means that the input is only audible when recording or overdubbing so i'm gonna start over dubbing here okay so that's that we can play this back to see whether it got recorded yeah so i'm gonna undo that so it's clean and we're gonna do the fourth option so the fourth option means that the input is audible when there's a recording or overdubbing happening but it's not audible when the looper is playing so check this out i'm gonna play this back there was no vocal but i'm gonna but i'm gonna start over dubbing multi-bend dynamics is a multiband compressor divided into three bands allows you to compress them individually the panel on the left side allows you to set the positions of each band and their input levels [Music] if you want you can turn on bands using these three buttons [Music] you can adjust the starting point of each filter using these two sliders also you can solo them so you can hear what you are actually targeting [Music] also soft knee and rms options can be accessed here with soft knee enabled compression or expansion begins gradually as the threshold is approached the rms peak switch also affects how quickly multiband dynamics responds to level changes these are a couple of types of compressions here downward compression makes loud signals quieter upward compression makes quiet signals louder downward expansion makes quiet signals quieter upward expansion makes loud signals louder this is going to make sense in a second let's now take a look at blocks blocks on the left represent the signal below and on the right above below means that affected will be the signal below a certain threshold so let's say i'm gonna be targeting the upper band and our volume is just just about here right dragging left or right on the edges of these blocks adjusts the threshold level as you mouse over the middle of the block the cursor will change to up down arrow click and drag up or down to make the signal within the selected volume range louder or quieter this is really a ratio of the compressor [Music] attack and release are available under t basically t is time b is below which is the blocks on the left and a is above which is the bars on the right side so as you change parameters on the middle view you will be able to see them change here you can also set a certain values in this place under b or a option in here you can adjust output levels of each band [Music] and here the output of the whole effect [Music] and here the time of the compression push it to the right to make it tighter and to the left to make it more squashed this is gonna make sense in a moment after we compress this sound multiband dynamics seems to be pretty complex at the beginning so let's take a look at this example it's gonna reset all the settings let's say i want to apply a compression on a high frequencies i'm just going to bring this to this part because you can do the same thing with both below and up above compressions i'm just going to use this one so as you can see nothing happens there's no gain reduction because as we go into above there's ratio one to one so it does nothing as we move the ratio up or down we will decide how much compression will be applied if the second number is smaller than the first one we are basically doing the expansion [Music] so we are making the highs louder after they reach a certain threshold which is minus 18.3 decibels right now [Music] so let's say i want to compress that i'm just gonna bring this down until it's red and now we we went into the compression section so in time i might just want to leave the transients and maybe want to do a really squashed sound so i'm just going to bring the release down also i can solo that so i can see what's going on well do something like that so that's what we did we can also try doing something to the below bin to see how it works together with the above all right so now a really interesting thing happened we are getting also a gain reduction and a gain boost depending on the loudness of the signal so when the sound is loud there's a expansion and when it's quiet there's a gain reduction so we are doing a downward expansion as well as upward expansion so we are making quiet signals quieter and loud signals louder at the same time we can do the opposite right [Music] to really accentuate that snare [Music] on the top let's do the same thing to the rest of the sound and see how it's gonna work together it's gonna do something similar it doesn't have to be really exactly the same thing because the levels of each of the bands are not equal yes so we can now adjust the output doing this in here so in this case we've got kind of like a tighter sound we can also use the time to make it more squashed or tighter time basically modulates these parameters that we haven't touched i forgot about this guy let me switch that to the way on [Music] yeah this is pretty now really tight and transient heavy [Music] it's not really audible but if you load an ott which is a part of the play button dynamics you can use a time to really hear the difference this is really squares but if you push the time right this is getting tighter overdrive overdrive is a distortion effect that pays homage to some classic pedal devices commonly used by guitars unlike many distortion units and can be drive extremely hard without sacrificing dynamic range at the top of the effect is an eq window it allows you to set a desired frequency range that will be affected by the [Music] distortion [Music] [Music] drive as always is the amount of the distortion [Music] tone is the post distortion eq simply makes your sound brighter or darker [Music] the higher it's set the more highs it has the dynamics slider allows you to adjust how much compression is applied as the distortion is increased [Applause] [Music] lower settings mean more compression and higher less [Music] paddle pedal is a guitar distortion effect the gain controls the amount of distortion applied to the dry signal [Music] you can choose between three different pedal types overdrive warm and smooth [Music] distortion tight and aggressive [Music] fuzz unstable with a broken amp sound there's also a three-band eq that you can use to shape the tone of the sound it is applied after the [Music] distortion this little slider decides how narrow is the mid knob frequency range if you want the sub to be boosted you can turn on the sub button on [Music] phaser phaser uses a series of all pass filters to create a phase shifting in the frequency spectrum of a sound [Music] poles knob allow you to change the amount of frequency notches that are being created as you can hear while i'm tweaking the poles knob you can hear that some of the filter resonances are being added or subtracted along with the earth mode the color can be adjusted this changes the timbre of the sound space is the second mode that has a different sound [Music] [Music] more feedback means the sound will resonate more and will be longer [Music] use the frequency slider to place the phasing effects you can also use this view and drag the orange dot as some of the previous effects phaser is equipped with envelope follower and lfo modulation use them to create some movement to the sound the envelope follower is gonna work better for tighter sounds not the sustained ones real quick redux redux allows you to create that low resolution sound by reducing bits and down sampling it turn on bit reduction and start pulling the bit amount knob down after some time you'll start to hear some artifacts [Music] also you can use down sampling which creates a fm modulation kind of effect if you're looking to make your sounds sound 8-bit and really retro this one is really great use hard and soft modes for different amount of dumb sampling [Music] resonators resonators create sharp frequency bumps called resonances to add some tonality you can tune each of the individual resonators to a certain key to create chords and even melodies if you automate the on off button [Music] you can use a filter to limit resonator's bandwidth [Music] you can choose from two types a and b [Music] decay decides how long the sound will last color is a timber control of the resonator's effect the cons switch holds the decay time constant regardless of the actual pitch width sets the stereo spread for resonators from 2 to 5. [Music] you can also fine tune each of them you can also set volumes for each individual one let's for example now turn off every single one [Music] now we can hear only one resonator and it's playing on a note of c2 [Music] [Applause] now let's turn on another one [Music] and now as you can hear the second one is playing on the left side if we turn on the fifth one it's playing on the right side so each of these from two to five are positioned in a stereo field so the sound can be wide at the end [Music] reverb it simply puts your sound in a certain space first of all signal goes from left to right so it passes a filter section in here you can target frequencies you want the reverb to occupy for example pretty common thing to do would be to cut low end especially if you're putting reverb on a bass zone the pre-delay knob defines how much delayed is reverb if you play a sound now the reverb will play maximum 250 milliseconds later so now let's set it to 0.5 and the reverb will start playing immediately once we set that to 250 milliseconds you will hear that the reverb is a bit delayed [Music] as you can hear the sound kind of changes from more like a chorus one to more metallic one if we increase the pre-delay early reflections is the next thing in a processing chain these are the earliest echoes that you hear after the bounce of a room's walls turn on spin for more of a chorus effect and turn it off for a more metallic sound to adjust the chorus modulation use the panel below [Music] shape decides how sharp or early reflections lower values make them hit harder while higher sound softer in the global section go ahead and turn on that high quality mode god damn it what you want your reverb to sound like garbage unless you try to be eco-friendly then you can turn on echo but no otherwise just use a high quality mode underneath we have the size of the room and even further down you can set your reverb to be mono or stereo so now the fusion network this one was pretty confusing for me first when i started using ableton's reverb but it's simply late reflections the decay time represents the length of the reverb once the reverb is playing you can freeze it to turn it into a pad now the reverb will play endlessly so the diffusion network before we get into the messing with it on the right side you can see the reflect and diffuse knobs the first one is responsible for the volume of early reflections and the second one for diffusion network so what we can do to hear the fusion network how it works better we can pull the reflect down to -30 decibels so now only the diffusion network mostly will play okay so there's no sound now almost really quiet now we have early reflections as you can hear the decay time makes a bit of a difference but it doesn't change the length of the sound so now let's make them minus 30 decibels and now let's use the diffuse only so now the decay time makes the sound longer what i'm gonna do i'm gonna just cut some high end yeah let's say this is the reverb i'm highly satisfied with now we can connect this with early reflections by just putting the volume back to zero decibels and now we have both things playing at the same time so the density knob controls the diffusion's network density the higher it's set the denser the echoes of the late reflections will be let's do the same thing as we did before [Music] the scale knob controls coarseness of the diffusion network higher values produce darker sounds [Music] so the next thing is the actual chorus there are also two options that work along with the freeze knob [Music] flat turns off the filters so now i played this the same sound twice the i played the saw wave twice and when the cut was turned off the signal was added to already frozen reverb if you turn on the cut and you play the sound while the reverb is frozen it will not be added to the reverb saturator saturator is a wave shaping effect that can add that missing dirt punch or warmth to your sound it can coat input signals with a soft saturation or drive them into many different flavors of distortion in the middle there is a window that shows you the actual shape graph that is being applied to the sound below we got seven different types of distortion drive adjusts the amount of the saturation but it's simply an input gain activating the color button enables two filters the first of these controlled with the base control dictates how much the filter will be reduced or increased for low frequencies the second filter is an equalizer that works together with width and depth knobs [Music] width is the frequency range of the second filter and depth is the second filter's amount [Music] the saturation types include analog clip soft sign medium curve hard curve cyanoid fold digital clip the last one is a wave shaper and can be manually manipulated every single one of these obviously so differently [Music] in the output section we got a soft clip which rounds the corners of the way from preventing it from hard clipping [Music] so now the wave shaper the wave shaper mode six additional parameters are drive linearity curve damp depth and period drive determines the amount of the distortion linearity works together with the curve and depth parameters to alter the linear portion of the shaping curve [Music] then flattens any signal near the grid's origin it behaves like an ultra fast noise gate [Music] you can notice that especially in here when we have a release on an open hi-hat [Music] and now hi-hats are almost completely gone there's a little bit of the noise happening [Music] period determines the density of ripples in the superimposed sine wave it's going to make your sound super synthetic okay so let's make a different sound now this subway sounds like an actual ethan synth also there's an output gain if something is too loud you can bring the volume down spectrum spectrum performs real-time frequency analysis of incoming audio signals it just shows you the frequencies of the [Music] sound first of all blog is the amount of samples are being analyzed each measurement it basically makes the spectrum more accurate [Music] because there's more data the spectrum can be smoother you can view frequencies of only left or right channels or both [Music] the refresh rate is how often the frequency view will be refreshed [Music] so higher values which is a slower refresh rate will create more of a choppy view while lower ones [Music] will make it pretty smooth the average slider while it's on the lowest volume the view will be updated more often while it's on higher values it's mostly useful to see peaks that have been here for a longer time because the values of them is more of an average one instead of a quick peak like it's on the lower [Music] value [Music] so below you can adjust what the view consists of bins or line is purely visual it just fills that gap here max shows you the maximum amplitude of the sound [Music] which is that thing in the background if it's get louder then it's gonna update and stay updated as it is now scale x is simply a view mode it can be linear logarithmic and the one that consists of node names [Music] this one sets the visible dynamic range of the spectrum [Music] if it's automatic it will get adjusted to the dynamic range of the song or of the sound while it's on manual you can set how much view you have so now it's minus 188 which is minus 188 here we can just make it smaller by zooming in can go to minus zero [Music] if you hover over the view you can see frequency note and amplitude information tuner apply a tuner onto a desired track to tune sounds into a certain key you can toggle between two visual modes target which is this one the view will show you how much offset is your sound from the perfect pitch in this case is plus 4 cents so what you have to do is to tune your sounds so the tuner shows you it's in the middle so the dot is in the middle and the tuner is turns green now we know that this is note a and that it has a perfect pitch so the second view is strobe [Music] which kind of does a similar thing [Music] but it has some lines that are just rotating so when you tune it the lines do not move anymore also there's another view this one that shows you the line and this the whole notes you could zoom in or zoom out by using the that thing here then you can see if the lines are not matching with the longer lines and that means that this is also you can decide whether you want to see values in cents or hertz just clicking right here reference is usually set to 440 hertz but it can be changed from 110 to 180 dependent on your tuning needs utility very simple it's super useful effect so let's start with the section on the left and then a section on the right the input section allows you to invert the face of left right or both channels may that be so nutty you can solo left right or stereo channels or even swap them so using the swap option will change your right channel to the left channel it will basically mirror them utility allows you to set the width of the sound both make it narrow or super wide click mono to listen to both left and right channels merge into one to see what your song sounds in mono this one is really great if you want to see what your song will sound on mono speakers like on the phone [Music] bass mono allows you to make all frequencies below a certain point mono you can also preview what frequencies are you targeting with this headphones button output section allows you to set the gain and the stereo field bound [Music] dc option filters out extremely low frequencies that are not audible the human ear but can affect the further post-processing so imagine there's an unaudible low-end in this song and i'm trying to master it so that low end will be affecting other things like distortion and making the whole thing just sound worse you can click mute to just mute the output so utility is super useful to be dropped on the master track to make your sub mono and to have the ability to listen to your mix in mono just with one click it is also great to replicate the truck's volume automation which as we should know is not the best idea to use so if you want to just make the volume of the truck quieter in certain places with an automation line i highly recommend to use the gain note because if you automate this slider and you wanna then change its volume you will then have to change the volume in automation which is not really convenient vinyl distortion the vinyl distortion effect emulates some of the typical distortions that occur on vinyl records during playback these distortions are caused by the geometric relationships between the needle and the recording groove the effect also features a critical generator for adding noisy artifacts [Music] you can modify the crackles volume with the first knob and it's tone with the density knob [Music] unfortunately the crackle doesn't have an envelope follower so it keeps playing all the time as you can hear right now but sometimes it is a really nice addition so the tracing model adds even harmonic distortion to the input signal you can move this yellow dot around to adjust frequency and amount of the distortion this slider here is dedicated to the bandwidth of the filter you can also change the bandwidth holding alt and dragging up and down [Music] so that's kind of nice below we have another distortion unit this one adds up harmonics and makes the sound super white you can adjust the filter the same way as in tracing model [Music] also down below we have a drive knob which controls the global amount of the [Music] distortion vocoder a vocoder is an effect that combines the frequency information of one audio signal called the carrier with the amplitude contour of another audio signal called the modulator the modulator source is generally something with a clear rhythmic character such as speech or drums while the carrier is typically a harmonically rich synthesizer such as a string or pad the most familiar application of a vocoder is to create talking synthesizer or robotic voice effects while this is pretty hard to understand let's talk some examples so the carrier is basically a thing that is gonna affect your sound so the sound we have is this vocal and if we apply a vocoder it turns into a noise because as a carrier we have set the noise so as i said the carrier is going to be the thing that just affects the sound so in this case the noise is affecting the sound grab that dot and control the noise [Applause] the next one is an external carrier for example rich synthesizer that is playing chords simply choose a track that the synth is sitting on and select whether you want a dry signal or signal with post-processing [Music] [Applause] another type of carrier is modulator modulator is our vocal in this case so it's gonna use itself as a carrier in this case you can apply all sorts of cool effects to it the last one is pitch tracking which basically turns your sound into a synth depending on the oscillator also pitch tracking it here you can set the pitch the waveform and the range that the bit tracking will be affecting let's stick to external carrier for now and explore more functions [Applause] unvoiced knob allows you to add noise generator to the sound sensitivity knob determines how much of the noise is going to affect the sound [Applause] slow and fast types decide how quick the detection is in the middle we have our main filter view think of it as of the eq but each of the stripes is a bandpass filter bands is the amount of eq bands higher values add more details while lower make carrier more pronounced [Applause] [Music] [Applause] range is simply the eq frequency rate [Applause] bandwidth also bw says the width of each band face filter so the lower settings is gonna introduce more of a resonance feeling [Applause] precise and retro change the bandpass filter response to frequencies retro causes the sound to be more harsh in high frequencies [Applause] [Music] you can use gate for a watery filling [Applause] you can also draw a shape in the filter section this is just like an eq you can make the certain bands just quieter [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] level is the vocoder's output level depth controls how much of the modulator's amplitude envelope is going to be applied to the carrier's signal as you can see last step makes your carrier more pronounced attack and release adjust how quickly vocoder will respond to amplitude changes [Applause] [Music] [Applause] again this is the modulator's attack and release so this has an impact on how much the carrier is pronounced formant lets you shift frequencies of the main filter up and down resulting in a formant shift [Music] mono stereo and left right allow you to decide how the full color to treat stereo material mono both modulator and carrier are mono stereo modulator is mono but carrier is stereo and left right modular is stereo as well as carrier yeah we can something like this we can also apply some reverb [Music] so that's it if you have any questions you can leave them in a comment section below if you enjoyed this video you can cycle that subscribe button also you can visit my site over sample.us for some high quality samples presets and free sounds

Channel: Oversampled

Views: 45,851

Keywords: music production tutorial, how to make music, ableton live tutorial, music production, sound design, sound design tutorial, how to sound design, how to make beats, ableton live, edm tutorial, making music, ableton live all effects explained, ableton tutorial, ableton effects tutorial, Ableton compressor, Drum buss, Reverb, Delay, Ott, Amp, Resonators, Glue compressor, Ableton live 10 tutorial beginner, Ableton live tutorial beginner

Id: LGU7P-VB07w

Length: 96min 9sec (5769 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/InternetHam]

Bonus points for a great simple explanation of how compression works!

[u/runawayw1thme]

This is excellent content

[u/nickthechen]

👏👏👏

[u/IdiosyncratiCm7]

I put cabinet on my drum snares and sometimes kicks and synth pads. Flanger is fun for ambient experimental.

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[u/Cpt-Hook]

Literally have 10 tabs ready of explanations for different effects... this is better.

[u/brandothedrummer]

Loveeeeeeeee

[u/Sugarlips_Habasi]

Didn't know how useful the Utility plugin was. Nice!