Ableton Live Tutorials – Using the Utility Device

[Music] hi i'm lima milan in this video we're going to look at ableton live's utility device so utility is right at the end of our selection of audio effects and basically what it is is our swiss army knife tool so let's just do a lot of either corrective or specifically focused things to the audio to solve technical issues that we may have um so let's let's go through the features on here so i've got it on my master track at the moment and i have a project running which is quite a stereo and deep sounding example okay so let's have a look at a couple of different tools that we have on here so we have the mono button which literally folds down the stereo signal and we're left with what remains equal between the left and the right channels so if i press that now you'll hear a massive reduction in the stereo width of the track but this is how a lot of systems can still be played for public address where on the mixing desk the output maybe from a dj console will be the left and right channels will be running separately into the mixing console but to make sure that the pa system playing through it has a good sense of power they'll pan the left and the right down to the center so you effectively have a mono pa system so if we do this we can check how our music might sound on such a system and make sure that there's no strange sort of loss of instruments because of stereo information that cancels out so you can hear there the the reverb of the the snare and also those pads dramatically reducing their presence and the brightness especially because there's stereo brightness but the mono part of the signal isn't so bright so it's really important to check that kind of information and based on the style of music you're playing and where you think it will end up being played it's worth making sure you can have it monocompatible or in some styles of music it's more about making sure you have a very good stereo sort of sense of depth and stereo width and you forgo the challenges you may have if it's played in mono so another section we have here is the bass mono so i'm going to just drag this over to my bass track we'll put that in context in solo mode so the bass mono is basically doing exactly the same as the mono except the sound has been split into two bands of frequencies anything below the cutoff point for the lower frequency band will be monoed anything above it will be left untampered with so bass sounds generally you don't want things especially under 100 hertz more likely towards 203 400 hertz you don't want those to be stereo as in differing volumes and different information in left and right channels you want your bass to be centralized in the mix so it has the maximum amount of power historically or for more niche sort of end formats as well vinyl can have an issue in terms of getting to uh be cut onto records if the stereo at the base has too much stereo in there although if you're taking your stuff to a vinyl pressing place and there's a mastering process involved generally that will be done by the master and engineer too but it doesn't hurt to check yourself and make sure that this will translate well to the vinyl format so if i press base mono this time and i'll just roll the cut off if you remember that that point where the the lower portion of frequencies are monitored and then everything above is left the same if we go low and then we start raising that up we should start hearing a change to how wide that bass seems as we listen to it [Music] okay so it could be more obvious so i'm gonna get a stereo effect actually and pop that before chorus let's just take bass bonus you can hear how stereo this is now so of course it sounds wide and fantastic but that energy has kind of gotten lost a little bit in the lower frequencies so i'm just going to make sure that the uh the lower frequencies are the right kind of at the right point get turned into mono so we can still hear all that smeared kind of stereo information but you should hear that the percussive part of that bass became more forceful because it was united between the left and the right it was turned into a mono signal okay so we've covered overall broadband mono of the signal so we turned it into mono all frequencies and we've looked at frequency specific making the signal mono as well so other things we have on here so we have an input selection so we can choose that we only listen to the left portion of the audio track if it's a stereo signal or we can choose that we only listen to the right by default it's listening to both it's listen to stereo or it could be that the source sound we've got sounds right maybe it's a stereo recording of a drum kit but the placement of the microphones is the reverse to the way you want it to be maybe it's a stage presence so you're hearing the drum kit as if it's played in front of you and you want to sound more like it's coming from the drummer's perspective so you want to flip the left and the right over so we have the swap button to be able to do that now the left and the right controls are quite useful one if you've accidentally recorded a track a stereo but you only were actually recording one input so maybe you're playing guitar you had it inputted to input one on your audio interface but you didn't set the audio track to record just input one you set it to record one and two you could get around the problem of it being on one side of your recording by telling utility to just listen to that left hand side of the signal alternatively if you're into sampling from classic recordings if you look at old recordings like the beatles when basically when stereo was the brand new format and people were experimenting with what what you could do with stereo sometimes a certain sounds within the song performances that are hard panned so the guitar might only be on the left-hand speaker and maybe you want to sample that and you don't want to pick up the drums that are on the right-hand side of the mix so you could set utility to be on the left hand side and then use that part of the sample that portion the left hand side as your source sound so that's our input selection here we have a phase reversal switch here which is especially useful when we're trying to layer sounds up so let me show you how that works if i let's get two kick drum samples so i'm deliberately just going to hold command so they are stacked on top of each other there and let's just solo those two out now there's two layers to this as you can see there's a first layer and a second layer now right now if we just loop this so it loops about every every half bar to commander now to loop that also highlight that wrong commander now we have this sound just meet the other ones so one's a very dry very powerful kick the other one's quite powerful too but it has a lot of ambience so it's really creating the air of our sample too now if you look at the actual content of our two samples we have parts in the top layer where the waveforms in a positive cycle and during that portion the more detailed kick that's underneath is doing quite a lot of changes in terms of its uh positive and negative positioning now basically when you're combining samples it's like a tug of war so one sample's pulling a signal one way and if the other sample is trying to pull the signal the other way you end up with the middle point between the two values of those two samples so what can happen when you're layering samples is one new layer is having a negative impact on a very important part of the original sample it's pulling one way which is having a negative effect on the actual timbre of the layers that you're going for so we can use utility to get around that so if we go for utility on here drop it to the second layer and we set it to a reversed phase now it's a stereo sample so i'm going to reverse the phase for the left and the right and basically that's done a polarity flip so it's basically the same as taking this image and just flipping it upside down to what was up is now down and and vice versa so let's see if this is is clearly audible when we do it it should be because it's quite a dense sample in terms of frequencies so i'm going to listen to it without flipping the polarity of that second layer and then i'm going to turn utility on which is set to phase reverse on the left and right channels so everything's 180 degrees in terms of its rotation and then we should hear a difference of the interaction of this layer with the original or the first drum layer as well so hopefully you can hear that especially that initial impact is much better of the combination of two samples when the second layer has had its phase flipped and reversed so that utility is really good for experimenting with layering sounds and as you add a new one add a utility and set it to flip the reverse turn it on and off and figure out which of the two positions is the most complementary to the sound you've already built with the addition with the initial layers that you started with so we're going to look at the mid and side balance of the utility device now which is basically allows us to blend between what's uniform in the middle of the mix so what's the same on the left and right side of our mix that's our mid signal and our sides which is the different information of the left and the right speaker so we have two modes here we have mid and side mode and then we have width mode now width mode is the default setting on here and this allows us to go from having the signal mono at zero percent through to 100 where the mid and the side balance is as it should be without utility on at all and then move towards increasing the volume of the sides and then basically figuring out what balance of those that we want now i'm going to show you how that sounds first and i'm going to show you a bit of caution that you need to take when you're playing around with the balance of these two signals okay so just as when we were moving to mono uh earlier and we could hear certain bright sounds getting cancelled because they were very bright and stereo what's happening here is a certain point the sides are becoming overpowering in their volume when we move to the right hand side and we find that we've got a very impressively wide sounding mix in this case but when we turn that balance into mono you've found a lot of cancellation happens because the sides are the things to go when we fold to mono and what we've done there is turn them up so they're now taking up more volume in terms of what's available in the mix so when we fall to mono the volume drastically drops so i'll show you that i'm going to get another utility device and i'm going to put it in mono so as i change the nature of the mid and side balance of my mix we're going to constantly hear how that translates to mono as well so you see how even though i'm increasing the volume right now the actual the volume of the uh the mix at the moment is staying the same if i turn mono off though when we do that again you'll hear that the actual stereo version of the signal is dramatically louder if you look at the master track there you'll see the volume increase so we have another way of dealing with this we have the mid and side mode now i may mention this earlier that the mid inside mode is a bit more like a cross fader between the mono signal and the stereo sound whereas the other option which was the width control was turning up the sides the mids was staying the same that the sides were being increased in volume this time we're moving between fully just mid signal over to fully just side and this is where it'll sound really strange and spatial when we're fully at the sides because it's all the information that's completely unique between the left and the right speakers [Music] now as an analysis tool it's really interesting to listen to tracks that you admire in terms of reference tracks and listen to just the side signal to hear what these producers are putting into their stereo parts of their mixes you'll find lots of the high sounds like symbols and and maybe some pads and and high lead lines have a bit of information in the sides as well as strong forwards information in the mids too and you'll hear a ghostly version of maybe vocal reverbs and those sorts of things you get a sense of what the producer uses to create their stereo effect so it's a very good analysis tool but it is also a balancing tool so we can balance this in terms of our stereo balance between the mid and the sides figure out how wide we want the track to be and we can use the second utility again to turn it into mono and just check it translates okay into a mono mix okay so that's that's a fairly good compromise a touch more balanced towards the side so it sounds a little bit wider but when we flip to mono it's not dramatically being reduced in volume so it's not too extreme a balance of the mid and the sides so just a couple of more controls to go through on utility we have an output gain which is very useful throughout your processing especially if you're using a a device or a plug-in that doesn't actually have an output control on it maybe it's a distortion unit doesn't have a way of toning down the output volume stick a utility afterwards and at least before that signal passes on to the next device you can reduce it a little bit to have a good gain stage of what you're doing we have a balanced control so if you've got a recording that seems a little bit unbalanced between the left and the right we can adjust that here we have a mute so we can just mute the whole thing in terms of uh cancelling out the audio we also have what's called a dc offset so dc offset is basically there's a middle line when a speaker should be at resting state and when we see the waveform moving forwards the speaker let's say the speaker's facing this way the speaker pushes out and then it passes that resting state that zero line in the middle on the waveform and then it goes to its negative space as well now dc offset is when a signal gets either recorded in a way that the waveform isn't centered around that resting point or something synthetic or processing wise to produce the sound that's ended up being off-balance with the actual resting point you should hopefully have a fairly equal distribution of forward motion and backwards motion on your waveforms and if it becomes very offset you're inefficiently using your speakers your whole mix could be well balanced one sound could be dramatically pushing the mix too far forwards to the forward part of the speakers and your speakers aren't being efficient and it won't sound very powerful so the dc offset button here just corrects that it takes the waveform and resettles it back into that center point so you have a more efficient use of forwards and backwards motion of your speakers so that's the utility device as i did say it's a swiss army knife so there's many times you might reach for it to do different tasks gain stage is a really important one make sure you get your levels correct from one device to the next and if needed use the utility device to do that we've got lots of options in terms of setting those mid and side balances to get the right balance of stereoness and mono compatibility we can choose to sample from input sources left and right speakers swap them over if the recording is not the orientation we want it to be and also we have those useful base monos which is generally useful even on your mix to make sure that mono's compatible or use it per sound like kicks and basses to make sure that that lower information is uniformed on the left and right speaker and is powerful

Channel: MusicTech

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Keywords: ableton utility, MusicTech, MusicTech Magazine, ableton utility tutorial, ableton utility mid side, ableton utility width, ableton utility mono, ableton utility gain, ableton utility phase, ableton utility effect, ableton utility bass mono, ableton utility device, ableton live 10 tutorial, Ableton live 10, ableton live utility plugin, utility ableton live 10, ableton live utility, ableton live utility effect, ableton live 10 utility, utility ableton live 9

Id: N3jAktWDxUs

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020