Ableton Live Utility Plugin Secret Trick to Increase Width

what's up everybody Sam SM here today I want to show you a trick that you can use with Ableton lives utility plugin to give you more control over manipulating the width of an individual track or even your master I posted a short video going over this process and I noticed that a lot of people did not know that you could do this with the utility plug-in and also a lot of people were confused about what I was actually doing I think there were a lot of people that thought that you could do something similar with like the isotope imager Plugin or like the waves stereo imager plugin but what I'm going to show you I haven't really seen very many people show that you could do this with the utility plugin so I don't know if this is just something that I kind of like thought up or maybe I saw it somewhere and then this kind of reminded me of it but this is a way that you can have a bit more control over manipulating the mid and side of your audio signal so let's go ah and just kind of jump right into it I have a couple pads loaded up that are stereo and stereo meaning that they have information that is different in the left and right Channel panel that makes them sound already a bit wide now I'm going to show you a process that you can start manipulating the mid and side of your audio signal the side is going to be the information that is different between the left and right channel so if you have a track an audio signal that is mono there will be no side information the track has to already have uh some stereo information in in the um signal has to actually have like some stereo signal in it for you to be able to even manipulate the sides so the mid is going to be everything that is similar or everything that is the same between the left and right channel that's just going to be like all the mono information so if I have uh if I just isolate all the sides and I'm listening to only the sides and I throw the track into mono all that information is going to disappear I'm not even going to be able to hear it this whole like widening thing uh this is really only for listening in stereo but we are always mostly listening in Stereo so this is why people um like when they're when they're using those stereo Imaging plugins you can use too much of it and then kind of mess up a lot of the phasing and then uh you think that everything sounds wide with your track but then you throw the whole uh your whole song into mono and then everything sounds like not as big so you have to kind of like be careful with uh doing this type of stuff like the stereo Imaging stuff uh because it does help your track uh when you're listening to stereo like kind of help things open up a bit but in mono it it's not really going to going to do too much so anyway just getting all that out of the way I hopefully I explained that mid inside stuff I uh hopefully that was kind of like a good enough explanation I'm sure I'll get people commenting that that didn't make any sense or I'm wrong but anyway I have a utility plugin loaded up and if you are confused about anything you can always click on this info bar and this opens up more details this this pad let's just go ahead and check out this pad I'm going to go ahead and loop [Music] this stereo sounding pad this utility plug-in we have this width knob now this with knob is going to be similar to using like the waves IM uh the isotope imager I think there's like a free plugin called I think it's called imager 2 and then there's also like a paid one let me just check that out let me load that up real quick this imager and if you increase this width then it gives you this heightened stereo field and then if you decrease it then it makes it more mono [Music] sounding like that you don't really need this imag or Plugin if you just want to do that because on the utility plugin that is with this wi knob is doing if I increase it above anything above 100% then you are increasing that side information that is already present in the stereo [Music] field and then the opposite is true when I take it all the way down to the left it is taking away that side [Music] information and now you only have that mid or that the mono [Music] signal now if I increase this I keep increasing it you're still still going to have the mid signal you're just raising up that side signal so you're still hearing the mid in the side but you're just kind of like increasing up the the sides and and you can see like as I hover over this width knob it explains it in the info panel now what I want to show you is this is something that is available in aeton live 10 11 and now 12 is that if you right click you have this mid in side mode if I lower this all the way to the left it says 100 M that is the same thing as having it on the width and lowering it all the way to zero because you're just going to play the mid content or like the mono content however if I go back to midside mode raise this up all the way to the side it is going to eliminate the mid content information so all you're going to be hearing is just the side and that is all the stuff that is only present in a stereo signal if I go ahead and just duplicate this utility plugin throw it in mono nothing is going to exist because that uh content you're hearing is only the stuff that is different between the left and right channel uh and that is going to be all that side content very small difference when you put it in this mid side mode but it is a difference that is going to help us out as I show you how to do this process what I am going to do is right click group it and click on this little chain show the chain list and I'm going to go ahead and put this as the mid and then I will lower this all the way to only have the mid [Music] content and now I'm going to duplicate this so I just did command D I'm going to command R side and raise this one up all the way to the right now we have the side now together you have the mid inside if I turn this on and off you don't hear any difference because I'm just separating out the mid and side but now if I turn this off you only hit mid and if I turn this on you only hear the side now I can essentially do the same thing as I was doing with that width knob like I can take down the sides now or I can I can go in here and increase the S let's go ahead and just decrease the level of this track so it's not super loud I can raise up the side I'm going to do it on in the utility plugin here you are increasing the level but you're increasing the level of the side information so you're getting a heightened stereo field now that is the same thing as just using that width knob and increasing it up Beyond 100% % but now I can manipulate these even further than just increasing the level of the mid and side which is all that you can really do in those like Imaging plugins what I can do now is I could go to an EQ like the eq8 and put that on the eq8 the eq8 has mid side mode but we don't need that because I already broke this out into mid and side and you can kind of EQ the mid inside I could throw this on like oh the mid and then EQ the mid but we're not going to do that because I I already broke out the mid and side so we're just going to leave this on this stereo mode and then I'm going to put this on the side and now I can EQ just the side filter it off like that and not only can I just like EQ this raise up the level I can also throw on some saturation maybe I want to add on a saturator maybe increase this drive add excitement to the sides [Music] increase the gain a bit and this is not only something you can do to make your track wider you can just make your track more mono or like the signal mono you could do this type of stuff very minimally on like your master or even like a a bus group of instruments this whole technique of splitting up the mid inside gives you so much more control to be able to manipulate both of these signals than just using the utility plugin on the width mode or using one of those Imaging plugins you can get from like isotope or or waves and maybe like the mid I want to I could um throw on saturation on the [Music] mid I could EQ it maybe I want to EQ it after the saturation [Music] and for some reason when it is on stereo mode it doesn't show it doesn't show you in the Spectrum analyzer what is happening but I mean you can hear what it is doing this is just in the uh in the in the side panel but yeah if you do like mids side you can and you put on the side you can see the sides but now if I do mid it wouldn't do anything so that's why I just have it on the stereo mode you could if you want you could have it on the stereo mode but if you did want to see what is doing you could go to the mid ins side and then just make sure it's on the side that is just like too confusing so I don't know if I'd worry about that and I'm just going to put a booster on let's say I put a booster on 1K and then the mid I take it out around 1K [Music] in this way I'm just kind of I'm just playing with the signal like with this pad by itself you're going to just hear it just going to is just going to sound a bit different give the but like when you have it in a track you might be able to give the uh feeling that it is wider because width is all about perception in your track if everything is wide then nothing is wide if you have everything in your track that is like wide sounding then nothing is going to sound wide but if you have things that are mono sounding and then you have these pads that uh kind of have the uh width from like all the side information kind of like enveloping them then you can create the sense of width um so yeah you just have to kind of like play around with the this stuff if you are manipulating the mid in the side eqing you can saturate it I don't know any other effect you can try depending on on what you're trying to go for I don't know if I'd get too crazy let's see what else could I do I don't know I could even throw on like an erosion [Music] plugin ultimately what I would maybe do for this pad like let say it were in a track i' maybe just throw on some saturation and maybe a bit of EQ that's all that you would need but doing this in this way just gives you like so much more control let's check out like maybe another pad how about this one let's see what we got in [Music] here and what you can do with this effect rack is I'm going to take off everything all the changes I made once you split this up into the mid inside then you can save this audio effect rack and then you can always just like go back to it and put it on any of your tracks uh let me just go ahe and duplicate this on this other track for [Music] now and like let's say I just want this one to be a bit more mono sounding so I'm going to take down the sides [Music] and maybe I'll do like a bit of overdrive in the [Music] mid like maybe I'm just trying to dirty that up I'm going to throw on like some hip-hop drums on that anyway I just thought this was a cool thing that you can do with this utility plugin was splitting this to Mid inside and then putting it into an audio effect rack and then splaying up the channels in the mid Channel or the side Channel and then you can have a lot more control over manipulating the width of your audio signal if you enjoyed this video please go ahead and give it a like and also please subscribe to my channel if you are not yet subscribed and if you like to check out any of my senior preset packs head on over to store. sanders.com

Channel: Sam Smyers

Views: 2,522

Keywords: serum presets, serum presets free, ableton live, ableton tutorial, ableton utility, ableton utility tutorial, ableton utility mid side

Id: lORu0zmSKzc

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024