Ableton Saturation Tutorial What is It For And When Should You Use It (Covers All Genres)

hi guys in this video i'm going to be showing you how why and where in my projects i use saturation i feel like saturation is a super misunderstood effect so in this video i want to show you exactly what it does and exactly where you should use it let's jump in [Music] so saturation saturation could be really misunderstood especially when you first start out when you a lot of people just throw saturation on the channel and they don't really know what it's doing or don't or they don't really know how to test if it's making something better or worse so what i want to do is give a thorough demonstration on what saturation actually does for the track today and why we would use it in what scenario we would use it because it can be your best friend it can also be your worst enemy so i've got a little basic 4 4 a kick an open heart and a clap there so what i'll do is i'll go to the kick what i'll use is voxengo span as well to kind of demonstrate so this is just a metering plugin so we can use this to see what's happening to the sound we have a kick here and to be honest this kick wouldn't really need much saturation however i will use it for demonstration purposes so a lot of people will just turn saturation on and start driving it up and to most people that will just sound like it's getting louder now what saturation actually does is it adds harmonics to the sound so what i mean by that is if we look at this span here if i put the saturation back to zero this is a visual representation of the frequencies and the harmonics within a sound if i start driving up the saturator yes it goes louder in volume but you can also see that the green bit gets more full there's more frequencies in there let me turn that back down and i can show you this physically so let's go and grab a limiter and drag it on directly after the saturator now what i'm going to do is pull down the ceiling of the limiter until i start seeing some gain reduction in this meter here here we go we can see that the limiter is now starting to activate it's starting to cut off the peaks of the kick now what i do anything that i affect before this limiter it's not allowed gonna going to allow it to go any louder than what it is now so let's change to the session view so what i'm looking at is the volume here and i'm going to gain match this now so if i turn on you can see that the volume of this kick is a minus 12.8 if i start driving this saturator you can see that the sound is changing however the volume is staying at minus 12.8 and that's because the limiter is working now let's have a look at the sound before i put any saturation on so we're looking at this grid now so as you can see we have this sort of shape we can see we've got a lot of punch in the low end and then not very many highs watch what happens to the green when i start driving up the saturator as you can see we start getting a lot of green here a lot of harmonics and this is all tiny little bits of sound and frequency that is being added to the kick so you can hear the kick is changing massively however the volume is not getting louder so the perceived loudness of the kick is changing and it's getting louder however the kick isn't actually getting louder now where would we use this in a real life situation let's draw a little bass line and what we will use for this is the sine wave so i have an operator here let me draw in a simple pattern lower it down in volume a little [Music] okay and i'm going to loop over that so to enjoy the video i just wanted to jump on and say if you're serious about making music and you want to take your production to the next level and check out the link to the kimber community in the description i've literally taken people from absolute amateur all the way through to now regularly releasing on labels so the content within the community has proven to be an absolute success we have a weekly zoom call to keep everyone accountable where i go through your projects and give some feedback and just show you what i would do to improve it i really enjoy watching people achieve their dreams there's nothing more rewarding so i've kept it super affordable to be a member of the community it literally cost you the same as one cheap takeaway a month so you'd be mad not to you'll get instant access to over 30 hours of content if it sounds like something you'd be interested in check the link in the description and if you have any questions be sure to just message me on instagram you can send me an email or you can live chat me on the website too thanks let's get back to the video now now that bass line is simply just sine wave if we were to listen to that on any device that can't reproduce them lower notes of the baseline for example your laptop speakers or your phone you will not be able to hear that bass line at all we can kind of just feel that bass line rather than hear it if we go even lower on the notes so we can feel that bass line coming through however we can't really hear it it's just in the background we want to bring that out to the front and the way i would do that is by using saturation so let's do the same again let's get a saturator let's also then hard limit using the limiter and let's pull span out so we can see we can see what's happening to the sound i'll now change to a session view and we're looking at this operator channel here so the volume of the channel at the moment is minus 21.1 i'm going to bring down the limiter until i start seeing activate there we go i can start seeing some game reduction here now if i drive the saturator let's turn the saturator off and look at the meter in here look what happens to all these harmonics in the sound if i turn the saturation off you can see they all drop off so that's what a saturator is doing it's adding harmonics to your sound it's not just hiring not the volume if we look at the volume now on this baseline it's at -22 let me just bring this ceiling down by one so it's at minus 22.5 as soon as i turn the saturator on it stays at -22.5 but ask yourself what sounds louder does this sound louder or this it's the second one because we've brought some harmonic we've added some harmonics to the sound so it makes it feel like it's louder but it's not actually changing the volume at all so saturation can change the perceived loudness of a sound that is what we use saturation for we add harmonics to change the perceived loudness of a sound and make things feel louder without actually changing the volume what we don't want to do is just put a saturator on because if i turn this limiter off that is what is stopping it from going louder if we lower it down a little bit if we look at the sound for if we look at the volume before the saturation it's at minus 21.1 if i turn it on it goes to minus 12.5 so it will add volume to the sound if you don't catch it with a limiter so it's just the only reason i'm using a limiter here is just so i can demonstrate without changing the volume we can change the perceived volume and sometimes i will use a limiter after a saturator to stop it from going any louder in the mix i hope that's been helpful if it has drop me a like and a comment let me know what videos you'd like to see it can be anything thanks for watching you

Channel: Kimba's Academy

Views: 18,248

Keywords: Ableton saturation, ableton saturation tutorial, saturation ableton live, saturation, tutorial, freeze groups ableton, ableton live 10 tutorial, group freeze ableton, how to finish music, how to make minimal house, minimal house tutorial ableton, minimal house ableton, minimal house ableton tutorial, how to make house music ableton live 10, how to master house music ableton, how to make deep tech music

Id: rt_wQmR6CoA

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020