Ableton Tutorial: Powerful Stock Max For Live Devices You Should Be Using

[Music] hey guys link here with another tutorial max for live dude there's heaps of awesome max for live devices that you already have that come stock with ableton and nobody's using them most people don't even know that these devices even exist so in this video i'm going to show you all of my favorite stock max for live devices what you can do with them and why you should be using them all right let's go so let's get a couple out of the way right away here the probability pack by sonic faction i've already done a video about this stuff but it's really good it actually comes with ableton if you have ableton live 10 suite you already have this stuff the other one to get out of the way right away here is the granulator 2. this is an absolute beast it's a great granular synth personally i prefer the grain scanner by amazing noises i feel like the user interface is just a little bit more friendly but this one's free it comes with ableton so you can't really complain about that i think the grain scanner is a bit more expensive than free it's more expensive than free let's get into some real life examples here i've got a midi clip with a bit of a bass line happening we'll just make a quick patch here we'll get a saw wave and then i want to put a filter on there with a little bit of an envelope happening so we'll turn that up and we'll turn the position of the filter down and i just want to turn the release up too [Music] cool let's throw this up a little bit higher so let's say now that i've got my baseline with that cool filter on it let's say i want to maybe distort it a little bit let's throw a saturated on there and then maybe we also want to use a corpus to add some weirdness to it that sounds cool and everything but now we've lost our filter it's it's kind of really hidden now it sounds like you know the original filter that we were going for here is being lost since we're saturating and copper seeing the sound after the fact so what we really need is like a filter over here to be doing the envelope but how do we do that you ask we use an autumn max for live device so in packs you go to core library devices midi effects max midi effects envelope and drag that on the front so what this does is every time it detects a midi note it will trigger this envelope which you can then map to anything you want on this channel so let's map it to the frequency of our auto filter here and we'll just adjust it a little bit so that it sounds very nice something like i said we'll turn the velocity sensitivity up as well and then this zero percent and 100 we can change the range so where the filter's maximum position and and our lowest position can be and now we can turn this filter off as well so if we don't even want to use a filter we can use an eq as well and have even more interesting things happening so now we have the stereo field filtering in an opposite direction to the mono field using these envelopes this is really cool stuff guys the best thing about this envelope device as well is that you can map it to multiple things with different ranges you can even reverse the ranges which is really cool but also there's this handy time multiplier here so it makes it really easy to change the overall time of the envelope like check this out and guess what you can actually automate that so we can have it automating across this clip this is a really powerful device i'm telling you guys okay let's talk about expression control you can find this in the same place that the envelope is in so you have five lanes and within each five lanes you can choose a different sort of midi information to listen to and then you can map that to anything you like as per usual so i thought maybe what we could do is create some kind of chroming effect with a delay and use key tracking like this so we'll map the key tracking to the time here and then we'll just change the minimum and maximums so the higher the note we press the more of a delay we have and then the lower note the shorter the delay which is pretty cool and then you can change a rise and a fall time as well with this expression control [Music] there's definitely a lot of things you can do with this this is just one example every note that plays it creates a random velocity for it and then this expression control is going to take that random velocity and apply it to our frequency shifter for some extra weirdness [Music] let's talk about convolution reverb this is an amazing max for live device you can find it in the max for live essentials pack let's drag one in so this is like a regular reverb except the big difference is that it uses impulse responses versus i don't know spectral blurring or something actually basic reverbs that we're used to like the ableton stock reverb for example are referred to as algorithmic reverbs they basically use a series of delays with varying decays and filters to kind of create a sound that resembles a reverb and how good this sounds will depend on the quality and attention to detail that the algorithm actually has built in but convolution reverb does a much better job at simulating a real reverb sound convolution actually involves some fancy masks that kind of mold the incoming sound into the same shape as the impulse response you can kind of think of convolution and vocoding as a similar idea they're both taking one signal and using it to modulate another except convolution gives you a more natural sound basically convolution reverb is awesome so what is an impulse response if you go into a room and then record yourself clapping your hands or something that kind of reverberation that you hear if you record that with a microphone and then plonk that wave file directly into here then it's going to use that impulse response to sort of shape the way the reverb actually sounds and there's like you know all these proper ways of how to correctly measure a room's impulse response using sweeps and blah blah blah but what's really fun is just recording uh anything with my microphone here and then throwing it in so let's just try like [Music] just like a regular reverb we can adjust the decay and the size so this early control and this length control decide where in the impulse response you want to focus on so by turning this early knob up i'm getting more of the beginning of the file there the trigger chick and then the r if i want to just focus on that i can turn this down [Music] so as you can tell this thing is pretty cool there's also a buttload of presets that come with this uh your real places let's try uh the stairwell and if you go into the impulse response you can actually hear how some of these impulse responses were actually created it definitely sounds like someone's placed a speaker in a room it's played a short burst of noise and then there's also a microphone there to record the slap back the reverb of the actual room convolution reverb is sick while we're in the maxwell live essentials pack here we can also check out the pitch drop this thing is super cool it works really good on like a whole bus of sounds i'm just going to use a song here to show as an example so just by clicking this button here and we can also automate that of course it gives it a kind of record stopping sound huge sound design potential for sure color limiter i bet you didn't know that there was another limiter in ableton this one's really cool it kind of gives you that saturation and color of like an old school modular limiter yeah it's kind of like a saturated and a limiter put together pretty nice i gotta admit i didn't know this existed until i went digging through all the maxwell live devices that come with ableton this one's really cool it's in the creative extensions pack okay when it comes to auto tune there's plenty of sophisticated plugins out there that you can buy but if you're just looking for something super getter and quick in the max 7 pitch and time machines pack there's something called auto tuner let me show you what i got here get your party on just get your party on so let's throw the auto tuner on there again this is a max for live device and it's free you already have this now we can just turn off whichever notes we don't want to play get your party on just get your party on everybody come on just get your party on just get your party on pretty quick pretty nasty but it does the job this little tiny button here is the latency compensation so if you turn that off just get your party on it'll be out of sync with the original vocal i don't know if you want that or not but you could use it as like a weird auto-tuned dimension expander i suppose in the same pack pitch and time machines there's also mono vocoder now actually let's go into here because there's actually a poly vocoder and i tested both of these the poly vocoder is a little glitchy i don't i'm not really sure what's going on there but the mono vocoder works pretty good there's one catch to it though in order to get midi into this mono vocoder you've got to turn this midi on and then you have to grab a midi sender and then throw that on any midi channel for example our little bass line we've got going on up here then we can click send to midi channel 1 and we'll also send the midi through to our operator cool so that still works so back over here on the monovocoder just get your party on all right it's a little bit low so what we can do is group this we'll grab another chain and we'll mute this one so this is sending the midi straight through then this is muted but it's sending it to our second channel what we'll do is just grab a midi effect pitch and we'll go up an octave so that should play our notes an octave higher yes your party on just get your party on everybody come on just i love how simple and quick this plugin is it's not relying on another channel as a carrier it's got a built-in sort of oscillator and you don't need to use midi you can just click a note and it'll just play that one get your party on just get your party on the cool thing about this is you can group it get your party on just get your party on the polyvocoder just doesn't quite work as well as you'd expect it does some weird fading in and out and i can't handle over a certain number of notes i'm not really sure what the problem is with it there's no documentation but just experimenting with it myself it's super unreliable but the monovocoder does a great job at monovocoding definitely check it out let's take a break from looking at really cool plugins and look at a really stupid one this one's called squirrel parade i don't even know what it's supposed to do besides just make a mess get your party on just get your party on it just makes a mess i don't know i don't know why there's a squirrel there or what any of these buttons do you show anyway that's all i really have to say about school parade it's kind of stupid but i love it i don't know why it's just it's so dumb there's no it doesn't make any sense but i love it this m4l plugger for live pack is actually pretty cool there's a couple of gems in there it is mostly just weird stuff but one thing i did find was this waistband plug in this is really cool actually so what i have now is the operator plane again [Music] what waistband is is essentially a three band overdrive for the left and the right signal it's really cool i like how you can distort the left and the right channels independently you can also change the splits and that really enhances the stereo kind of effect [Music] pretty cool i actually love this plugin i didn't know about it before making this video so i'm going to start using it for sure [Music] the phone filter it's pretty cool it's part of the plug go pack hello this is link speaking yeah how are you going uh this is jono just calling from australia wondering if you've seen any rules around your place um i'm afraid not i'm i'm in canada there's no ruse around this place sorry so there you go it's pretty convincing it definitely sounds like having a conversation on the phone spectral blur is a really interesting one as well let's check this out [Music] [Music] it's kind of like halfway between like a noise generator and a reverb i guess pretty interesting stuff it's in the creative extensions pack so from what i understand the frequency 1 and frequency 2 is sort of like a band pass for where you want to spectrally blur things and then this residual knob will turn up the volume of the original signal where it's not being blurred for example and then this halo knob i guess just makes it more blurry i'm not really sure maybe it's like a release timing i can definitely see myself using this for interesting filters interesting rises that sort of thing i really like this plugin this is cool okay this is a little confusing but there's actually two drum synths that come with ableton you've got the one in the core library this will be called the ds and you can drag a whole drum rack in with all the different sounds in there sounds like this [Music] but there's actually another drum kit that you can use down here in max for live essentials max instrument drum synth there's a few presets here and then the individual cells here pretty cool so just as an experiment to compare these two i've got the drum synth kick on this cell with a velocity in front to always play maximum velocity and the same thing over here with a ds kick and you can see there's a lot more options with the drum synth here look at this [Music] i think the ds kick is actually sounding a lot better though but i do like how you've got a lot more control that means you can make more sounds out of this thing but over here on the ds kick it's more simplified you don't have as much control for sure but the ds kick sounds better right out of the gate and personally i love the ds drum kit it's dope [Music] like that's actually useful that almost sounds like an 808 almost i'm trying to make a cool bass line at the moment and i've got an expression control and i'm using the key track for the frequency of this auto filter and in fact i have the frequency knob mapped to the macro and then this key track is moving the macro because i wanted a little bit more control over the range of the knob and you can do that in here like that so that's going on this operator is just playing a saw wave and that's it no release time or anything and then we've got a waistband then after that i'm summing it back to mono because this kind of creates some stereo width which i was finding hard to balance especially for a bass line so i just made it mono again and then a color limiter which is maxed out essentially and here's what it sounds like right now and you'll notice when i pause playback this resonance is up so high on this auto filter and the distortion and limiter are maxed out so the resonance kind of carries the note a lot longer than i would like and one thought i had is to actually map the velocity to the gain knob here on this utility and we'll set the maximum to 50 percent because that will be the the middle of this knob and if i play notes at 100 velocity it'll always play at 0 db because of the expression control i think that's pretty [Music] [Applause] cool it doesn't even matter if i'm not playing 0db anyway because this color limiter is absolutely maxed out it sounds pretty cool though [Music] [Applause] so now i'd like to do something with the color knob maybe what we'll do let's go back into the core library devices audio effects max audio effects now these are three more effects that i haven't even spoken about yet and they all do a very a similar thing i would say so we've got the envelope follower that will just follow the envelope that's happening [Music] so you can see it listens to whatever's happening and then there is a envelope being created but you can then assign to things there's also the lfo which just creates an lfo you can change the rate of it you can change the shape of it etc but my favorite is the shaper which takes the good things about the lfo and the envelope follower and puts it into one you can change the shape you can change the rate and you can map it to anything so let's map it to the color on this color limiter [Music] [Applause] but this is great for just drawing your own shapes really look at this [Music] cool so that's shaper lfo and envelope follower so there you go heaps of max for live devices that come with ableton stock and if you want more there's even more for sale all over the internet on the ableton website you can download a lot of them for free and to go even further than that if some nerd on the internet hasn't already made what you're looking for you can learn max msp and make anything you want in max for live like this [Music] cool so hopefully i managed to show you a couple of macs for live devices that you might not have already been aware of i think they're all great max for live devices that you should be using and the creative potential with these things is through the roof man so have a play with them thanks for watching peace [Music] you

Channel: Slynk

Views: 54,063

Keywords: Ableton Live, Tutorial, Sound Design, Music Production, EDM, Max For Live, Max MSP

Id: A8Z8DPLFfhU

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020