Expanding Ableton Operator

hey friends so this is the final video in the operator series and now we're going to expand operator we're gonna take operator in all kinds of awesome places by using Ableton native devices to create sounds that are more unique to you this video is going to cover how Ableton Live in and of itself is a modular synthesizer basically all the things that you see in Ableton all the devices instrument racks audio effect racks all of this stuff is basically modular connectivity for different aspects of the sound that you're trying to create so what I'm gonna show you now is the first method that I want to show you is is building an effect chain okay what this is right here you might be wondering well that looks that looks a little weird or strange but this is this is actually an effect chain so this is the sound before it and here's the sound after it [Music] that's awesome so so as you can see we've gone from a sound that potentially you've kind of heard before this to something that is just wild and wide and moving and evolving [Music] what this is this is an effect rack okay all of these little guys in here these are collapsed effects okay so I dragged an auto filter in I dragged a multiband dynamics in I dragged in let's see what else did I do a vinyl distortion with which I absolutely love a vocoder absolutely love it a utility to get the gain back where I wanted there's a reverb in there interesting we've got an EQ and we've got a glue compressor and the saturator okay so let's go ahead and I'm just gonna switch these off and we're gonna go over kind of the methodology for building an effect rack to go after operator to expand its sound palate and take it in extreme and fun ways okay so this is the effect rec right what I can do is I can just ungroup this and now just all the effects are just kind of living after they're all turned off and they're living after operator if I click on a bar this is a nice shortcut if I click on the bar of the first one and scroll all the way to the end hold shift click on the last one they select all of them are selected now and so then what I can do is I can right-click and I can hit group and it will create an if track with all of those effects in it right and I can collapse it by hitting this this is the show/hide devices tab I can collapse it right but the way I actually had it running was these are the macro controls that you can map and we'll get into that in a little bit but what I did is I just double-click the title bar and it shrinks each one of these see that so it's kind of like an out of sight out of mind kind of thing alright so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna turn these on one by one we're gonna talk about why I did them alright so the first thing [Music] so the first thing I did is I had an Auto filter on right this is pretty self-explanatory [Music] first of all I felt like the the top end that that operator was making wasn't controlled enough I also have a little bit of envelopes so this is what it does is it just moves just a little bit of yo-yo just a little bit of moving in that filter and I have that envelope turned on there so that's that first thing the second thing I did multiband dynamics and you know we're gonna dive pretty pretty deeply into this because this is a huge it changes a lot of your sound because what it's doing is it's it's compressing but it also can can do compression in two different directions upward and downward and doing that can really help you shape your music and especially after you've done that kind of messing around with these the split points but I'm not gonna break this down right now but I'm just gonna kind of show you what I did essentially I needed to compress some of the low-end as you can see the low-end is just huge so with with this off it sounds like a lot of like kind of like fuddy muddy low-end there I'm gonna turn this on [Music] just listen to the difference [Music] so we'll get more into that here in a bit I'm gonna shrink that down now this is one of my favorites vinyl distortion is just an incredible effect okay so check this out we've taken basically a completely mono signal and now we've just made it super wide [Music] just done with this little mono to stereo switch you can you can really add some some width to what you're working on just by adding that okay that's what that was now the vocoder this is huge we're gonna dive deep into this guy this is what it sounds like without it and here's with it now it gets quieter so I added a utility so let's actually do it this way this is before and this is after do you see where I was able to emphasize some of those top frequencies and there's a little kind of sound that's in there too that's really fun I was able to use vocoder to do that okay so here's the reverb without it [Music] just adds a little bit of sense of depth then we've got an EQ 8 and listen to the difference before this and after this so get this EQ kind of addresses that now we got whenever those treble areas get peak out this kind of grabs those and and keeps them from getting too loud right so this is kind of another tone shaping and yes it does make it a little bit quieter so you can always add some gain here but what I did is I put a glue compressor at the end of it alright so here's without the glue compressor here's with it and what the glue compressor is doing is it's just kind of like evening out the sound notice I have it on limiter mode okay this is kind of some of the process I want to talk about this is an extreme setting why would I put this in a track well that's okay a lot of these settings need to be extreme in order to get we're trying to take Ableton and flex it as hard as we can and move it and just try to get we're exploring sound you know in sound design you don't need to worry about if you just forget what you've learned okay what matters now is experimenting and taking Ableton to its limits and trying to find that new sound whatever that new sound is so in this case I have this glue compressor really just ducking the sound when it gets loud but watch that little look at the gain reduction we're going between 0 and 10 0 and 10 how how incredibly far that is it's just it's just nuts right so this is helping us level out this bass on because really when when we're making bass we can't afford to have the the signal moving from zero we can have full 10 decibels of dynamic range we don't want that so what the glue compressors do isn't it's it's also fusing all of these wacky sounds that we've made with all these effects into something usable right okay and then finally talking speaking of gluing quote unquote or putting the the sounds together we also have the saturator which is kind of helping us just homogenized this sound into an even more cohesive together kind of kind of thing right so check this out before it [Music] in fact I feel like we could go a little bit harder if I'm gonna turn the output down the drive up a little bit now listen to that what's awesome is that when the signal underneath of the of the drive is playing there's there's not that much saturation and once it passes that line you get a little bit more teeth so now we have a lot more movement going on so I'm you know this is an extreme distortion setting right but the cool thing about it is that the sound is kind of moving in and out of that distortion phase [Music] [Applause] [Music] now obviously when I play this bass sound lower because I was making this for low bass it's a little bit more controlled and it's not as extreme so like especially in it's just so nice okay so alright so I know I didn't like really break too much down but that's kind of the point what I wanted to show you is the incredible difference you can make just by using an effect chain and and some of these techniques what we're gonna do at the end of this lesson is make a voice from operator from scratch and then build an effect chain around it but that's at the end okay because what I want to get to is a lot of these other methods okay and so let's go ahead and move on to the second one so you know a complaint that I hear with operator is but doesn't have unison detune like serum man like you know I can't add all these extra large wide detuned voices well Ableton is designed so that you can do literally anything that you can think of but there are certain ways to do that and and these these controls have more accuracy and more options okay so in this case I have let's just listen to this single operator so this is you know as wide of a patches I can make a kind of a hyper sauce so each one of these oscillators is running a saw waveform and they're slightly detuned and you get [Music] right sounds pretty good okay but it's not huge sounding like and and if I was making this in serum or ominous fear or anything I would turn on the Unison detune right but instead what I've done is I've actually just copied this operator into these other slots okay and I've made this sound it now sounds like this so what I want to do is I want to show you how to do this from scratch okay this is taking operator and we're what we're doing is we're doing at quote unquote unison detune by just making a voice and operator and and ending it okay so let's just go ahead and do this from scratch so we've got oscillator one is going to be I'm gonna kind of fly through this alright so oscillator one is a Saudi right and we got just a little bit of release a little bit of attack okay so what I want to do is I'm going to turn this down and I need to compensate with volume because each one of these oscillators is gonna be the same alright I'm clicking on the second one right click copy from oscillator a copy from oscillator a and copy from oscillator a right so now I have a bunch of saw waveforms that are all stepping on each other's toes so the next thing I need to do is unfazed each one of them right we're trying to mock a big analog synthesizer right so now you can hear the phase is moving right because I've unreached rigored each one of the phases okay and now the next thing I want to do is I want to just detune some of them so I'm going to turn the course down on this oscillator and go all the way up and this one is just going to be a little bit less and now we get a bigger and just to get as much as we can out of this I'm gonna turn the spread up and if I didn't explain this before what spread does is it creates two different sets of this operator of these operator voices and D Tunes one versus the other so you get this is without it this is with it right so now I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna right-click on the top bar now this this is this is where the methodology comes in right click on the top bar get a group okay when you group something all you see is these brackets kind of form on the outside what we need to do is we need to look at the show/hide chain list okay so what this is is this is showing you all the different chains a chain could be considered so let's let's just say I have an auto filter and who knows whatever else that is a that is a chain of effects okay so there's an instrument and then some effects right what I can do is I can go back in here and I can say alright create chain okay and now this is a whole nother chain of let's say we have just some random effects in here there's a whole nother chain of instruments and effects all right so I don't want that what I actually want to do is I want to I'm gonna cut this out I'm gonna get rid of this Auto filter too because I just don't need that it's just the operator I'm looking at now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at this operator and I'm gonna right click on it and hit duplicate so now I'm a second copy of that first operator right I'm gonna do it again okay so now I'm gonna look at each one of these operators right and I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna change some settings like what I've done now is I've made three operator voices that I can just stack on each other and I'm gonna have to turn the sounds and this is gonna be loud but we hear how phasee that is what I actually need to do is I need to go into each one of these and I need to change the tunings a little bit so I'm gonna make them a little more extreme in the second one so this one's going to go up to 2075 now we've got in fact I'm even the the original gonna do that too there we go now we're starting to get some whiter sound so here's without it here's with it actually could turn this up a little bit so without it with it so it's starting to get whiter now this third copy I'm going to make this even crazy I'm gonna really just go go for it in terms of detuning because I really want that detuned sound right let's go ahead and make this yeah that's good that way with it wooh no that's huge huge sounding operator you know and I could just keep doing this I could keep duplicating this and then with each one I could progressively get farther away from the fundamental now we've got like access virus level right now we've got a lot of that top end kind of gargle e sound so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and put an auto filter at the end of the K and what I'm gonna do with this Auto filter as I'm actually going to use the envelope section of it so if I turn the envelope up it's gonna when it hears signal it's going to react to that envelope right here you go warrant if I turn the attack down it's instant but what I want to do is maybe open the release just a little bit so I can get and what you're noticing is that it's sustaining the whole time because the all the envelope on here can do is react to the incoming signal so we're gonna I'm going to show you another trick when you're building these instrument racks let's say I want to have a different way that this envelope reacts to this so what I can do is I can actually create a new chain I'm gonna drop an operator into here okay this is just another operator and I'm gonna make this first section I'm just gonna make it I'm gonna solo it out so we can listen to it just kind of just this this sound but I'm gonna make it a little bit more resonant so or sorry a little bit brighter okay so that's this sound now why would I make this sound well what I want to do is I want to open the sidechain of this filter this little button right here and I'm gonna sidechain this from the exact same seat of this is to instrument rack to instrument rack this is that this is the track then I'm gonna sit chain this and here's the thing when you have effects after instrument racks you have all these sidechain options look at all of this every single one of those operators okay so this final operator here if I just click on this it doesn't matter which one I click because there's no effects like messing with it if I just click on pre effects this this this end now watch coming into this filter what it looks like you can't Punk okay so what I can now do is I can hit this little chain activator so these speakers this is how you turn voices on and off you could think of these as like synthesizer voices and I can turn them on and off so when I turn this off the cool thing is that it's still triggering the autofilter' see now we can hear that release I'm going to turn up the the rezident so we can really tell in that cool so if I turn the release up I get [Music] so now we've got a really huge kind of like if you're going for that analog you know vintage analog like poly synth kind of sound this is you've got the hyper saw kind of thing going it's just it sounds huge and the way that I did this is I'm just triggering the sidechain here on this Auto filter from a track that we can't even hear right so that's using instrument rack to add a bunch of voices of operator okay so operator is not limited to four oscillators I mean how many office letters we got going out now we've got 16 oscillators actually we've got if we wanted to really to be accurate we've actually got you know 20 oscillators running right now and we could just keep going this doesn't take that much CPU and as a side note Ableton's native devices are optimized to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of CPU so the more you can learn how to use these devices the better off you're gonna be in the future okay all right so let's go ahead and move on to the next track this I'm actually gonna save this voice I love this voice I'm just so stoked about the sound it may check it out it's like a weird like old like vintage piano kind of synth voice now you might be wondering what's going on you can see operators just freaking out what what what is happening here here's the rad thing if you have Ableton Suite you also get LFO an LFO is an incredible way to expand operator what I've got going on here is I've got you know LFO is is affecting all kinds of parameters we've got you know even the LFO amount in Ableton is being affected by an LFO LFO and LFO LFO inception is going on right we've got filter and resonant frequency you know all of these changes that are happening over time let's go ahead and look at the LFO as I play okay so isn't that amazing all right so I've got all these LFOs let's go ahead and build a voice from scratch using LFO okay so I'm just gonna grab an operator I'm gonna make a just some quick edits here okay turn down the volume to compensate all right so I've got a little voice here maybe oh yeah I wanted to get I just wanted to get a little bit more high-end in there okay okay so now I've got this voice and here's this LFO so the next thing I want to do is I want to start mapping the LFO so this is the same thing that you would do in your MIDI mapping okay we hit the MIDI map thing when I hit this map button see this flashing this is now flashing that means it's ready to be mapped to a control so if I just let's map it to the course frequency of oscillator or not the course but the level of us of oscillator 2 okay so what's happening now is that this thing is turned all the way up to a hundred okay this is going from the lowest possible setting what it's gonna do what LFO is going to do is it's going to take the control completely over okay so if the depth knob for example if depth is all the way up then you get we want to turn depth down check it out you might think of that as maybe a more useful way of using this but let's say I don't want it to get as high as it's getting okay but I want it to have that much range what I can do is then offset it so watch what happens to this graphic when I offset this do you see it kind of moved down now we've got some of the lower frequencies and then obviously the other way this is a huge thing in modular synthesis this is how to offset and attenuate a control okay just as a side note so what I want to do is I'm gonna turn the depth to about 55% okay and here's the rad thing so you're like alright well great so I'll just get another LFO you actually don't have to do that if you like this curve and this is a useful curve you can actually apply this to multiple mappings at once check this out boom oh my god one two three four five six seven eight different mapping locations for each LFO imagine the power so I'm gonna map this now to the tone control remember this is kind of like our FM index so check this out now because these controllers are moving the same way you might be asking okay well what is this stuff well this is actually a way that you can tell the LFO what to do what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to increase the minimum and decrease the maximum so I've got now I've got check this out they're they're they're they're going opposite directions as each other right so now we've got check that out how rad is that now we've got the moving cool kind of sound right that's kind of fun so now we've now you can see you can go ahead and you know just map this all over the place right so let's just grab another elephone we're gonna we're gonna look at some of the other things that LFO does so here's the second LFO I already really like this sound in fact I'm gonna kinda I'm gonna get just a little bit more top-end out of this by increasing some of these I'm actually gonna slow this LFO down so that's obviously the rate control [Music] so it's kind of just evolving and moving slowly so another thing that you can do with with LFO is there are all these different shapes these are all the shapes are so let's choose random what this is gonna do is it's gonna make a stepped random kind of situation going on right so what I'm gonna do with this is I'm gonna map this to something else and let's let's just go ahead and listen to it so this is the volume of oscillators C okay and we've got the depth all the way up right so what I want to do is I want to do a really complex kind of LFO with this I want this to kind of move around in a wild way so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna increase the rate check this out now it's just well a lot check it out now if we had a beat going and we synced this LFO it could be really fun to have like a really you know kind of like a rhythmic thing going on but that's not what we're doing doesn't matter what the speed of this is at this point okay I just want this now the next thing I want to show you is I want to show you smoothing so what smoothing will do is this it will so these are really extreme changes if I turn this up this is gonna kind of it's called slewing this is going to slough it's going to take these signals and it's gonna it's going to kind of blend them all together right now if I just turn the rate back down [Music] and I turn the depths down a little bit so it's not so wildly moving I'm gonna get this nice [Music] [Music] do you see what I'm saying so I mean like this is part of this this should be part of sound design it is 2019 it's time to start embracing the incredible amount of control that you can have over sounds by doing these kinds of like actions this is what's known as adding movement we're adding movement to the the sound that we're creating right so you know another thing that we can do is we can take this very same kind of you could almost think of this as like a drunk LFO and map it to multiple places so maybe what we'll do is we'll map this now to the the filter frequency right so now we've got and in this case I'm probably going to want to do an inverse relationship again so this is zero and that's a hundred so these inverse relationships are how you can get a lot of action and now we've lost some of the top ends so I want to do is I'm going to turn on the shaper of course and give it a little Drive compensate with volume [Music] actually sees the heart [Music] okay so as you can see I could just keep going through and just doing more and more of this right and I can just go ahead and tweak some of these sounds maybe I don't want this to go as low I don't want this to go as high and let's just go ahead because I'm getting a sound that's kind of like freaking out let's let's talk a little bit about using some of these other devices to kind of control sounds okay so as we're doing operator sound design I really like to use there's a couple tools I really like to use one of them I like to use is glue compressor a lot okay so something you can do with glue compressors you can turn on this soft clip section right here and basically anything that goes up to zero will just get totally chopped off okay so if it ever gets that hot so let's go ahead and just just to show you I'm going to turn down the volume of the track so it's real but I'm going to boost this now notice that that because I have soft clip and and this would normally be clipping it would be going above zero this is I should also say that at this point this wherever I set this is quote-unquote zero okay even though this is zero here when I'm moving this down this is a macro control over the final output of this track right so as I turn this down anywhere I set this is essentially the tracks zero point right if I turn up the the makeup gain to this level it'll just clip out eventually right so so this is a really good thing to put at the end of a signal chain when you're when you're doing a lot of sound design right it just it just it just helps you out so the next thing I can do is I can pull the threshold down [Music] and now I can I can kind of control this sound a little bit the dynamics of moving it around right [Music] okay so you know the final thing that I would probably add to a voice like this is a multiband dynamics so I want to show you this real quick a lot of people they instantly bust out this preset known as OTT they don't know what it does they just think it makes their music sound better but let's just go ahead and learn a little bit about multi multi band dynamics if I'm just playing I'm just watching what multiband dynamics does is it splits the signal into three bands and then it you can compress or expand each one of those bands separately right what you can do is this is the compression coming at this is this is addressing the peaks of the audio right so if I pass this little guy right here this area if I pass this then I can do something to the audio this is essentially setting a threshold right okay so let's go to this section this is the this is the above threshold and ratio so whenever we cross this line that's what a has to deal with right so there's a lot of mid-range in here and it's kind of annoying so I'm gonna I'm gonna increase the ratio to about you know four to one right so at four to one watch what happens now you can see what what's occurred is that this is the peak of the audio of the incoming signal and this is now where the incoming signal is hanging out this this area right here it's pushing it down and it's showing me live how much it's pushing it down right negative 17 so I'm gonna recompensate a little bit of makeup gain here but I'm not gonna add all of it back in so listen I'm gonna a be this now so without it we've got kind of too much of that mid-range now with this and now it still kind of sounds muddy to me so I'm going to do the same thing to the low-end right so I'm gonna increase the ratio yeah let's go up to four [Music] and we're taking 13 decimals out you can see it right there somes gonna add a little bit of that back in [Music] and now another thing that I can do is I can also I can I can also add some highs back in right so what I can do is is is I'm gonna compress this but I want the highs to have less dynamic so I want them to be more present so what I'll what I'll actually do is I'll increase the ratio and it looks like when it's really ripping we we are taking out ten decibels I'm gonna actually add ten decibels back in and check us up [Music] now we've got a more filterable sound right [Music] and another thing I can do is I can add an expander so on this side that's what this part deals with so when I click on B what I can do is I can now decrease the ratio and so whenever it's under here it's got you're going to raise the highs [Music] okay so now the highs are present almost all the time and that's essentially what this OTT plug-in section is doing it's also got some fancy settings on the attack and release and also you can deal with this remember an operator how you via taught you have a time knob you can also set the time here and what this is doing is its shortening or lengthening the attack and release times so if you increase this you could probably get maybe just a little bit more of a natural sound right if you if you increase this now the other red thing about multiband dynamics is that you have an amount control okay at zero essentially this should sound like what it sounds like without multiband dynamics even on right essentially there's no compression and then when you turn it up you get now listen to that we've really got this like now that we just the idea is that now that we've just kind of screwed everything up with these LFOs we've brought it back to a homogeneous center with multiband dynamics right [Music] and now this sound is it is it's primed for filtering okay we've got a lot of high-end content and now we can you know whatever it is that we're trying to do no matter what kind of filtering we're trying to do we've got enough harmonic content in there to really mess with it right okay so that's using more LFOs and using multiband dynamics there let's move on into this next section and this is what I feel like is kind of an unexplored area and I find it curious I mean we've really focused on very specific styles of synthesis in the digital world but we haven't really focused on wave shaping and I think wave shaping is really cool let's go ahead and listen to what this sounds like without the processing okay and we've got that's that's the operator voice that we're working with and let's go ahead and turn on the wave shaper and let's just listen to what this does okay [Music] whoa pretty rad right so what wave shaping can do wave shaping is awesome wave shaping is a really cool way to make new tones especially out of sounds that aren't very bright and don't have that many harmonics in them and I really think that this is a this is a really awesome frontier what I have going on here is just a LFO a multiband dynamics of course which you already saw in the last section and the saturator which which has this is where the wave shaper is found and it's the last algorithm in saturated right so that the end result you get is it's really it's a powerful sound okay so let's just go ahead and make lets let's do the wave shape from scratch hey and we're just using a sine wave form that's all that we've got just a sine right I'm gonna grab a saturate I'm gonna put into the sack and I'm gonna use the wave shaper okay so in order to see some of the controls I need to do proper wave shaping I have to unfold the device so I have to hit this guy right and the next thing I want to do is I want to make sure that I am I am saturating that I'm hitting this threshold right so I need to turn down volume and turn up Drive okay so now let's we're almost there I'm gonna turn it down a little bit more so now we're crossing line but notice hey there's no there's no there's no clipping what's going on well what we need to do is we need to actually start wave shaping we need to change the curve we need to add basically we need to add harmonics that's what we're doing here so when I open curve up how cool is that you get this like isn't that fun you get this really awesome way to dynamically add harmonics to this original signal okay and not only that you get these really cool other controls too you've got so you've also got a way to add depth it adds a sine waveform that's kind of lower and in this is this is how much of it is being added to the original sound so really what this is doing is it feels like it's adding like a little bit of fundamental back into this really wildly curved sound right so without it let's play it lower I really think that I like the sound of wave shaping with like bass sounds and lower sound so it's just so powerful it's got so much meat to it right so so the next control is its linear control and basically what it does is it works with these other controls to kind of make it so that the curve is is affecting more or less of the fundamental right so now we've got less lower okay and here's where the fun is I really like period so moving three it around [Applause] it determines the number of ripples in the in the depth control right so the depth control remember this is adding kind of a sine waveform and this is adding partials to it [Applause] isn't that wild okay so you might be like well that's kind of a wacky sound man like yeah this is what we want what we want is we want to really flex a waveform to its extremes and another way to get a lot of extremes is is here on soft clipping so remember there was soft clipping in glue compressor well there's also a soft clip circuit it's not really a circuit but there's a soft clip algorithm in saturator and when I turn this on it adds an instance of the analogue clip to this output stage okay so we're gonna get more harmonics check it out right that's with it for without so maybe that's what you're going for maybe it's not but what this is gonna do is it's gonna give us some more harmonics [Applause] okay so what I want to do is I now want to I want to effect period over time and maybe one of the first things that you might think of is is going for an LFO maybe that could be cool but let's also look at something else what we're gonna look at now is envelope so envelope is just like LFO you can map this free envelope to any parameter that you've got going on and it listens to the incoming note on the track to determine its stages right so let's go ahead and map this to the period right so now well it's gonna wacky so so now we have a tach sustain decay and release sound we don't need to worry about release because this is just the note ends pretty quick but now we've got minimum and maximum settings just like LFO and we can kind of dial this back a little bit and maybe get more of a usable wow that's crazy so as you can see how awesome is this and it has its own amount just like LFO has depth amount is right here so without it [Applause] so yeah a lot of unexplored territory with wave shaping really get into this this this could be this could do a lot for you so I actually want to listen to what this sounds like without soft clip on and as you can hear kind of on that top end there's a little bit of what sounds like a kind of like a digital a liasing situation going on so I'm going to add an auto filter and pull some of that out okay and you might be like whoa we've taken a lot of that top end out [Music] [Applause] but remember the idea is that when you're building an effects chain you know if I've lost top end I have all these creative options for adding top end back in right so let's go ahead and bust out another effect that I want to show you that's really useful this is erosion so what erosion can do is it can add noise back in some top-end or I mean really any any area like higher than the subs it can add some noise back into a perhaps the sound that you feel like has lost too much trouble because of processing right so that's before let's go ahead and add some of this sine ah there it is now we've added a new character back in how cool is that and you have three different algorithms to choose from this wide noise is the one I use the most okay so now let's listen to this I'm going to group these two together holding shift right clicking hidden group and let's listen to the difference so how cool is that I mean it really just you know that's that's getting closer to a complete it sound obviously this isn't a completed sound but you know I mean I this lesson could go on for a hundred years if we wanted it to right but I'm just kind of showing you some of the the ideas present in sound design right okay so let's move on to something really exciting what I've got going on here is this is just an operator trip okay so that's just that's just a really nice cool sounding operator patch by itself right just operator okay so what I've done here is I've actually added a noise layer inside of an instrument rack so what I did is I I made an operator I grouped it which turns it into an instrument rack and then I added a in an instance of simpler and what is in simpler well there's this repeating noise sound check it out when I unsolo this listen to them together [Music] this is what the noise sounds like itself so what this is actually is a noise from a sample pack that I and my friend released recently known as the forest collection and this is just a texture of us probably waving a stick around if you're interested in getting a really nice big fat sample pack of really fun like nature sounds you can go ahead and check out this link up here and that's where you can get that if you want that so having samples and adding them to sound design is a great way to get really original sounds going because you can have samples interact with operator in really interesting ways and in this case I'm using it as just a layer so this is a noise layer this is a noise layer over top of operator right so when I play them together and kind of in the base region I get right so now they might sound a little disjointed so what I did is I added a saturator to get them to kind of fuse together right it's a lot of distortion right what it's doing is kind of it's put it it's pushing those sounds together and I also added a notch filter in that kind of mid-range frequency that's that's kind of overpowering so check this out [Music] how cool is that so when you know someone says I want to make a dirty base well this is a great way to do that you know I I'm physically heading a dirty sound okay and I'm blending it back in with saturator and filtering it down a little bit to make it a sound that I want so this is without the texture and here's with adding that that little looping noise [Music] that we're just gonna go ahead and do it from scratch so that you can can make this happen by yourself so I'm gonna grab an operator okay add a little bit of harmonics to this and remember when we're making like a bass or a lead you know we're going to turn on the glide time and I'm gonna make this just one voice okay so there's here's our there's our bass sound right right click on the top group it show/hide chain list now this is where we can start to add other sounds okay so I'm gonna go ahead and create a chain so this is a new chain I can add anything in here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab a simpler okay and I'm gonna go to that forest collection that that we made this thing is so fun I'm gonna find a texture that I want to use okay so here's a bunch of rustling sticks let's just go ahead and listen to this by itself that's what that sound is okay oops I'm on the wrong page sorry that's what that sound is what I need to do is I need to make it so that if I says stay in a note this needs to loop so what I'll do is I'll turn on loop and another thing that I need to do is I need to fade the edges just a little bit and change the start just a little bit so now I have this smooth loop right maybe I'll make it just a little longer why not okay so now I've got that sound now I got operator with this voice and what I've noticed is that when I'm playing in the range that I actually want to play in the texture is kind of a little bit too low so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to MIDI effects and I'm gonna grab a pitch plug-in and here's the rad thing about instrument rack so you can just add anything you want this is essentially a new track in some ways right so I'm gonna add this to texture and it's gonna place itself before texture now what I can do is I can say okay we're gonna add twelve steps to this okay so now this is going to when I play lower texture is still gonna play in the range that I want it right if you owe me how nice is that okay so now these sounds they sound good and the cool thing is that the the texture is kind of moving around with with the low end of this of this operator but it's not enough it's not being fused together so what I did last time is I use the saturator instead of using a saturated let's just try something else let's use a vinyl distortion because I want this to be like a big and wide sound right so I'm gonna move this till I find something I like now that's a huge sound right there so that's really loud and it's clipping out so let's go ahead and add a glue compressor remember and then turn on the the soft saturator and then the now we can turn this down a little bit and we're gonna clamp down this with a threshold and use the make up game and here's the fun thing something that I haven't shown yet is that if you get a big bunch of effects kind of messing with an operator patch and then you go back into operator later and start messing with it that's when you really start to get some just a very small change in operator can make huge changes later so [Music] so as you can see this is a great way to make basses that have more action on in the top-end [Music] all right so that's adding a noise sound to operator and having basically a sampler and operator work together okay so now let's take a look at vocoding a vocoder is just such an awesome tool it's I really think it's it might be one of my favorite things to use in Ableton it really helps it just gives you a lot of control over stuff so let's go ahead and check out what we got going on here I have this incredibly awesome voice [Music] there's just so much going on here okay so this is a really fun voice this is operator this is what the operator patch sounds like really kind of dirty patch we're using sign for the four bit sign kind of thing listen to the difference without sign for bit it just really adds a lot of really crappy digital top-end that's really fun to work with and then there's the second track check this out what sounds pretty weird right this is a really fun layer I'm using vocoder and I'm using operator to vocoder sample what does the sample sound like what sounds like this it's just a vocal coach saying mer and it kind of plays back and forth and what I'm using is then vocoder took have operator kind of mess with that and then I turned both these both of these on and so essentially I've got kind of like a you can think of it as like a dry wet control where I can blend I can mix these two sounds together so and I've made yet another sound that's ripe for effect processing right now we can go in with you know filters and all kinds of other stuff but instead of doing all that let's just go ahead and build something like this from scratch okay so I'm gonna get out an operator so in this case I want to build a voice that's got a lot of top-end harmonics in it so I'm gonna use a well I'll use a 4-bit sine I'll use a little bit of noise now I'll do this song and then I'll use this one as noise [Music] I'm gonna choose now okay so that's a lot of noise that's actually something that we want when we're working with a vocoder a lot of just a lot of top-end harmonics right okay so the next thing I'm gonna do is obviously right-click on the on the bar choose group okay now in the next section I want to find I want to put a sample in here and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to just grab that sample ma right if I drag and drop that in here something that that's really rad is you instantly get a simpler right so let's just listen so now what I don't want to have happen is I want this actually to play at the same pitch all the time this sample I'd like the vocal to be exactly the same every time I play it because I don't want the note to change I want operator to change the note when we're using vocoder so what I can do is I can actually right click in here on the top bar and this is this is a little Ableton secret simpler to sampler if I click on this what will happen is it will load the sample now up in sampler instead of simpler and sampler is like a beefed up simpler it's got a lot more options so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna you know now if I play this with the scale all the way up when I play up the keyboard it's gonna go up in pitch but if I make this zero now I get doesn't matter where I play it's the same sound I also have to turn off the filter too because that might have some key mapping on it so now we've get so let's just kind of put this in a in a in a section where it's looping the way we want it to so now in sustain mode I'm going to turn it on loop so now it's going to go in fact so now we've got this kind of looping and the next thing we need to do is we need to put the vocoder we need to put the vocoder on that part of the chain so the mud part right and the next thing we need to do is we need to choose what the carrier is the carrier is the the thing that's determining the notes okay so exil and now we get this drop down menu right and now we can choose vocoding is the track that this is in and I can choose the operator okay so now so that might be the kind of vocoding sound you're used to hearing right but there's some controls here that are really fun so you know one thing you can do is you can reduce the bands and kind of treat this like it was a that it's kind of like an EQ right [Music] I scoop the mids a little bit to get you know more of a high-tech sound another thing you can do is you can increase or decrease the range of this so this is the top and the bottom there we go now we've got some some fuzzy things and now as I move format around this is kind of a this is kind of a fun controlled it to tonal sculpt and then what the the final control my show you is depth so what depth will do is it will impart less or more of the mah sound overtop of the operator sound so I'm actually going to turn this up just a little bit so I kind of like where I've got this set so the final step now that I've got this kind of noise layer is to turn the operator back on turn this month in all the way down and just reintroduce it oh and just listen to that ridiculous phasing we have going on [Applause] when I hear phasing like that I you know I instantly just start thinking about using a notch filter you can get a lot of right you kind of like airplane kind of jet kind of sound I'm gonna fly through this so I skipped ahead and I added an auto filter and some multiband and now again now that I've got all these effects kind of going on here any changes that I make earlier in the chain will be a you know a big deal so I can go ahead and maybe filter this down a little bit maybe add some shaper see so much fun okay so let's move on to something else entirely this is now using operator to trigger a delay okay this is a totally different way to use this what what now is happening is I've got just a really quick sharp kind of sound okay I'm going to turn these off so we can really hear what's going on so now what this first operator is doing is just all it's making is a click sound what I did is I dragged a simple delay in here and you can I mean just the new delay like anything you can use all you need to do is just turn the time down way low so we've got it doesn't matter what I do this little click sound all this is just a little click sound when I play it into this delay if I turn the feed back up and the time way down I get this this is a type of synthesis known as car plus strong it's just taking a delay and the delay is happening so fast that it's making a note it's at audio rate right so the next thing is I added an auto filter you know another thing I could do is to make this stereos I could unlink these channels and make these really close so maybe this is you know thirty three thirty 2.1 or something you know yet it's pretty sweet sound might be a little far from the other one maybe thirty two point eighty or something right so the next thing I was like I was like okay let's let's let's put an OTT in there to really just kind of crank this up now I really like that but what I want to show you is this next thing that I did what I did is I didn't want the sound I wanted to play it rhythmically I wanted it to stop when I lifted my finger up off the key so how can i how could i how could I make something like that happen let's say you're in the middle of a sound design session and the sounds it's lasting kind of too long well this gate here can be sidechained okay so what I did is I opened the gate up and I turned on sidechain and I I started another operator okay let's just go and listen this up I gotta turn it down super it's just a fixed frequency square wave right all right well what's the point of that Anthony well let me show you so what I did is I this is now off okay I just turned the speaker off I don't want to listen to it what I want to do is I want to trigger the gate with it okay and that way I can have the gate closed down on whatever it's it's it's listening to by using the sidechain so I open the sidechain choose this not using operator as the fundamental yes I choose this operator right in this area so not the first operator the second one right operator two right that's the one that's just making that big square wave sound right and as you can see now when I play this now when I lift my hand up I can see that there's more decay to the sound but it stops all I have to do is set this threshold if I if I set it to low it's gonna last you long right so I just got to set it right up there at the top and you know I don't know what note this is because I'm just using this delay time to make this note but you know all you have to do is listen to your song and kind of tune it to your song if you go down in a millisecond size you actually go up and pitch and the end vice-versa the other way but now you know I could I can play that rhythmically and that could be a new element so of course I put a saturator at the end so I get okay so the final thing I want to show you is something that's really fun okay this is using operator so this is what the operators patch sounds like so it sounds pretty cool right but what I've done is I've actually dropped a corpus corpuses are really cool it's basically the resonant section of the device known as collision and you can choose different materials and resonant materials to run sounds through so the processing when it's all said and done sounds like this and what's right about this is you can make like you can just make the coolest like natural kind of sounds I mean a lot of people just end up using corpus for just you know drum sounds but the the rad thing about is that you can change the pitch that see these incoming notes you can actually change the pitch by sidechaining so we're gonna build this from scratch alright and I'm just gonna choose a triangle waveform there's not that much going on with it it's just kind of you know it is what it is and what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to audio effects we're gonna grab a corpus okay now right now when I play this that's not really doing much for us the the corpus is staying on the same note so how do you do this well so how you do this is you need to open corpus up okay and then you've got this you've got this Oh sidechain oh wow you can you can feed it MIDI so I can just choose 8 operator and now I can now it's going to listen to the incoming MIDI data and then you can tell it what to do with it so what I can do is I can turn on frequency and now the same sound we got okay so now you can hear what's going on what I want to show you though is that what operator needs to do is operator needs to make kind of like a brighter sound in order to make this work because this material I mean really any of these materials you can get some cool like stereo effects going on and maybe this would sound cool to distort you know and then filter of course you know but what you really want to do when you're working with these resonant materials is you kind of want to what's known as strike them okay so what I need to do is I need to go back into operator right and I need to make this kind of more of a starting a corporate stuff so we can just listen operator okay so that's our like you know Casio keyboard kind of sound coming out of operator right but when I turn on Corpus now that I've got this bright sound check it out so at this point yet again the world is your hamster choose all these different resonant frequencies and kind of mess around with them you know what I'd like to do actually is make this just stop quickly what I'm gonna say in this case is that there are really what I'm gonna say in this case is that there are a lot of sounds that you might have heard on records and be like how on earth to somebody make that I think that using corpus and messing around with some of these materials you'll find that a lot of the sounds you didn't know how to make before are maybe instead of in a standard synthesis way they're made in this way you with with what's known as a physical modeling style of synthesis okay so this is a really powerful combination using operator to trigger corpus right okay so you know before I was saying we were gonna design a voice we might as well go ahead and use this as the voice that we're gonna design okay I'm gonna create a operator driven instrument rack completely out of just starting out with this voice okay and I'm gonna show you kind of what I mean when I'm doing some of the things that I do okay so when I listen to this sound [Music] it kind of seals to me sounds a little basic right so what I want to do is I'm going to group this okay and now what that means is that this first any of these well let's go ahead and do it this way I'm gonna hold shifts select both of these tracks right click and group them okay what does that do it creates a chain okay what I've noticed about this I like this voice but I kind of just like the top end of it I like that the brighter parts so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab an auto filter and drag it to the end of this chain okay turn on high-pass mode and listen right so now I've got this kind of high-pass sound alright so now in this device chain I'm gonna add another operator because I want to make the sub with something else now I've got a a sub section that I need to open some release a little bit and I'm gonna do my classic bass thing I'm going to turn the the glide time down I'm gonna make this one voice right now the next thing I wanna do is I'm going to add some harmonics maybe so now I've got these two different sounds going on I've got this kind of like sub and I've got this other sound another thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and remember I'm gonna I'm gonna add a noise layer to this okay I want to just a little bit of a noise layer so I I made a chain I'm gonna go to my handy dandy forest collection I'm gonna drop that into this chain and because I'm dropping it into a chain it's gonna make a simpler right so I'm just gonna loop a section of this I'm gonna find a section that I want so Melissa no just this okay I'm gonna loop that fade it a little bit okay and the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to up the pitch a little bit maybe we're gonna up to pitch a lot a bit yeah so we can get some kind of like a all right so that's our weirds layer on top so now I've got this where are you going with this Anthony well check this out so now that I've got all three of these sounds these are these sounds sound cool by themselves like you know bass is cool that rad corpus kind of layer and then this noise what we need to do is now we need to fuse them together and there are so many different ways to do this you know what one thing that that I think is a pretty great thing to do is a little bit of saturator okay so we're gonna compensate so that's one way to do it let's go ahead and look anything else let's go ahead and grab let's grab a amp so amp is fun because it's just another form of saturation okay but it's kind of like dedicated to like different you know it's styles of guitar amps okay this it doesn't matter you like well why would you use a guitar amp on a synthesizer y'all this is this is the the the center of trying to think outside of the box when it comes to creating sounds so whoa that's crazy so now we've got this really ratchety kind of well that is Wiley okay so let's do a little bit of mixing [Music] okay maybe a little bit of dry way [Music] okay so now I've got this really crazy just whack he sounded so this is a great time too now what filter okay so now I can add a low-pass filter [Music] and maybe I kind of just wanted to go whoop maybe that's kind of what I want to do so how would I do that well I would grab an envelope so now I've grabbed it in an envelope I'm going to go ahead and map that to the filter frequency but I need to make this in an inverse relationship so I'm going to soften some of these attacks [Music] right okay so now I've got this filtered sound I'm just gonna add a quick and dirty OTT setting this is a great way to kind of fuse some of these frequencies down [Music] and you know just grabbing OTT and dropping it down there is not the the move you kind of want to mess with it a little bit right you need to look at kind of what's going on you know what I mean what do you want more of so in this case kind of what I want a little bit more of is this top end right so I'm going to actually change these settings a little bit so minus 50 I'm going to add a little bit more here right now that sounds kind of cool I mess around with time a little bit maybe a little more mid-range okay and at this point now that I've added this I'm actually going to go ahead and put a at the very end of the chain I might put a glue compressor in there to you know just ensure I'm going to turn on the soft clipping just to ensure that we don't hit the top [Music] and now I'm going to add another Auto filter on the top of us to get some of the very high-end out of there in fact let's go ahead and use an EQ 8 you know now I'm just gonna do a little bit of sculpting [Music] put this glue compressor at the end okay so now what I can do is I can go ahead and just kind of collapse all of this all this stuff down you know I don't really need to look at this I don't really need to look at all these because now once I've got these set the ideas that you know these things are now out of sight out of mind right as I add effects to this I can I can just get kind of things it's out of out of my way and now I've got this and what I've got now is basically this this sound that's just totally mine this sound does not exist anywhere else in the world it's totally me when we talk about you know sound design and stuff like that I think a lot of people what they want to see is they want to see how to make exactly a specific sound that they heard and I really don't think that that is the approach that you should be taking as an artist I mean in in in general the moment that you start trying to emulate a sound that you've already heard you're already 14 steps behind the people that are making new sounds and in forging new places just just totally forget the idea of trying to copy another sound and instead your time is going to be much better spent understanding how to do some of these different methods that I'm showing you and any other messes that methods that you see and then really developing your own methods by using effects to just they're they're they're their total extremes and then just taking them and changing them and moving them around and and developing you know new sounds because when you're when you're creating music you know you it would sound design music you know like electronic sound design music like the the idea is not to sound like what you've already heard the idea is to sound like something that nobody's heard and then you can you can you can hone that craft and over time like that craft is going to get better and better and better and you're going to develop a sound around yourself you know a set what is the sound design trick that you that you're bringing to the table that's that's getting people stoked you know so yeah that is taking operator out of its original you know that's taking operator out of what it is by itself and adding effect chains you know grouping them together to make more of them using LFOs wave shaping all these different tools can really help you take operator to the next level and again using operator with all the different tools that are available to you there is no sound that you can't create there is no radness that you you know you can make all kinds of stuff and and what I want to point out to you is that only in that first affected we even end up using reverb this whole time taking this you could take these sounds a step even further by you know you just using a little bit of reverb on top of these sounds you're gonna make incredible sounds if you liked this episode and this is the kind of thing you want to check out all the time feel free to subscribe and ring that little bell so much love everybody this was a really fun thing to show you I can't wait til the next one much love everybody see ya bite

Channel: Seed to Stage

Views: 39,054

Keywords: ableton operator, sound design, ableton live, ableton 10, operator tutorial, ableton racks, ableton instrument rack, operator sound design, ableton 9, ableton tutorial

Id: nwfPFLRt4Nw

Length: 71min 49sec (4309 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/geodebug]

Was watching this earlier. His channel is legit. If you want to know and love operator you owe it to yourself to watch his series.

[u/Kaic47]

you're awesome for the time markers homie, thank you! Marking this for when I get home :)

[u/prophis]

Great post!

[u/frogman-cl]

great work!

[u/DangKilla]

How do I get Operator? I have Ableton 10 Standard.