How to Get a Good Guitar Tone with Ableton Live

[Music] hey friends so this video is absolutely by popular request everybody wanted me to make a video on how to get a good guitar sound using only ableton devices which is a fun little challenge and absolutely achievable i don't really know where to start other than just to say that all of the racks that you're going to see here are available to download and i'll put the link down at the bottom in case you want to have a bunch of different guitar racks to use right off the bat um and then further on the lesson we're going to show you how to roll your own essentially how to make your own guitar effects using kind of the method that i have laid out here all right so let's first of all listen to the clean tone okay the clean tone meaning i'm plugging directly into my interface in the instrument input so when you're doing this you want to make sure that when you plug in your guitar that you're plugging into an instrument input okay there's usually a little switch on your interfaces that will switch between a line level input and an instrument level input all this does is change the impedance so that there's more level when you're plugging in an instrument so i'm using my super awesome and amazingly trusty and incredible relish jane guitar this thing is unbelievable um but i'm basically just using it with uh some humbuckers and it has a coil tap so i can get kind of uh single coil sounds okay so we can kind of have all the different stuff so anyway enough talking this is what my clean tone sounds like this is the first tone this is the rock tone okay [Applause] right and let's just maybe break down like what's going on here so this is a rack okay uh when you combine a bunch of effects together and you save it you can call this a rack okay and a rack is just a collection in this case a collection of effects so yeah let's break this tone down a little bit there's a pedal which is kind of a newer effect of ableton there's an amp and then there's an effect rack with two different cabinet effects on here okay and then finally we go into a compressor so essentially when you load up a brand new amp with ableton nine times out of ten if you don't know what you're talking about and you don't know what you're doing you're gonna be like why on earth would anybody use this okay so let's go ahead and do that we would load up a new audio track uh i'm gonna turn it on auto so i can hear my guitar [Music] and when i load up an amp we get this sound sorry about that this is so bad so yeah if i maybe turn up the gain turn on the volume so what you need to understand is that all these guitar effects rely on each other to achieve a good guitar tone a good guitar tone is is almost like a boot camp level training in gain staging okay so amp in terms of trying to get a you know what you would consider a classically good guitar tone is not going to work in and of itself it has a companion effect called cabinet okay so when i grab cabinet and drag it down here we instantly get a different sound right now without cabinet we get [Music] okay so so i hope you can kind of start to understand what i'm what i'm going for here so what is cabinet a cabinet is essentially a filter and it's a filter designed to try to sound like these different speaker cabinets okay and then there's also these microphone configurations you can do near on axis meaning right on the speaker and then near off axis meaning that this the microphone is going to be slightly off the center but still pointed at the center and then far away from the amp okay so this is what will create a natural sound and then so when we go back to look at this rock tone okay you can see that i not only have one cabinet effect but i have two okay there's a single single 12 speaker with a dynamic microphone and then a 212 speaker cabinet with a condenser microphone on it okay now if you listen to what this sounds like with just one that's the kind of sound you get when you add this other microphone and you get see how much more natural that sounds let's try to listen to with just a big chord [Applause] so when you think of designing a really ideal guitar sound what you have to think of is that there is a whole series of things that are occurring before the amp and after the amp that create a natural tone when you have a guitarist with an entire rig usually that rig consists of a pedal board an amp and a cabinet that's being fed into the amp and a microphone that's picking up the cabinet that is the sum of its parts and then at the end here i have this just nice little i chose the just to use the lead solo glue compressor setting it's a pretty good setting on honestly on its own and it you know just kind of levels out the the sound now you might be looking at the samp and saying well anthony you're on clean tone right why would you want the clean amp if you're looking for a rock tone which is what this this setting is well that's where pedal comes into play without pedal we get and then what we're using this pedal as is the pedal has three different settings we have an overdrive a distortion and a fuzz okay and on the overdrive mode it kind of gives you that classic tube screamer overdrive and then in order to get more of a tube screamer kind of sound i turned up the mid-range and this mid frequency you can bump it at different levels right so this is like a low mid kind of fuddier sound and then this is like a kind of vanilla setting and this is your kind of brighter sound right so i have it right in the middle there now what this pedal is doing is it's distorting pre the amp okay the distortion okay the distortion tone is made by the pedal and the amp is just simply providing kind of like a container for the tone right and then the effect rack we are using this to kind of filter that bright so here's what it sounds like without oh yeah the the again remember amp and cabinet always have to go together okay so now with those concepts kind of like like kind of rooted in let's go ahead and look at treble booster so this is another way to think of making a guitar chain is that this is sort of like gain staging boot camp okay let's go ahead and listen without pedal all right so [Music] [Applause] so what this amp kind of sounds like to me is like a fender basement right you know it's got that kind of like thuddy like low end that's kind of growly and [Music] and it kind of sucks right well back in the day in the first the early tube amps in order to get rock and roll tones out of these early amps with uh you know tube distortions that you couldn't crank the the volume up enough to get it to break up right so what they invented was this thing called a treble booster right which is essentially a pedal that boosts your gain okay so there's a lot of gain coming out of it and it boosts kind of the top end of your guitar so you get kind of like more distortion tones right so now we got and here's without it [Music] right so this is more of like a treble booster sound now if i turn the amp off i'm sorry about this already but see how much more gain it has without and this without it [Music] so here's the concept this is where this is just a little bit of technical knowledge now this is a lot of gain i'm turning this up almost 9 db coming into this amp but listen to the amp if i turn this output down the amp is almost the same level okay what's happening is we're clipping the input stage of this amp as i turn this output up the amp doesn't necessarily get louder okay it just has more gain all right this is gain staging this is exactly this is a great way to show what gain staging can do okay so with a setting like this you kind of get like a vintage tone right so this is kind of like the jimmy page setting right [Music] right so that's kind of that sound right and and and this is a really great way using boost boost is a great amp to do this now other amps like clean aren't going to have the same result all right so as you can see down here i don't know if i explained this yet but this is these are all the different amp styles these are different amps if you will and each one of them has a kind of a different uh way of handling the input gain so if i switch to clean you can hear that if i turn the the output up we're going to get more gain as i turn it up right see how it gets louder but if i turn it on boost we just get more distortion okay so the boost is a great amp i really enjoy the boost one because you can you can use gain staging to get different amounts of breakup in the amp and man does it sound amazing i love it [Music] right okay so anyway let's move on to a clean tone so so let's talk a bit about a clean tone so when i'm when i say clean i put it in parentheses for a reason let's listen to this without this is with no processing this is just my raw guitar signal and now this is my clean amp so you might be saying anthony hey that's not clean man like that's actually kind of distorted and you're right and maybe let's unpack that a little bit so if i play lightly versus if i play heavily [Music] [Applause] you can hear that i have i have control over how much distortion is in the signal any hit record that's got a clean guitar amp isn't clean that's that's totally untrue what it is it's filtered through all kinds of stuff you probably have a pedal board you have gain staging going into an amp you might have some effects loop you have you know different microphones on different uh cabinets and stuff like that compressors and things like that to create a clean tone that's really i think the best clean tones do this kind of thing you have a if you play lightly you have hardly any distortion at all if you play heavily [Music] the player has control over the tone depending upon how they play okay and this is a great kind of amp to feed effects into a little bit of distortion can help a guitar stand out in the mix but you'll never know that it has distortion on it okay this is that's also why this is kind of a funny video because you know i can show you all these different you know uh presets all day but you know how it blends with the mix is going to be completely different if you heard a a guitar in a hit record soloed by itself you might think well that's kind of weird and why is the eq like that well that's because they dialed in the amp to try to fit the song okay so when you're thinking about mixing a guitar rarely rarely is a guitar ever going to sit in a mix just right without a little bit of saturation a little bit of gain a little bit of something so you know i hope you got a little bit out of this because a clean tone doesn't necessarily mean totally clean now let's talk about another way to blend a guitar now up until this point i haven't used any reverb but i'm going to go ahead and turn on my i made a studio guitar reverb uh preset here and i'm going to go ahead and turn that on i'll put this in the in the little pack for you later if you want to use this too but essentially this is so in context of trying to figure out how we can make a more realistic guitar sound reverb is going to play a big role okay you never hear a sound in dead silent space okay you always hear something some manner of the room okay so usually when you know another thing is if you pull up an amp by itself and play through it and you don't have any reverb on it it's not going to sound natural right so what this is basically simulating is a relatively large studio room that you might record a guitar in right so this is like a studio guitar room okay so [Music] right and without it [Music] so this is just gonna add a level of realism okay to your guitar tone all right so i'm just gonna leave that on for the rest of the video let's move on to big fuzz this is gonna be hilarious so tame impala for you so yeah uh this is a hilariously super over the top uh version of using the fuzz on the fuzz pedal okay and i'm going into the rock amp and i've got the mid-range turned all the way up this is going to give you that really like hovery kind of wolfy woolly kind of sound you know and that's what i think whenever i think of fuzz i think of woolly uh some people think of like broken amp kind of sound i think it's more descriptive to think of it as kind of like a big hairy woolly sound right and yeah it's ridiculous but that's why one of the most popular uh fuzz pedals is called the big muff pie so you get that kind of like fluffy woolly kind of sound right so uh in this in this case uh i've got the gain turned almost all the way up and the the output turned almost all the way down as you can see and i've got a little bit of mid-range in there and yeah the mid-range is turned up right here and you get this big huge way over the top right now you might also be hearing hey anthony i hear like something in stereo yeah i wanted to show you something else i'll go ahead and turn the pedal off for just a second so we get less of that noise but in this case you can hear that the amp is kind of in stereo i'll even turn off the the reverb just so we can hear this and you're right there's a little more treble on the right speaker and a little bit less on the left and that's because what i've done is i've also tried something else i've taken my uh two cabinets and i've actually panned them left and right so this is a great way to get some stereo imaging out of your guitar you could really go ham on this make them pretty wide and get a [Music] you know and then you know if these are effect racks so you could also just grab like an eq8 if you wanted more brightness on the left speaker you could just kind of you know pull this up a bit and listen to that we've got a really awesome wide sound and then with this fuzz i love fuzz fuzz is awesome so as if you can't tell i absolutely love fuzz it's so unique it's so distinct it has a totally awesome character and honestly this emulation isn't bad now i want to show you something else if you turn on fuzz and you right click on this top menu you can go to high quality okay now what this will do is i think it'll do some some sort of over sampling to try to get more resolution especially in the mid range out of the whatever effect you're using whether it be overdrive distortion or fuzz so now we get so some of you might hear the difference some of you might not no big deal okay so oh yeah do a little drop d action let's go to the the metal the metal setting and real quick uh update about my ableton online courses i am pretty much in the beta stage now of the composition course and i'm starting to flesh out the mixing course so we're getting really close people if you're into the idea of learning ableton from a to z with me i'm assembling these paid courses and they're going to be incredible again you can learn anything that you want to learn about ableton just off of youtube alone but if you enjoy my teaching style and you want to do this quickly and efficiently my lessons are going to be thorough optimized and organized to get you to the next level very quickly okay so if you're interested in learning more about that i've also included a link so you can sign up to be notified when those courses are ready all right let's get back to it [Music] so yeah if you're not a tool fan get out so in order to make a metal sound the most classic thing about a metal sound is high gain and scooped mids okay now you'll notice that well anthony you've got the bass more scoop than the mids so that's where understanding what these different amps do is so important this lead amp already has a scooped mid kind of sound if i were to switch this to rock right that doesn't really work for me right listen to lead the cool thing about the lead one is that it's got really tight lows so you can get um great paul muting kind of [Music] sounds you feel me and then you know you might say well why wouldn't you use heavy for heavy music well i don't know i kind of feel like i like the way that lead kind of bites a little bit more you know you'll notice that there are sort of some of these amps that i kind of skip over and you know i think that lead just does a better job it sounds like it has more mid-range resolution it sounds like it just is going to sit in a mix a lot easier right awesome okay okay so moving on let's look at this spanky compressor tone okay so now we [Music] got understanding a compressor as sort of like a pedal effect is absolutely different than using a compressor to smooth out the uh a guitar track right this this lead solo setting this is more for just kind of smoothing out the volumes but this compressor is set on some pretty extreme settings and if you get and if you get something to the order of like a ross compressor or something like that these are almost limiter circuits right that have a really slow attack and what that allows to to happen is you get a lot of spanky kind of sound so this right you hear that so listen without it so what the compressor does is it um it can't react fast enough to push the gain down when it hits the threshold and what that results in is a little bit of a spike in the audio right at the beginning which is basically attack it's adding kind of like a little clicky transient at the beginning of what you're playing so you get that let's try a different setting [Music] and you might also be looking at the pedal and being like dude you got you got the p why are you using a pedal this is a spanky clean tone right well what the pedal is providing me is a little bit of an extra tone pallet in terms of my gain staging if i just played with a clean amp listen now with the pedal do you see how the pedal is sort of and you know i'm subtracting a little bit of what's coming into the amp so the amp can treat my signal a little bit differently right i've got sort of basically what would be a kind of different style treble booster going into the clean amp okay just remember again it's so important to think about how one effect is affecting the next effect is affecting the next effect and so on and so forth the sum of its parts is how you get the tones right okay so moving on uh somebody had asked me hey how can i make a bass tone with a guitar in real time well now there are lots of effects available to you um in terms of plugins that can do this much better than uh kind of the stock ableton plugins can do but i found that you can actually use grain delay and if you set it on negative 12 okay and then you play around with spray and frequency and you also want to turn your time instead of sync you want to turn it to as low as it'll go so one millisecond that's about as fast as it's going to be all right and then if you if you mess around with spray and frequency i put them on this xy controller so we can just try different settings but you can get kind of an octave down effect right no it's not going to be good but what's cool about it is you can blend it with the original signal and get some really awesome uh sounds right so here's without it with it right kind of like a like a boss october right now what i found that i really did enjoy however is the uh really crappy badly executed octave up sound that grain delay can make and you get that perfect radiohead sound with it [Music] right it's like almost exactly right it's just so cool so these will also be included in that little kit okay so you really hopefully hopefully you're really going to enjoy this next part this is a pedal board that i've designed using ableton effects to make different standard pedals okay so let's go ahead and look at what's going on uh in the back end and in the back end we've got a clean amp okay and we've got just two cabinets and that classic lead solo preset on the glue compressor and it sounds like and remember just like a good clean tone if i play it real hard i can get a little bit of breakup right okay so let's look at some of these effects let's start with the pedal compressor so now we've got that classic right you got that kind of clickety clickety kind of sound now here's an interesting one this is a two-pole phaser okay kind of like your classic mxr phaser [Music] right now this this took a little bit of tweaking in order to get it to be within the range of a guitar this this color thing can really help so check it out when i have this up high listen see how it kind of goes over the top of the range of the guitar the guitar is a mid-range instrument so you actually need to pull the color down you can also get some cool tones when you use the space [Music] now when you use phaser right i think phaser is actually a really well-designed effect in ableton and it's really really awesome okay so i also have a tube screamer okay now this is just a classic you know maybe a setting that a tube screamer would sound like you've got that that low what is that probably like 800 hertz boost in the mid-range decent amount of gain a little bit of output left and you get now what is so important to understand about guitar is that on a pedal board the order of your effects really change everything okay a really awesome sound that you've probably heard a lot is a pedal phaser before a distortion i like to think of this is kind of like the 90s lead tone right [Music] now listen to what happens when i take the phaser and i put it after the tube screamer [Music] hear what i'm talking about i'll do it slower [Music] now see to me that doesn't sound as pleasing right i mean maybe it kind of sounds like you know like a wean effect i feel like they purposefully like put you know guitar effects and use crappy guitar effects to try to get that hilarious sound that they get but really you know like like to me a pedal a pedal phaser sounds really great before your distortions because you can kind of control those resonant peaks right the distortion is acting like a filter [Music] okay so and i also have a tremolo and the way that i did this is i use an auto pan right if i have it set on 180 it's not going to do much and the reason that it's not going to do much is because we're listening in mono okay so what we have to do is we have to phase the auto pan to be totally in phase with itself so that it will duck the volume here and there now we get this nice and now i have an amount knob so i can get a really big or a kind of like more subtle right now used in conjunction with a phaser on space mode you get a classic boards of canada feel me cool so then like let's go to the 80s we've got a classic pedal chorus kind of sound [Music] so that's kind of like you know your classic like ballad 80s all right then we've got an analog delay kind of classic we'll put that on with a tube screen and get kind of a the way i designed this effect was i used ableton's new echo effect which is just so great and the cool thing about is that you can you can filter out the lows and highs of the uh echo and you can get kind of like a more old school sound right [Music] so you know analog delay is great for those like david gilmour style like lead tones though [Applause] [Music] it's got that kind of like you know old school kind of really vintagey kind of sound yeah so i'm gonna turn that off and let's go look at the beginning of this um so again effect order is so important let's check out this envelope follower right now if i play this envelope follower with no other effect on we're gonna get kind of a spanky so yeah when i turn on this compressor though [Music] there's a little bit less of that you know that resonant peak isn't going to just kind of get super loud and obnoxious right now if i use it in conjunction with the distortion the same effect is achieved just in a different way right see what i mean and maybe together see how much more uh controllable that is okay so we'll turn that off and then i have an auto wall which is you know basically the same thing but what i did is i used the um i used a different filter mode to kind of get more of a different voicing for this and i put it on 12 instead of 24 which is more common with wall pedals so now we have [Music] let's listen to that clean [Music] now another cool thing you can do is you can turn off this um this amount for the lfo and you can kind of you can plug in a midi controller and kind of control your own wall if you want to feel me so yeah so now we're gonna roll our own guitar tone i'm gonna grab an amp i'm gonna grab a cabinet okay these are companion effects that go together as far as i'm concerned there's no reason unless you're going to use a pretty uh drastic eq8 i really think cabinet and amp just go together it's just how it works all right so let's choose we'll choose the blues i'm sure that sounds blues is kind of like a it's kind of like a great betweener for pretty much any tone right now the first thing i want to do is i want to kind of hone in on maybe the sound i want cabinet instantly comes with the condenser settings i'm going to set this on dynamic [Music] now right off the bat this is a bit bassy but instead of turning the bass down that much on the amp i'm actually going to grab a pedal okay so we're going to grab pedal and right off the bat we get more of a mid-range tone because we have it on the overdrive mode right i'm going to turn the treble up a bit and the output down a bit [Music] so now we've got kind of a great tone to start with [Music] but it's a bit honky right it sounds hunky so what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click here i'm going to go to group all right and now when i click on this middle thing to show the show or hide the chain list i can actually duplicate this boom now i've got two cabinets now remember if we're doubling the signal chain we're also going to what double the volume so i got to turn this down let's turn these down 7 db each and we should have relatively the same tone as we had before so now we get but now i can look at i can i'll just mute the first one let's go ahead and try to work on this second tone let's use a condenser microphone okay and let's maybe make it off axis [Music] actually sounds pretty good let's try far and maybe let's try a different speaker there we go that's what i was looking for i wanted to have kind of a more scoopy sound now what will happen is if i turn both of these on at the same time let's listen to the first one by itself there's more that honky kind of sound right so i'm going to turn this all the way down and i'm going to sneak it back in until i get kind of a balanced tone right so without it and with it we get more of like a this is this is kind of that woolly effect right we can try different combinations right it's actually kind of nice there but i think my favorite is the fart and remember add a little bit of room reverb [Music] and yeah once you feel like you've started to hone in on what a good tone is the way to really be sure if it's a good tone or not is to give it the yellow lead better test [Music] well i hope you enjoyed this video as much as i enjoyed putting it together again all these amp racks are available as well as the reverb and as well as the you know guitar pedal board all that is available in the link below if you like this kind of thing like comment subscribe much love everybody have a good one

Channel: Seed To Stage

Views: 295,182

Keywords: ableton amp, ableton cabinet, ableton pedal, how to get good guitar tone ableton live, how to use ableton amp, ableton live guitar, ableton live guitar effects, ableton live 10, recording guitar in ableton

Id: FcpW7Ftcn7k

Length: 32min 42sec (1962 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020