I attempt to explain all of Ableton's built-in Audio Effects // Music Production for Beginners

if music production is the art of sandwich-making your instruments and notes I'm sorry it's such a dumb analogy your instruments and notes are the bread and meat now while some people may be satisfied with just a turkey on rye for lunch more than likely some toppings can spice things up and really make that sandwich pop naturally as you have probably assumed audio effects are the toppings in this analogy hello there my inspirations my name is Inspira Spur and today i'm gonna cover all the built-in audio effects that come included in Ableton's library now since this video is geared towards beginners I'm gonna briefly mention five things that perhaps seem obvious but I feel as though should be clarified one you can add audio effects to any track in Ableton by clicking and dragging the effect from the library onto your track or by double-clicking the effect after you have selected a track too you can stack multiple audio effects on any given track and these audio effects process left to right so whatever effect you have located at the leftmost side of your track will take the input audio do whatever it's supposed to do then spit out some resulting audio as output that resulting output then gets fed into the next effect as input which works its magic on that audio spits it out etc rinse and repeat three Ableton nine has different versions that you can purchase and these different versions may have different audio effects for example Ableton intro or light has 21 effects Ableton Standard has 33 and sweet has 36 for the sake of covering every effect I'll be going over able to nine sweet just be aware of this if you don't quite have every effect as I do for Ableton has built-in audio effect presets that you can use to quickly get an effect without tinkering with the default state it can be nice to sometimes throw an audio effect preset on a track to see what it does and get a feel for if you like the result or not at this point you can then tweak the preset to your liking 5 finally these built-in plugins are not your only audio effect resources you can download external audio effect plugins to get an even wider variety of sounds in your mix sometimes you have to pay to download these third-party plugins and other times they can be free just take some time to do a search for audio effect plugins to see if there are any out there that can improve your workflow right now that I got that out of the way let's briefly cover what every audio effect does in Ableton for the sake of explaining what audio effects do I have created a MIDI tract with a chord progression it sounds like this and just for the sake of organization I'm gonna run through the audio effects alphabetically so to start amp amp is an audio effect to simply replicate the sound of a guitar amp you can choose between seven different amp models to work from and you can adjust certain attributes in the amp to get the sound that you like audio effect rack if your audio effects are tools then you can think of your audio effect rack as your toolbox it's more so just a way to drag-and-drop audio effects into it to kind of contain everything which you can then turn on or off which activates or deactivates all of your audio effects it's more or less just a way of organizing everything that you have on your track Auto filter as the name implies Auto filter is a great way to automate a filter on your track this can allow you to isolate certain frequencies on your track and change that over time so for example I can select either a high-pass filter or a low-pass filter a band I can remove certain frequencies and what I can then do is over time I can automate this frequency let's say for example I have my track let's automate my filter let's automate my high-pass to go from zero or at least I guess the lowest is 26 Hertz all the way up to 20,000 in addition you can also add an LFO to your filter to give a more unique sound auto pan auto pan allows you to bounce your sound from the left to the right side you can change how much this bounces by changing this amount and you can also change the rates and also the phase in addition to the shape and change a few other parameters essentially what this will allow you to do then is pan your sound from the left ear to your right ear back and forth [Music] beat repeat beat repeat allows you to add repetitions of your sound on your track you can designate the interval which determines over what time period you want the sound to be repeated and for how long in addition to things like an offset and also variation which adds an element of randomness to your sound [Music] [Music] cabinet similar to amp cabinet is meant to replicate the sounds of a guitar cabinet this is intended to create a more authentic sound and essentially what it does is emulate different positionings of sounds as if you were in a room and you can determine where you're sitting in that room to get that particular sound to generate a more like I said aunt ik feel to do this you can change the number of quote-unquote speakers so for example let's say one speaker at will be 12 inches and you can choose where the microphone is whether you're up close and personal dead in the middle to these speakers if you're off to the left or right or if you're far back away from the speakers this cabinet then emulates what that would sound like if you were sitting in that room in that particular position chorus chorus is a way to add different voices to your track this can be a way to thicken your sound and to simulate what sounds like if your track turned into a choir so a group of people replicating that sound but also with this you can change features such as the amount of modulation and the rate in addition to the dry/wet which determines the overall effect of the audio effect as well as feedback in addition you can change these delays which are essentially the voices that you are hearing compressor a compressors can be used to change the amount of gains on your track this reduces the peaks in your sound and changes the overall Headroom essentially the result of this can create something that sounds a lot louder and punchier to do this you can change these ratio attack and release knobs or move this knee around and bend it to your liking [Music] after creating a certain threshold and the amount of compression that you want on your track this adjusts your output your gain in addition a compressor can be used for side-chaining by clicking over here and selecting sidechaining and then choosing an input that you'd like for side chaining side chaining is a bit of a beast on its own and I've actually made a video covering that before so if you want to check it out click right here in the top right corner other than that let's move on to Corpus Corpus is another one of those audio effects that is meant to resemble authentic real sounds you could choose from seven basic sounds including beam marimba string them you can choose seven different sounds to try and replicate and from there you can adjust parameters and tweak it to your liking [Music] dynamic tube my impression of dynamic tube is that it adds saturation to your track as usual you can change these dry/wet knob which determines how much the effects affects your track you can also adjust these output and Drive knobs in addition to the other ones but these seem to be the main ones that add the saturation to your sound eq8 similar to side-chaining EQ mning is also a bit of a topic on its own however the short and sweet of it is eqe allows you to isolate remove or even amplify certain frequencies of your track you see here before you an orange bar laid out across frequencies ranging from zero all the way up to about twenty thousand you can move these nodes around by clicking and dragging them you can activate and deactivating them by clicking these orange squares below the number corresponding to that knob and you can change what type these little circles are by clicking this drop-down menu and selecting one of these options so for example clicking this option creates a low-pass filter I can then change the frequency of that knob by moving it or changing this frequency knob right here what this allows me to do is remove low frequencies similarly I could amplify frequencies by clicking and dragging upwards or again moving this frequency knob to the area I like and then moving this gain knob upwards and this cue allows you to widen or expand how much effect that particular circle has on the entire band you can then also change different modes between stereo left-right or mono and stereo EQ 3 is actually a lesser version of EQ 8 it essentially does the same thing just has a little less control the reason is called EQ 3 is because you have three knobs whereas if you noticed with EQ eight upwards of eight control points what you can then do here is set a low frequency boundary a threshold and a high frequency threshold this is the same as using an EQ eight but with only three knobs say for example if my low frequency is at eight thirty four that's the same as moving this knob to eight thirty four and then moving my third knob to let's say my high frequency boundaries I don't know 2800 right here essentially what this allows me to do then is my low frequencies I can adjust this gain which is the same as clicking here on this knob and adjusting my gain or let's say on my frequency I can adjust this gain to be plus two point eight three plus three essentially what this EQ 3 is doing is roughly this more or less again EQ three has a little less control than EQ eight but for the most part it works the same erosion erosion is a way of degrading your sounds by adding in certain noises to your track you can choose from three bass sounds one of them being signed which is just a sine wave you have wide noise and then you have noise to work with this you can pick a particular frequency in your sound and then change the amount that you want that frequency range to be affected let's say for example I want 3200 to be affected by a sine wave I can then change the amount and again the frequency and for noise and wide noise you can change the width which determines how much other frequency ranges this encompasses external audio effect external audio effect allows you to route your output into some form of hardware they have plugged into your computer this allows you to choose where you want to send your audio to and where you want to send your audio from so while there are plenty of audio effects software out there this allows you to implement certain hardware to give you the effect that you want filter delay filter delay allows you to add a small delay on your track on up to three parts of your track based on what frequency range you want to add that delay on so for example on the left side of my stereo I can make a delay that's I don't know at 2,000 Hertz frequency range and you can change the width of this range as well as the delay time a smaller number means a quicker delay and a larger number means a longer delay you can also change things such as the feedback which determines how long the delay goes for as well as the panning so you don't necessarily have to make this be on your left side in addition to the volume you can do this for your left side right side or in the middle of your stereo range flanger the flanger is a unique audio effect the best way to describe it is that it adds flange into your sound because that's just what it is it's it's own little thing it has a unique sound what it sort of sounds like is it modulates your frequencies and makes them higher pitched it almost has an alien II outerspace vibe to it but we can then do here is change the delay time for this flange as well as the amount of feedback as well as your high-pass filter and a bunch of other knobs these are on a lot of other effects these are just more ways to add different sounds frequency shifter this is another audio effect where the name is pretty self-explanatory frequency shifter allows you to change the frequency of your sound as usual you have an LFO tool over here you can tweak with but the main use of this frequency shifter is over here with this frequency knob as well as the fine the frequency essentially allows you to modulate the sound the frequency range fine is the same thing but it gives you a much finer control frequency knob you can usually only change about you know 20 Hertz at a time maybe 40 it looks like whereas the fine you can change even just to the hundredths of Hertz this is perfect for adding a detuned sound to your track which has its time and place gate a gate is a unique and interesting audio effect it allows you to only filter out sounds that pass a certain threshold that you designate let's say for example if I choose negative 12 decibels which is just a default this will only pass through sounds that surpass that amount so if I turn it off they'll hear my sound naturally has a reverb a kind of tail that follows it after the sound plays which naturally turns down the volume over time it just gets quieter and quieter this gate only filters out everything that's above negative 12 decibels and I can tweak this to my liking this can be a good way to remove background hums from vocals or something where maybe there's a small small sound in the background that you don't necessarily like adding a gate will allow you to filter that out and if you tweak it and use it properly hopefully remove it entirely glue compressor a glue compressor is an expansion of the compressor it was designed to model an actual audio effect from the 80s I believe but essentially the key feature of the compressor is meant to be added on to glue quote-unquote multiple tracks together so if you have a bunch of tracks stacked together and you group them together add this glue compressor to them the intention is to create one smooth sound rather than a series a stack of sounds so as the name implies it's meant to glue everything together to create a cohesive unit but similar to the compressor it can be used to alter the gain and Headroom of your track while it may not look like it these knobs are very similar to the compressor itself where you have a threshold you have your make up which is your gain your output you have a tack release and ratio it essentially works in the same way and you can also use it for sidechaining [Music] Grainne delay grain delay essentially chops up your audio your tract into tiny equivocal grains that are then randomly delayed what you can then do is change certain parameters of this audio effect such as delay time spray frequency pitch random pitch and feedback these can all be changed separately limiter this audio effect is along the lines of gate in terms of volume limitation as the name implies limiter will cap off your audio track meaning whatever this gain you have set it will never surpass that volume so if I have my game set at negative seven for example it'll take my track and whatever it receives as input it will essentially lower it by seven decibels and then spit that out as output whereas if I make this for example negative twenty a really small number it'll take what I have and lower about twenty-one decibels alternatively if you raise this higher it then raised this by four decibels so it can be used as a tool to either raise or lower the volume of what you have and it can be good for preventing Peaks or spikes in your track looper looper allows you to play instruments and functions similarly to a loop pedal which allows you to play the same audio over and over again this can be perfect for live jam sessions they say for example if I were to hit this record button and play some random notes on my keyboard and then stop and then press play clearly that didn't quite fit my song here but it recognized the BPM of what I played and then it plays it over and over and over and loops the segments that I made on top of what I have in Ableton multiband dynamics multiband dynamics allows you to alter the dynamic ranges of certain frequencies in your track similar to how the EQ 3 worked you can adjust the split between low middle and high frequency ranges whatever you said is your high frequency range anything above this number so for in my example let's pick something like I don't know 5600 Hertz anything above that in my track can then be adjusted using anything on this same horizontal layer so this input in this output knob similarly anything with this low nob anything below this frequency range so anything below 533 Hertz as I randomly chose will be considered low and then is adjusted by these knobs on this horizontal row and in the middle is anything in between this range and you can adjust those using these knobs what the knobs do is alter the amount of input that you receive from your audio track as well as the output also you can change attributes such as the threshold and the attack and release the decibel range both below and above this essentially allows you to dynamically filter out your volume and your sounds so that nothing can ever be too loud or nothing can ever be too low it's like crunching everything together smooshing it so that it's never too loud never too low one helpful thing for using multiband dynamics is you can actually solo each of these high mids and lows to hear what it sounds like so for example this is what the high element of my track sounds like and this is what the low is sound like overdrive overdrive is an audio effect that allows you to distort your sound and give it some good as you would expect drive some nice punchiness to your track this one's pretty simple you can adjust the frequency range you want to effect how wide of a range you want to affect the amount of Drive so that punchiness and the tone as well as the dynamics in addition to the dry/wet which Germans how much this affects your overall sound phaser phaser adds a phase shift to your sound which can create some funky results in your track you can change the frequency you want to effect and also how much feedback in addition to the typical envelope and LFO knobs that we've gotten used to one of the bigger knobs that you want to focus on is this poles if I'm being completely honest I can't really tell you the science behind it and what it does however I just know that generally less poles creates less of an effect and more poles creates more essentially it sounds like it adds more voices to your track [Music] you can also switch between earth and space which from my impression space gives a more wider but also kind of dulled out sound desaturate it if you will whereas earth you can change this color to also change them on a saturation that you would want ping pong delay we've actually covered quite a few delays in this tutorial and ping pong delay is one of the more simple audio effects we've covered delays a few times in this tutorial and ping pong delay is one of the more simple versions essentially you can pick a frequency range as we've seen before and select our delay time where one is obviously at the smallest increment of time and is almost immediate whereas 16 is the longest you can then adjust the dry/wet which determines the amount of delay that you'll hear and feedback which determines how long the delay goes on for so for example if I set this to four and I would have a large amount of dry wet but not much feedback you'd hear the feedback you'd hear the delay significantly at first but then over time it'll quickly disappear whereas if I have a small amount of dry wet and a large amount of feedback it'll go on for a long time you can then balance these to get a nice large delay [Music] Redux Redux is a way of adding an 8-bit sound to your track it essentially distorts your audio and gives it a sort of retro feel so if I were to play what I have and slowly turn up the down sample knob this is used in a lot of songs typically at the beginning or end of songs you'll usually hear this sort of effect in certain songs not all of them of course but you can't also turn this button on to turn on some bit reduction turning this knob down then amplifies the effect and it can get pretty loud and pretty compressed quickly so just be careful resonators for my impression resonators adds a certain tone or note on to your track at certain frequencies I think then the purpose of this audio effect is to add in another layer of pitch another voice on to your effect reverb reverb is one of the most common audio effects and is personally one of my favorite reverb allows you to add an echo to your track producers typically call this wetness so naturally as we've seen before this dry/wet knob ultimately determines the amount of reverb that will be applied to your sound you can also change a bunch of parameters such as the cuts which determine the frequency range of your reverb the tail of your sound you can change bunch of parameters such as the frequency range of the input under this input processing area over here you can change things such as the pre delay the shape size you can change the output reverb or the tail the actual echo sound you can change the frequency range of that if you want to add some cutoff you can add some chorus which you've seen before the decay time determines how long the reverb last for a long amount of time means if I were to play this once it'll take nine seconds for the sound to finally decreased its volume to zero whereas a short amount it's very subtle but it's there you could also change things such as density scale defuse reflect which just alter the sound a little bit more I mentioned before that you can add in presets of the audio effects and I just want to mention that for reverb because there are a lot of presets for this so for example if I wanted to replicate what this sound what this track would sound like in a gymnasium for example Ableton has created a preset that should essentially emulate that result and then at this point I can tweak the results to my liking saturator saturator is a way of adding some warmth to your track there isn't much of a better way to describe it other than it just adds color and warmth this drive knob ultimately determines how strong this effect will be it's worth noting that a little bit goes a long way so don't be adding too much saturation on all of your tracks simple delay simple delay is yet again another delay but this time you can determine the delay time for your left and right side of your stereo where again you have your feedback and dry/wet knobs that we've covered before over ping pong delay so that this means on the left side of the left half of the stereo I could have a delay time of 2 for example and on the right I have a delay time of 4 [Music] spectrum spectrum is a great way to visually see the frequencies of your track you can expand your spectrum by clicking this triangle right here and if necessary you can click and drag up here and you can see a visual representation of what I'm about to play where the left side here the y axis is decibels so the volume and then the x-axis itself is the frequency range on a logarithmic scale on a log scale but this is super useful in seeing that for example this frequency range right here if you look at the bottom left of this corner and I play this apparently 103 Hertz is the loudest sound on this track so you can then do is you can add an EQ and let's say for example I don't necessarily want 103 to be too large I can then go to 103 and sort of tune it out or maybe at least lower it so now if I were to play this since the spectrum is after this EQ you'll notice that the peak at 103 has been lessened if I were to do this even more you know it pretty much disappeared so you can use spectrum to see your frequencies a little bit better it should be noted of course that EQ you can do the same exact thing a spectrum I can see the frequencies and all if you were to expand it clicking this triangle but spectrum just looks a little bit nicer and spectrum has a few settings you can tweak to properly visualize the frequencies of your track tuner tuner is a good way to see the notes the key that you are in for your given track if you put a tuner on a audio track or MIDI track and press play you should see the notes that are being played or roughly what that final audio sound the audio that's going into this tuner what note it considers that to be in the center here we have zero sense which essentially means if their sound hits right here it'll turn green it'll say a note that's essentially saying the audio that came into this tuner is on that key exactly to the left and right you see negative 50 and plus 50 those represents cents which are a smaller smaller form of semi tones so if you have a sound that goes to negative 50 or plus 50 that means that the sound is very detuned and doesn't quite land on any given note this is perfect for if you do anything lie when you perform and you want to verify that you were on key if not you can then add in something like frequency shifter or maybe even change the notes themselves to get in key to make that nice music theory shine through utility utility can do a few things one thing it can do is mute incoming audio you know it has its place in time you can change the game so the overall volume of the inputted volume which can be useful you can pan your sound either left or right or just keep it in the center and one of my favorite parts about utility is you can change the overall width of your stereo sound 100 percent is normal if you turn it down to 0% that's essentially saying you are mono which is perfect for things like a sub bass for example sub bases don't need to have stereo but for the most part you'll typically keep things at stereo so 100 percent is usually good if you kick this all the way up to 200 percent it's actually a 180 degree phase shift of your inputted audio vinyl Distortion this is another one that its name is quite self-explanatory as to what it does vinyl distortion replicates what a vinyl record would sound like the noises and scratches it would make when it's played you can then replicate that on your track you can pick frequency ranges and you can determine how much you want it to crackle as an old-time record would do you can also adjust other settings and what-have-you to further perfect this sound to your liking vocoder for my impression the vocoder is a way to modulate your sound based on the parameters that you tweak here this is usually either used for drums or for voices to give a very interesting sound one example I know off the top of my head that famous Daft Punk vocal sound that kind of robotic sound is made using a vocoder that's essentially what it does is it sort of takes that inputted audio and one thing that it can do is make a robotic sound or can't make it all funky say for example I were to add this preset chromatic clearly I'm not going for that robotic sound here but what you can do is you can change these bands which essentially chooses the frequencies and you can add a sound to it by either clicking this noise external which is some audio file that you produce a modulator or pitch tracking as you've probably picked up I'm certainly no expert on the vocoder don't quite understand it fully however I do know that it can be used for some interesting results so you just have to play around with it basically my impression is if you do it right you can make some really interesting sounds with it and there you have it those are all of Ableton's audio effects as I mentioned before there are external and third-party plugins that you can use so this doesn't necessarily have to be all of the tools that you use to make music but it's certainly nice to know that they're out there and ready at your disposal in Ableton that was a long one huh if you made it to the end thanks for watching I appreciate it subscribe to stay tuned for more awesome content thanks for watching hope you learned a lot [Music]

Channel: InspirAspir

Views: 233,495

Keywords: Ableton, tutorial, How to, How to use Ableton, music production, music production for beginners, ableton for beginners, ableton tutorial, audio effects, fl studio, logic, garageband, edm, music, production, how to make music, how to make your first song, InspirAspir, Launchpad

Id: jEXCEelPlEM

Length: 31min 36sec (1896 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2018