Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, my name's Jonathan Haidt all and I'm a composer and a producer and I pretty much only use able to live. And I created this class to share with you some advanced audio editing techniques that I use on every single project. And these are some techniques that are going to take your production quality to a whole new level. Even if you're a beginner and you feel like you're just learning Ableton Live. Because these techniques, while they're advanced to very simple in concept once you start to apply it. Now I should mention that this class is not going to be a thorough tutorial on how to use Ableton. Or I'm gonna go through every menu button, show you what everything does. And while those causes are important to help you learn the software, today's class is going to be more about helping you to become a better producer. So come on in and let's get started. I also have a number of other classes on April to live and you can check those out on my profile.
2. Clip Volumes: Alright, so let's jump right in, in this whole, entire class, a lot of the tips I'm going to share with you have to do with manipulating audio. And there'll be some repetition to some of the skills that I'll be sharing with you as it's applied to different situations. So my first tip relates to clip a volume and you can access that by going and double-clicking on the clip. That brings up this screen here. And you go to the left-hand side and you see this slider. And by moving this up and down, you're able to adjust the volume of this particular clip. Why I like using this is it gives me a very visual way to make sure that the different sections and attract that I've recorded are at the volume that they need to be. You can also apply this same technique to certain sections in there, not just the question. If you notice, I already have this whole section divided into pieces already. I can take that even further by coming in here maybe let's say to this piece, I could select what I want to select. You can right-click on there. To bring up this menu. You can do split or I oftentimes use the short key, which is Command E. Once you have this cut and isolated, you can come in here and adjust the volume on this particular section. So I use this trick all the time on all my recordings to adjust the volume at different parts if they ended up being a little too quiet. Here's why you might do that. Compression and limiting. We'll certainly do some of this job for you. But if you have too much variation between the louds and sauce in your audio recording, it's going to make it really hard to use compression and limiting without overlay, compressing some parts and not compressing and other ones. So what I do is I go through here and try to even things out a little bit before I start applying compression or limiting. Now, you can certainly get extremely detailed and go through the whole clip, cutting and increasing, decreasing volumes to level this all out. I caution you from going too far because that's kind of what a compressor or a limiter will start to do. I generally just look for the greatest increases between volumes and then use it for that purpose. For example, let's look at a section a little later in this piece. You can see here that this particular section is quite a bit quieter than this section over here. So if they're both running through the same compressor, this section over here is going to be compressed to allow more heavily. And this section here, maybe not at all depending on the settings. And if I want them to be more even, I'm going to need to come in here and increase this volume so that the volume going into the compressor is going to be more consistent. And again, a great thing about working with clip volume is you get such great visual feedback. So when I come over here and I start to adjust as volume, it's very easy to look at this section versus this section and simply keep adjusting the volume and tone. It looks about even. Now, even though I'm giving you an example where all these parts are going into a compressor. That might not be the case. There could be a situation where your audio is already treated like you wanted to and you just decided that you want. Let's say this section here to be quieter. You can use the clip volume to do so as well. Instead of trying to automate the volume of that particular track, you can just come in here and cut the section. You want to be quieter and then bring down the volume. So there's a lot of potential applications for this. Some of them I'm going to discuss and some later chapters. Now after you've gone through a section, you cut it up into bits. You've increased or decreased the volume of small sections. You might want to pull it back into one singular clip again. You do that by consolidating it. You need to first select the area that you want to consolidate together. Then you right-click on there and choose consolidate. Or you can use to fast key, which is Command J. After the computer processes that information and is now taken all your changes and put them into one clip. One thing to note is that whatever you highlight is going to be what is included in the new clip. So you might want to pay attention to where you start selecting with your mouse and where you end in case you want that to start or end on a measure. Because when you consolidate, it's going to make your new clip began in and exactly where you've highlighted. Notice when I did it the second time that I made the section go all the way to beginning of this other measure. Now it's just a little easier to move around and make sure that it's lining up correctly. If you get in there and you started it here, and you happen to want to copy and paste that somewhere else, it's going to just make it a little bit more difficult to do so and get it to be lined up. We're gonna come back to consolidation several times in this class. But this is a good starting point to understand how it works.
3. Clip Fades: Another key tip that I use in Ableton all the time when I'm working with audio is the fate feature. And you get to that simply by coming to the clip. And on the right-hand side there are couple little icons here that you can control. And the top one controls where the fade starts. And this middle one controls the degree to which it fades. The more that you pull it down, the more that there's a steep slope to that fade. If you go up above it, there's more gentle curve at the beginning until you get to the end. What I like about the fades on Ableton is you get such a great visual feedback for you can literally see the wave shape change as you move these fades. I uses all the time when I want to clip to fade out because I get great visual feedback for it. You can do this at the beginning or the end of a clip, not in the middle except for if you cut that particular section like we did before when you adjust the volume. So if I wanted to come in to this particular part, maybe right here and fade this, I would simply apply the split option here. Same thing before Command E. Now because I cut it here, I can fade in this particular section in the middle. And the same thing I mentioned before about consolidating it can be done here as well. After you make all your fates just like you want them to be. You can highlight this whole section. I do Command J. And now all my fades are consolidated into one clip again. Now I personally don't go through and consolidate sections whenever I make fades on him when it's on the beginning or the end, because it's easy just to leave in place, which allows you the chance to change it later. It's when you consolidate something. It is going to print new audio in that place and erase over what you had before so you can't go back and change a later. The only time that I do a consolidation with regard to fades as when I'm doing that in the middle. And I'm really happy with all the adjustments that I made and I just want to make it into a new clip.
4. Cross Fades: Another advanced tricked for working with audio in Ableton is to use cross fades. And I'm going to show you a couple examples of what you can do with that. One way that I use cross fades is sometimes to take a section of audio, loop it and then crossfade it together so that it extends for a longer period of time. And here's an example in context. So let's listen to this example here and I'll show you why I want to use a crossfade. I'm gonna play just this vocal line first and then played in the context of the mix. And explain why I don't like how this ends. Here's just a vocal line right now. Okay, so at the end here, it goes down, down, down. If I play this for you in the context with the full mix, here's how it sounds. When you boil chain. Okay, so the rap first comes in right at the end of this. And when this phrase goes down to me, it distracts and competes with the rap first coming in. Listen again. What I really wanted to do is to go down and hold that note, but it goes down. So I'm gonna have to do something with it. Alright, so it goes down at the end of his phrase and that's the part I don't like. I think it's about right here where it turns down. Let's listen to that again. K, That's the note that I wanted to end on, but it ends too early. So what I need to do is get this to extend all the way to beginning of the measure because I wanted to cut off and hold that note there. So what I'm gonna do here is select the section I want to loop. I'm going to hold down the option key, click on it and drag it, and that makes a copy. This now will extend all the way to here and let's listen to how that sounds. Okay. It's continuing like I wanted to, but that transition is really harsh. So what I'm gonna do is crossfade it. And here's how that works. To do across phase. It's very similar to how you would do a normal fade, where I would click on these little boxes and drag them around. I do that on the inside. But if I click and drag this way, it's going to be a fade. So I have to go the other direction and that makes a crossfade. After I go to the left here, I can come back to this one here and move the crossfade around so that it can be at different points. Let's go ahead and listen to how that sounds. A little war ugly. You can hear that it might not be the cleanest points because there's a change in volume. A way to adjust for that would be to move this around a little bit in Thai feigned the right amount of cross fade at the right points so that it's the smoothest as it can be. That was better K. Now let's listen to this cross fade in the context of the mix to see if it works. Alright, that's getting pretty close. What I hear is that it's competing a little bit when the vocals come in for the verse. And so I'm going to consolidate this and then fade the end of that so that it's out of the way. It didn't work. Now that I've consolidated this whole thing, I can go to the end and then fade it out so that it's getting out of the way of the vocal part. You boy. Maybe even a little bit more. I might do it like that. Alright, I don't know if I'm a 100% happy with that. But for the purposes of this class, I hope that this has given you some ideas for how you can use cross fading to loop certain sections of audio and crossfade em together in order to extend it.
5. Cross Fades for sound design: Another way that you can use cross fades is to blend two entirely different sounds together to make something new. Alright, so I just went into Ableton and grab their samples, found some different examples. How about this one here? Yeah, that's a good tone. Let's find something else. And how about this sound rehear? Cans drag this in and blend these together so I'm going to shrink it down so it's approximately the same size. Get them so they're close to overlapping with each other. And let's go ahead and do this crossfade. Again when I live about Ableton, as you can literally see, the waveform changing from original one and blending into this other waveform. It's a nice transition. I even have it be like this if I was doing it so that it would end a little bit more abruptly. As I hope you are recognizing the possibilities of cross fading and mixing sounds together is really quite endless. And it opens up a whole new possibility for sound design. You can go through and crossfade different things together. Now, as you probably guessed, using any sort of sustained sound or something like a pad is going to be easier for cross fading because you can do it over a longer period of time. But it also can work really great for customized 0 drum sounds. Let me show you an example to demonstrate, let's make a new snare sound by combining a original snare sample with some pink noise. And the reason that I might want to do that is because sometimes snare samples, they just decay so quickly. It's nice to have a little bit more sustained and depth to that sound. All right, what I have here is a snare sample and some noise. First of all, the snare samples way too quiet. So I'm going to click on this and increase the volume. So it's more in line with the pink noise and then bring down the pink noise sound. So if you look at the decay of the snare, comes down really quickly and what I wanna do is get this about right here to sustain longer. And so let's bring over the noise. I increase the noise just a little bit more to bring it in line with the snare. And then let's listen to this first before we do the crossfade. You can definitely hear with a noise comes in. So by cross fading, I can take out some of that transition. Now the noise is still way too loud in my opinion. So what I'm gonna do is continue to keep bringing that down until it's more in line with the snare. Might be even a little bit too much as well. Maybe even let's make it a bit louder. But bring the crossfade in to a closer point like this. So I'm more of getting that quick clip at the snare. There you go. Now I can either leave it like that or it could consolidate it together. What I usually do is both. I leave this in the track is kinda my sound design area. Am I just drag this to the end much further out in my song. Copy and paste it like this. And then come in and consolidate this section. And just leave this one as it is so that I can come back to it later. Because the nice thing about cross fading, or anytime you're combining samples is that it's non-destructive. So if I wanted to, I could simply pull these apart. I could take the noise, move it over here, and bring it back to where it was before. Same thing would be true with the snare. So if you don't consolidate it, it allows you to continue to reshape it and adjusted. But once you consolidate it together, you just made entirely brand new sound and you're kinda stuck with endless, you rebuild it again. So to summarize with the sound design, what I did is I took the transient from the snare and the sustain of the noise, and I combine them together. And you could really do the same thing from a sound design standpoint for any sort of transient. And then the sustain. So maybe like a piano sound that turns on annoys, or maybe a piano sound where that piano tech turns into a string sound. There's really unlimited amount of possibilities, but it tends to work good when you have more sustained to at least work with you can see here with that noise because I had a longer sustain, I had more choices with regard to how much I wanted it to decay and where I wanted the blend to be with the snare sample because it was so short already, it didn't give me as many choices, but I was primarily wanting to use it for the transient.
6. Taming Transients: Another trick for working with audio is to manually adjust and transients. And there are certainly a number of plugins that can, on a broad scale deal with siblings or to deal transients, either to increase or decrease them. But those usually apply it on such a broad scale. And sometimes you just really need to go in with a scalpel and adjust some things. Very specifically. Let's start with talking about how you can decrease transients, which usually I do in vocal recordings because there's so many transients that can be captured in a vocal performance with the mouth clicks oppress the consonants. So to demonstrate what I'm talking about, let's come back to the same piece that we've been working with. And I'll show you how you might apply this concept to a real piece. Okay, first of all, let's go back to this part that we've been already working with. And I noticed right away that there is a transient at the beginning of this phrase that is much larger than everything else. Let's listen to that first and then I'll adjusted. Pretty subtle and it doesn't bother me too much. But if I was going to apply that scalpel like I was talking about before, I would come in here, tighten this up a little bit and then use the fade. Just to tame that transient a little bit more. You can just literally see that decreasing as I'm doing this. To me, I can hear a subtle difference that one is pretty mild. Let's look at another section of this that has a lot more transients that stick out. Here's diverse. You boys changed. Q right there, there's a significant continent. You can even see it right here in the middle. How much that, that sticks out, changing both of these two parts. So it applying that scalpel a could come in here, make a cut. If you notice, it automatically puts in a crossfade every time you make a cut. And what I can do is come in here to eliminate that. You move these around till just flattens itself out. And I'm going to move this over a tiny bit and then to my fade right there so I can eliminate the initial transient. And here's the other one that sticks out lot. I'll make my cut as close as possible. I'm going to eliminate the cross fade and then bring this down about that level right there you go. That's a little better. And this is a spot at the beginning of the year that I noticed as well needed to be brought down. You can just adjust these to make sure that you're not reducing a too much, so it's fading in, but you're just eliminating the most offending transients. You boy, changing as we go. So that's much milder Now you can still hear the k and J Fordham changes. Maybe I might bring the second one down just a little bit more. Change. Bribe affordably. Now, I like having a little bit of breath in there. That would be something that you can eliminate as well. And this right here are, there's that breath. This can be easily done by changing the volume on this particular section. Bringing that down a little bit. Snapper bribe affordably both past rivals left, decreased or no value for what we believe. What we believe. K is also a little bit harsh in my opinion. Take out that cross fade and then smooth as down just a little bit. I've gone and when is what we believe a little bit more back. This is a very subtle and surgical procedure whereby the chemical is another spot right there. Oftentimes you can just see them. And I I don't know if you can notice that there's a huge spike in these two particular spots that I want to bring down a little bit. Again, you don't want to eliminate them, otherwise it starts to sound too unnatural. I just want to bring those high peaks down a little bit more so make those cuts. I eliminate the fades, the cross fades. And then I just bring this down a little bit. Sometimes it's helpful to start back a bit further so that you can use that slope just to ease off the top peaks. Let's listen to how that sounds. Whereby the chemical whereby the chemical much better, just to tone down just a little bit. And again, the great thing about working in audio in this way is you can see it. Ableton provides you with a lot of feedback. So to summarize, I would recommend doing a combination of using different plugins to control siblings or DS scene. But I use the surgical approach when I want to go in to just deal with a couple of problem areas when the whole performance is generally pretty good. And you don't want to put a broad approach on something when you really just need to go in there to a couple of key points.
7. Increasing Transients: All right, so we've talked about how you can use this scalpel approach to decrease transients, which you can also use it to increase them as well when needed. I usually do that more on drums and Percussion, Where you want some of that transient effect. And maybe it might be missing in a particular sample you may have seen online where people drag samples into Ableton and they lay in baselines are snare parts that way. One thing to be aware of if you're doing that is that dragging samples in can sometimes put fades into them automatically. Like in this situation here, there's an automatic fade. You can adjust that setting by going up to live, going to Preferences. And you go to record warp and launch. And there's an option here to turn on and off to create fades on the clip edges. I would recommend keeping an eye on because clip edges can create some unwanted noise and it's very time consuming to remember to go through and do that on every single sample that you have to make sure that it's clean. I find it easier just to simply go in and remove the fade when needed. And that's oftentimes particularly necessary on percussion sounds. For example, with this kick right here, and let's listen to it. It's kind of a soft sample, but part of that is the fact that it has this fade in the beginning. So if I get rid of that fade by just pulling it all the way to the left. You can see there's a lot more transient that's already in the sound that was being covered up when it was dragged into Ableton first. Here, much more transient is already in that compared to before. It's just a tiny fade, but just enough to eliminate a very important transient. So that's something very important to look out for when you're importing drum or percussion samples into Ableton. Now sometimes you might have a drum sample or percussion sample that just doesn't have very much transient to begin with. And you can use this same technique going in there with a scalpel to increase the transient. Let me show you an example. So I am just going into Ableton's stock samples here to pull it in, kick sample. Let's drag that into here. Immediately. Let's get rid of this fade in the beginning to make sure that we're not decreasing the transient at all. And I'm going to give us a little five DB boost because it's a little quiet. So let's take a listen to this. It's not too bad. But this beginning section here, I notice already that this transient section right here is much quieter than the rest of the sample. So if you wanted to cut through the mix, the way that you can do this is by making a very small cut, maybe just about right here. I'm going to really diminish this crossfade quite a bit because I don't need it to be that significant. Then I just click on this beginning transient and really crank it up so that it matches more of the volume of the rest of the sample. You can get carried away on this and blow out the transient too much, then this situation, I just want to bring it up to be more even with the rest of it. If you wanted that kick to cut a bit more. Let's loop this and I'll show you the comparison between the two of them. Here's the first one in the beginning with no transient adjustment. Second one with a transient adjustment. Here. How the second one just has a little bit more bite in it. Now again, these are very subtle adjustments and that's the whole point. You usually don't want to make a change so dramatic that it's going to kick you in the face. You just need a little adjustment to help something to cut through the mics or to pull back. Now as we've already talked about, if I'm gonna make this little small adjustment, I want to make sure it stays in place. So i would come through, select the section, and then consolidate it. So now it is merged together and a new sample. You can also apply this concept to any sample or portion of your recording. For the transient needs to be increased. You just find our that transient is cut it out, increased the volume a little bit on it, merge it back together. And now you have a more aggressive transient.
8. Stretching clips: So another way to work with audio clips is to play around with stretching them. And let's go back to one of these vocal parts as a way of demonstrating how I might have used that instead of copying and pasting and then cross fading the two parts together. So here's a section I was working on before we changed this ending part here. What I looped it in, crossfade it. I kind of want to do the same thing to this section right here, where it sounds like this. I want that note to be held out instead of going down because it goes down here, goes down here. So I want to alternate that by having the note sustain here and sustain at the end. And instead of copying and pasting cross fading, let's use the stretch tool to accomplish this. So I'm going to do first is find the point at which the pitch changes. Right about here, same spot as before. Okay, so instead of copying and pasting in the cross fading, what I'm gonna do is make a small cut about right here. And then I'm going to stretch this audio to fit the rest of the space. Now something really important when you stretch is that you need to make sure this is on complex pro. Because if you don't, the audio is going to be severely distorted. Now this isn't a long distance, so this probably isn't going to sound too unnatural if I stretch it out, but I can definitely happen. So to stretch this out, you need to push the Shift key down. And then you move your mouse to the upper right-hand corner. And then allows you to be able to stretch and change the shape of this. So I'm going to stretch this out, tell fits the end of the measure and let's listen to how this sounds. And so that sounds pretty natural, but let's stretch it out a little further to show you what happens if you take this too far. Listen, But this sounds like and which can be a fun effect if that's what you're going for. And you can see it starts to become a lot more unnatural soil. Let's compare how these two different strategies ended up sounding to see how they differ or are the same. Here's the first one where I stretched it out. And here's the other one where I blended it. Definitely stretching it out, I think might even be a better strategy in this situation because that little bit of stretch didn't alter it too much. And then we didn't get that little war bull in there that happened when I was copying and pasting and then blending the two together. You can also use this technique, stretching audio on many other things like I oftentimes using one drums. Not just to stretch it out, but to also to shrink it and get it to fit in a certain tempo a lot better. For example, I pulled this drum loop in here. Let's listen to sounds without any changes. Okay, and so again, if you're going to stretch anything, you want to make sure you come down here and change this to complex pro. I have it set up to automatically have all clips that are important to be a complex. But again, you need to take it a step further to complex pro if you really want to make the stretching work. And I come up here, press shift, and I can drag this around and move it to whatever length that I needed to be to get something to fit. Let's just say if I wanted the drumbeat to line up more like this, now it's actually lining up for these two measures. This is a great way to take loops that are maybe at a different tempo and pull them into your track and line them up correctly. There are some other strategies for taking loops that are at different tempos and your track and then lining them up correctly. But this is a great way that I like doing it because you can just drag the clip to the end of the measure and it's going to line itself up automatically at the right tempo. There are some other ways that you can use to stretch things out. Like if I was just to grab this bass drum clip here, copy and paste it to a little different section, double-click on it and then change the tempo in here with a relationship with a clip. Problem with that is when I shrink it down, it starts to pull in other content. And what I really like about the stretch tool is it only works with what's visible. So when I shrink this down and if I push shift and then pull the left, it doesn't pull in any other parts to that. It's only working with what's visible.
9. "Bouncing" Effects: Another audio editing trick that I use enabled ten all the time is to print or balance my effects onto an entirely different track. And let me show you what I mean by that. Let's use this focal part that we've been working with as an example. Most of the time, people are putting effects like reverb or other things like that on a track. And you're usually use some sort of wet, dry knob to adjust how much reverse is going to be applied. So in this situation, I put a black hall reverb, which I love. It's amazing reverb. And you can use this makes to determine how much of the reverb is going to be on that track. Now, you could certainly just leave it on there and used the mix knob or the wet dry knob to adjust how much gets applied on there. But if you print it or bounce it to another track, you have so many more opportunities to manipulate that particular reverb. So first I'll show you how to get it onto another track, and then I'll give you some examples on what you can do with it. The first thing you wanna do is set up some of the parameters for your effects that you aren't going to be able to change later. And this situation, I really wanted just fine tune the size and the delay. And this modulation, the EQ and the mics are things that I can actually adjust later. But I do want to dial in the size, right? So I've sold this and let's adjust the reverb size. Okay, that's pretty good as well where I want it to be now that I have the reverb or I want it to be, it's time to get ready to bounce it or copy it to a new track. So I need to go back to the reverb and crank the mics up to a 100% because I'm now going to separate the reverb from the original track, Put it on its attract all by itself. And that's why I need it to be at its full capacity. I can then blend the two together later, essentially doing this mix option between these two tracks. But for now I needed to be a 100%. Now to get it to a new track, you can either do one of two things. You can either freeze this and then copy and paste it to a new track. Or you can just record a directly into new one. I've already created a new track here. That's going to be for this reverb. If I want to record it directly into here, I need to select that I want the audio to come from this singing Vox, which is this track I'm working on here. Then hit record. Somebody come through and start recording and it's going to take this audio and get it on this track. I usually just freeze it and then copy and paste it. I find that to be just a simple It kind of depends on the complexity of what's being recorded in their freezing does a nice job if the effects and things that you have on that track require a lot of processing, and it might cause it to glitch a little bit. If you only have reverb on there, then just recording into a new track should work fine. It's kind of up to you both ways. Accomplish the same task. For now, let's just freeze this one as an example. I'm gonna go ahead and freeze this reverb on this track. Ok, now that this is frozen, what I'm gonna do is select the section that I want to copy. And then I'm gonna hit option and click on my mouse and simply drag that to the new track. What I've done here is now copy this 100% wet reverb onto this new track. I can then go back to the first one. Unfreeze it. Turn off the reverb because I now have it on this new track. Let's listen to how that sounds. This is in some several different pieces here. To make it a little bit easier to work with. What I would do is come through and select this whole area and then consolidate it. So it's now no longer pieces. It's just one whole reverb section. Let's listen to the reverb by itself. Okay, so now here's where the fun starts. Up to this point. If this is all that you did, it's kind of worthless having it on a separate track because it's really no different than just using the wet try knob on the reverb itself. But now that the reverb is printed as an audio file, we can start to use many of these other techniques that we've already talked about. Cutting fades, cross fades, stretching things out, as well as applying other effects. Now to the reverb itself, what I usually do, at least in the situation of reverb, is put on an EQ so that I can start to treat my reverb separately. Reverb, if it has a lot of low end, can be really boomy and muddy up your mix very easily. So I'm going to go through immediately and eliminate a lot of the low end. Let's listen to these together so you can hear them in context. This is where you can start to adjust the Dry Wet portion based upon volumes so I can turn up the reverb a little bit more if I want to maybe turn down the volume of the original ones so that there's more reverb that's in the mix. Next I might start to edit the tail, the reverb. And because it's audio, I can do that manually. So I'm gonna make a small cut here because I didn't like how long the reverb hung out. And I can shorten that up, maybe put a little fade on there. Same thing here. And I make a cut and then scooted over. I want this one to end. Right on this beat. Maybe in the beginning, I also want to tone it down a little bit because it starts to compete with the original vocals. Let's get rid of this section. And especially this last one I wanted to cut off right on the downbeat so that there's a really crisp transition between this intro and then the verse lets us into this whole thing. Now, in the context of the mix, you boy, see how that has such a nice crisp ending to it. Now you could certainly accomplish the same effect by going in to the reverb wet and dry, and then automate it to turn off at this point. But I just like working with the audio so much better because it's visual. And you can make all these modifications to it just by using these fades or other features. Another trick I like to do with reverb is to side-chain against the original ones so that when the original vocals are coming in, it's quieting the reverb part, and then the reverb comes in afterwards. So there's not as much of an opportunity for things to get muddy. You do that in this situation by dragging in a compressor to the reverb track. And I'm going to open this up and select as side chain to come from the singing Vox right here. So now I need to adjust the compressor so that when the original vocals command that they create some gain reduction and see how it's happening just so far. Looks like I need to turn the volume up on the gain coming from the original vocals. And wanted to be a fast attack because I wanted to kick in immediately and move the threshold down a little bit on it. It's maybe a little bit too much. For too much. I want that release to be a little slower. Again, what this is doing is that the side chain compressor is quieting the reverb whenever the original vocals are singing. So you're not having this readiness and part of that mix. And then when the original local stop, the reverb really has a chance to come out, which is having more perceive reverb. Anyways, let's listen to this without the side chain and then put it back on again. My take out these fades in the beginning so that you can hear maybe even a little bit more how it's working. But the compressor back on for the side chain. I like that a lot better. Just creates a little bit less Medina In that lets us into the whole thing out in the context of the mix. That's mostly as far as I might go with reverb, maybe adding some saturation to it or automating something with a filter. The great thing is now that it's on a track all of its own. The only limitations you have are your creativity and kind of what you want to do with that reverb. Now reverb isn't the only thing that you can do this with. Delay works really great as well. Also, I loved doing it on compression. The key thing is if you're going to apply this technique which is the bounced the effect to its own track that you do some of the dialing in on the track itself. Kids, your parameters set where you wanted to be, especially if you're using compression, because you really need to get that attack and the release and the threshold all set just how you want B. Then crank the mics up to a 100% and then bounce that to a new track. Bouncy my effects to another track. I find really forces me to think about sound. Because now I'm working with an audio clip. And when I separate that from the original track, now I work with it as an entity of its own.
10. Class Project: Alright, let's talk about the class project. What I want you to do is use the technique I talked about in the last video, which is to print your effect to a new track. Now once it's there, you can apply some of the other concepts which involve trimming the audio, adding fades, stretching it out, et cetera. And while you can certainly keep it very simple, meaning just move the reverb to new track and maybe change the Q on it. I encourage you to consider this new part to be like an entirely different instrument or a new element in your composition. And maybe even see how far you can take it. Are you stretch it out at some other effects onto it. Move it even further away just from being the regular effect on a new track. Because if you can grasp how to use this technique to take your sound design to a whole new level. Really, the only limit is your creativity.
Jonathan Haidle
