Ultimate Ableton Live 12, Part 5: Producing with Effects

1. Introduction: Hey everyone. Welcome to Ableton Live 12, part five audio media effects In this class. In this part of the giant sequence of classes, we're really going to focus on media effects. Now I am going to walk you through every single audio and Midi effect that we have in live 12. But I'm also going to talk a lot about effect theory, how to use effects, the different types of effects, and what order they should go in, and how to do some other techniques with them, like side chaining and bussing and things like that. I highly recommend watching this class from beginning to end to get a feel for all of the effects. But after that, keep this class in your account and use it as an encyclopedia. Pull it up whenever you want to know how to use some effect. You can always come back to it and rewatch any segment as you're working on tracks. Also, near the end of this class, we're going to talk about effect racks. Audio effect racks especially. And those are one of the most powerful things in all of life. If you haven't explored audio effect racks yet, you're in for a world of amazement. So let's get started. Let's dive in. Off we go. All right, so there's all the frequencies of our sound. Now here's what we're seeing. On the left, we have low sounds, everything all at once. We can go up to this triangle here and click on it now, don't freak out, it looks like we have 1 million more settings here, but we don't. We quiet it down and then we boost everything by the amount that we quieted down. Okay, so we're going to smush it, compress it, and then boost everything else. Now this is my favorite. This is my kind of go to for effects is to do. All right, so let's hear the three now. 2. The 4 Areas of This class: All right, let's dive in. In this class, we're really going to focus on audio and Midi effects. However, in live, in Live 12, that's going to put us in four different areas here in our browser. Okay, We're going to look at audio effects, right? We'll go through all of these effects and look at how they all work. We're also going to look at midi effects. Okay, We'll look at all these Midi effects and how they work. We're also going to look at modulators. These are effects that focus on modulating things. If you've been following the rest of my Live 12 series of classes, you know what modulation is already, but we'll get much deeper into it with these things. And then lastly, Max for Live. So we're not going to go real deep into Max for live, but we will discover a few Max for live effects because they are sprinkled all over the place. You'll see here, even in audio effects, there are a few Max for live effects that pop up like this LFO, this Align Delay, you can tell by the icon that they're max for live. They have these little lines popping out of them. Let's see, there's any other yeah, Shaper Midi effects. There's probably a few envelope Midi expression control, shape or Mid. These are all Max for live modulators are all Max for live effects. We're not going to go into building with Max for Live, because if you're not familiar with Max for Live, basically it's like its own programming language that lives within live. And we'll let us build things. Sometimes things get built that are so cool that Ableton says, we're going to put this into the main release. That's what you see here when you see Max for live effects all over the program. You can build your own effects with Max for Live. We will do that in, I think, part seven of this monster. Everything there is to know about Ableton Live class. We're going to devote that just to Max and learning how the basics of programming and Max works. But in this class, no programming. We're just going to use some of the Max for live effects that have been programmed by other people. Those are our four areas that we're going to be working in. Audio effects, media effects, modulators, and Max for live. We won't go into plug ins too much. Plug ins might be effects. Plug ins can be effects, they can be instruments, and they could be a few other things too. But the plug ins are unique to everybody's system. You will have some plug ins that other people won't have. These are things made not by Ableton, by anyone else. We're not going to focus on plug ins in this class, we're just going to focus on the Ableton made stuff. Audio effects, media effects, modulators, and then some X for live stuff. Okay, cool. Let's get good at all those things. Let's start at media effects. 3. What are Midi Effects?: Midi effects. Let's start with media effects, Media, generally speaking. More simple than audio effects. Because remember that Midi is just numbers, right? It's like note number 60. Turn it on. Turn it off at a volume of 100. It's just a bunch of numbers. Media basically are doing math in a bunch of different ways. Don't worry, we don't have to do math. That's handled for us by the effect, but they're not as complicated as something that's like adding frequencies and overtones and partials and all of these other things, like audio effects, are. Let's go through our Midi effects and just learn what each one does. Remember that in any Midi effect, we need a few things for it to work. First, we need an instrument on a track. We're not going to hear anything if we don't make an instrument. Let's just use the default analog patch, there it is. Then we'll go to our Midi effects and add something. The other thing we need is some Midi info, either a clip or a keyboard like I have plugged in. I have a keyboard. So when you see me like do this, it means I'm like reaching for the keyboard and playing some notes. We might even just put in some clips, we'll see how it goes. Now when we get down to our effect area, we're always going to have our instrument and a Midi effect before it. Audio effects would come after it. If we want to remember, these little dots here are telling us that we're dealing with Midi. And these lines are telling us that we're dealing with audio. Midi effects need to deal with Midi. You'll see those dots here and here coming in. Dots coming out, meaning Miti data is coming in. Midi data is coming out. Instruments are magical things where Midi data comes in and audio comes out. Any Midi effects need to come before the instrument. If I click and drag this over here, it's just going to say no, you can't do that. All right? So make sure you have those things. If you're not savvy on setting up a Midi keyboard, you don't really need a Midi keyboard, You can just make clips, But if you need help on setting up a Mitte keyboard, you can go back to, I think, part one of the Ableton series that we're currently in. Part five of that, I walked through all of your set up procedures, even like what keyboards you should buy if you want to buy keyboard. All right, off we go. Let's just go down this list. I think just alphabetically will be fine. I always like to start with our Pegiator, which is convenient, because it's alphabetically. First, let's do it. 4. Arpeggiator: Okay, let's talk about the arpeggiator. If you're not familiar with the concept of arpeggiation, what this means is you can think of it as a harp. And I think the origin of the word comes from the word harp. I haven't read that somewhere. But basically, if you imagine a harp, you play it like this. See if I can get a good angle for you. You can play chords by going and playing a bunch of notes on the harp. However, when we think about a harp, often we associate it with arpegiation, which means going and playing that maybe but one note at a time quickly. What we're doing with an arpegiator is we're going to give it a and it's going to play the notes one at a time. Okay? In some kind of pattern for this, maybe I'll demonstrate it by putting a clip here. Let's make just like, well, let's do this. I was just going to type in a major chord. However, let's take advantage of our new key aware setting. I'm just going to switch to a minor minor key. Okay? Now I'm going to put in a minor, okay? Very simple C minor chord. Maybe I'll put one more note at the top. Two another C, okay? I have four notes in this chord, okay? Now I'm going to hit Shift Tab, so I can go back over and see my Arpegiatorka. If I start this going, this style is set up, so that means it's going to play the lowest note and then go up. Okay, here we go, one to three. I can change the pattern by this list or by using these arrow keys, got into this one at the moment, okay? So you can see that sometimes it has to do a repeat part of the pattern in order to fill out the sequence. But this will tell us what it's doing. So we've got a whole bunch of other options here, let's go through some of them. First, the rate, this is the speed at which we're going, we can set it to milliseconds or division of the beat. It is currently set to division of the beat And an eighth note, if this is our beat, it's going to play twice that bump, bump, bump, bump two for every one click, we can speed it up by going to 16th note at oh, I should also point out we have random things here that I really like using a lot. We do other and random once, I believe the difference is that random is truly random. Random, other means it can't choose the same note, two notes in a row. Random. I'm not sure how that one's different, but if I choose random, but I don't want any repeats. It's fun. Let's leave it there. Okay, here's my speed. I can slow it down or speed it up. Distance. This one is interesting, and this goes hand in hand with steps. What's happening here is we're going to let it go away from just the four notes that I gave it. Right now we're saying don't go away from those four notes I gave it because steps is set to zero if we say one, Okay? Now, distance turns on. What we're saying here is you can cycle through the pattern once and then transpose it one time. That's what steps means here. And what is that transposition? How, what notes are you going to choose? We're saying distance 12, which is an octave. So now it's going to play our notes and an octave higher. Okay? If we wanted to go two octaves, we can go here. So now we're going to say, okay, do your pattern. But then you can also do two octaves higher, and it'll set to octaves, okay? It doesn't have to be octaves. We could say two steps. This is going to get weird. But we could also turn on our key aware settings here. Now it's going to know what key we're in and behave a little bit better. Now it's just taking those four notes, but it's playing four times. Two. It's playing eight notes. Actually it's playing 16 notes because we're letting it go twice and it's transposing differently. So I'm going to go back to an octave because that's always a good sound. Gait means how long the notes are. If we shorten the gait, it's going to go. If we make it longer, it's going to go, it's going to go t, it's going to make them long. Let me show you, Rather than use my voice a short long, I'm going to keep it down to right in our octave. So that's the gate. Okay, then we've got two more sections over here. We've got the retrigger section and the velocity section. Oh, before we get to that, let me show you this hold thing. Because this is fun hold basically means I can play some notes. If I just press two notes, I can press as many as I want, but if I just press two notes, it's going to start going do, do, do, do, do. With those two notes, I can let go and walk away is going to keep going. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. It's going to hold in that pattern. I plus two other notes. It's going to switch to that pattern and I can walk away like so all two more notes rather nice, right? One, four notes. So you can just like notes, chords, it's kind of fun. Let me turn that off. Re trigger is how often does the pattern start over? We can tell the pattern to start over a few different ways. In this way we don't really have a pattern. It's not going to do much, but let's go back to converge. We could say the pattern is going to start off, meaning like when it's done, there's four notes in this pattern, it's going to start over every four notes. But we could also say every time I give it a new note, restart the pattern, make sure it's starting that pattern at the beginning or every new beat, restart it at the beginning. If the pattern starts over and we don't jump into the middle of pattern, the interval would be like a multiplier. So if I say every beat, then I can say every two beats. If I want, I almost always leave that off. Then I can tell to repeat the pattern however many times I need. Down here we have the key aware stuff that is currently off because we're using the keyoware up here. If we turn this off, we could set our own key down here if we wanted. But I like that on velocity is going to add some variation to our velocity. We can say decay, target and retrigger, just to vary up our velocity. You can hear it fade and then grow and fade. It can add some variation to your arpeggiator. Okay, so that's how the arpeggiator works. Let's move on to CC control. 5. CC Control: Okay, I made another Midi track here and put a default collision on it. Now let's look at CC control. This is almost a utility thing where basically what we can do here is we can send out CC messages. Cc messages means one of two things, depending on what school of thought you have. I learned it as continuous control. That is, any Midi device that's not a button, like a key, like a fader, or a dial, where it's got more than just an on or an off, it's got some amount of value to it. Those are called continuous controllers. The more modern definition is control change, meaning that it's a controller that changes, I guess it's not sending control change messages, that's a different thing, but it is a control change message. What we can do here basically is emulate having a mod wheel, having a pitch bend, having pressure sensitivity. If we don't have it on our keyboard, we can set custom things where we can say, here's custom B. We say this is outputting, here's all our possible CC messages that are available to us. We could say send out sustenuto. That's a good one. Send out a sestenuto message. Sustento, if you have a proper acoustic grand piano, the middle pal, there are three petals under them. The left one makes things quieter. The middle one is called sustenuto. In the right one is a sustained pedal. Sento basically sustains certain notes that you tell it it can be actually really fun to use. Here's the Sestanudo pedal. No Midi keyboard I've ever seen has had a Sestanudo pedal. We can emulate it if that's what we want to do and send it out to the instrument. We can also map to these or automate these, make a clip and go to our automation envelopes. Here we can set all these continuous controllers that we get from that device. Here's all our custom ones and the built in ones, we can map those as envelopes or if we were in arrangement view, we could just create automation lanes with those in them. Basically, to sum up, if you want to send pitch bend information, for example, to this instrument, but don't have pitch bend on your keyboard, you can do it this way and then automate it. That's how it works. It doesn't make any sound on its own or send any other note data. It sends CC data, which is a type of control message. 6. Chord: Okay, I'm going to stick with collision and do something with it. I got rid of our CC control, Midi effect and I'm going to put chord on it. Now this one is really cool. I'm going to be totally honest with you and let's just not tell anyone I said this, this midi effect used to be really pretty useless. I could never find a good use for it. And even when I was doing these videos in previous versions and I had to demo it, I'd be like, because it wasn't very useful. But now it's great, watch this. What we could do is basically we can add notes with this. If I play a note, I can say, okay, add to that note six, let's say an octave, okay? Now I have an octave. Every note I play now is going to have an octave, octave. That's cool. But I could also say add a fifth, which is seven steps. That's cool. However, we start getting into a problem here, because if you're in a key and you add a fifth to everything, you're going to start going out of the key once you get to the top of a scale. But let's make it even uglier. Let's add a major third, which is four steps. Now every node I play, I have a major cord, right? But that's totally wonky because those cords are going to go out of key all over the place. But with our new key aware settings I can say, cool, let's do that again. Let's say 12, a fifth and a third. A major third. Now we're going to stay in key because this isn't going to let any notes happen that are not in the key. Now it's going to alternate between major and minor records as I go up. Cool, right? So you can add up to six notes here. Now there's another new feature that's really cool here too. Let's reset these. Remember that if you ever want to reset a dial in live, just hit the delete, click on it. And then hit the delete key. But I can hit this now. I'm just going to play A. Okay. Now it's said, cool, I just played four notes and it's going to add three notes. What it's saying is for the, the lowest one, it's going to call the fundamental. And then it's going to say minus seven steps, minus three steps, plus four steps. It actually picked one in the middle as the root, and it's going to add these all around it. I'm not sure how it picked the one to be the root, but it doesn't really matter. Oops, I lost it because I didn't turn off. Okay, now that is going to stay the same throughout. I can add strum to that, which does exactly what it sounds like. It's like you're strumming a guitar a little C in there. If I do crescendo, it's going to get louder as I go. Tension, I believe makes our strum uneven. If we go up, this can be fun. If you want to add a bunch of notes to individual notes. Don't put this on chords. Put this on like you want a melody to be harmonized. You could play around with this and see if you could find something that works. So it can be fun. 7. Envelope MIDI: Okay, so I've made another Midi track and I threw the Default Drift onto it. Now let's add envelope Miti. This is a cool effect. What we have here is really quite simple. We have an ADSR envelope, right? If you watch the last class where we went through all the instruments and talked about synthesis a whole bunch. You know, these attack decay, sustain, release. We also have an amount and a little graphic that's going to let us control the same parameters of the ADSR. Okay, now you might remember from the synthesis stuff, what does the ADSR envelope do? It needs to be assigned to something. What we have here is kind of a free floating envelope that we can assign to anything we want on an instrument. Okay? All we have to do, okay, So let me just show you what I made here. I made a Miilipjt. One note over and over. Okay, so it sounds fine. Boring. But let's say I wanted to put an envelope on any parameter here that even one that I can't get at with the envelopes in that are built into this instrument, maybe like, okay, so let's say something like octave, right? Like what if I wanted to put an envelope on the octave to make it go up and down in an ADSR shape. All I have to do is click on Map. Now it's blinking and it's saying the next thing you click on, I'm going to lock to that. So now I'm going to go click on Octave. Okay, Now I have an envelope on the octave setting. Okay, cool. I can get rid of that by clicking here. Then I can say, let's put an envelope on this filter amount. Sure. Ooh, this frequency knob. It's interesting because there's so much modulation we can do within this instrument. But if there is a parameter that we can't modulate, we can do it with this envelope miti like. Here's a good example. Let's map the attack. Okay, now I have an envelope here. Let's set that to control the shape of our sound. But then we're going to control the shape of the envelope with another envelope using this effect. Hey, so it's kind of wild. You can basically put an ADSR envelope on anything with this media effect. It's pretty cool. 8. Expression Control: Okay, I loaded up an electric here. Neat. Let's add our next Midi effect, which is Expression Control. This is really similar to the envelope that we just looked at. What we have here is some of our cool new MPE controls that we can map to anything else. Let's take something like velocity, so we can see here what my velocity is. Actually, let's take slide. I have slide on my D keyboard where I'm sliding my finger up and down. You saw me do that in part four of this series. We can see where my finger is and I can scale it if I want, so that it's not so extreme. Then I can hit this Map button and we have the same map parameter. Let's map the stiffness of the hammer to that slide parameter. Now I have control of this slide parameter on my keyboard. I can give it a little more finesse if I want to do something like that. Okay, now where I play and how I play is really going to impact this instrument. It's basically bringing those MPE controls to instruments that don't yet support it. Let's make something here really quick. I'm a, I'm just kind of goofing around in the key here. Okay, cool. So let's solo and now I can randomization. I have here, map that to the time increment. So it's just going to go up in a series of the dapper, these last two random and increment A increments. Just going to step through something and random is going to randomly move around in it. We can assign those as well. That's actually pretty great, so I've been kind of quietly building a little track here. Let's hear all of it. Right now, it might be just pure chaos. I kind of like it. 9. MIDI Effect Rack: Okay, so up next is Midi Effect rack. Now if you watched part four of this series of classes, then you're familiar with instrument racks. And you know that a rack means that we can put a bunch of effects in them and create a super effect. We don't need a rack to put more than one effect. Even with media effects, I can put other media effects on a single track, but effect racks, let us do some special things where they get combined together. Let's look at some of the presets in the media effect rack echo variations. Let's put this on this new track I made here. What we have here is a media effect where we can launch different settings. That's what these are. Let's put an instrument on here. What have I not done yet? Impulse isn't great for this. Let's do Meld. The default Meld. Who? All right. I just pressed one note, this is one note. That's crazy. Now we can go to a different set of settings. Lots going on here, we can see what's in it. If we hit this button to show all the devices a effect, what is this? If I double click on it, it's going to open up. This is a delay. This is a note Echo. This is a Midi delay. I suppose. Then we can see like we've got different settings on each of these macro variations. You can build complicated and interesting Midi effects through the Midi effect rack. Check out. Let's do one more here, let's get rid of this. Here's another one, and this one, we don't have macro variations saved. We have some dials. But let's look at what's in it. A random object, a scale object. I think that's a Shaper object. But now we can create a set of macros which are these little dials that will let us control a bunch of different things. Here I'll play one note again. It's playing different notes. I'm going to play the same chord over and over. This is choosing different notes to play within this scale. Check out the midi effect. There's some cool stuff in there. There's some cool stuff you can do if you want to build something like that. 10. MIDI Monitor: Okay, let's go down to Midi monitor. This is exactly what it sounds like here. But what we can see here is basically what's happening. I can play some notes and it's going to say this is enough major chord. Let's see, my velocity, my root. I can look at all my Midi data coming in. I can look at any MPE data that's here. And what's happening, it's wild. This particular effect doesn't really do anything, It just shows you what's going on. The most useful thing for this to me anyway, is this function. This is great because you can play some random notes. And I'll say, oh, that's a B diminished chord, D minor seventh, like it can't get too crazy and some chords, But I can figure out what you're doing pretty well. It's really handy for that. Also, if you're wondering what's going on with MPE, you can always pull this up and just see what it's doing. It doesn't do a whole lot, but it just shows you what's happening. It's a great tool when you need it. 11. MPE Control: Okay, next MPE control. This gives us another access to some of our MPE values. What we can do here is get access to some of them and then control them a little bit. This isn't going to generate any MPE data, it's just going to let us smooth it out. If I go to slide, I can see where I am as I slide my finger around on this MPE enabled keyboard and I can scale it, which is actually really handy. Like if I go to pressure, this one to me is like really sensitive. I could do this. Now I can get into the low end a little bit easier. There we go. So it's very sensitive on this keyboard, so this will help me scale it a little bit. Cool, again, almost a utility, and not something that's going to actually generate sound. But let us control our Midi information a little bit. 12. Note Echo: Okay, I'm going to get rid of these two utility things here and add note echo next. Okay, what this is going to do is add an echo of a note. However, remember that this is not an audio echo, like we have a device called Echo that will echo audio. This is a note echo. That means that if I play a note, it's going to generate that note again, maybe at a lesser velocity. And then send both those notes to the instrument that is going to have sometimes a different effect than a different effect than an audio delay. Actually, let's compare these. Just for fun, I'm going to throw an audio echo on this track also. Okay? I'll turn off the note echo. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to play a note, play a note a bunch of times. Let's turn this up a little bit. Okay, now let's turn off this echo and turn on note echo. Well, it's a lot longer, It's a lot crisper. The note echo is feeding back a little bit. It's just a different sound, it's not dramatic. But what we have here is the delay time. These are in 16th notes. 4568 and 16 sync is going to let you use the delay times as 16th notes. If you turn off, it's just going to give you milliseconds. You can do a little transposition on it. F we can mute, I believe will mute your original note. Yeah. And just play the delay. It's basically like getting rid of the dry. Then we have the delay amount feedback. And then some MPE controls that it'll use. Also, it's basically going to function like a delay. Now your next question might be, in a normal world, am I going to reach for this or the audio delay 100% of the time? Audio delay, I don't know why, there's not like a great reason for that. It's just what I would do, just being honest. Let's move on. 13. Note Length: Okay, Up next is note length. So I've made a new Midi track here, and I put an operator on it. I also made a little Midi clip with just some short notes on it. So let's just hear what I've made here. Okay, So with note length, it's pretty obvious what it's going to do. We're going to be able to basically lengthen or shorten notes. We could do effectively the same thing by just doing this, but if you have a whole miti sequence and you suddenly want it to be like staccato, like really short notes, then this is a handy way to do it. We can say, what are we basically going to use the note on or the note off? If we use the note off, we can control what the velocity does with that note off command. But if we cited to note on, which is probably 90% of the time what you want to do, then we basically have these two controls to deal with gait and length. Gait is going to elongate or shorten your notes by up to 200% Like that. Length, though, is what's really going to make them a lot longer or shorter. Now everything is short and we can make everything like 60 seconds long. That's insane. We can also switch to divisions of the beat, which is very handy. Now this latch control is going to the sustain pedal and other Miti notes, or basically it's going to sustain all the way until it gets new Midi information. It's just going to fill out the empty space. When I use this, it is in that case where I have like a whole ton of Midi notes and I want to do something where they're all staccato, suddenly this is a good way to do it. Can just save you time from going in and editing the whole Midi sequence. 14. Pitch: All right, now I'm going to add pitch to the same operator patch here. If I go to pitch to throw that down there, I already have note length that's set to be like that. Now simple, It's going to change your pitch, but we have some magic that it can do zero semitones. If you're not familiar with music theory, a semitone is the smallest possible amount you can move on a keyboard, That's one. Okay? Sometimes we talk about steps and a half steps. A half step is the same as a semitone. If you're in Europe or somewhere else. You might say tone and semitone. One tone is going to be two spots on the Midi grid. A semitone is going to be one. Also, one step is two spots on the Midi grid. And one, two step is one spot on the Midi grid. It's weird, it's just how we do it. Okay. One step are zero semitones, one semitone. We can also go negative with this. If I hit play, we can go, we can add a bunch of stuff. This looks like it's going to, this is going to increment us by 12. 12 is an octave. That means that basically if you add an octave to something, you're doing the same notes, just in a higher range. If you have something that sounds good, if you add an octave, it's still going to sound good in terms of like notes clashing and dissonance and all that stuff. Okay, now we also have these controls down here. What these do is set a range. We can say what is our lowest and highest. Remember that what pitch does is it's going to add semitones to all notes in that clip. Okay, we can define a range here and say, don't go out of this range. This mode tells us what happens when a note does go out of the range. Let's say this range is 90. We tell it with this to go above that. Well, one of three things can happen. Block means it's just going to block those notes. It's not going to let them through. Fold means it's going to wrap them around and start moving them back down. You will hear them. Limit, I believe means that it's just not going to create those notes, we'll just hit a upper wall. We can also turn on this key aware setting, which will make us stay in key. We're still in C minor here. With this going, I can just go crazy with this and know that I'm never going to transpose out of key. I'm never going to move my notes out of key because they're there. Here we have semitone, but when I turn this on SD, we get scale degree. It's going to sound more or less the same since, because we don't have a harmony going. But let's leave it there just for fun to hear what that does to our whole wacky track. Oops, turn off solo. I kind of like it best right there at zero, so we're not gonna really use that, but that's okay. Now we know what it does. Let's move on. 15. Random: Okay, Up next is random, one of my favorite ones. Let's add this one still to our operator track here. What we can do with random is basically say pick a random pitch. What it's going to do is it's going to take notes coming in. We can say with chance. We can say random. Do we want to get choices? We can say how many possible could you choose 12. Then interval, we can say far away from our original note. Are you going to go if I leave everything else the same? I'm at 0% for chance. Now it's just sounding the same. You can see here what it's doing. Zero. It's playing the notes that we've given it. Plus means it's going up and minus means it's going down. Let's say higher, mostly zero. Every now and then it's giving us a new note. Let's say 100% Now we're going to get no, maybe once every once in a while. I think now we're only going up, it's adding random notes above the notes we've given it. That's because we've said add. What it's doing is it's going to add these notes together. We can say subtract, and it's only going to go down. Or we can say both. Now it's going to go up and down. If we wanted to get really wacky, we increase this interval, now it's going all over the place. Let's go back. One thing to keep in mind here is that these notes are truly random. They are not in the key. If we want them to stay in the key, we have to hit the little key ware button. Okay? Now those random notes are going to stay in that key. Okay? So what I'm going to do to make this sound good, I'm going to say just add, I don't want to go so high. See, now we've got nice little like, melodic ideas popping out. It's kind of cool now. I kind of wish this whole thing was an octave higher. So let's go back to pitch and set this to 12. Just push everything up an octave. Neat little melodies kind of pops out. Cool. Let's move on. 16. Scale: Okay, let's make a new midi track. Let's go to sampler. I don't know, That's kind of cool. All right, let's put a note there. Up an octave and just long. About that long. Okay, now let's go back to our media effects and go to scale. Okay, Now scale is a weird one. Scale used to be important because what you would do is you could say, here's what key I'm in, and then put that on the scale. Then put the scale effect on it. And it would conform all your notes to be in that scale. But now in Live 12 we have this key aware business, right? Scale has become a lot less important, but there is one important use for it that I'll show you right now. Ok, watch this first. Let's say what key we're in. We're in C minor. Now, this list of possible keys is the same as the list up here. Okay? So these are just different keys. We can add an extra transposition to it. We can set a range so that it doesn't go out of it. Now, this is going to conform to the scale. If we want to do something really weird, we could draw our own scale if you wanted to. What this means is that notes that come in, we're looking at a piano keyboard this way. Here are notes coming in. Then how are they going to be remapped? When this note comes in, it's going to get pushed down to here, or up to here. We can make it quantizes in a way to a scale, but we can also turn on key, and then that just says, well, you're in minor and this is minor. Now all we can really do with this is add a transposition and range if we wanted to. But one thing you can do with scale that you can't do with the key ware setting is automated. This is going to get a little complicated, but trust me, it'll be worth it. Okay, here's what I'm going to do. Maybe I should go to a new video for this. Just because if you want to know how to use scale, that's it. And then this is going to be more of an advanced technique. Let's go to a new video and I'll walk you through how I'm going to use this. 17. Automating Scales: Okay, I'm going to go back over to my first track here. I'm going to copy this clip and put it here. Okay, now I'm going to put a scale object on it. Now that scale object is on both clips, and that's fine. We're going to say C minor. Now for this clip, I'm going to go into the Midi clip. I'm going to go into my envelopes. I'm going to say the scale object. I'm going to say base. Okay, we're on a minor. But for this clip, the second clip, we're going to switch that to. Okay, now we're going to be minor when I launch this clip, this clip is going to switch the scale object to minor. Okay? Now, in order for that to make sense, I need to do it on all of these, which is handy because you're going to want to see me do that again. This is going to change all the notes to F minor, but it's not necessarily going to just change my whole chord, right? Because the notes are only going to conform to minor. They're not going to transpose up or down, all the way to minor, okay, So let's put scale on this one, okay? And then go into this clip. Go to envelopes, go to this scale object, go to base, move it up to for this clip. Now before I go on, I should point out that I should lock this one in at C so that when I launch this first one again, it goes back to. I'm just going to make a point here so that there is automation here saying that this one is in same deal with this clip. Let's put a scale on it and let's go into this clip. Oops, did I set this one to be minor? See minor? Go into this clip, envelopes, scale base and then this one. All right. This one scale, this one doesn't want scale for some reason. There we go, C minor envelope hoops. I don't need that. Almost done. Now, this seems tedious, but the reason this is handy is because now I can do this more than once. I can just like keep at moving the base around or the scale around if I wanted to. It creates a cool effect that I like to use a lot. All right. Envelopes scale base on the first ones we want that on a C. Second one we want that last one. We already have a scale on this, Let's just set it to minor. And then with this one, with this clip, we want to set that to scale base and then scale base. Okay, now when I launch this top row, I'm going to hear basically the same as what we had before. Then when the second scene everything's going to transpose to the key of. Okay. Now you might say, well, that wasn't nearly as dramatic as I was expecting, but the key of minor and the key of minor is different. It's only different by one note. So it's really just one note that got changed. What I'd really want to do is add a base note to reinforce that we've switched keys, or I could switch to a more dramatically different key, but really only one note was changing when we did that. So let's add a bass note with our next media effect, and it'll be, it'll have a much cooler sound. Trust me. 18. Shaper MIDI: Okay, what's my next instrument here? We just did sampler. Let's do simpler. We want some in base. Let's go, that's cool. Like this thing is a super 80 synth. Let's do a super 80 synth. Okay, I'm just going to put one big note here that is a C. And then I'm not going to use the scale object on this, and I'm just going to make one big note here, that is an Now let's learn another idia effect, which will be Shaper Midi. Okay? Shape or midi will be really familiar to us from the envelope mid, where we have basically an envelope that we can map to a parameter. Then we can see what's happening down here. Let's click the Map button and then let's see what we have here. Let's try this low pass frequency. Right now we can see what's doing here. We can change some shapes, please. Some predefined shapes. But we can also just move points around the grid. We can command click for a little more resolution. We can shift click to get rid of something. We can also command option to add an arc to it. But let's just do this. We don't love that. So let's remap it. Here's our mapping button. Click on that by try. All right, let's kill that. And just fight. Let's try this resonance. Let's increase the length of that. Okay, now I can map this to multiple things. If I hit this button over here, I have a whole bunch of mapping options. So I could make a much more complicated instrument by doing this kind of a thing. Let's go back now. Let's just say random on this a few times. Random, cool. Try that one city thing. All right, let's just go with that for now. All right. Now one more thing I want to do here is go back in here and take this down in octave, and this one down in octave. And now let's try our little chord change again. So here's our first scene. Oops, let's turn off solo first, scene, second scene. Let's turn something kind of cool over and over. 19. Velocity: Okay, last midi effect is velocity. Let's add that. Let's go back to one of these. Let's do this one, this collision, let's put velocity on that, here it is. Basically, this is going to give us just a little more control over our velocity. And we can scale it in different ways. We can push it, we can set a limit, low and high limit, add effectively some compression here. This is fake compression, but it's going to sound like compression answer randomization to the velocity. This is super handy for making something sound a little more human, a little more realistic. However, we can do the same thing in the Midi clip now and don't need this effect. But sometimes it's better to have this effect relatively simple. Great. There's one thing I wanted to add here. I wanted to change this note. I know you're like Jay, you're getting a little too obsessed with this vibe you're making. Check it out. Now let's go out of solo. Let's, let's add one more dramatic thing to this, and then I'm going to give you this session. 20. More Chord Changes: Okay, I'm going to duplicate this scene. I'm just control clicking Duplicate Now, I'm going to go through here, go back to that envelope, make sure we're on scale base. Let's do something a little more dramatic. Let's go to will be slightly a will be a little bit dramatic. From minor to a minor. Yeah, that'll be dramatic. Okay. Let's do that. On all of these scale up to a scale to A. I'm actually going to not do it on the last two, up to A. Okay. Now, this one I'm just going to change this note up to an A. But then I should also change that envelope just to make sure that because I'm going to block out that A. Let's make sure this one all I need to do is change the note to A. All right? All right. So let's hear the three now. It's pretty dramatic. That's so weird because the jump to A is out of A, is not in the key of minor. So it's a weird jump. We could do a flat and then it would be in key. But let's not players. I wanted to do something dramatic and that's how we did it. Okay, so that was fun. I'm going to give you this session. You're welcome to play around with it and go crazy. And then let's move on to modulators. 21. What are these?: All right, modulators. Modulators are a new tab that have just showed up in 11 or live 12. You probably already know what some of these are. If you were with us for part four of this class where we talked about synthesis, then you're already familiar with a lot of modulators, modulator, anything that applies control of something else, it modulates that, right? We saw it in synthesis. All over the place, we have an LFO. An LFO is an oscillator that latches onto another oscillator and controls it. Therefore, it is a modulator. It modulates that an envelope, the ADSR thing, that's a modulator. In synthesis, we have FM, where we have one or more oscillators that are carriers, and then one or more that are modulators. They are controlling some or all elements of another one. Modulators are just things that affect something else. We could make an argument that any automation is a type of modulation. These modulators are going to be things that control other things. Now we can see just from the icons that these are all max for live devices, right? Again, that doesn't really mean very much other than that we can pop them open and rewrite them or make them do different things just for fun, but otherwise they're just normal effects. Now these are not audio effects or Midi effects, these are some of both. We're going to see some of both in here. Also in here, there are some redundancies like envelope Miti. We already saw in if envelope Midi, we'll deal with those as they come up. Let's dive in. 22. Envelop Follower: Okay, envelope follower, cool. This is a really cool utility. Let's make a new track. But I'm going to make an audio track, let's find some long sample to put on it. Just I'm trying to find a very obvious thing we can do with this standing in the rain, further down image. All right, let's use that one. Okay, so here's a long vocal sample. Okay. Now let's find one of our other sounds and see what we can do with it. Okay, let's at, okay, let's use this one. This will be a little weird. Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take my envelope follower and put it on this Midi track, Okay? Now look where it put it. First of all, that's going to tell us that this is an audio effect because it put it after the instrument, which is fine. What this is going to do is it's going to look at the audio and extrapolate an envelope that that is doing okay. There it is. It says there's a little envelope, let's boost it. Okay. We can shape it a little bit with some of these controls here. Okay, so now I can map that envelope to anything I want. Any other parameter. I'm going to click on Map. Then I'm going to go over to the volume of this other track, my vocal sample. Okay, now that envelope is going to control the volume of the vocal sample. Cool, right? So, and I can do the same thing. I go to this list and say I also want that map to control our baseline. Cool. Let's get out of that. Basically what we've done is we've taken the volume envelope from a track, from a sound, and applied it to anything else. Let's hear the whole thing, okay? I like that on the vocal. I don't love it on that bassline. It's going to go here and just kill that one, Okay? So you can make that envelope. Do anything you want. 23. Envelope MIDI: Okay, Envelope Miti. Now we've already seen envelope Midi. This is a redundant one. We put it here on our drift track. With envelope Midi, we can do a very similar thing, except backwards. In a way, we can draw an envelope and then apply that to any Midi parameter. Okay, this one is a midi effect. It's going to come before the instrument and let us control any element of the instrument. But it's essentially the same as the envelope follower. But just backwards, we've got the amount here, we can customize it a little bit our envelope and then use this tool to grab any parameter in our instrument. Here you can do the same thing, you can grab multiple parameters and control multiple things. I don't think with this one we can go outside of this track. I was wrong. We super can. Now this envelope is controlling the panning on our electric. So the envelope miti can control any parameter just with a ADSR envelope. 24. Expression Control: All right. Expression control. Another one we've seen before. We used it out on our electric here. This is the one where we've got some parameters but also random and increment that we can use to control our Midi instrument. This one, like envelope Midi, is both a modulator and a midi effect. It is designed to control parameters of something else, which makes it a modulator. That's why they've listed it twice. But it's worth thinking about these as modulators as something that can modulate something else as you're thinking about using them to create music. Just pointing that out again. Let's move on to our next one, LFO, which is new. 25. LFO: All right, let's look at this LFO modulator. Now This one is very similar to envelope follower, except that instead of grabbing the envelope from something else, it's just going to generate an LFO. Now if you remember from synthesis, an LFO stands for Low Frequency oscillator. It's an oscillator that's just going. And we can latch onto that pattern and apply it to another parameter using it as a modulator, modulate something else. This effect is wild because it's basically put an LFO on any thing, let's put it down here. This effect, this sound, is that ind of long sustained thing. Let's turn this off. The sound let's add a little more shape to that, a little more motion to it with this LFO. Okay, here's our LFO. Note that it's an audio rate device. It's over on the right side of our instrument. We can use it for anything. We can shape our LFO in all kinds of ways. We can say a triangle to have it go up and down. Stray, a meandering, one like that. Let's go with that, let's set it to divisions of the beat depth offset phase. Then let's map it to something we could go back to our Midi device and map it to this filter. You see what it's doing there, Let's hear it. That's interesting. Let's map it also to the high pass, but let's do it opposite. So we'll go 100 here in negative 100 here. So they're moving in opposite directions. It's kind of fun. Gives it a little bit more motion. Let's map it to the drive, but less. It's cool. We could also map it to any other parameter. I mean, let's go to Meld and say the shape, I just grabbed the shape of that Meld. You can map it to tons of stuff. It doesn't need to all be the same device. It can be all over your session. It's a lot to keep track of as you're working on it, but it's giving us some cool sound, so it's just becoming much more alive. You know, it's like all these modulation elements are really just giving us like, it's like putting electricity into Frankenstein, you know, or not Frankenstein, the monster that is Frankenstein. Everyone makes that mistake anyway, breathing life into it. Let's move on. 26. Shaper: All right, I'm feeling like we need some groove here. I threw in this drum loop. Let's see if we can make it work with our next modulator, which is Shaper. And we've seen Shaper before, or have we? We've seen a Midi Shaper. But this is audio, this is different. There's shape or Midi. And there's shape or audio. You can see that we are going to see Shape or Midi again, it's the next one, but this is an audio version of the same effect. All that really means is that we can map this to something different. What if I put this on this drum loop? I don't think this is going to sound particularly interesting, but maybe if I did some pattern, let's put it here, E. It's going a little too fast. Lower down. Lower down, okay. Nothing like concess. Yeah, that's not really working for me. So let's try a different mapping. Let's maybe do a little bit of mapping on the panning. Maybe a no subtle, the shaper thing, we can basically map to anything. It works the same as Midi, except we can do some audio things with it. Go. 27. Shaper MIDI: Okay, now we're back to our sh Midi, which we have down here. This one. It looks exactly the same. It can do the same stuff, except it goes on our track before. On a Midi track, it's a little bit easier to keep track of what's going on because we can see our Midi parameters very quickly. But otherwise, it's basically the same device. 28. Presets: Okay, before we wrap up this section, I do want to point out one thing that I skipped over. And that is that we do have some interesting presets here. For all of these, not all of them, most of them explore those. Miti doesn't, but Shaper does. And this can get you some cool effects. Explore those presets. Now let me give you this session again, if you want to see how we did this mapping, you're welcome to play around with it. Rip it apart, have some fun. Then we'll move on to audio effects. 29. Three Types: Dynamic, Time, Frequency: All right, up next we're going to deal with audio effects. Now we have a big old list here. Let's think of a way to divvy these up into categories. Now in Live 11, they put all of these in categories. If you're looking at Live 11 or you're familiar with Live 11, you'll see that I think there was five or six different folders where all of these effects were categorized into. Those folders were a bit controversial because people argued about what goes in what folder and what type of thing. I don't want to have anything to do with it, but now those folders are gone. There may be a way to put things back into folders by the time the full version is released because getting rid of the folder is also controversial. Um, so I am going to divide them up into three categories that I like to think about. We think about audio effects in terms of dynamic effects, time effects, and frequency effects. Okay, Dynamic effects are effects that deal with volume in some way. Time effects are things that deal with time in some way, like delays and things like that. And frequency effects, effects that deal with adding or removing frequencies. Some pitch type material. Now, there's a lot of effects that fit into more than one of these categories. Don't take them too literally. I'm going to work through all of these effects based on those categories. And then some subcategories. We're going to start on frequency effects and move on from there. Now I think what I want to do here is something different than what we did with Midi effects because we really want to understand what the effect is doing. I really want to take one audio clip and put all of these effects on the one single clip so that we can really hear how it changes for each effect. I generally don't like doing that a thing because it can get boring listening to the same clip over and over and over and over. But I think in this case, it's the best way to really hear what the effect is doing, which is the most important part. So that's how we'll explore these effects. Last thing I'll say on this topic is that just like the modulator section, we had some modulator effects that were listed in the modulator category. And also in media effects. We have the same thing in audio effects where there are a few effects that are listed in modulators and audio effects. In particular envelope follower LFO and the Shaper. I'm not going to go over those again in the audio effects section here because we just have too many to go through. But we are going to go through every single one of them other than those three because we've already gone through those. Cool. All right, let's dive in with some frequency based effects. 30. Amp: Okay, so I lied a little bit. Instead of one audio sample, I put together four short samples that kind of all have different characteristics. And we'll kind of show off the effects. So we'll put the effects on all of them because we're all on the same track. We'll kind of focus in on a few different. So here's my four quick little clips that we'll listen to. This is no effects, totally dry. Okay, cool. I just changed the warp setting on this to make it a little cleaner. Okay, so cello, little beat, trombone and another little beat. So let's start with amp. Okay, so here's amp. Now, all in this first category are going to be frequency effects, and particularly these are going to be kind of drive effects, which basically is a fancy way to say distortion. This amp effect is really an emulator, meaning that it's designed to mimic something in the physical world and software. And this one is designed to emulate amps. Really simple here, actually we've got a couple different kinds of amps here and these will be familiar based on the graphics, like they don't say the name of what these are, but this is, I think it's a Fender looking thing. This is like your big rock cabinet, like a 51, 50 thing. I think this is a Mesa Boogie or something like that. Heavy bas, Where's mine? Several different things. Now in addition to this, we can boost, The volume gain is always going to be just a volume boost. We've got a little EQ here, mid and treble. If we want to hear more base, we're going to turn that up. If we want to hear more the middle frequencies, we're going to turn that up more treble, we're going to add more frequencies. Okay. Presence is another Q that zooms in on mid, high frequencies. It's more important thing in distortion type effects because so much of what we're adding frequency wise is upper frequencies. Real quick. Let me just explain why a distortion effect is a frequency effect. When we add distortion to something, we are adding a bunch of frequencies, particularly higher ones that drive sound. Distortion is adding a bunch of frequencies in the high upper range. Let's hear it on our cello. Let's go to rock. And let's just use the default settings here, right? That gnarliness, that grittiness, those are really just high frequencies. All right? I should say it's mostly high frequencies. A couple other things that we'll point out here that we're going to see in all of our effects. Basically we have a volume here and again here you'll see this in a lot of effects. Gain is basically going to boost the input and then run it through the effect. Volume is going to boost the output, okay? There are some situations where you could turn up the gain or the volume and it's not really going to matter, it's going to make things louder. But there are other situations where if you want something louder, it will change the sound of it quite a lot, whether or not you boost it when it's coming in or boost it when it's coming out. Let's try it. Let's go. Okay. Okay. Now, let's boost the game a lot. And pull the volume down so that it's roughly about the same volume. Okay? It's crunchier, it's a lot crunchier there. That's the difference between those two dry, wet amount. You'll see this on nearly all effects. This is really simply just a balance knob between the effect and the knot effect. The knot effect is dry. If I turn this all the way dry, we're turning the effect off. Okay, As I turn this up, we're going to get more, and more and more of the effect. The wet is the affected sound. Okay? And if you go all the way wet, you want maximum effect. Okay? Sometimes if you want the effect, but you want to tone down the effect but not change the character of it, it's really just the dry wet that you want. So here I'm getting half the original and half the wet effect. Tear it down our drums bad. Okay, see that's too much. Pull it back, I got a nice tasty amount of distortion. Okay, so there we go. Now this output mono and stereo. Basically, if we turn this on, we're going to process each signal separately, which will be handy, will have some effect in this drum beat because it is a stereo file, but will have no effect in this one. Okay? There's no need to turn that on here, but if you have a lot of panning and stuff in the file, you're probably going to want to turn that on. Okay, Let's move on to cabinet which complements amp really well, in fact, they're designed to kind of work together. 31. Cabinet: Okay, cabinet is another drive frequency effect. I might even just call it a coloring effect because it's going to add color When we are adding color to a sound, we are adding frequencies and overtones which are frequencies. Cabinet is another emulator thing, and it's designed to emulate a cabinet. In fact, if you're not familiar with these terms amp and cabinet, let me take you on a little field trip real quick. This over here is a cabinet. It's got speakers. This one has four small speakers in it. The amp is in the back. And then the cabinet, any guitar amp, has the amp. And then the cabinet. Most of the processing, all of the processing happens in the amp. But the cabinet, the arrangement of speakers, does matter when you're recording it. Where you put a microphone also matters. A lot of people don't realize that in a recording studio, when we record guitar, sometimes most of the time, especially if it's distorted, we record it by sticking microphone in front of the amp. That's how it works because we want to get the sound and color of that amp. We have the amp and then we also have the cabinet. That's the arrangement of speakers. Okay, what we can say with this is what is the arrangement of speaker one by 12 means we have one 12 inch speaker, has a slightly different sound than 2122 big speakers. Four 12 speakers, usually in a grid of two by 2410. That's what I have back there. Four ten inch speakers or four ten inch base speakers. Okay, let's set it to four ten, my amp. And then where are we putting the microphone? Okay, Let's say this box of guitar strings is our speaker. This microphone is our microphone. Because it is a microphone. How are we going to me it on axis, this is O. Let's see that. I'm going to go vertical. We're near on axis. That basically means we're going to put a microphone close to it, right in front of the speaker. Cool. If we're going to go off access, we're going to go like this. Okay? It's not going to be like just right in front of it, it's going to be off center just a little bit. Then far means we're going to be farther away. Near and off center doesn't really matter when you're farther away. I always prefer to mike my amp off center and near always when I'm recording mic, I always start with off access. I can say what microphone I'm using, condenser and dynamic. Most of the time I'm using a dynamic. Do I want a mono or stereo output? And then I have a dry wet mix. The cabinet is going to add a certain coloration, but it's much more subtle than the amp. Let's hear it. Okay, let's go back to all the way wet on our amp. And let me just turn off the cabinet for a second. So here's our cello through the rock amp without a cabinet. Okay, now here it is with the cabinet. Okay, it's much darker actually, let's try it with a condenser mic. In this case, the cabinet is coloring the sound quite a bit. It's actually taking away a lot of that distortion. It's filtering it out. You can use the amp or the cabinet independently, but they really go great together. 32. Drum Buss: Okay. Up next is drum bus. Now, I didn't point this out before, and I probably should have the effects that I'm going through. The list of effects, these are all the effects in Sweet. If you're not using sweet, you probably don't have a lot of these effects and that's okay. You can skip over them, but I'm going to go through all of them anyway because I am a completionist. I've taken all our effects of sound. So we're back to clean. Let's put a drum bus on it. The drum bus really goes well on a group or a bus, that's why it's called drum bus, why? And what does that mean? This is really designed to help glue drum sounds together. In fact, we have another tool with that specific purpose called the glue compressor that we'll deal with soon. But the idea here is that we've got an analog style processor that's going to add some color and brightness to our drums and help them gel together. If you've got like five tracks, then you've got kicks here, snares here, high hats here, and other effects or ox percussion or something here. Then you can put those in a group and then put this drum bus on them. And it'll help blend them together in a way that feels like a kit. That's the main purpose here. It's not going to do that for what we have here, but we can still get a lot of color out of it. Let's listen to it on these drums, okay? So we can already hear that there's like some real drive happening. Really push it, I'm going to pull our output down because that's screaming loud. Okay, let's push that drive. It's kind of like a classic analog kind of sound crunch. That crunch is really going to push the high end, going to push the low ends a little intense. We can adjust the frequencies of those two things. Remember transience our attacks, That's really when we get into like a gluing situation. Trying to make things work together has a lot to do with the transience. This is how much crunch we're going to apply to our transience. We've got three different types of distortion here, soft, medium, and hard. Soft is like a wave shaping distortion. It's like a fancy term for it's going to make the waveform a little more rigid and that'll produce some upper overtones that we'll hear as distortion. Medium is a limiting distortion that's basically set up a ceiling and just let us push up against it and that creates a certain amount of distortion. And hard is a clipping distortion, which basically is going to emulate that we're clipping our signal which is going over a threshold. They have slightly different sounds, they're more aggressive. As you get higher, obviously soft is soft and hard is a more aggressive sound. This trim is pushing our input amount, so we can scale it back. If we want to get less aggressive with it, then we can add a little bit of compression to it also, which is going to color it in a different way actually. Okay, the last thing here is this button is a little strange, basically is going to set low end. This boom is a low end enhancer. When you click this Go button, it's going to set your low end to the nearest Midi note. It's basically going to quantize you to an actual note versus just having your frequencies in the low end just all down there. It can help clean up a mix a little bit. Then we have a dry, wet mix over here that your drum bus use it on drums. 33. Dynamic Tube: Okay, up next is dynamic tube. If you've ever heard people talk about tube amplifiers, that means an amp with actual, they're called vacuum tubes. They look like a little thing that you might find in Frankenstein's lab. They're cool and they have a certain sound to them. You find them in some more expensive amps. Older amps, you don't find them in most modern amps because they're a little delicate sometimes, but they do sound cool. This effect is emulating that tube. Sound tube. Amps have particular color to them and a certain distortion. That's what we're going to get out of this. We have our output, our drive, that's just our amount of distortion tone is, is the color of our distortion. We have three different types of distortion here. You can see what they're doing. The way that a tube gets its distortion and its real tubiness, is that a word? I think so. Is to push it beyond its capacity. If we're just using the tube, how it's supposed to be used, we get a nice sound, but if we push it too hard, that's where you get that cool tube. Sound The way we're going to push it too hard is this bias knob. This is where the magic lives. Let's go to A and let's hear it on our cello. No one's gonna loop that cello Sound 'cause that just is working really great for all of this, Okay? Not much. Let's push that bias. Ooh, okay, there's that bias. But we don't have any drive on it, so let's give it a little drive too. A lot of drive, Yeah. Let's try the flavor a little more stable, okay? Can boost the output. Really crank up that bias. It's a different kind of distortion. It's now, we can also drive it with this envelope which is controlling this bias knob. Push this car, the envelope is going to follow our signal and push it more as our signal needs it. We can also go negative with that, to kind of have it invert. And then the attack and release are going to help shape how that envelope is applied. A different kind of distortion, more of a tube distortion. Let's hear it on this drum loop here. I like using tube effects on drum loops because they give it that really kind of like 90s hip hop kind of vibe, which I kind of like. 34. Erosion: Okay, let's look at erosion. Another flavor of distortion or drive what we have here is this is going to add distortion by modulation. It's going to modulate into the signal another signal. Either no wide noise or a sine wave. It's a synthesis actually that's happening here. Let's go back to our lo, let's see. We can point the noise where we want it to be. As we go up, we get more of that noise. Try wide noise, a little messier than the sign. Takes away the width parameter. So you can move this little ball around this grid to really dial it in where you want. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that this erosion distortion is not my favorite distortion effect. I don't actually use it very often. I find it to be just a little too digital sounding. It's just not my favorite sound. If you like the sound that is awesome, you should use this sound all the time. I don't know, It's not the one I reach for. I prefer the tube and some of the more the tube effects and the overdrive effects, like the overdrive plug in, like the overdrive effect that we're actually going to go onto right now. Let's do that. 35. Overdrive: Okay, oops. Let's get rid of erosion and pull up over drive into our cello. Okay. This one is relatively simple but I like the sound of it. We just have a few stages here. First we have a little band pass filter. We're going to apply that to the sound and then we're going to put distortion on it. What that does is it lets us hone in what we want to distort. Do we want to focus our distortion on the low end? Mid range, almost everything. If we push it way up high end, let's put it, this is a low sound, let's put it right there. Okay, Drive and tone is just going to be a filter on our high end stuff to shape it a bit. This dynamics is going to apply a little bit of compression, which basically means we'll go into compression a whole bunch in a little bit. But basically what that means is that the distance from the loud stuff to the quiet stuff, or quiet stuff to the loud stuff can get smooshed a little bit. That can make it so the distortion is applied a little bit more evenly. Let's hear it, let's push that drive a little harder. Let's push our dry wet all the way up, make it a little brighter. So there you go. A pretty simple overdrive, but I mean this overdrive is really emulating like a classic Boss Distortion petal. You know, if you're a guitar player, you know what that is. Guitar effect petals, basically. 36. Pedal: Okay, Up next is Petal. Now if you like to overdrive, petal is similar. Petal is literally emulating, like guitar petals. This is listed by Ableton as a guitar effect. That means nothing. That does not mean you can only use it on guitars, means you can use it on anything you want. I know a lot of people that like to use this on vocals. I know people that use this on drums. You can use it on anything. But it really is emulating a guitar petal, that's why it's called Petal, let's check it out. Gain, we can just really boost our gain which will push dist, squeeze more distortion onto it. And we can cut our output or boost our output if we like. We have three different flavors of distortion. We have drive distort, which is distort have fuzz. You can think of these as overdrive is pushing an ample a little hard and it's going to give you a warm distortion distort is going to be a little bit brighter and more aggressive then fuzz, like your amp is partially broken, that's the fuzz. Sounds like this broken amp. Sound With this little switch, we can basically decide what we want to boost. If we want to boost the mids, we turn this up and put this in the middle. If we want to boost trouble, we put this over here. Okay, let's leave it as is for now. We have dry, wet mix and then sub is going to add a boost to the very low end of your sound. If you have a sound that has a lot of low end, you can turn this on and it'll actually bring it out a little bit more. A lot of the time with these guitar pedals, you don't want too much going on in the low end. This is set up as an option. All right, let's hear it, Let's do overdrive first. It down a little bit. Gain is, all right. Distortion. Let's go to Distortion. Fuzzier and fuzz. You hear like in between the notes with fuzz, it just feels like it's like like falling apart for a minute. Let's try over Drive with our sub on. It's not so obvious here, we don't have a lot of low end. Let's hear it on these drums. You can really hear that sub on these drum sounds. Let's actually go this one just a little bit longer but it doesn't have very much bass. All right, let me give you this one to hear a little bit. Sub on, it's really bringing out that kick a little bit. I like the sub on for distortion on drums not so much for guitar and more trouble things. 37. Redux: Okay. Onto Redux. Now, maybe you've heard of a Bit Crusher before. A lot of people actually think that the erosion plug in that we looked at a few videos ago is a bit crusher and it's not. It sounds like a good name for a bit crusher. And I think that's where the confusion comes from. But it's not a bit crusher. Red, however, is a bit crusher. So what does a bit crusher do? We generally, if you remember or if you were here for back in part two, I think when we talked about recording, we run systems at 44,001 samples per second and 16 bits. Okay, that's like standard audio. You don't need to know what that means. Let me just tell you that that is standard audio rate that is good quality audio. If we want bad quality audio, we can use an effect like this to lower that or to simulate lowering that bit rate or sample rate that will create a certain distortion effect. The effect generally has an old video game sound, like a Tari video game. Let's go back to our cello. That'll probably work pretty well on it. Okay, so we have rate here, that's that sampling rate here we have bits, We can add a little jitter, which is going to adjust our sampling rate a little bit, shake it up, move it around, and some shape to the bit rate. Let's just hear it first. Okay, here it is. All the way up, we're not doing anything, is all the way up. Let's start with sampling rate because the less dramatic one, pull it down, you can instantly hear, let's run up, jitter on it. Okay, cool. Let's put this all the way up and then go to our bit rate. So don't you get down to one combined, we get that real video gaming sound. All right, we can add a little filter to this if we want to adjust some frequencies. Dry, wet amount. This DC shift is going to what we can do, what this does here is when our bit crusher is down really low like where we are now. If it's just getting too out of control, you could turn on this DC shift and it kind of softens it a little bit. Let's put this back up, right, like it's, it's really kind of making more chaos in the, in between, which is kind of wild. But the notes themselves are a little softer and more controlled. But the notes in between are just kind of crazy. If you want that old video game sound, that Bit Crusher Sound, this is the tool for you. Oh, before we move on, I love Bit Crushers on Drums. There we go. 38. Saturator: All right, up next is saturated. So we've seen that word pop up a few different times. Here's how I like to think about saturation. Here's my weird colorful analogy for it. So let's say you have a bag of water. No, let's use this cup, empty, coffee cup full of water. Okay? And you put a bunch of glitter in this cup. In the water in this cup. Okay? And then you kind of shake it up and now you've got this water filled with glitter, right? And that's cool. It's got a lot of glitter in it. Now let's say you take the same amount of glitter, but less water, in a smaller cup. Okay, so we're going to go down to a smaller cup that's only like this big, and you're going to use the same amount of glitter. You're going to have a much more glittery, your water will be much more vibrant with glitter, right? Because it is more saturated into the water, right? There is more glitter in the water. That's kind of how I think about saturation. We're basically saying take the distortion and like so it take more distortion and smoosh it into the same amount of signal, saturate it with the glitter in a way. Okay, enough colorful analogies. Let's go back to our cello sample and dig through this effect, our main drive control here. Let's pull our output back a little bit and just drive our drive as hard as we can. Okay, let's pull that back just a little bit. What we're going to do here is basically use wave shaping. Okay, wave shaping means we're going to take the waves and modulate them with another wave form to alter them to create more overtones. Here are our options. Okay, we have analog clip, soft sign, medium curve, hard curve, Sinoidold, digital clip and wave shaper. Let's look at sinoid folds. Crank this up and just listen to the differences, okay? So a bit of variety to them. A couple of things we haven't seen before. This soft clip, you'll see soft clip on a few different things. This is just like a very light distortion. It's just pushing it a little too hard, pushing the signal just a little too hard and giving us a little bit of distortion that actually a lot of the time comes off as like warmth to the sound. Like if I do nothing on this, everything is off except this soft clip. Put our output back up. Okay, that's a good tone. So you know, it's very subtle. But on a lot of effects, newer effects, you're going to see this soft clip button kind of hidden there, and it can add a nice little bit of warmth. Okay, let's go back to color now. There's a weird little secret hiding in the saturator. That is, that if we go down to waveshaper, this is going to be the most extreme one. And it's really going to let us define the wave that we use to shape the other wave or the incoming signal. Okay? You're like, how do I create my own wave here? Because waveshaper means that I can create my own wave that we're going to apply. Well there's some controls that are hidden and they're right here. Okay, so these six controls only apply to Waveshaper. If I go to a different wave with this open, they all get grayed out. Only Waveshaper can use these. With this we can really define some wacky stuff and make some lovely distortion. One thing I'll say about this is back in the day there was a wave shaping tools, like a very early wave shaping tool in a dedicated program called Turbocynth. Turbocynth I believe is long gone. I haven't seen anything in Turbosynth for a long time, but I used to love that program because of its wave shaping function. I used to actually keep an old Mac around that was really old, was like S eight or something like that. Just for the purpose of running Turbocynth, that wave shaper tool that it had. I was always told that that is what Trent Reznor ran his guitars through because it was it was just so gnarly. This wave shaper on the saturator is as close as I can get to that. If you run guitars through this, you can really get that early nine inch nails Sound where it's just a wall of distortion. Consider that. 39. Roar (Basics): All right, up next we have roar. This is the mother of all distortion effects. Let's call it a super effect because it has like ten different effects built into it. It's got a compressor in it, it's three stages of distortion. It's EQs in it, it's got routing in it. It's giant, we're going to go through it. We might break this one up and do a few different videos though. Okay, so let's start over here first. We have our drive where we can push the signal or pull back the signal before it hits. All of our processing tone is like before, just a little filter. If we push it up, we're going to get more higher frequency stuff. If we pull it down, we're going to get lower frequency stuff. And we can set the threshold on that with this dial right here. Okay. Next we have this routine thing. We've never seen this before. This is very new. I will call this routing, but Ableton wants to call it routine. It's a little different than routing. It is a routine. If you look at this little icon here, what we have is it's saying single meaning stage one. All of these settings is basically our distortion setting. We're going to run our signal into stage one and then out of stage one, and that's the end of it. Easy enough, right? We could go series, in which case we're going to have two stages of saturation. We're going to go into our first stage and then into our second stage. And then we have a loop creating feedback in our second stage if we want it. We have parallel where we're going to run through both stages at the same time and then put them back together. We have multi band where we get a third stage and they're separated low, mid, and high. We can set the thresholds of each one. Down here we have a mid side, which is a type of EQ, or a type of processing where we're, we're doing different things depending on our stereo field and we're doing things like in the middle and the sides. Then we have just a feedback chain where we're going into our first stage. And then feedback. So we can see here it's direct and feedback, we can blend where that occurs. You can see how things are hitting the different stages. Here we've got a little input to show us where our signal is going as we adjust the three different stages. Okay, let's go into cereal and let's look at stage one here. First, we have an amount that we're going to send to the shaper, and we have a whole bunch of options for our shaper. This is like what we've already seen in terms of different types of saturation and distortion for digital clip. A bit crusher, we know what that is now. A tube prem diode clipper we haven't seen yet. Some of these we've seen and some of them we haven't. But they're basically different shapes that we're going to apply to our incoming signal within this wave shaper. This is actually a good example, a good visual of what the bias does here. It's basically showing us where we're going to hit that waveshaper. If we move this bias around and see we can find a sweet spot for our particular sound with that bias tool. Then also next we go through a filter. If we want it, we can turn it off. We have a bunch of filter settings, resonance amount, and our cutoff frequency. We can be pre or post, meaning we can hit and I believe if we're on, the filter applies before the shaper. If we're not on pre, it applies after the shaper, like what it looks like here. Okay, next we have this feedback section where we can select a mode an amount of time and then an amount that we're going to use it if we let it feed back on itself, which is what we're doing here. Eventually you get this come filter Sound Which is that which can be cool sometimes. One cool thing about this feedback mode is you can actually set it to note and then kind of center your feedback on a particular pitch, which can be really cool for your mixes sometimes. Okay, And then next we have this compressor at the end of it. Now we're going to talk more about compressors like I said, but basically compression is a dynamic thing that smooths out the volume of your sound. Now this can be important in a thing like this where you're adding so much and doing so much and you've got this feedback. You might have some elements of your sound that are super loud and some that are super quiet. This compression can smooth things out. If you have a really wild sound, crank up your compression, We don't need it so much here in what we're doing, but it can help. This CHP is side chain high pass filter. Basically if you turn this on, it's going to bring out some of the low end. If you turn it off it's not going to do that. Can be a mid range low bot ally boost, but more of a U. Let's see, boost. Okay, that's like the basics of R, but there's like a ton of things we haven't looked at yet. In. Let's go to a new video and focus on this modulation section. 40. Roar (Modulation): Okay, so let's go into the modulation settings here. Okay, so we have two tabs here. Mod source and matrix. Okay, this matrix probably getting a little familiar, we've seen that a few times in the synthesis section. Let's go to mod sources. Basically here we're going to set up things that can modulate stuff. Okay, these are our stuff, these are things that can be used to modulate those things. Then here is where we're going to connect them. First we have LFO one we can say. We can give it a shape, we can give it a rate, some different settings. Another LFO, an envelope, and a just noise generator that has different characteristics. We've seen this wander thing around a little bit. We can have it synced to the beat here. Then we can go over here. Now it looks like we can just modulate one thing, but that is super not accurate. This target is going to change based on what we click down. Everything we can click on here is modulatable. Let's say I want to modulate saturation amount in stage one, okay? I just click on it and it comes up here. Let's modulate it with LFO one, okay? We can see in these little tiny lines what these modulators are doing. Okay? There's shape or one amount. Okay, let's maybe go to our frequency here. You can see that the shaper is working. It's just very subtle. This is the opposite of that. Let's pull that down, get a little less subtle. What else do we want? Our feedback mode. Let's put that on our noise as well. Let's maybe go to stage two and say we got our second LFO on this amount here. Pull that back a little bit. Let's make it more complicated by also putting an envelope on that. Let's do something weird with the noise here. Maybe a comb filter, a good amount of resonance. All right, so now we're starting to get a very lively living sound. Okay, one of the things that's going on here is that we can see the parameters that we've modulated in this little window. We can see stage two here and stage one, but we can't see everything all at once. If we want to see everything all at once, we can go up to this triangle here and click on it. Now, don't freak out, it looks like we have 1 million more settings here, but we don't. This is just stage one broken out, so we can see it at the same time as stage two, stage three, which we are currently not using. Down here we have our mod sources and our modulation matrix here. We've just set it up so we can see a bunch more stuff, right? If we open this up even more by pulling this up, we can see more. We can see our modulation sources at the bottom. Now we have this nice big thing. We can also see in our modulation matrix, everything that's possible. Okay, let's see. Got some action, and let's do some more modulation. I like this noise setting, so I'm just going to put a bunch of stuff on. Noise. Let's do our feedback frequency, that's probably going to get kind of annoying kind of fast. There we go. It's marching around up there. This modulation in this thing is just insane. I didn't mention before, This envelope follower that we can see is following our wave form. And we can use that as a modulation source up here, which can be a really fun way to modulate stuff. Let's move this over to our cello because there's so much modulation possible here that people are actually using this as a synthesizer. What if I modulator our modulation with some of the LFO? Okay, so now I've made just something kind of crazy here. Let's go to this beach. Yeah, that's super D. This is a giant effect. I could spend all day on this. Check it out, play with it, especially check out some of the presets in there's a lot of really wild and cool ones that I'll get you to really cool places really fast. Check out some of those. Let's move on. 41. Vinyl Distortion: All right, now for something completely different, let's go to vinyl distortion. This is a very simple effect that basically is going to give the feeling of the old crackle from a vinyl record. Let's go to our cello. Here comes the crackle, got density to it. We can dial this into getting more realistic, but this is a very simple effect. It's really just layering this vinyl noise over top, like I've stopped it and you can still hear it going. You can do this. It's a cool effect, it is adding some frequencies, so I'm including it in the frequency effect, but it's actually very simple added if you like stuff, it's neat. Okay, moving on up next, we have EQs and filters. Let's head to it. 42. EQ Eight: Okay, up next we're going to do four different effects, and these are all EQs and filters. These are still frequency effects because what all of these do is mess with the frequencies of our signal or our sound. We're going to start with the most complicated, but it has the best visual way to understand what's going on after this. The other three will be relatively simple. We're going to go to eight. All right? I'm going to throw that onto this. So in the synthesis part of this series of classes, we talked about how an EQ works. But I'm going to do it again just because it's really important that you understand how EQ's work. Now one of the best things about EQ eight is that we can hit this button here and get a much bigger version of what's on the screen here. Let's do that. All right, now we have this nice, big thing, and we can see our sound in it as well, right? So there's all the frequencies of our sound. Now here's what we're seeing. On the left we have low sounds, and on the right we have high sounds, right? Pretty simple. Low stuff. High stuff, okay? Now, the vertical axis, what we have here is there's a zero underneath that little tal line and then six, 12. Negative six and negative 12. Okay. When this little line is at zero, we are doing nothing. Okay? Zero means nothing. Above zero means boosting, and below zero means cutting. And those numbers six and 12 are decibels. Right now I am boosting the very low frequencies of this sound by 6 decibels. Okay? And then by maybe 5 decibels, 4321, and then back to 0 decibels for the rest of it. Okay, now I'm cutting volume from the low mid range. I'm still boosting stuff up here, Right around here, we're not doing anything. And then down here, we're reducing the sound by about 4 decibels. Right here, around 200 K. All right, so low stuff, high stuff, boost cut. Cool. Now, this particular EQ is called EQ eight, and what it means the eight means we have eight different bands of EQ. We see four here. We can set up each one of these four to do what we want. If we go down here, here are our first four. We can turn on four more if we want them and have up to eight. Okay. I'm going to go down to just one for a second. All right. Here is one band, EQ, here's what's in a band. First we have a frequency. Where do we want to target this thing? Then let's say we want to put it right about there. Then what do we want to do to it? Do we want to boost or do we want to cut? Okay, the third thing is the shape. Okay, we have a lot of different shapes here. High pass, that means let the high frequencies pass through it. But cut off the low frequencies, we have low pass, that's the opposite. Let the low frequencies pass through but cut off the high frequencies. Then we have a few different kinds of band pass, band reject, and things like that. Let's do a high pass filter. I can adjust the frequency with this dial or just by clicking on the one and moving it around. Now in this high pass, it means we're going to cut all the low stuff out below this point. This is called the cutoff frequency. It's going to roll it off, but things above it are unaffected. We can give what's called resonance by doing this a thing. Resonance gives it a little lip up right at the cutoff frequency. Then we've got something called Q, which is like the width of it. It looks like resonance here, but it has to do with how wide this bump is. You can see that more obvious in things like band reject like this, where we're just going to go to a specific area and say we want to cut out those sounds. The Q is going to be like the width of that, right? It's really how specific do you want it to be? I believe Q stands for Quality. Okay, that's it. We can do that eight times with the eight. If I turn on more of these, every time you add another band, things get a little more complicated and start to pile up. You can make some interesting EQ's this way. But let's go back to our single band so we can just hear it. Okay. High pass here is cello. We're basically is going to cut out all the low frequencies of it. Uh, right. If we want to do the opposite, cut out all the high frequencies, we can do this, we can open this up. Okay, so that is your basic EQ. And EQ eight is really the go to for me, like I always am just grabbing EQ eight so that I can really see what I'm doing. I have a lot of room to work and I can add more bands to it as we go. Okay, so now let's look at kind of the mini version of this, which is called Q Three. 43. EQ Three: All right, let's get rid of Q eight and go to EQ three. Eq three is very small version of it. Wow, that was bad words usage. Good luck to the translators working on this one. Let me try that again. This is a smaller version of it. Here all we have is a low knob, a mid knob and a high knob. What we can do is we can say what defines low. In this case, that's with this dial, we say 1,000 hertz, or 600 hertz, whatever we want it to be. We say what defines high. We set where that we want that to be. Then what's left over is the mids. What's cool about this one, This EQ is a really good DJ tool because watch this. Let's go over to like this at, okay, now it's going to sound normal, fine, but we can basically turn off the low mids and highs with just these LM H buttons. I can be like, cool. We're going to the break of the song. Let's take this, let's pull back in the mids. Add the, add the highs, play around with them. Do this thing maybe down here. Add that back in. Play around, whatever you can set up cool ways of just turning on all the low stuff or all the high stuff and just using that for like little party things. You can map these LM, H buttons to your quirt keyboard or keyboard or a knob or a fader or whatever. You can just hit them, Kill all the lows, do something, and then drop them back in when you want them. It's really handy for that. Okay, let's move on to Auto Filter. 44. Auto Filter: Okay, auto filter is a single band filter with modulators built in. We can say, here's our filter. We can dial that in to be however we want. We've got different shapes here, We've got a couple different, what we call circuits here, and they'll sound slightly different. Then we've got this LFO that we can set up to basically modulate this almost like a wah pedal. Hear that kind of wa, petal sound can just it a little bit, a few different shapes for our LFO. This gets us to like a sample and hold is what this S and H stands for. This is a sample and hold Sound This is on off toggle almost. We can turn on this quantas which will make it so that the modulation motion is attached to a beat can get a cool sound. Yeah, cool. A little filter. We can also side chain with this. We talked about side chaining in the last class, but when we think about side chaining normally, we think about compressors. But we can do side chaining with EQs also. And a few other effects too. If you want to side chain with it, you would hit this right here. Okay, let's move on to the channel Q. 45. Channel EQ: Okay, last in this category is the channel. This one actually to be totally honest with you, I think where this comes from is that logic different. Introduced a feature a while back where there was just an EQ on every track or every channel of the mixer. Same thing, just by default. This was Ableton's answer to that, I think, where they said, let's just make a nice simple EQ that you would put on every track. They didn't put it on every track for you, but they made it easy to add to any track. I don't do that, I don't put it on every track, but some people do probably. It's a simple Q we can dial in. We have three bands, so we've got low. We can boost or cut mid and high. We can boost our output with our, we have a mid frequency selector here. If we give it a little boost here in the mid, we can dial in where that is, we can also cut with it if we want. Then we've got just a low end cut button right here. I would say this channel Q is great. It's a utility. It's designed, I think, for more subtle EQ work. If you have that need, throw it on a track, and you just want to quick base cut, throw it on a track. This works really, really well and easy. 46. Auto Pan: Okay, next let's go to some pitch and modulation effects. These are effects that have some kind of modulation built in that are still frequency based effects. Let's start with auto pan. Here we go. This is a relatively simple one. Panning right is our left to right balance. We have access to panning on any given track right here, left and right. What this is going to do basically, is we can set up an LFO inside this effect, that Weill start moving our sound around left and right. We can start with some amount, okay? We can see our left signal and our right signal. We can speed it up. We can adjust the phase here, they're going to move at the same time. And here completely opposite, we can round out the shape of that if we want it to feel like it's moving, jumping back and forth. Or if it's more gliding back and forth, feel it, it might be more obvious on something like this cello sound N we feel like going back and forth, kind kind of wacky. Let's slow it down a little bit. Okay, that's cool. We can also switch it to division of the beat. So right now it's on a 16th note. Let's slow it down to like an eighth note, maybe. There we go. So now it's moving on an eighth note. That'll be more interesting for a drum beat. We can go back and forth between an inverted version, which let's slow it, well, let's speed it up so we can see, okay, basically this is what it's calling normal. An inverted version is basically going to flip it. You can see where to left becomes right, right becomes left. If we invert it, that's all. We can offset it a little bit. Maybe we wanted to to dart the pattern on a unison. A couple of different shapes we can play with a randomized one. It's wacky, pretty simple. It's going to move our panning around. 47. Chorus-Ensemble: Up next is chorus ensembles, grab that and throw that on there. Now this one looks actually similar because it does have some motion modulation built in. If you're not familiar with chorus, it's an effect that we usually use to thicken a sound a little bit. If you think about a choir, the thing that makes a choir sound big is the slight imperfections between everybody singing a similar part. You can think of the same thing in a string orchestra. If you have 20 violins playing exactly the same, all it's really going to sound like is one violin really loud. But if you have 20 violins playing the way humans normally play, which is with very slight variations, it sounds like a big ensemble, that's like a chorus effect. What we're going to do is we're going to use two or sometimes three, in this case, very short delay lines to peel them apart. And then we might even pull those signals out of tune, just this pinch, and that's going to make it sound big and thick. So let's check it out. Here's our classic. We can do a quick little low cut here if we want. With this big rate, it's going to be our speed. Let's put this on our cello. That will be the most obvious. So you can already feel that, that weird thing, that weird thing is called Favor. You can speed it up. We generally don't want to do that more amount more feedback gives us that. Please your gun. Sound Okay, let's go to ensemble mode where we have a third delay. It just makes it feel a little bigger. Let's try it on our other trombone thing here, that's so obvious. Let's go back to Marcello Vibrato effect is gonna go down to one delay line and it's gonna move around quite a bit more. That's an awful lot for vibrado. You want this to be quite a bit shorter chorus ensemble. These kind of thickening effects that can really help in your mix or in synthesis and sound design just to make a sound, or a part of a sound, even a little full. 48. Corpus: Corpus. Corpus is up next, you ever do that thing where you sing into the body of a guitar and you hear how the guitar body resonates or into like a fan. And you hear how the fan chops up your voice. That's what corpus is. Corpus is a physical model. We talked about physical models. When we talked about synthesis, what a physical model is, is it's basically this giant algorithm that tries to emulate the physical world. What we can do with corpus, we can run a sound through an object, like if you are running a sound through the body of a guitar and letting the guitar body resonate it. It's that same thing. Let's take a look. Here's the thing we're going to run our sound through. Let's do a pipe. Okay, that's obvious. We can change where we're listening to the pipe, change the size of the pipe, adjust the radius, decay. Is the pipe open on both ends? How big is that opening? We get access to more parameters depending on which one we're doing, which material we're using. We have tuning here which is really going to dial in that U Sound, the frequencies that are resonating out of this. The cello is playing something in G sharpish. Setting this to resonate G sharp sounds rather nice, fine tuning. You can add an LFO just to kind of spruce it up. That sounds ghostly. Throw a little filter on it. This bleed is kind of like a dry, wet mix. It's going to take some of the original and filter it back through. So it's somewhere between a dry, wet mix and a feedback. Let's go all the way wet. That's a pretty extreme effect. You can do some really fun stuff in Corpus. Let's switch it to a string. What if we ran our cello through a string? It's like making me a little sea sick. It's a really fun effect. Play with some of the presets on this one, especially, and you'll find some cool tools. 49. Shifter: Okay. Up next is shifter, let's put this on our track. Now this is a pitch shifter, again, a frequency effect. Now a lot of people have asked, does Ableton have a good auto tune plug in and no, it doesn't. This is probably one of the biggest complaints that they have. And when asked directly about it in a recent meeting, the person I was talking to said no, which makes me think they're working on one. But this isn't an auto tune effect. This is an effect that's going to shift the whole pitch of your thing. So you can say transpose it high, transpose it lower. Just move the whole thing up or down. That's different than autotune. However, there are some kind of hidden little gems in here that make this a really fun effect, especially for making big ambient sounds. So first we can run our sound through this, then we can adjust the pitch. Here I'm in steps or semitones, right? Or I can go down whatever. It's fine. I can do fine tuning where I'm moving in sense. I can also switch to like a frequency mode where I'm just dialing in frequencies of the transposition or a ring modulator, which is like multiplying frequencies. It's a bit like FM synthesis. But let's go back to pitch and let's move it up like almost. Okay, now if we're all the way wet here, we're just hearing the transposed one, which is usually what you want when you do this. But if I put it down to half wet and half dry, we're going to hear the untransposed and the transposed. Okay? Weird. But we also have this little feedback loop built into this, which gets really fun. Okay, watch this. Let's turn on the feedback loop. Set it to a quarter note, and just turn it off quite a bit. We have an LFO we can add in. Okay, let's make this a little less sickly and set our transposition to an octave. Try an octave down. Don't like that. With the feedback loop. You can do some wild stuff where you can make some things that just keep moving and going and going. I would maybe put like a bunch of reverb on this and then maybe use that envelope follower to shape all of that feedback that's coming out of it. And that would turn it into a pad. Sound almost. It's simple, but you can do some fun stuff with it. 50. Phaser-Flanger: Right up next is our phaser flanger. This is similar to the chorus ensemble, where we have two, actually, three effects in one. Here, a phaser is like when we take the wave forms of something and just let them move in and out of phase. We say it creates a very specific effect that we call a phaser. Let's hear that. Kind of hear it. That thing you're hearing is called phasing. We can make it go faster. Ordering. Gonna add some feedback to it. Ordering, that is phasing ordering. And all phasing is really doing is just making another copy of our wave form and just moving it in and out, lining it up with the other one sometimes and letting it kind of move around. A flanger is very similar, it's a very short delay and with phasing issues that it causes makes this very specific sound. Flanger always has like a Y and Y. Then a doubler is just going to thicken things up, like our chorus and ensemble. But this does it a little bit differently. It's a strange sound. Take our feedback down and our amount down, there we go. See this just sounds like two cellos trying to play together that are just really out of tune from each other. But you can make some cool effects with it, play around with it, you can adjust the timing on this to make it a little more tasteful but pretty simple effects. 51. Resonators: All right, next we have resonator. We've seen effects very similar to this where we added frequency content by superimposing a resonator basically. But what we have here something much more pitch centric. First we have a filter now. Don't sleep on this filter because using this on your entire sound, I find to be not super useful. But if we say, okay, I want this just to affect the high stuff, let's go all the way wet, okay? So this is just going to apply to the high stuff. Now what we're going to do is we're going to set this up. Then we're going to take our dry, wet back and it's going to add all kind of shimmery resonance to this cello. Sound First line of stuff, we have main settings. The mode is just like a different algorithm behind the scenes. The A mode is the default mode to get a realistic ish sound. The mode is better for more extreme effects, especially when you're doing low stuff. We're filtering out the low end here. The mode isn't the best way to go. Let's go with a, This constant button, which is short for constant holds. The decay time of the pitch for longer, regardless of the pitch. Now, when we see these Roman numerals one through five, this is where we get into the real resonance. The first one is different than the other four. The first one, we're going to say what a pitch is. I believe we discovered that this cello riff, G sharp ish. Let's dial in a G sharp. It's going to use arrow keys to get G sharp here. Okay? Now, these other ones are relative to this first one, we're going to say seven semitones, 12 semitones. I'm just thinking of some harmonic idea here, then maybe let's do like a ninth, which will be 14 semitones. I have one more, two, okay? You can set those however you want. We're basically adding a bunch of semitones above this first one. We can detune it with these. These are going to give us some sense control. So they're going to detune it in less than a semitone. Then gain we have control over how much of these extra frequencies are popping in. Let's hear it now. It's going to this back up. Can hear those extra overtones that are coming in and they're kind of piling up because we're hitting that fundamental with that G sharp and that's resonating it and that's what's giving us that clip. But let's pull down our dry wet. Now we've just added kind of a weird shimmer to our cello sound. Let's try that on like this trombone. Here's just the resonance, you hear that it feels like it's like hitting a lead pipe. So it can be a cool effect to add some, just kind of brute force add upper partials to some of your sounds. 52. Spectral Resonator: Okay, our next two effects are both spectral effects. What are spectral effects? In most tools that we have in live, we have access to two parameters. They are the amplitude of the sound time. If we look at a waveform, we see time going this way and volume going this way. That's mostly what we have access to in your average waveform. But in spectral effects, they do a little fancy math behind the scenes, usually something called an FFT. They give us access to the pitch content. Now we have access to three parameters, the pitch content, the time, and the amplitude. We tend to see things displayed in a spectrogram, something like this, where we're seeing the pitch content horizontally, the time vertically, and the amplitude in color. With that, since we have access to the pitch content, we can do some wackier stuff. We already know what a resonator is. We're going to add or bring out some upper partials or frequencies from the sound, but with a spectral resonator, we can really amp that up. First, we have two modes. Internal, meaning we can just listen to the sound that's coming in and dial in what, what frequencies we want to bring out. Or Midi. If we select Midi, what we're going to do is we're going to select a Midi track, which I don't have any with anything going on. And then it'll look at that Midi track and get the note data there. And use that to drive the pitches that we want to bring out. But let's use internal for now. Here's where we set our frequency. I said it to G sharp already so you can hear. It's basically, it's keeping the tamber and throwing out the pitch of our cello. Remember this is what it sounds like with spectral resonator off And here it is with it on. It's keeping the rhythm but just having it play that G sharp over and over. We've got some filtering here that we can do and then some added effects that really bring this to life. So watch this modulation rate. Wow, wow, let's stick to this last drum beat for a minute. Let's take this unison and set it to something big, like eight, maybe go up a bit with our pitch. Then we're Oct higher, now we're in a wet cave. What I did with this unison here, by the way, it was default to one, meaning it's just going to use our signal. If we set that to a higher number, it's going to duplicate our signal. I set it to eight. There's eight versions of our signal there that creates phasing, so just a thicker sound. Let's go back to our cello since we're all intimately familiar with that. Now let go to eight and combine it with the dry. So now we're like adding these upper notes. Let's do it with a Midi track. So what did we say? G sharp. So let's see, let's add some notes to it. Let's go sharp, sharp, sharp, sharp. Sure, that'll be fine. We'll just stretch those out for this whole clip. I'm not even going to put an instrument on this because I don't think I need one. All right. Now let's go back to our spectral resonator. Select mid, mid, to mid. It's using these Mies to decide on what we want to come out of our resonator. Let's go all the way wet. We can add a transposition to this. I can go like up and octave, or down in octave, alright. So it's really just using one note. It's not using the whole chord that I put in there. But it's still a cool sound spectral resonator. Super fun. Let's move on to spectral time. 53. Spectral Time: When I'm starting a new track, I don't really know what I'm going to do. But maybe I've got a sample that I like, and I just want to start monkeying around with it and seeing what I can get out of it and what feels good. The first tool I reach for is spectral time. Here's why I feel like I can put this on a track or on a sample, actually find the harmonic essence of that sample. That's not a real term, it's just something I say sometimes. Basically I can pile all the frequencies together and just sustain them forever and just start playing on it. I might just start improvising on top of it and feeling it. Let me show you what I mean. Okay, so we have two big sections here, the freezer and the delay. Okay, so what we can do with the freezers, exactly what it sounds like. We can just say freeze. And it's going to do just that. Let's play this sound. And I'm going to hit the freeze button, somewhere in the middle of it. Okay? It doesn't work when we're looping. Let's go like this. Let's take, put these over here, turn off looping, and go like this. Okay? There it is. We have our spectral stuff here. So I can do that all the time. I can also set retrigger and tell it to actually hit this freeze button for me. Quarter note, let's say quarter note. Okay, Now it's gonna take a new freeze every quarter note. Okay, that's kind of cool. Let's go back to looping it. Okay? That's actually too fast. I need like a longer sound for this to really work the way I like it to work, but we'll make it happen. Once I have something that I'm playing with, I can go to this delay and do a spectral delay to it. I've time feedback, do some pit shifting, increase the stereo field, mix tilt, you'll see that in a second. Spray and mask. So let me get something in there. Okay, here's tilt. Oops, I got to send, it's Emmanuel. So now with this, I can do a fade in and a fade out. And if I put these all the way up, I have like instant ambient music. Let's let this play through this drum loop, go all the way wet. Even that look, I really love all the way wet. Let's go back to our cello sample. There we go. So this is what I'm talking about. You can get this kind of thing and just start playing with it and start feeling what's happening and what we can do with it. I love this sound. Play with this effect. It is one of the most fun effects we have. It can be complicated, but you can set up these just really drifty patterns. Check out some of the presets here. Freeze fading, I think is probably one of my favorites. 54. Vocoder: Okay, Last one in this category is vocoder. Now, vocoder is not autotune. Vocoder is a different effect where we're basically going to take different bands of the signal, not unlike an EQ band, Different section of the frequencies. Rebuild it with a different carrier signal. Okay, Right out of the box, it's going to be set to noise. So we're going to take our cello sound, basically, we're going to peel it apart and rebuild it with this noise sample. Okay? Yeah, not so interesting. We can change that. So it's not noise but it's something external. A different sound. Maybe. Let's take this trombone, line it up, and then we'll say, Audio, what is that? Three trombone. Three trombone. Now, we'll use the same thing, but we're going to use this trombone sound for it. Okay, so that's not a great option here. We can also do a modulator, let's get rid of that sound for now. And pitch tracking where it's trying to do it with various wave forms. We can also draw in the limits of O of the different bands. If we want the high stuff to come out, we can do it this way. Now we're getting a little more buzziness. This can be cool if you want to pull back in some of the dry can go all the way wet. We have a whole new sound that's interesting. Now we did talk about how this is not auto tune. The shifter plug in we looked at is an auto tune. There's basically not an auto tune in live, but there is, there are various Max for live devices that are great little auto tune plug in. We'll get to those when we talk about Max for live in detail, but for now let's move on to dynamics and talk about compressors. 55. How Compression Works: Okay, let's move on and talk about dynamic effects. So with dynamic effects, we're primarily talking about volume, okay? So you might think like, how many effects can there be with volume, right? Like you turn it up, you turn it down? Not really, actually, quite a few because there's a whole bunch of different ways we can turn things up and turn things down. And we can do it very, very fast. So let's start with compression. Compression is the main, most common dynamic effect that there is. It's also a wildly misunderstood effect and a really important effect because if you want your music to sound loud and big and like it's on the radio, this is what you need to master is using compression. Okay, so let's take a look. Before we use compression, let's take a quick look at what's in this wave form. Okay, this is our little cello sample. So let's hear it one more time. Okay, neat. Now, here's what we see here. Our signal is going up and down. Right? That's just how this works. We weigh in, we'll see that it's going up and down and up and down, and it kind of swerves around this line right here. We're not going to worry about details of that at the moment. What we are going to worry about is the top of this up here is the loudest we can go. Now, we usually measure volume in terms of a negative number. This to the loudest point is zero, okay? Everything under that is negative number. If we want something to be as loud as possible, we want to get it as close to that zero as we can. We could turn up the volume on this whole thing until the loudest point, which is probably this point, hits zero, okay? And then we'd scale everything up so that the loudest point hits zero and then everything else is relative to it. That would be called normalizing. It's just boosting everything up till the loudest point hits zero. Normalizing, but that's not compression. Compression is actually going to change the dynamic range. That means the distance from a loud thing to a quiet thing. See, it's this far. Okay, In compression, what we can do is we can say, let's take this loud thing and this quiet thing and balance them out so that they're the same volume, okay? Now technically the way we do that is we take the loud stuff, we quiet it down, and then we boost everything by the amount that we quieted down. Okay, so we're going to smush it, compress it, and then boost everything appropriately. If we use a ton of compression, a ton of compression, we can flatten this thing out so that everything is the same volume, okay? All nodes are the same volume. If we use a little bit of compression, it might look similar to this. Okay, let's do it. Let's go to compressor. I'm going to put it on this track. Okay, here's what we have here. We have the ratio attack, release the threshold, which is this line here, okay, we can get it right there to the threshold is our meat and potatoes here. Now, one thing I like about the Ableton compressor is that we have these buttons down here, and what these are showing us is really just three different ways of looking at what's happening. Okay, these are all working. We can really just visualize this three different ways. Which is great because it can be a little tricky to visualize. Let's start with this one. If we take our sound coming in and my threshold so I can, okay, the blue line is the threshold and it's above our signal, right? So it's fine. The compressor is doing nothing. But if I pull this down, okay, so what's happening now is the yellow line is now in adjusted, that yellow line is our volume change. So what you can see here is that if there was a volume fader right here, it's not doing anything in here. It's starting to push it down and then when the signal gets really loud, it's pushing it down. All right? It's almost mirroring the arc of the waveform, right? Because as the waveform goes up, this line is saying push the volume down so that it's staying about the same volume. If we pull this threshold way down, now we have basically completely flattened that volume. I can prove it by exporting this clip, we call it smushed, then importing it, we can see it. Now you'll see it is smushed. Everything is the same volume here, and it happens to be very quiet. We flattened it so that the quiet stuff and the loud stuff is the same volume, but it's really quiet. How do we make it? There's a setting called Make Up. What make up is going to do is the amount that we push the loud stuff down. If we turn on make up, it is then going to boost everything up by that amount. So our loud stuff will be as loud as it was, and our quiet stuff will come up. Okay, So I turn this on now. We can really hear it. But if you listen closely, you'll hear that quiet stuff and loud stuff is all the same. Let's do our export thing again so you can hear so you can see what we're doing. Say smushed to, okay? And let's pull in smush two. And you will see that it is now more or less the same volume and still very quiet. Probably because I turned this way down so I could talk over it, but very similar volume. Let's look at the fine points of how compression actually works now that we understand what it's really doing. 56. Using The Compressor: Okay, so I just told you that this compressor showed what the compressor is doing in three different ways. Let's go to a different view here, and I'm going to turn our threshold up a little bit here, Okay? Now, what we're seeing here is this ball here is our threshold. Okay? And the little ball is where our signal currently is in terms of volume. It's above the threshold, it's below the threshold, it's going above and below. This blue line here is what we're going to do to the signal when the volume is, at what point on it. So let's do this, Okay? Now we're doing nothing to the signal, okay? The volume is unaffected. When we're in a perfect diagonal like this, volume goes up and comes down. Okay, Nothing fancy. I want to find this. Okay. What this means is that the volume is mostly unaffected until it hits the threshold, and then you can see it kind of flattens out. So we're still letting it get a little louder once it goes after the threshold. Because this is on an angle, it's just not as steep as this. But we're not going to let it go very much higher. Okay. We're going to kind of slow down its rate of ascend. If we really want to flatten it, we do this. So now, once the volume goes above the threshold here, we're saying like, no, you can't go any higher than that. So we're going to push the volume down so that it stays right there. But underneath the threshold, we're not going to mess with it. We're going to let it do what it does. O okay, so let's see what these 3 meters are telling us. This one is showing us our threshold. And where this one is the most interesting right now, GR is gain reduction. How much we are smooshing, that sound, how much we are pushing it down. As you see an amount here, it's going to be upside down. You're going to see it come from the top. And it's going to show us how much we're pulling the volume down at any given moment. Okay, here we just have our output, the result, and we can give it a quick boost here if we want as well. If we want more gain reduction, that means we want to compress it more, we're going to lower that threshold. Okay? If I go all the way down to here, this little bit still will fluctuate, but above it, totally flat, It feels, feels, that's that feeling. Okay, let's look at our third way of looking at it. Here, we just have threshold gain reduction and output. So if you want to do a little bit of compression, you want to put your threshold where it's just kind of given a haircut to those, to that signal at the top of the on there. That's a little bit of compression, maybe a little bit more if you want to give it a lot, pull that way down. Now everything is flat. Now we have a couple other controls here too. Ratio, we can see best here, Ratio is the angle of this line, right? So we can make it more extreme or less extreme, the attack and release. Now this is speed. How fast this thing kicks on For different situations, you might want different things to happen. You might want to slowly kick on that the signal goes up and then you pull it back a little bit and then maybe you slowly let go. It goes all the way down before you let go, the compression turns off. For mastering, you tend to want really fast acting things, you can mess with that. Usually I just set them all to be quite fast, that's usually what I need. The knee is this angle. You can think of it as like a knee on your leg. It's the sharpness of that angle, that point. Then we've got a dry, wet mix. Now, there's interesting history behind this. There's a lot of different types of compression. Maybe you've seen the phrase New York compression. There's a bunch of different compression types that are named after a city like New York. San Francisco compression, I think is one LA compression, stuff like that. A lot of them have to do with mixing a certain amount of uncompressed signal with the compressed signal. If you want New York compression, I believe that's like 50, 50. By mixing some of the dry, we get what's called New York compression. It's a subtly different sound in this case, but if you want to, if you want to play with that, you can do that. That's how compression works. Now there's something else we can do with compression that is side chaining. We've already talked about side chaining. I think in the previous class, maybe we'll go over again how to do it just because it's a question. I get asked 1 million times a day. Let's talk about sidechain compression. 57. Side-Chaining With the Compressor: Okay, side chain compression. The only thing that makes this different is that we're going to use, we're going to compress a clip, but we're going to control the compressor with a different clip. Okay, that's side chain compression. That's all it is. Let's take something like this. What if I did this and put an instrument on it with just resonance? Okay, It's, maybe take that down an octave so that it doesn't drive us insane. Okay, that's cool. Now I'm going to take my compressor off this track, because in order to do what I want to do here, I need the compressor on this track. Let's put our compressor here, okay. Now what we're going to do is we're going to tell this compressor to compress this synth, but do it by listening to something else. So we're going to hit this little arrow right here and we're going to click on side chain and we're going to say listen to, and we're going to do that cello thing. Okay? So now I can see there's the cello pull my threshold down. Okay. So now you could almost imagine the cello playing, but we're basically creating a volume envelope with it and applying it here. That's cool, let's try it on this drumbeat, it's already set up for that. It's listening to that track. Let's go there. Whoops. So now let's try it. Now it's the drums controlling the volume of the compressor, right? So most of the time you've heard sidechain compression, it's just with a kick going, boom, boom, boom, and it's creating this type thing. Let me show you that. Let's just find a kick sample sample. One shot. Sure. We'll go like this, 1234. Turn that into one clip and put this against that. Okay. And then we'll loop it. Okay. This is what you're used to hear in your side compression, right? It's ducking down every time the kick hits, the kick hits and then the volume for the synth scoops out under it and then comes up. If we listen to both, this is that sound. You've heard the sound 1 million times. People think this is nauseating. I agree, but it's a normal sound, but it's just using side chain compression in an extreme way. There are some really cool things you can do with side chaining that aren't that even like taking this and just toning it down. Even that is a nice sound too. You can do a lot of things with side chain compression. It can be really handy once we get into mixing. It's great for composition to come up with effects. I even like it for like weird effects like putting a rhythm onto this sound by using this, this will apply this drum rhythm to this sound. It's not the traditional way that we think about using side chaining, but it's a great effect that is side chaining. 58. Gate: Okay, up next is gait. Now when I was talking earlier about like how many different kinds of ways can we turn the volume up and down? Well, we saw compressor, that's one gait is another gate often gets used for noise reduction, but it's actually not that great for it, but it's good for other things. Basically, what we have in gate is a threshold, okay? With this threshold, we're going to say do not play any sound until we exceed the threshold. What that means is that we could turn this really low and we could say make it so that when I'm not talking, it just goes down to zero, right? Like small amounts of volume just get zeroed out. Let's look at it. Okay, so now our threshold is underneath the majority of our signal. Let's push it up. Get it in there just a little bit. Mm hm. Right? So now you can kind of see what it's doing. We hear nothing unless we go over the threshold. Okay? So that means think of this like what it's named after a gate. If we exceed that line, the gate opens and we can hear that sound if we come under, the gate closes and we can't hear that sound. Now to make things a little more complicated, we have this return amount. This means that the signal can go up above the threshold and we'll start to hear it on its way back down. It has to get past the return before it shuts off. Okay. That can make this a little smoother o you can play with that to make it so that it's mostly on. When I said noise reduction, a lot of time we use this if we have a recording and there's ambient noise in the background, this will chop that out, Meaning that if we were running my microphone through this right now, whenever I'm not talking, it would go down to zero. But the problem is, the reason this isn't great for noise reduction is that while I am talking, that noise would still be there. You're still going to have a noisy mic, it's just going to be silent in between. It's not all that great for noise reduction, but it can be a cool effect for let's put it on these drums now. We can just get the tops of those still have like thinned out these drums by just listening to the things, the loudest notes. Now we also have this floor setting. This is going to make it so that in between we don't go all the way down to zero. We actually let a little bit of the background sound in it, can make it a little more elegant. This is all the way up, the effect is off really. We're basically turning down the stuff under the threshold here, okay? Then we have attack and release times. That'll just be how quickly the thing latches onto the sound. And then hold will be how long it can stay there before it starts to move around under the return. Pretty simple. You can also actually flip it, which is fun. Now we're chopping out those quiet sounds, that can be a fun little trick. You can side chain with this. This isn't something we would normally think about side chaining with, but it can be really interesting experiment with that. Let's. 59. Glue Compressor: Okay, up next is the glue compressor. Now we're back into compressor land here. So this is on one hand, another compressor, right? It works the same as the other compressor that we already looked at. However, this one has a little bit of extra sauce to it and the majority of that is behind the scenes. This is called a glue compressor because it's really designed for you to take several different tracks, put this on them, and it's supposed to help them blend together nicely. It's going to compress them all and help them blend. We would typically do that with a group. So we would say select two things, command, put them in a group and then put glue compressor on that group. That's its best use if you want that glue sound, but you can also just use it as a compressor. Let's check it out on these drums. This should be pretty familiar to you by now. We have our threshold and then we have the makeup gain. We can manually push this makeup gain a little bit, which is different than we saw on the other one. Okay. So right now it's not doing anything. We're going to pull our threshold down until we see that needle start to move. Okay, Now we're pulling our threshold down. Okay. Now it's moving a lot, so we're applying a lot of compression. Now let's kick up our makeup game. And there we are. There's our compressed signal. It really brings out those little ticky things in between, little symby things. Again, we have our attack, our release the ratio. This soft clip we've seen before. We saw this on something recently. This is going to just push the signal a little bit and give it that warm small amount of distortion. Let's compare the two. Here it is. We also have this Range button here that we can use to pull back the possibility of compression here. If we pull it down at now, let's try this soft clip. Now that we're really hitting this clip, it is a little softer when it's already clipping. And we hit this soft clip, it softens it down a little bit, but I know a lot of people who are using this effect right now for nothing. They're just leaving that all the way up. That all the way down. All the way up. Now it's not doing anything. No compression. The only thing it's doing is the soft clip. I've seen people using it a lot for that something to consider. A lot of people are really liking that soft clip circuit here. But try this on, especially drum groups, this works especially good on. 60. Limiter: I'm is a limiter in a way is like an upside down gate. We have in limiters relatively simple effect where we're going to say the signal can go to some amount. Once it gets to that amount, it shall go no higher. It shall not pass. We set what's called a ceiling, and we say that's the top. You cannot anymore past that. Take a look at this. Here's our ceiling. Pull it down. Okay. Now you can see we're hitting that ceiling. If we listen, we're really softening those, Like I'm really slamming it up against that ceiling. Now what's happening here is that we're basically clipping it by going by artificially lowering the top of the loudest sound that's possible, right? Because it's zero is the loudest sound that we can deal with. We're lowering that with this ceiling. We're artificially clipping it by telling it to smash up against that ceiling. Normally you don't want to smash that hard up against it. But this is a tool that we use a lot in mastering. We use a lot in mixing, where you can just put this at the end of a chain of effects just to make sure nothing goes crazy. You can say, no matter what happens, this is the top, Don't go past it. You might want to set that to be like negative eight for mastering or something like that. That'll keep anything just getting out of control on you. It's often used as basically a safety net at the end of a bunch of complex processing. 61. Multiband Dynamics: Okay, multiband dynamics. The music content I'm going to be using here to demonstrate this is going to be a little different than the videos around this, because I made this video and then I literally just like woke up in the middle of the night last night being like, oh, I didn't explain that very well. Let's do it again. Multiband dynamics and what we have here is two things. Three times we have a compressor, okay? So compressor, and then we have that three times. Another, another compressor, another Q, and another compressor. We have three bands of EQ and a compressor. For each one we have like a triple compressor here. First, let's dial in our EQ. If I play this little clip, I've got drum and bass. So here's our highs, there's our mids, and here's our Los. Now what I've always been taught to do with this is listen for the snare drum, okay? If I go to my lows, I want to get just a hint of that snare drum in there. There it is. Okay. Now, the same thing in the hives. I want to raise my cut off a little bit here because I want just a tiny bit of that scenargoI'll do. Okay. You can set that up however you want. We'll talk more about this particular device when we get into mastering, but for now that's just a good, just general basic rule of thumb. Now the compressor part of it, this is a different interface for the compressor than any other compressor interface I've ever used ever. This is different, it's a little tricky to wrap your head around. Here's what you need to know. Let's look at our highs, okay, First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to move this block down so that I get my signal in the range of my compressor. Okay, this is basically your threshold, right? We're just going to get that up into our threshold. Now, we're not doing any compression yet, we haven't done anything to it, we're just getting it in there. Now the thing you need to remember is that each of these vertical lines here is ten DB of volume, Okay? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click and drag inside this box. I'm going to pull down. Okay. Now, each of the lines inside this box is still ten DB volume. Okay? Now you can see it's just got to go farther to get ten B volume. That's compression. This is, if you're a scifi nerd like me, you might know this is like an FTL drive in Like a lot of scifi shows where they basically like warp space time in order to move fast. We're warping math in order to get through it faster. That's the way I think about this. We've got a lot of compression here. Now let's look at our mid, let's get in there. And then pull that down a little bit, compress it and our base, okay, we can compress it this way. Now there's something else you can do with this that you might not have noticed. We can go up. Okay. Now, that doesn't sound very good in this case, but what that's going to do is it's going to make each of those ten DB lines farther apart. This is called backwards compression. It basically means we're going to uncompress it a little bit If you're working with a sample that has already been compressed a whole bunch and you want to get more dynamic range back into it, this is a way to do it backwards compression. Sometimes we do that in mastering a little bit, just to give us a little bit more dynamic range. If in the mixing process something has been really compressed a lot. But there we go. In addition to that, each one of our compressors has our setting, our threshold and ratio attack and release times output. We can boost that volume up if we want. That's pretty much it, a different way to look at compression, but it's really useful if you get used to it. Again, we'll come back to this one in mastering because that's where this one is really powerful. 62. Using Time Effects (Bussing): Okay, we are up to time effects. There's a bunch of effects that do various things with time delays echo even reverb is a time effect because it's very short. Amount of delay is what makes the reverb sound. In order to use time effects, we need to talk about busing a little bit. It is common, and it is good practice to use time effects on a bus. Here's what that means. We talked about this I think earlier, but in live we have these two buses. By default, what this means is that we can very easily route Sound down to these tracks. They are right here. This is going to send signal from this track down to this track. This is the first one. This is the second one. This is A. This is the first one. Sends the signal down to A. If I hit play right now, you're going to see it show up in A. Nothing is showing up in B because I didn't send anything to B. I can also send it to though by doing that. Okay. Now there are a few different reasons for busing, but the one we're concerned about right now is effects. In particular, time based effects. You can do this with any effect, but there is a common acceptance, I guess, that time effects are better going on a bus. If I wanted to put a big delay on this, I might send it, I might not put a delay directly on this track, but instead put it on a bus and then route the signal down to that bus. Now, the reason for that is that it can make the sound a little cleaner to do it that way, what you would do. Let's do it here. We have B, and this has a big delay on it, right? When we do this, we always set this all the way wet. If this is all the way wet, what that means is that this volume knob is basically your delay amount. So if I don't want any delay, I'm on the wrong track. This one. If I don't want any delay, I just turn this all the way down. If I want delay, I turn this up. Let's loop this. I can turn this up. And now my delay amount is this volume of the. The idea here is that if we separate those two, if we have a volume knob that is just delay and a knob that is dry, which would be this one. Then we can layer the delay on top and it can be a cleaner sound. But if we put that delay right on the track, the muddy up the dry signal a little bit, let's actually try it. So I'm going to take this exact same delay and put it on this track. Let's get rid of this multi bandynamics. Okay, so here is the same delay going right through this track. Okay, let's turn it down to half, dry, half, okay? Okay. Now keep that in your head. And I'm going to turn off this delay and turn on the bus delay. Oops, that's right. Yeah. Okay. So it is a little bit different. Sound Something to consider. Now, let me also say that if you look around online, you will find people who say you absolutely must put delays, Maybe even reverbs on a bus in order to use them. Anyone who puts a delay directly on the track is wrong, wrong, wrong. That's what you'll find people saying. And I could not disagree more. Sometimes you just throw a delay on that track and nobody gets hurt. It's fine. I do it all the time. You don't have to route things with the bus for your time effects. You do not have to do that. You can do it. The reason to do it is that it generally results in a little bit cleaner sound. But if you've got a super distorted sound that you're adding and bunch of delay to and don't care about it being clean, then you don't have to do it. It's fine. So keep that in mind, you don't have to do it, but it can sound pretty good for these going through, just for the purposes of our example, I'm probably not going to do it. I'm just going to put them right on the track so that we can go back and forth to hearing them on and off. But keep that in mind, I think I might talk about this a little bit more at the end when I talk about how to build effect chains more on this shortly. Okay, off we go. 63. Putting Effects on Sends: O let me talk just really quick, that if you do want to use the sends for things like delays, this is how you do it. We talked about using these to send. Down here we have what Ableton by default gives you, two sends and one is called reverb and one is called delay. And they have a reverb and a delay on them. They don't have to be called that you can delete this reverb and get rid of it and rename this with command R, whatever you want. Delays. Sure, you can add more by going up to create in search, return track and you'll get a third one. Whenever you do create another send, you get another send up here, another place we can send it with. You can create as many sends as you want. You'll get tons of them down here. Then all you do is go to your send and then put whatever effects on it you want. Here's an echo gait phaser. Sure. Now I've got this complicated effect here. If we want to use it, we just send signal up to it. Make sure that when you do things this way, you always set it all the way wet. This doesn't have a dry wet. This one doesn't make a whole lot of sense here. Whatever set them to all the way wet so that you can balance all the effects with this. You can do this for any kind of effects. Like I said, there are other good reasons to do it. One reason that I really like for doing it this way is for something like a delay or even this big crazy effect. I might say, I want this crazy effect to happen to a bunch of stuff. Keeping track of all of these settings is hard. I might just put it down here on a bus. Then any thing I want sent to that, I can just do it with that so that I don't have to copy all those settings to a bunch of different tracks and worry about getting one wrong. I can actually just think of another really good example. I was working on this podcast where I was writing the music for the podcast. But they also wanted some treatment of the voices. So the voices to sound like they're in a certain place or with certain things. And there's like ten tracks of voices, but there's only three characters, so there's a bunch of different, a bunch of different tracks of the various people. I could just set up the effects in a bus for where I wanted them to sound like, and then just route them to the right bus for each track. And then I was sure that all the right characters had the right effects and no one would get mixed up. And I put one person's effects on the other person's voice or something like that, Very handy for things like that. Anyway, that's how we set it up. You can put whatever you want on these tracks. These bus tracks are funky because it looks like we can do some cool stuff with them here, but you can't put any clips on these like it won't let me drag this down there. That's wasted space for now. They just hold effects and things. That's why we usually keep them nice and small because there's no real need to see all this stuff. Okay, let's move on and talk about delay. 64. Delay: Okay, let's talk about delay. This is our general all purpose delay. The way we have these numbers here, it can be a little confusing at first. Let's start there, okay? First of all, sync or not sync. Sync means that it's going to lack our delay to divisions of the beat. If we turn that off, we just get a millisecond amount. If you want to do beat based things, keep that. If you're doing more ambient things and there's no pulse or anything you can use the probably just fine, this is going to unify the left and right channels so that they stay the same. Which can be good sometimes. And sometimes you want them to be different. To make a little kind of hocket sound. This little percentage down here can be used to push our delay amount forward or backwards. And very slight amounts, if we say like three 16th notes and we just push it up a little bit, you can get like maybe a swung feel or just a different kind of feel you can play around with that. I don't use it very often, but it's pretty great for really dialing in like exact groove amounts into your delays feedback feedback. How many times this delay is going to come back? This infinity symbol on the feedback sounds awfully dangerous. It sounds like you're going to feed back something forever and then we're all going to die. That's not what it is. It's like a freeze button that we saw in spectral shape, where basically it's just going to stop taking in new stuff and just feedback what it already has in its buffer forever until you tell it stop. Okay? So these numbers, okay, Wait, so let's go back to these numbers. So these numbers are numbers of 16th notes. Okay? So 1234, this is going to be one 16th note, two 16th notes, also an eighth note, three 16th notes, four 16th notes or a beat. Five 16th notes, six. There's no seven button here. Eight is going to be two beats, 16 is going to be four beats. You can dial them in a little more specifically using this if you want one of those odd ones, but like seven is strange, like you wouldn't normally do that. Usually this is what we want is one of these options, okay? Then we have a filter. This filter does nothing until we turn it on. There it is turned on. Basically what we can do is we can use this filter to carve out what's going to get delayed. Let's say like right here I have this, it'll be okay. Let's say I don't want to delay those kicks. Okay, that's something that we often do with a delay, is try to not delay our kicks or low base type sounds, it makes it really hard on our mix. Let's just take this and say, okay, I'm going to carve out the low end and we're just going to apply a delay to the high end. What we're going to hear now, because my wet is at 100% we're just going to hear the delayed high stuff. But if we want to hear the low stuff, let's pull back our dry wet. Now our kicks are not delayed. Cool. Lastly, this mode, this has to do with what happens when you change the delay amount while it's running. Okay, in most cases you don't need to worry about this. But let's say this is going, let's just make it big and wide. I change the delay amount, it makes a little glitch type thing that happens. Well, because you've got a buffer and you're asking it to do something different, it's complicated, but basically when you switch the amount of delay while it's running, it's saying, do you want me to do this weird re pitch thing? That's just a algorithmic thing. Do you want me to fade between the two amounts or do you want me to just jump right to the new amount? You can specify how it's working here. Ping pong is going to add some panning into your delay. It's going to move things back and forth, which is fun. And then dry wet. We've also got a little modulation we can put on our filter if we want that to move around a little bit while we're playing with it. But this is pretty much like out of the box normal delay. We'll look at some more complicated ones, so in fact, next. So yeah, let's go on and look at a little more complicated one, the Echo. 65. Echo: Okay, next is echo. Now echo is like delay, but a lot more complicated. Let's start over here. Here we have our delay amount. Same thing. We can link them together so that they're the same or not. Here we have 16th note and we can basically just crank up a division of the beat. But we have some more options. We can turn sync off just to get us back to a millisecond, but if we don't want to do that, we can say dotted triplet 16th. These are going to add different rhythms to it. We could say we would combine these. If I said eighth note triplet, our delay amount is going to be an eighth note triplet rather than just an eighth note. If you're not familiar with these terms, a triplet is a little bit faster than an eighth note. It's going to make it trickier. It's going to make it not line up perfectly. Same thing with dotted. It's going to be a little bit longer than an eighth note. If it's a dotted note, that's going to make a much more complex echo happening. We've got our offset here, so we can nudge it a little bit. We can attenuate our input a little bit as it comes in with this and our amount of feedback. Okay, next we have this really cool graphic. Ableton calls this the Tunnel. You would be hilarious as if I put a whole bunch of echo on that. When I said it. Like the echo, I had to entertain myself somehow while I'm doing all this. Anyway, here's what we see here. We see the left and the right signal. If I separate the two signals, you can see they're different, left and the right. The white dots here are showing us a constant eighth note. Okay, that's what a constant eighth note would be. The white dots are just for reference, the yellow lines are our feedback where we're going to see it as we move down towards the center, we're going to go bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Right? If I pull back the feedback, we're going to get less of that, right? At zero. We're just going to hear bum, bum. That's it. Let me fix that there. Okay, so it's just a visual representation of what we're going to hear. It's neat, actually, if you have a push controller, it's really gorgeous on a push, to be honest. We do have a filter here. It's hidden away, but there is a filter just like we saw in delay. If we want to focus this in, we can use it, I'm going to turn it off. Then we have reverb that we can add to it. Just reverb, as we'll talk about in a minute, is basically like a super short delay. It's adding another layer of delay. We can decide if that goes before the other delay or after the other delay or combines with the feedback of that delay decay of that reverb. Whether this is a stereo delay, ping pong, meaning it goes back and forth. You can see what that's going to do there. Or mid side, meaning that our two basic things that we're playing with are the middle and the sides. More on that when we talk about mixing. Okay, now we also have some extra goodies. Here we have modulation where we can really play around with the stereo balance by adding in some modulation. Basically we have something like an LFO going here to control it. Then some character elements, we can add a gait. We can do some ducking, which is basically saying side chaining but just manual here. We can say, here's the threshold, turn it down, add a little bit of noise, add some wobble to it. Just fun. Here's that re pitch thing that we saw earlier. If we mess around with some parameters while it's running, you're going to get this re pitch effect. It's going to sound like the pitch. You can turn that off there, that's it. Echo is weirdly complicated. And check out some of these presets because there's a lot of really handy stuff in here. But that's basically how it works. 66. Filter Delay: All right, up next, filter delay. Here's what it looks like. This might look a little familiar. Yeah, this is a bit like the multiband dynamics where we have three filters set up and then we can do delay things separately. We saw in both delay and echo that they had a filter built in so that we could focus our delay on where we want it. This is that just amped up. If we want to say, here's my low, here's my mid, and here's my high, we can do that. We say I want this to delay like this, I want this to differently. And this one maybe we don't want this one to delay at all, that's fine. We can turn it off, or we can set it to something different. Now, we can also do some interesting panning things here. If we want, we can say this one is left, this one is right, and this is left and right. That is by default what is set up. You can see the panning right here, but we don't have to use it that way. We can say that these are all centered or however we want them to go. In other words, we can set this up so that the filters are pointing to specific frequencies. Or we can set it up so that these are going to treat our left and right channels differently, or we can actually do both. Here's where we set our delay time again in 16th notes, Our feedback amount, the panning amount, and then the volume for each one, our dry, wet amount. We're often running, I like this on drums where I might say nothing on the low end. Maybe three in the mids and four on the highs. No, the other way around. Because the odd numbers are going to get you a more complex sound. They're going to interfere with everything. And generally speaking broad terms. Odd numbers in your delay. Odd numbers of 16th notes are going to get a more bouncy thing. Even numbers are going to get things that line up easier. This will make our high end at our mid, more or less line up, so there's that kind of syncopated feel to the highs. I just Jag what's going on in the mids? Let's turn off the Hives. It's a solid groove. Maybe we'll have to come back to that and play with it some more, but for now, let's move on to grain delay. 67. Grain Delay: Okay, let's talk about grain delay. Now, do you remember when we were talking about the spectral effects from before spectral resonator spectral time? That idea of spectral is very similar to the idea of grains or granular. We talked about granular synthesis. I think back when we were talking about synthesis. Whenever you see that word grain or granular, what that means is that we're using a technique a lot like the spectral technique where, But in this case what we're doing is we're taking the sound and chopping it up into little bits, like small amounts of sound that are maybe ten to 15 milliseconds each, okay? Now, once we chop up the sound into those small little bits, we can rearrange them however we want, and that can make some really interesting sounds. Think of them as little droplets of rain, right? Like there's all these little droplets of rain falling all over the place and we can scoop them up and put them together however we want. Granular effects give us some control over some neat things. This is a confusing effect the way it is. Basically, we have this big grid that we can play around with. We can set these things here. We can say spray. Now, this is when those little droplets of rain hit the ground. How far are they just chaotically going to go? We can say, yeah, a lot. We can set frequency where there's going to be a certain amount of frequencies generated. Pitch, I believe is more of a transposition than adding new things. Random can say make random stuff how much feedback we want and how much dry versus wet. This is all the way wet right now. Then we can give it a delay amount here. Now you have the settings and then the same settings down here. And the reason is we can set them to values here, but we can also pick two of them to place in this grid. So we can say, I want spray on my vertical axis and pitch on my horizontal axis. Okay, that makes this little dot a really fun thing to map. If you have a pad or some controller that you can move around, do this, you can make some really crazy effects by modulating this. You can even automate it, but it's more fun to play live. See, like watch this, Let's go all the way wet. It's pretty cool. It's pretty fun. 68. Reverb: All right, onto reverb, we don't often think about reverb as a type of delay or a time effect. But it is actually a very short delay bouncing around and that's what gives us the effect. How does reverb work? Reverb actually is three elements, okay? In the most classic situation, we have the direct signal, the early reflections, and the reverb tail. Okay? In our reverb here, this input filter, this is going to deal with the direct signal. The input signal. Okay? We can shape what we want. We can do a low cut, a high cut both. And just shape where we want to put our reverb. Okay, let's just leave that off for the moment. Early reflections are the first bounce back of the signal. For example, in the room I'm in now, there's a wall about seven feet behind me, but there's a screen about 1 ft in front of me. When I talk, the first thing that's going to happen is my voice is going to hit that screen and then bounce back. And I'm going to get it right away. That's going to tell my brain a lot of information about what's happening. It's going to be like less than ten milliseconds. Those are the early reflections. After that, the sound is going to bounce back behind me and hit that wall, then come back. This is the actual bigger rever with our early reflections, we can do this spin thing where we move them around a bit, adjust the shape. This is all in this automation or modulation, I should say, of these, the diffusion network is what happens when it hits that back wall and then spurs out. I have these big black things right here. These suck up Sound And don't let them bounce around a whole bunch. But they are specifically for this purpose. To stop diffusion, we can create a little filter to shape how these sounds are coming back. If we want a brighter reverb, we're going to do this thing. If we want a darker reverb, this thing, Okay, then down here, this pre delay, sticking to the analogy of where I am, this pre delay is going to push my screen back a little bit if I want it to. So I can give the sense that the room is a little bit bigger than it is. The size is the size of our room. So I believe this has to do with what we were talking about before. If we change the values while it's running, how does it deal with that? Fast and slow means it's going to catch up quickly or slowly, or it's just going to do none. I always have that set to fast, then decay. This has to do with the length of our actual reverb tail. I notice this is in seconds, everything else is in milliseconds, this is in seconds. 2.5 seconds is big reverb tail. We can freeze it so that it just really goes nuts for a long time. Density is going to divide our signal up into multiple signals and put them back together like a chorus effect, which we also have here. And then we diffusion amount and reflection amount, all of that gets us reverb. Reverb is actually a weirdly complicated effect. Check out your presets to get you in the ballpark, and then go from there. 69. Hybrid Reverb: There are two different ways to do reverb. There's actually a few different ways to do reverb, but there's two more common ones. There's reverb by algorithm, which is what we just talked about in the reverb tool effect. Then there's also something called convolution reverb. And what you do in convolution reverb is you take what's called an impulse response and you analyze it, and you create a reverb based on that. Let's say you want a reverb that sounds like a grain silo, right? If you don't know what a grain silo is, Google it, it's a big concrete building. One thing you can do is you could go into a grain silo with a gun. A real gun, don't use a real gun, but like a starter pistol, something that shoots blanks. And you could set up a bunch of microphones. Shoot your gun and then listen or record the reverb tail, just how long that reverb goes and all the frequencies of it. Then you could put that analysis into something called a convolution reverb. And it would basically extract the reverb elements from that sound and give you a reverb that sounds like that grain silo convolution reverb. It's pretty cool. In a hybrid reverb, what we have here is both. We have the algorithmic way of doing it blended with the convolution reverb that can produce some wacky reverb sounds. We have some similar things here. We have pre delay. We can set that to be a division of debt if we want feedback amount. Here we have our convolution setting. Convolution impulse response I R. What do we want? Do we want early reflections stuff or big things, let's say like textures? Then we have these ones. Jet wash blanket. Sure. That's what the impulse response looks like. That's like it's going to grow really big for a couple of seconds and then it's going to tail off. It's going to sound crazy. Let's try it on our cello Sound Here, that's a long reverb. Okay, so we can set how these things process. Do we want them to process in parallel? Two different kinds of reverb and then parallel like this and then come together at the end serial, or do we want to just do algorithmic reverb or just convolution reverb? Okay, so that's how we can combine them together. For the algorithm side, we have a couple different templates here. We can do the freeze thing, delay, decay, size damping, shape, normal settings. This vintage effect can be cool where it's basically, every time it feeds back, it's going to degrade it a little bit more so that it sounds like it's falling apart as it moves away from you. We also have an EQ in here if we want to, if we want to tailor the output of it, pretty cool effect, go to this. If you're looking for a little bit of a weird reverb sound, there's a lot of crazy presets here that will get you some really cool effects. Gossip. 70. Beat Repeat: All right, two more time effects, and these two fall into a big category that we just generally call performance. Meaning that these are great tools for using a live performance. However, at least the first one, I've used a whole bunch just on a track, not for live performance, so both of them, I mean, they can be used however you want. You're the boss, you do what you want. Um, okay, so beat repeat. This is great for like glitchy effects. So here's what this one does. Imagine you've got a glass of water. Okay, and you pour, well, you've got an empty glass and you pour water into it. Then from anywhere in the glass, the computer decides to poke a hole in that glass and let the water out in different ways. That's what Beat Repeat is doing. We're going to take in a signal, some music that we play into it, and then it's going to store it and then start shooting it out in different ways, creating glitchy effects. We can add some randomization to it if we want, or we can make it very predictable. Basically, what we have here is we have this grid where we see four beats. Okay, we're looking at 1 bar. Here's the first, be the second, be the third beat, and the fourth beat. We can make it longer if we want with this interval, but 1 bar is the default. While we're listening in, we're going to grab something in this first 2.5 beats is the way we're set up. Now we can say we want it to pick up more than the 2.5 beats by going to this gate and opening it up more. Now we're saying we can listen to the whole bar or anything else. Let's take it back. Let's take it to like two beats. We can move forward where those two beats are. Oops, We can move forward which two beats it's targeting? With that, we can chop this up more With this grid, we can say, I want you to focus on 16th notes or 32nd notes. Let's set it to 16th notes. We can crank up this variation, they'll add some randomization. Same thing with chance. We could pull chance down that would say we're going to get one of these repeats, like grains, actually only 50% of the time that we expect it. We can add some pitch changes to the, to the repetitions of it, and we can even set a delay, a decay on the pitch that it ramps down or up. Then this is what I find most interesting about this. What we can do with these three controls is we can say, I want to hear both the glitchy stuff and the original stuff. It's almost like a dry, wet mix. Or you can say, I want to hear just the glitchy stuff with this gait, or I want to hear just the input signal with this. In then of course we've got a little filter on here, so we can help target it. Let's look at some of these defaults. Brain Dance, let's put it on. Let's go to this clip here. Let's just hear it turn off this one. Here's that brain dance preset. You hear that? That's the pitch decay. We go to G, we're going to hear just the glitchy stuff that it's adding. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Let's deconstruct one. Let's just do a mix. It just crazy this air push one is obviously this is designed to emulate I think square push his music. Let's go to gait. So fun, glitchy stuff with this one. 71. Looper: Okay, last thing in our time effects is the looper. If you've ever seen someone like a singer, songwriter, or something using a looper pedal or any performer using a looper pedal, where they have a pedal that maybe it'll cycle back their voice again, maybe their guitar again, so they can build big harmonies and things like that. Someone who does it really well. I love watching these performances. It can be just fascinating. A lot of the time when people are doing that, they're using something that looks like a guitar pedal goes on the floor and they run their equipment through it. But they could be doing it with a laptop if they are doing it in Ableton. This is how they're doing it. This is designed to emulate those looper petals perfectly. You can record in a thing and then add layers to it. You can keep recording on top of it, or you can let it play while you do something else. I'm not very good at using these, but basically what we have is this big red button. Well, it'll turn red. Basically what we have here is this big button, this is our action button. We say when I click this, do this Record X bars, which we can change however we want. Then I believe is continue adding more layers on or we can change that to just play the layer that I just added. If I do this, I'm going to play this drum loop into it, which is weird. Let's move it out here. I don't need this loop on, but I could have it. Let's arm this to record so that it's got my voice coming through. And let's try it. Here we go, Check, check, check. Now I'm going to add some loop or to it and check, check, check. Now it should start playing that. Check, check, check. Now I'm off and running loop to it and check, check, check. Okay? I'm going to add some loop to it. So let me turn that car, okay. Now I could do some weird things like change the speed of it, reverse it, add some feedback to it. One of the coolest things is if I really like what I made, I can go to this drag me and actually just take it as a clip and throw it onto a track and just keep it. That's a cool feature of it. But the ideal thing that you would do is maps, map this button to a petal, or a key or something, so that you can use it as a performance tool. Using these loopers is not my jam. I think it's awesome when people are really good at it, But I've never really practiced it and got into using looper petals. But if you want to do it in live, this is the way Star Wars 72. Audio Effect Rack: All right, Up next is audio effects racks. Now we've looked at instrument racks, we've looked at drum racks. I think we looked at media effect racks. What we need to look at here is audio effects racks. Now this is my favorite, this is my go to for effects is to do something with an effect rack because it's just so powerful and so versatile and there's just so much stuff you can do with it. If you remember, instrument racks, this will be really similar. What we're going to do here is we're going to build super effects. We're going to combine a whole bunch of effects into one thing. Okay, let's go to this track, we'll look at this drum thing now. Let's say I wanted to do something to this where I'm going to give it some compression. Let's put a compressor on there. Maybe a little delay spectral time to do something weird, okay? And maybe a reverb in there too, okay? Now I have this chain of effects. I have a compressor, then a reverb, then an echo, then spectral time, okay? I can put all those effects on a track. That's fine. They're going to run in series. They're going to run from this one to this one, to this one, to this one. It's going to sound like this, like popcorn going off all over the place. Now I could dial these in and get this to sound cool, that's all great. But I could also turn these into an effect rack. Okay, if I go up here to audio effect rack. Okay, let's throw that on this channel. Okay, Here's my audio effect rack. Okay? It's empty now, there's nothing in it. Let's take the spectral time and put it, and just drag it into that effect rack, okay? Now, my effect rack has this spectral time effect. Let's open up our chains here, which is this knob. You remember this from instrument racks, and let's put Echo on a different chain just by dragging it down here. Okay, now I have two chains. Let's put reverb down here, let's put compressor down here too. Okay, now I have three different chains in my effects. The way that this is different, before everything was running serially, it went from one effect to the next effect to the next effect, to the next effect to the output. Okay, that was before. Now that it's in a rack, what this is going to do, before I mess with anything this is going to do is it's going to process these all at the same time. Signal comes in, splits into fours. Gets processed by each of these effects and then comes back together into one on the other side. This is called parallel processing. These are all processing at the same time and then getting put together. In our case, right now, it's not going to sound wildly different than it did when they were just in a row. Let's hear. It actually does sound quite a bit different actually, but that's not the greatest thing about this. We can do a few things before we get into the really cool stuff. There's some stuff right on the front we could do. We could say that this echo is a little quieter than the reverb if we want. We can blend these effects nicely, just like that. We can adjust the panning of the effect. We can solo it. We can mute it. We can do all kinds of stuff. Now there's two super special things we can do with an effect rack. Let's deal with those in separate videos. First, let's talk about the chain selector, and then second, we'll talk about macros. 73. Chain Selector: Okay, if you remember from instrument racks, we could build a super instrument by going into the chain selector and deciding what effect was being used. When we can do that same thing with Effects Rec, we click on this chain here right now. Basically we're going to build a cross fader for our effects that one effect morphs into the other effect. Okay, let's say spectral time, we want to happen, I don't know, half the time. Echo, we want to happen half the time, and reverb, we want to have happen half the time. This compressor, maybe we want going all the time, okay? Let's say on the low end, we want to go reverb and then echo the spectral time. This is basically making a longer and longer reverb or delay. Actually we start off with reverb, tiny tiny delay. We get to echo where we have big delay, then we get to spectral time where we basically obliterate time. Okay, Then we're going to have this compressor that's just always on and moving. We adjusted the range of these. Now we're going to adjust the little tiny bar, you got to get right in there and we can do this and that, then that, oops, it's hard to grab that little bar sometimes. Okay? Now, as I move this chain selector up, we're going to move through these effects. The compressor is always going to be applied and then we're going to end up on this spectral time. Okay. Now you'll remember that when we did this with instrument racks, we had a key selector where it could decide which synth to use based on what key we played. And it had a velocity selector so it could decide what synth we use based on velocity. This doesn't have either of those because this is not a Midi track, right? This is audio. Those won't always apply, Sometimes they will. If we put this onto an audio well, sometimes they will. What we have here is just the chain selector. So we can take a knob and let crank it up, but we can also automate the chain selector. Okay, We can draw a line on how this is going to move. For now, I'm just going to click and drag it, and this is what it sounds like. Now we're in the reverb, moving into the echo, moving into spectral time, cool. Set up our spectral time settings a little bit here. Okay, I'm going to mute our compressor just to make this really dramatic. And I'm going to turn up all the way wet on all of these effects. Okay, now let's check it out. Okay, so here's our, our weaver moving up into our delay and then into the infinite void where we get here. Okay, so now we've got this super effect. So how can we control this dial a little bit more elegantly. Let's talk about macros next. 74. Macros: Macros. We click this little button here and we get macros again. We saw this with instruments, right? One thing we know we can do with macros is assign a whole bunch of parameters to a single effect. The idea behind macros is that we don't want to dig through all of these chains and all of the effect settings just define the effect. We want anything that we want access to quickly, we can put on one of these macros so that we see it right out front. The first thing I want to access to is the chain selector. I'm going to control, click on it, map to macro one. Now that's here, there's my chain selector. Now if I want to do other stuff, I could say the dry wet mix, Let's put that on macro two. But then let's go to spectral time and put the dry wet mix also on macro two. Reverb, I already did echo. I don't think I did put the echo on macro two and the compressor, maybe if I want. Sure. Okay, now macro two is the dry, wet mix of all four effects. Okay, I can control them without even clicking inside of these parameters. I can control them where they are. Anything else I might want, I can map to a macro, we can make more macros or less macros right here with this plus and minus. Then with this chain selector, I can easily just go into automation mode and say click on the chain selector to make sure you've got it. And then say, I want this to go like this. Now, this effect rack is the ultimate live performance tool, right? You move that chain selector and you've got this crazy amount of effects. I'll show you a trick for this once we get into the DJ setting where basically this is like your transition for everything. It's just to use one of these. But for now, even not live performance, but just for production, these chain selectors are awesome. So if I get out of here, well, I can leave that on and we listen to this. Let's pull the dry, wet down of everything. That's cool. That's what we can do with macros. We can control every element of it With the macros. Again, there are so many audio effect racks. Here it is, ridiculous. Okay. There are tons of them. There are some mastering set ups. This is where it's unfortunate that they're out of the folders that they were in, but you can see here, master, big boom. Over driven tape, master media, analog master, full chain master. These are get you in the ballpark of a good master. Take this master, put it on your main track. Now you've got some good set up for a mastered track. It's not fully mastered. You need to dial this in, but in a pinch it's a good place to start play around these audio effect racks. They'll blow your mind once you really get into them. They're amazing. 75. Align Delay: Okay, we just have five more effects left. And then we will have covered everything in this giant list. These last five things that we're kind of lumping into the category of utilities. These are things that are handy. Let's start by looking at a line delay. Align Delay is a max for live device. We can tell not that that matters to us too much, but this is something new. And my best guess for how I would use this is in a live setting, if I'm running a PA, or running playback or something like that, what this is going to let us do basically is set a very small delay for each speaker, and we can use that for timing purposes. For example, let's say I'm in a club or something and I'm, I have two feet of cable between me and the left speaker, but like 80 feet of cable between me and the right speaker. Okay, in that case I might want to slow down the left speaker by just a smidge couple of milliseconds so that the signal arrives at the left and right speaker at the same time. This is the configuration things that you can do with this particular tool. You can set it to be in milliseconds or samples. Delay a certain number of samples, or what's really fun in distance, meters or feet. I can say delay this by 19 feet, which is translating as 17 milliseconds because sound travels through a wire at a certain speed, and obviously this is figured it out. You can even set the temperature as you do this, because the temperature will affect the speed of sound. A handy utility, I'm never going to use this for any production purpose. This is really just for the purpose of like speaker alignment and things like that. 76. External Audio Effect: Okay, external audio effect, you may remember external media effect. Remember what external media effect did, was it? Let us send a Midi signal out to some synth in the physical world and bring back an audio signal. External audio effect is similar except it's just audio. The best purpose of this is, let's say you have some cool outboard effects unit or guitar pedals or something like that, something like this. Here I have a reverb petal, This is my handy trusted reverb petal. I've used it for years, let's say. Let's just say that I'm in love with this reverb and I want to use this reverb on my track, not any internal reverb. I like this one. What I could do, it was like go to my interface, go to one of my outputs and plug in a cable. And then I'm going to say where that output is here. I'm going to say output one. Okay, I can give it a little extra gain if I want. That's going to send this track the signal out output one on my interface. Now I'm going to take that cable and I'm going to plug it into my effect. And then I'm going to plug out of my effect and go back in to wherever I say here let's say two. I can give it a little gain, I can do a little dry wet. Now I can do it live like that signal is going to be running through this effect now. And I can adjust my signal and listen to it and dial it in. It's just like any effect in live at this point. Probably not the only, but that is the real purpose of this external audio effect, let you send out an audio signal to a physical thing and get back an audio signal to do some processing outside of live. 77. Spectrum: All right, Next is spectrum. Spectrum is really cool. I'm going to put spectrum on this track now. Spectrum doesn't do any signal processing that we can hear. Okay? Spectrum is for us to see what's going on in our audio signal. If I load that here, I have this grid and you've seen this grid before. This was something very similar to this was in our EQ eight. But if I play the signal, we can look at it. That's useful. But what's even more useful is we've got this little arrow here and we can make it nice and big. Now we can see a spectrum analysis of what's happening in our signal. One thing that's handy is that we can put our mouse over different spots and then see in that lower left corner, we can see where we are. We're at 99.5 hertz, which is approximately the pitch G one. The mouse is at negative 66.4 decibels. Okay, One thing that I get asked a lot is why is it that we play a signal? And then when we stop playing a signal, it looks like the signal goes up right? Here's our signal. When I hit stop, it's like drifting away. The reason is, we're actually looking at an averaging graph. It's averaging the signals out to see it. Once we stop, it keeps averaging it against zero, goes away. That's just how these work. You can change what we're looking at here. Blocks are basically the fidelity of what we're seeing. You can look at the left and right channel, the refresh rate averaging how it's graphing stuff. But if you ever want to dig in deep and see what's going on in a signal, this is a good way to do it. Throw spectrum on there and take a look. 78. Tuner: Up next is tuner, very handy. We tune because we care. This is just a tuner. It's an old school tuner. Whenever I'm recording my guitar, I throw this on a track. This one, just like spectrum, doesn't do any processing. But you can put this in a chain of effects and it's going to do you no harm. Even if I have other effects on here, like this petal effect, the signal is going to go right in and right out of the tuner. It's not going to affect our signal at all. We can put it there and it doesn't matter. It's still going to pass right through it and go to Petal or whatever is next in our chain or to our output With this if, let's just turn on my signal here. And now you can see it doing what it's doing. I was getting kind of close, so when it turns green, it's in tune. Let's do this. Let's switch to input two, which is my guitar. And now let's look it, my guitar in tune. This is potentially embarrassing. Ooh, so flat. Turn it up. There we go. Come on, come on. Tiny bit sharp. I like these to be my A string to be a tiny bit sharp, but that's too much. It's like negative 1,000 in Minnesota right now. And I have a space heater right next to this guitar, which is why it's out of tune, but that's how it works. Very simple. It's a tuner, just like any kind of other tuner. You can put anything into it, you can sing into it. You can play a guitar into it. You can play your zoo into it. It'll tell you if you're in tune or not. 79. Utility: All right. Last but not least, appropriately named utility. If we put utility, this is a little Swiss army knife of goofy things you might need to do at different points for a given clip. I've needed to use all of them. If you just need like a crazy gain boost, you can do that. If you just need to do some hard panning, you can do that. This is going to invert your phase. If you need to do phase inversion, if you need to swap channels, the left and right channel, you want to swap, be like that. You could say this is just a right channel, just a left channel. You could say this is a monorack. Or you could say the base of this is mono. This mono track business is what I use this for the most because of cases exactly like this. See what's happened here? This is that thing we did with the looper. It recorded a stereo file with a single microphone, meaning all our signal is in one channel. When I play this, it's going to play it back all on the right side some Lu or the left side and check, check, check. I could pan it but if I pan it all the way right, it's just gone. Pan it all the way left, it's there, right is just going to play this. When you have a situation like this where you've got a signal on one side, but it's a stereo track. It's just ugly to deal with. What you can do is put this utility on it. Let's say this is Mano now you can deal with it just like a mono track. You can pan left and right and it's going to be fine. That is the number one reason I use it. Utility effect, I use it a lot when I get these weird audio files. It's really handy for that. Okay, enough of that. Let's move on to a couple more things. 80. Order of Operations: All right, real quick, I get asked a lot about what order should I put effects in. We have something called the signal chain or the effect chain. That's if we put a whole bunch of effects on something. What order should those effects go in? Here's my answer to that. Here's my like weird arts cop out answer that effects should always go in the order that they sound awesome to you. There's no hard rule about this. Some people say there's a hard rule, there's not. What is a hard rule is that the order of the effects will matter. In most cases, they will change the sound. It does matter that they go in one order will sound different than another order, okay? There is no like this goes before that and this goes before that if you like the way it sounds. And that's the right order. Now if you need a place to start, the common way to think about this is to put dynamic effects first in your chain, second, and time effects third. Again, there's more exceptions to that rule then there is the rule if that makes any sense, but it could be a good place to start. But remember, always listen to it. If you're hearing something and it's close, think through it, maybe try switching the order of the effects, and it might change it and get it to something that you really like. When in doubt, go dynamics pitch time. 81. The Effect Chain: When it comes to the chain, the chain of effects you use on a track. If you hear something you really like, like if you hear a sound in a track and you're like, man, how did they get that sound? Search online for the name of that track and then effect chain, you might find it. Some people publish that information. This is especially true with vocal effects. As you work with vocals, you'll find that the effect chain can be really important for getting a very specific vocal sound and for getting your vocals to blend. If there's a performer or a producer you really like search for their effect chain. Especially like a vocal effect chain. Like if you want to know how they're processing Taylor Swift's vocal, look for Taylor Swift vocal effect chain, you can probably either find it or find some people who have rebuilt something that they think sounds pretty close. Those things are out there online. Don't be afraid to look them up and see what people did. That's how we all learned how to do things. Something to keep in mind. 82. What comes next?: And allright, we've got to the end of this giant X one that was a lot, Take a deep breath, maybe take a day off from learning live. But then come back because we've got a lot more to do. In the next class, part six, we're going to learn mixing, Mastering Jing, okay? So we're going to spend some time talking about how people do all this stuff onstage live. When you see Jays onstage live with a laptop and they're turning dials, what actually are they doing? We're going to cover that in the next one. We're also going to talk about mixing and mastering. You know, we'll be pulling out a lot of those audio effect racks, especially in the mastering section. There's a couple other tricks that we have yet to talk about, like working with controllers, mapping follow actions. I'll show you my live performance set up and we'll talk a little bit about using the push for production to all of that in the next class. That'll be part six. It's probably out now. Go check it out. Okay, one more thing for you before we go. 83. Bonus Lecture: Hey everyone, want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here. If you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. Please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.