Effects and Mixing
Return Channel Tips & Tricks
Ableton’s Drum Rack instrument has its own integrated send/return section, which allows you to add return effects to individual drum samples. You don’t, however, necessarily need to add the effects plugin to the rack; instead, you can use the send/return section to route individual drums to the master return channels…
Syncing Sidechained Compressors
Sidechained compression is an ubiquitous sound in dance music. Its pumping sound brings a shot of energy to basslines, pads, lead synths, vocals: nearly any element of an EDM track. To help a sidechained sound gel with the rest of your production, synchronize the compressor’s timing parameters to the track’s tempo. Syncing the compressor’s attack and release controls to the BPM…
3D Mixing
To prevent sonic conflict, each element in your track needs its own space in the mix. To help you put each element in its own space, think of the mix as if it were filling a room, with the listener standing against a wall, facing the centre of the room. You can move an element up and down in the room by changing its frequency, send it forward and backward by using volume and reverb…
Mixing the Bass and Kick
Because the bassline and the kick drum are the two lowest-frequency elements of your track, they’ll often end up occupying the same space in the frequency spectrum. When they overlap, they can cancel each other out, causing your track to lose some of its low-end impact. Use a few tricks to keep the bass and the kick separate.
Trance Gate Effect
Add the sound that you want to gate (either a piece of recorded audio or a synth plug-in) to a new channel in Ableton. Create a new MIDI channel, then add the Impulse drum machine to this new channel. Load a short sample into the first slot in Impulse (a closed hi-hat is ideal). Create a new MIDI clip on the Impulse channel, then program in the pattern that you want to use for the gate:
Make a Mono/Stereo Effect for Bass
Generally speaking, the bass channel in a track should be in mono: most subwoofers (not to mention club soundsystems) play a mono signal much better than a stereo one. If you’re making an octave bassline, though, or your bass patch has a lot of high-frequency content in it, you may not want to mix the entire channel to mono. Here’s how to build an…
Time Effects
Time-altering audio effects like reverbs, delays and choruses all function in essentially the same way: they capture a portion of an input sound, delay it slightly, then play it back. The main differences between the various types of time-based audio effects lie in the lengths of time for which they delay the sound, as well as in the complexity of the resulting delays. Reverb may be the most important…
Using Reverb
A reverb effect creates a complex series of echoes from a source sound. Reverb usually simulates a certain listening environment like a jazz club or a concert hall; used heavily and creatively, it can also warp a source sound until it’s unrecognizable. For the best-sounding reverb, put the effect plugin on a return channel. Turn the reverb’s wet/dry control up to 100%, then use…
Frequency Splitting
Frequency splitting divides a sound’s frequency spectrum into sections, allowing you to alter one section of the spectrum without changing the rest. It’s especially useful for sounds — like dubstep basslines — which include frequencies all across the spectrum. Drop Ableton’s Audio Effects Rack plug-in onto a synth or sample…
Vocal Doubling
Doubling vocals makes them sound bigger and fuller in the mix. A vocal doubler plug-in creates two (or more) copies of the vocal, pans them to the left and right, then adds a slightly different delay to each copy and changes the copies’ pitches by a few cents. Doubling is a subtle effect, but it can really fill out a vocal and give it presence. Instead of running a dedicated vocal doubler…
Formant Filters
Formant filters (loosely) simulate the characteristics of the human voice. When a formant filter is set to the letter “E,” for example, it emphasizes the frequencies contained in the “E” sound, cutting out everything else. Sweeping the formant filter’s frequency causes the vowel sound to change. If you’ve heard a dubstep “talking” bassline, you’ve heard a formant filter in action. Build your own formant filter in Ableton Live by combining the formant EQ presets in an effect rack, then sweeping through them using a macro knob.
