goodeh wrote:you mentioned in post just now about effects sounding thin, and sounding 'ableton'. Do you have any examples of good chains to bring out each effects best features. i know that two hard clip saturators on an Analog made reese can blow anything Massive could out of the water.
that's a good question... here's a few things i do (or don't do):
ping pong delay: no. just no. this has ableton written all over it. it sounds like amateur minimal techno from the word go. if you do use it, put a utility after it and narrow the stereo width by at least half.
grain delay: likewise, although if you're very careful you can pull some interesting sounds from it. be careful.
redux: i use this a hell of a lot, but only the bottom half, usually on "soft" mode, and usually very subtly. you don't want it on everything - better to have it on certain sounds than the whole drum bus for example. you can also run it in parallel with a dry channel using an audio effect rack if you want to make it a bit more subtle.
vinyl distortion: this is very tweakable and seems to work best when applied a bit more subtly. can be great for synth parts, especially together with redux. the SR reduction of redux obviously grits up the top end, but it tends to emphasise any grittiness that's already there, so vinyl distortion -> redux can be a great combo. one of the (many) bass patches in cactus was all about v dist + redux, if i remember correctly. again, don't just stick it on everything. i generally use it on monophonic notes.
filter delay: i don't use this that much anymore since my go-to delay is the guitar rig tape echo, but it can be pretty usable as a very basic delay. IMO the trick here (actually the trick with delays in general) is to not go too extreme with the left-right separation. don't hard pan the left and the right, and don't set the feedback filters to wildly different settings. also, take it off sync mode and line up the beat divisions by hand, that way they're not so perfect.
auto pan: this is GREAT on pads and atmos before a heavy delay or reverb to widen the stereo image a bit without any weird phasing tricks. so simple but works a treat. you just have to make sure you do it subtly.
frequency shifter: again, very simple as ring modulators go, but actually quite cool for strange sounds, especially combined with the trashier fx like redux
one INCREDIBLY USEFUL effect that i've made for myself (and you can too) is the VOLUME KNOB. the problem is that you don't wanna automate your channel fader since you're constantly adjusting these, and the ableton utility plugin only goes down to -35dB so you can't use it for fadeouts. solution: take an empty effect rack, add a chain to it, and assign the chain volume to one of the macros. rename it "volume" and save it. now you have a dedicated plugin to use for fade-ins and fade-outs.
_v_ wrote:cheers Objekt.
How about a random production tip?
dude, we're on page 5 of a thread in which i tell you everything i know about production
EDIT: ok. when making 4/4 stuff, set up a channel called "sidechain trigger". stick a 909 kick sample (or whatever you like) on all four beats and repeat it for the whole track. mute it and turn the volume down in case. now anything that needs to be sidechained off the kick can be sidechained off this instead.
the advantages to this are various:
- you can sidechain with a faster release than the amplitude envelope of your kick might allow
- the sidechain trigger is still active even when the kick cuts out, so your pads etc don't get super loud during the break (though they might continue to pump, which may or may not be a bad thing)
- if you fuck with your kick, the sidechain effect is still the same
- modern DAWs are heavily optimised for multiple CPUs, and they process different channels on different CPU cores. if one channel is sidechained off another, then the sidechain source has to be processed before the destination can be sidechained, which can drastically increase your CPU load because the processing is now one after the other rather than in parallel. with this method, the sidechain source uses up very little CPU, whereas if you were to sidechain something off the kick and the kick has lots of layers or processing on it (as is very often the case with my kicks), ableton might start stuttering and complaining.
DAW screenshot coming shortly
