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Advanced Techniques: MIDI & Audio Effects Racks

Lesson 22 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

Advanced Techniques: MIDI & Audio Effects Racks

Lesson 22 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

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Lesson Info

22. Advanced Techniques: MIDI & Audio Effects Racks

Lesson Info

Advanced Techniques: MIDI & Audio Effects Racks

So next we're going to look a tw uh audio effects racks and I've got an effect iraq here this is an audio effect rack and on this rack so I have one cell that's actually empty I have a band pass filter and I have this filter set to the range of sixteen to thirty two now one thing I actually didn't mention in the middie during the media fact section is that you can also cross fade these values between each other so if you want to start gently bringing in another layer of middie effect, the mini will adjust that in velocity this will actually attenuate the volume or are you bring that up? The volume of that channel up on that effect sees they're all, uh a parallel set up well, it's actually technically an insert effect but they can live parallel and I I have the set up parallel because I haven't empty chain going throughout the entire thing, so every time you play something through this rack it's also playing and us in a parallel channel on with a clean signal so there it's just adding a...

layer of effect. So what I've done is I've added I've got eight effects here well seven if you include the empty channel so got a band pass filter and erosion reverb vocoder chorus and corpus which is really cool resonator effect of lots of different some different tones and a filter and it's really awesome. I can't recommend playing without enough and then there's also the filter delay on here. So basically, what I've done is I've created a sub mix, so I've routed some of my drums, uh, through this through this channel, so I'm gonna just set off a couple loops here and then on my on my committee controller here, I actually have a, uh these air called dummy clips and basically what these dumb eclipse do is they move the chains selector if you look at this at the chain selector at the top of the affect iraq, you'll see it moving around. I've also got on affect amount here we'll just call that crazy dub and this adding all kinds of harmonics there's, even a resident vocoder vocoder in there, some noise and reverb and so there's ah there's, that band pass filter and then we're back. Tio our clean signal there's our purpose, so basically you can you can you can assign this affects chain tio a dial or you can also it can also live in these dummy effects. Um, which is how I'm triggering in them here so you can basically stuck is we'll stack up to one hundred twenty eight different effects in an audio effect, iraq and I've never had the need to nest one inside of another, but we're gonna try it right now because we just mapped the crazy dial we're going to see how crazy this gets and yes so you can actually map sets of one hundred twenty eight different effects inside sets of one hundred twenty eight effects, so once again we're trapped in her car fractal universe of ableto life um actually gonna undo that because I needed to keep that hope they're okay? So as I said before, these khun b either cereal or burial parallel you don't have to include this empty empty rack with a dry signal if you don't want tio these can these can basically punch in over the top of whatever the signal is you're passing through it um you can put in effect iraq on a return bus you can't control well, you can't control the the mapping directly with dummy clips in a return bus unless you actually route the middie outside of able to name back in so it's a little tricky can be done, but you can't you can't do it with uh uh would just able to end with many club you can use your icy driver which comes with a mac on, but I think that there's something you can buy for win or not maybe I think it's a free download for windows like many yoke or something like that where you can actually write your audio out around your midi out on back in and you cannot and we also discussed the cross fading so if I wanted to create smooth transitions here just lengthen that out and then that if you click and select that top part of the affect iraq it will actually fade it for you create that slope that you're looking for okay, so we can also do macron's with instrument reacts to so well let's move over to an instrument rack actually just created an instrument rack here and so if I wanted tio map on value say a tonal value too any of these matters I could do that just like we did it in the in the many affect iraq er instrument racks can also live cereal or parallel if you want to have a sub harmonic with all of your sounds you can have an operator with a deep sine wave that's basically stretched out over the course of all one hundred twenty eight values and the chain selector. So if this were your your your sub base um it could live at the same time with all three of these separate and sure it's as well so you can use you can use velocity and instrument iraq's you can also map aki range say I want a sub based operator and see negative too to see one analog from c one t o c for and collision from uh c five it's super easy to do you just going here your cursor changes to a bracket and you just combine you can also cross fade these together too for um if you wantto cross fade different between different instruments on your keys tio okay, so this is a a protest uh for power users and essentially if you're using a bunch of different instruments and you want to map uh you want to go in and you want to say I want to sign the filter of all of these these dials toe one macro you can use a function called map two siblings and normally before you were throwing everything into iraq you you should probably have your default set so that auto maps your filter or whatever primers you want access to anyways but sometimes that's not the case you've built this crazy thing and you're like oh man I need to get in there and map one hundred twenty eight samplers now so there's ah there's ah there's something called it was a hidden file called options dot tx tea and that lives in your version directory of whatever version of able to live that you're running and it's a hidden file so you have to show your hidden files and basically like I forget that for example I'm running live nine one seven right now and I just dropped it into the live nine one seven folder it's an eight bit unicode file called options dot sixty and if you put in its, um, there's a whole there's, a reference of these listed online that you confine and there's a bunch of extended features, and ableto this being one of them also where you can actually turn on and off devices from the session view without looking at the device panel so there's a bunch of different ah work arounds and some developer tools and all kinds of stuff that mableton doesn't really advertise. But there are some hidden features under the hood, and you can access them with options that t x t so there is the I the path for your, uh, for your mapping and options pleasure. So another one thing I love about creating these little music making tools is that you can share them, and any time you're working on a project and able to live, if you've had to share it, you might have discovered the collect on save function. So mableton, when it works with this nun destructive audio technique, it actually goes in there, and it just it basically creates a dynamic link to the file, and then it stores a meta data ah file of its own that basically has all of the editing information um and the tempo and wart markers and transients and all that stuff that able team keeps track of for you and uh so whenever you you're creating these your projects and ableto it actually it doesn't save those files to that directory so when you're sharing projects between hard drives or friends or whatever you need to centralize that that data so that everyone can access it and uh the way that you do that is a function called collect all and save so basically you go up to file menu and you say collect all and save and that will owe that will basically put all of the audio files that in samples and stuff better that are unique to your project or you can also bring in factory sounds if you need to most everybody has those because you're a couple options but you can bring in all the sounds that you're using and make sure that they live in that directory um and you can concept that up and send it another way to do it is you can actually create enable to live pack and this also compresses file size a little bit and and sends plug ins and this is how you these ableto life packs or what you download from the hilton website so basically when you get when you download the lp that expands and there's projects that living there in those projects usually have some patches and that kind of stuff that live in your library after that's you, which is really nice.

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