Productions tips and techniques

Good idea !
The erosion is nice to add that fuzzy top end movement to bass.

I recently started building my own distortion chains. I use 3 or 4 distortion types which combine to give a certain flavour to the sound. I listen to each one individually to make sure they have their own tone/texture and complement each other. So something like, one for the mids grunginess, one for the mids ambiance/background and one for the tops works well for me. I use it on basses mostly, but it works on pretty much anything, leads, pads, ambiances etc…

Then I made a macro control to automate all the dry/wet controls of my distortion plugins at the same time. Assigned to my controller’s mod wheel, it’s a lot of fun to play with. Automating a high pass filter after that can give it some nice movement too.

For distortion, I personally like Trash 2/Camelphat/OTT I find they have a nice warmth and they don’t sound too digital. Apparently Saturn is good too, but I haven’t tried it yet. The Amp from ableton is often overlooked too, it has some really nice tones.

Nothing revolutionary here, but hopefully it gives you a combination of techniques that you can start from to build your own chains.

Wicked thread idea! And big up on the tunes you’ve been putting out Ewol.

So here’s a little tip that I’ve been really enjoying recently, and it’s sort of like a more interesting version of the Haas effect. This is pretty specific to Ableton but I’m sure a workaround could be made in most DAWs.

If I have a mono sample I want to add more stereo width to, instead of creating a duplicate, hard panning and offsetting one in milliseconds, I’ve been using the Ableton grain delay plugin. Set the delay mode to time and adjust in milliseconds to taste (good idea to have an imaging plug in up when doing this), then the secret sauce is to add a tiny amount of random pitch.

This effectively makes the delayed version slightly different to each hit, creating a bit more of a natural spread due to the difference in each “channel”.

So there’s mine.

Cheers guys, I look forward to hearing more from the other members 🙂

Whichever DAW you use, make yourself a template with all your group buses, tracks you always use all routed into the appropriate buses and put EQs on them. Saves a chunk of time when you start a new track.

I also stick a Pro-Q2 on my master with a hi pass on the side to keep the bottom end mono. It makes a handy frequency analyzer as well which comes in handy for tuning elements in the track.

couple of tips I picked up recently, this one from Lockjaw:

– using a very gentle bitcrusher (low mix settings) on the drum bus will give you more rounded frequencies and diminish the harshness you might have on the tops.

this one from Disprove:

– Send the whole drum bus channel to one return track using a transient modulator with an extreme sustain setting and crush the output into a saturator/exciter. Send the kick and snare to another return track using a transient modulator with a strong attack setting. Slowly turn up the levels and add them to your mixdown.

Hi

I kind of made a multiband transient shaper with 3 instances of ableton multiband in parallel in a rack, each having a transient master plugin fro Ni on ( free ones are available). The high and low frequency band adjustments of each multiband are mapped to macros to adjust the bands. So one macro adjusting the low band cut off and the other adjusting the high band cut off. I then adjust the transient for each band on each individual transient shaper. Not sure if this is a true multiband but it seems to do the trick.

atmosfear wrote:

Could you elaborate on what you can achieve with this technique ? And what would you use it on ?

I usually mainly used on drums, I’m still very new to the ideas myself and before I shell out on one I was seeing if I could make my own.

Here’s a video of waves version: https://youtu.be/7SQ1s5H_A3A