Ableton Live Tips #1: Professor Nalepa - Add Life to Your Pads

http://bit.ly/f3UT8D

In the first installment of Ableton Live Production Tips Dubspot instructor Steve Nalepa shows you how to improve the quality of your production and avoid clutter from the get go. He demonstrates a simple technique that can take a bland pad sound and transform it into a more interesting and lush mixture of moving sounds. By adding audio effects such as Reverb and Auto Pan to a series of Return tracks, the pad will begin to come to life and demand a little attention.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Ableton
• Ableton Live
• Ableton live tutorials
• ableton tips
• lesson
• tricks
• effect
• effects
• fx
• digital
• audio
• computer
• music
• recording
• steve nalepa
• mixing
• reverb

[breakphreak]

Well, but could be better imo. Why not to make an effects group with all the reverbs and put it on insert? How about attaching a different delay and/or moving filters to each reverb path? How about compressing (ableton compressor or Waves Rvox) all the output to glue all the pad elements together? And, finally, why play sine wave with simpler?

[DubSpot]

@breakphreak those are all good suggestions. Certainly there are many many ways to go deeper with this, our goal here is just to provide a quick tip to give people some ideas and simple usable stuff for their productions. In our online courses at dubspot.com we go in depth and teach many of the techniques you recommend.

[troelsbk]

Nice video, but maybe you should mention that you usually set the dry/wet on the reverb to 100% if you're working on a send (i'm assuming its intentional for this particular effect). Its an extremely common mistake made by people who dont understand dry/wet and general signal flow. As it is now its not _just_ the reverb the panning affects. Just a heads up :).

[DubSpot]

@troelsbk agreed, good point.

[FinalFragment]

Really neat trick. Got a question for you though.

Do you always use the send for reverb? I usually use the arrangement view when I produce, and I put a reverb effect on each track. Mostly so I can specify the reverb uniquely for each sound, but also to control the amount along the track more easily.

I this always your approach?

I been wondering if it was better with the send/return tracks.

[DubSpot]

@FinalFragment it's usually better to use send tracks. It saves CPU time so there's less latency, and by using sends, it gives the whole track a consistent feel, rather than different tracks.

So you overall you can use different tracks, but it's better workflow to use sends and a great habit to get used to.

[karmagreen]

you guys should do a video on mixing and mastering . I'm still new at all this and I have no idea where to start with these two things

[TheSpambomber]

great series awesome stuff as always

[desirebluesky]

śmiecham z jego nazwiska

[24hrpub]

has this guy made any hits and who has this guy worked with

[mxkallstrom]

@FinalFragment I can tell you that you save a LOT of computer power by using sends! However, using reverb as an insert plugin is not wrong by any means, like you said, you have more control. That control gain is to the sacrifice of computer power. Also understand that using a lot of different reverbs can make it harder to make the sounds fit in your mix just because you are using to many different room simulations. Just some pointers in the right direction!

[rharold]

I didn't think much of this while I was watching this, but then I added comps and verbs to my sends and it was something fresh to what I couldn't have done any other way. Great tip, I recommend people try this on channels when-in-doubt.

[shutupandsuckitup]

i have no idea what any of this means..

[IIHOGZBREATHII]

Nalepa, you rock dude.!! It's a pleasure to learn from you.

[DirtyJ214]

@breakphreak Keeping it simple, showing use of sends with effects on the returns.

[sammypotato]

good tip! thank you for reminding how to, um, enable the sends on my return tracks too. woops =D

[sammypotato]

good tip! thank you for reminding how to, um, enable the sends on my return tracks too. woops =D

[snalepa]

@troelsbk Yes. I made a note/comment of that almost immediately after we had posted the video, definitely would have been nice to include that in there. Very good point.