Book Image

The Music Producer's Creative Guide to Ableton Live 11

By : Anna Lakatos
Book Image

The Music Producer's Creative Guide to Ableton Live 11

By: Anna Lakatos

Overview of this book

The Music Producer's Guide to Ableton Live will help you sharpen your production skills and gain a deeper understanding of the Live workflow. If you are a music maker working with other digital audios workstations (DAWs) or experienced in Ableton Live, perhaps earlier versions, you’ll be able to put your newfound knowledge to use right away with this book. You’ll start with some basic features and workflows that are more suitable for producers from another DAW looking to transfer their skills to Ableton Live 11.2. As you explore the Live concept, you’ll learn to create expressive music using Groove and MIDI effects and demystify Live 11’s new workflow improvements, such as Note Chance and Velocity Randomization. The book then introduces the Scale Mode, MIDI Transform tools, and other key features that can make composition and coming up with melodic elements easier than ever before. It will also guide you in implementing Live 11's new and updated effects into your current workflow. By the end of this Ableton Live book, you’ll be able to implement advanced production and workflow techniques and amplify live performance capabilities with what the Live 11 workflow has to offer.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Live Concept and Workflow
7
Part 2: Creative Music Production Techniques with Ableton Live 11
15
Part 3: Deep Dive into Ableton Live

Sidechained reverb

Sidechaining reverbs is something I personally found super useful in certain situations for vocal processing. For example, sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where you have found a lush reverb, and you really want to use it on your vocals, but for some reason, you just don’t seem to be able to set it right. If you add a bit more, it makes your vocals sound too washed out; if you add a bit less, then it seems to sound too dry. In this case, of course, you can look for a different type of reverb and settings, but maybe you can also try to sidechain the reverb. The sidechain will duck down (reduce in volume) each time the vocals come on, and when there are no vocals in the playback, the reverb level comes back up. This can also be used very creatively in slower tracks with more spaced-out vocals (in terms of having long spaces between words or phrases), so the increased level of reverb can beautifully fill out these spaces.

Let’s see how...