the production thread

303abuser the nuances of laser sounds.

Lay them on me! Using Ableton 10 intro… but willing to buy laser orientated plugins as long as my Tesla stock continues to blow up.

303abuser yeah there are some nice to haves in the new update, but i’m sure my money is better spent in other places. this should’ve been a 10.5 upgrade, not a new version. i waited to upgrade to 10, i’ll likely wait on this one too.

Agreed. It doesn’t feel like an entire 1 point leap forward in terms of typical software upgrades. Outside of 10, Ableton’s upgrade cycle has been kind of weak. They’re starting to lag behind on other DAWs on certain things that I would consider to be industry standard - for instance, having to stem/bounce out entire tracks manually instead of having a queue and automating it. Cubase has had this option for so long and their recent update further improves upon that.

I love Ableton for their ease of use in terms of audio manipulation and being able to write creatively from the offset, but as an over DAW it kind of sucks. It feels to me as though they’re relying too heavily upon their large userbase and not innovating as much as they once did. When Ableton first came out it was blowing people away with the innovative ways that one could create. No longer.

Amps Fuckin yes Jay!!! I knew they would be called something other than ‘lasers’ Damo’s link was spot on, but hard to emulate in the newer version of Ableton for a noob like me. ‘Risers’ seems to get me some more recent results. Big thank you peeps!

Filter automation is also your friend on this. The easiest one to do is take a white noise sound, use a low pass filter and automate Ableton to open up the filter so it slowly progresses.

Another term is ‘sweeps’. Lots of tutorials out there on this. Why’d you settle on Ableton instead of Cubase after all those years of poking my brain about Cubase? Hehe.

As far as sound design goes, this is a good one to get stuck into because it allows you to understand basic concepts in synthesis and audio sample manipulation. That sort of stuff will give you a foundation in doing other things later down the line, so you picked a good lesson to learn, young padawan.

Amps Spoken like a native!

I’m probably one of only 3 people on here who knows who you actually are. Haha.

Is Amps really Prince Andrew?

Amps Lay them on me! Using Ableton 10 intro… but willing to buy laser orientated plugins as long as my Tesla stock continues to blow up.

As far as actual ‘pew pew’ laser/Star Wars noises, this is all very easy to do. Much of this is down to the ADSR (AKA envelopes) and the settings you have. Set the resonance to pretty much maximum and cutoff to just above naught so some signal comes through. Draw or play a MIDI note. Make sure your attack is down to naught, release is set to naught and the same for your decay. Sustain settings you’ll have to play with a bit. If you’re doing this in Ableton, I’d recommend using Analog as the device for this setting and a saw wave or square wave as the default. You only need one oscillator turned on for this.

So basically tweak your settings in these areas until you get that zappy kind of feel you’re looking for by tweaking the filter cutoff, resonance and ADSR settings. To throw a bit of a wrench into the Matrix for extra pew, add in some LFO and modulation that effects the filter cutoff frequency. Play around with the rate of the LFO for rapid fire ‘pew pew’ sounds or ease it back for slower, more evolving sounds.

This is making me think I really should do a YouTube channel on sound design.

303abuser

Once you learn one DAW, it’s not hard to figure out another. I started in Cubase and once I figured out how things in Ableton worked that were the same concepts, but implemented differently, it was a piece of piss. I have applied those same concepts to working in Logic - although I don’t like the workflow in that DAW at all and think it’s terribly named.

Plus now with YouTube being so prevalent, I guarantee you that you’ll pick up stuff pretty fast and be pretty crafty in pretty much anything if you have the core skillset already down. Basically just Google what you don’t know how to do.

Mad_Cyril Is Amps really Prince Andrew?

I’ve been sworn not to tell.

303abuser that has to get your blood pressure up. i’ve had a few crashes, but i think they were all plug in related. i learned not to stack certain plugins together to prevent it, but i’m not sure that’s ableton’s fault. overall, it does well for my workflow at the moment.

‘Mildly annoyed with Ableton’ is a slight understatement at the moment.

Sensing your rage Loopy. Ableton has been really solid for me though. When I have had issues it has been related to 3rd party instruments and plug ins. Support I find really slow. However nowhere near as bad as N.I. who basically tell you to post it on the user forum.

303abuser I’m using Ableton 10 Intro, didn’t want to go all in on the full bundle as I have a sneaking suspicion that I am completely devoid of any musical talent.

loopdokter understand basic concepts in synthesis and audio sample manipulation

This is very much the current issue. Think I might have to fork out for the full version of Ableton though as so many tutorials use stuff I don’t have in the ‘Intro’ version.