Since you guys liked the last article we’ve come up with more tips to fully utilize the powerful tools Ableton offers. 1. Redux Redux is an effect which degrades sound quality by using Downsampling or Bit Reduction. It’s a similar effect to a bitcrusher but has a different feel. My favourite mode is Downsampling with the Soft setting (2). For every sound I manipulate the Resolution knob (1) to my taste. Here I used it to add some hi-end grit to a saw synth layer: Before: After: It’s really nice to put it after reverb - it gives it a different...

  In this 3 part mini series, @nuckychulo shares his vocal mixing techniques on a nice Hip Hop Ableton project. Contents of this series: Gate and EQ EQ8 and Compression Reverb and Delay + Bonus tricks  Pick up the effect chain rack for this vocal mixing tutorial from our freebies section.   5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Keywords: mixing vocals like drake, vocal mixing like post malone, hip hop vocal mixing, vocal mixing in ableton   Check out other content on Hip Hop / Trap: How to Make a Trap Beat? Top 5 Elements Trap...

Creating a Dry/Wet knob for any device If you’re wondering how to create a Dry/Wet knob from any instrument, here’s how you do it. What you need to do is to group the effect into an Effects Rack (cmd/ctrl+G). Next create an empty chain inside it (our dry signal). Click the Chain button to enter the chain selector. Now drag the ends of the „blue bars” to create transitions: Now just expand the macros (marked with the red arrow), enter the Map mode and map the orange „chain selector” to one knob. Voila! GRAIN DELAY Grain delay is an effect...

Project files or templates are a great way to improve your production skills. Here are a few ways in which they help you get your production to the next level. 1. They allow you to study the track’s MIX & MASTER. In a track’s project file you can see everything the producer did, including the ways in which the track was mixed. You can take a look at all the effect chains behind sounds and at all the automation lines. With a project file you also get the whole mastering chain - by studying it you can see how it’s...

Writing melodies and chords Writing melodies and chords can be difficult. The best future bass tracks always have an excellent catchy melody & chord progression. Today we will go over some techniques, that help you get better at writing hooks. Here’s our Harmony and Chord Progressions course!  1. Know what emotion you're trying to capture Before you start writing a progression, it’s good to think about what kind of mood is the track going to be in. If you’re aiming at a happier feel, try using major scales. If you’re trying to achieve a more mysterious vibe, try writing some...

At PML we love sharing our sound design tips with you. This time we've prepared 10 Xfer Serum tips we found useful. Some of them we found in the SERUM Manual, which is a great read! 1. Customizing LFO Shapes double-click to Add or Remove points shift-click to draw steps on the Grid (similar to a step sequencer) alt-click+drag Points to snap points to the the Grid alt-click+drag any Curve Point to move all curve points at once. click+drag on background to multi-select points command-click+drag a point (ctrl-click on Windows) to multi-select points for a relative movement (rainbow color will...

Hi! I recently made a video for PML explaining how I made my track called "pronto". It contained some tips that I wish I knew when I was starting out, so I listed them here for you. Stick around until the end of the article to watch the video and get the project file for this track: 1. Arpeggiators for hihats and instruments To create hihat rolls fast you can throw a MIDI effect called Arpeggiator before your hihat sample. That will trigger your sample for as long as you hold it. You can automate the speed of your hihats...

  We’ve recently done a tutorial explaining our new „Major Lazer - Cold Water“ project file. Here, we’ve extracted some essential tips from it which can help you improve your mixdowns. 1. Sound widening Here are two possible techniques you can use to make a track sound wider: - using Simple Delay / Filter Delay  To widen your track with a Delay, set both Left and Right channels to Time. Next, bring both of the Time settings to 1.00ms. That way the whole track will be delayed by 1 millisecond. Next, increase the time difference between L/R channels. You’ll notice...

We had a lot of questions on how the compressor actually works, so we decided to make a small series of videos covering the functionalities from the perspective of the Ableton Live built-in compressor.     Learn more about compression in the mixing stage: NEW PML 5h+ Course: Mixing A Track From Scratch in Ableton (with stock effects)     Keywords: mixing, compressor, how to use a compressor, how does a compressor work

Definition of Dithering Dithering or to dither means adding noise to the audio signal. Noise is being added on purpose to trade a little bit of low-level hiss for a great deal of distortion. The distortion is first caused by using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 16 bits) to represent our sample points as accurate as possible (in the analogue world, there are infinite or continuous sample points available, whereas they are finite (discrete) in the digital world).  So, in our DAW for example, "dithering is done by adding noise of a level less than the least-significant bit before...