This Ableton Live Tutorial shows how to split the frequencies of a sound and apply individual effects to each band. This technique can be used for, amongst other things, applying side chain compression to only the low frequencies or maintaining a mono sound in the low end whilst applying stereo width effects to the mid and high bands.
Abletons Multiband Dynamics plug-in can easily be used to split a sound into 3 distinct frequency bands. If the amount control in the bottom right of the effect is turned down to zero then no compression or gain adjustments will be made to the signal and the plug-in can be used purely for the purpose of splitting frequencies (of course the compression settings can still come in useful if needed).
The first step is to solo the low and then high bands whilst setting the frequency cross over points to taste. When suitable values have been chosen the effect is grouped (ctrl+g) and then the original chain is duplicated twice. The relevant band in each instance of the Mulitband Dynamic plug-in is isolated using the solo button and then it is time to add additional effects to each chain.
A few useful effects that can be added include a utility set to zero width and a side chain compressor on the low band, reverb and any stereo widening plug-ins on the mid and high bands and distortion and panned delays on the high end.
In this Ableton tutorial we also make use of the macros available in Abletons racks to map a selection of useful parameters for further tweeking.
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This Ableton tutorial makes use of the Sample Auditioner Rack. You can watch how to make one of these here.
This Ableton Tutorial is suitable for all varieties of EDM including deep house, tech house, progressive house, electro house, techno, minimal and trance.
Good idea. Thanks for the tip!
I’ve been using Ableton constantly for about 8 months now and had no idea about FX chains like that to split frequencies, I’ve got about 8 tracks that I will finally be able to finish mixing down properly (drum and bass) … big thanks!!
Thank you! I had no idea you could use one lane and isolate multiple frequency bands. In the past I had multiple tracks of the same thing and then used filters/eq’s to isolate different frequency spectrums. This will definitely speed up the process and do it in a much more neat and clean fashion. Thanks!