From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

Audio plugins - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 12 Essential Training

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Audio plugins

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- [Presenter] Live comes with a large number of audio plugins and while there isn't time to discuss them individually, let's talk about the best way to locate a plugin and some of their special features. So I've got the audio plugins project open, and if you're looking for an Ableton audio effect, they're all in this audio effects category. Now, earlier versions organize them alphabetically or by device category. In Ableton Live 12, you can do it both ways. So by default, we see them here alphabetically. I find that kind of difficult to find the plugin that you're looking for. So if you open up the filters in this area under devices, we can click dynamics if we're looking for compressors or limiters or we can click EQ for EQs and so on and so forth. Now, device organization is something that I like to use the collections area for because I like to group all of the plugins that I actually use into their categories. So for example, if I go up to the EQ category, I see the EQs that I use, and in dynamics, I see all the compressors that I use. And notice that this includes not only the Ableton devices, but also plugins from third-party manufacturers like Waves or universal audio. Now, when I was in the EQ category, I noticed that one of the plugins that I frequently use isn't in that collection. So if I go back to audio effects under EQ, well, it's not there. So let me uncheck that. If I go to the auto filter, I can add that to one of these collections by just pressing the number of the collection. So synth is one, dynamics is two, EQ is three. So if I press three, it's added that little yellow box there that corresponds with that collection. And if I click that, we can see that auto filter's been added to that collection. Alright, let's continue and I'm going to select the EQ track. And if we look at EQ eight, I just want to point out some of the common features that we'll see on all the other plugins. So at the top here, we have the on off switch. Over on the right, we've got the hot swap switch and the save preset switch. And as we've seen in previous videos, we've also got this unfold triangle that lets me see more detail in this particular plugin. Now while we're there, I want to show you another interesting feature, which is this little button right here that will let me audition. And what it does is it lets me audition the frequencies in a particular band. So I'm going to play this clip and show you what I mean. (upbeat music) So if I click on that third band, it's only playing the frequencies in that band or auditioning those frequencies. So here I'm hearing lower stuff and as I go higher, (slow upbeat music) I'm only hearing the higher frequencies. Let me pull that back down and I'll stop that. (slow upbeat music) Alright, I'll take that off and I'll fold that back down. Now another feature that's up here in the title bar, but hidden is the option to go for oversampling and other plugins that have that might say high res. So if you do decide to choose one of these, you're going to get a higher res processing of the audio that passes through that device, but that's at the expense of a little bit higher CPU usage. Now over on this auto filter, I want to show you that there are several plugins that have filter emulations like this auto filter plugin or like operator that we saw in the instruments category. And here, I can see those emulations by clicking this option that says clean. So clean is the filter emulation that we see in EQ eight. Below that, we see emulations that come from some different synthesizers. And the bottom one, for example, is PRD from the Moog prodigy synthesizer. Now when I choose some of these options, you get this extra option here, which is for drive, and that will increase the gain level of the signal going into the filter, which can add more warmth or tonal characteristics or even grit. Okay, let's go over to the delay category or the delay track, and I've got a couple of older Ableton plugins here to start the delay and the filter delay. Now, when you're in sync mode, the delay time is set to synchronize to the session tempo via some rhythmic increment like a 16th, eighth or quarter note. Now with these older type plugins, that delay amount is set by these numbers which equal the total number of 16th notes in the delay time. So one is going to be 116th, two is going to be an eighth note. Three is going to be a dotted eighth note and four a quarter. Now you'll notice that as I did that, it was setting the delay time, same for the left side of the stereo image as the right, if you disable this stereo linking button, we can now set these independently of each other. By the way, over here on this filter delay, you'll see that we can set delay time by the same number of 16th notes. Now over on the right here with Echo, which is a newer plugin, we can set this using a knob as that as we turn indicates a rhythmic increment below. Now if you don't want this to sync to the host tempo, you can disable this sync button and you can set the delay time via a number of milliseconds. Now finally, if we go over to the modulators track, there is a feature that has annoyed me for a long time that they have finally done something about, and that is when you're using a plugin like Shaper or the LFO plugin, we can use either of these plugins to control a parameter or parameters on another device. And we can do that by simply clicking the map button and then clicking the target parameter. So as I do that, we can see that this is now modulating this volume amount, but I can no longer make any changes to that volume amount. And that's the aspect of this that has always really annoyed me. Now with Live 12, when I map this, there is this remote button that appears and when I click the remote button, I have two options, either remote or this new mod option. And when I switch it to mod, I can still change the overall value of this parameter and it is just going to modulate that parameter instead of take it over and control it. Now when you choose the mod option, we also get this plus button to the side, and that allows us to either have this kind of bidirectional change of the level or modulation of that level or have that be positive only. And then to the right of that, we can actually set the depth to which this modulation is happening. So if I want that to go deeper, I can raise that up and you can see that we're getting more modulation out of that. So now that we're familiar with some of the confusing features of audio plugins, we'll look at MIDI plugins.

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