Ableton Spectral Time Deep Dive — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Hey, friends. So spectral processing is all the rage these days.
2. 0:03It seems like every single week, a new plugin or a new device is coming out
3. 0:07that takes advantage of spectral processing in some way.
4. 0:10And it's for a good reason, too. There's a lot of undiscovered sonic territory with spectral,
5. 0:15and it's all over some of the freshest new music that's coming out.
6. 0:18So in this video, we're going to take a look at one of Ableton's new devices called Spectral Time,
7. 0:22which I feel is a really powerful device that most folks have overlooked.
8. 0:26The sound design potential here is through the roof. Let's check it out.
9. 0:37Okay, so here's a hastily assembled hip-hop groove that I have here. Take a listen.
10. 0:52So, yeah, it's kind of boring. There's not really much going on. I'm going to hit this Cue key, and I'm going to activate all of the Spectral Time...
11. 0:58processors that I have running at once in the set. Now take a listen.
12. 1:12Yeah. So each one of these tracks has a Spectral Time on it, as well as I made one as a Return Track.
13. 1:18So I'm just going to go ahead and mute the Return track, and I'll delete this Spectral Time, and let's just listen to this first track by itself.
14. 1:27Just about as boring as possible, right? I'm going to grab a Spectral Time and drag it here, and let's just take a look at what's going on.
15. 1:33So to understand spectral time, you have to realize that it's actually just two different devices.
16. 1:38There's kind of a Freezer section and then there's a Spectral Delay.
17. 1:42Okay, so I'm going to turn off the Delay for now and let's just listen to the Freezer.
18. 1:45So the way that the Freezer works is essentially you have this little button, and you can do it manually so you can be like...
19. 1:52So I just froze that first note, right? Nothing special. Kind of boring.
20. 1:57Now, you could manually turn on Freeze and turn off freeze, and sometimes that's fun to do.
21. 2:01But I'm going to turn it on to Retrigger mode. Now, you can turn up the Sensitivity,
22. 2:05and if you activate Freeze, what will happen is that it'll activate and deactivate Freeze depending upon the incoming audio. So take a listen.
23. 2:17So essentially, every single time it hears some audio, you can see this little yellow thing light up.
24. 2:24It's clearing the buffer out and then replacing it with the next little snippet of audio.
25. 2:29Now you can change the way that it sounds by going over to Resolution. Let's turn it onto Ultra.
26. 2:36That's different. High.
27. 2:39And then on Low you get kind of more of like a glitchy kind of crappy digital sound.
28. 2:45But each one of these Resolution settings has a place and can create vastly different sounds with this device, right?
29. 2:52So let's just put it back on High for now.
30. 2:54So then we have X-fade, and this is how much time it takes to get between each different Freeze.
31. 2:59So to listen to this, let's turn the Dry/Wet all the way up.
32. 3:01Now, if it's turned all the way down to its lowest setting,
33. 3:03which happens to be two milliseconds, it's pretty much going to be instant.
34. 3:10But if we start to turn this up a little bit, it's going to fade between each sampling.
35. 3:22So by itself, the Freezer is pretty powerful. And you can use this to take very staccato sounds and stretch them out over time.
36. 3:29Now, let's take a look at the Delay size. I'm going to turn off the Freezer, turn on the Delay,
37. 3:33and at this moment, it's essentially just a normal delay, right? So we have Feedback.
38. 3:37Let's go ahead and listen to this delay as it is.
39. 3:43And we can turn the Time down.
40. 3:48Or we could switch it to a Synced mode. So in this case, let's go to 16th, and then you can subdivide the 16th, so now we get...
41. 4:01Right on. So that's just a normal delay at the moment.
42. 4:04But what we're dealing with here is we're dealing with spectral. And what does spectral actually mean?
43. 4:08Well, what we're talking about is frequencies. So what's cool about this delay is that you can start to influence
44. 4:14how the delay reacts depending upon the source material, okay?
45. 4:18And the way that you control that is down here in this section. Now, the first one is Tilt.
46. 4:22And essentially it will take the Delay Time and shift it toward the lows or shift it toward the highs depending upon which way you go.
47. 4:28So with this setting we have right now, I'm going to turn the Dry/Wet up a little bit more so we can really listen to this delay.
48. 4:34Now take a listen to what Tilt does.
49. 4:42Really cool sounds, right? So essentially, we're taking the spectra and we're sort of smearing it, right?
50. 4:47We're saying, okay, the top frequencies are going to be delayed right on the 16th.
51. 4:52But as we go down to the lower frequencies, they're pushed away from the top frequencies, and it's causing kind of "zi-ooon."
52. 4:57So if we went the other way, we go "whiiiip."
53. 5:08So then we have the Spray control. And you could consider this... I feel like they should have said "smear,"
54. 5:12because what this will do is it will distribute the frequencies and make it a little bit more of a smeary kind of sound. Take a listen.
55. 5:20That's without it.
56. 5:26And Spray is useful for turning Spectral Time sort of into more of a reverb. Now, the last one is Mask.
57. 5:33And so I'm going to turn the Tilt up a little bit more in the Tilt down a little bit. Take a listen to this.
58. 5:41Now, what Mask will do is it's kind of like a choke control for either the lows or the highs.
59. 5:47If I want the highs to be choked out a little bit more, I'll turn it to the right. Take a listen.
60. 5:58So it's kind of limiting or turning down the amount of time that it takes for the Tilt or the Spray control to occur.
61. 6:06And so that's for the top end and then I could do the opposite by choking out the low end.
62. 6:19You could almost think of this as like a Global Time control, right?
63. 6:21So another thing that's cool about this is that because we're dealing with time, we can start to distribute that across
64. 6:27the stereo field by turning up the Stereo control. Take a listen.
65. 6:36And then when it comes to sound design, we have a Mix control. Like right now we have a Dry/Wet for the entire effect over here.
66. 6:42And then we have a Dry/Wet for just the Delay.
67. 6:44So if I turn the Dry/Wet for the delay all the way up, we get...
68. 6:51Sounds awesome. But if we turn the Dry/Wet all the way up here, we just have the spectral delay.
69. 7:00Super rad. So now let's turn the Freezer back on.
70. 7:03And what we have now is a situation where the Freezer is being fed into the Delay,
71. 7:08and that's where you can see this control here.
72. 7:10At the moment, the Freezer is being fed into the Delay because of this button. Now let's take a listen.
73. 7:22Of course, we can turn the Mix down now and kind of get the Freezer to come all the way through to the output as well as the Delay.
74. 7:33Now, that's lasting kind of a long time. Let's go back to the Freezer and look at another option.
75. 7:37So when you're on Retrigger mode, you also have the ability to choose
76. 7:41how long the Fade In time and Fade Out times are.
77. 7:44So let's go ahead and turn off the Delay real quick and take a listen to this.
78. 7:53So maybe this is yielding a more usable result when it comes to the Freezer going into the Delay.
79. 7:58Let's go ahead and turn the Delay back on and make the Fade In time instantly.
80. 8:07Now we can hear that the Delay is kind of swirling around your head, right?
81. 8:10Maybe what we want to do is just have it so that one note triggers an entire cycle of what's happening here
82. 8:15where we have a Freeze and then we have one Delay that's doing this cool stereo thing.
83. 8:19Well, what I could do is I could just turn the Feedback all the way down. Now take a listen.
84. 8:28It's just so cool - all the way up with Stereo.
85. 8:38Got to love it. And then you could now let's say you wanted to do some sound design
86. 8:41where this was just the sound you were making, just the swirly part. Just turn the Dry/Wet all the way up.
87. 8:50Now, of course, this is going to be latent compared to everything else. Let's go ahead and listen to this in the mix.
88. 9:05So yeah, that's kind of cool. But I think it'll sound better if we have the Dry/Wet, like, maybe at half.
89. 9:16Real quick, if you're enjoying this video and you're enjoying my teaching style,
90. 9:19I have a really awesome Ableton webinar that you can watch up here where it's kind of like
91. 9:23a speed training, where I go through a lot of the essential Ableton skills that you might want to know that will help make your music
92. 9:28more interesting, more creative, and more exciting. So if you want to check that out,
93. 9:32the link's down in the description and then up here. Anyway, let's get back to it.
94. 9:35So let's move on to track 2 and listen to what's happening here.
95. 9:38So without Spectral Time, this is just Ableton's Upright Piano that they made with Spitfire, sounds like this.
96. 9:46And then with Spectral Time, this is what I did.
97. 9:58And so, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and build this up from scratch.
98. 10:01So I'm going to grab a Spectral Time, slap it on here. I'll put it on Retrigger mode.
99. 10:05And what I'm doing is I'm using Sensitivity. And what's cool about this is that it's freezing and unfreezing the track because
100. 10:11the piano is coming in and out of sensitivity range.
101. 10:15You can see this little yellow thing each time it resamples the audio. I'm going to turn off the Delay and just listen to what this does.
102. 10:29So this kind of garbling effect is happening and it kind of makes the piano sound like lo-fi, right?
103. 10:34We could put it on Low mode and get a really, really lo-fi kind of sound.
104. 10:42But I think that Mid actually is my favorite sound here.
105. 10:48And we could mangle this further by maybe changing the Fade In and Fade Out times.
106. 10:55So now let's look at the Delay. And I should say a really good way to work with Spectral Time is to turn off the Freezer
107. 11:00when you're working on the Delay so that you can hear what's happening.
108. 11:04So on this Delay, what I'd like to do is kind of make this spread out a little bit more.
109. 11:07And so what I'll do is I'm going to be working with the Spray. I want to kind of make this kind of more like a reverb.
110. 11:13So I'm going to turn my Delay Time down, turn the Feedback up and the Spray up a bit,
111. 11:17and let's start working with this.
112. 11:24Now, one thing we haven't gotten into yet is the Shift. So Spectral Time also has built into it a frequency shifter.
113. 11:31Because again, we're dealing with frequencies here. We're dealing with spectral frequencies, right?
114. 11:35So let's turn the Delay Time all the way up and listen to Shift.
115. 11:40Now, if you go to the right, you're going to have the pitch go up. If you go to the left, you're going to have the pitch go down.
116. 11:51So low settings like this can get some kind of cool - it almost sounds like a cassette or something, like something like constantly slowing down.
117. 12:04Let's go ahead and add some stereo.
118. 12:18Cool, now that we have that dialed in, I'll turn on the Freezer.
119. 12:24Now this is 100% wet I'll bring this back. And now it's got the piano in there.
120. 12:33So I think in this situation, it might make sense to choke the lows out completely with the Mask.
121. 12:39And then we're going to get a pretty interesting sound here where we're kind of focusing more on the frequency shifter sound.
122. 12:53Super weird. Cool, so let's look at the drums now. So here's the drum sound without the Spectral Time.
123. 13:02Here's with it.
124. 13:06Now, drums have a lot of really fun options you can do with Spectral Time.
125. 13:10I might not even rebuild the same thing. Let's go ahead and take a listen to this now.
126. 13:13And what I'll do is I'll turn on Retrigger, of course, and we'll use the Sensitivity yet again.
127. 13:18I'll turn off the Delay.
128. 13:23That's one option of what you could do.
129. 13:25I'm going to shift this over here so that I have more control over the Freezer's volume
130. 13:30because right now if we leave it on the X-Fade mode, we're just going to have endless freezing of noise, right?
131. 13:35So instead I'm going to turn it on this mode and we'll have an instant fade in and a longer fade out.
132. 13:46So in this regard, it's kind of like a room reverb, right? If I turn this up, I can get a little bit more.
133. 13:56So that's pretty interesting. And yeah, if you turn the Dry/Wet down a little bit, you can get kind of like a pseudo reverb.
134. 14:05Now that's cool, but let's go ahead and turn on the delay and now we're going to have some fun.
135. 14:07So I'm going to turn this on the Time mode, right? And let's put it on a 16th on one.
136. 14:13So basically just one 16th.
137. 14:16And what I'll do is I'll turn the Dry/Wet back up and I'll turn off the Freezer for now. And we're just going to listen to the Delay.
138. 14:29And so what I'd like to do is shift the Delay toward the top.
139. 14:32So I'll go ahead and turn up the Shift a bit.
140. 14:38Nice. Okay, so now we're going to use the Tilt and I'm going to bring it to the right
141. 14:42and so what that's going to do is, remember, it's going to make the lows have longer delay times than the highs,
142. 14:48and then we'll get a really cool sound going.
143. 14:59Boom. I love it. That's awesome. Let's turn on the Freezer and see what we got.
144. 15:06So obviously my Fade Out time is really long, so I've kind of lost that interesting effect.
145. 15:10So I can turn the Fade Out time down a little bit. And now we get...
146. 15:18So up until this point, we've had the Freeze going into the Delay.
147. 15:23Now let's do the opposite. Let's have the Delay go into the Freeze.
148. 15:26And remember, there's a Dry/Wet mix. Let's go ahead and leave the Mix all the way up, though, at this point
149. 15:30and take a listen to what we have. Now we might have to adjust the Sensitivity to get the Freeze to work
150. 15:34because we're changing the volume that's going into it. But let's go ahead and listen to what we got.
151. 15:44Now we can turn the Fade Out time and take a listen to a brand new sound.
152. 15:53That's pretty cool. And maybe we'll turn the Mix down and get more of the dry going into the Freezer.
153. 16:05So, yeah, completely different sounds when you're switching between these modes, right?
154. 16:09Alright, let's go to the next track. And this is a Wavetable bass. Let's take a listen to what it sounds like by itself.
155. 16:24Now, another thing that Spectral Time can do is it can add stereo width to your sounds in an interesting way.
156. 16:30So I'm not even going to use the Freezer. Let's just look at the Delay.
157. 16:33And what I'm going to do is turn the Delay Time pretty low.
158. 16:35Let's try 30 milliseconds, and let's take a listen to what the result is thus far.
159. 16:47Now, thanks to our ability to tilt the Delay Times, we can tilt the lows and highs away from each other
160. 16:53and take advantage of the Stereo effect. Right now, we won't make any stereo
161. 16:58because there isn't any information where we're tilting the frequencies.
162. 17:02But as I start to tilt, listen.
163. 17:11So, yeah, that sounds really good. Now, another thing I could do is go up to Shift, and start to shift the frequencies around.
164. 17:25So without the Spectral Time, we get this.
165. 17:31Let's listen with the Spectral Time.
166. 17:37Rad. And then the final track is just a shaker. And this is what it's like without the Spectral Time.
167. 17:44And then with the Spectral Time, I'm using the Delay to kind of make some stereo sounds happen.
168. 17:51So the way that I'm doing this is I'm just grabbing a Spectral Time,
169. 17:54turning off Freeze, turning on Delay, making the Delay Time very short.
170. 18:02So now we can hear the "shio shio."
171. 18:07We can hear that kind of sound starting to come through. Let's go ahead and use the Spray and the Stereo.
172. 18:29So, yeah, I could overtime for the fun of it. Let's go ahead and listen to this with the Drum Rack.
173. 18:35I could, over time, maybe change the Tilt. So I'll look at the automation here, and I'll go ahead and change the Tilt times
174. 18:43so that it's kind of oscillating through different Tilt times. This could be really fun.
175. 18:52So, yeah, you can add a lot of interest with this thing. And then finally, let's take a look at Spectral Time as a Return effect.
176. 18:58So what I've decided to do is I've decided to use Sync.
177. 19:00What does Sync do? Well, essentially, it's just constantly retriggering the Freezer over time.
178. 19:07And so what I'm doing is I'm using this to constantly retrigger it every 30 seconds.
179. 19:12Alright, what we get... let's just go ahead and listen to this by itself.
180. 19:23So by constantly retriggering, very quickly, we're getting that kind of lo-fi kind of sound.
181. 19:28But I'm feeding that into a delay that's highly smeared with the Spray, and we get this.
182. 19:38Cool. So with all those changes that I've made, let's go ahead and listen to the dry jam.
183. 19:46And here's the Spectral Time's.
184. 19:54Dry.
185. 19:58Spectral.
186. 20:04Awesome. Well, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you use Spectral Time a lot
187. 20:07because you can come up with a lot of really new awesome sounds. And if you like this kind of thing, like, comment, subscribe.
188. 20:12Much love, everybody. I'll see you next time. Thank you.