𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐬?
Guitaritis is a deluxe suite of sophisticated amp racks, designed to make the most of Live’s Amp and Cab devices for electric stringed sounds, plus various effect racks to further modify and bolster them.
It Includes…
𝟹𝟶 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚋𝚘 𝙰𝚖𝚙𝚜.
𝟽 𝚂𝚙𝚕𝚢𝚝 𝙰𝚖𝚙𝚜.
𝟹 𝙼𝚒𝚜𝚌． 𝙰𝚖𝚙𝚜.
𝟹𝟶 𝚂𝚝𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚎𝚛 𝙿𝚎𝚍𝚊𝚕𝚜.
𝟷𝟸 𝙼𝚒𝚜𝚌． 𝚁𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜.
𝟹7 𝙼𝙸𝙳𝙸 𝙲𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚜.
Just about every Ableton Push owner I’m acquainted with: “Yeah, I know the Push has a mode for custom MIDI mapping… but I don’t really use it for anything.”
I have at times gone to inordinate lengths to map controllers so they have as many different useful functions as possible. So upon finally acquiring a Push for myself, I was eager to brainstorm how best to integrate its User Mode into the grand scheme. Well, it took awhile, but I got something!
[Screw all this reading…skip down low to the free download.]
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Finally.
After 2+ years since the conception of the idea thru research and development, the DeathStalker Audio Effect Rack for Ableton Live is finally here!
Quite simply, DeathStalker is an Audio Effect Rack that makes guitars sound better.
It’s optimized for heavier distorted guitar tones, but can also sound amazing on clean or modulated electric guitars, acoustic stringed instruments, or just about any instrument.
🧠Memorizing Sucks.
As audio engineers, certain numerical values become often-used and thus can become useful to memorize. If you suck at memorizing stuff like me, graphs and charts can be helpful.
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🎛0—127.
In Ableton Live and other programs, range values are often scaled from 0 to 127, rather than 0 to 100. So it can be useful sometimes to know certain fractional values to type in (either mathematically perfect for extreme precision, or rounded values for quick input).
BassTame from the KVR Developer Challenge 2023 is purported to be a bass compressor, yet level-independent. The blurb about it says the energy of the bass signal is compared to the overall signal to determine the bass reduction. lkjb‘s ReFine and QRange plugins are oft used and much beloved, so I was intrigued to find out what this new one had to offer. I’ll break it down based upon my experience testing the plugin out.
Continue readingWhen applying dynamic effects, we are rarely going to need the entire timing ranges available, depending on the tempo, right? The new Tempo Dynamics pack provides go-to racks with minimum and maximum values hard-wired to ranges most potentially useful, given the chosen tempo — avoiding values that are likely too fast or too slow to be helpful.
Continue reading Since my son has now acquired Ableton Live 11 Intro, I thought it would be interesting to make a pack of effects that utilize only effects native to that iteration of the software. These include Audio Effect Rack, Auto Filter, Auto Pan, Beat Repeat, Channel EQ, Chorus-Ensemble, Compressor, Delay, EQ Three, Erosion, Gate, Grain Delay, LFO, Limiter, Looper, Phaser-Flanger, Redux, Reverb, Saturator, Tuner, and Utility. This is no paltry collection to smirk at! Quite a range of possibilities. But also — a nice change of pace, being arbitrarily limited in options according to what I am used to as a rack craftor. I saw it as an exciting challenge. At the end, I’m super proud of what I’ve come up with. Methinks I’ll definitely be using these racks in the full version of Live 11 Suite aplenty moving forwards.
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(or acquire via Gumroad if you prefer).
Read about the process of the device creation below.
So one day i got it in my head to figure out which of Ableton Live’s Effects are the best to use in parallel.
What is the criteria for this? Simply, which processes alter the phase of audio passing through them, either to the least degree, or in a nicely summable way.
Why does this matter? Because phase offsets, when summed in parallel with the original signal, will inevitably cause changes to the frequency contour. Sometimes slight amounts of this phase offset can add a nice creamy touch to the sound of things (and pretty much all analog gear causes it to some degree), but when being surgically technical like during the finalizing stages of a track, they are generally just not helpful.
An example of not altering phase at all is Live’s Compressor effect which is phase-neutral; it can be used safely in parallel with no unwanted frequency coloration whatsoever.
An example of altering the phase in a “nicely summable” way is Live’s Reverb. Technically, it’s altering the phase a whole bunch, but it’s doing so in a time-smeared fashion which results in far less likelihood of perfectly-lined-up frequency cancellations, and so, when at 100% wet, reverbs can be just fine to use in parallel, and are often preferred this way.
After carefully checking the phase response of all of Ableton Live Ten’s native Audio Effects, i came up with five distinct racks providing combinations of the most parallel-friendly native effects, optimized for specific purposes with maximal versatility of application.
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>Download ParallAux PDF Manual<
It’s always been more of my mentality to try to figure out how to make optimal use of what i have on hand — even when flawed — than to try to find immediate replacements… from using a TI-83 calculator to code as a teenager (since that’s what i had access to), to learning how to mic two small guitar amps to sound amazing rather than try to buy bigger amps which i didn’t have space to store. Whether or not this is the optimal way to be, it’s been pretty ingrained in me over a lifetime of dealing with less-than-ideal equipment and environs, figuring out how to increase functionality past apparent limitations, and squeezing every drop of valuable usage i could garner out of existing gear.
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This BCR-2000 MIDI Controller i have happens to have a top row of encoder knobs which act all wonky, sending out their values all slow and choppy and making them pretty much unusable as MIDI controls. However, each knob does have a set of LED lights, and it is possible to send messages to those lights to make them move.
By using a couple of MaxForLive devices in Ableton, i have it set up so that the 8 knobs each provide a VU-meter type experience in reaction to whatever’s playing in Ableton Live. Now they aren’t useless! Yay!
Continue readingSimple and straightforward.
Just grab what the ones that entice you the most.
Ignore everything else!
Read about them below.
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PerforModule 