From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music
Using wavetables - Ableton Live Tutorial
From the course: Ableton Live: Producing Electronic Music
Using wavetables
- [Instructor] In this course, we're not going to cover every single instrument contained in Ableton Live, but I do want to point out one really interesting synthesizer called the Wavetable which is available in the latest version. Wavetable allows you to generate some really interesting evolving sounds and it uses Wavetable synthesis. Let's check that out and I'll explain what that is. So I'm going to go in to our instruments and let's drag an instance of Wavetable. You can see we can access a ton of presets here. I'm just going to go and drag the default state as a new track, and here is Wavetable. So Wavetable synthesis essentially uses wave forms and audio wave forms connected to an oscillator to generate and modulate sounds in a variety of ways, and you can also layer wave types, and many Wavetable synthesizers allow you to bring in your own wave forms and import your own samples or create wavetables. So what we're looking at here on the left-hand side is our wavetables, and we have a selection of our basics in here under basic shapes. We have these various saw, pulse and sine kind of shapes, white noise as well. And then if we go to other sounds, like if we go to instrument, you can see that we would be using a piano, to a sitar, to a guitar, as our wavetable. I'm just going to play a note here. (electronic piano sound) So this is actually using a piano. Let me bring that down for a second. (electronic piano sound softens) This is actually using a piano sample as a sound source or a wavetable. To the right of that we have a filter section, and we can control our basic filter types like high pass, low pass. We have cut off and resonance, things like that. To the right of that we have our amp section, and then with our envelopes, and then also more advanced controls like our modulation matrix and various MIDI mapping parameters. Another thing we can do with Wavetable is just expand the view a little bit, and I'm going to click on the triangle here, and you can see Wavetable opens up, and then we have an expanded view of our amp envelope sections. And essentially what we're looking at here, but in a view where we can more easily see what's going on. So if I hit a note here, (electronic piano sound) and cycle through the wave form, (sound shifts) you can see that we're already getting some kind of evolving going on, and what's happening is I'm cycling through the oscillator position. But that's something that we can actually work on automating and we can do that with our modulation matrix on the right side. And that's where we get some really interesting textures and start to create some really interesting sounds. So in oscillator one, (electronic piano sound) I'm just going to go and go to the position, and let's map that. Let's use LFO1 to modulate that oscillator here. So if I go to the Mod matrix, I'm just going to bring that up. Let's bring it up to 16, and now when I hit a note (rhythmic vibrating sound) you can see we're kind of cycling through the wave form a bit. If I went all the way up to 100, (muted rhythmic buzzing) when I hit a note it's going to cycle through the whole thing. But I'm going to bring that back down. Let's bring it to 30. (rhythmic buzzing) And I'm also going to change the envelope just a little bit. (rhythmic buzzing brightens) And maybe let's adjust the mapping there too. (rhythmic buzzing sharpens) If I bring the amp envelope down (buzzing sound reverses) just to change the attack. I kind of like it coming in with a little bit slower attack. And then our LFO also, if we change the wave shape, square for example, we might hear a more noticeable (pulsing buzz) adjusting of the sound, 'cause we're getting a different kind of pulse than more of a sine. So one of the other things we can do is layer that. And if I just enable oscillator two, now we've switched over to oscillator two and I can layer that with something else. Maybe I'll go into, let's go into another instrument here. And I'm just going to go, let's see what a sitar kind of sounds like layered over that. (buzzing rhythm grows more complicated) I like that there. I'm going to go into oscillator two and let's use LFO2 to modulate the second oscillator. (buzzing rhythm becomes simple melody) Cool, and we can also adjust the filter a little bit. And that's something that we can modulate as well. Maybe we'll use our filter frequency and open that up with LFO1 just a little bit. (melody becomes more staccato) So you can see the filter's now moving when I adjust and press a key. (pulsing buzz) Cool, so you get it. By experimenting with this synthesizer using various wavetables and the modulation matrix, you can get some really nice evolving sounds. I encourage you to experiment with this synthesizer. And in the next several videos I'm going to show you how to create some really nice evolving baselines as well as lead sounds.
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