How to Make Lush Evolving Pads in Wavetable | Ableton Tutorial

[Music] hey it's bound to divide here with ableton tips and today i'm going to be showing you how to make a really nice lush evolving pad using um wavetable in

ableton okay so i've just got some chords that i've prepared for this the whole point of this was just to basically make really big chords so you can see there's lots of voices being used here they're nice and spread out

across the octaves okay so we just uh loaded up wave table and now the first thing we're going to be doing is we're going to be going to oscillator 1 over here and setting it to a saw wave it doesn't have to be like perfectly a

subway you can maybe shift it up a bit so you're getting something slightly more unique and that's going to sound like this let's just turn down the volume here okay so

for this pad we want a lot of voices and and we're going to get that from using something called unison so over here on the right you see it says unison it says none if we change that to classic or shimmer one of these it's going to

create as many voices as we choose so here we can choose like 8 or 3 or whatever and i'm going to set this to the maximum of 8 voices and so what this is doing is it's basically creating

copies of each voice and spreading them out and detuning them and that detune is dictated by the amount here so if we listen to this you can hear it's nice and wide now but

as i start to increase this amount you'll hear it detuning it'll start to become really like uh smeared and almost like fluffy sounding and the more you go it's gonna get start

going out of tune so we wanted probably probably around 30 and we can just try these different modes i think my favorite one here is shimmer i like it because it kind of sounds like

it's pictures drifting a little bit like a tape effect sounds really nice then we're going to go into oscillator 2 here and we're just going to click on this little square to enable it and we're going to do the same thing we're going to set it to

a saw wave but with this one we're going to pitch it down 12 semitones and we're doing that because we want to add another octave of voices to really make like thicken up the pad and make it nice

and beefy so now you can hear we've got this like really huge sound already and we haven't even touched anything else okay so next we're gonna be looking at this amp envelope and with a pad sound you

usually want the pad to kind of like fade in over time so we can just grab this little square here and increase it or you can use the attack time yeah and drag it up and down probably want about

two seconds and then we're going to create like a drop off so we're going to bring down this sustain to about -13 that doesn't have to be exact but basically half the

original volume the half of this um high point over here and then we want quite a long decay let's make it like six seconds

[Music] okay and then we want to increase this release because we want the tail of each chord to like overlap from each other and really just make this pad really

lush and we don't want sudden stops between chords we don't want something like this to happen [Music] we want this to overlap [Music]

so i'd say about two seconds of release and then we're going to go into envelope two and we're going to use this to control the filter so if i just grab this point here and bring it down

that's what we essentially want to do but we want to do that automatically so we're going to use envelope 2 to modulate this cutoff frequency so let's go over into the matrix here and we're

going to go to filter one frequency you can see we've clicked on it and now it's white so we can see it there and we're just going to go to envelope 2 and we're just going to increase the amount here and at the moment it's behaving a bit

more like a pluck i think we're just going to bring it up to about 70 and we're going to have our starting point at like 200 hertz so yeah it's behaving a bit like a pluck now and we don't really want that we

need to change the shape of envelope too quick way to get back to underloop too is to just click over here and we'll jump back to envelope 2. okay then we're going to have a similar sort of shape we

want around two seconds of attack [Music] we want a long decay and a nice long

release too [Music] okay so now we've got some it's like

your typical pad we've got the filter opening but it's kind of predictable and boring to me because it's like mathematically doing the same thing every time and it just it's not very exciting it

doesn't feel very alive i can introduce some randomness almost into into the sound and by using an lfo so i've clicked on lfo1 here and we can map it to this filter cut off so now this filter is

going to be moving with the envelope it's also going to be moving with that with the lfo so let's first just assign it lfo1 to filter frequency and i'm

gonna not do too much maybe about 40 over here if we play that now now you can hear what the lfo is doing but i don't want the elephant to move so quickly so we're going to go over here to the

rate and we're going to change it to we're going to click on this little um button over here which is it from hertz into like tempo synced alipho and here we can change the rate so you can see if

we set this to 16 we'd get that sort of really fast movement and what i want is to actually set it to three slash one so it's going to be like three bars long or maybe we

can do 1.5 now let's do 3 and i want to change this to a triangle shape okay but it's still predictable and the reason for that is every time we start a

new note the alpha re-triggers and starts from its initial phase point and that's not going to add any randomness or variation to it so we it's very important to just turn off retrigger

here by clicking on this r button over here and now when we play it

[Music] so now you can see or you can hear that

this filter is in a different position on each chord and when when the note when the chord change happens it's at a different position so it's now starting to feel like somebody's actually just sitting there and turning these by hand

and kind of feeling it out so it feels a lot more alive to me okay and then i want to introduce like a little bit of a little bit more of like a detuning going

out of tune kind of vibe like a tape vibe to it so we're going to use lfo2 here and we're going to map it to the frequency so if we go to pitch here we

go to lfo2 and we're just going to turn this up very slightly and now you can hear it going up and down in pitch but that's obviously way too much

so we just need to click on lfo2 and we want to decrease the amount [Music]

and what we can do at this is we can also introduce some attack so it kind of um lfo fades in so we won't hear it for if we increase it to maybe i don't know

one second or half a second we'll only start to hear this alpha fade in towards the end of the chord so it'll have like the tail of the chord will start pitching a little bit which is kind of a

nice effect still sounds like it's a bit too much so i'm gonna go back here to the matrix and just bring down this picture amount here

to like 1.5 [Music] okay i like that i think it sounds good

all right so now we can um i'm thinking of adding a bit of distortion to it and a great way to do that is to use this filter we can change it from clean to

any one of these models these are like um modeled off of real analog filters and stuff so what happens is when you enable one of them for example this prd

one which i think is like a mug filter or something um we can take this and now you see this drive if you just focus over here on this area over here you'll see there's no drive option but when we

enable this one suddenly we get that drive feature and we use this to basically introduce some distortion it's like saturating the filter or over driving the filter so that uh the signal like clips into the filter and distorts

and we can get like a nice gritty texture to it but as we do that it's going to increase the volume too so we're going to have to decrease the volume here so let's just listen to it [Music]

so here you can see this plugin is now clipping going into the red let's bring down the volume quite a lot and i want to actually drive this signal a lot

[Music] and what you can do with this is you can also introduce resonance when you have the drive up really high resonance doesn't sound the way you'd expect it

doesn't um like have that sweeping kind of like acid tone to it the drive actually kind of dampens the resonance

[Music] so i'm gonna it's maybe a little bit too high there [Music]

and let's uh make this steeper here so we're going to click on the 12 little 12 button here that's going to make it a 24 db low pass it's just going to be steeper

[Music] okay i think i like the sound of that maybe bring it a bit louder around there okay so now we've got like

the the base of our sound done the dry signal sounds pretty good and lush to me now what's left is to just go in and eq it a bit let's eq it and then we're

going to add some effects to it so here we can see there's a ton of rumble which i just want to take out over here [Music] and i feel like the

low end here is maybe a little bit too muddy so i'm just going to take out a tiny bit here and i also want to roll off the top end i don't want it to go so bright

[Music] okay next up is delay and i love using delay because you can kind of get these filter movements to repeat a few times

um and it just sounds like really nice musically a delay on here and we're gonna leave it on three and what we're going to do is just change the left and right the timing of the left and right to make the delay nice and wide and you

can just set it to like one or two percent that's just going to offsea set the left and right and it's essentially going to make the delay sound a lot wider so we can increase the feedback too

[Music] i'm just going to increase the output here

[Music] okay i like the sound of that and then lastly i want to add some reverb to it and the reverb i like to use is is black

hole by eventide if you don't have that um ableton comes with a plug-in like a max for live plug-in i think it's a max of live plugin in live

11 or definitely was in live 10 anyway if you go down to pax over here should have convolution reverb and if you don't you might need to go and um install it from ableton but it comes with a bunch

of presets and one of the presets is black hole so if you just search black hole and you can go down to reverb presets here and just choose this black hole one double click on it now you're getting essentially a recording of that

black hole it's called an impulse response what they do is they basically record a reverb tail and then create like sort of like an algorithmic copy of it so it'll sound pretty much identical

to the original plug-in but you obviously don't have all the same controls that you would in the other plugin so it's let's just like the default preset black hole but yeah it sounds great and let's just bring up the

dry wet here [Music] we can come into the eq here and just

reduce the reverb in the low range [Music] i think i'm going to bring down this

resonance a bit more okay so that's pretty much it it's more of a process than an exact you have to do this to make a nice pad so you can get creative and do your own thing at

every step of the way um something else you might want to explore is like playing with the wave table position here in wave table you can pretty much click on anything and modulate it once

you click on it it'll just pop up over here in the matrix and for example we could assign a lfo2 oscillator position here and we'd see that moving a bit

[Music] and yeah you can just get quite creative with it okay thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you want to

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