Exciter Effect In Ableton Tutorial - How to Create an Exciter Effect

Exciter Effect In Ableton Tutorial – How to Create an Exciter Effect

Hi Ableton fans.

Here’s a cool Ableton exciter effect tutorial.

An exciter effect adds a tightness or sparkle to the high end of your mix – it’s normally used in the latter stages of mixing/mastering to give a mix a little bit more clarity.

For a long time I thought that Live was missing this effect. Really, it’s not – you just need the time to create one by mashing up some of the existing effects in Live!

Here’s how it works: Basically, the low end passes through the effect pretty much unchanged, but the high end has a little saturation to give it some sparkle. The following tutorial is going to cover how to make this effect in a bit more detail, and even better, you’ll be able to save the effect for later once you’re done making it.

Step 1

Drag an ‘Audio Effect Rack’ onto any channel that you want. It’s under Audio Effects folder, along with all of the other effects in Live. There’s going to be two parts to this effect: we want to separate and boost the highs, and also we need the rest of the mids/lows etc to pass through unaltered.

So to accomplish this we’ll need two chains – right click to create a second chain. The high boost effect shouldn’t be too pronounced, so lower the volume of one of the chains a little and rename it as ‘highs’. Once you’re done you should get something like the following:

Step 2

On the high chain we only want high frequencies. Add an EQ Eight effect to the ‘highs’ chain, and get rid of low frequencies with a nice big high pass filter.

Step 3

Next, the high frequencies need a bit of sparkle. To do this, we’re going to use the ‘saturator’ effect – just drag and drop it after the EQ Eight effect in your ‘highs’ chain. Change the saturation to your liking – if you want you can copy what I have set below:

Step 4

Save the effect – click on the little floppy disk icon on the top right of your effects rack.

And you’re there – you’ve now got a nice high boost effect that you can use whenever you want. By adding this effect to the master channel, you can do wonders for clarity of your mix.

Original source: http://www.everythingableton.com/2011/01/creating-an-exciter-effect/

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