Spektre – Spiral Pulse FREE Track And Ableton Project
As part of our ongoing effort to not only provide the highest quality royalty free samples and loops, but to also contribute to the knowledge of the producer community at large, we’re always interested in ways to tap into the knowledge of the world class producers we work with and share some of the wealth.
We’ve teamed up with top Techno duo Spektre to do just that.
Spektre have created a track made only from stems in their Loopmasters sample pack Spektre – Atmospheric Techno using Ableton Live and only native Ableton plugins. If you are using Ableton, this is a great opportunity to download the FREE Ableton Project and look at how Spektre have arranged “Spiral Pulse” and made use of Ableton’s great range of native plugins (Made using v.8). Don’t have Ableton? You can download an unrestricted trial version here and have 30 days to check it out.
Loopmasters aim to be bringing you more of this type of thing and spread some knowledge about how some of our Artist Series artists are making use of the power of Ableton Live.
Download the .alp file here (Just click “Like” to access this and other Fan Specials on our Facebook)
We’ve taken some time to look at the session and ask Spektre a few questions about it ourselves, which you can see below.
———————
“Spiral Pulse” comments from Spektre’s Paul Maddox:
Hi Paul – thanks for taking the time. Just a few questions that about your Ableton Project of “Spiral Pulse”.
1. You start on track one with a muted simple kick for side chaining other track elements to. Do you usually start tracks this way or at least include a muted kick for side-chaining elements to in your tracks?
Yeah, we tend to use sidechaining effects in pretty much every track, so the “SC Trigger” track is in our template project.
2. I notice that your kick and bass are grouped and that you have a filter and utility device on the group channel. Do you often filter the bass and kick together like this? Why did you choose to add the utility device to the audio effects rack?
Yeah, it’s something we do quite frequently, particularly in tracks like this where the main pickups are where the groove drops out and then back in again. The utility is just there because I preferred the sound of the filter with a decent bit of Q on it, but this can increase the perceived volume of the part when the filter is switched on, so the utility is just there to knock the level back a bit so that the untreated version of the groove kicks nice and hard when the rack is switched back off!
3. You’ve compressed the main kick pretty lightly and left a fairly slow attack and fast release. Do you just play around with these settings until it sounds right to you or do you have a set of basic rules you follow? I also notice you throw in your EQ after the compressor. Is this where you would normally place it?
Totally varies depending on the situation, but in this case the compressor just gives the kick a little more “pop”, but at the cost of losing a little bit of depth, so the little EQ boost is after the compressor to compensate for that a bit.
4. You’ve left the bass unprocessed. Is that because it comes from your sample pack and you’ve already processed it nicely? I guess you were happy with the way it sat in with the kick already?
Exactly that – the bass was originally some kind of discoey loop but processed with distortion, filters and dynamics to within an inch of it’s life, so there wasn’t really anything else that needed doing to it!
5. The filter on the FX Loop doesn’t seem to be very drastic at all but it makes a difference. I’m curious about this. Also, with the concert reverb, are you just playing with the parameters to get your desired effect or is that pretty much the stock setting.
It’s just doing a really simple low-high sweep to introduce the sound really. We use Autofilter for this all the time, as in a fairly sparse arrangment like this, gradually revealing the harmonics of a complex sound like this can really hold the listener’s interest and stop things getting too static. I think the reverb was just the preset with the time turned up a bit; For things like reverb it makes sense to start with a preset to me, then tweak it to suit.
6. Can you talk us through the signal processing on your percussion group. Especially the “Dry” “Verb Layer” and “Delay Layer”. How is that set up?
This is a rack that we have saved in our “Favourites” folder and use all the time; It basically splits the incoming signal into 3 paths:
Dry: Is pretty self explanatory – just the original, unprocessed signal.
Verb Layer: Is simply a nice big reverb with the mix set to 100% wet, so you can automate the chain volume to fade a big wash of reverb in and out.
Delay Layer: Is a bit more complex, it’s a pingpong delay with a little reverb mixed in, then fed to a compressor sidechained to the trigger channel. It sounds great either faded up over the dry chain, or fading in as the dry chain fades out, so that whatever is running through it kind of evaporates into a cloud of delays. On this particular project I added an eq in there to round the tops off a little bit as they were getting a bit harsh.
It’s things like racks that make Live so fun for sound design – would be a total pain in the arse to do all that in any other DAW!
7. What’s the purpose of the gain tool on the overhead hi hat? I notice you use the gain tool in a few places.
Another one from the favourites folder! It’s just a very simple little rack I made for fading things in and out. I prefer not to automate the channel fader so that I can adjust them at the mixdown stage, but “Utility” only goes down to -30 rather than -inf, so no good for fades to/from silence. The chain volume in a rack however *does* go to -inf, so this is just an empty rack with one chain and a macro mapped to the chain volume.
8. Can you take us through the signal flow on the Dark Riff and why you chose what? The processed sound is big.
Sure. The original sound is more of a droney bass, so the first task to make it into a lead was to add some higher harmonics with distortion, then add a bit of girth with chorus and size with reverb. I actually ended up putting one of the distortions (the Overdrive) after the chorus, which I wouldn’t normally do but it was a trial and error thing; It sounded good, so it was in! The final insert is a simple Sidechain compressor, just to tie the sound to rhythm of the track.
9. You are using two effects sends – one for room reverb and one for ¼ delay. When do you send elements to these effects sends, instead of putting the processing directly on the track?
Like the Sidechain trigger, these are in my template project as they get used in much the same way on most tracks. The room reverb is there for percussion sounds; as well as saving a bit of cpu from having a reverb insert on every percussion channel, having them all sent (in varying amounts) to the same effect adds a bit of gel, tying the percussion section together. The delay is mainly for doing little “spins” off the end of parts. Just automating the send up for the last beat or two of a part that is about to drop out and make it’s exit a bit smoother.
10. I notice that your master limiter is subtle and in fact not much in the track is heavily compressed or limited. What are your thoughts on that? And why the utility device pulling pack the gain on the master?
I tend to try and get things sounding as close to how I want as possible at the mixdown stage rather than relying on a lot of processing on the master channel. The utility is just because I often end up with the levels running quite loud into the master and whilst not as elegant as bringing all the channel faders down, there is so much headroom internally, that whacking a utility on the master does the job nice and quickly with no clipping. I’d normally export the track with no limiter on the master at all, then do a quick version with a limiter applied myself to test out on the road and send the premaster to out regular mastering engineer.
11. Finally – you’ve made the track in the arrange view. Do you ever use the session view for jamming out tracks and record those to arrange?
Yeah, I actually gathered all the sounds in session view first and got the basic groove sounding good there before moving into arrange. With a more complex track I’d have a few different scenes for the different sections to have a play around to see how they flow into one-another, but as this was a simple techno groove it was ready to lay out once all the main parts were in place.
Thanks again for the time.
No worries, it was a pleasure :)
——————————
For more Ableton Live training visit our online course at WWW.LIVE-COURSES.COM and get 20% discount of all courses with the code LM20
royalty free loops, samples and sounds from Loopmasters – the sample boutique.
Related Posts
2 Responses to “Spektre – Spiral Pulse FREE Track And Ableton Project”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe To Loopmasters
Sponsors
Tweets
- No public Twitter messages.
About Us
Loopmasters blog is a resource for producers and electronic musicians. Enjoy tech tutorials, DAW specific software tips, and music producer interviews, plus keep up with Loopmasters producer news & latest sample pack releases.
Contact
Email Loopmasters
Credits
Framework by Graph Paper Press
Design by CueSounds
All content © 2012 by Loopmasters Ltd.
It would be nice if you would make this accessible for everyone, not just facebook members….. thank you
Hi Mansy we’ll post up the link shortly, good point.