Ableton Live Ultimate Course 22 - Utilities Video Lecture | Become the Master of Music Production: Ableton (English)

there's a geyser wrapping up the effect
devices in Ableton these are what I
would call the utilities and we're going
to start out with the gate so you know
how a compressor once the audio reaches
a certain threshold
you'll get gain reduction a gate works
that once audio reaches a certain
threshold
you'll get audio coming through so it's
kind of like reversed an example would
be if you are recording a live band per
se and you have the vocalist in easing
and are doing whatever he does you
wouldn't want the background of like the
drums in like maybe the guitar coming
through that microphone so you would put
in a gate so I actually have somewhat of
a gate in my microphone that I'm talking
into right now so you wouldn't hear
necessarily a lot of what's going
through Ableton through my speakers the
gate is triggered when my stupid face
makes noises so I'll give you an example
here we have this type of thing right
here and it's pretty dynamic it's pretty
fun alright so we have this kind of
percussion you hit here and all this
junk we want to get rid of that will
pretend that that's like say your
overheads if you're making up a drum kit
which is a completely other series so
I'll just do this and we have our
threshold right so every time that audio
goes a certain goes above a certain
threshold the it'll open up you can see
it visually here right and others an
attack so it's it's not so abrupt one
the the gate does engage alright so you
have a smoother attack for like say
background vocals or something like that
just make everything smoother gates are
as old as compressors there
really neat and that's basically it not
a whole lot of use for electronic music
but say if you're making up a drum kit
or you have a band going on a gate is
extremely useful and it cleans up the
mix and makes everything sound great
okay so we have a utility here
so what utility is is basically a
utility you can think of it as a simple
gain knob so say if you have a plug-in
before it and it's really hot or it's
it's you know going over zero which is
fine because of floating-point
processing you wouldn't want it to go
above zero into another plugin so you
just put this in here and you'd bring
the gain down so then the next plug-in
is not working too hard that's one
example to do it you can mute that mutes
everything so there's that you can
isolate left or right which makes it
mono you can have just the right right
you can have you can swap the left and
right so once you have it on stereo mode
you can pan it left or right you can
have that so width
what is with well with is a width of
zero is everything collapsed into its
mono stuff so you have a mono sound when
the width is at zero to start with is at
zero right like when you increase the
width to 200 you're only getting the
difference between the left and right so
mono sounds is what's similar between
the left and right and like say stereo
is look that the wide start your image
is what's happening the difference
between the left and right so you get a
wide sound that comes into play when
you're dealing with mid/side eq which
we'll get into
right that is the wide the wide stereo
image right yep a left and right speaker
and that's what you use it for the phase
so what this does is you have left and
right signal right and you have these
little we've Lee wave Lee's right right
when you invert the phase of left or
invert the phase of right what happens
is one of these it gets flipped so the
left channel the phase is flipped so you
have these two plan kind of upside down
and you get a really weird effect so
when you invert both of them it kind of
goes back to normal right so what's
happening is you're getting a different
different phase from each speaker and
it's kind of canceling it out and that's
why it kind of makes you feel dizzy
alright so oh yeah another thing I'll
just open up an audio track and I'll
have it received from my synthesizer in
right so what we have here is we can
have something called DC offset and
that's not good most of the time and
what we can do is I'll show you so we
have like this noise floor here which
isn't good this happens a lot with like
meters gear and the phase can be not
directly at zero it can be moved up you
don't get this with like bsts and stuff
but you get it with certain pieces of
analog gear so you just turn on DC
offset and this you know kills off the
range it kills off like the noise floor
and it's really useful for vintage gear
that's kind of unpredictable and broken
and yeah I don't have anything like that
to show you with but I do get some noise
through my outboard gear
and that's that another thing okay we
have this right we have our spectrum so
this is kind of interesting we have a
readout between 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz
and it shows you what the sound is doing
right and you also have the same thing
within your EQ 8 right and it's just a
it's the readout of what the frequencies
are doing so if you completely high-pass
something you lose all bottom and
generally yeah it's neat to look at but
you should really be using your ears and
trusting your monitors and having high
quality monitors you can have a block
which is the resolution left and right
in the refresh rate of however many
milliseconds you want in the average and
you can have a line graph and select max
you could double click it and have a
very high quality readout and you can
find like problem areas and peaks of
your sound and you'd have this on like
your stereo master or in a group and you
can see what's going on yeah alright
that's pretty much it for utilities and
stuff alright have a good one