This Ableton Reverb Tutorial shows you how to use Gated Reverb to thicken out drums such as claps, snares, toms and other percussion. This sound design tutorial works perfectly for all underground dance music genres including Deep House, Tech House and Techno.
So let’s look at five steps for setting up a gated reverb effect. So the idea here is that we’re going to take clap sound, we’re really going to thicken the sound out. But we’ll gain control of the length of our reverb as well. So it fits the track better and really enhances the groove. We’re going to be using a clap but this works well on snares, percussion, offbeat hats, give it a whirl. It’s really really good sound works really brilliantly with drums. Let’s listen to the loop. What I’d like to focus on is this claps. l notice how weak it sounds compared to everything else.
So first thing to do, step one is obviously add a reverb to thicken out the sound. So we’re going to create a return track basically and then you’re going to chuck a reverb on 100% wet because it’s on a return. And I’ve gone for around two seconds here that’s going to provide a really nice thick sound for the clap. So I’ll send the clap 100% to this. That sounds really good but what one is to bring the length of the clap in and still retain the thickness of the reverb. If I dial back the decay time, it starts to sound pretty weak very quickly. So step two is to chuck a gate device after the reverb. We’re going to open up the sidechain input and you’re going to select your dry signal.
So in this case our 808 clap, the idea being, every time the clap plays we’re going to set the gate to open so that we hear the reverb. And then of course we can use the parameters of the gate to control that reverb tail. So step three is to set that threshold. We need to bring it down to just below the peak volume of the clap. You’ll be able to see in the display here the dark waveform represents the clap, the top orange line represents the threshold and as it comes down below that gray waveform, you’ll hear the gate opening and the clap will come through. In order to make it more prominent I’m going to crank up the release and also when the gate is shut at the moment, what it’s doing is attenuating a turning down the reverb by 40dB. I want it to completely annihilate, it so I’m going to turn that all the way down far left. Let’s have a listen.
So that’s perfect. Literally as soon as that clap plays the gate is opening and we’re hearing the reverb. Next up, I need to tweak the release. So step four is set your release on your gate now, not the decay on the reverb and set this so that it’s matching the groove you’re happy with the sound that you get. So let’s sweep it all the way from three seconds open down until we find something we like.
So that’s working for me. So without the gate. Here we’re still getting that added thickness. Again let’s just take the reverb off. So that leaves us with one more step which is just to tweak the reverb. We’re going to be focusing on the decay time and what like just to focus on here is when I go from really short times you can’t hear the reverb then we get to that kind of weak sound. And then as we go really long with it we get a really nice thick sound. But of course we’re not creating that extra length because the gate is controlling that. So before we tweak this and play the video out, please make sure you hit the YouTube subscribe button. Want to make sure that you’re catching every single one of these videos. They’re coming out regularly. And if you subscribe you won’t miss any of them at all. Okay so please hit that now and then let’s play this out and have a listen to how the decay time affects the timber of the reverb.
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