Ableton Wavetable SuperSaw Lead Without effects
3 December 2023
Ableton Wavetable – Super Mean Rabid Bass!
17 December 2023
Hi, super nice you came here!
So I’ve got the Lush Strings patch for you that I did during the video tutorial, But I have later Fine Tuned it and added some most useful macros as below:
I used the drift synth but you could easily follow the process on any other polyphonic synth.
The whole idea to recreate sounds is to imagine how the sound is produced in the actual instrument. We’re talking about strings here and strings more often than not are producing quite a lot of harmonics. In the synth we will then try to find a sound source that is rich in harmonics.
In this case I chose 2 saw wave oscillators.
Normally these produce quite an aggressive sound, so we need to tame them down with a filter. Ideally it would be 6dB/octave but drift doesn’t have one so we had to use 12dB/octave.
After that we need to simulate string players in orchestra playing that is not always ideally tuned and there are many voices. Unison is a great tool to widen and multiply the sound. Another technique is to use the drift dial so the sound drifts in pitch and volume.
The last ingredient is to produce a bit more of harmonics and that slightly wobbly sound using a basic FM synth.
In the drift synth, both the LFO and the Envelope 2 can be switched to ratio mode. It means that for every pitch played it will multiply the base pitch frequency of a note by the amount set. So for example with the ratio 1:1 Lfo will produce the same frequency that the base frequency, with the Ratio set to 2:1 the Lfo will produce double the frequency.
Going by ideally even numbers isn’t so exciting as these won’t add too much charter but the fun begins when you will set an uneven ratio like 3.01 or something totally crazy like 7.39. but the more crazy you’ll go the weirder the sound will be. Play with the ratio to see what I’m talking about.
In my patch it will just affect the shape of the waveform, nicely visible in the little display, but try adding an FM synthesis to the pitch or to the filter frequency and you’ll be gone for hours playing with it 😁
Leaving the Drift, there are just some basic effects to shape the sound a bit more. Filter to shave off some unwanted frequencies a bit more precisely, I have actually decided to use 2 AutoFilters so the patch will be compatible with all Ableton Live 11 versions.
The saturation that adds more harmonics and that little grit to the sound. Usually when you add “Drive” you would like to bring down the Output as the volume can get pretty loud, but in this case the patch is pretty much tamed with the filters so I didn’t reduce the output level. In fact at the end of the chain I have added a Limiter to make the sound a bit louder but also limit it just in case.
And of course we need a Reverb. Free Valhalla Supermassive is great for that, just find some nice settings or a preset, but any stock Reverb + Delay will also be fine.
Fun trick… Duplicate the drift and change some settings as a separate chain. You can see it here along with some changes I did to the second drift. It sounds massive 😀
Here’s the link to the patch i have made during the tutorial:
And If you for some srange reason haven’t seen the video yet, here’s the link:
And if you liked it and you want to say thanks, you can buy me a virtual coffee ☕️ here:
Thanks ❤️
