There's a class of effects that's called multiband effects.
And we're going to see it all over the place in the devices inside of Ableton.
And even better, we can create them ourselves.
So earlier, we talked about creating a bandpass filter.
That was a narrow range of frequencies that we let through the filter.
And a multiband effect allows us to put a different effect
on different frequencies.
So I could put one effect on the bottom end, another effect on the mid-range,
and a different effect on the high end.
And we'll see a lot of effects have this built-in.
Real quick, if I look in the browser, and I look at my audio effects,
the multiband dynamics plug-in gives us a gate and a compressor
for the high end, a gate and the compressor for the mid-range,
and a gate and a compressor for the bottom end of whatever sound
is going through it.
We also have a delay that is set up that way called the filter delay.
And that similarly gives us three separate bands and a separate delay
for each one of those bands.
What I'd like to do is create one myself that takes this groove--
[DRUM BEAT PLAYS]
--takes the low frequencies, makes them mono, takes the mid frequencies
and distorts them, and on the high frequencies,
gives us nice stereo space and maybe a swirling quality.
So multiband effects are great on sounds that are full spectrum.
Something that has bottom end, something that has mid-range, and something that
has high end all at once.
And then building them, we're going to figure out a really cool way
to work with racks.
So the first thing I'll do is add in an effect rack.
And I'll make three chains.
Top one will be high, I'll name it, mid and low.
And then I'm going to add EQ3 to each one of these chains.
Filter EQ3 to the high chain, to the mid chain, and to the low chain.
So we see we have EQ3 in all three of those chains.
Now we have options in EQ3, which is really nice to just kill or mute
some of the bands.
So I'll go to my high chain and I'll mute the low and mid bands.
I'll go to the mid chain and mute the low and high.
And I'll go to the low chain and mute the mid and the high.
So let's hear what this sounds like with the groove going down.
[BEAT PLAYING]
And I could solo the high band, just have the the high frequencies.
And so we see that I'm almost kind of isolating parts of the groove.
When I solo the high band, I get almost the high hats
and it's a little bit of the high end of the snare.
When I solo the mid band, it's going to be primarily snare drum.
But I'll also hear the upper end of the kick.
The high hat is almost gone in that band.
Then I can solo the low band and all I hear is kick drum.
So this multiband effect is also great on the drum kit
after it's been mixed to try to apply effects to individual parts of the kit.
So now we can add effects to each one of these individual bands.
And I'll start by putting the utility effect in the lowest band.
So I'll go to my Dynamics plug-ins.
I'll grab Utility.
And I'll put it in the lowest band.
And I'll put it to mono.
And so I'm taking the lowest frequencies of my mix and making them totally mono.
This is a very common thing in mixing.
Very often you want the lowest frequencies
to be the same in both speakers.
Our sense of stereo localization doesn't really rely on the bass frequencies
much.
So putting it to one or other side doesn't matter a whole lot
when you're listening on speakers.
And when you have headphones on, if you hear
a lot of low frequencies in one ear and not the other,
it feels really uncomfortable.
So it's very common to make the bass frequencies totally mono.
And this is a great way to do it.
But we actually, as a sidebar, don't even
need to do that because the utility device has a bass mono
option right in it.
So I could just add utility to anything and make the bass mono.
It's that important a technique, they made a plug-in just for it.
And this is an effect utility, multiband effect itself.
But we'll turn that function off.
Just make the low frequencies mono using our frequency splitter.
In the mid-range, I want to add some distortion,
make that range kind of gritty.
And so I'll go with the Saturator device.
But any of our distortions could work here.
And let's hear just the mid and low band together.
[BEAT PLAYING]
So that's allowed me to distort that mid-range
without distorting the bass at all.
That's really a powerful technique.
Often you want this kind of gritty sound to your music.
But if you start distorting the lowest frequencies,
it might end up with just way too many upper harmonics.
And just isolating a small band of frequencies can be really useful.
And now I want to add some delay and swirling effects to the high end
and not have them be distorted.
So let's try that out.
I'll just take the echo device and put it
on just the high end of this drum groove.
Grab Echo, add it to the high chain.
And we'll have feedback kind of low.
And we'll let it be synced.
And we'll do 50-50.
Let's hear it.
[BEAT PLAYING]
So we had that delay on just the high end.
Maybe some stereo space would be nice too.
I'll add an auto pan after it.
[BEAT PLAYING]
So I like that effect.
And I love the possibility of putting different effects
on different frequency ranges.
Now, there's one thing about this that I'd like to change.
And that is I'd like the ability to adjust
which frequencies are in each band.
Right now, I think the low frequency band
is including too much of the mid-range.
And I think the high frequency band isn't quite high enough.
So what I need to do is to be able to move these crossover frequencies,
but to do it the same in all the bands.
And we can go to our macro controls for this.
So in my effect rack, I'll open up the Macro Controls.
I'll click on Map.
I'll go to my high band.
And I'll map frequency high to macro 1.
Mid-band, frequency high, macro 1.
Low band, frequency high, macro 1.
My low band, I'll also map frequency low to macro 5.
Mid-band, frequency low to macro 5.
And on my high band, frequency low to macro 5.
And then I'll close up the macro mapping.
So what this allows me to do, if I turn this frequency high knob,
it's changing the frequency high cut-off,
or the crossover, actually, in all three bands.
So if I look at high, mid, and low, they're all at 2.95k.
If I turn this up, we're going to see they've all moved up together.
And the same thing has happened for the frequency low.
Now, this sounds pretty cool when we start sweeping the frequencies.
Let's hear it.
[DRUM BEAT PLAYING]
I love it when I take that crossover and bring it down,
how the snare starts getting in the delays.
And then I bring it back up.
And it's only the high frequencies, only the high hats in the delays.
There's a lot of great uses for this.
I love multiband effects on basses because they're often a full spectrum.
I love it on full drum kits like this.
It also could work really well on vocals if I
want to control the S and F sibilant sounds separately
from the body of the vocal.