Today I'm going to show you seven different techniques for using auxiliary channels, which are
going to make all the difference to your music. I'm will from EDM Tips, where each week I share
with you different music production techniques to really up your electronic dance music production
game. I'm going to be using Ableton Live 11 but you can use these techniques in any DAW, so they
work perfectly in FL studio and Logic Pro and, as I say, pretty much any other DAW. Don't forget to
stick around for the last one because it's a real game changer and without further ado,
let's hop into the DAW and get it done! Okay, so first let's explain what an auxiliary channel
is. Now, another way of referring to them, as I said in Ableton Live, are send and return channels, and
I'll show you exactly why that is. If you look at your normal mixer, you'll have lots of different
channels, like that, and they all play different sounds, and these over here are the auxiliary
channels. And this basically means a channel where you can send sounds to that's going to be treated
separately from the main channel, where the sound is generated from. So, in Ableton live
you can create an auxiliary channel by just going up to create and then pressing insert return track,
again that means the same thing. So, if you make sure that the return channels are showing by
pressing this R button here, and then you can see all of the return channels that you've created,
and then press this S button, which shows the send knobs. And this is where you can select how
much of each sound to send to these channels that you've created. So, in this example we have a stab.
Just a normal synth stab, and if we create an auxiliary channel, we can put a reverb on it
and then send some of this stab to the reverb.
Now, why would you want to do that? This takes us on to part two. One of the main
reasons is that you can process this auxiliary reverb separately from your drive's dry sound.
So, if you were to have a reverb on this channel, which is our stab channel,
anything after this is going to affect both the dry sound and the wet reverb. So, if, for instance,
we want to take out some of the low end of the reverb, we're also taking out the dry sound as well,
whereas if we use an auxiliary channel like this, you can see we are now processing that
reverb separately from the dry sound. So, I can take out just the low end of the reverb,
whilst leaving the low end in the normal channel. This is really useful because then you can add
things like saturation, EQ, just to the reverb or whichever other effects that you are using in
the auxiliary channel, and it's worth noting: any effects that you do have on the auxiliary channel,
at least the first one, it's a good idea to have it at a hundred percent wet,
so you're not duplicating the dry sound, when you are sending it to that auxiliary channel.
Okay, tip number three: this is sharing a room reverb. This is a great way to get your sound
a bit more cohesive, get everything sounding like it's coming from the same space. So, on this first
return channel you can see I've created a room reverb, (let's turn that off for the time being) and
it's just a reverb with a very short decay time. So, let's put some of that on our stab.
Now, having a dedicated room reverb on one auxiliary channel or return channel
is great because then other instruments can share that same reverb and instead of having loads of
reverbs running on your track, using up cpu, getting the sound wishy-washy and muddy, sharing that one
reverb will just gel everything together a little bit better. So, this is without the room reverb on,
and this is with it on gelling everything together.
A subtle difference but one of the main things that will separate a pro mix from an amateur mix.
Okay, tip number four. This is where we're actually going to do something that is Ableton specific.
We're going to be using the drum rack and then creating send controls to our return channels
from that drum rack. Now, if that sounds a bit complicated, let me explain. If we go into our
drums here, you can see each of them have got their different volume controls, each have got the
different panning controls. If we click this button here and the S and the R buttons, lots of stuff
starts to happen. So in this section down here (i'll just delete those), if you right click and press
create return chain, you can then select whichever of your auxiliary channels that you've created. So,
let's select from the drop down the room reverb, and now we can shut that off, turn off the return
chain there, and just leave the send button switched on. And now we've got the send control
here, and that means that we can assign a little bit of room reverb to each of those separate drums,
rather than assigning room reverb to all of the drums together because you might want some more
on some of the drums and less on others. So, let's add some room reverb to these drums, to the clap,
to the hat,
to the right. So, this is where we were,
really dry, and this is where we are now. So, with everything together,
and that's off.
And let me know in the comments if you're enjoying these tips so
far and which one of them you're gonna try out in your next track.
Okay, tip number five. This is where you can use an auxiliary channel in quite a special way.
We are going to side chain compress a reverb that we have created on our auxiliary channel
and we're going to use a dry signal as the side chain input. Let me explain why this is
really useful. If you were to have some vocals on a track, for instance, so i'll just load some in now.
So, we've got our vocal loaded in, let's create an auxiliary channel for it. The shortcut is option +
command + T, if you're using Mac, and then let's call this vox reverb, and then load on a reverb effect,
like so, make sure it's 100 wet. Now. let's feed some of that reverb onto our vocals,
and I'm going to increase the volume, using a utility plug-in,
so it's kind of washing out some of the vocals and they're losing some of their clarity.
So, this is what I mean by using some side chain compression.
If we load on a compressor onto our auxiliary channel after the reverb, open this little
button here, press side chain, and then select the vocals as the input. Here we go, then we can use
that sidechain compressor to duck the reverb slightly, whilst the drive vocals are playing,
and as soon as the dry vocals have stopped, then the reverb can open up to full volume again, and
this is a great way to have your vocals cut through the mix while still having a
nice reverb on them. Okay, tip number six. This is where we are going to create some interesting
multi-tap delay, using an auxiliary channel. Now, this is great because it
just gives you so much flexibility and creativity. Okay, so say we have a stab
and we want to create some interesting delay. Let's create
a multi-tap delay. What we're going to do is feed some of this sound, using the send knobs.
At the moment it's just dry, so we're doubling up the dry sound there,
but now let's see what happens when we start adding delays. Let's put one delay on, 100 wet,
ping pong. Okay, that's pretty normal. You could do that but just by putting it on the
channel itself and using the dry wet control but now if we press command G and group it together,
open up the chain and then create another couple of chains, what we
can do is put a different delay on each of these chains with a different delay setting,
and then one more and let's use a different delay unit just to make things a bit more interesting.
And the best thing about this is now you can add different effects to each of these delay
units as well. So, say one of them we wanted to create some kind of
flanging effect. We could go to audio effects, pitch modulation, flange phaser,
and then on another one we could add a frequency shifter,
just see what happens, put some reverb up there.
So, that's a very cool creative thing you can do using auxiliary channels as well. Now, time for tip
number seven and this one is a real game changer. If you've got your whole track finished and it's
pretty much mixed to how you like it, this is how you can get a bit more power, a bit more loudness
out of it. So, let's create one more auxiliary channel. I usually wouldn't have this many, guys,
I'd usually have maybe five or six. Some tracks I might have this many but not usually. Now, let's
just put a normal compressor on that last auxiliary channel. We are going to drive this
really, really hard and what we're going to do is just feed a little bit of everything
that we want to kind of pop through the mix a bit more. So, let's just do that on the fly,
and let's just make sure the compressor is activated by taking the threshold right down.
So, you can hear it's really hard compression but if we add a little bit of the things that
we want to pop through, it's going to make the mix just sound louder.
So, this is the compressed signal, which, as you can hear, is
way too loud on its own, or way too compressed rather, but this is turned off
and this is turned on.
So, a subtle effect and something only to be done really at the end of the mixing process but
it is a great way to just get an extra bit of loudness out of your track. Let me know if you
like this in the comments below, guys, smash like, don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you
want tips like this every couple of days, and we will be back on Friday for our long, the super long
videos that I like to make that kind of... Uh, in the style of, and yeah, we got a really good one this
week, so I will catch you then! Oh, yeah, if you want more tips like this, you can download my Ultimate
EDM Mixing guide below this video completely free and until next time, cheers and happy producing!