Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
What’s up, everyone? Subterranean here. And today we’re going to learn how to make this effect.
Stay tuned for a detailed walkthrough where we will explore each step. Let’s dive right in and unleash our creative potential!
Note: This section is just getting started. More detailed instructions and specifics will be covered in the following sections.
Table of contents
Using Vinyl Distortion for Low-Fidelity Effects
This is a very unique type of sound effect, usually meant to go more in the background of songs rather than being brought to the forefront. It can add a lot of nice low fidelity grit to your songs and works well in future garage songs in the style of artists like Burial.
First, delete the original track and open up a fresh MIDI track. Next, drag on a vinyl distortion, which is one of the stock effects in Ableton. Now, go to the crackle and turn up the volume.
It doesn’t really matter where we turn the volume up to, as long as it’s not clipping. Turn up the density a little bit, maybe somewhere around 22. That should be good. You’ll probably notice that the vinyl distortion doesn’t have a lot of control with it—it plays in a random pattern that you can’t affect in any way.
Creating and Managing Audio Tracks
And unless you mute the sound or turn the volume up and down, you can’t really start and stop it. We’re gonna fix that by creating a new audio track. Let’s mute the drums so that doesn’t get in the way. And now we’ll go to the recording panel and change it from external in to our MiDi track, which is seven midi. Now we’ll arm it for recording.
And now let’s turn our midi back on because I muted it so I could talk easier. And now let’s record. We don’t need to record too much, just a small, little piece, something like this. Now we’ll delete this track because it’s no longer of use. Now, the first thing we’re going to do with this bounce down audio file’s pretty interesting.
Creating a Rhythm from Audio Peaks
We’re going to take parts of the sound where it has clicking and popping sound effects, and we’re going to morph those into sort of a rhythm by cutting the sound up. Let’s zoom into the timeline so we have a more accurate way of cutting things up. And we’re going for any section of audio where you can see sort of a little peak that almost looks like a small kick. I already see a good one right here.
Let’s actually increase the volume of this a little bit so the peaks are a little bit easier to see. There we go.
Here’s a peak. And we’ll cut that out, and then we’ll isolate this part. I see, another good peak right about here. And I’m not going to be too intricate about making a rhythm with this, I’m just doing this as an example. There’s another peak and I think that’s good.
So now we’ve got parts of the audio with popping sounds. Now we’ll arrange these into sort of a rhythm, maybe something like this, and then we’ll take that and copy it over a bunch of times.
Optimizing EQ for Better Sound
And here we have our pattern, pretty repetitive and not very creative. But this is just for example. Now the sound so far is pretty bland. There’s not really any tonality to it. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to get an EQ Eight and drag it on.
What we’re going to do with the EQ Eight is add a lot of tonality to the sound by taking an EQ band and increasing its gain significantly. This approach can make certain sounds very resonant and maybe tinny or muddy, but with this quiet, tonality-free sound, it actually enhances it. We’re just going to use this third EQ band. It doesn’t matter which band you use, as long as we have it on this default curve.
If you’re making a track, I would suggest setting the frequency to the key that your song is in. We’ll assume the song we’re making is in the key of G. So, I’m going to set the frequency to 783.99, which translates to a G5. In the description box below, we’ll have a link to a page showing various musical notes and their frequency translations. Now, let’s play our sound and adjust the gain to see if we get a good result.
I think we’ll put it all the way up at 15 decibels. And now, we’ll do the same thing with the quantize setting, something nice and tight at about 5. This is sounding a lot better but is still a bit too subtle. So, we’re going to grab another EQ Eight and duplicate these exact settings. We’ll set the frequency to 784, put the gain at 15, and set the quantize to 5.02.
And now, the tonality is a lot more noticeable.
We’re going to do a couple of more adjustments with our second EQ Eight. Let’s cut out some of that unnecessary low end by taking our first EQ band and changing it to a low cut times four. Now, we’ll play with the frequency knob to see what we get.
Somewhere around maybe 625. We’ll do the same thing by cutting out some of the highs. Depending on the type of song you’re making, you may or may not want to do this. But for garage tracks, which are supposed to have more of a mid-range sound with fewer highs, I like to do this.
So, we’ll take this EQ curve, change it to a high cut times four, and once again, let’s tweak the frequency knob.
Maybe somewhere around 6. We’ll leave the quantize for both of these EQ bands at the default settings. They sound really good the way they are. Now, we’re going to add Multiband Dynamics. We’ll use the OGT preset, and if we play the sound with the OTT as it is, it sounds too overly compressed and a bit too cavernous.
Tweaking Audio Effects
So we’re going to change this by going to the amount. And we’re going to drag it down maybe somewhere around 45%. It’s bringing out some more mids in the sound, but it’s not compressing them too much. And for our last effect, we’re going to add on a reverb. And like always, we’ll turn on low cut and leave high cut on.
And then maybe make a curve. Something like this. We’ll turn off the chorus. And now let’s play with the decay time. And see if we get a sound we like.
Not too much, maybe somewhere around 2 seconds. 1.92. And now we’ll do the same thing with the dry wet.
Maybe about 28%. And there we have our sound. So that was my tutorial. I hope you enjoyed it. In the description box below, we’ll have a link where you can download the full Ableton project file.
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FAQs
The Vinyl Noise Effect adds low-fidelity grit to tracks, commonly used in future garage music for a background texture. It mimics the crackles and pops from vinyl records, contributing to the nostalgic and atmospheric sound typical of artists like Burial.
To create Vinyl Distortion in Ableton Live, start with a fresh MIDI track, add the vinyl distortion effect, and adjust the crackle volume and density. This produces a random crackling pattern that adds depth to your tracks.
After recording the audio, zoom into the waveform and identify peaks representing clicks and pops. Isolate these sections, arrange them into a rhythm, and repeat the pattern to create a unique background effect.
Use the EQ Eight in Ableton to add tonal richness to the effect by boosting specific frequencies. You can remove unnecessary low or high-end frequencies to create a more mid-range-focused sound, which is ideal for future garage tracks.
In addition to EQ, applying multiband dynamics, adjusting compression, and adding reverb can refine the sound. Experiment with the reverb’s decay time and dry-wet balance to achieve the desired texture and spatial depth.