EXPERIMENTAL LOFI ELECTRONIC TRACK

During the trimester I experimented with a few types of electronic tracks to better my production skills in Ableton. One I’d like to talk about is this lo-fi electronic track I’ve been toying around with over the past few weeks. I didn’t really have a reference in mind when I started making this track, but what I was aiming for was a laid back, low tempo, synth heavy kind of “chill-wave” track.

I began by creating a drum loop at 110BPM to get things of the ground. Simple 1 bar, kick/snare/kick/snare type sequence to keep things basic and allow room for synth and bass melodies. I then found a DX7 plugin and picked some jazzy sounding chords to try and give it that ‘lounge’ type feel I really like. Kind of like music from ‘Desmond Cheese’ I guess. I set up a Valhalla Reverb send with medium decay and depth settings but a decent amount of mix level + an EQ with a high pass as to only let the nice shimmer of the verb get through so we’re not competing with lower frequencies already. To add another layer, I duplicated the DX7 track and added the bass (root) notes in with MIDI and stuck a piano plugin on it to add texture. I now wanted a fuzzier kind of synth melody to sit right on top and give the track some movement or a ‘voice’. I used dual saw-tooth wave oscillators from Serum to create this sound and applied a heavy dose of compression from the plugin and again, a high pass filter to make it pop out and be what your ears want to listen to first.

Ableton session for Lo-Fi track

Now I wanted some bass to lay underneath to support what I’d done already. Nothing too complex as to take away from the higher register melodies so just root notes for now to fill it out. Using the plugin ‘Massive’ I picked a sine-square wave for a smoother bass sound; I find if you go for square or sawtooth waves for bass it takes away a bit of the low end and adds unnecessary muddiness. By now I had this part pretty complete except for one thing which was one of the main reasons why I wanted to make this track in the first place.

Sidechain Compression!

I basically decided to make this track so I could experiment with sidechain compression and store this technique in my arsenal for whenever making electronic music in the future. The way I set it up was:

Apply a compressor directly onto the tracks that you want to have the ‘pulsing’ sidechain feeling. For me it was all the synth pads, piano, synth lead and bass synth. Instead of activating the compressor straight away, open up the tab next to the plugins name and click the sidechain button.

(Allison, 2015)

This has now activated a gain and a mix pot and given you the option to select and audio source which is going to control the amount of compression. In my case, I selected the kick drum track as the audio source to active these compressors when triggered. Now it’s time to lower the threshold to taste in order to get the pumping sidechain compression effect. I’ve lowered mine quite far in order to hear a decent difference, but you may want just a subtle effect it’s up to you! Now when you solo the track you’ve applied the compression on you can really hear how it’s effected the sound.

What you could do now is adjust the attack and release times so that this is changing the envelope of the sound that you can hear coming out of the compressor. For instance, if you were to increase your release time, you will hear that it’s taking longer for the compressor to recover and for the level to come up to where it was before the kick drum caused the level to duck. If you were to make the release time shorter, it becomes more of a straightforward kind of gating effect. Same with adjusting the attack, you’ll find a balance between a hard-gated kind of sound and a smoother ‘pulsing’ kind of sound.

“For drastic sidechaining, we need a short attack and release time so that the compressor is able to both fully compress the audio down and to release it back to its original level fully. Otherwise we end up with a sound that is too muffled when the release is too high, or a sound that barely ducks at all if the attack is too high.”

("Sidechain Compression in Ableton Live", 2019)

It’s a relatively simple technique but very effective and works well with 4/4 kick drums and legato sounds such as strings or sustained basses because of the simple rhythmic interplay between those elements (perfect for my song).

After I’d applied this technique, I was messing around with adding small elements to the song to make it more interesting as I knew I wasn’t going to extend this into anything more than what it already was (verse and chorus). So, I decided to add a guitar solo in the middle of the song. I was listening to Led Zeppelin that day, so I went for a very ‘boxy’ sounding tone by filtering out a massive chunk of the lows and lower mids and rolling off the super high end as well. DI’d of course, because I’ve been enjoying DI guitar tones lately, I created a signal chain that was compressor > distortion > delay > reverb which is typical of Jimmy Page’s setup recorded the solo then doubled it and hard panned them left and right to get a more ‘grand’ effect. On the left side I made an EQ boost up around 4k and on the right-hand side I made an EQ cut of around 4k in attempt to widen and clear up the mix even further.

Overall this was a fun experiment as I got to create a lo-fi electronic track, learn about sidechain compression and mix in a guitar solo of my own which I haven’t done in a while.

References

Sidechain Compression in Ableton Live. (2019). Retrieved 16 August 2019, from https://bassgorilla.com/sidechain-compression-in-ableton-live/

Allison, J. (2015). Side Chain Compression in Ableton Live Tutorial. Retrieved 16 August 2019, from http://austinabletontutor.com/side-chain-compression-ableton-live/