Presets and Sounds - LiveKeyboardist

10Mar 2020 by Brett Pontecorvo

Build Your Own Shimmer Reverb

1Sound Design, Blog, Live Playback, Presets and Sounds, Sound Design

Shimmer reverb has turned into such a buzz word. It shows up everywhere and produces an awesome effect. But what is it? Essentially shimmer reverb is a course pitch-shifting device paired with a reverb. The shimmer effect is achieved by creating a feedback loop between the two devices. In Ableton, this is most easily accomplished using sends and returns. Building Our Shimmer Reverb Start by creating two new send tracks. You can do this by right-clicking on the screen and choosing insert return track. Rename the first return track, "shimmer verb" and the second, "shimmer delay." You can rename any track by selecting it and pressing Command- R on your keyboard. You can also Right-mouse click and choose rename. Now we need to create our feedback loop. We are going…

23Jul 2019 by Brett Pontecorvo

Musical Theatre Sound Effects In Ableton

1Creating A Keyboard Set Up, Blog, Live Playback, Presets and Sounds

Musical theatre is close to my heart, and figuring out how to make Musical theatre sound effects happen has always been a welcomed challenge for me. Musical Theatre shows are a great working ground for Ableton live. They come packed with lots of different patch changes, and at times, keyboard parts come backed with Sudo-unplayable parts that require the assistance of software to pull off- and of course lots of musical theatre sound effects. When I first started programming keyboard for musicals, I used mainstage, which seems to be industry standard for this genre. Unfortunately, It always cracked under the pressure of extensive programming. This was one of the causes of me moving to Ableton. If you're going through the same thing, make sure you grab a copy of my…

05Jan 2019 by Brett Pontecorvo

Three Audio FX to spice up any Piano Patch

1Sound Design, Blog, Live Playback, Presets and Sounds

I love a good piano patch. I've spent a ton of time thinking about what makes a piano sound interesting and I think it really comes down to three things. ColorPresenceTexture There was a time that I really hated using non musical words to describe sound, so let me extrapolate a bit more. Color When I talk about "color", I am specifically referring to saturation that has been added to the low-mids. It doesn't have to be a ton, and sometimes, it's not needed at all. But time and time again I find myself adding a little but of saturation or distortion there to help give my piano sounds a little more body. Presense When I talk about "presence" I am specifically thinking about come form of compression. When I…

01Jan 2019 by Brett Pontecorvo

Cool Ping Pong Delay Trick

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Presets and Sounds

If you are playing keyboard live, you will want to make excellent use of all the audio effects you have available to you. It's one of the things that sets us apart from someone who is playing on a regular acoustic piano. Ping pong delay is a great effect that you hear probably more often than you would expect. It's a great way to add dimension and rhythm to a standard piano patch. It takes a delayed signal and moves it quickly back and fourth across a stereo feild. Many ping-pong delays leave my sound a little muddy. I have created a bit of a workaround for that that will leave this effect still sounding crispy. Rather than using Ableton's ping pong delay device, I use the simple delay panned…

18Dec 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

How To Record Automation In Ableton

Blog, Presets and Sounds, Program Features

Recording automation in Ableton Live is just about as easy as recording anything else in Ableton Live. There is and will always be a time and a place to manually draw in your automation, but much like using curved automation lines, recording your automation brings in a whole new level of human expression to what could be otherwise stagnant. You can record all of the same parameters that you can manually enter in live. However, with the ability to record Ableton you can capture things that you actually do during a live performance such as Aftertouch and Modwell adjustments. If you add this to the other things that you could draw in that you might actually do with a controller during a live performance like bring side-chained effects in and out, adjust…

11Dec 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Delay: Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Presets and Sounds

Delay can add a lot by doing a little. Admittedly this post transformed into to something different then I intended as I explored the Ping Pong Delay. In all of this, my passion is using the software as a piece of my instrument. When an electric guitar player plugs into their pedal board, the board is no less a part of their instrument than the guitar. As a keyboard player, how do I use my software the same way? This is a question I ask myself often. This post comes from that place. And I know you are going to love this approach to using delay. https://youtu.be/WoMH5YHi0eA What is Delay? Delay is an audio effect that takes a part of your signal, and repeats it after a given amount of…

17Nov 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Preset spotlight: Light Keys

1Sound Design, Blog, Presets and Sounds, Recording

I have found in my talking with people about Ableton that there are a lot of people who hate on Ableton's preset sounds, and even on their built-in synths and instruments. It's my personal opinion that the somewhat lack-luster looks of many of its synths contribute to some users gripes with their sounds. I will concede that there are other DAW's that have some shinier out of the box sounds, but I can offer an immediate explanation for this. Ableton is modular in nature. Sounds and effects are meant to be layered, stacked, and used in combination to create awesome things. So for where certain routing abilities are in lack or effects missing within the synth itself, there are innumerable possibilities for sound and effect layering that quickly make up for…

06Nov 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Reverb: Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players

1Sound Design, Blog, Essential Audio Effects For Keyboard Players, Live Playback, Presets and Sounds

Before most music hits our ears, it passes through some sort of a computer program: Protools, Logic, Cubase, Studio One, Ableton, and any of the others I might be missing. Very rarely is anything getting onto our most popular streaming services without being molded in some way by a computer. Even more than that, many of the sounds that we hear in music is created from a digital instrument: Whether it be sampled based, or a synthesizer. So it seems to logically follow that if you are playing a cover gig, you probably aren't going to make it through the whole night without having at least some handle on how to make computerized sounds. That is what this series is about. What we as keyboard players NEED to know to be…

18Sep 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Three Ways To Add Stereo Depth To Your Synths

1Sound Design, Blog, Midi, Presets and Sounds, Program Features

Adding stereo depth to your synth can make the somewhat lame not so bad, and the absolutely awesome, completely incredible. It ups your game. For a while, I really struggled to create interesting sounds with my synths. While there are a ton of possibilities for creating deep, interesting, and evolving sounds without using any effects at all, using some audio effects can really help speed the process along, especially for beginners in synthesis. Here are three really easy ways to add stereo depth to your synths. By the way, if you are new to Ableton, The Complete Transition Course comes with 15 great sounds you can start using immediately. You can check that out in the link above. https://youtu.be/448tBXO2aX0 Method One: Reverb It’s great if you’ve got a reverb setting…

11Sep 2018 by Brett Pontecorvo

Preset Spotlight: Lush Roads

1Sound Design, Blog, Live Playback, Presets and Sounds

I love a good preset sound. I even love a halfway decent sound. Presets are a great starting point to make something awesome. Thankfully, Ableton is full of great presets. Recently, I've been really enjoying checking out all of the awesome wavetable presets. Today we are checking out the wavetable preset, "Lush Roads". https://youtu.be/pdSbiyRBT3g What I Love About It The Attack When you strike the first note, you may hear a slight "wah" sound. You can create this sound a few different ways. In this case, we can credit that nice audible chunk to the attack of envelope 2. Although it is relatively short, that "wah" sound is coming from the rising of oscillator 1's position. I like when sounds have an interesting quality to the attack. As a musician, we get…

Category: Presets and Sounds