1 Song Basics
Open a song with a bassline or melody that is good, but lacks that certain something. Create an audio track and load a Field Recording onto it. We used Walking Back And Forth.wav from the booklet data. We add a compressor, EQ and noise gate to the track, like Pro-G from FabFilter .
2 Routing
You can use any gate you like, the only important thing is that it has a sidechain input. To route the bassline sound into the gate, we‘ll create another audio track in Ableton Live, put its input on the track containing the bassline, route the output to the gate effect‘s sidechain input, and activate track monitoring.
3 Short Mixing
In other DAWs, the process may be simpler. In Cubase, the bassline can be routed into the gate via an aux send without creating an extra track. In the compressor, we lower the Threshold and Ratio to maximum to give the field recording a consistent volume, and we use EQ to cut the bass below 300 Hz.
4 Gate Settings
Back to the gate: Start playback and turn the THRESHOLD knob all the way up so that the field recording can be heard permanently for the first time, and switch SIDE CHAIN to Ext, which means that sidechaining reacts to the external input. By auditioning, you can check if the bass line is routed correctly into the plug-in.
5 Attack & Release
Slowly turn the knob down until the textures can be heard to the desired amount. Set Attack to 44 ms and Release to 300 ms as a starting point, so that the effect does not sound choppy, and then vary the two parameters so that the effect suits your taste and fits the sequence or melody.
6 More Recordings
One more tip: In addition to the Field Recordings in the workshop data, you will find about 1.8 GB more in the „Loops and Samples“ folder of the issue software in the sample pack Spectre - Field Recordings.zip. By the way, drum loops or single drums can be enhanced with the same principle. Have fun experimenting!
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