Ableton Live for Sound Design :Tron Legacy

[houseplant]

I'm huge fan of the 82' classic. When the official trailer came out this past friday i was absolutely floored. I also saw it as a perfect playground to try and recreate the scene from scratch. Over the last several weeks I had already been experimenting with using Ableton Live for post sound design, and decided to really give it a go on it friday night.

Two things i would loved to have.... Nudge ....and the ability to change the grid to frames instead of time/bars beats. Overall it was extremely fun to do. I used a combination of library sounds for the light cycles.... propellerheads reason/NI Reaktor. Also what was a god send was abletons new crossfade tool... and the ability to do transpose automation (came in handy on the bike modulation).

Anyhow... Just wanted to see how many others out there are using Ableton for post production sound editing/design. I really do hope the company turns around and provide's true video support at some point.

Screen shot of the session:



Extremely messy... Without the ability to nudge to frame I had to drop markers for cam cuts and to spot specific points i wanted sound attached to.

Thanks for looking.. Cant wait for the movie!

[iamstudios]

Bloody hell. That is an amazing job. You own my respect dude.

[houseplant]

Originally Posted by iamstudios

Bloody hell. That is an amazing job. You own my respect dude.

aww man! Thanks alot. I had a blast doing it. It was really frustrating at times.. but there was no turning back once i got past the light cycle construction. I hope to put together some feature requests for real video support to Ableton.

cheers

-Chris

[Jesse Peterson]

light cycles sound great, fits really well.

[JamieMB]

I tried ableton for some sound design..it was really cool being able to trigger sfx with my computer keyboard keys and to manipulate them in real time..it's really like a sampler/linear daw mangled together. Unfortunately the timeline editing was frustrating and I gave up :(

[tilman]

That was great! Really dig the sounds!

What Ableton features did you use most?
Did you also use Clip Automation? What where the advanteges to protools?

Most of the time I use Ableton Rewire to protools.
I have to try to do post stuff in ableton as well.
Tell us more!

[Blank]

I use Ableton a lot for sound design, Live is an amazing sketching pad and has really nice sonic capabilities. The realtime aspect is a total must to my workflow and the flexibility induced by the plugins/instruments rack since version 6 is very profitable to me.

For the final integration I still use protools to tight it all up. I don't know if max for live will help using ableton as a standalone tool for that kind of job but I pretty hope so.

[houseplant]

Originally Posted by Jesse Peterson

light cycles sound great, fits really well.

Thanks Jesse! I used a combination of Airplanes/MotorCycles/Simple analog Oscillators with fast LFO. All sent through a erosion(noise)/vocoder/chorus/eq/limiter chain. I kept the chorus effect 48% wet/dry to have some of the original texture bleed through as to make it somewhat recognizable.

Originally Posted by JamieMB

I tried ableton for some sound design..it was really cool being able to trigger sfx with my computer keyboard keys and to manipulate them in real time..it's really like a sampler/linear daw mangled together. Unfortunately the timeline editing was frustrating and I gave up :(

The timeline is definitely hard to get your head around first.. its just awkward compared to other daw packages such as PT/Logic/Nuendo...The best thing is to just dive in head first and see if you can weather the storm. A quick look at the hot keys went a long way.... especially for zooming in and out. I just used the -/+ on the numpad. It served a lot better than dragging down/up above the timeline.

Originally Posted by tilman

That was great! Realy dig the sounds!

What Ableton features did you use most?
Did you also use Clip Automation? What where the advanteges to protools?

Most of the time I use Ableton Rewire to protools.
I have to try to do post stuff in ableton as well.
Tell us more!

Thanks!!

I really enjoyed using the clip automation.. specifically Transpose. It was EXTREMELY useful in helping make the bikes simulate the increase/decreasing in speed. I used the TONES algorithm for most of these setups.. but on some of the doppler whiz-by's i used complex pro with a short grain amount.

I really think the only advantages to pro tools are the compatibility with other studios (though you can always bounce stems /rewire record to PT)... Nudging (HUGE!!)...and a Frame based grid/timeline.

I'm going to post some sound examples of some of the layers/processing as well as screen shots showing the fx chains... automation lanes. I'll have this up in the next couple days. Busy at work doing big robots!

Thank you everyone for checking the vid out and the many kind words!

[SoundEng1]

Wow! Awesome

[adl]

Thanx for sharing!
Amazing job.

Love and use Ableton Live myself and really like the concept and simplicity of the program, while it even features more complex stuff as well.

[feyshay]

Originally Posted by houseplant

I really think the only advantages to pro tools are the compatibility with other studios (though you can always bounce stems /rewire record to PT)... Nudging (HUGE!!)...and a Frame based grid/timeline.

I'm going to post some sound examples of some of the layers/processing as well as screen shots showing the fx chains... automation lanes. I'll have this up in the next couple days. Busy at work doing big robots!

Thank you everyone for checking the vid out and the many kind words!

I don't use Protools (just Ableton, and sometimes Cubase).
What do you mean by Nudging and a Frame based grid/timeline? Can't you just click in the grid or timeline in Ableton?

Good stuff BTW. That must have been a lot of fun.

[j-uk]

It's always such a pleasure seeing and hearing professionals at work - very awesome sir!
I've been surprised over Live's somewhat poorly video integration but of course Post hasn't been their core market, maybe that'll change when people are using it as skillful as this.

Cheers
J

[shilshoolon]

Great work!!

[breit72]

This is soooo cool! Very well done!

[Kayo]

Great work! and with no intention of disrespect, I just prefer Sony Acid Pro 7.. Dunno why, and wonder what you’d think of it? Maybe, I got used to it, because it was way before Ableton even came out into the market etc..!? But, to me, it's got everything for sound design plus Video.

Just can't go past the ease of use of Acid...
The Sound Design sounds inspiring..

Regards,
KAyo

[Jim Stout]

very nice!

[Dumb-Ask]

Thanks for sharing, a tutorial would be highly appreciated

[adamtrance]

really nice. what did you use for that sound at the end that comes exacly at 2:48? it sounds like the robot sound from terminator salvation.

[houseplant]

Originally Posted by adamtrance

really nice. what did you use for that sound at the end that comes exacly at 2:48? it sounds like the robot sound from terminator salvation.

At 2:48? or at 2:38 when Flynn hits him the Disc?

The sound at 2:38 was a Kick Drum made stereo by doubling the track and delaying the second track by 5ms. Then running the sum of both through a vocoder chorus chain.

2:48 is several little quick filter sweeps done on some drums, then chopped with a bit of reverb/slight phaser.

Also

Thank you everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response. I hope to put together some tutorials this weekend and walk through s of exactly what I did to create some of the sequences. On the agenda... Light Cycles / Light Cycle Construction / Crash . Stay tuned!

Best

Chris

[timek]

Fantastic, I am just at the very beginning of the first step of sound design, and when I hear what you did, I just want to learn and experiment more and more

What you did is awesome, thank you for sharing

Olivier.

[adamtrance]

the sound I mean is at 2:48 when the letters in TRON start fading out and it seems the sound is some wavestable sound in the background?

[houseplant]

Update: Busy week . I will try my best to put together some promised tutorials this coming weekend. Thanks for your patience.

-Chris

[riverrun]

Looking forward to the tutorial!

[Airon]

Enjoyable work. Quite a feat in Ableton from what you've said.

I'm a big fan of hands-on editing, but this is giving me ideas to maybe try out Ableton Lives little version and rewire it in to Reaper.

Thanks for sharing.

[dr.sound]

Chris,
Very impressive work.
Well done.

[kk@jamsync.com]

Originally Posted by houseplant

Update: Busy week . I will try my best to put together some promised tutorials this coming weekend. Thanks for your patience.

-Chris

Definitely looking forward to those. I wish I knew Ableton Live 1/10th as well as I know ProTools!

[cmcpress]

this is great!

Any news on the tutorial?

[houseplant]

Just bought a copy of Camtasia last week. I've been completely slammed lately at work so i have not had time to put anything together. I apologize for the delay and I'll do my best this weekend. I also have several other trailers I have redone that I will posting soon as well.

Best

-Chris

[acroberts]

As a Live and Reason owner, I'm itching to know - what software were used for which key sounds? How much Operator with Live did you use versus the different Reason devices? Awesome work!!!

[houseplant]

Originally Posted by acroberts

As a Live and Reason owner, I'm itching to know - what software were used for which key sounds? How much Operator with Live did you use versus the different Reason devices? Awesome work!!!

Thank you! Actually the Tron Legacy trailer was done on a 14 day trial of Live 8 Suite. I previously had a copy of Live Lite 6.. and was fascinated by the new additions with 8 in terms of stretch manipulation... vocoder....frequency shifter etc. After I completed the trailer It was a no brainer to purchase the entire suite. Its a great addition to my program arsenal. and I was glad to throw some financial support toward Ableton for such an outstanding upgrade.

For the majority of the LightCycle sounds... outside of the organic motorcycles/jet source SFX used .. I did multiple layers in Reasons Malstrom and Thor... For the rest I used Reaktor's Skrewell.. I typically record hour long sessions while designing patches in skrewell.. you'll be suprised how much usable audio you can get from it. I also forgot to mention that i used Paul Stretch (freeware pitch/time manipulation program) as well. Its absolutely incredible... you can create amazing pulses.. drones.. and even speed up material with very little artifacting. I used it to make alot of very digital noises in the trailer.. specifically on the bike construction. Some of the bleeps/blops and the transformeresque sounds were the result of taking some long sweeps I recorded from Skrewell and processing them in Paul Stretch.

Since then Ive had the opportunity to use operator quite a bit more.. and I'm really really enjoying it. You can really create some incredible material with it.

For a quick breakdown:

Reason Malstrom / Thor : LightCycle SFX Layers (Bottom End)
Skrewell: Lightcycle SFX. Various Digital Noise SFX
Various SFX Library Source for the rest.

More to come.

-Chris