Project 7 - Ableton Dubstep Template
Hey everyone, and welcome to Project #7 where we’ll be creating a Dubstep song template in Ableton Live 11. For anyone that hasn’t noticed yet, teaching yourself music can be a pretty daunting task, its a subject that’s as complicated as you want to make it and has a nearly endless history, so there’s no shortage of things to learn and rabbit-holes to fall into. So, to alleviate that lost feeling that settles in when you finally have the time to sit down and make music, I’m bringing a little more structure into my creative process, so even when I’m a little lost, I can always fall back on my template and workflow to give me some direction.
There is no shortage of Ableton Template videos on Youtube. Unfortunately, many producers who share their templates or make videos about them, use expensive plugins from typically large libraries of samples and plugins. When you’re first learning your way through something, it’s difficult to know which ones are worth your money because you don’t know which aspects matter. So, to keep costs low and help everyone expand their knowledge and libraries, I followed along with Catfish’s Youtube Video titled “How To Make The Perfect Ableton Template” and you can find Catfish’s Youtube Page Here. His video is only six minutes long but he walks you through creating a basic Dubstep template in Ableton. Additionally, he only uses free plugins so following along is a great opportunity to build your knowledge and your Ableton Library, which will save you time and make it easier to get your ideas out.
Before starting the video, I would head to these four sites and downloading these free plugins. Catfish utilizes all of them in the template and downloading them first will save you time while working through the video. If you haven’t installed any new plugins previously, you can guides for “Using VST plug-ins on Windows” and “Using AU and VST plug-ins on Mac” in the Official Ableton Knowledge Base.
GClip – https://www.gvst.co.uk/
Ozone Imager V2 – https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone-imager.html (Save your serial number, you’ll need it to activate Imager)
Voxengo Span – https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/
Youlean Loudness Meter 2 – https://youlean.co/youlean-loudness-meter/
After following along with Catfish’s video you should have a basic template to kick-start future Dubstep projects. It may not be the greatest or most complex template, but use this as a way to start your perfect template, just keep refining and improving it until it works for your process.
If you’re like me and still learning your way around Ableton, remember you can create an Audio Effects Rack on a MIDI or Audio channel and drop in Imager, Span, Youlean, and Spectrum (it’s native to Ableton) and save it as a Audio Effects Rack Preset. Then just drag your preset onto you master channel to create the song analysis rack Catfish uses in the video.
I hope this helps you spend less time preparing and more time producing. Now get out there and make some music!