DIY Tilt Filter in Ableton Live

Wow! First post of 2017, and we are already half way through February. Needless to say, it was a very busy end to 2016 and start of 2017, but things are a little more under control now and I have been finding some time to write music and work on sharing some cool creative tools and techniques. Hope 2017 is off to a great start for you.  

​I was lucky enough to get over to Berlin back in November for Loop 2016, Ableton's amazing summit for music makers. I got to celebrate my 30th birthday on Saturday at Day 2 of Loop, which was a great added bonus. It was such an inspiring and creatively invigorating experience, so many great ideas presented, brilliant people and amazing performances. All housed in a fantastic venue, the Funkhaus which is situated beside the Spree river in East Berlin, and is one of the worlds largest purpose built recording facilities. Anyway that is enough reminiscing for now, onto the good stuff. 

I first started exploring Tilt filters back in the middle of last year, primarily through Softube's Tonelux and Sweetone from Sonimus. In essence a Tilt filter is a simple EQ, that allows us to rebalance the frequency spectrum of a sound. A great tool for quickly adjusting the tone of a sound, before we move on to the more detailed tonal processing with a parametric EQ.

I really enjoyed using both of the plugins, and found them a useful part of my workflow, but instead of purchasing them I wondered if I could recreate a similar result using Ableton's EQ8 Device, with two bands; a low and high shelf respectively and utilising the scale control for the Tilt amount. After a bit of experimentation with the Q values and frequencies for each band, I managed to come up with a curve that worked well and gave me the desired outcome (Not exactly the same but near enough).  I have now have combined it into a rack that provides quick access to the important controls, adds low and high pass filters and has all parameters restricted to a musically useful range.

As you will see in the image below, there are only three controls so it is very easy to setup. I usually use it as the first insert effect on a track, if I need to adjust its tone or limit the bandwidth (Remove low or high frequencies). 

You can download the Audio Effect Rack preset here below.

ml_simple_tilt_filter.adg
File Size:	8 kb
File Type:	adg

Download File

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If you open up the rack and have a look inside you will see there are actually two EQ8 devices, one for the Tilt filter and another for the low and high pass filters.

Hopefully you find it useful, I don't use it on every track , but it can be very handy for making quick tonal adjustments to get in the ballpark range you are looking for.

Lots more stuff coming on here over the next few weeks, so keep posted for some more goodies. :-) 

Ps. There are a few photos below from Loop!