How to Make an Instant Synthesizer with Ableton’s Simpler

I get a lot of questions about what synth plugin people should buy.

I often don’t have the heart to tell them that they shouldn’t buy any at all.

It is very easy to make a simple synthesizer in Ableton, using only the built-in instruments and any old sound you can find. And in this tutorial, I’ll show you how exactly how to do it!

First drag an empty Simpler into a brand-new MIDI track.

Then, load up any sound you can find, literally any one! I myself used a sample of a stream burbling, but go ahead and be creative.

Next, isolate one or two waveforms of the sound. Just zoom in and keep on zoomin! Try to set the start and end points of the sample where the waveform crosses the horizontal line.

Now, enable the “loop” function on the Simpler. You do this by clicking the little rectangular button that says, you got it, Loop.

Now you should have a basic synthesizer. Using the envelope functions of the Simpler, you cah affect the attack and release of your shiny new synthesizer. We’ll use this as the basis for an instrument rack in a coming tutorial, so make sure to save it!

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9 Responses to “How to Make an Instant Synthesizer with Ableton’s Simpler”

  1. navarre October 11, 2011 at 1:11 am #

    Nice! Thanks for this one.

    Reply
  2. altan October 16, 2011 at 10:49 am #

    Thanks a lot. Tune part is very important. Good to learn this.

    Reply
    • Anthony October 16, 2011 at 6:09 pm #

      Yeah, I used to forget that all the time. Keep in touch!

      Reply
      • Alan December 2, 2011 at 1:41 am #

        Great sound design idea. I’ve been doing this for a while now with sampler as it gives me more parameters to muck around with. As for your simpler preset coming loaded with the kick drum….remove the sample from simpler then right-click on the header of simpler and select “Save as Default Preset”.

        Reply

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