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1. Tempo-synced ducking with Ableton Live’s Auto-Pan

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With a little trickery, it’s possible to turn Ableton Live’s Auto-Panner into a sort of tempo-synced tremolo that’s useful for stuttery ‘trance gate’ effects and rhythmic ducking. Let’s try it out. Drag Euro chord.wav onto an audio track in Live, and insert an Auto Pan effect onto the track’s device chain. 3

We don’t want to apply stereo movement to this sound, so turn the Phase knob down to 0%. This zeros the offset of the left and right channel’s volume modulation LFOs, putting them perfectly in sync. Hey presto – we’ve turned our panner into a tremolo! (Audio: Tremolo chord.wav) 5

Click the sawtooth LFO waveform button. This downward sawtooth movement gives us a more percussive sound, but it’s going the wrong way for a ducking effect. To switch it to an upward sawtooth movement, click the Normal/Invert button. This creates the smooth ducking we’ve been looking for. (Audio: Ducking chord.wav) 2

The effect won’t actually make any difference to the audio until we turn the Amount up. Set it to 100% and you’ll hear the panning kick in. Auto-panning can be just the thing for keeping sounds out of the centre of the mix, making it a useful mixing tool in its own right. (Audio: Panned chord.wav) 4

Now we need to sync the LFO rates to Live’s tempo. Click the note button to change the LFO rate type from Hz to Tempo. Now the LFO is in sync with our project. The default LFO shape is a sine wave, which doesn’t make for the best ducking effect. (Audio: Synced tremolo chord.wav) 6

The limitation of this technique is that there’s no way to apply swing, but the effect is perfect for rigid 4/4 kick drum patterns. Set the Rate knob to 1/4 and you’ve got a classic pumping sidechain effect, the strength of which can be controlled with the Amount knob. You can also adjust the shape of the sawtooth with the Shape parameter. (Audio: Pumping chord.wav)

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