Ableton Filtered Haas to Fatten Samples

Haas delays are a game changer for making mixes fatter. I stumbled into a twist on them one day that I haven't heard anyone else use as a technique. That is to combine the delay with an eq filter to push the sound left or right in the stereo image and make it sound more realistic. I believe it works very well because surfaces and rooms don't give perfect echos due to differences in distance to surfaces, materials, angles of incidence, etc. I find this technique to be critically important when working with Ableton drum racks because of the fact that they usually have a single sample for each instrument which can get boring to listen to. Thickening up those sounds makes them less boring and less likely to wear on the listener.

This was made with Ableton 12, but should be applicable going back to at least version 8 (the first version I used).

I made this video to share with my classmates in an Ableton college course.

** When talking about the audience vs drummer perspective, I was not clear enough when discussing the differences and which viewpoint I was referring to each time. To clear up any confusion, the audience perspective typically has the snare and hihat right of center. The drummer's perspective is with them left of center. To get a right of center image, you want your filtering to occur on the right side, and therefore pan the filtered delay to the left (and vice versa for drummer's perspective). I hope that isn't too confusing. **