Ableton Live 12: Roar

Opening Roar’s Expanded View allows you to see all stages at once and quickly make changes to any parameter.

Introduced in Live 12, Roar is much more than just a saturation plug‑in...

Roar is another of the amazing new devices that arrived with the major Live 12 update earlier this year. At first glance, it would appear to ‘just’ be another saturation and distortion effect, but look again... Roar combines analogue modelling techniques with extensive modulation and delay capabilities to create something genuinely different and deceptively powerful. As Marco Fink, lead developer of Roar, says: “The saturation curve in the analogue domain is never static.” And that idea of dynamism is something the team have deliberately put at the heart of Roar and extended to its logical limit.

Understanding how Roar works is the key to getting the best from it, and whilst it’s perhaps not completely intuitive at first glance — especially the feedback/compressor stage — it doesn’t take long to grasp what each of the sections do and to start achieving amazing results. Let’s dive in...

Input Stage

Before you even apply the Shapers (which is what the distortion algorithms are called), Drive and Tone can be adjusted. Given the power of what’s to follow, this might almost seem superfluous, but one reason it’s there is to ensure good gain staging as indicated by the yellow Drive LED.

The Tone knob is a kind of tilt EQ that can emphasise either the highs or lows in the input signal. This can be useful to remove some of the low end, which, having more energy, can otherwise cause heavier distortion more quickly. Below the Tone control is a frequency slider, which sets the frequency around which the tone control ‘pivots’.

Now that we have prepared our signal, the next most important decision is to choose which mode this instance of Roar will run in.

Single is the simplest mode and uses just one Shaper. In fact, it’s the best way to hear the basic raw (roar?) material. It’s highly instructive to use a sine wave to play a simple riff (generated by one of the new MIDI Generators, of course — see the October Live column) and step through each of the Shapers to get a feel for each of their characteristics.

Serial/Parallel/Mid‑Sides are the different modes in which two Shaper modules can be arranged, Mid‑Sides being a particularly interesting inclusion for creating spatial effects. Processing the Sides channel to your heart’s content while keeping the Mid channel relatively unprocessed is one obvious — and powerful — use case.

Multiband provides a third Shaper for multiband processing — a standard option for a subgroup or drums mix. Distortion effects often benefit from the low end being processed separately so as not to...