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 overwhelm the higher frequencies. Unless that’s what you want of course — distortion is a broad (wide‑band?) church!
Feedback is a mode where a single Shaper and a Feedback Loop (also including a Shaper) can run in parallel. More on Feedback later...
Distortion Stages
Shaper’s 12 algorithms are a mixture of digital and analogue‑modelling options.The drop‑down Shaper menu is where you choose the distortion algorithms that will work on the source signal. There are two categories of Shaper, the first comprising fairly standard analogue and digital models: Soft Sine, Diode Clipper, Tube Pre‑Amp, Half Wave Rectifier, Full Wave Rectifier, Digital Clip and Bit Crusher. All of which are fairly familiar (but great‑sounding) distortion algorithms.
The second type are novel saturators that provide a different kind of digital non‑linear distortion. These are: Polynomial, Fractal, Tri Fold, Noise Injection and Shards. The distortion from these Shapers can often sound more like wavefolding than out‑and‑out fuzz (especially Tri Fold, which actually is a wavefolding algorithm!), but the main point is they are not standard analogue saturators, and provide an extended set of sound‑sculpting options.
In each of the Stage modules, there are a few simple controls: an Amount knob to control how much distortion is applied; a Bias control for increasingly asymmetric clipping (which in the analogue‑modelling types often leads to the sound itself breaking up, but with the digital models can sound more like a wavetable sweep through the distortion curve), and a Filter, which can be inserted pre‑ or post‑Shaper.
Roar’s eight filter options include a low‑sample‑rate emulator.There are eight filters: Low‑pass, Band‑pass, High‑pass, Notch, Peak, Morph, Comb and Resampling. This last emulates a digital machine with a low sampling rate. So you could recreate the general sound of a 12‑bit/12kHz sampler like the Akai MPC60 by selecting Bit Crush for the Shaper and Resampling for the filter! Though it’s not possible to dial precise values, you can certainly get lo‑fi sampler crunch this way.
Modulation Section
Modulation is really what sets Roar apart. As stated above, this is a self‑proclaimed dynamic saturator, and keeping settings static is very much not what the designers of Roar think you should do!
But it goes much further than just offering a gentle flux in general saturation to model an analogue circuit. No, like many other Ableton plug‑ins, Roar features a full‑blown modulation panel, allowing you to add movement and change to practically any setting within Roar by virtue of two LFOs, an envelope follower and four noise sources. This is a major difference compared with other saturation plug‑ins, where settings are usually just a case of ‘set and forget’.
The options are endless: you could choose to control the amount of distortion with the envelope follower. Or Bias amount could be changed randomly by the noise source. Or how about setting up two different Shapers in parallel mode and using the LFO to morph between them in time with the track?
If you’re wondering where all the modulation destinations are when you first open the mod matrix, never fear: move a control in Roar and it will appear automatically in the grid. It’s a clever feature, but I feel that sometimes built‑in plug‑in prompts would help discovery with these kinds of hidden features, even if it disrupts the otherwise ergonomically clean display.
The modulation matrix is one of the key sound‑design areas and you should spend lots of time here! You could either very intentionally decide to modulate parameter X with control source Y for a particular and desired result; or you could just experiment and be inspired by what happens: what Marco Tonni, the team lead for the Roar project, calls “controlled chaos”. And it really is fun with Roar. It’s impossible not to come up with unexpected sounds and really usable results through experimental whim and chance.
Right‑clicking a stage will give you the option of quickly copying settings from one stage to another.
Feedback & Compression:
If Modulation wasn’t enough, another key source of dynamic change is the Feedback section. The Amount control sets how much of the output of Roar is fed back into the input of Roar, which can, of course, lead to a simple positive feedback loop of pure distorted noise.
But this feedback loop has been given the extra superpower of delay as well. This means that depending on the amount of actual distortion in the chain, it can also function as a simple delay effect, with the Amount knob then also controlling the delay feedback.
The delay time can be set from 1 to 500 Hz in free Time mode, or set to musically significant chunks using 16th, Dotted or Triplet modes. Note mode sets a specific delay time to create that very short delay comb‑filter effect, only in this case, it can be precisely set to be in tune with your track.
If you increase the amount of distortion within the Shaper stage, then things can get very wild as that distortion is fed back in a positive feedback loop to potential howl‑round. But this is where the final stage, Compressor, comes in to suppress the level of the feedback itself, preventing complete collapse into pure noise even at the very highest feedback levels.
Modulating the amount of distortion, compression and delay feedback is a kind of sonic Three‑Body Problem where all kinds of interacting effects start to take over as these different circuits push and pull against each other.
Modulating the amount of distortion, compression and delay feedback is a kind of sonic Three‑Body Problem where all kinds of interacting effects start to take over as these different circuits push and pull against each other. Which is really the summit (and point) of this extraordinary plug‑in: creating effects that no ordinary distortion plug‑in could ever do. Not to mention the changes you can experience as you play an instrument in real time through the effect, with Roar in turn affecting what you might choose to play in response.
I’d love to write more, but as you can hopefully tell, the addition of modulation and delay to what might otherwise have been ‘just another saturator’ (albeit with some novel digital programs) transforms this into a creative tool of some considerable depth. I’ve barely scratched the sonic surface in the writing of this article and can’t wait to dig into it even more!