BILL HOLLAND: Now I briefly touched upon the software that comes with the FireStudio Project. The Camel Crusher was one of those VSTs. It's a freeware plugin that you can actually download online if you don't even have the FireStudio Project, so for people at home watching, this is actually a really easy way to beef up your setup.

The CamelCrusher is a VST plugin, and we're going to look at how to use it in Ableton using the Presonus FireStudio Project inputs, so let's go over to Ableton and take a look.

Here we are in Ableton Live, and I'm looking at the Camel Crusher plugin that comes with FireStudio Project. Right here I have a drum track. I brought this in from the presets. If you look over in the browser over here, you'll see that Ableton comes with actually a whole slew of presets. In this case, I have much of my own projects lined up, but I have brought in this sample. I'm going to close the in/out panel, see my loop is right here.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP IN ABLETON LIVE]

All right, so we have this basic loop, and if you look here, you'll see the drum setup. Here's the drum sampler, Impulse. You'll see my kick, snare, other kick, synth, hi-hat, and crash. But what I want to do is check out CamelCrusher and see what it'll do to my drums in this situation.

So here I have CamelCrusher. I'm going to drag it with the impulse right here. All right, so you'll notice here that the CamelCrusher has main patches: Annihilate, American Crunch, American HiGain, British Clean, and British Crunch, British HiGain, Bass Maker, Clean Rainbow, Tube Warmth. So, you'll notice there are a lot of amp presets on here. You can also hit randomize, and it will totally randomize all your controls.

Now I'm going to first look at each control individual to see what it does.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP IN ABLETON LIVE]

You're going to want your master on at all times. Now what I did here, if you'll notice, the mix goes between the two different distortions that are inside of CamelCrusher.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP IN ABLETON LIVE]

For the purposes of learning here, I'm going to put it in between both levels and turn my distortion on, which it is right now.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP IN ABLETON LIVE]

so I'm going to raise the tube distortion first.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH CamelCrusher IN ABLETON LIVE WITH HIGHER TUBE DISTORTION SETTING]

Now I'm going to listen to the mechanical circuit

[BILL HOLLAND AUDITIONS MECHANICAL CIRCUIT COMPONENT]

Now both together.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH BOTH CHANNELS OF CamelCrusher IN ABLETON LIVE]

This filter is a pretty standard filter. I'm going to turn it on and play the track again...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH CamelCrusher IN ABLETON LIVE WITH FILTER CUTOFF BEING MANIPULATED]

...raise my resonance.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH CamelCrusher IN ABLETON LIVE WITH FILTER RESONANCE BEING MANIPULATED]

Okay let's combine the filter and distortion.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH CamelCrusher IN ABLETON LIVE WITH FILTER AND OVERDRIVE APPLIED]

Now let's pull out and combine that with the master mix.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH CamelCrusher WITH MASTER MIX SETTINGS BEING MANIPULATED]

Awesome. Now, let's take a look at the compressor. First I'm going to turn the distortion and filter off and then go down to the compressor and turn it on. First put it off...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH CamelCrusher WITH COMPRESSION OFF AND FAT MODE ON]

Now what I have on what's called fat mode. Let's turn that off for a second.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH COMPRESSION AND WITH FAT MODE OFF]

Now is it on?

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH COMPRESSION AND WITH FAT MODE ON]

Now let's see what happens with the combination of that and the filter.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH COMPRESSION AND WITH FAT MODE ON AS WELL AS FILTER]

All right. Now let's add distortion and see how high we can go to CamelCrusher.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS LOOP THROUGH COMPRESSION AND WITH FAT MODE ON AS WELL AS FILTER AND DISTORTION]

All right. Now let's look at how to automate this in the timeline. Now, I'm going to go into arrangement view and open Metalhead. I'm going to select the CamelCrusher and first I'm going to select the filter cutoff. I'm going to set keyframes, and I'm going to bring this up and then down, and then with the resonance, I'm going to have the filter resonance rise as the filter cutoff goes down again, and then we're also going to take the mechanical distortion and we're just going to screw around a little bit, add some points. You can actually use the pen tool as well. See when I draw this out -- If you look I'm just going to do. This is one thing you might run into in Ableton a lot. I'm going to hold down Ctrl and click on my sequence here. And you'll notice it says fixed grid. In this case, we're going to want the smallest possible measurement we can get or we can turn it off. Because we might be doin very very organics movements, I want this off. I'm going to draw just pretty much anything that comes to mind. It might be cool for distortion, and then play that back so stop it.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS AN ABLETON PROJECT]

So there you have it. That is the CamelCrusher plugin that comes with the Presonus FireStudio Project. I will be back with more on the MasterVerb LE and a handful of other things that come along with this piece of hardware. I'm Bill Holland, and this has been Gearwire.Com

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYS AN ABLETON PROJECT]