Lazarus: a riser plugin that turns any sound into a build, locked to your bars

Lazarus was four days dead before he got back up. Most of my risers took longer than that to finish, which is exactly why this plugin exists.

Why I built it

A good riser is not a white noise sweep. The best builds in melodic techno are made from the track itself: a word from the vocal, the lead’s first note, a texture from the intro, stretched and pitched and stuttered until it pulls the whole room forward.

Making one by hand is a small project every time. Warp the sample, automate pitch, automate a filter, automate a stutter effect, automate a reverb send, automate width, automate volume, then line all of it up so it peaks on the bar line. Then the arrangement changes and the build is two bars shorter, and you do it again.

I wanted to drop a sound in, say “4 bars”, and get a riser that already knows where the drop is.

What it does

Drag in a sample, pick the part you want with two markers, and draw one note where the build starts. Then shape six lanes, each with a handle for the start, the bend and the end:

• Pitch: up to two octaves either way.
• Stutter: retriggers faster towards the drop, locked to the grid, from off to 1/64.
• Filter: a high-pass rising and a low-pass opening, with resonance.
• Fader: the volume build, from silence or from a set level.
• Space: reverb and a dotted 1/8 delay growing into the drop.
• Width: from mono to extra wide.

Intensity scales every lane’s end point together. Granular stretching keeps a long build textured and smooth, Tape makes it behave like a record speeding up. At the end you choose Cut (dead stop on the drop) or Ring (let the space ring on). A noise layer rides the same lanes if you want extra air.

Presets include vocal lift, tension, snare-style stutter, wash, and tape stop up.

The benefits

• Your track’s own DNA in the build. A riser made from your vocal or lead sounds like it belongs, because it does.
• Set in bars, not seconds. Change the tempo and it still lands on the drop.
• See it before you hear it. The timeline shows the real rendered level, so you can see the stutter slices and the fader build before pressing play.
• Your sample lives in the set. It is saved inside the Ableton project as FLAC, so moving or deleting the original file does not leave you with a corpse.
• Drag audio out as a 24-bit WAV when you want to commit it.

How I use it on a track

I take one word from the chorus vocal, loop it short, and give it 8 bars with Stutter and Pitch doing most of the work and Width opening in the last two bars. With Six Feet Under on the bar after, the build and the drop are a matched pair, and neither came from a sample pack.

The honest bit

It will happily make a terrible sound rise beautifully. Rubbish in, rubbish raised from the dead. Pick a sound with character, and Lazarus does the rest.