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MT Technique The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live: Part 3
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the track, which is incredibly useful. Just be aware that Flatten is destructive - your original track is gone! What I usually do is duplicate the track, then create a group track called ‘Spare’ ‘Spare’ which I use to contain all of the original versions of my frozen tracks. You’ll You ’ll notice that every clip in a flattened track is double the length of the original source clip - this is a feature not a bug(!), designed to accommodate effect tails at the end of loops - this makes sense because it’s quite annoying to hear a reverb tail cut off and begin again as a sample loops. If you’re obsessive about house-cleaning, which I am, you can use the crop sample command to put your clip back to its original length. We added the Resonator effect to our new percussion track. I love the Resonator, it has quite a distinctive sound, although that means that sometimes you have to tweak it somewhat to get something different. It’s It’s very important to use that Note control though, and make sure it’s pitched correctly to fit in with your other parts - things can get a bit discordant otherwise. Having programmed and customised a beat earlier earlier,, we’re we’ re now converting it to audio and beginning the process all over again, slicing it up and adding different sounds and effects. We’re doing this because I want to show you the very cool ‘Slice to New MIDI Track’ command, and also because it’s another interesting creative step you can take. Even when you’re working with something you’ve programmed yourself, you can give it more of a ‘sampled’ vibe by converting it to audio and slicing it up. It makes you use dif diffe feren rentt too tools ls in dif differ ferent ent way ways.‘Sli s.‘Slice ce to
The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live: Part 3 Technique MT
MTStep-by-Step Processing Processingyou yourr beat beats s
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Track’ is great if you have a beat from another record, and you want to edit the arrangement, or tweak or even replace some of the sounds in the sample; putting a compressor on the kick in a sample loop is a good example. I also like to use lo-fi effects such as Redux, Erosion, and Cabinet to dirty things up a bit. The correct technical term for for the
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slices made by this command, as they’re created and placed in a rack, is ‘chains’. Dragging samples or instruments to replace slices is a big thing; you can take a loop from an old record and totally replace the kick or snare with another sample. Or as we touched on here, drag in an instrument. The slice will be replaced, and the MAGAZINE
April 2015 | 47
MT Technique The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live: Part 3
MT Step-by-Step Processing Processingyou yourr beats beats... ...cont’ cont’d d
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maybe we’re getting bored with the original beat now – it 08 Uh, sounds quite flat against aga inst the Resonator percussion track. Let’s put it through the wringer taking it on a gratuitous journey of sonic dismemberment.
is just a fun way to mess with your parts as we want a 10 This different vibe. Crop the new clip down to only two bars. Rightclick on it and choose Slice To New MIDI Track.
operation has sliced the audio clip, and made a new drum 12 This rack, with a different instance of Simpler for each slice. It’s also automatically created a MIDI clip, with a note for each slice. and hide the various elements that make up the rack, including input/output routing, effect effect sends and returns (yes you can have these in a drum rack), and of course the macros, chains, and devices. If you really want to go big with elaborate evolving beats, you can start using automation as well. This is a real
MT Technique The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live: Part 3
MT Step-by-Step
Processi Proc essing ngyou yourr beats beats... ...cont cont’d ’d
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we’ve sampled ourselves. Experiment with dragging we’ve 14 Effectively the notes around the editor grid, to see what happens; you can take any beat and reorganise it to fit your song, this is one of Live’s top featu features! res!
we turn our attention to the snare. Drag the Ping Pong Delay 16 Now onto slice 3, the first snare in the clip. Wow! That’s That’s too much. Dial the Dry/Wet control down to 30%.
that automatically replaces the original slice – now you 18 Doing have a bass note hitting alongside the beat. Click on the track name, type Cmd-R, and rename the track ‘Sliced beat’. That’s it for now. for a few weeks! That’s all we have room for now and we haven haven’t ’t even mentioned the totally awesome ‘Convert Audio to Drums’ command. That will have to wait for another tutorial. Next month we will use the Simpler instrument and MIDI Effect devices to add some bass to our beats.. MT
Sidechain compression ‘ducks’ one sound’s volume level when another sound plays. This can maintain clarity when two sounds share the same kind of frequency content, for example helping kicks punch through in a track with a big, subby bass sound. Here the compressor will begin to duck the bass as soon as the transient portion of the kick plays. This part of the kick is actually mid rather than bass, so our sub gets ducked before it’s strictly necessary. By filtering the sidechain input signal we can ensure the sub only ducks when the conflicting, subby part of the kick plays, giving us a fuller sound.
Technique | Ableton Live
Ableton Live
For many situations, the library grooves will contain something that you can use; there’s a lot of them in there, you know. But if you’re matching something from an outside source, or you have for instance a drum sample which has a groove that you
Using Groove Templates
absolutely must have, you can steal the groove from that. To do this you right-click on the clip you want to take from, and choose Extract Groove(s) 3 . This will then put it in the Groove Pool, and you can work with it just like any other groove. The ability to extract and modify the groove from a piece of music fits right in there with some of Live’s other tools, especially the Slice to New MIDI Track command. These are ways that you can take what you want from the character of another tune, ditching whatever doesn’t fit with your master plan along the way. Bad news for users of Live Lite or Live Intro – those slimmed down versions will let you load grooves, but not edit them.
Sometimes the robot is good, sometimes the robot is bad… Martin Delaney shows shows you how to borrow some bounce from one place and use it somewhere Groove Management Once you’ve created your else, for some practical – or weird – effects!
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ll of the major DAWs – Cubase, Logic, Reason, and of course Live – have ways to apply groove templates; adding timing or velocity variations that impart a more human feel to programmed
music. This goes back further than your computer, to machines like the Akai MPC and Yamaha QY700. It’s a desirable thing in MIDI sequencing, just like we need quantisation – they’re both fundamental ways of adding a real-time ‘feel’ to music that’s been drawn in with a pencil or tapped in on a keyboard, instead of being played on a ‘real’ instrument. Groove templates are simply a format used to store and recall this information, for use in other tracks, or other projects. Electronic music being the ever-changing beast that it is, sometimes we want more humanity, sometimes less, and quite often inside the same song!
The way of the groove – Live style Every DAW implements this differently. As far as Live’s concerned, a groove combines two types of information: timing – when the notes happen, compared against a grid of bars/beats/fractions of beats; and velocity – how ‘hard’ the note is being triggered, using standard MIDI velocity measurements to reproduce this part of a performance. Nobody can play every note with exactly the same velocity, so this is an important part of the sonic ‘signature’, even if the variations are quite subtle. Live grooves are kept inside the default Library, and any that we create are contained in the User Library. You You can find them through the Browser, either by navigating to them directly (they’re in Packs/Swing and Groove 1 ) or by using the search function Cmd-F. To apply a groove, all you have to do is drag it onto a clip in your Live set, in either Session or Arrangement View – grooves are clip-specific, they don’t apply across an entire track. After you’ve added a groove to your set, you can view it in the Clip box at the bottom left of the screen; there’s a little pop-up box called Grooves 2 . If you’ve got more than one groove in your project, you can view and load all of them from here. Actually, you can also use the hot-swap button next to the word Groove there to view the grooves in the Browser – they end with .agr. Open the Groove Pool by clicking on the small wavy icon under the Browser, and you will see the controls for the grooves. Here you can fine-tune them to suit your specific material, and this is usually a good idea. There are separate controls for each groove that you load, for even more flexibility. After making changes to a groove, you can use the save button in the Pool to put it in the user library, and rename it if you want to.
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ideal groove, save it into the Library by clicking the The Expert Save Preset button. By Martin Delaney, default this goes into the Performer, Producer Artist and Grooves folder, accessible instructor Martin, aka from Places in the Browser mindlobster, Sidebar – the left-hand has produced Live training material and column; you can rename, was one of the UK’s first certified Ableton move, or delete these. You Live trainers. can share or archive them, as well, either by saving or sharing a Live project that contains your groove/s, or by finding the groove in your User Library folder in the default Live location, and dragging them onto a USB drive, or into into an email. Going deeper with the groove The Groove Pool also features a Global Amount control, at the bottom right 4 . You can use it to change the ‘depth’ of the groove effect across all of the clips in your project. This ranges from 0% to 130%, so you can push the groove up beyond its original application. When you’ve got grooves applied to clips in your set, this control also appears at the top of the Live screen, in the Control Bar 5 . You might be wondering if you can exchange groove templates between different DAWs, and I was wondering about this too; I tried. The answer is no. There’s no common shared format for these; you would have to do it by creating and exporting MIDI files that contained the information. Even without saving them in the User Library, you can move them between projects using the Browser. Navigate to the project containing the grooves you’re after, and unfold it, just as you do to see tracks and clips inside it. Open the Grooves folder and pull out the grooves into your new set 6 . For Push users, we can’t view the Groove Pool controls in the LCD screen, and we can’t browse and load grooves, but we can use the Swing knob on Push, in conjunction with the Quantize button – this isn’t connected to Live’s global groove, or to localised grooves from the Pool. For other hardware controllers, there’s no way to MIDI map those groove controls.
Ableton Live | Technique
The Way of The Groove – Live Style
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> Going Deeper With The Groove
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Alternative Velocities
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> Grooves With Unusual Rhythms
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Technique | Ableton Live
Alternative velocities
The Groove Pool Controls
Sometimes you want to work with only the velocities, and leave the note timings alone. You can do this in the Groove Pool controls, by using the Timing and Random controls to straighten them out, and just manipulating the Velocity settings. You can also do it by avoiding grooves altogether, and using Live’s native Velocity MIDI effect device. Just add it to your MIDI track and you can use it to limit or expand the velocity ranges in your track. This is different than using a groove, mainly because it applies to the entire track, and as I said, it’s going to affect only the note velocities. Like Live’s other MIDI effects, this can be used as a real-time effect, applied to incoming MIDI messages from a keyboard, drum pads, hardware, or other software 7 . For some programming situations, I prefer to hear slight, randomised, velocity changes, but to keep the note timing tight and quantised. The Velocity effect can be loaded from, and controlled by, Push; hold down Shift and add device, and (as long as you’re in a MIDI track) you can browse to the device and scroll through the presets. So we know that grooves are useful for imparting a more realistic, natural, feel to programmed tracks. We can also use them to apply the groove from one piece of audio to another if we want to, to help them fit together better in a mix for example. And we can use them in more unusual ways to create odd sounds and rhythms, by using the Extract Groove command on source material that doesn’t have any ‘normal’ timing or velocity, like speech, or field recordings. We have something in our example Live set on the DVD you can try it with:
Life Life is Ra Rand ndom om When programming ‘realistic’ band parts, like a finger style electric bass or a nice acoustic kit from Live’s Session Drums, I’ll use grooves. I’ll start with the drum track, and edit a preset rather than start from scratch. To To create the sound of a band playing together, together, I’ll put the same groove on every track. The Random control
When you use Alt-Cmd-G to view the Groove Pool, underneath the Browser, you’ll also see controls arrayed across the top of the window. If necessary, drag the Pool wider to view all of the controls, especially the important Velocity control at the far right.
is important – if it’s at a decent level, you can leave it the same for all tracks, and they’ll all fluctuate around that central point. If it doesn’t sound right, try adjusting it for individual tracks. Grooves with unusual rhythms Go to the audio clip called ‘speech source’ and right-click on it, then choose Extract Groove(s). Open the Groove Pool with Alt-Cmd-G and you’ll see the groove in there, with the same name as the clip. Play the ‘percussion target’ clip; listen to it a few times. Now drag your new groove from the pool over, and drop it onto the percussion clip, while it’s still playing. You should hear quite a difference. Experiment with the Timing and Velocity controls to really mix in the amount of the groove. I think that sounds quite cool! Now stop that clip running, and launch the other MIDI clip, called ‘synth target’. This one is using a custom Operator synth preset, where some of the controls have been configured to be velocity sensitive 8 . The notes in the clip are very simple, so we can easily hear the before and after effect of the groove. Drag the speech source groove onto that clip, and again, manipulate those controls. I really like these types of sounds; it’s a good way to create more unusual programmed parts. If you’re feeling really experimental, though this only works with audio clips, use the Commit button to embed the velocity as clip automation, then select the envelope (put your mouse near it until it highlights, right-click and choose ‘cut envelope’) and apply it to another parameter, like transposition, or filter frequency 9 . I get a kick out of using speech and field recordings to ‘redirect’ the timing of other programmed or Movin Movingg sampled parts. I also like to experiment Grooves with using sounds like these to side Betwe Between en chain a compressor on a synth track, to Aud Audio io and and get weird and unpredictable pumping MIDI MIDI Clip Clipss effects. Try it – you can come up with Grooves wouldn’t be so something distinctive, that you can useful if we couldn’t then, if necessary, dial back a bit to move them freely between different types of clip – make it fit alongside more ‘regular’ from audio to MIDI, or the parts, to add some customisation other way round. This leads to much more to your music. You can’t use preset organic programming in all your life! the first case, and more unusual programmed-type Whether you go ‘practical’ or ‘weird’ variations in the second case.
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with grooves, it’s all good; there’s always something interesting to be had, and these set ups are still easier to do in Ableton Live than in anything else out there.
Ableton Live | Technique
How to Apply Apply a Groove Groove and Make it Stick! Extract a groove from any clip, apply it to another, then embed it permanently!
01 > Open the example Live set on our DVD. Right-click on the clip called ‘source beat’. This one is a MIDI clip, but you can take grooves from MIDI or audio clips. Choose Extract Groove(s) from the pop-up Context Menu – there are no options, it just does it! You might see a short progress bar.
03 > We also have an audio clip called ‘target beat’ in the set. We need to straighten that out before applying the new groove, and there are two ways we can do this. The first method is to use audio quantisation to quickly and permanently straighten it out. Secondly, we can use the Quantize control in the groove to straighten it out non-destructively non-destructively..
04 > You pick how you want to do it, but either way, apply the groove 100%. To implement the groove, just drag it from the Pool onto your clip. Now when you look at the Clip box at the bottom of your screen, you’ll see the Groove listed there. You can also use that list to choose from other grooves in the Pool, or to choose ‘None’!
05 The groove controls make a big difference particularly Velocity. Some grooves don’t sound like they’re doing anything until you tweak this. The Quantize control we already mentioned; Random is very useful, and Timing blends in the amount of the groove’s timing variations. Back in that Clip box, we can use the Commit button to permanently embed the groove’s parameters in the clip.
02 > Now open the Groove Pool by clicking on the little ‘wavy’ icon under the Browser, Browser, or be like the cool kids and use the keyboard shortcut Alt-Cmd-G. Your Your new groove is listed in there, identified with the name of the clip you took it from, so ours will be called ‘source beat’. 61
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bleton blet on Li Live ve ha has s qu quit ite e a fe few w fe feat atur ures es no nott fo found und in ot othe herr DA DAWs Ws,, an and d Ra Rack cks s is on one e of th them em.. At th the e mostt bas mos basic ic lev level,Racks el,Racks are con contai tainersthat nersthat enable ena ble you to‘rack to‘rack’’ tog togeth ether er MID MIDI,instr I,instrume ument nt and aud audio io dev device ices.A s.A Rac Rack k con contai tainin ning g int interna ernal/ l/ extern ext ernal al ins instru trument ments s is cal called led an Ins Instru trument ment Rac Rack;a k;a Rac Rack k of sta standa ndalon lone e aud audio io pro proces cessin sing g devi devices ces is an Aud Audio io Rac Rack. k. Howe Ho wever ver,, Ra Rack cks s ar are e mo more re th than an an ea easy sy wa wayy to bu bund ndle le multip mul tiple le ele element ments s int into o one eas easily ily sav saveab eable le – and the theref refore ore recall rec allabl able e – pac packag kage.Racks e.Racks giv give e you the opt option ion to run the their ir intern int ernal al si signa gnall pat paths hs in par parall allel el or in ser series ies,, whi which ch off offers ers a
Accompanying project fileincluded project ontheDVD
Racks Rack s are morethananeasy way to tobu bundl ndle e mu mult ltip iple leel eleme ements nts saveable eablepacka package ge into a sav FOCUS FOC US ON… USIN USING G EXTE EXTERNAL RNALHARDW HARDWARE ARE Live’sExternal Audioand Instr Live’sExternal Instrumentdevicesenable umentdevicesenable youto creat create e defaultt preset defaul presets s foryour outbo outboardprocessor ardprocessors s andsound sour sources ces respec res pectiv tively ely.A sou soundbeingtrigg ndbeingtriggere ered d byMIDIor pas passin sing g inand outof yourcomputerr as audiowill alway yourcompute always s incura littledelay time.Howev time.However er,, youcanoffsett thi youcanoffse this s forinst forinstrum rument ents s bysettin bysetting g the them m toplaysomet toplaysomethin hing g percussiveon percu ssiveon thebeat, thenenable Live Live’smetronomeand ’smetronomeand chang change e the Hardwa Har dwareLaten reLatencyvalueto cyvalueto ge gett bot both h pla playin ying g intime.Thi intime.This s is setto millise mill isecon condsby dsby def defaul aultt butyoucan cli clickthe‘ms’boxto ckthe‘ms’boxto swi switchit tchit to sampleincrements sampleincremen ts fora highe higherr resol resolutionof utionof detail. Thesametechniq Thesametech niquecan uecan beapplie beapplied d toExter toExternalAudi nalAudio o Eff Effect ects s by playing playin g a perc percussiveaudio ussiveaudio clipthat match matches es up withthe metro metronome nome,, and themajority of exte externalsourceswill rnalsourceswill needsome hous housework ework
56 | | January January201 2014 4
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huge ran huge range ge of opt option ions.In s.In fac fact, t, the onl onlyy rea reall res restri tricti ction on you may enco encounte unterr wil willl be max maxing ing-out -out eit either her you yourr CPU or RAM RAM,, but thi this s isn isn’t ’t any anythi thing ng tha thatt any com comput puter er use userr has hasn n’t had to fac factor tor int into o the their ir wor workflo kflow w bef before ore.. In thi this s tut tutori orial al we we’ll ’ll be usi using ng Liv Live-on e-only ly dev device ices s tha thatt are quite qui te eco econom nomica icall in ter terms ms of CPU req requir uiremen ements.It’ ts.It’s s onl onlyy when wh en you sta start rt sta stacki cking ng lar large ge num number bers s of thi thirdrd-part partyy, resource-h reso urce-hungry ungry instr instruments uments and effects effectsthat that you you’ll ’ll perh pe rhap aps s ne need ed to be a bi bitt mo more re co cons nsci ciou ous s ab abou outt wh what at yo you u use and why. If pro proces cessin sing g pow power er doe does s bec become ome an iss issue, ue, make mak e use of Liv Live’ e’s Fre Freeze eze fea featur ture e to ren render der the liv live e proces pro cessin sing g as tem tempor porary ary aud audio io.. Whe When n yo you’ u’re re rea ready dy to commit com mit to ide ideas,we as,we enco encoura urage ge you to the then n Fla Flatte tten n the them m into int o new newly ly rend rendere ered d aud audio io file files.You s.You can the then n per perfor form m any additi add itiona onall edi editin ting g in the these se aud audio io file files s whi while le fre freein eing g up comput com puter er res resour ources ces (bo (both th of the these se fun functi ctions ons are acc access essed ed from fro m the Edi Editt menu menu). ). Rack Ra cks s ca can n be us used ed at an anyy po poin intt th thro roug ugho hout ut th the e productio prod uction n proc process,and ess,and typic typical al uses inclu include de stac stacking king layer la yers s of sy synth nths s fo forr hug huge,epic e,epic sou sounds nds,, app applyi lying ng gogo-to to parallel para llel proc processi essing ng such as compr compressi ession on and dist distortio ortion, n, mid-and-si mid-a nd-side de proc processi essing, ng,and and buil building ding inter interestin esting g music musical al tools tool s for new idea ideas s or expl exploring oringintri intricate cate audio audio-pro -processi cessing ng chains chai ns for sound sound-desi -design gn task tasks. s. As yo you u can see see,, the there re are mul multip tiple le use uses s forthese too tools ls and an d we we’l ’lll no now w goon toexpl toexplai ain n so some me of th the e mo most st im impo porta rtant nt aspe as pect cts s of Ra Rack ck de desi sign gn.. If at an anyy po poin intt yo you u ge gett lo lost st or ar are e stuck stu ck fo forr ins inspir pirati ation,we on,we rec recomm ommend end tha thatt yo you u ha have ve a lo look ok throug thr ough h the Liv Live e li libra brary ry fo forr Aud Audio io,, Ins Instru trumentand mentand MID MIDII Racks Rac ks.. Fr From om her here e it’s eas easyy to exp explor lore e and mod modify ify
Audio Aud io& & Ins Instru trument mentRac Racks ks Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step
AudioRacks: advancedcontrol
Create te a Ra Rack ck by ei eith ther er dr drag aggi ging ng a pr prese esett fr from om th the e Li Live ve Br Brow owser ser 01 Crea or usin using g Gr Grou oup p fr from om th the e Ed Edit it men menu u wh when en an ex exis istin ting g in inst strum rument ent
There re are aretwo tworea reason sons s for forpar parall allel el pro process cessing ing,, the firs firstt bei being ng to 02 The audition auditio n variou various s appro approaches achesfor for proces processing singaudio audio.. This Thisapproa approach ch
or effe effect(s ct(s)) is hig highli hlight ghted.Each ed.Each int interna ernall audi audio o cha channel nnel– – call called ed Cha Chains ins – wi will ll no now w be vi visi sibl ble.Th e.Ther ere e wi willbe llbe onl onlyy oneby de defau fault,butmore lt,butmore Ch Chai ains ns can ca n be cr crea eatedby tedby cl clic icki king ng in th the e em emptyspac ptyspace e bel belowand owand ch choo oosi sing ng Creat Cr eate e Ch Chai ain n or Du Dupl plic icat ate e a Ch Chai ain n fr from om th the e Ed Edit it men menu. u.
letsyou try out dif differe ferent nt tec techni hniques ques/pr /proce ocesso ssors rs and gene general rally ly expl explore ore the th e po poss ssib ibil ilit itiesfor iesfor eac each h el eleme ement nt in yo your ur mi mix.Use x.Use So Solo lo to mo move ve between betw een eac each h Cha Chain;when in;when you you’v ’ve e deci decided dedwhi which ch trea treatmen tmentt to go for for,, delete del ete the oth other er Cha Chains insto to avo avoid id unne unneces cessar saryy pro proces cessin sing. g.
Reason on two twois is for forpar parall allel el pro proces cessin sing,with g,with typi typical cal use uses s bei being ng for 03 Reas
Chai ains ns canalsobe us used ed to cr creat eate e di diff ffere erent nt so soni nic c st stat ates es to mov move e 04 Ch
compressio compres sion/s n/satur aturatio ation.This n.This is set up by kee keepingthe pingthe firs firstt Cha Chain in as-is asis and andaddi adding ng a seco second nd Cha Chain in to pro processin cessin par parall allel.Chain el.Chains s can als also o be use used d to spl split it a sig signal nalint into o its itscomp componen onents:by ts:by freq frequenc uencies iesusi using ng multiple multipl e Multiba Multiband nd Dynamic Dynamics s devices devices;; by mid-a mid-and-sid nd-side e componen components ts using usi ng the Uti Utilit lityy devi device ce’’s Wid Width th con contro troll at 0% and 200 200% % res respect pective ively ly..
If yo you u mov move e th the e Zo Zone ne Bl Bloc ocks ks fo forr ea each ch Ch Chai ain n so th they ey ar aren en’t ’t
05 ove overla rlappi pping,the ng,the Cha Chain in Sel Select ect Rul Ruler er abo above ve them(in ora orange nge)) can be mo move ved d fr from om onesoun onesound d to th the e ne next.Whe xt.When n us usin ing g Zo Zonesin nesin th thisway isway,, effects effe cts wit with h tai tails ls – lik like e rev reverb erb or del delays– ays– wil willl die dieout out natu natural rally ly.. To ble blend nd between betw een the two two,, dra drag g the Zon Zone e Blo Blocksacros cksacross s the ful fulll ran range,then ge,then dra drag g the th e Fa Fade de Ran Range ge sh shap apes es so th they ey op oppo pose se ea each ch ot othe herr tocrea tocreate te thefade thefade..
between,such betw een,suchas as a lig lighte hterr ver verse se and hea heavie vierr cho chorus rustrea treatmen tments. ts. Createthe Create the two twotrea treatmen tments,using ts,usingSol Solo o to foc focus us on eachone lik like e bef before ore,, thenopen the Cha Chain in Sel Selecto ectorr Edi Editor torby by cli clicki cking ng on the thebox boxlab labell elled ed Chain.Look Cha in.Looking inglik like e a sam sample pler’skey-r r’skey-rang ange e edi editor tor,, thi this s all allowsyou owsyou to move mov e the ass assign ignment mentof of eachChain eachChainto to a dif differe ferent nt areahoriz areahorizonta ontally lly.
AllRac Racks ks hav have e Macr Macro o cont control rols s tha thatt you youcan can ass assign ignmos mostt 06 All
paramet par ameters erswit within hina a Rac Rack k to to.. If youright/[ youright/[Ctr Ctrl]l]-cli click ck (PC/ (PC/Mac)on Mac)on the Ch the Chai ain n Se Selec lecto torr Ru Rulerit lerit canbe as assi signe gned d to a Mac Macroand roand th then en assign ass igned ed to a MID MIDII cont control roller ler.. Mul Multip tiple le ass assign ignment ments s can be mad made e to one Macr Macro,so o,so expl explore oredif differ ferent ent com combina binatio tions ns of ass assign ignment ments,ranges s,ranges and the thedir directi ections onsin in whi which ch the theyy mov move. e.
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January Janua ry 201 2014 4 | 57
Audio Aud io& & Ins Instru trument mentRac Racks ks Technique MT
MT Step-by-Step
Instru Ins trumen mentt and andDru Drum m Rac Racks ks
Instrume ument nt Ra Rack cks s wo work rk in a si simi mila larr wa wayy to Au Audi dio o Ra Rack cks s an and d ar are e 01 Instr useful usef ul for forsta stacki cking ng sou sounds ndsfor fordens density ityand and dept depth,or h,or set settingup tingup
Instrument ent Rac Racks ks hav have e mor more e opti options onstha than n Aud Audio io Rac Racks ks whe when n it 02 Instrum comes come s to usi using ng Zon Zone e Blo Blocksand cksand fade fades.Use s.Use Vel Veloci ocity ty to cre create ate
different differ ent sou sounds ndsto to mov move e betw between een dyna dynamic micall allyy. To crea create te som somethi ething ng big,, tak big take e the sam same e app approa roach ch of usi using ng mul multipl tiple e Cha Chains insand and lay layeri ering ng contras cont rastin ting g sou sounds nds.The .The MID MIDII Pit Pitch ch dev device iceis is use useful fulher here e for forqui quickl cklyy findi fin ding ng th the e bes bestt oc octa tave ve or ha harmo rmony ny fo forr eac each h newCha newChain in..
layers wit layers with h exp expres ressiv sive e cont controlfrom rolfrom a MIDIkeybo MIDIkeyboard ard,, or Key Keyto to crea create te tonal ton al cha changesup ngesup and anddow down n the thekey keyboa board.Here rd.Herewe we’ve ’veadd added ed a bas bass s laye la yerr to th the e lo lowe werr ke keys ys of a mel melod odyy li line;thefade ne;thefade ena enabl bles es it to bl blendin endin at the bot bottom tom of a des descend cending ingpas passag sage. e.
Macros os can be ver veryy use useful fulfor forcrea creatin ting g cons consist istenc encyy in an 03 Macr
instrument instrum ent perf performa ormance nce.. Forinstan Forinstance,if ce,if you youwan wantt to use dra drasti stic c effect eff ects s su such ch asa hi high gh-p -pas ass s fil filte terr th that at re remov moves es th the e bul bulk k of th the e bo body dy from fr om a so sound und,, yo you u canoffs canoffset et an anyy lo loss ss in pr pres esenc ence e by in incr crea easi sing ng th the e volum vo lume e of a Ut Util ilit ityy de devi vice ce as th the e fil filtercuto tercutoff ff isincr isincreas eased ed..
As thes these e effe effects cts are areinte internal rnal,, you youcan can sub sub-pr -proces ocess s all allyou yourr drum drums s
05 as one one,, hel helpin ping g you youto to ach achiev ieve e a coh cohesi esive ve sou sound nd by pro process cessing ing
both th both the e dr drum ums s andreve andreverb rb wi with th to tool ols s li like ke co compr mpres essi sion.If on.If yo you u wa want nt to drive dri ve an eff effect ect tha that’ t’s s alr alread eadyy set setup up in Liv Live’ e’s mai main n Ret Return urnT Trac racks,righ ks,right/ t/ [Ctrl] [Ct rl]-cl -clickin ickin an emp empty ty Cha Chain in are area a and sel select ect Cre Create ateRetu Return rn Cha Chain.Thi in.This s can thenbe rou routed tedto to the rel releva evant nt Ret Return urnT Trac rack. k.
Drum um Ra Rack cks s ha have ve theadde theadded d bo bonusof nusof an in inte terna rnall Se Sendsand ndsand 04 Dr
Returns Retu rns setu setup.Thisis p.Thisis gre great at forachiev forachieving ingpol polish ished ed pro product duction ion soundswit sounds within hinyou yourr Rac Rack.First k.First enab enable le the Sho Show w butt buttons onsfor forSen Sends ds and Retu Re turns(at rns(at th the e ve very ry lef leftt of th the e Ra Rack ck).Dra ).Drag g th the e req requi uire red d eff effectto ectto th the e area ar ea la label belledDro ledDrop p Au Audi dio o Ef Effec fects ts Her Here e – a Se Send nd am amou ount nt wi willappe llappear ar on the th e Ch Chai ain n Li List st th that at ca can n be us used ed to fee feed d th the e eff effect ect..
hybr brid id ap appr proa oachcan chcan be us used ed to co combi mbine ne st steps4 eps4 and5 by 06 A hy
initial ini tially ly usi using ng Retu Return rn Cha Chains inswit within hinthe the Dru Drum m Rac Rack.When k.When you you’v ’ve e decided on you decided yourr cho choices ices,, dra drag-a g-andnd-dro drop p the int interna ernall Retu Return rn Cha Chains insto to the mai main n Ret Return urnT Trac rack k are area a in Liv Live.This e.Thiswon won’t ’t car carry ry acr acrossthe ossthe Send amounts amo unts,, whi which ch you you’llhave ’llhave to rea reappl pplyy fro from m the mai main n Send Sends s sec sectio tion n of the Dru Drum m Rac Rack’ k’s s cha channel nnelin in Liv Live’ e’s mix mixer er..
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January Janua ry 201 2014 4 | 59
Produ oduci cing ngau authe thent ntic icdru drum m & bas bass s MT Tutorial Pr
Powered Pow ered by
Genre foc focus us Technique Genre
Authentic and original drum & bass Part2 Follow Fol owiing ngon onfr from omth the e cr crea eati tion onof ofd dru rum m be bea ats tsa and ndba bass sslline nes s in Pa Part rt 1, Liam LiamO’Mu O’Mullane llane turns his hi s att attent entio ion n to tothe thevit vital alel elem ement ents s of ofmel melody ody,, at atmos mosph phere erean and d arr arran angem gement enttec techn hniq iques ues..
T
his sec his second ond ins instal talmen mentt bui buildson ldson the kno knowl wledg edge e gained gai ned in Par Partt 1 for cre creati ating ng ori origin ginal al-so -sound unding ing drum dru m & bas bass s tra tracks cks.. But wh whilethe ilethe dru drums ms and bass bas s are at the hea heart rt of D&B D&B,, it’s als also o imp importa ortant nt toconsid tocons ider er th the e me melo lodi dic c – an and d pe perh rhap aps s no nott so melodi mel odic c – par parts ts yo you’ u’ll ll nee need d to cre create ate.. Dep Depend endingon ingon the directi dir ection on youwant to tak take e you yourr wor work,you k,you mayneed to cre create ate huge atmo atmospher spheric ic sound soundscap scapes es for a dark,techy dark,techy,, scisci-fi fi moviemov ie-lik like e tra track;if ck;if yo you’ u’re re cre creati ating ng a mor more e mus musica icall llyy dri driven ven piece,you pie ce,you wil willl needdecor needdecorati ative ve mel melody ody inf inform ormati ation on in the
Accompanying projectfile inclu projectfile included ded ontheDVD
We’re We’ rear armi ming ngyo you u wit ith h th the e too ools ls you yo u’ll llne need edtto ta tak ke cr crea eati tivve id idea eas s mak ke th them emwo work rk asasong and ma form of ar form arp p sy synt nths hs,, pa padsand dsand soon.Eventhe mo most st mi mini nima mall forms for ms of the gen genre re ha have ve ele element ments s tha thatt sit in the bac backgr kgroun ound d behind beh ind the mor more e obv obviou ious s for foregr egroun ound d so sound unds,and s,and thi this s is wher wh ere e yo your ur mi mixe xes s ca can n ga gain in a se sens nse e of de dept pth. h. First Fir st we we’ll ’ll loo look k at the appr approach oach(and (and pers persevera everance) nce) you you’ll ’ll need nee d to tak take e wh when en it com comes es to sou soundnd-des desig ign.Usinga n.Usinga multi-lay multi -layered ered appr approach oachof of proc processi essing, ng,rende rendering ring,, editi editing, ng,
FOCUS FOC US ON… PERS PERSEVER EVERANCE ANCE& & NEW NEWSOUN SOUNDS DS Sound-des Sounddesignis ignis aninteg anintegralpartof ralpartof D&Band the thereare reare man many y appr approac oachesto hesto cre creatin ating g som someth ething ing uniqueandengag uni queandengagingforyourtrac ingforyourtracks.Alt ks.Althou houghsoun ghsound d qua qualityis lityis impo importan rtantt inall asp aspect ects s ofmusic production produ ction,sometimesthe ,sometimesthe audioqualityof yoursource asa trig triggerforheav gerforheavilyproc ilyprocess essedaudio edaudio.In .In fac fact,it’lloften t,it’lloften you’llneedto you ’llneedto tak take:star e:startingwitha tingwitha sele selecti ctionof onof sou sounds nds,tr ,tr applying applyin g auto automationand mationand explo exploringwhat’spossible.If ringwhat’spossible.If yo proces pro cessin sing g liveandin rea reall tim time e youcanalwa youcanalways ys swap-o swa p-outthe utthe sou sourcesou rcesoundsto ndsto seehowtheyare affecte affe cted d bythe pro proces cessin sing g asyougo. Theexample Theexamp le aud audio io forthistutor forthistutorialemploy ialemploys s variousstage vari ousstages s ofproce ofprocessin ssing g andshoul andshould d giv give e youan ideaof howyoucan appr approac oach h thi this s tec techniq hnique. ue. Startin Star ting g witha fewrando fewrandomlychos mlychosenbass enbass gui guitar tar slide samples,the sourc source e materialis proce processed ssed threetimes to creat create e threecontrastingresults. Theseinclude a combin combinationof ationof reverb reverb,, satura saturation, tion, frequency-shif frequen cy-shifting ting and white-n white-noise oise vocodi vocoding. ng. Certainparame Cert ainparameter ters s areauto areautomat mated ed andedite andedited d totry togain themosttonalchang themosttonalchange e foreachsoundwithi foreachsoundwithin n thephrase.EQ thephras e.EQ is use used d tore-bal tore-balanc ance e thesoundand reduceunwantedfrequencies,then reduceunwantedfrequencie s,then all threeresults are ar e re rend nder eredintoa edintoa ne new w au audiofiletobe diofiletobe tr treat eatedas edas a newsourcesample newsour cesample.This .This is the then n cho chopped pped-upand -upand edited edit ed int into o som someth ethingof ingof inte interes rest.By t.By list listenin ening g to thisaudioyoucan hea hearr howthesetech howthesetechniqu niquescan escan yield surpris surprising ing result results s that are drastic drastically ally differe different nt fromthe sourc source. e.
64 | | January January201 2014 4
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reprocessing reproces sing and re-edi re-editing ting,, it’ it’s s impo important rtant to remem remember ber that altho alt houghthis ughthis maybear no fru fruit it to beg begin in wi with,push th,pushing ing forwa fo rward rd pas pastt poo poorr ini initia tiall res result ults s is the onl onlyy pat path h to cre creati ating ng somethinggenuinel some thinggenuinelyy inte interesti resting.Creating ng.Creating perfe perfect ct and unique uniqu e sound sounds s thro through ugh soun sound-des d-design ign and mix mix-pro -process cessing ing as wel welll as rere-sa sampl mplingtechn ingtechniqu iques es can be sl slow ow at tim times,so es,so keep ke ep an op open en mi mind nd as yo you u wo work rk an and d be pa pati tien entt – it ca can n ta take ke anyt an ythi hing ng fr from om 20 mi minu nute tes s toovera da dayy of tr tryi ying ng ou outt id idea eas s until unt il yo you u stu stumbl mble e on tha thatt gol golden den nug nugget get!! When Whe n yo you’ u’ve ve gotyour ide ideas as to toget gether her,, sta start rt to thi think nk abo about ut your yo ur arr arrang angeme ement;here nt;here we we’llbe ’llbe exp explor loringa inga fewways in whichyou wh ichyou can tak take e yo your ur ide ideas as andwork the them m int into o a pla playa yable ble struct str ucture ure.There .There’’s no str strictform ictform tha thatt a D&Bsong mus mustt tak take, e, butt do ke bu keep ep in mi mind nd th that at th the e ma majo jori rity ty of yo your ur au audi dien ence ce wi will ll hearr yo hea your ur mus music ic in a DJDJ-mix mixingconte ingcontext,so xt,so it’s imp import ortant ant to make ma ke it su suit itab able le fo forr bo both th cl club ub an and d ra radi dio o pl play ay aswel aswelll as maximi max imisin sing g on themomen themoments ts wh when en thesong mig might ht be presen pre sentt in a mixalong mixalongsid side e ano anothe therr tra track. ck. Butt aswe st Bu stat ated ed in Pa Part rt 1, we we’r ’re e ar armi ming ng yo you u wi with th th the e tools too ls you you’llneed ’llneed to tak take e cre creati ative ve ide ideas as and mak make e the them m wo work rk as a so song ng – no nott ho how w to ch chur urn n ou outt ye yett an anot othe herr ba band ndwa wago gonnchasin cha sing g clu club-b b-bang anger er.. So tur turn n on tha thatt sub sub,, shu shutt out the dayl da ylig ight ht an and d do wh what atev ever er el else se yo you u ne need ed to do to ge gett in into to a creative headspace. MT This tuto This tutoria riall hasbeenendorse hasbeenendorsedby dby ACM ACM,, TheAcade TheAcademyof myof Con Contemp temporary orary Music,, worldleaders in Music inmusicindustryeducation.ACM’sAudio musicindustryeducation.ACM’sAudio Product Production ion SchoolprovidesDiploma(one-year)and Degree(two-year)courses in Contemporary Contemp oraryMusicProduction MusicProduction,, Electroni Electronic c MusicProductio MusicProduction, n,Creative Creative SoundDesign andTourProduction& Manag Management. ement. wwwacm acuk
Produ Pr oduci cing ngau authe thent ntic icdru drum m & bas bass s Tutorial MT
MT Step-by-Step
Decorative Decorat ivesoundsand soundsand melod melodies ies
Dependingon ingon th the e vi vibe be of yo your ur tr trac ack,you k,you ca can n ch choo oose se to fil filll th the e 01 Depend background backgr ound with withmelodic melodicpads,pitched pads,pitched FX, FX,drones drones,, atmosph atmospheres eres or a mas mash h of th the e lo lot.We’ t.We’ve ve ch chos osen en tocrea tocreate te a si sini nist ster er pa pad d asa ten tensi sion on layer lay er for forthe the intr intro o by pla playin ying g dis discor cordant dantnot notes,laye es,layeringsequenc ringsequenced ed sounds sou ndsunde undernea rneath th the thelou louder der syn synthet thetic ic str string ings s (fo (forr mov movemen ement) t) and automa aut omatingthe tingthe pan pos positi ition on of the qui quieter eterlay layers ersfor forste stereo reo int intere erest. st.
radio-fri o-friendly endlystyle styles, s,melod melodies ies usual usually ly requir require e strai straightf ghtforwar orward d 03 For radi
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How To Create A Pitch Build Effect In Ableton
Having the ability to control powerful effects during crucial moments in a set – and in Ableton, setting up instrument racks of unique effects is useful both during a show and in the studio. In today s video tutorial, Ableton Certified Trainer Lenny Kiser shares his technique for a crafting pitch build effect – perfect for modulating vocals or building up to a drop. !
Tension-building effects: if used correctly they allow you to keep your audience following along with you until the end of a song. So how do you build tension and keep the listeners interest? For me tension building can be done in a couple of ways such as a gradual move to a higher pitch, repetition of sounds and dynamic volume shifts. Today I ll going to show you how to create a pitch build effect that incorporates these tension-building theories using the Ableton Simple Delay. !
Pitch and Tension The answer is in the musical concept of tension and release. When something is rising in pitch, it creates a sense of dissonance and tension. This tension leads to a desire to be resolved, coming to a place of resting and completion. Proper tension-building makes the drop feel right and helps develop contrast and interest in your track. Tension-building can come in many forms, from subtle volume shifts to intense pitch rising effects. In today s tutorial, I ll show you how to use the Simple Delay to create a long-delayed signal that repeats and is then pitch shifted up: !
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Click here to download the .ALP project file with the complete pitch shift rack.
Simple Delay Transition Modes: Repitch, Fade, Jump
Imagine you are driving a car a hundred miles an hour and then suddenly you are forced to transition down to 20 miles an hour instantly, there will be some abrupt changes! This is similar to what happens if you change the delay time on the Simple Delay while it is processing audio. Essentially it will cause some abrupt changes to the delayed signal. The Simple Delay has three transition modes for how it switches between these changes in delay time (accessed by control clicking on the Simple Delay device title bar): Re-pitch: Re-pitch: This causes a pitch variation to the delayed signal and is the main component of creating this effect! Fade: Fade: Creates a smooth crossfade between the delay time changes. Jump: Jump: Jumps directly to the next delay time value and is more abrupt which may cause pops and clicks. For this effect we want to choose Repitch so that when we gradually change the delay time it will create a pitch rising effect.
Additional parameters that need adjusting on Simple Delay: Feedback: Feedback: The Feedback percentage controls how much of the delayed signal is fed back into the delay unit itself. I think of this as controlling the amount of delayed repetitions that will take place. Higher values equal longer delay times and longer effect tails to work with. Link and Beat Offset %: %: The link button links the delay times of the left and right channels to be the same. For this effect, link the channels to control one delay time for both channels. The beat offset percentage allows you to shift your delayed signal away from the original so it is not perfectly in time. I normally use this for creating swung delays or grooves with drums. For this effect the beat offset % will adjust the delay time and since we have it in Repitch mode this will cause the pitch shifting effect on the delayed signal. Sync: Sync: This parameter causes the delayed signal to either be synced to the project tempo or free from it. For this effect we will be using sync.
Automating the Return Track
Automation is a necessary function to keep things moving and interesting in your production. Things will get even more interesting when the effects on the return tracks are automated. Start by sending some signal to the return track in a buildup section. Next, automate the delay time or (Speed Macro) on the simple delay to create this pitch rising effect.
Live Vocal Effects Method To use this effect in a live situation (it works especially well with vocals) do the following: Create a new audio track with your microphone signal routed into it and place the pitch build effect on that channel directly. Map a controller button to the device activator. Keep the effect off and then turn it on as you say a word that you want to be repeated through the effect. The device activator in this case is essentially used as a button to “sample” a word or phrase into the effect by turning it on. Once you ve said the word use the Speed control knob to increase the pitch. Modulate any other effects post the delay for more interest. !
Other Devices To Use With This Effect
This pitch-rise effect can be taken one step further by adding some other processing devices. Here are some of the devices I use after this effect: Utility device: device: To makeup for lost volume and create dynamic volume increases to maximize tension. Sidechain Compressor: Compressor: Have the sidechain compressor only turn on when the drop hits so the effect pumps when the kick and bass come in! Limiter: Limiter: Place a limiter at the end of the chain to protect from overloading the channel with high feedback levels and volume. Frequency Shifter: Shifter: Not enough pitch rising? Automate the frequency shifter to keep the pitch going up! Filtering: Filtering: Removing frequencies with filtering can add to the tension of this effect and also create an uplifting feeling. Reverb: Reverb: To add space, depth and dimension. Performing music live is about the journey that you take the listener on and pitch buildup effects like this one will be one sure way to keep the listener interested and take your audience for a ride.
Preparing a Custom Live Music Performance Setup Technology for real-time electronic music performance has seen significant prog ress in the last decade. Flexible non-linear digital audio workstations like Ableton Live combined with plug and play hardware control offer remarkable potential for streamlined access to the stage and direct connection to fans and audiences. Despite the fact that all of this is more mor e accessible than ever, creating unique personalized setups can still be challenging. With so many choices available, and with add-ons like Max for Live and Reaktor, the possibilities are truly endless. It’s extremely easy to get lost dreaming up “what could be” while experimenting with infinite possibilities, rather than accomplishing what we initially set out to do... perform!
"Creating unique personalized setups can be challenging with so many choices available and with add-ons like Max for Live and Reaktor, the possibilities are truly endless." Where to start? To create a setup that is tailored to meet your individual artistic needs, I recommend beginning with a proper brainstorming session. Personally, I find it useful to get out from behind the computer, with some good old fashioned paper and a pencil, and start scratching out lists and diagrams. Solidify ideas by asking relevant questions that define a specific plan of attack and help prioritize what is most substantial. Both technical and aesthetic considerations are important as one side often influences the other. What you learn from this exercise will assist keeping you on track, focused, organized, and directed. It s important to note, once you start implementing your ideas, anything not on the list should be considered a distraction from your true mission. If you really believe something needs to be included, go back to the list and re-prioritize to account for the addition. "
Below are a few preliminary thoughts to ponder at this stage: !
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What is the purpose of my performance (Solo Instrumentalist, Instrum entalist, DJ set, Live Remixing, Audio/Visual Instrument, Acousmatic presentation, etc.)? What is my model s primary function? Is it an instrument, an effects processor, an interactive system, a playback device or is it a hybrid combination? If it is a combination of various elements, which of these are highest and lowest in importance and priority? Which of these tasks require the most resources and how might this play into how I have prioritized? What do I want to be doing during any given point in my performance? Equally important, what do I NOT want to be doing? What aspects of my setup are most important and which are least important? What is essential and, if push comes to shove, what am I willing to sacrifice or compromise? How do I envision myself as a performer? Does my rig allow for this? If not, how can it be modified to meet my needs? How much of my set will be predetermined and how much will be improvised (very important!)? Who is my intended audience? (If it s of significance) how entertaining and/or engaging will my performance be and how will it stand up under various conditions? What types of environments will I be playing in? What types of situations or locations will my setup be affected, enhanced or limited by? "
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The process at this stage is much like writing an essay. Define a thesis or topic, add supporting details and discard ideas that are irrelevant. The more complete an outline you create, the easier it will be stay on target.
"Remember to try and keep your ideas honed, simple and concise and avoid paradoxical paradoxical and contradictory concepts."
Think about the overall main idea first and determine how this will work in conjunction with smaller sub-sections. Remember to try and keep your ideas honed, simple and concise and avoid paradoxical and contradictory concepts. For example, it s not feasible to expect to run a multitude of virtual instruments and processor-hungry plug-ins simultaneously and still be able to keep your buffer low enough to avoid latency when running inputs through your software (although, this is one of the most encountered issues in a majority of my client s setups!) !
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To illustrate what your brainstorm might look like. The following example demonstrates some preliminarily considerations for a solo live performance setup. Every model should have a somewhat different set of priorities based upon unique criterion. As my role changes, so does my focus and my performance system s layout. I recommend avoiding the idea of an “all purpose” performance setup that is capable of anything at anytime. Like most fine things in life, custom fit means it s unique and tailored to meet specific needs for specific situations. I m not necessarily suggesting that you ll need to build everything from the ground up each time you perform, but it is a great idea to consider whether or not your setup might benefit from modification or additional fine tuning before the next gig.I recommend avoiding the idea of an 'all purpose' performance setup that is capable of anything at anytime.There are some well designed templates floating around the internet for Live performance and DJing. These can be great jumping off points for creating custom rigs and it is amazing how much you can learn from backwards engineering. As you brainstorm, watch videos and read articles to help get ideas and inspiration, investigate how other artists with similar performance styles are approaching their setups and consider which aspects are similar and dissimilar to your own. Most importantly, do not settle on a performance dynamic simply because you feel limited by the technology you are using. Creativity is the hub of great invention and invention is realized by first knowing what you want, devising a well designed plan, and putting it into action. !
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Technique | Ableton Live
Ableton Liv Live e
field, and they now make a USB-MIDI-to-CV converter, to keep things right up to date! If your synth fits in our ‘middle period’, and has the standard MIDI in and out jacks, and ideally, MIDI through as well, then you can connect by using either a MIDI-to-USB
Using Hardware Synths
cable, or using a MIDI cable to connect your synth direct to the MIDI connections on your soundcard, if it has them.
Ableton Live excels at connecting to the real world – to the hardware synths, samplers, and effects, that live in your studio. Martin Delaney shows shows you how easy it is to get hooked up…
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he synthesizer is one of the cornerstones of electronic music – that and the sampler. Oh, and the sequencer. Oh well, moving on… Everybody needs more than one synth. It’s like guitars: each one
has a different sound, a different interface that leads you in new directions, or just a different vibe. Some people use hardware synths, some try to keep it ‘in the box’ and use software synths exclusively. Most of us are in the middle ground – we want the convenience and mobility of software synths, but from time to time we also crave the ‘real world’ experience of tapping on some keys and twisting a pot or two. A collection of synths expands your range of sounds, and creates a different texture than you’d get if you used one instrument all the time, even with different sounds and presets. Hardware synths expand on this more by giving us the ‘instrument’ vibe we experience with other types of keyboard, guitars, drums, violins, and so on.
One way or another Sooner or later you will want to connect a hardware synth to your computer. If not your own, you may be working with someone who uses synths, or you may be running a studio and your client has one. Ableton Live is the best tool around for this, it does a fantastic job of sitting at the heart of any routing set-up, in the studio, or in live performance. Routing in Live achieves the feat of being easy to configure, without sacrificing anything in the feature department 1 . How you go about connecting your synth will depend mostly on its vintage, but not exclusively. The earliest synths used CV and Gate communication to talk to each other. You could use the Roland TB-303 (outputs only) 2 and original Korg MS-20 as examples. After the introduction of MIDI, most hardware used MIDI to communicate – look at the Yamaha AN1x or, even earlier on, the Sequential Circuits Prophet 600. MIDI worked so well, and has been so durable, because there was a strict standard at work, and although there have been tweaks along the way, by various manufacturers, it’s i t’s never degenerated into a VHS vs Betamax-style format war. And more recently, most synths include a USB connection alongside or instead of the regular MIDI port (they’re still sending MIDI, just over a different cable): check out the Roland SH-01 or, coincidentally, Korg’s new updated take on the MS-20. The exceptions to this timeline are some modern analogue synths which are sometimes built according to the original techniques, and MIDI is not included. All of these methods of connection are still viable. As I mention over the page, a simple MIDI-to-CV converter will let you include CV/Gate in a modern rig. Kenton are leaders in this
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The Expert Martin Delaney, Performer, Producer Artist and instructor Martin, aka mindlobster, has produced Live training material and was one of the UK’s first certified Ableton Live trainers.
Track Freezing You may want to play back your project correctly when your hardware synth isn’t connected – laptop users are likely to run into this. Freeze track to the rescue: right-click on the MIDI track and choose Freeze, which creates a temporary audio file version of your MIDI track. The difference this time is that Live has to play through the track in real time before it can complete the Freeze operation. To make this change permanent, rightclick on the track again and choose Flatten. Too much USB
Synths that have USB are the easiest of all, although ideally your synth would have USB and MIDI connections, so you have more flexibility. One problem with depending on USB for your connections is that you quickly run out of USB ports to connect to! Sometimes a USB hub will bail you out, but some hardware just doesn’t like being connected to a hub, even if it’s a mains-powered hub. This is a real consideration these days when I’m looking at new hardware. Audio connections are more straightforward – it’s going to be line out from your synth to your soundcard 3 , or possibly audio is travelling with MIDI through the USB connection as well. Even if your synth does USB audio, try it with the cable option as well. Sometimes I prefer the sound of regular audio cables over USB. That’s just my unsubstantiated opinion, and a lot of it will depend on the quality of your soundcard, but I suggest you try it. That’s the hardware connections out of the way. Then we’re back on familiar territory inside Live. You’ll need to configure your MIDI and audio inputs and outputs in Preferences 4 , then add a MIDI track, and… well, read our walkthrough! We could achieve the same results using separate MIDI out and audio in tracks, but the External Instrument Device makes it much cleaner visually, and even more importantly, makes it a recallable operation, especially when included in an instrument rack – your hardware starts to look like a plug-in on screen! 5 This means that you can create a MIDI clip and send your notes out to the synth just like with any software instrument 6 .
Notes plus It’s not just about notes. You can send any MIDI messages that your synth is able to receive, such as pitch bend, modulation, program and bank changes, and any other relevant CC messages, thanks to clip envelopes 7 . You can also
Ableton Live | Technique
One Way Or Another
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The Effect Treatment
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Technique | Ableton Live
apply Live’s MIDI effects to the track; once again, it’s just like working with any software instrument. Check your synth’s manual to find out which messages it will receive. Most manuals are online now, so if I’m wondering about a particular piece of hardware, I’ll grab the manual and read the MIDI info. And after shopping, I keep the PDF manuals on my computer and iPad, so they’re always to hand during sessions. Another benefit of PDF manuals is that they’re searchable! The audio comes back into the same track that the MIDI is leaving, thanks to some neat routing from Ableton. This is a great way to organise your hardware for performance, but if you want to record the incoming audio, you’ll have to set up another audio track, and record into that one, either directly from your audio input 8 , or by using the In/Out View to route audio out from your MIDI track into the ‘recording’ track. You can also Freeze and Flatten the MIDI track, to permanently ‘print’ those synth parts to audio files. This works in the usual way, but it takes longer because Live has to play through the song in real time to capture the audio 9 . You can add any of Live’s audio effect devices, or third-party plug-ins, to the track, to expand on the synth’s original array of effects. An interesting development with synths that connect through USB is that they usually have some kind of supporting plug-in or standalone editor that gives you access to their deeper features and preset management, directly from the computer. Vyzex have produced a few of these editors for different hardware synths, including the Dave Smith Instruments Evolver, Ev olver, and M-Audio’s Venom synth. The Venom editor is particularly useful, because the control panel on the actual synth is so bare!
Versatile boxes Control issues get interesting in other ways, too. Once your synth is hooked up, you can play it from another connected keyboard, or even the Live Virtual MIDI Keyboard – the computer keyboard, in other words. You could use the knobs and faders on a MIDI hardware controller to reach out to your synth. A lot of modern synths also send MIDI out from their controls, so you can use it as a hardware control surface for Live; very versatile. A modern synth can be a soundcard, a controller, even an audio processor, if it lets you run external audio signals through its onboard effects… some of those synths have fantastic filters! Where this will go in the future, nobody can say, but it looks like things are pretty
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MIDI MIDI-to -to-C -CV V Converters There are older, analogue, synths out there, that pre-date MIDI (the MIDI spec was published in 1983). Before that, CV/ Gate signals were used for communication between hardware. Companies like Kenton still produce MIDI-to-CV converters, meaning you can include analogue gear in your digital rig.
healthy for hardware synths, even with all the great software examples. The iPad is getting called on more as a control surface for them, and perhaps soon we’ll see wireless connectivity become common. What I really want every synth to come with is a plug-in editor that runs as an AU or VST inside Live – that would be a real boost to the workflow.
Sounds On Demand There is deeper integration available. An obvious one to start with is getting Live to tell the synth to load specific sounds on demand as you launch the clip that needs the sound. This is quite easy to do, although you’ll probably need the synth’s manual handy! Make a MIDI clip if you don’t have one already, and go to the Notes box. There you’ll see choosers where you can enter Program, Sub Bank, or Bank changes, which are sent when the clip is launched. Refer to your synth manual to find out which messages you need to send. Soft Synths
The effect treatment
If you don’t own any hardware synths, none of this concerns you much, unless you work with somebody who does use them. Software synths are so advanced now that hardware models aren’t the essentials they used to be. A soft synth and a controller might do the job!
One last thing… Most of what we’re talking about goes for hardware effects units as well. Look under Live’s Audio Effects category in the Browser, and you’ll see the External Audio Effect Device 10. This device routes audio to and from your hardware, but you could also send MIDI from a separate track to load patches or change parameters on the hardware. You may or may not be a synth-head, and truthfully I’m not, but everybody should have a couple of nice pieces to expand on their sounds and create a different mood – and Live will make this as seamless as possible.
Ableton Live | Technique
Hook Up Your Favourite Synth To Live Get your synthesizer working with Live, receiving MIDI, and sending audio back in
01 > Connect your synth to your computer; how you do it depends on what connections your synth has. If it’s a relatively recent one, it probably has a USB connection, which makes things easy,, handling audio and MIDI with one wire. easy For older hardware, with MIDI ports, you’ll need either a MIDI-USB cable, or MIDI cables into your audio interface, as well as connecting the synth’s stereo outputs to your soundcard.
02 > Once you’ve connected everything, launch Live and open Preferences. Under the Audio tab, make sure you’ve enabled the soundcard inputs that you’ve connected your synth’s outputs to. Under the MIDI Sync tab, select your MIDI adaptor or interface ports as MIDI Output destinations. Turn on Track and Remote, and Sync, if you want to sync your synth to Live’s project tempo.
03 > Create a new MIDI track in your Live set. Go to the Browser, and from the Instruments category, drag the External Instrument Device onto the track. The MIDI To and Audio From pop-ups will show the audio and MIDI connections you just made in Preferences, so choose them. You don’t need to configure the track inputs because the device does it all .
04 > Play a few notes on your synth, and you should hear its output coming back through the track in Live. Draw a MIDI clip in the track, with some notes, and they should trigger the synth as well, with the audio coming back in. It’s like a hardware plug-in! You can even use Live’s virtual MIDI keyboard (the computer keyboard) to play the synth.
05 > Now have fun applying Live’s MIDI and audio effects to the synth! This is good for playback, but to record the incoming audio, you still need to set up an audio track, just like recording from any other source. Once you get a set-up you like, save it as a preset so you can recall it quickly in future projects.
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Technique | Ableton Live
Ableton Live
For many situations, the library grooves will contain something that you can use; there’s a lot of them in there, you know. But if you’re matching something from an outside source, or you have for instance a drum sample which has a groove that you
Using Groove Templates
absolutely must have, you can steal the groove from that. To do this you right-click on the clip you want to take from, and choose Extract Groove(s) 3 . This will then put it in the Groove Pool, and you can work with it just like any other groove. The ability to extract and modify the groove from a piece of music fits right in there with some of Live’s other tools, especially the Slice to New MIDI Track command. These are ways that you can take what you want from the character of another tune, ditching whatever doesn’t fit with your master plan along the way. Bad news for users of Live Lite or Live Intro – those slimmed down versions will let you load grooves, but not edit them.
Sometimes the robot is good, sometimes the robot is bad… Martin Delaney shows shows you how to borrow some bounce from one place and use it somewhere Groove Management Once you’ve created your else, for some practical – or weird – effects!
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ll of the major DAWs – Cubase, Logic, Reason, and of course Live – have ways to apply groove templates; adding timing or velocity variations that impart a more human feel to programmed
music. This goes back further than your computer, to machines like the Akai MPC and Yamaha QY700. It’s a desirable thing in MIDI sequencing, just like we need quantisation – they’re both fundamental ways of adding a real-time ‘feel’ to music that’s been drawn in with a pencil or tapped in on a keyboard, instead of being played on a ‘real’ instrument. Groove templates are simply a format used to store and recall this information, for use in other tracks, or other projects. Electronic music being the ever-changing beast that it is, sometimes we want more humanity, sometimes less, and quite often inside the same song!
The way of the groove – Live style Every DAW implements this differently. As far as Live’s concerned, a groove combines two types of information: timing – when the notes happen, compared against a grid of bars/beats/fractions of beats; and velocity – how ‘hard’ the note is being triggered, using standard MIDI velocity measurements to reproduce this part of a performance. Nobody can play every note with exactly the same velocity, so this is an important part of the sonic ‘signature’, even if the variations are quite subtle. Live grooves are kept inside the default Library, and any that we create are contained in the User Library. You You can find them through the Browser, either by navigating to them directly (they’re in Packs/Swing and Groove 1 ) or by using the search function Cmd-F. To apply a groove, all you have to do is drag it onto a clip in your Live set, in either Session or Arrangement View – grooves are clip-specific, they don’t apply across an entire track. After you’ve added a groove to your set, you can view it in the Clip box at the bottom left of the screen; there’s a little pop-up box called Grooves 2 . If you’ve got more than one groove in your project, you can view and load all of them from here. Actually, you can also use the hot-swap button next to the word Groove there to view the grooves in the Browser – they end with .agr. Open the Groove Pool by clicking on the small wavy icon under the Browser, and you will see the controls for the grooves. Here you can fine-tune them to suit your specific material, and this is usually a good idea. There are separate controls for each groove that you load, for even more flexibility. After making changes to a groove, you can use the save button in the Pool to put it in the user library, and rename it if you want to.
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ideal groove, save it into the Library by clicking the The Expert Save Preset button. By Martin Delaney, default this goes into the Performer, Producer Artist and Grooves folder, accessible instructor Martin, aka from Places in the Browser mindlobster, Sidebar – the left-hand has produced Live training material and column; you can rename, was one of the UK’s first certified Ableton move, or delete these. You Live trainers. can share or archive them, as well, either by saving or sharing a Live project that contains your groove/s, or by finding the groove in your User Library folder in the default Live location, and dragging them onto a USB drive, or into into an email. Going deeper with the groove The Groove Pool also features a Global Amount control, at the bottom right 4 . You can use it to change the ‘depth’ of the groove effect across all of the clips in your project. This ranges from 0% to 130%, so you can push the groove up beyond its original application. When you’ve got grooves applied to clips in your set, this control also appears at the top of the Live screen, in the Control Bar 5 . You might be wondering if you can exchange groove templates between different DAWs, and I was wondering about this too; I tried. The answer is no. There’s no common shared format for these; you would have to do it by creating and exporting MIDI files that contained the information. Even without saving them in the User Library, you can move them between projects using the Browser. Navigate to the project containing the grooves you’re after, and unfold it, just as you do to see tracks and clips inside it. Open the Grooves folder and pull out the grooves into your new set 6 . For Push users, we can’t view the Groove Pool controls in the LCD screen, and we can’t browse and load grooves, but we can use the Swing knob on Push, in conjunction with the Quantize button – this isn’t connected to Live’s global groove, or to localised grooves from the Pool. For other hardware controllers, there’s no way to MIDI map those groove controls.
Ableton Live | Technique
The Way of The Groove – Live Style
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Alternative Velocities
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Technique | Ableton Live
Alternative velocities
The Groove Pool Controls
Sometimes you want to work with only the velocities, and leave the note timings alone. You can do this in the Groove Pool controls, by using the Timing and Random controls to straighten them out, and just manipulating the Velocity settings. You can also do it by avoiding grooves altogether, and using Live’s native Velocity MIDI effect device. Just add it to your MIDI track and you can use it to limit or expand the velocity ranges in your track. This is different than using a groove, mainly because it applies to the entire track, and as I said, it’s going to affect only the note velocities. Like Live’s other MIDI effects, this can be used as a real-time effect, applied to incoming MIDI messages from a keyboard, drum pads, hardware, or other software 7 . For some programming situations, I prefer to hear slight, randomised, velocity changes, but to keep the note timing tight and quantised. The Velocity effect can be loaded from, and controlled by, Push; hold down Shift and add device, and (as long as you’re in a MIDI track) you can browse to the device and scroll through the presets. So we know that grooves are useful for imparting a more realistic, natural, feel to programmed tracks. We can also use them to apply the groove from one piece of audio to another if we want to, to help them fit together better in a mix for example. And we can use them in more unusual ways to create odd sounds and rhythms, by using the Extract Groove command on source material that doesn’t have any ‘normal’ timing or velocity, like speech, or field recordings. We have something in our example Live set on the DVD you can try it with:
Life Life is Ra Rand ndom om When programming ‘realistic’ band parts, like a finger style electric bass or a nice acoustic kit from Live’s Session Drums, I’ll use grooves. I’ll start with the drum track, and edit a preset rather than start from scratch. To To create the sound of a band playing together, together, I’ll put the same groove on every track. The Random control
When you use Alt-Cmd-G to view the Groove Pool, underneath the Browser, you’ll also see controls arrayed across the top of the window. If necessary, drag the Pool wider to view all of the controls, especially the important Velocity control at the far right.
is important – if it’s at a decent level, you can leave it the same for all tracks, and they’ll all fluctuate around that central point. If it doesn’t sound right, try adjusting it for individual tracks. Grooves with unusual rhythms Go to the audio clip called ‘speech source’ and right-click on it, then choose Extract Groove(s). Open the Groove Pool with Alt-Cmd-G and you’ll see the groove in there, with the same name as the clip. Play the ‘percussion target’ clip; listen to it a few times. Now drag your new groove from the pool over, and drop it onto the percussion clip, while it’s still playing. You should hear quite a difference. Experiment with the Timing and Velocity controls to really mix in the amount of the groove. I think that sounds quite cool! Now stop that clip running, and launch the other MIDI clip, called ‘synth target’. This one is using a custom Operator synth preset, where some of the controls have been configured to be velocity sensitive 8 . The notes in the clip are very simple, so we can easily hear the before and after effect of the groove. Drag the speech source groove onto that clip, and again, manipulate those controls. I really like these types of sounds; it’s a good way to create more unusual programmed parts. If you’re feeling really experimental, though this only works with audio clips, use the Commit button to embed the velocity as clip automation, then select the envelope (put your mouse near it until it highlights, right-click and choose ‘cut envelope’) and apply it to another parameter, like transposition, or filter frequency 9 . I get a kick out of using speech and field recordings to ‘redirect’ the timing of other programmed or Movin Movingg sampled parts. I also like to experiment Grooves with using sounds like these to side Betwe Between en chain a compressor on a synth track, to Aud Audio io and and get weird and unpredictable pumping MIDI MIDI Clip Clipss effects. Try it – you can come up with Grooves wouldn’t be so something distinctive, that you can useful if we couldn’t then, if necessary, dial back a bit to move them freely between different types of clip – make it fit alongside more ‘regular’ from audio to MIDI, or the parts, to add some customisation other way round. This leads to much more to your music. You can’t use preset organic programming in all your life! the first case, and more unusual programmed-type Whether you go ‘practical’ or ‘weird’ variations in the second case.
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with grooves, it’s all good; there’s always something interesting to be had, and these set ups are still easier to do in Ableton Live than in anything else out there.
Ableton Live | Technique
How to Apply Apply a Groove Groove and Make it Stick! Extract a groove from any clip, apply it to another, then embed it permanently!
01 > Open the example Live set on our DVD. Right-click on the clip called ‘source beat’. This one is a MIDI clip, but you can take grooves from MIDI or audio clips. Choose Extract Groove(s) from the pop-up Context Menu – there are no options, it just does it! You might see a short progress bar.
03 > We also have an audio clip called ‘target beat’ in the set. We need to straighten that out before applying the new groove, and there are two ways we can do this. The first method is to use audio quantisation to quickly and permanently straighten it out. Secondly, we can use the Quantize control in the groove to straighten it out non-destructively non-destructively..
04 > You pick how you want to do it, but either way, apply the groove 100%. To implement the groove, just drag it from the Pool onto your clip. Now when you look at the Clip box at the bottom of your screen, you’ll see the Groove listed there. You can also use that list to choose from other grooves in the Pool, or to choose ‘None’!
05 The groove controls make a big difference particularly Velocity. Some grooves don’t sound like they’re doing anything until you tweak this. The Quantize control we already mentioned; Random is very useful, and Timing blends in the amount of the groove’s timing variations. Back in that Clip box, we can use the Commit button to permanently embed the groove’s parameters in the clip.
02 > Now open the Groove Pool by clicking on the little ‘wavy’ icon under the Browser, Browser, or be like the cool kids and use the keyboard shortcut Alt-Cmd-G. Your Your new groove is listed in there, identified with the name of the clip you took it from, so ours will be called ‘source beat’. 61
MTF Technique A track from scratch part 2: Dubstep beats
Technique A track from scratch: Part 2
Dubstep beats Following on from the building blocks for bass design within the harder side of dubstep, Liam O’Mullane and Christopher Pearson now delve into the art of programming and producing drum sounds that tick all the boxes for the genre.
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f you’ve absorbed the first part in this series (over the previous pages) you should be joining us with a solid bass idea, or at least a good starting point to tweak later. This may still need a bit of work but, as you’ll see, when it comes to drum design and programming, the groove aspects of both drums and bass can now intertwine and move forward together, inspiring each other as you go. In this instalment we’ll explore the use of drum synthesis, sampling, ambience, groove, quantization and the hows and whys of each. We’ve chosen to delve a little bit deeper into the actual design of drums for this tutorial, so you’ll soon be armed with more than just the simple skills of grabbing the same, commonly used samples that many aspiring producers reach for today. Creating your own drum sounds is not only satisfying, it can also be the
On the disc Accompanying example audio files included on the DVD
Soon you’ll have more than just the basic skills of grabbing commonly
used samples FOCUS ON... GUIDE DRUMS
Like our bass elements from the first part in this series, individual drum sounds also benefit from being grouped to a single channel and being processed as a unit. This is the point when you might insert various processing devices to add character to all drum elements as a whole, which in turn helps them stand apart from the other mix elements. It could simply be a case of inserting an EQ, saturation or compression device, as long as it can unify the group as a whole by adding some form of unique tone. For instance, we did try to use compression to glue our elements together but this suffocated the group, making it feel a little lifeless and over compressed. So after a bit of trial and error (which we can’t encourage enough) we settled on using a combination of two EQs, specifically for colour, which then ran through a shaping device to smooth out the harsh transients, rather than enhance them. After using the Dangerous BAX EQ and Maag EQ4 plug-ins to add some colour to our drums, the Transient Transient Master by Native Instruments enabled us to soften any harsh transients. At the end of this processing chain we’ve added a limiter,, which is just tickling the signal limiter with a few decibels of reduction to keep dynamics options open for the mixing stage.
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perfect ingredient to inspire a track to be taken into a unique direction. Our own project drum sounds make use of a variety of techniques simultaneously: acoustic-based drum samples with FXpansion’s BFD3, and home-made, synthetic drums using FXpansion’s Tremor for some simple physical modelling techniques. These first two techniques give us a contrast of sounds to mix due to their opposing approaches of being acoustically and synthetically rooted, respectively. These techniques can, of course, be achieved through the careful use of samples, but we’ve chosen to use sources that give us more flexibility over dynamics and tonal shaping if it’s needed later in the mix.
Let there be drums Although the blind pursuit of searching for drum samples can be a fruitful event for inspiration, it it can be difficult to understand what and why you should choose unless you have grasped the basic aesthetics of dubstep drum production. You first need to have an idea of the drums’ role: will they be a lead element, standing forward in your mix and providing constant interest; or will they serve as a backing track to support a leading bass or melodic line? These types of questions need to be addressed in your choice of both sound source and programming
A track from scratch part 2: Dubstep beats Technique MTF
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Synthetic kick drum design
first element we usually deal with when synthesising a kick drum for 01 The dubstep is the fundamental impact sound. This will involve an oscillator having an immediate and severe drop in pitch created by an envelope. The main oscillator should be fairly clean unless you want to go into a more hard-style tone of kick, so sine and triangle waves are commonplace here. For more knock, start the kick at a higher pitch before its descent or add curve to the envelope. To give a good push-and-pull groove to your drum sound, group all elements except for the kick and snare. Set a compressor on this group to listen to the kick and snare on its side-chain so all surrounding sounds duck when these two play. The groove can be shaped using the compressor’s attack and release times.
techniques. For For instance, if the lead instrument is to be quite frantic and given the limelight in your track, the drums need to provide space by being made sparse and infrequent in events, ensuring there’s there’s a focus of power in the right frequencies rather than overcrowding the mix with details. Alternatively,, when using a more minimal bass section such Alternatively as a dub-like sub or less manic-sounding synthesis for the bassline this opens up the opportunity to be more detailed, and driving rhythms and sounds can be explored. During our initial bass-design stage, guide drums were thrown into the project using a simple break sample or two
You need to have an idea ofthe of the drums’ role: role: will they be a lead element or backing?
the weight aspect of your kick taken care of it’s time to consider adding 02 With some character. As it is, this kick can be given a more rounded tone by carefully increasing the attack time on the amp envelope. Alternatively you can add a tiny snippet of noise or distortion, or a fraction of a bright sample at the start to give it a more aggressive tone, adding more bite to the front end.
to help guide our bass creation process and govern an initial vibe. We We needed something to give us a very simple part that wasn’t precious. If these drums didn’t fit how the bass was starting to sound, it didn’t matter, we hadn’t spent countless hours creating and processing drums that could’ve been wasted due to the bass creation taking us down other paths. Now we have our outlined bass, we can start to build our drum section to fit the project’s more focused direction.
The science part Regardless of the style of drum sounds you have in mind for your project, each individual drum element can be thought of and broken down into stages. Let’s Let’s think about the physics of hitting an object and how each stage affects the next. Firstly we’re hitting a surface with a stick or a brush,
your track is going to be quite sparse you’ll have more room in the mix to 03 If make each sound big and interesting, and this is where you can be quite experimental and give your kick a unique body tone (as long as you use EQ shaping to keep this new sound in balance with your track). Various sounds such as toms, gated reverb tails, etc, can be used to give your kick a tone to set it apart from the stock 909 kick that’s too commonplace. Moderation is advised.
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 2: Dubstep beats
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Synthetic snare drum design
For variation, rather than programming fills don’t forget that effect processing can also be quite useful too. We’ve made good use of low-pass filtering to create the odd spot of variation at the end of a musical phrase before a new section begins. Just program or record a filter sweep to minimise the drum sound so it has more impact when coming back in.
the skin then vibrates, firing part of the sound into the air whilst the rest reverberates internally to its shell and casing dependant on its material, stiffness, mass and volume. All of this then radiates out into the room, which creates yet another reverberation. We’re We’re not expecting you to get too scientific here, but creating drums with these factors in mind can help you produce very rich, deep and more natural sounds. In our example the two synthesized hits for kick and snare are intended to represent the first impact strike or transient of a drum’s drum’s surface along with a little of its own ambience. As we’re working with electronic music it’s actually preferential to use something synthetic in nature for this initial transient hit as it keeps it pure, clear and up front. Their fundamental pitch will trend towards lower frequencies because our bass is full in frequency content and occupies much of the higher register. This means the only real
Creating drums with these factors in mind can help you produce rich, deep sounds prominent mix space available is around the lower mids, around 100-300Hz. Although we’ve we’ve chosen BFD3 for our tonal and ambient layers you can continue with synthesis or break samples to complete your drum tones, though the former is beyond the scope of this tutorial. We shaped our acoustic drum sound in BFD3 by bringing forward the ambient mics and utilising their width and contrast with the synth layers to fill the stereo field. We’ve tightened the body mic sounds with amp envelopes and tuned them by ear to help them gel with the synth layers. The body mics have been tightened with amplitude envelopes and tuned to be more ear-pleasing when layered over the synths. Similar Similar tightening can be achieved through synth envelopes or careful volume control of samples. To reiterate here, in this particular genre a note of importance is that anything too high-frequency-based in the main drum hits may get lost in the mix due to being masked by our synth basses. Something to keep in mind for the mixing stage later down the line! Finally,, to mimic the natural ambience from the skin Finally and the shell of a drum in a real room, add a very short
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the Kick Drum Design example, it’s usual to start designing a snare from its 01 Like impact sound onwards. This will hit higher in the frequency register from around 180Hz to 250Hz. A good trick to get a nice ping here is to set the pitch of a higher, tonal layer to ascend so the pitch goes upwards when the impact goes down.
impact noise aspect of the snare itself can come from a noise oscillator by 02 The adding ring modulation or distortion to an existing synth hit, or by using a sampled snare sound, then high-pass it so any lower frequencies don’t clash with your existing impact sound. A classic drum machine sound can also be achieved using white noise samples. But however you add noise keep a close eye on your envelope duration (so it’s a tight impact sound), and on the top end (to avoid harshness).
working with a sparser drum track like our own, a long noise source can 03 When create a huge ambient type of sound when thinned out with a high-pass filter to avoid any mid-range clutter. Again, white noise can work, but more tone can come from using an open hi-hat, cymbal crash, ride or even adding a large reverb tail to a trigger sound.
A track from scratch part 2: Dubstep beats Technique MTF
FOCUS ON... PERCUSSION TRICKS In most cases, percussion leans towards being used for creating fills and phrase endings in the harder side of dubstep rather than being a constant element used to drive the rhythm section forward. This is mainly down to the fact that basslines, especially in our example track, tend to be all-consuming in respect to the frequency range used and how rhythmical they can be. You You could, in fact, say that bass can take on the roll of percussion in this genre! But percussion, when used wisely, can fill out any uncomfortable gaps in bass or melody parts and help fill the space with new points of interest and tonal dynamics. Your choice of percussion is quite open and can be made from any source, so a healthy amount of experimentation in this area is always advisable. That said, dynamic elements can also be born from the use of empty space. This too can help to feed the feel and groove of your track. Sometimes the music just needs to breathe, and silence can be golden in these circumstances. Even using rhythmic tools such as a tremolo device on non-drum elements in your track can be a percussive tool. Here we’re adding a rhythmic effect to a pad sound for one of our fills.
and wide reverb to the appropriate layers individually. The main difference is the impact synth layer should have a dampened sound in the high end so that it maintains its thud-like character and the shell sound has a slightly longer, roomy reverb which can have a brighter timbre. A different use of width or panning on the reverbs can give a greater impression of size.
Compression and EQ Processing is always a subjective craft, but some basic guidelines are always a good place to start. In our case, because the bass sound is the aggressive, mid-ranged element we have pulled back the mid frequencies on our synth layers in favour of allowing BFD3’s acoustic timbres to come through in this region of frequencies. We did, however, add overdrive to produce some sizzle in the top-end of our impact layer using a very slight
Although we’ve talked a lot about synth envelopes, don’t forget that most DAWs have audio sample volume envelopes as well. These are great to fine tune the start and end points so transients don’t mask each other and to make fade outs as smooth as possible.
amount of distortion built into the synth, which helped highlight its punch. Though compression tends to have a reputation of destroying destroyin g dynamics it can be used with a slow attack and heavy gain reduction so that only the tail after the transient is reduced, therefore actually increasing apparent dynamics. This is best used as a shaping tool on your kick and snare groups individually with custom settings as required. A more airy sound can be achieved by only compressing the impact transient layer per drum, as it leaves any additional layers or ambience effects free and open sounding while the transient layer is still slightly enhanced.
Groove and bass Everyone associates an infectious groove with drums, and it’s often easy to fall prey to thinking that this is the
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 2: Dubstep beats
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Pattern sequencing
For an authentic dub delay, bar getting your hands on a real tape delay device, there are emulations available which offer non-sync’d timing settings in milliseconds and dulled-out delays over time. This can be roughly emulated by low-pass filtering a delay that runs in parallel and automating its cut-off to go low over time.
only aspect involved in creating it. The fact is, every sound in your track can enhance or destroy an existing groove you may have created. This is something to stay vigilant of when adding any new elements to your track. It’s important to be mindful that each new element added works at its best to enhance the t he song. When added, each new element in a track can either be placed to work alongside a drum part or create a new feel by working rhythmically between drum hits. But this doesn’t have to be the extremes of placing a bass sound in the biggest gaps between drum hits. For example, it can be a simple matter of just placing a bass part slightly before a beat. beat . Then, why why not let the kick drum hit early here, in time with the bass part, to highlight the fact? This kind of thinking will give more power and energy to a mix, and the groove now feels much more natural and less grid-static and sterile. Groove can also be explored through the use of delay lines. Classically, the roots of dub relied heavily on the
Every sound in your your track can enhance or destroy an groove you’ve created
simplest of beat patterns can have a rock feel to them as the kick falls at the 01 The start of each bar and the snare in the middle on the third beat of the bar. Some beats will simply have a thin crash-cymbal-sounding layer alongside each drum to create a large, sparse sound, leaving space for the bass to breathe in the mids. Alternatively, explore adding cymbal hits slightly earlier on the grid for a sense of immediacy or slightly later for a lazy, laid-back feel.
feel of your pattern can also be dramatically changed when you explore 02 The either swing or triplet quantization. These grooves are instantly recognisable as they are commonly used in commercial music as a base rhythm or a means for variation. Whether your track will benefit is entirely dependant on the song, but be sure to experiment as sometimes you’ll find it can bring a track together.
use of delays and this carried through to current-day dubstep. Using triplet tape delays on some drum hits can add to the groove and work in place of drum fills at phrase endings. They can even be used to add rhythmical ghost notes to a pattern, and this works especially well when turning off quantization from the delay unit and using your ear as a guide for tempo instead, creating a more human feel and a more classic dub delay from a time before ‘Sync’.
Moving forward Now we’ve we’ve outlined the steps we’ve we’ve taken in creating our bass and drum tracks you should be in a good position to move forward towards completing your track (in its rough form, at least). Next time we’ll be looking more closely at developing our existing ideas towards an arrangement and adding melodic content. In the meantime be sure to explore what can be achieved with the tools we’ve demonstrated so far. MTF Turn to p88 for part 3 of Liam and Christopher’s dubstep guide.
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you’re aiming for a more pounding movement in your track, a traditional dub 03 If beat will give a sense of sounding like 4/4 hard-style music even though the third beat of the pattern is a snare rather than a kick. We’ve used velocity changes and side-chain compression to emphasise the main drum hits, and left lighter, dynamic hits in-between. Our crash and rides also fall on the beat for a more driving feel.
MTF 20 Pro Tips Instrument mic’ing
Instrument
Mic’ing Tips It’s the most vital technique to master, as capturing a great sound is key to producing a top-notch top-notc h mix. Get the insi inside de track with our essential advice…
Getting your amp off the floor will eliminate unwanted dirt (above).
ACOUSTIC GUITAR POSITIONING
A good starting place for recording acoustic guitars is to use a cardioid mic placed around 40cm from the guitar, firing at the join of the neck and body body.. This usually offers a good, well-balanced sound, and though it captures some of the power coming from the sound hole it doesn’t dominate the signal. With any live recording, experiment with moving the mic around to see what works best for your particular situation. As a general rule, moving the mic gradually further up the neck will increase the high frequencies captured and lessen the bottom end, whereas moving the mic closer to the sound hole will add warmth and depth if your sound is overly bright. Moving the mic further away from the guitar will create more ambience but perhaps at the risk of losing some definition. Placing the mic closer to the guitar will create a more intimate and dry sound.
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RAISE YOUR AMPS UP
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It can be a good idea where possible to place combo amps on a chair or a stand to isolate them from the floor, as this will result in a cleaner sound. Also try placing amps away from walls or the corners of rooms, as this tends to reduce the likelihood of a booming effect that will be picked up by the mic and colour the signal. If you’re dealing with amp cabs and heads they’re usually too big to place on top of something, though you could consider a couple of crates, like you sometimes use at gigs to raise amps up to direct more sound at the crowd. If the space you are recording in isn’t perfect you can try boxing the amp and mic in using sofa cushions or, at a pinch, a duvet. This will have the effect of creating a kind of acoustic shielding that should remove unwanted room ambience from the recording if you are having problems with reflections.
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More mics for a cleaner sound, or fewer for a trashier one (right).
Drums are probably the most technically difficult of all instruments to record properly, but your approach should reflect what you’re trying to achieve. A slick pop record might well call for upwards of ten drum mics, lots of ambient room mics and so on, but a more lo-fi kind of garage guitar track might sound better with just a few well-placed microphones picking up a grungier sound. This also means fewer drum
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Instrument mic’ing 20 Pro Tips MTF
tracks to juggle in the mix, though also less overall control of the drum sound. Bleed is something that some producers get obsessed with and it can be lessened by using very directional mics, though you’re always likely to get some signal leaking between them. Bleed can be minimised through careful placement and also reduced using EQ after recording, but it’s usually not a huge problem if a little signal has bled between some of your drum mics.
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MAN… 04 PIANO, Recording an acoustic piano can be particularly tricky and you will almost always want two microphones to capture the full range of the instrument: one nearer the bass end of the body, and one nearer the top. For an upright piano you will probably need to open the top lid, but if you remove the front panel entirely you should be aware that this dramatically alters the way the air resonates and fundamentally changes the sound of the piano – even though this can sometimes be an interesting effect to go for. You may want to angle two mics in from above, or place one near the ear level of the player so the sound they’re hearing is what gets captured. Some people even place a mic around the back of the piano for a slightly different effect.
ATTACHED 05 STRINGS When you record any kind of stringed instrument such as a violin or cello, think about where the sound is actually being generated. In the case of smaller instruments such as the violin, the strings and sound holes are facing upwards, so it’s best to angle a mic from slightly above, adjusting the distance from the player to control the balance of direct sound and room ambience. A cello is played at a different angle so you will find that pointing the mic more or less at 90° towards the bridge should capture it pretty accurately. As ever, close mic’ing will give a more intense and intimate feel, and moving back a little will soften things. You can even try recording strings with stereo mics for a little more flexibility at the mix stage. To get a better ensemble effect when recording several players, try a few mics placed in more ambient positions a little further away.
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Mic positioning can be crucial when recording guitar amplifiers(above). Recording from a little further away captures a similar sound to that which the listener hears (below left). Use multiple microphones for more options (below right).
presence and so on. Mics positioned closer to the floor will generally provide a bit more low end. Close mic’ing an amp is the most common technique for capturing a harder, rockier guitar tone when the mic points straight at the speaker. Moved off centre, the tone softens a little. You can also try adding a second ambient mic that you blend with the first, moving each around until you hit the precise spot that works for you. Any phasing problems should become apparent as you monitor mon itor..
LOW CAN YOU GO? 07 HOW Recording bass is much the same in terms of technique as recording guitars, with the possible exception that you would never really record bass amps in stereo because bass almost always has to sit at the centre of the stereo field. Another thing to bear in mind is that a lot of general purpose mics have a bass roll-off built in to deal with the proximity effect caused by close mic’ing vocals and some other sources. This can result in reduced bass capture, which you don’t want if you’re trying to get a nice deep sound. If it’s switchable you can always turn this off but it can be a good idea to use either a non-vocal dynamic mic that has a flat low-end response or a dedicated bass or kick drum microphone, positioning it around 6-12in in front of the speaker in the cabinet.
MICS AND PICKUPS 08 USE If you want a close mic’ed acoustic guitar sound but also some room ambience you could either try an omni pattern mic, or using two separate mics, one placed close by and one further away (being sure to listen for phasing problems). Mono mic’ing is often sufficient for many tracks, but it’s not the only option you have. Positioning a single mic correctly is
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ALL IN THE POSITIONING 06 IT’S A mic pointed at the centre of a speaker will give you a brighter sound, and moving towards the edge smooths it off and introduces more bass. Distance will affect the FOCUS
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MTF 20 Pro Tips Instrument mic’ing
fine, but having two mics in different places sometimes gives you greater flexibility when it comes to mixing. The DI’ed sound produced by piezo pickups captures only the sound of the strings, very little of the body and none of the room, and so tends to result in an unnatural-sounding recording. But recording it won’t affect the mic’d signal and it costs nothing to record an extra audio track. In some situations, blending a little of this signal with the mic recording can add weight and body when balanced correctly. At the very worst, you can just not use it if it doesn’t sound good.
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THE CHALLENGES OF PLAYING TOGETHER
If you are recording multiple musicians in a single space, bleed can become a real issue. A bit of hi-hat leaking into the tom mic isn’t a huge problem but lead guitar getting into the bass recording definitely is. And while you can fix some of this stuff in the mix with EQ and gating it’s better to try and stop it happening in the first place. plac e. Sometimes, recording recording everyone separately really kills the vibe of a track, so it’s better to record people at the same time if you can. Your drummer should ideally have some kind of isolation from other players since drums are so loud. One tip for guitars is to place amps in a different room, mic them up and then feed the signal to the player through headphones. This way the sound gets captured accurately and the guitarist can play with feeling, but there’s there’s little or no bleed in the room itself.
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stereo effects in use that are modulating the way that signal is directed to different cones. If you are able, set up several mics 3-6in from the grille of the speaker.Then, listen to them at a sensible volume and audition each one. Ideally you would want to have someone to move the mics for you until you find the best position for the microphone you end up choosing. If you don’t have an assistant then put the guitar in the headphone mix, crank it up, stand in front of the amp and move the mics until you get the right sound. This is all much easier,, of course, if you have someone to play guitar while you easier arrange the mics.
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CLASSIC MICS
The classic mic for recording electric guitar is the Shure SM57, an inexpensive microphone and a staple of many studios. They are often used in combination with a second mic and the two channels either recorded to a single track or double tracked and layered together later. later. Other popular microphones include the Sennheiser MD 421-II, t.bone RB 500, Royer R-121 and Neumann U 67, and of course each has its own characteristics. Using acoustic isolation like sE’s SPACE can help you get the most out of your mic and the space you’re working in.
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THE QUIRKS OF AMPS AND SPEAKERS
On a multi-speaker guitar cab not every cone will sound the same. Some are different sizes, or there may be some
A well well-chosen -chosen all-round condenser mic can fulfil a wi wide de variety of studio roles
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KEEP IT SIMPLE
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IT’S JUST A PHASE
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PERCUSSION TRICKS
People obsess about microphones sometimes, but the truth is that a well-chosen all-round condenser mic can fulfill a wide variety of studio roles from vocals and electric guitar recording through to percussion and acoustic guitar. Combine it with some acoustic treatment like an isolator and some clever positioning and you’re able to achieve a lot with a fairly simple mic.
Check stereo mics for phase cancellation by panning them to the same spot and listening in mono. Retaining each mic’s mic’ s recordings on separate tracks t racks will enable you to wait until the mix stage to balance them properly. Another interesting idea is to mic the front and back of an openbacked cabinet. If you do, be sure to start by placing the mics at an equal distance from the speaker itself and reversing the phase of the rear mic.
When an amp has more than one cone, remember remember that its sound may vary between cones (above).
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When recording percussion such as bongos or a djembe you will get very different results depending on your mic placement. A mic firing at the top of the skin will capture the
Instrument mic’ing 20 Pro Tips MTF
harder, more percussive slapping motion of the hand. A mic harder, pointed up inside the drum body from underneath will capture the booming from inside the drum. Some people use both mic positions at the same time and then balance the two in the mix for a really percussive but meaty overall sound.
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WORK THE ANGLES
One common guitar amp mic’ing technique is to point one mic at the centre of the speaker and angle another across the face of the first mic towards the speaker edge. Bring the mics up on the desk and route them both to one track on tape or in your DAW. Flip one out of phase and balance the two channels until the sound is really thin, then flip the phase back and you should have a nice thick sound.
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LIFT THE LID
Simply raising or lowering the lid of a grand piano can dramatically alter the way sound is picked up, as can moving a microphone closer to the strings or further away. With a
Get a more consistent sound with certain instruments by using clip-on mics (right). Taking a dry feed from an amp’s direct out gives you more options when mixing guitars (below left). Get creative with dynamic mics (below right).
A mic pointed up inside the drum body will capture th the e booming from inside lower lid you’ll get a more intimate sound, and with the lid raised, a bigger effect and more room ambience. Since grand pianos have huge soundboards you will almost always need to place one mic near the lower strings and one higher up to ensure you capture all the signal properly.
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CLIP-ON MICS
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USE STEREO… CAREFULLY
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ONE DIRECTION
Some instruments are particularly hard to capture with a conventional mic: flutes and some other brass, such as trumpets and saxophones, where the players move around. There are categories of clip-on mic and they remain fixed to the instrument rather than the performer having to play into a static mic. For serious studio recording you’ll want to spend a bit of your budget on one of these, but it will be worth it.
If two acoustic guitar mics are different distances away from the guitar you can encounter phasing problems, so many producers make sure they are equidistant to avoid the problem. If you want one to be further away for a specific kind of sound you can phase align the two parts in your sequencer afterwards. If you want to get really creative you could try placing one mic about 30cm from the neck and another firing over the player’s shoulder, which can produce a sound much m uch more like what guitarists hear while playing.
Directionality can be crucial. An omnidirectional mic will generally offer a more roomy sound, but a directional mic should reject sound from the back and sides and just record what you point it at. Some mics have switchable polar patterns and others are just directional. Dynamic mics such as the SM57 are often used to record amplified instruments thanks to their directionality and high SPL tolerance. MT MTF F
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DON’T BE AFRAID TO DI
When recording anything through an amp it can be a good idea to take a feed from the direct output of the amp, if it has one, to record on a separate track and then blend in with the mic’d takes. This is worth trying if your guitar amp is smaller, as the DI will give you all the bottom end whereas the speaker might offer more character. Record both at the same time and balance them afterwards, remembering that you may need to reverse the phase of one of the sources. FOCUS
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 3: Riffs, fills & fx
Technique A track from scratch: Part 3
Dubstep riffs, fills & fx Rome wasn’t built in a day, and good craft takes time and patience. Liam O’Mullane and Christopher Pearson share more tips on creative exploration and the important decision making required when shaping initial ideas into full song sections.
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ur first two instalments have taken you through being mindful of various production techniques and creative possibilities when carving your own sound in the dirty dubstep business. If you’ve been with us so far you should have a balancedsounding song section for both drums and bass. Our next process is to develop these ideas and extend their playable duration. We’ll then look at exploring other foreground and background melodic information to take the song elsewhere and aid arrangement while musically guiding the listener. We’ll We’ ll continue to develop our sound as we move further towards the final stage of mixing but remember that things can change; so whether it’s an instrument sound, or an over-laboured pattern you’ve programmed, don’t be afraid to throw away bad ideas if they simply don’t do justice to the
There are many many approaches you can take when it comes to expanding ideas BLURRED LINES Much like the sample-based melting pot that was jungle jung le in the 1990s 1990s,, dubst dubstep ep is also a musical musical gen genre re that constantly borrows the vibes of other, often classic, genres. This can help create a distinct musical element for the listener to latch onto, and it is open territory that’s well worth exploring. The influences of trance and hardstyle are very popular right now, encouraging heavy use of synth arps, dense musical-sounding pads, hard distorted lead synths and triplet rhythms. Skrillex has used obvious dub reggae influences in tracks such as Make It Bun Dem and Ragga Bomb, Zomboy’s Survivors shows influence of techno and metal, and it’s impossible to avoid the scourge of trance and chip-tune influenced tracks in any mainstream charts these days. But this all goes to show that experimentation can not only work for a song, it can also be the seed to start the next new sub-genre. The only thing tying these elements together is the unified focus on a heavy bass drop and a snare on the third beat – aside from this you’re free to explore new musical hybrids as you like. If you’re not sure on where to take this, open up your preferred music resource and have a listening session on a particular genre. This could be a genre already proving successful in musical charts around the globe or a nod back to older times – whatever it is, you can find inspiration by listening. Electro swing is a great example of fusing new and old, so don’t be afraid to dig out music that hasn’t glimpsed the mainstream for a long time. Then look at emulating the style of sounds available, or just the compositional style and feel, replacing older sounds with a new-age, synthetic equivalent.
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On the disc Accompanying example audio files included on the DVD
work you’ve done already. For example, our bass idea might be completely re-worked by the final part in this series, so be prepared to take your time and be open to a change in direction if you create something that raises the game of your song. If a new idea works, just go with it and do what you must to get all other elements up to this new standard. But if some sounds are good but not right for the track, be efficient with your efforts and save them out as presets to use another time or bounce them as audio to store as samples. If you’ve done this several times already you’ll be piling up your own arsenal of sounds to cherry-pick the next time around. Great for when you need quick inspiration. Whereas parts one and two of this series have focused more on the technicalities of music production, it’s possible and sometimes favourable to revisit simpler and often overlooked techniques. There’s a lot of creative potential in working with sounds at their most fundamental level, i.e. their notes, and using endless effects chains will degrade the quality of your sound source. So take note of the simpler things in life where possible and put to use our tips on musicality and further editing your initial ideas.
Open your mind There are many approaches to take when it comes to extending your initial ideas. When exploring variation, some techniques can quickly become quite complex and place a fair amount of strain on your computer if you’re piling on effects or using various sound sources, so we’ll start with the least CPU-hungry options. Feel free to start wherever the track takes you, but we’ll focus on drum patterns first. Aside from adding the usual eight- or 16-bar fills to break up each phrase of your bassline, it can be good practice to edit the groove of your drums in a repeat of your initial pattern to alter the feel of the drum and bass combination already established. This This technique works well when the bass plays a second repeat of itself, as the drum changes can be enough to keep the listener engaged. In our example track we changed the position of the kick drum for our second section to hit in unison with the bass instead of a beat later as before, thereby altering the groove to emphasise the bass. This type of editing instantly changes much more than just the kick
A track from scratch part 3: Riffs, fills & fx f x Technique MTF
placement – it has the power to change the t he groove of the whole track when done with care and is a very simple edit to implement. Similarly, Similarly, try to change the position of bass notes around the drums to get a feel for how they can play off of each other and create new rhythms or to extend the section in focus. When it comes to bass parts, if you’re keeping your instruments live, or even programming a sampler from sounds you’ve committed to audio already, there’ll be a handful of new sweet spots to discover through the exploration of pitch and parameter manipulation. As well as trying to vary the notes of an existing riff for musical change as it progresses, explore the extremes of high or low octave notes to dramatically change an instrument’s timbre. A bass will often break-up below a certain pitch and this effect can be used as an occasional accenting tool as it has a differing power when compared to the instrument playing in its strongest area of pitch. Higher pitched notes can be a good way to add a dynamic too, as the instrument that is usually more bass orientated can suddenly gain a lot of midrange information and a dramatic shift in character.
LEADS, PADS AND AMBIENCE From intense, driving bass drops to the slightest of ambient sections, music needs dynamics. Take time to think about these contrasts and how they can complement each other. Our example track sports a main lead sound that is very simple in its creation – just saw waves in a synth that have been detuned and distorted with soft saturation and embellished with reverb. After the reverb, compression really helped to give a sense of size to the patch by emphasising and swelling over time. This technique is best used when melodic content isn’t overly complex, as it allows time for the reverb to be heard. In addition to large leads you might want to consider backing and overlaying them with delicate arpeggiated synths and other lighter, more ambient sounds. A simple way to create strings is to use a monophonic synthesizer with a relatively simple sine, triangle or saw wave pitched up high to emulate a bow stroking a string. Add a little movement from a modulation wheel or slow LFO for vibrato to add more depth to the final result. Next, adding a long-tailed reverb as an insert or send with around 75-80% wet on the mix can give a quite realistic single-string sound. Multiplying this patch and creating chords across tracks can lead to you creating your very own, rather convincing, string ensembles, especially if you use panning and/or mid/side processing to place each string in its own space.
Chopping and changing Though cutting, moving, inserting inserting and reversing are all techniques you’re you’re probably familiar with when working on audio files, look to approach your MIDI patterns in much the same way. way. Dance music as a whole is based around sounds being looped and stuttered in a variety of ways, and this should therefore be how you see your MIDI patterns. MIDI clips can be edited to small quantized-sized lengths, so try slicing them up and re-ordering them as you would an audio
Musicality plays a big role in even the most seemingly unmusical dubstep tracks file. Repeat Repeat some of these smaller parts for a looped effect, or try moving a small number of notes from part of your existing idea to paste into a different location within a new clip, i.e. i.e. start the pattern from beat three rather than beat one. From here, write new parts around them so there’s a mix of new and already established material for the listener to latch onto. Again, this seemingly simple technique can help your elements progress through a track without getting too complex from the production side of things. Remember: MIDI should not be overlooked in favour of effects chains. This editing technique can be applied to automation as well and works particularly well when altering the placement of rhythmic data. It’s pretty much like playing around with the triggering and speed of an LFO or envelope on a synth – copy a highlighted portion of data from here to there, change its shape, extend its duration (if your DAW supports this) and so on. Copying automation from other areas of your song can also be handy for recreating certain sweet spots between parameters to then edit and move on from. For example, you might have two or three distinct timbres that you’ve created
Although we only used two layers to create our choral pad sound we managed to create a sense of depth and movement by picking the right sounds that would modulate each other through phase when detuned.
through automation for one instrument, and you can copy the automation from these sections to new ideas so you’re starting from the same tone. Don’t Don’t forget that too many automation lanes can be a real headache to deal with, so we always advise the use of macros to group particular parameters together and make them much easier to manage effectively. Re-edits can apply to the instruments themselves as well, and we often take an existing instrument, duplicate it to a new track and then edit it to take it to another timbre. This can help create a new layer to embellish what’s already there, or even help you find a completely new instrument that might complement the first when not over-layered. Keeping all automation intact helps to gel new layers together,, and from there subtle automation edits can start together to give even more movement between layers. Just be careful, as this can soon result in tens of instruments with processing chains being active at the same time, which will put a lot of load on your computer computer..
The knowledge Musicality plays a big role in even the most seemingly unmusical-sounding unmusical-so unding dubstep tracks. Although some songs will go for a heavy musical section that stands apart from the bass drop there’s also room for some musicality to aid the bass section no matter how ugly it may appear to be on the surface. Even when a track appears to be made of purely horrible sounds and noises, they need to have some musical relationship to each other or they just won’t gel. Drums can be pitched musically, musically, and riser sounds and other effects can carry forms of musical pitch to help the listener get a sense of key without even realising. Even seemingly disassociated FOCUS
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 3: Riffs, fills & fx
FOCUS ON… VOCAL MANGLING Vocals are a common feature in dubstep tracks these days, and fall into two main camps: fully performed vocals and lyrics, which are generally left to be heard in the state the performer intended; or heavily manipulated vocal parts that sound nothing like the original recordings. The latter approach requires quite a lot of trial and error but the fruits of your labour can result in a critical hook line for your track, so it’s often time well spent. You can search for vocal samples from a variety of sample packs to begin these techniques, but we prefer to get the mic out and do a continuous recording session while we explore different vocal ideas to use. These can be anything from spoken word ideas, singing, or general weird noises which on their own won’t sound like much to work with. The key element here is to try and get as much timbrel range out of your vocals as possible, as this will give you more to work with. Also explore the duration of your sounds so you have a few variations to work with. Once your audio is ready to use, first explore pitch transposition to see if the vocal recordings slot better into your current production aesthetic when pitched up or down. If you have the option to also play with the formants of your sound through your available transposing tools, this can yield large timbrel shifts and get you into the ‘alien voice’ territory as well. This is quite handy when we need to remove the embarrassment factor of hearing our own voices! We like to add mix processing here too, especially if these vocals are home grown. So we’ll add compression, EQ and some master buss-like processing as well, and this will then be rendered down to audio. The idea is to make this vocal sound like we’ve sampled it from elsewhere so that it has that richness of sound from the outset to work with. Next it’s time to chop the audio up, and this can be done on an audio track or after slicing it into a MIDI sampler if preferred. The main requirement is that you can sequence individual slices and then move the start point of each slice’s content. We want to sequence an interesting rhythm first, then move the content of each event to find the best place for each vocal sound to start – with audio tracks this is called slip-editing, and just moving the start marker for each slice in a sampler creates the same effect. Also make good use of pitch and direction, as vowels can take on a completely different tone when reversed. When you have an interesting pattern going, explore pitch alongside the start point of each sound. You want something that’s musically interesting here, so you might want to edit pitch to create a melody line of sorts. Remember that less can be more, so don’t just fill up each bar in your pattern with a constant barrage of vocal edits – leave space for other sounds to come through the mix. Once you’ve established an idea that seems to work in your track it’s time to add more texture, and we do this through further effects processing. You can punch in certain effects to be sequenced as part of your pattern using automation, so for instance, a ring-mod only turns on for one slice of your overall vocal pattern, etc. The more creative you can be here, the better. Use dry/wet controls to balance out your processing if you want to retain some of the original vocal character for an overall consistency in timbre between samples, but the type of effects you choose is completely fair game.
When it comes to vocal manipulation, it’s not often oft en that we’ll stumble across a good pattern and idea straight away. Like all aspects of heavy sound-design, follow this process until you have something of interest – edit, process, bounce, and repeat as necessary. necess ary.
bass sounds should have a harmonic relationship with each other, as our ears need this to make sense of it. This is why some tracks, although well produced on the surface, still don’t don’t seem to sound completely in the pocket – a common occurrence in electronic genres, and something to keep an ear out for for.. You don’t don’t need to understand music theory to pitch your sounds in the right place, though, just just explore the potential pitch of each sound (trial octaves too) and then decide which sounds best. Musicality is also an important aspect of the mix process; after all, musical notes are divided by frequency, so choosing the right pitch will mean you’re letting the mix take care of itself to a certain extent. Don’t introduce sounds that need major mix correction, and be wary of building up frequency conflicts in the mix – key is key here!
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When extending your bass ideas it’s easy to assume this needs to be done with editing alone, but there’s no reason why you can’t continue to make use of your instrument’s sweet-spots through a controller to jam out new ide ideas as for whe where re you yourr sou sounds nds can go.
keep the timing interesting we’ve used a less-thanpredictable point for chord changes. We highlight this by changing the drums’ groove in some sections to match. We’ve also used heavy sidechain compression from the drums, so although they are long and sustained they actually only play at full volume for a very brief moment in time. This This makes the drums, bass parts and melodic content all interact with each other for a sense of sonic and musical dynamics. The chords you hear on the intro are actually the initial ideas we developed, but it made more sense to keep them sparser in the main drop to simplify and create space, so we confined the busier content to the intro and breakdowns to help fill things out. We’ve We’v e also added an arpeggiated synth part over our lead, which again began its life as a continuous sequence while we figured out the best notes to use. u se. Then, later in the arrangement, we stripped it back to play less frequently, frequently, giving it more impact when it does play. Its notes help to highlight the lead further whilst also creeping into the upper register of the mix. Musical elements can have just as much interaction with your drums as bass parts do, so be mindful of
There are no set rules when it comes to adding musical layers to accompany your bass where you place each new sound. Groove is an easy thing to lose if you don’t stay focussed and keep that bin handy for dropping ideas if they don’t aid the track. Experimentation is key to finding complementary parts that help inspire progression.
Come together Anything goes There’s no set rule when it comes to adding musical There’s layers to accompany your bass, and we’ve kept things pretty sparse in our example track – we have a prominent lead synth of a few chords tied together. To
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On listening to our track’s basses, lead and arp as a whole sequence you’ll notice that all of the separate elements work together to create a single, cohesive musical phrase. The idea here is that you should be able to hum along to your track through most of its
A track from scratch part 3: Riffs, fills & fx fx Technique MTF
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Three steps to better instrumentation
sections, no matter what style of sounds you’ve used. It’s important to note that without this ‘hum’ approach you might find an audience to be disengaged. It seems people need some form of musicality to connect with, but this doesn’t mean it needs to be directly obvious. For instance, employing simple techniques such as tuning the drums and finding musical content through your choice of FX can help to really solidify a track into a particular key. key. Even though these methods may be subtle, do still aim to create a full musical phrase with them by using different sounds and sections. This makes a big difference to whether or not listeners find a track engaging.
Time to face the change In dubstep it’s common to make fundamental changes to sections after 16, 32 or 64 bars. A good place to start replicating this type of arrangement can come from copying an earlier section and making edits, such as cutting all musical elements to let the bass lead the track for a while. You You can also go for an A/B format that moves between one main bass idea and another while editing each repeat to give them unique variation. Our example is quite progressive in terms of the song sections we have so far, but this could change. We have an intro section, breakdown, main drop, second edit and a middle-eight section to change the feel of the track and introduce a new focal element. To create the latter we studied the musical notes used throughout our intro and main sections, then copied the drums over to a new section. Here we added a new main arpeggiated synth in the same key but altered the melody to fill the frequency range and kept our bass elements minimal. This This new section is used as a prelude to the breakdown, delivering delivering a softer entrance to the upcoming ambience. Sections like this can often be used by DJs to mix out of tracks – another thing to keep in mind, and something we’ll we’ll cover more in depth when looking at finalising our arrangement. Alongside the new melody line we recorded and mangled some vocals to add a new texture to the track. This took quite a while due to experimenting with a mass of editing techniques, but we ended up with an interesting-sounding alien vocal part. All of this experimental play gave us a slightly percussive vocal element that we could carry through to the breakdown. In fact, we might later develop this by overlaying percussion to highlight this section further further..
not to get too distracted with the idea of having a vast range of instruments 01 Try to work with. We prefer to get stuck into a few instruments at parameter level and explore automation editing in much the same way as we work with MIDI. Copy, paste, insert, stretch and edit automation and you’ll be surprised by how much range is available from each instrument.
easy to get stuck in a jam with automation when trying to create a lot of 02 It’s different tones from a handful of synths. If you can, try to map parameters to macros or snapshots so it’s easier to automate them.
Destination anywhere… We’ve covered drums, bass and musicality through We’ve parts one to three, and you should now have at least a rough idea of where your track is heading or even what it will sound like on completion. There’s still much to do before we reach the finishing post, though, and part four of our dirty dubstep series (over the page) will look at the arrangement, bridging song sections with effects, build-ups, and breakdowns, and and adding any other sounds required to aid the arrangement. Then we’ll finally look at mixing and pre-mastering (p96). MT MTF F
DAWs offer different levels of MIDI editing functionality, which can be 03 Different used to manipulate your existing ideas for variation. Cubase (pictured here) has some of the most comprehensive tools for this task, but most DAWs will offer features such as reverse, flip and the ability to re-scale the duration of a highlighted number of notes. FOCUS
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 4: Arrangements
Technique A track from scratch: Part 4
Dubstep arrangements Ready to lay it all out? Liam O’Mullane and Christopher Pearson guide you through the twists and turns of a successful dubstep arrangement and get you one step closer to your final product…
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f you’ve followed us from part one you’ll be aware that there are many ways to start a track from scratch. You You might start with a musical idea that inspires a song or maybe a bass hook that’s just begging to be written around. Regardless Regardless of how you go about the task of composition it’s it’s a rarity to write in the order that the song plays, i.e. from intro to ending. It’s more likely that you’ll write from the meat outwards, as this is where most ideas happen. The surrounding sections are then designed around it to guide the t he listener on their journey journey.. Bearing this in mind, this penultimate part in our dirty dubstep series will focus on taking our meat and turning it into a full, delicious meal. Although it’s rare to carry out arrangement work in the running order a track is built, for clarity’s clarity’ s sake we’ll talk you through each section in a linear fashion, from from the first bar to the last.
On the disc Accompanying example audio files included on the DVD
It’s a rarity to compose al alll the parts in the order that the song plays The ‘stock’ format Although there are distinct sonic and rhythmic differences between this sub-genre of dubstep and other forms of club-friendly dance music, song arrangements are becoming more and more universal these days. This unified
TRANSITIONEDITS Once a track has a fuller form you can step back and listen to it as a whole before making decisions on what might need to be nipped and tucked for further improvement. Transitions between song sections are one of these decisions and they need to be smooth and unobtrusive. To achieve this you can play with a few techniques such as using a slowly creeping, sweeping sound to cover the transition, or removing some complex content so there’s a sense of breath in the song’s density. These can both be used, though; for instance, you could simplify drum editing a bar or two before the end of a section, and where a drummer may play a fill, instead introduce the sweeping sound before the next section begins. This will create suspense by stripping down the track’s drive for a moment to have another sound sweep through before a new section starts. Another approach is similar to how you can borrow parts of a main drop to tease in an intro, but instead you’re borrowing parts from the section to come. This is especially useful to help smooth a drastic change that’s about to happen by preparing the listener to some degree.
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approach is down to how DJs have increasingly become centre stage in the industry over the last 30 years. Because DJs tend to play mix-friendly tracks and shun the trickier side of dance music, over time this has forced producers into more simplistic arrangements to be sure their music is playable. Classically termed a ‘club’ or ‘DJ friendly’ mix, this format is traditionally six or more minutes in duration and extends the ideas from a shorter three-minute ‘radio friendly’ version. Though Though the format for a club mix hasn hasn’t ’t changed that much the duration has, especially with dubstep. Many dirty dubstep tracks these days only last around four-and-a-half minutes, which which inevitably means they cut to the chase quicker. This This shorter duration also means that the songs are more radio friendly, friendly, but with this comes the need to have strong ideas that will catch the listener’s attention from the very outset. So whereas the traditional club mix might have a long, drawn-out introduction that enables the DJ to mix the track in for a while before anything major happens, now now it needs to get to the point pretty quickly. A typical arrangement format goes like this: intro, drop, alternative drop, breakdown, drop, alternative drop, outro. This isn’t isn’t a strict rule as there may be a breakdown before the drop, multiple breakdowns or none later on, and so on, but you should get the idea of the order in which each section is introduced. Although Although the second repeat of the drop may not be strictly identical to the first time it’s played, a simple duplication of the parts when laying your arrangement out is a good start, but we’ll get to that later on. First let’s let’s break down the format above and separate each part into their respective functions.
In the beginning
(Above) Here we’ve borrowed parts from the breakdown section and teased them in beforehand through simplifying their content and fading them in to smooth over the transition.
Intros are obviously a precursor of what’s to come later in the track. You’d usually expect an inclusion of some light rhythm work provided by perhaps some sparse hi-hats or a catchy percussion phrase. The DJ uses this section as a metronome for mixing and also helps the audience stay in sync with the track should it be played from the beginning – rewind! Introductions usually include some unique sonic elements, but leading sounds tend to be borrowed from, or musically associated with, a main drop’s hook. There is a reason for this over an apparent laziness – a focal or memorable motif from the main drop in some form can help an audience identify the upcoming
A track from scratch part 4: Arrangements Technique MTF
track during a DJ mix (providing they’ve heard the track before, of course). This creates a sense of excitement and anticipation for the listener listener.. This most commonly surfaces through a form of effect variation, such as filtering, to tease in what’s to come. Musically associated ideas can be anything from leads and SFX to strong rhythmic motifs. These work as a less obvious way to guide the listener to the drop but they do need to have a melodic or rhythmic association with the main drop. Bearing this in mind, it’s good practice to create these sounds over the drop at first to build them in context, then move them to earlier in the song over the intro to create a sense of build or lead-in.
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Reverse engineering an intro
Dropping science The drop is the part of a song that people recall when they think of a track. It’s where where all the energy lies and what all the excitement is about. In dubstep, the intricacy, bass melody and full body of other musical elements live here, the rest of the song is almost superfluous to a dancefloor – it’s all about guiding the listener to this point in your song and then guiding them to the second iteration, making sure they appreciate the second drop by arrangement dynamics. This section has probably been the core focus of your composition from the outset for this very reason and it makes or breaks a track, so we have little to discuss here for the elements you might choose to include. However, However, if you wish to go for a common 32-bar section, variation is something to focus on to sustain interest over time. In part three of this series (p88) we discussed how you can choose to unite or offset sounds such as your bass and drum parts while programming a drop to add variation, but finding
The drop is th the e part part of the song that people recall – it’s where all the energy lies some other occasional sounds outside of those for accenting can be a good trick for variation too, as it introduces new timbres. The drop and alt-drop in our example track consist of the same 32-bar bass sequence, doubled, but we’ we’ve ve inserted new sounds in the alt-drop half and edited it to change the rhythm as well. The alternative drop in our example isn’t as drastic a switch as some songs have. For instance, the drop may consist of two main bass ideas that interact and play off each other. This technique is referred to as ‘Q&A’ and is how our bassline has worked when adding the second element in our alt-drop. For further development, another element can be added, bringing a third party to the conversation, which can be joined by another, and another, and so on. Just try to use a few core elements to lead the musical phrase throughout for continuity and musicality for the listener to latch on to.
Start breaking down Regardless of where breakdowns live in your arrangement their purpose is to both let a listener take a break and
intro is at its fullest before a drop or breakdown, so start here and work 01 The your way backwards while chopping content away. Intro content should always create a slightly lower energy level than the drop, so bass is usually removed and drum tracks have less content.
Paste a new copy of all content before this section and then mute parts to
02 audition what can be either removed entirely, partially edited down to be
more sparse, or teased through the use of filtering, volume or other audio effects processing that can mask a sound.
trick to introduce a musical section is to create a looping-like effect 03 Another where you duplicate a short first section of the phrase for a section before it plays in its entirety. This works especially well when used in conjunction with filtering for a DJ-like effect.
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 4: Arrangements
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Creating a second drop
DECORATIVE SOUNDS From chopped vocal ditties to foley sounds or synthetic effects, additional interests that surround surround the main elements in a track can really help to let a record shine. These elements can help establish new song sections by introducing a new sound that hasn’t been present in a song up until that point. Alternatively, a stripped-down song section can benefit from flutters of sonic interest to give them life and a little ear candy. These smaller details can go a long way and are a great excuse to get creative in or out of the lab. If you have a portable recorder, phone, or any device capable of audio capture, leave the studio space in the search for sounds. If you like to write songs with a theme, think about what sounds that theme might entail. Trying to recreate and record them is a very creative process and gives you an excuse to escape the mouse and keyboard for a while if you’re computer-bound with your music. Alternatively, if you love your mouse and keyboard, explore combining different layers of samples from your arsenal of instruments, effects processing and any other audio mangling techniques you may not normally go for. From this you can stumble across happy accidents that can then be re-sampled, edited and generally taken further through experimentation to achieve unique sounds to augment your song.
When it comes to your second drop, explore being bold – a memorable first and second drop will make your track more desirable and likely to be played for longer in a DJ set. Switching the accenting on your drum groove to a 4/4 style can lift the drive of your track, and although key changing is often associated with cheesy boy bands, when done well it’s a powerful tool to keep building up energy levels throughout your song.
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Though they’re not at the forefront of your track, decorative sounds should be given close attention, as this is where you can work on another level for unique timbre and textures.
To truly understand arrangements we recommend you grab a small selection of your favourite dubstep tracks and start slicing them up into sections. This will help you identify how many sections there are and how much is repeated.
heighten the impact of the drop that’s to come by lowering the energy level from the section that’s come immediately before. In this genre the main sections tend to lead into a single breakdown, or into a pre-breakdown where the aggressive midrange of the bass dissipates in favour of a melody or other inoffensive elements. For instance, the pre-breakdown in our example track replaces the main bass parts with a floating synth line and new vocal edit. This introduces some breathing space into the
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DJs rarely allow a second drop to be heard mixed ed before they’ve mix into another song track before it slowly filters out to an ambient breakdown prior to the second drop. As the drums are now mostly absent it gives us the room to explore expressive musicality, which we’ve achieved through the use of ambient pads and delicate tones. tones.
Rinse and repeat
When you’re considering where to add or remove layers of information in your track to enhance arrangement dynamics, remember where the peaks and troughs need to be b e to guide the listener listener..
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When it comes to other repeated sections like the second drop and alt-drop, there are two schools of thought on how this should be approached. The first is to simply copy the earlier sections and just repeat them; after all, most DJs these days rarely allow a second drop to be heard before they’ve mixed into
A track from scratch part 4: Arrangements Technique MTF
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
another song. But But if you want your tracks to have a bit more musical merit and also increase the chance of a full play in a club, make a significant change to this second drop to distinguish it from the first and further increase the track’s energy levels. A simple yet effective way to raise energy levels is to alter a sonic or rhythmic aspect of the drums. Adding a thin-sounding thin-soundi ng ride or crash cymbal layer to play on the beat is a common yet still effective practice in the genre. If done right, fundamental reprogramming of the drum pattern and bass parts from the first drop can create a drastic switch for this second drop. If you’re feeling brave, don’t believe that this section has to simply be a repeat of the first drop at all. So, though it’s not commonplace by any standards, a strong, independent second drop, complementing the song as a whole, has the ability to make your music stand out and be more than the flavour of the week in a DJ’s crate.
The ultimate goal The outro is quite open-ended in terms of its execution, and if you’re here you’ve already experienced the ups and downs of production along the way. Outros are usually the last piece of the puzzle and can be relatively straightforward. By simply copying a short portion from an intro or breakdown with no elements of crescendo you can
Creating risers and descenders
At its most fundamental level, a synthetic rising or descending sound can be used to help get to or from one song section to the next. Any synth with a fundamental waveform can be used like a saw wave for clarity. Then draw in a held note over 4, 8, 16 bars, etc, and automate MIDI pitchbend from zero to its highest value. Make sure the pitch-wheel is set to a musical interval such as one or two octaves.
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An outro can be another opportunity to explore artistic flair in your track achieve a passable ending to your song. This is short, sweet, and a quick exit. Alternatively, a more traditional approach is to remove track elements one by one to filter out density over time. Much like our advice to be bold when creating a second drop, an outro can be another opportunity to explore even more artistic flair – there aren’t any set rules here, so musical freedom is entirely yours.
For an increase in intensity add an LFO to amplitude and automate its depth of modulation so the volume fluctuates faster when the pitch is at its highest value. This could also be an LFO controlling pitch for a wobbly tone, or any other parameter to help amplify the effect of this sound in the mix.
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The end is nigh Before we move on to our fifth and final instalment in this series, it’s time to recap where we’ve been and what we expect you to have achieved before it’s time to mix and pre-master our dirty dubstep track. We’ve worked on bass, drums and groove production while sharing various methods to expand ideas and craft a final arrangement. This has been a lot of work so far and we encourage you to follow us through to the end. By this, we mean even if your ideas aren’t chart topping at this stage, the value of seeing this song through to the end outweighs waiting until you have a perfect song to mix. Yes, it may not get you signed, it mightn’t even give you a track to play out for yourself, but it will teach you the hardest part of the music making game – completing your work! We’ll see you next time for the mixing treatment… MTF
As well as parameter exploration, try effects as well. An effect that generates stereo width such as chorus can have its dry/wet control automated so a sound goes from mono to stereo as it grows in intensity. Or perhaps increase saturation on a distortion unit while keeping the output level controlled so there’s an increase in frequency content over time.
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perfect mix MTF Technique A track from scratch part 5: The perfect
Technique A track from scratch: Part 5
The perfect mix In the final part of this epic series Liam O’Mullane and Christopher Pearson guide you through the hardest part of music production: finalising your mix and finishing off your track…
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ell, it’s been a long road but we’re finally at the last stage of our dirty dubstep track, and we hope you are too. Even if you feel that the track you’ve created isn’t that great, stick with us and sit through the entire process from start to finish. It’s It’s important to drum in all of these skills and not get too caught up on one part of the process in particular,, as every track you complete is a worthwhile particular lesson for the skills you’ll gain for the next project. We’ve We’v e been crafting our ‘mix’ throughout the sound- and idea-building process, but regardless of how good things may seem to sound at the t he end of a creative songwriting session there are many problem areas that are much easier to detect when you’ve given yourself a break from the project and listen with completely fresh ears.
On the disc Accompanying example audio files included on the DVD
Patience is a (dubstep) virtue We’ve waited a good few weeks before re-opening our We’ve project for writing this final instalment and can immediately hear a variety of problems with the mix and finer
We’re at the last stage of our dirty dubstep track, and hope that you are too… MIX BUSS PROCESSING
arrangement details that could prevent our main ideas from coming across in their best light. Remember that your song is a story and your mix is there to sell it to the listener. A bad mix won’t get the ideas across clearly, so with that in mind let’s make some mixing decisions and compile our completion list.
Trimming the fat The first rule about evaluating your current mix is to listen with your ears and not your eyes. So for the first few evaluative plays, listen listen with the computer monitor turned off.. This secret of the pros is often overlooked yet it off highlights parts of your song that need further editing. Perhaps some sections need improving as they aren’t in keeping with the established flow of the track. Or maybe the ideas are all there but in some sections they’re they’re sounding cluttered due to an overload of events. A big part of this stage is to be brutal and decide what aids the song and what needs cutting back so the ideas can breathe. This is a time to explore muting out specific parts that may distract the listener from the main ideas happening at any moment in time. Choosing muting rather than deleting means you can always un-mute later, later, and this is better than having to undo or load an older project version. When creating fills at the end of a section, newly programmed elements are often blighted by competing layers of sound that may still exist from the song section that’s that’ s about to end. These can also be muted or you could choose to re-program them to work in unison with the new idea instead. After listening to our own song with fresh ears it’s immediately obvious that our track is a little too dense in the top end and that the kick and snare are often being masked by other sounds in the mix, resulting in an inconsistent feeling of power. When assessing your track it’s important to start creating your end goals for completion – this is where writing a list is important. (See the Completion List boxout on p54 for an example and check out the audio files provided on your MT DVD.) DVD.)
Processing on the mix buss will help to sculpt your work. Here are a few tips for heading in the right direction when mastering dubstep… Use a linear phase EQ for the most transparent adjustments, and add a high-pass filter to cut below 35-40Hz to clear out sub frequencies that will only eat up the headroom and therefore the potential maximum volume your track can achieve. Also limit the top end with a low-pass filter around 16kHz. Although this is a classic technique to help your music translate better to vinyl, it’s good to smooth off the top end for a warmer sound. Experiment with gentle compression but be careful not to get too squash-happy or you’ll ruin the dynamics. We’re talking 2-3dB of gain reduction, applied with a slow attack and release to keep the transients intact. Stereo width control and possible enhancement are a consideration too; but with width comes a loss of power, so so be sparing and keep it in the higher frequency range. Last in the chain is limiting. Although this needs to be left off for mastering, to get a quick playout version beforehand try one limiter and lower the threshold until you h ear crackles and Mix buss processing should be used with caution, but it’s useful to make artefacts, then back off.A second limiter with a the track ready to play out on the day of completion. A non-processed different algorithm can be added, and a little of version should always be available when delivering your work for the two will have a cleaner loudness than too mastering, but sending your processed version can give them artistic much being squeezed out of one. reference to work from as well.
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Physical phatness Now that we have an initial to-do list of fixes for our mix, let’s look at how we can achieve some basic tasks. One advantage of stripping back some elements in your track is that they’ll
A track from scratch part 5: The perfect perfect mix Technique MTF
bring the remaining sounds to the fore, making them seem more present even though you’ve not technically made any changes to them. In the case of our drums being lost in the mix, this needs more attention than simply stripping out other conflicting elements, as this could result in almost nothing being left and we don’t want to lose the epic, trance production-like sound we’ve gained so far. The kick and snare have plenty of size in terms of ambience and weight for lower-end impact but they don’t come across as aggressively as we’d like. One option is to process single drum sounds, or the whole drum group, with some saturation-based plug-ins. Saturation is a good option here as it can be used to increase the density of mid-range frequencies while also compressing the signal to become a little louder and more up-front sounding. sounding. A drawback of this approach is that we could soon be chasing our tails by beefing up the drums too much in relation to our other sounds, and then ramping up other elements and ending ending up with a louder but just as cluttered mix. We also thought about the key frequencies within our drums and how we don’t want too much overlap from other parts, which will cause masking. A simple trick that can be very effective here involves adding an EQ to the drum group, and then using its frequency bands to pinpoint where the main impact and mid-range frequencies of our kick and snare are via a combination of positive gain settings and sweeping sweepin g the frequency of each band to find and boost the key frequencies. Group all non drum-based sounds and drag the same EQ over for subtractive reduction of these set drum-orientated frequencies. This can be as subtle as five or so decibels in reduction, but these notches in all non drum-based sounds will help the drums to cut through the mix better and therefore have more impact.
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Effective side-chaini side-chaining ng
A good way to ensure your drums will always cut through your mix is to group all other sounds that aren’t drums, and then set up a compressor triggered by the kick and snare with a fast attack and release to duck this ‘all but drums’ group.
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Stereo dynamics Though we’re about to discuss loudness and dynamics, it’s important not to overlook the dynamics available through the manipulation of the stereo field. A variation to the stereo width of different mid-range bass sounds can really help your basslines have a stereo dynamic as a whole. Some of your upper bass sounds may be stereo from source or from effects you’ve processed them with as part
If you want a massive sound for leads or pads, send them to a hugesounding reverb on an auxiliary channel. Then add a compressor after the reverb and have the original sound trigger it with a fast attack and a slow, musically set release time. This will duck the reverb when the source sound plays and the reverb will swell up in volume in-between the notes.
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It’s important not to It’s overlook the dynamics available through stereo field manipulati manipulation on of your sound design. If this is the case, a simple stereo width plug-in can help you pull in or slightly widen the stereo field on a per-sound basis. If sounds are mono or only slightly stereo in nature there are a few ways to process them to become wider sounding. The first and most common way is to use dedicated stereo enhancement tools. Though this isn’t the cheapest method, plug-ins such as iZotope’s Ozone or Alloy make it easy to create dense, stereo sounds. But before you splash the cash, there are other options out there to create width.
A great way to tighten up your mix without losing its ambience is to add a compressor after your auxiliary ambience FX, as in the last step, but with a snappier,, short release time to be triggered by your drums. Now ambience FX will snappier duck in sympathy to your drums so the heavier sections sound tighter and breakdowns fill out with louder FX.
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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 5: The perfect mix
MTF MT F
Creating tight micro edits
COMPLETION LIST EXAMPLE Below is our own completion list, created after a few fresh listens to our project at the start of the day. As well as noting down points of concern, jot down how you think you’ll fix the issues as well. This will help create a list that you systematically systematically have to get through. Even though more areas needing attention will become apparent as you start working through each task, using this method will at least help you get started in the daunting task of finishing your music.
Stripping down your mix for short fill sections really helps to tighten up your sound and create more dynamics in your track. This is quite a time-consuming task, but a good starting point is to loop around the fill with a bar or so either side for context, then solo each track to hear where all the current sounds are coming from.
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clashing frequencies on all other sounds in the mix. filter and add tape delays to create more rhythm. it’s less wide sounding and overly up front. drop to make the vocal more prominent. various bass fills for a dryer sound. vocal part. for more interest and make it the main feature just before the breakdown. playing, maybe through filtering.
The first method is to use u se slightly opposed pan settings for two related sounds. This isn’t great for bass, but does work very well on percussive drum parts such as two hi-hats that alternate between each other on a regular basis. Just set one slightly to the left and the other to the right and your drum sounds will suddenly start to sound wider while your kick and snare still drive down the centre of the mix. You can also do this with layered pad sounds so the layers are panned across the stereo field. Be careful because width substitutes power, and whereas a hi-hat doesn’t need to be up front, a bass generally does, so exercise caution with leading instruments.
Special effect Now start muting out parts that detract from the main elements. If sounds have a decay to them you’ll have to automate either a mute or a fade to create complete silence. This can also apply to your auxiliary FX channels too, as reverb tails and delays will also shift the focus.
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The Haas effect is one of our favourite methods to widen any non-percussive sounds. This involves delaying one side of the signal by a short , sub-50ms value, so although you can’t detect the delay as a separate event you do get a sense of stereo. But its delay-based nature means it doesn’t work very well on
Your drums sound wider while your kick and snare still drive down the centre
When stripping things down to one or two sounds, experiment with going from a wide stereo sound to mono using a stereo width plug-in. This will give another dynamic to the track at this point and is brilliant to help the sound seem unique to the rest of your potentially wide mix.
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percussive sounds, as you can start to hear a slight flamming effect on transients at higher ms values. For pads and mid-range bass tones, though, this is a valuable tool. You may have already utilised modulation effects in your bass design, but chorus, flanger and phaser are excellent tools to stereo-ise a variety of sounds. You can go for slow, subtle modulation rates and a liberal amount of wet signal, or go for more extreme tonally altering settings and only feed a slight amount of wet in with the dry signal to achieve width. The trade-off with
A track from scratch part 5: The perfect perfect mix Technique MTF
these effects, though, is that sounds become a little smeared and will step slightly further back into your mix, but this smoothing side-effect is often more beneficial than being a hindrance. Our final technique can achieve similar results to the purpose-built enhancing plug-ins already mentioned, but you’ll need to figure out how to do mid / side processing within your specific DAW to achieve it. In short, the mid signal is the mono centre of the mix, and the sides are all the information that is unique on one side of the mix from the other. Start with at least a slightly stereo-ised sound so some side information exists, then add compression or saturation to the side signal only. Saturation is particularly useful here as it adds compression and new harmonics, which is great for that super-wide sound whilst retaining mono compatibility.
Achieving tasteful loudness Our last focus is on maintaining a level of volume dynamics while also achieving a competitive level of loudness. As dynamics are coming back into fashion it’s important that you don’t just slam the hell out of your sounds for a perception of loudness. If you add saturation, compression compression or limiting to a sound or group of sounds, go for little and often so the effect isn’t so obvious to the ear. We like to use a variety of tonal, vintage gear emulations, pushing pushing the sound a little bit with each one so the tonal sum of each tweak is texturally interesting to the ear.
MTF MT F Step-by-Step
Unwanted pops and clicks
While you’re performing micro edits you’ll start focussing your hearing at such a high level that you’ll potentially start to find problem sounds and clicks, which you’ll want to get rid of. If they are at the start or end of a piece of audio use fades to smooth them out.
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Experiment with Experiment settings in the context of the whole mix to tune harmonic content When it comes to saturation, a multi-band multi-band option over broad or whole-band processing can let you selectively choose where you want the new, loudness increasing increasin g harmonics to sit while leaving the other frequencies untouched. Just Just remember to experiment with these settings in the context of the whole mix so you can correctly tune your new harmonic content to sit in a non-congested area of the mix.
Another problem area can arise from clicks in consecutive heavily edited pieces of audio. This happens from jumps in the waveform cycle position between edits. To solve this, solo the track and use crossfades to smooth out the transition from one slice to the next to even out the resulting waveform.
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Final thoughts If you’ve made it this far we want to say ‘well done’ for sticking with us on what’s been quite a long pursuit. Over this series we’ve covered a lot of ground and hope you’ve picked up some useful applied technique for the filthier side of dubstep. Though you will of course aspire to produce to the standard of your heroes, don’t forget our tips on experimenting with your ideas to discover something unique. This attitude is what will continue to push the scene forwards, striving to achieve the same FM8- and Massive-based Massive -based bass sounds that the masses will not. We wish you all the best with your efforts and don’t forget to see each project through to completion when possible, as it’s the final tasks that are the hardest skills to master. MT MTF F
Sample-based MIDI instruments may also benefit from some de-clicking, especially if you’ve been heavily re-sampling bass from f rom your own creations. You can move the start point with a ‘Snap To Zero Zero Crossing’ setting enabled, or, or, like audio parts, you can use the attack and decay or release stages as fades to smooth out any clicks and pops.
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MTF Reviews Live 9 Suite & Push: the original review
MTF Reviews Hardware
Software
Mobile
Accessories
For PC & Mac
ABLETON
Live 9 Suite & Push To those of you new to Ableton Live 9 and Push, here’s Liam O’Mullane’s original review… MT review… Details Price Push & Live 9 Intro £429 Push & Live 9 £668 Push & Live 9 Suite £863 Live 9 Intro £69 Live 9 £299 Live 9 Suite £519 £ 519 Contact Ableton +49 302 887 630 Web www.ableton.com
Key Features LIVE 9 SUITE 54GB of content, 40 effects, 9 instruments, Max for Live Enhanced mixing devices and new Glue Compressor Improved Browser layout and functionality 32-/64-bit plug-in support Session View automation PUSH Solid build (weight 2.99kg) Bright, colourful RGB pads 4-row LCD display Touch-sensitive encoders Velocity-sensitive pads with aftertouch
A
fter an incredibly long wait since version 8’s release, Live 9 is finally here, accompanied by an Ableton-developed controller called Push. This is a controller that Ableton describes as an ‘instrument’, which sounds promising as Live itself has long been seen as more of a creative, compositional tool than an audio/MIDI workhorse for the studio. Live’s primary appeal has always been its two distinct approaches to workflow and the way in which they interact. For structuring tracks, Arrangement View enables you to work from left to right in a linear fashion. Session View, meanwhile, is a looporiented mode, letting you focus on musical ideas or sketches without needing to think about the arrangement stage. It’s very much the reason why many people turn to Live even if it’s not their primary platform. These ‘part-time’ users often believe that Live isn’t up to the task of full track creation and mixing, probably because Live has been slow to incorporate certain features that users of other DAWs take for granted. For instance, ins tance, automation curves have only just been added, and you still can’t take the classic approach of recording lanes of audio for compiling together quickly afterwards. But that’s missing the point: Live isn’t the same as other DAWs, so it’s wrong to try
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Excellence
to compare them in such a literal way, feature for feature.
Making introductions Live 9 comes in three flavours: Intro, Standard and Suite. As you’d expect, the entry-level Intro has limitations that reflect its price. These include a small number of ‘idea spaces’ in Session View (Scenes), a maximum of 16 audio/MIDI tracks, and just two audio inputs and
and for the rest of this review, the features discussed relate to these versions only only.. After the 54GB install of Live Suite (Standard is a 12GB install), it’s evident from browsing the library that version 9 is more complete than ever (the complete package can be installed piecemeal if you prefer). Various genre styles and instrument types are
It’s evident when looking through the library that version 9 is more complete than ever outputs. However, However, you do get a perfectly respectable, though small, production centre including drum devices and sample-based instruments along with Live’s flexible real-time audio warping. The feature set gets Choice deeper as you move up to the next two versions,
9/10
included in Suite – far too many to list here, see Ableton’s website full details – but they cover most bases and alone justify just ify the dif differ ference ence in cost cost bet betwee ween n Suite and Standard – and that’s before we’ve even looked at the other Suite-only features.
A full suite Audio content aside, there are some other significant differences between Suite and Standard. Standard comes with the same three sample-based instrument devices as Intro, but it offers much more in terms of factory content.
Live 9 Suite & Push: the original review Reviews MTF
Alternatives For hardware control of software with visual feedback on the device itself, both NI’s Maschine (£483) and AKAI’s MPC Studio (£350) may suit your needs. These aren’t quite as in-depth in terms of features and flexibility, though. Live 9 could be purchased alone and used alongside Novation’s Launchpad S (£150), AKAI’s APC 20 (£170) or APC 40 (£290). These are all a solid choice for performance control, but they don’t cater for expressive musical input in terms of notes. Other comparable software options are FruityLoops Signature Bundle ($299) from Image-Line and Propellerhead’s Reason (£349). These both have very intuitive GUI designs, a healthy library of sounds and instruments, and are easy to pick up and learn.
Note Box now has reverse, invert, legato (to modify notes end to end) and duplicate loop, which doubles the loop brace and its content. These all help speed up workflow and encourage creativity.
Suite’s instrument i nstrument collection, c ollection, however, is a lot more comprehensive, comprising analogue-style synth sounds from Analog, rich-sounding percussion from Collision, Electric pianos from Electric and string modelling from Tension. Operator caters for FM synthesis and Sampler offers a professional level of sampling that can accommodate multiple sample key-mapping and layering. In terms of processing, Standard has quite a few more effects than Intro, though Suite boasts the excellent Amp and Cabinet devices, which will otherwise be add-on purchases. These provide guitarists with sonic textures on tap, though they can be applied to pretty much any sound in need of a new sonic identity. Corpus is another effect that can create something unique as it adds simulated acoustic resonance.
uninitiated, Max is a graphical programming environment that was previously a separate purchase from Live 8. It offers two main advantages to the Live user. The first is access to the wealth of Max-created devices already in existence; the second is the ability to create your own devices, limited only by your imagination. The Max for Live library now includes some excellent devices including Convolution Reverb Pro, Note Echo (for re-creating that classic MIDI sequenced effect) and API tools that enable you to map LFOs, envelope followers, randomisers and more to any parameter within a Live project. Max for Live is attractive to technical nerds as well as musicians or engineers who just want to access more practical and creative tools.
The newcomers Max(imum) benefit While Suite’s comprehensive features make up at least 50 per cent of its attraction, for us the real deal-sealer is the inclusion of Max for Live. For the MTF MT F Navigation
Push control
AUTOMATION Moving an encoder will override any automation for that parameter in a clip. Hit this button to record changes, or combine with [Shift] to revert to clip automation.
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Both Suite and Standard have some other fantastic new features. Highlights include Audio to MIDI, the Glue Compressor and some well thought-out overhauls of other mixing devices.
While it’s not a real-time option, Audio to MIDI lets you analyse an audio file and turn it into a drum pattern, melody or harmonic content for chords. The facility to sing an idea into Live or drop in a file recorded on your phone (perhaps captured during a moment of inspiration) is a huge time-saver and enhances workflow a great deal. It’s also useful for adding that human feel to your drum work – record yourself tapping or beatboxing a rhythm and turn it into a drum pattern. Other uses could include transcribing material for covers, mimicking a part in a track for remixing purposes, or taking a drum pattern to make your own. It isn’t a flawless process, but the most unexpected results come from the usual suspects of dense, layered or noisy material, which is always difficult for a computer to decipher. In most cases, though, the results are very usable. Glue Compressor does the job that a good buss compressor should – making individual elements sound cohesive as a whole when processed as a group. We NAVIGATION BUTTONS In Session mode these let you navigate around your session, clips and scenes. In Note mode you can move left/right between tracks and up/down to move between scenes and launch them immediately.
ENCODERS All encoders are touch-sensitive, which enhances the LCD screen’s function as it displays relevant material as you work.
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Ableton Live 2015 | 105
MTF Reviews Live 9 Suite & Push: the original review
also like its saturation stage, which can be used to push the signal into the red if you want to introduce some character. EQ Eight has had its most significant overhaul since Live 8, particularly in respect to the new spectral analyser. We never really got on with Live 8’s Spectrum device as you had to put an instance on every track if you wanted to do track-by-track analysis while EQ’ing a mix. Since you’ll almost certainly use an EQ per track anyway, the incorporating of a spectral analyser into EQ Eight is a welcome practical step.
input and output levels and thresholds. This makes them much easier to set up quickly, yet accurately.
Live’s new browser layout makes it much easier to navigate the included library. It’s also easier to move between user-defined locations as they are now situated on the lower left-hand side rather than in a dropdown menu.
Streamliner Before we look at how Push may redefine how you interact with Live, we’ll take a moment to cover improvements to Live 9’s workflow from a programming point of view. Session and Arrangement Views are finally truly united, with automation that works between both Views for audio and MIDI clips. It may sound
Session and Arra Arrangem ngement ent Views are finally truly united with automation for audio and MIDI
basis. MIDI editing has also had some useful improvements, as mentioned in the box to the upper left.
Pushing on Other new additions include an Audition mode for helping you to hear the frequency band you’re working on, and an Adaptive mode that adjusts the EQ filter’s Q width as you change the gain amount, resulting in a much more musical sound. Two other devices to undergo updates are Compressor and Gate, which now have graphical feedback on MTF MT F Power User Q&A
bizarre, but this wasn’t implemented before, which was always counterintuitive considering the otherwise close integration between both Views. Automation can now be recorded in Session View as well and the global Back To Arrangement button – which stopped all Session View clips in order to return playback to Arrangement View – can now be controlled on a per-track
For the second part of this review it’s time to turn to Ableton’s Push instrument, which at first glance appears to do much the same things as other Live controllers on the market – launch clips, control devices and generally navigate around Session View. But while Push does offer this type of control, switching to Note Mode allows you to create MIDI, audio or return
Rik Simpson
From Coldplay to Jay Z, Rik has produced and written for an impressive array of big-name artists. We caught up with him to hear his verdict on Ableton’s new combo.
Sun, sea and sound: Rik working on his own material on the edge of the Indian Ocean.
MT: Your website describes Live as ‘A DAW that makes you think differently’. What feature has changed how you work with Live? RS: Live 9 seems snappier than 8. The new browser is really speeding up my work flow – it’s much more intuitive than before and searching for files in the search field is considerably quicker. A close second favourite new feature would be the visual feedback you now get from the Compressor, EQ and Gate plug-ins, which also makes it quicker to get a result. MT: What in Live 9’s new features represents the biggest sonic improvement for you? RS: That would have to be the oversampling option in the EQ Eight and Glue plug-ins – they add a lovely fidelity. The Glue plug-in is amazing, by the way. I’ve been using the Cymotic plug-in for a few years now – it’s great to have it so integrated within Live. MT: Have you explored any Max For Live devices yet? RS: To be honest I’ve mainly been playing with the Max For Live presets up until now. I’ve downloaded a few fun devices – ultraGlitcher and The Granulizator by Design the Media, for example – but haven’t really got in that deep yet. I’m more interested in eventually making my own stuff but Max has a such a steep learning curve. Its very nature as an open-ended piece of
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software makes it hard to pin down. I’ve got the Live 9 tutorials by MacProVideo which are great. There’s one I’ve just started on Max For Live so I’m beginning to ‘break the crust’ so to speak. MT: What do you plan to explore next when you have time? RS: Push is a game-changer for me. It actually does what so many other controllers over the years have failed to do: it feels and reacts like a real instrument. Partly due I think to its tight integration with the software but also because of the feel of the pads which are tactile and responsive. I’ve come up with riffs and shapes that I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards – it’s opened up a new area for me. I’ll definitely be delving deeper over the next few weeks.
Live 9 Suite & Push: the original review Reviews MTF
MTF MT F Power User Q&A
Felix Martin
MT: Do you have a favourite sound design tool in 9? FM: Now that Max For Live is included in Suite, Live functions more like a huge modular synth. I like grabbing the Max LFO device and applying it to any Felix Martin: getting creative with Live 9 and Push in very parameter – a simple but textured way to get life and short order o rder.. MT: What’s the most striking new feature in Live 9? variation to sounds. Functional tools like EQ, Gate and FM: The Audio To MIDI tool is the first feature that caught my Compressor have improved to the point where I’m not so tempted attention. I’d always loved this type of function in Melodyne so to use third-party plug-ins. It’s nice that Ableton has put focus on having it integrated into Live is great. It seems to be part of the these building blocks rather than just cool DJ-friendly features. ongoing work from Ableton to smooth the interaction between audio and MIDI – really useful when working between synthetic MT: How have you found Push in terms of workflow? tones and textures and acoustic ones. As I have no formal musical FM: I’ve been using Live for so long that I’m still unlearning the training its really handy to transcribe chords or a melody of interest habits I’ve gained. But the concept of being able to turn off the to then pick apart and analyse. Considering it’s the first screen is brilliant. I’ve put together a couple of tracks with Push implementation of the tool, I think it works really well. I also love alone in a very short time by creating drum patterns, adding the improved browser as it’s much quicker to access everything I modulation effects, playing chords and melodies. I like the way it have, which in turn leads to a more varied approach to arranging functions as a musical keyboard with visual aids when set to and selecting sounds. I compose by fiddling with MIDI sequences a different chords or scales. This opens up new composition options lot, so the improved editing tools are also very welcome. to someone who’s pretty ignorant in music theory.
Hotchip member and one half of New Build talks to MT while he’s on the road away from his own Lanark Studios, London. We discuss his favourite new Live 9 features and how Push opens up new avenues.
tracks. You can also step-sequence drum patterns, play in melodic parts via its intuitive Scales interface, add Audio devices for further processing and generally shape your sound using the eight encoders and touchstrip for tweaking and automation passes. Drum parts can be recorded in using the lower-left quarter of 16 pads, step-sequenced using the upper portion half, or sequenced in real time using the Repeat tool. The latter is like
Scales is the most unique aspect of Push, as you may have gathered from the online promo videos. It’s flexible enough to let you switch keys from minor to major, and switch between six keys immediately so you can jam between them. The choice of scale style can also be changed via an encoder. We found the learning curve of Push to be incredibly gentle and the Scales approach certainly opens up new ideas. Within minutes we were creating
The learning curve is incredibly
gentle and the Scales approach certainly opens up new ideas the classic Note Repeat function on AKAI’s famous MPCs. The pads are velocity-sensitive and include aftertouch, so dynamic parts can be created with Repeat for elements such as hi-hats, or instruments can be modulated while the pad is held down with varying pressure. Parts can be quantized and throughout your use of Push, an Undo button gives you the same flexibility of undoing and redoing your work, just as you can onscreen.
musical elements, which are stored as Scenes within Live – and it can all be done without looking at your computer. Live 9 builds further on the already solid foundations of Live 8. Push is a great first foray into hardware, though some minor functions have not been implemented as yet. However, as updates are released, we’re sure users’ needs will be addressed, and we can see a bright future for the company’s bold move into hardware. MT MTF F
MTF MT F Verdict
LIVE 9 SUITE
+ Excellent value for money + Extensive library content + Max for Live + New device enhancements and additions really help craft a mix + Session and Arrangement Views better integrated Live 9 is an excellent example of how a company can radically update its software while retaining the familiarity and ease of workflow that made it so attractive in the first place. The new tools and features certainly improve its capabilities and should keep users happy for a good while to come.
10 /10
MTF MT F Verdict
PUSH
+ Gentle learning curve + Offers true hardware-only control during the compositional stage of music creation + Can be powered via USB or mains power supply (included) - Not aimed at loop importing and loop-based creativity - Doesn’t act as a central hub for other controllers A promisin promising g start start for for a well well-integrated,composition-focused hardware controller. The heavy focus on MIDI doesn’t open up full access to Live’s creative capabilities, but we look forward to new features in the future.
When it comes to mixing, the overhauled EQ Eight, Compressor, Gate and new Glue Compressor really up Live’s game in terms of mixing and controlling your sound to microscopic levels of detail.
Method Spot When you’ve got a feel for Live’s new go-to mixing tools, it’s a good idea to store them as a default for any new track you create in the future. Once you have an audio or MIDI track as you would like your defaults to be, right-/[Ctrl]-click (PC/Mac) the title bar of the track and select Save As Default MIDI/Audio Track. We’d recommendhaving all tracks begin with an EQ for general frequency house- keeping (making use of its new steep low- and high-pass filters), then a dynamic device, another EQ formix-shaping and a Limiter or Saturator at the end to catch any stray peaks.
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Glitch Tactics | Technique
Crush On You
Glitch Tips Be prepared to break the rules – a little audio misuse can lead to some interesting results Sampler tricks
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We’ve utilised audio editing and real-time processing techniques in this feature, but practise your samplerwielding skills, too. By looping a small section of a sample, then automating or modulating the loop’s start and end points, you’ll conceive a myriad of customisable electro-glitches electro-glitches and buzzing timbres. Pitched turntable stops, extreme pitchshifting and unorthodox rolling effects are also easily achieved via the wealth of features your sampler has to offer. Automate multiple parameters to introduce even more interest.
Get set to record
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Ever encountered unexpected audio glitches,
digital clipping, plug-in pops/clicks or other malfunctioning errors? If you’re after authentic glitch noises and tones, prepare for these sonic mishaps and be ready to record them through your audio interface (or using real-time recording software) software) – you never know what could become your next hi-hat or synth tone. You can encourage these glitches through experimental patch-cabling and studio rewiring mishaps – failing cables and broken gear are your friends!
Collate your takes
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Most DAWs now offer some kind of ‘comping’ feature, traditionally used to compile the best vocal passages from a multitude of takes. Use this function to collate the results of lengthy glitch-tweaking sessions. If your host doesn’t have dedicated vocal comping tools, simply stack up your glitch renders on separate audio tracks, cut them up, then use the ‘mute’ tool to silence the unwanted segments.
Custom chains
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While there are plenty of useful multi-effect plug-ins available, any producer with an internet connection can
access the exact same software and presets, meaning the release of an epic new effect plug-in is often succeeded with a wave of homogenous, ‘cookie-cutter’ ‘cookie-cutter’ glitch edits and fills. Go against the grain and instead build up your own custom ‘glitch’ chains of effects – or even entire project templates – primed to propagate dazzling (and bespoke) results. Plus, if your plug-ins allow, hook up multiple parameters to single macro controls and get tweaking.
Databending
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An infinite universe of oddball sounds can be generated by opening media files in the ‘wrong’ software – a process known as databending. By loading non-audio files into an audio editing program as raw data, the software attempts to interpret the data and creates unpredictable noise bursts, scratches, glitches and weirdness as a by-product. Remember to render your favourite new creations out to your sample folder.
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Nothing touches the humble bitcrusher bitcrusher when it comes to emulating the sonic sonic degradation of hardware samplers and malfunctioning digital gear. Subdued application application adds a subtle, lo-fi vibe to pristine sounds; more heavy-handed heavy-handed quantities reduce signals to a nasty fuzz. Bit-depth and sample-rate reduction effects are especially effective sequenced within beat divisions over a drum loop: for example, you can target a groove’s snare in isolation with extreme bitcrushing bitcrushing while leaving other elements untouched. Automating a bitcrusher’s parameters parameters over short time periods can also coax out glitch-style glitch-style crushed drums and noise snippets.
Glitch your ’verbs
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Reverb is an effect that responds well to abnormal glitching techniques. When we hear the initial portion of a long reverb signal, our brain naturally expects the tail to decay over a certain period of time. Breaking this expectation – by cutting a reverb tail off to silence – triggers a stark psychoacoustic response for a distinctly unnatural effect. Try combining extended reverb tails with staccato sections for contrast.
Schoolboy error
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The complexity of fast glitch effects makes them outlandishly impressive,
leading novice producers to stuff their projects with excessive buzzes, rolls, scratches and stutters. Exercise restraint, and save the most complex effects for when your track really needs them, otherwise your flashy hyper-edits will quickly lose their impact. Remember, Remember, less is i s more.
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