Thursdays Tech: Ableton Live Tutorial - Techno Fundamentals

Moog: Ladder Filter 500 Series Module

If you think Moog’s entry into iPad synthesizers is too new-fangled, something for the kids, and nothing compared to the authentic analogness of … uh … analog, you’ll like this, at the opposite end of the spectrum.

In the same week they unveiled their first iOS synth, Moog has their first 500 series module – and it’s a classic, derived from Dr. Moog’s legendary Ladder Filter design. Engineering audio isn’t quite like engineering bridges and airplanes: it’s actually the unique flaws in what might have otherwise been a forgettable filter design that led to a distinctive distortion, first heard in Moog modules but made famous by the Minimoog. That signature sound is what you get in this module.

I propose we celebrate Ladder Filter Day on October 28 – the 45h anniversary of Dr. Moog being granted the patent for the “Electronic High Pass and Low Pass Filters Employing the Base to Emitter Diode Resistance of Bipolar Transistors.” (I also propose that you greet everyone you see on that day with “Happy Electronic High Pass and Low Pass Filters Employing the Base to Emitter Diode Resistance of Bipolar Transistors Day!”)

Here’s some good reading on the original Ladder Filter:
The Classic Sound of the Moog Ladder Filter [Universal Audio Blog; check out their references at the bottom, too]
Analogue Systems has some good thoughts on what made the filter special, in the commentary for their own module, influenced by the same

But seriously – what’s in this module?

• Low pass and high pass analog filter modes with cutoff
• Attack and release parameters
• Amount (positive/negative), which you can drive hard enough to make compression-like sounds or even reverse filtering, claim Moog
• Resonance, which you can push into self-oscillation
• 2Pole/4Pole: (12db per octave/24db per octave)
• Relay bypass switch
• Modernized design, including XLR (Via 500 rack) balanced line level

Better trade in your 64GB iPad 2 now — US$769, available in December 2011. That our else you need a special relationship with Analog Santa Claus. (Can I actually please have a chat with Analog Father Christmas?)

One downside: it doesn’t play Angry Birds. But you could make a sound like a flock of angry birds – which, by astounding coincidence, is also how I’d describe CDM comment threads earlier this week. Have at it:

http://moogmusic.com/products/500-series/500-series-ladder-filter

Thursday Tech: Ableton Live Drum Racks

On the surface, Ableton Live’s drum racks seem to be surplus to a DJ’s requirements with clips being able to deal with everything we need. Look a little deeper, though, and that’s not the case; let’s look at where we can use drum racks to our advantage.

One of the biggest advantages to using Ableton Live is its flexibility. Whilst it can’t quite boast the straight to business simplicity of Traktor, Torq, Itch, and the like, it’s got a clear lead when it comes to setting things up how you want; there’s so much choice that sometimes knowing what tools to use where can be a bit confusing, and drum racks are definitely one of the more specialised tools.

Clips

There are advantages to using clips, and there are also advantages to using drum racks. First off, let’s look at what using clips is perfect for anyway.

• Available in all versions of Live
• Great for full tracks and loops
• Good for quantising

Clips are a lot more flexible than you may have realised. Despite defaulting to the global quantise settings and acting like loops, clips can be set to be more or less independent. To use a clip as a one shot, simply go to its launch settings and turn both quantisation and warp off. In doing this, you can set some clips up to play tracks, others to play loops, and throw one shots into the mix as well.

There are some important limitations to consider when using clips, though, that by using drum racks we can overcome:

• Only one clip can play in a track at a time
• Clips between different tracks can’t ‘interact’
• One shot clips can’t be put into MIDI loops
• Editing options for audio clips is limited

Drum Racks

Drum racks are included in all versions of Live 8, but they are only editable in the full version. That caveat aside, let’s take a look at the pros of drum racks.

• Great for single hits and kits
• Can have a MIDI clip assigned to them for sequencing
• Simpler and sampler are more capable for editing than audio clips

Because only one clip can play simultaneously in a track, setting up a bunch of one shots to trigger will spread across your clip view quite quickly. This is not only messy, and a bit of a waste of precious screen real estate, but can also be a bit of a puzzle because of the ambiguity about what’s controlling what on your controller. In reality, a drum rack is just a container for audio/instrument tracks, and the rack can be expanded to show them as such (although MIDI clips can’t be stored in the within individual rack tracks), but the grid view that the rack uses is much easier to align with pads and buttons of controllers.

Another advantage to using a drum rack to trigger samples is that MIDI clips can be recorded into the main track, allowing all the samples and devices in a rack to become one big instrument – this is something that can’t be done if you use clips to trigger sounds.

Drum racks default to triggering instruments at C3, which may not be what you want. To change this setting, expand the drum rack track to show all of the tracks within, and you’ll see the receive/play section, which you can alter as you see fit. You’ll also notice a choke setting; 16 flexible choke groups are another advantage to using drum racks.

Hot Tips

• Although it may seem like a bottomless pit of expenditure, to get real control over your samples you’ll need to get hold of Sampler, Ableton’s ‘step up’ sample player from the bundled Simpler device. Simpler’s still plenty powerful enough for the majority of tasks, but one thing it can’t do is set samples to one shot. The workaround? Increase the release time on your sample to ensure it plays out fully.

• When you’re working on your sounds, rather than tiresomely doing the same thing over and over again you can right click on a device control and select ‘copy to siblings’ to copy the setting across to all the other drum pads that share the same instrument.

• The name drum rack is slightly misleading: don’t feel restricted to drums! Whilst the drum racks are by nature a percussive tool, loading in instruments, perhaps combined with MIDI effects like arpeggiator, can give you a handful of different sounds all on one MIDI track that you can dip into with much more flexibility than an audio track.

• Want to chop up a sample, MPC style? Instead of using clips and editing the start points manually (which can take forever!), take advantage of a not quite hidden, but not front of stage feature of drum racks. Simply right click a clip and choose Slice to New MIDI Track to bring up a dialogue box that will allow you to use timing or warp marker info to chop a sample up in a drum rack of Simplers. Simple!

The most important thing to glean from this article is that the best way to use Ableton Live is to mix and match its myriad features into something that works for you! Clips will almost certainly be your workhorse tool for the structure of a Live set, but the strengths of drum racks can take your performance to the next level. When mapping your controller, consider working your clip launch MIDI around a grid of MIDI notes and making sure that you always use those notes in drum racks so that when you switch between them everything stays a finger press away. This way you’ll get to have your cake and eat it too. Good luck!

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Production on the iPad

Salva on Writing Music on iPad with Modular Tabletop; Download Music Mixes.

More than any technical obstacle, and very often more than any artistic or inspirational challenge, very often the single biggest enemy of music making is time. Finding a way to comfortably develop ideas anywhere, therefore, is a godsend. And some of our favorite artists are the ones who’ve found a way to simply keep producing. Whether it’s a laptop, a gameboy, a manuscript notebook, or indeed an Apple tablet, it’s always nice to see some of the tools that make music creation mobile and inspiration always-accessible.

Chicago-raised, LA-based artist Salva has been lighting up the radar of a lot of DJs, cities, and outlets like Resident Advisor and FACT, and recently was accepted to teach a session at Red Bull Music Academy. He’s also been lighting up the radar of air traffic controllers — all of that success and endless gigs mean some time on the road. He’s swapped his laptop for an iPad in order to keep writing. Here, we get to watch as Paul Salva constructs music from scratch using Tabletop, a modular creation environment for the iPad.

Check out the step-by-step process in the video at top, as Salva constructs a tune. Found via Prefix Magazine, which notes Salva is appearing alongside the likes of some other artists we love – Sepalcure and Starkey, among others – in an upcoming compilation:

Salva, Sepalcure, Starkey Appear On Frite Nite Comp [Prefix Magazine, an excellent and prolific source of music reporting]

Retronyms, the developers of Tabletop, were naturally excited by what Salva was doing with their software. “We had a good time working with him,” says Retronyms’ Keith Pishnery, “as he gave us a invaluable feedback during the beta stage as well as really pushing the limit of the app in his demo songs. For version 1, he created a custom 808 kit, but has plans to create more sounds for other instruments in a future update.”

Retronyms have also done an interview with Paul on their blog, as well as the video chat here, which elaborates on the step-by-step vid above.

Tabletop Q+A: Salva (Frite Nite/Friends of Friends)

HOW TO GET A THICK ANALOGUE SOUND.

Thick Sound

Working in music or learning to, you hear a lot of "funny" words: fat, warm... thick... organic. These descriptive words often have quite different meaning from one person to the next and that makes it kinda confusing trying to decipher what you need to know. Words like these are used because, since the days of tape and big desks, through to the time of digital DAW's, we have lost something that we haven’t quite had the lexicon to explain, or an understanding of how to express what we mean. For a long time the digital purist protested it was all in our heads, and in some ways it was. We had lost an array of subtle distortions and effects that gave audio a certain texture, a certain human / organic nature. When you hear a song - and the sound just seems so thick, so physical in coming out of the speaker and sounds so cohesive and real you may wonder how that level of production is achieved. What you’re hearing there could be any number of subtle distortions and effects. We will cover a few ways of bringing these into your production in this blog.

Harmonics

Harmonics are truly wonderful; they make up the character and soul of many real instruments and hardware. They are what makes a violin and a guitar sound different, and allow us to hear the differences between different materials in the real world. (Yes, that strange place outside the studio) They are also incredibly useful when working on a mix, one of the biggest mistakes people make is hearing a track with a HUGE sub bass and slaving away trying to fit massive amounts of sub energy into their mix and ending up stuck in a mire of bogged down energy as the mix falls apart.
How do they do it? Well the trick is, they aren’t putting loads of sub in their mix, and it just sounds like they are... Sounds confusing but let me explain: if you have a strong bass and you want it to fit in and flow nicely, get hold of a distortion plugin or a foot pedal to run your bass through; what this distortion will do is create harmonics that sit higher up in the frequency spectrum than the actual fundamental of the bass, but you will find the sound is still jelled and sounds like it has a heavy sub element even when you filter or eq the subs down a bit to sit in your groove nicely. So in effect you can have less 70 Hz.....more 140 Hz but it still sounds as deep and subby as it needs to without bogging down your mix with all the low frequency energy.

Physical sound

When you listen back to older tracks, they often sound more real and by real I mean literally physically coming out of the speaker. (Not in a modern “so loud your ears bleed” way either). What’s happening here is the equipment used is all imparting its tell-tale signature on the sound. Little bits of dynamic compression, harmonics and other distortions are all moulding the sound in almost imperceptible ways. In the end all this adds up and adds gravity, power and musicality to your mix if done well. Often the beneficial effects of subtle distortions can be impossible to discern in isolation or A/B tests, but the cumulative effects are often stunning and strike a deep chord with the human part of the listener. We have grown up with these distortions not only in the old records, but in our real lives - nothing you hear is without some sort of distortion, harmonic or vibration.

If you’re looking to get a mix that jumps out of the speakers, is highly dynamic and has more presence, then subtle distortion and drive on your samples may be what’s missing. You can often bring more power to you mix by giving each sound a subtle treatment of Tape, Tube, Clipping your A/D or other types of distortion. Working this way is a good way to start stamping your own character on a production.

Warmer Audio

I spent a lot of time working on and developing a sample pack recently. When creating the drum sounds it was important that they be full of character, presence and vibe and offer producers an edge. There are a lot of digital ways to create interesting sounds, but to get a vibrant and musical sound, analogue distortion can be one of your most powerful tools. Sometimes it’s enough to use just a touch to give the sound a different edge, and affect the attack portion enough to sound pleasing.

MPC Crunch

One of the tones I turned to first was the famous MPC sound. The Akai MPC units have been making their name since the late 80's and well into the 90's through to the present day. What set them apart is an almost Lo-fi crunchy sound most often found in Hip Hop, Rap and Electronic music like House. This sound defined a genre and set the tone for a lot of full bodied and punchy sounding music. In sampling percussion through an MPC I was able to give the sound more percussive energy and interest. Just the very act of running your samples through the machine can impart a little bit of a signature on your audio through a combination of the internal workings of the machine and the A/D convertors of your Pre-Amp taking the audio back into your project. and if you’re using the right equipment this can be very musical.

Tape Warmth

Tape has been much loved for years. The word warmth may as well have been invented to describe the loveliness tape can bestow upon your music. In professional circles STUDER machines were amongst others used to record some of the timeless hits of yesterday. What tape actually does to your audio is very complex, with the machines often having many stages, magnetic heads etc. It’s no wonder it took so long for companies making digital tools to come close to offering the tone you can get from a tape machine in your computer. When working this tone is probably one of the most useful to have at your disposal - the warm vibey sound is really what house music is all about. I had the chance to work with the Studer A800 and the REVOX machines; each has its own character and offers slightly different variations due to different internal components and the way they work.

When you are producing the most important thing to have in abundance is choice. Even subtle choices between two different machines can help you blend things and get that physical sounding nature to your recordings. Often with tape you lose a bit of the high end off your recording as it affects the top frequencies. That, along with a slight compression of the audio, and, depending how hard you’re driving it, some harmonic distortion can really add a noticeable thickness to you sound.

Distortion is real

As I mentioned earlier, distortion is a natural thing, it’s a physics thing inherent in everything around us and prominent with hardware components and processes. That’s why sometimes I think, with our excellent speakers and digitally perfect sound, things can sound a little cold coming straight out of a soft synth, and that makes it sound unreal because it’s never been bent to the will of the world, is unrealistic or too perfect. A good analogy for this would be the uncanny valley theory. Even the craziest sounds benefit from a humanity and physicality. You will see a lot of soft synth makers nowadays adding in analog emulation routines and code, some quite good too! We are in an age where computers are finally becoming powerful enough to start to emulate these complex interactions.

I like to think of it like this, when audio production went digital we ended up with a metaphorical DATA from Star Trek! It looked like a human and spoke like one, but it couldn’t feel emotions, and didn’t do all the tiny little weird things us humans do, it wasnt quite human. That’s why people said digital audio sounded cold, as it was missing something. We had to learn how to program-in all those little quirks that hardware did automatically and that has taken a long time.

Subtlety is the key

When working with distortion it’s important to know what your aim is, as there are two uses. If you want to go all out and make big rock music sounds, we will cover that in the next section. For everything else, all tonal sculpting and imparting character to your audio, it’s important to know that sometimes you don’t really need to hear it much, don’t overdo it. A good technique to follow is to increase your effect till you can audibly hear it, then back it off until you cannot. The effect you’re looking for is often more subtle than you think and if your mix down is tight, the smallest changes have the biggest impact.

Creative distortion.

That said, if you want to crank it to 11 and drive it into oblivion, distortion is also your friend. This creative use of distortion can often provide some incredibly large tones to work with. A good tip if you’re working this way is to have an EQ and Filter before you go into the distortion, small changes before can be magnified by the distortion and yield massive tonal changes for more creative inspiration.

What analogue distortion offers you.

For a producer working in todays often overly clean, modern world, distortion offers you something that is sorely missing. It doesn't matter if you buy a pack of sounds that have been crafted to include this element or have splashed out on a foot pedal or even a vintage tape machine. Even the latest software emulation are getting useful on modern pcs. The most important thing is you are aware of this dimension and what it adds to your music; power, physicality, presence, warmth and it will sound more natural to your listeners so subconsciously they will find it easier to connect with your music.

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Logic Voice Sampling..

Playing Melodies With Voice Samples in Logic..

In this tutorial, producer/DJ and Dubspot Senior Logic Instructor Matt Shadetek shows you how to manipulate, re-pitch, and process vocal samples using Logic Pro 9’s ESX24 Sampler and Pitch Correction plug-in. Utilizing one of the vocal samples that comes with Logic, Shadetek slices each individual note of the sample, converts them into a sampler instrument. Shadetek delves into the ESX24 Instrument Editor, in order to re-pitch the vocal samples and make them playable across the keyboard. He then utilizes Logic’s Pitch Correction plug-in (similar to Antares Auto-tune), which he uses to refine the pitch of the re-pitched notes. At the end of the tutorial, you should have a strong grasp of how to take a sample and play your own melody with it in Logic’s EXS24 sampler.

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Ableton & Maschine video tutorials....

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Mixing & Mastering .......

Here are some tips on Mastering.... from Daniel Wyatt. For all my producers who are just starting out, my advice is never master your own music but you can clean up your mixdown with these tools...

Tuesdays Tech Tips: Beat Programming...

So here at the blog I'm all about trying to get people started on there musical journey. As my regular readers will know, I try to post what I consider to be helpful to producers who are starting out from scratch and only have the basic packages to work from.....

So here are some tutorials on beat making and programming within Logic & Ableton Live... I realise a lot of people programme purely from audio but its nice to know how to make beats from scratch...