Hey, what’s that cheap Casio synth doing in your studio? Well. I needed a quick way to find out the key of various songs I’m adding to my DJ playlist collection. I save the key as a file name and a clip value in Ableton Live as well. It means I could quickly find song keys, and compare it with the playing clips, and with complex warp mode I could easily change the pitch and get the keyed-in mixing that sound really good.

So I took this old cheap synth from my son’s room, and it’s a snap to hit the key and get the info.

Key mixing is good, but you need some music theory, or at least learn it the hard way, how to mix together different keys. With the complex mode and changing the key, you could put together all songs with the same key, but it would sound boring after a while. There’s tension added when you put together songs where the keys change. But with some little tweaking you could use any song connected to any other song.

I did a private DJ gig last night, and before that I needed something in the mastering chain as a limiter and analog warmth, as digital files tend to sound somewhat harsh (in my ears). I usually use PSP VintageWarmer in the studio, but this plugin is not yet (sigh) ported to Mac Intel, so it’s not available as a universal binary.

So, I looked around the rack section of Ableton Live, and found a couple of mastering racks (sets of effects). I selected MasteringTape Boost, and it actually sounded really nice. So I used this for the laptop, and I really liked the end results.

In case you have a similar need, check out the new rack presets, or experiment with Saturator/Compressor/EQ combinations — you could always start from a preset rack and modify the results. Just now I could live without VintageWarmer…

I’ve been working on initial steps to make minimal electro, tech-house. As part of tonight’s experiments, and to create good karma for this electronica project, here’s an Ableton Live 6 Project as a Zip archive (16.4Mb), called Sun Reboot, done somewhat in the style of James Holden, you know that pumping effect production.

Feel free to download it, use it for remixing, your own remixes, songs, anything you want, add your own lyrics, songs, other instruments, and so on. This project will not be always around, so please hurry download it as soon as you are interested. The project contains 16 clips, 24-bit 44.1kHz AIFF files, and they are also available as aiff files inside the project import folder in case you don’t have Ableton Live 6.0.
The drum sample were done with Logic Ultrabeat. The bass sounds with Automat, and the rest of the synth sounds with Zebra 2.

Advise about using these: You get a lot of mileage if you change the loops and loop points for each sample. Also use effects, such as ping-pong for one or two tracks, to compensate for the beginning loops with no effects, otherwise each starting beat in the loops sounds empty (will notice this when you run these as default). I had a fun time adding beat repeat effects on individual loops for interesting minimalist electronica effects, and phasers, and anything I found inside Ableton Live 6.

It would be nice if you mentioned my name somewhere in case you used it, or sent me a link to the music, but hey feel free to use it for anything nice and great for others to listen and dance to (I need that nice karma to get this project done).

And yes, the whole project is in 128 BPM :-).

Keith Jarrett, the famous jazz improvisation pianist, has a lot of interesting opinions and views. I was reading part two of an interview with him in Keyboard Magazine (11-2006), and he talked about the stages of a musician and how to find and actually forget about the final voice found.

Or, the steps with musicians are usually the following ones: Step one is to learn your instruments. Step two is to understand your historical realities of what you are doing and what other players have played. Step three might be to learn how to phrase. Step four is learning how to find your own voice. This is where you figure out your own personal touch and style, and explore this one.

But Keith Jarrett then added a fifth step, and that is to just drop that voice and just play!

Going back to the point of music production and producers. Step one is to learn your instruments, today it’s the combination of DAWs, synthesizers and effects. Step two is to understand the background of let’s say electronic and dance music, and where you fit in, and what others have done or are doing. This involves listening and learning what has happened and is happening with music.

Step three is to phrase the productions, you need to learn with dance music the breakdowns, how 8 and 16 bars rule, entry and exit points for easy mixing, for pop music the chorus-verse patterns. If you know them well, then you could even break the rules now and then.

Step four is then to find your own production style voice, so that anyone who listens to a specific production could — if possible — associate it with you. Now, to be true, few listeners could do this, but it’s always good to aim for this. Good DJs could listen to a track and quickly narrow down the producer or artist.

What then becomes interesting is step five — just forget your voice, and do music. If one is too focused on the style and voice, it becomes a hindrance, maybe even causes creative draught, lack of inspiration or interest. I think Keith Jarrett is right, the magic happens when you just relax and let go of anything. But it’s important to get through the stepping stones to this specific point.

In my case it also feels like I’m moving up and down, and up again, on this ladder, from time to time.

Better start with a new project before I’m getting stone cold, again..

This time I will try to put together 12-15 tracks of minimalist electro dance music, the closest I could explain the style is something similar as the newly released James Holden compilation James Holden at the Controls, or the tracks here in this Shiloh mix.

There are many reasons why: it would be fun trying out a style that is as contemporary as possible, to see how far one could go with it. Also, I would not mind for a while to make dance tracks that could be remixed or used for generic purpose, so this project will be more serious and constructive, need to keep a poker face and not go overboard. Oh well.

To make life more interesting, I’m toying with the idea to actually also make 12-15 pseudonyms, and each track would be unique, so it would sound like fifteen different artists or bands, while there’s only one single person behind it.

So that’s the challenge. As pre-work, I’m loading my iPod with this kind of music to study the formats and production styles. Hmm, lots of electronic drums, very simple oscillator bass synths, repeating lines, hihats have backbeats. So, production-wise that means I will use Automat, Zebra 2 and Logic’s Ultrabeat drum machines for a lot of this work. I think CamelSpace will also come in handy for gating and delay effects, maybe even CamelPhat to dirty the sounds. I might also need a granular synthesis tool or effect, or use of warp point mismanagament via Ableton Live to get more granular chop effects.

The other challenge is to minimize the arrangement section and try to think how DJs use such minimalist songs — that will be the biggest problem for me, as I want something to happen every four bars, and that’s not how minimalist electronica is produced. Hopefully this style is around another month, otherwise I need to change my plans midstream!

In the never-ending quest to saturate the universe with songs, 52 Minutes Close to Chaos is released. This was the earlier mentioned wacky-synth project.

Check the web page that has the MP3 file for download, background about the project, the songs, technical information and so on. Let me know what you think, feedback always appreciated.

What has this picture of steam to do with the release? I don’t know, maybe releasing musical steam helps now and then. I took that picture while visiting the AES tradeshow recently, and while taking it, a couple behind my back said: who would like to take a picture of that? So that’s why I published it, so the action had a purpose.

This was a positive surprise. I was working on some initial test mixes of the latest work I’m doing, and I didn’t do a good export, there tons of transients in two places in the 52-minute song that cause normalization from Ableton Live to fail miserable.

Anyway, I loaded it into Waveburner for doing a test CD, and just for fun I selected the Dance Music Master preset from the plugin chain as default mastering setup. And it sounded really good, as well as the multicompressor evened out the total audio material.

I will do some more critical listening now in the car and elsewhere, but this is promising. I don’t mind a good default setup for the mastering plugin chain, and if this works fine, it’s Ok if it’s my own personal sound — if not I could start from this setup and modify it along the way.

Anyway, in case you have WaveBurner (part of the default Logic Pro installation), check out the various default plugin chains for mastering!

It helped having a week off from work. That and reading many strange SF books recently. Oh, and also having fun with my latest SW synth purchase, Zebra (more about that later).

All this work was done in less than three hours today. Here’s a list of the last songs that I composed, arranged and produced for this 52 minute thingie: Electronic Dolphins Reboot, Devonian Funk, Data Dump City, Exmento and Eternal Friday.

I will actually take Exmento and make it to a 12″ track later. Most of that was done with Zebra and its fun arp patches.

Next I need to dump down it all as a long track and do critical listening, fix anything odd, do a final mix with Logic (really like the Logic Exciter nowadays), and then export it all. Don’t know how long it takes, maybe end this week, or a little bit more.

Ok, let’s talk more about doing the ‘production style’ Ableton Live session work.

If you have songs, it’s good to chop things into specific sections for easy mapping. The most natural ones are to find places with just drums, ending, beginning, no keys, so those could be used as the backbone for any new remixes when playing Ableton live. The other natural clips are any acapellas or clips with no drums (those empty buildups in many dance tracks). So now when you have clips with just drums, and clips with just instruments, you could mix together two totally different songs, assuming the BPMs variations would not cause problems. I even have separate colors for these now, as colors are quicker to see than text strings mentioning the clip style. Anyway, it’s VERY IMPORTANT that you could clearly see in the clip what it’s about, so you need a system to mark up clips for reuse later.

Secondly, you could make clips with just the bass and drum section. Using complex warp mode you could change the pitch of such things and map them with any other clips with keys. Small changes are fine, let’s say D and D#, or C and A. With wider changes things start to sound strange, so you need to think about chromatic mixing. That’s another story and requires some musical background to learn what fits together, and what not.

A big problem is to add together too many layers of musical material, so it sounds like a big Eno soundscape with drums behind — this is where taste is important, and layering of clips where there’s a dominant part, and supporting parts, is important.

You could also use the EQ to block out the low end for certain clips to just get the high-end, pads, or hihats, and let other clips take care of the low end.

If you are really good, you could use very long loops, 32 bars or so, it’s easier to get all this to work reliably with short loops, so it’s good to start this way.

When you play track live, put aside such clips you would like to use later in the show, place into a dedicated other audio track (I have two, drums and Misc where misc has non-drum loops). Then, any time you wish, you could trigger these loops later.

If you are really, really good, you could even change the loop length for any saved loops and reuse them this way, or put the starting point somewhere else than in the beginning of the loop, and this way make variations. Or, you could trigger the same loop over and over again for rapid loop styles.

It’s also sometimes fascinating to start the song with the ending of a track, and then continue, or mix-and-match sections of the song out of order, let’s say start with the first buildup, empty section, jump to the end drumming, then start with the first verse. This while you use other clips underneath from other songs.

Also, for buildups, it’s good to use the levels to introduce clips instead of starting them immediately. Same with fading them out rather than stopping immediately.

One big key is to train your memory to remember songs and clips in your head, the more you kind of remember the character of a song, the easier it will be.

The warping must be perfect, otherwise mushing will easily happen.

I must say, all this is still a big experimentation for me, myself. I’m learning every day something new about having a pool of clips and doing remixes on the fly. But it’s fun.

Here’s the workflow I’m using with Ableton Live 6.0 for taking any audio tracks, music, and chopping it into useable clips that I could mix and match later in a DJ-live session. The idea is very similar to what Sasha is doing, in other words make new productions live.

a) Open a new Live Window/project

b) Drag in the WAV/AIFF/MP3/AAC file into the one and only audio track as the first clip

c) Autowarp, adjust markers from beginning to end, make sure it all works out, set proper 1.1.1 point and so on.

d) Set a default beginning loop that sounds OK, 8 or 16 bars.

• As this is the whole song, you could use this for the whole playback, and just start it, and remove the loop point so it continues, and place starting points on this clip, in case you don’t want to use the additional clips created.

e) Clone this clip (command-D), rename it to INTRO - JUST DRUMS or something meaningful.

• I use upper-case as it’s easier to see the text string.

f) Clone this again, adjust the loop point to the next natural loop, maybe more intro, or the first part.

• I have trigger as the default clip start, set this in your preferences, or in case you want to have some other starting option, change those per each clip.

g) Continue such cloning (don’t forget to move to the next cloned clip), until you have the song chopped o N parts (I could go up to 20 and beyond…).

• The key is to make loops that sound good when you combine them in any possible ways!
• I’m also using color coding to separate the intro loops, main loops, end ending loops.

h) When happy, rename the first clip so it has a good title, my style is:

• <> means that you place your own string in there, 128 D# TEC for example
• As a bonus, you could even colorize the clips, intros have one
• color, main part another, ending a third color
• Or color clips with drums only, or any other things you want to
• quickly see using a coloring scheme
• I use a cheapo plastic synth to find the main key of the song
• The is an internal running number I use as an index to make each song unique.
• The whole reason for all this is that I could on the first clip always see the main info about the song.

i) Save this whole thing as a project (.als folder), name it -){}[

• This so in your file browser you could quickly find certain styles, or BPM values, or keys.
• Put this in your main archive folder

j) Run collect and Save so that any audio files you used will be copied into this new .als project file, as well.

• Important, we want these to be self-contained, so they could be moved from location to location, from computer to computer.

k) Quit, test, make sure things look OK. Put a note into your log about this new song, in case you want to keep track of these.

In use, drag in the .als project into any audio window, or copy/paste it in, all your clips, including ordering and coloring, is preserved.

Yep, a lot of work. Then again, I’m mostly interested in Ableton Live as a producer/DJ tool, combining two-three songs to see what happens, similar to what Sasha has done for a while. For that you need to do all this pre-work, but the fun part then is that you could combine, mix and match, and do all kinds of interesting mixes from then forward. The best part - in a live situation!

I this test last weekend. The idea was to see if Ableton Live 6.0.1 could handle eight hours of continious live mixing, as in a very long DJ session.
It worked. Eight hours and two minutes. Standard MacOSX 10.4.8, latest M-Audio drivers, 2GB RAM, 2×2.0GHz PPC, 23″ studio screen.

Lessons learned:

+ No crashes. I spent the first four hours doing Sasha-like mixes of various elements, but then when my .als files run out, I switched to manual loading of audio and moving the playloops by hand and doing loops on the fly. I could even save the final eight-hour session, there was a short SPOD (spinning beach ball) of about 10 seconds and then the file was saved, 3.8Mb in size, as it just contained the changes in the session. I think a clean laptop environment should indeed handle an eight-hour session, provided you are really careful with the setup, no odd things running, latest drivers, tested, and so on.

- Do not do midi map changes while in session, recording stops. I did this by mistake 30 minutes into the session, so only 7:30 minutes or so was recorded. I tried to reproduce this later for bug reporting to Ableton, but was not able to get into this same situation. So I still don’t know if this is a real bug or a fluke.

- The autowarping in 6.0.1 is not that super-accurate, there’s always a need to go in and fix it, and do this during live… I avoided using any non-prewarped and checked out files in this session…. This is
another thing that I think Ableton should fix in post 6.0.

- It’s indeed hard to keep track of songs used after a while. I will send Ableton a report with possible ideas how to for instance flag used .als project files with a color in the browser.

- Eyes, eyes. I woke up the following morning with a tension headache. I watch screens all day long at work, but eight hours straight looking on the Ableton screen is tough. Maybe having a stronger contrast setting would have helped. Or then just try to not always focus on the screen during a long session. It would also help if the next round of Ableton had a cleaner screen setup, for example bigger font/graphics support, and more layers to turn on/off.

+/- It’s important to mark up the material concerning song key, BPM tempo and so on. I have my own system, but I realized things I want to change now after this test. The more you know upfront, the better. Again, there’s only a certain amount of text info present (I will fire another feature request to Ableton about having automatic popup support with meta-information about tracks…). I will also mark my clips better concerning sections with only drums, so no cueing is needed when saving such tracks for later use.

- Electro/minimal is boring, at least that’s how it felt for me. What I ended up doing was to spice it up with clips from earlier tracks that I put aside in two audio tracks (drums, misc) that I could trigger from time to time. Especially minimalist drums, for me, are not that strong, so having more drum tracks running helps.

+/- It’s good to know your tracks inside out. The ones I knew, I hardly bothered doing any cueing, as I knew the format.

- I did about one to two mistakes every 30 minutes. Means I need to practice more.

+ Especially in a possible club environment, you don’t have a chair, so you need a good stamina, and a healthy posture. Yoga helps.

Sorry this was long, but this was interesting, and I recommend anyone else doing it, in case you have time! For me, I’m really happy Ableton 6.0.1 held up, I was prepared to file off a long list of bugs, but I never needed to write these down in my notebook.

Same with the background.

I like simple studio setups, so my mind is not wandering.