Archive for November, 2006
I don’t have much problems producing mystical or beautiful music. But the amount of la-la-la material could go overboard. It’s also a good challenge to extend oneself, to see how far you could grow in a new direction. My new motto is: pretty-gritty-strange. If I hit all those three in my production work, I’m happy. The gritty part needs focus now. There are of course raw technical tricks to achieve toughness in music: raw saw-tooth oscillator synth sounds, filter sweeps with really rough algorithms, Camel Phat that munches any sound to any kind of distorted reality…. Another one is to avoid using pads and long winding arrangements, rather keep the drum and bass lines hitting the speakers, with simplified synth leads. This is a lot what the new electro-progressive music is about, as well. Also, using tight loops of sound snippets, sounding like the system needs to be rebooted… But the other part is just the mental attitude, to try to put this in place while I’m very hesitant to become aggressive — tried for a long time to remove that part from my mind. Oh well, the challenges…
Anyway, when solo:ing both kicks to hear the final result, I heard a lot of strange digital rippling happening on one of the kicks. Originally what I did was to let the envelope clip dramatically, from infinite to zero. When I changed the envelope (see image above) so that it has an incremental decay, then the rippling sound disappeared. So sometimes it’s good to experiment also with the envelope release times, to see if you could make sounds more smooth and not so harsh in case the sound ends too quickly. Doubling of instruments is an interesting and big topic, it’s a classical production technique, so more about that in the next post.
But I did a test tonight, had two house tracks playing, same key, and had one or two bar loops happening with both tracks, and move the loop bars around. Meanwhile, I had beat repeat slicing and dicing one of the audio tracks into new variations. The result was pretty interesting, like a freshly made groove-loop every time. This is a little bit how the Spectrasonics RMS Stylus is doing with drum tracks. But I could take any DJ tracks and let Beat Repeat make new versions of small loops over and over again, annotating other tracks. So it could build up totally, unexpected new mixes, live. If the loops also have melodies, the beat repeat changes would make it all very interesting! Which leads to another topic. I do feel that a DJ should be proactive, do unexpected things, even if it could lead to problems on stage from time to time. It’s very boring to be part of a totally prepared show, with everything done in a secure way to avoid mistakes. For me that’s more boring than a train wreck from time to time, but the DJ is really trying to push it and make the event an experience for everyone. Maybe you have seen this movie before, but here Robert Henke is presenting beat repeat plugin.
That means that the initial starting point has just drums or a melody, 16-32 bars or more and the progression is building up to two or so breakdown points, one around minute and a half, and one from 3 minutes forward. Now, this is not carved in stone, there are all kinds of variations. Check any of your favorite tracks to see how the layout is done. I think the 3+ minute breakdown is a good one, it gives the DJ a chance to skip to another track at this point, in case it’s a short mix he or she is aiming for. Anyway, the end is similar, after 5-8 minutes or so the song should end with a simple track setup, just the melody, just drum sections, and so on, and it should progressively end. This means that the DJ has a good chance to mix in a new track. If there’s no melody in beginning or end, even easier for the DJ to do the job. What I was going to write about is that I think it’s really important to keep 8/16 bar sections in the track. I have sometimes encountered tracks that have deliberate sections of two bars, one bar or so on. It sound musically interesting, but it totally causes havoc when doing mixing at some point. For example, Ableton users could jump around with their loop point set on four bars, and if the format is broken, it’s hard to catch the right places for the next loop point. It does not hurt to keep a nice clean format of the whole song, if it’s a break-down, we could keep it at 32 bars, or 16 bars, not 9 bars… Now, when working with DAW systems, such as Ableton Live, it’s not always clear how things work out, especially as the timeline indicators do not easily show the bar breakdowns. What I do nowadays is now and then zoom out the whole project (see picture), and I could see gaps, and look at the top timeline, if it fits nicely into 16 or 8 bar gaps, it’s all Ok. If not, I need to go in and rearrange the track so it looks nice again. Also, please make sure the initial starting point also has an even 8 bar or so loop, sometimes when I’ve purchased music, the starting point is chopped off, so I need to hunt around and find a more suitable starting point to align all the loops done later…
Also, the configuration is set that the first time someone comments, it needs to be moderated. After that any subsequent comments from the same address will be immediatley accepted — this is just to avoid spam commenting to the site, so be patient in case your comment does not show up immediately. Otherwise, oh, please comment, that makes the whole effort more enjoyable for everyone. As for future posts, I have a big pile saved, mostly about music production, and about starting small music labels, all kinds of things good to know… If anyone knows of similar music production DJ blogs, let me know, I could start adding back links to similar sites so those reading this part could also find similar web sites.
However, if you select the loop, so the loop has a solid color, and then select any of the loops in the timeline, all the other loops in the same section will also be extended. This is very handy! I could then later go in and terminate the ones I don’t like. The loops could also be shortened, to the left, with this technique. Just remember to hilight the loop so it has a solid color.
Cymbals are nice, but you usually want to control the decay time, when they should end. With the volume envelope I could take a very long cymbal ringing, and fade it out exactly at a specific point in the timeline. It’s very handy, you could use any long ringing cymbals and never worry about them playing over sections you don’t want. If you also change the pitch, you suddenly have a big set of cymbals available, from the same sample! Another case is taking drum samples to annotate an existing drum line, but you don’t want the existing kick in the drum sample to be present. All you need is to go inside the volume envelope and take down the kick slice volumes. No need to use eq to take out anything below 100Hz, the kick sound would still be heard in the higher frequencies — unless you of course want that as a production value. It’s a classical trick to put in multiple drum loops to make the final drum section sound more polyrhytmic and interesting (but that’s another story). It seems I spend more time nowadays to cut put material than adding — and that’s actually good news for me.
So I have nine days, including the weekends, to work on making tracks for this record company project (more about that later). Maybe most of you know the drag, when you work for yourself, there’s no manager, no schedules, deadlines, and things just will fall apart after a couple of days, you sleep until 11am, watch TV, browse the web, and so on. This time I will not fall into the trap! Two things that have saved me so far (I have two tracks done in two days) is to have an make-believe manager. This manager of mine is really tough, he wants results, so I need to please him (he also has a female director, she’s more interested in the bottom line.) The other thing that helps to write a daily status report, using voodoopad, of what I have accomplished. If the list is short, the the manager will get after me… I must say, I really admire self-starters and entrepreneurs, it’s very tough to constantly set goals for yourself, and drive things.
Most of us that produce — at least me — we hear a lot of the material as we know each part. But for a listener, they could get just overwhelmed. In general, a typical listener could keep track of up to three things in their mind. Any more musical overtures happening, and it becomes mush in their ears. So that’s something to be careful about. The other issue is the amount of energy going on at the same time. In dance music, the kick (and bass) is the most important sections. If the kick is drowned in material coming in at the same time in the 1/4 and 3/4 beats, the total effect could become very mushy, especially if you have compressors and other tools operating at the other end. One classical trick to avoid the kick to be drowned is to either let the kick be the only entry in the places where it’s heard. In other words, cut out anything else happening at those beats, bass, pads, effects… The other trick is to side-chain a compressor so that when the kick comes in, it will drive the other tracks, so those are muted. This is that pumping sound that is in and out of fashion from time to time. It seems to always be a crowd-pleaser, though… The thing I was actually working on was to take material, and slice it here and there, deliberately. So each part had a chance to be heard. This is where the volume envelopes in Ableton Live are so neat, I could just draw in the places where each track section should not be heard, and puzzle it all together. I was quite fascinating to suddenly hear each section have a saying along the timeline!
The stick hand controller has a small speaker, so when you for example play tennis and hit the ball, you hear the racket sound close to your ears. Same with other games, with the built-in rumble kit the controller is very natural. In the sports games, themselves, depending on the outcome of the game, the audience has different reactions, audiowise. Sometimes it’s really dramatic, like when the last pin finally falls in bowling… The default music in the setup section is this normal “Hello Kitty” nicety Japanese music, but when writing music for a game box, especially a generic one like Nintendo, you should not scare away anyone. Anyway, Nintendo did a very good job with this new game box.
There are multiband compressors, low CPU AUMatrixReverb, AUPeakLimiter and others. One of the most used, in my work, is the AUHighPass filter. This is a hard cutoff filter - it will filter out anything below a defined frequency threshold. The usefulness in production is that most of the tracks don’t need to include anything below let’s say 100Hz or so in the final mix. If it’s included, it just adds a lot of low-end rumble that will not enhance the specific track. Rather, it will all add up and cause low end energies that muddy up the final mix. There are some exceptions. For example, in dance music you want the sub-woofer parts, bass and kicks, have the energy present. And the AUHighPass filter actually will help out, as you then carve out the lower frequencies for well-defined instruments. But for hihats, snares, guitars, synths, voices, all the low-end rumble is not needed. I should actually make a default template for Logic and Live where this plugin is by default always included. Also, I’ve noticed that I need to put in this plugin across all tracks, otherwise if some have it, it will introduce latencies across the tracks… Thus the latencies are evenly distributed. Or, you could change the latency delay values for individual tracks to get everything back in line, but for me it’s just fastest to include this plugin on all tracks — it does not consume many CPU cycles, anyway.
I’ve tried all kinds of solutions to keep track of ISRC numbers, BMI registrations, project numbers, and so on, Excel spreadsheets, MySQL databases with web interfaces… The problem with most of these is that the maintenance takes time, cycles I rather would like to use to work on a mastering project, or writing music. Voodoopad is this nice open-ended scratch pad, or database, or list taking system. For web page handling and uploading I’m using Transmit the ftp server and BBEdit text editor. Yes, I’m old-fashioned, have a set of php functions I’m maintaining. Most musicians have their own promotion web sites nowadays, so it’s good to have good tools for updating the web site. I’m also usually running Quicksilver for quickly switching between applications. After a while you forgot how you could live without this app switching system. Sometimes I exit this application when doing studio work, just to be sure, then few apps run in my system — don’t want that crash happening in the middle of a big inspirational session 4am! The rest is all the iLife applications, iWork and so on. I also use LameBrain for LAME MP3 encoding and xACT for the few times I use FLAC (Apple lossless is Ok for my own use). Otherwise I use QuickTime Pro and iTunes for all the audio encoding/decoding needs.
Two examples where this is good to do — with DJ MIDI control setups — is the volume and EQ3 settings . It’s good to restrict the max volume to 0dB or something similar. In a busy DJ session you might by mistake push the volume slider or knob too far up, resulting in over 0dB signals sent to the master. With the EQ3 equalizer, for example with the low end bass, you don’t want to push the eq too far up, over 0dB, when tweaking the knob. Now, when you tweak it far right, you know that you will not exceed the max value you have set. This all is especially good with crazy DJ sessions, you take down the EQ low end with a track, and then to reset it for the next track, just move the knob all the way to the right. Also, don’t forget to tweak the knobs just before the DJ session starts, if the values are in a specific setting, and you start tweaking, you might initally get really odd and unexpected values. So it’s good to reset all of the knobs before the DJ session starts.
It’s usually good to try out various UI elements in the application with the option, control, command or shift keys, or even combinations, to see what happens. Sometimes you even get visual cursor changes indicating that the behavior is different…
I’ve been looking through the current controllers out there. Behringer BRC2000 is a rotary one, the BCF2000 looked OK, but I think the price is too high for what you get, especially as it only has eight rotary controllers — I would like to get three per channel, for a combination of either DJ eq, or with a switch using other effects. If someone made a MIDI controller similar to the Ecler Nuo4, that would be what I would purchase in a jiffy. Alas, Nuo4 only has volume MIDI controls for two of the four channels. I suspect that M-Audio will release something similar later, the new X-Session Pro is cheap, has four channels, but somewhat limiting, but it might do the job for the time being until better controllers show up. I also looked at the Novation Remote SL Zero, my biggest gripe with that one was that the slider ranges were very short, I really want very long slider ranges, with precision… Then again, maybe that’s another compromise I have to live with, as I liked the rest of the design. |
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Something that I need to improve myself with is producing and composing more tough music. The initial starting point is hard — I’m a vegetarian, happily married man working for a great fruit computer company in Silicon Valley, with few problems in life, so the amount of conflict in my life is extremely minimal. Does not exactly inspire one to be tough…
Ok, here’s another real-life scenario that happened minutes ago when I was tweaking two kicks triggering at the same time. I like to have two kicks, one is a strong sounded one that is heard through the mix, and one has a low boom sound that is good for club systems. If you just use either one, either you don’t get the low end, or you really don’t hear the kick, especially in cheaper systems that don’t go below 50Hz or so. So this is a good compromise.
I must confess, I have not used Ableton Beat Repeat plug-in that much (even if it has been around since the 5.0 days)
When you produce dance-music tracks, the goal is to deliver a product that DJs and mixers could easily use. Anyway, that’s at least a noble goal.
FYI, I just updated the blog Wordpress version to 2.0.5. I didn’t see anything odd, but in case something happened, let me know.
Here’s another trick I found just recently in Ableton Live — maybe it’s been there all the time. Something very common is to drag out loops further in time in the time view. I used to drag one at time - what a drag…
To talk more about ‘less is more’ production tricks, here are two other cases where I use Ableton Live’s volume templates in productions.
The fruit company I work for gave us all the whole thanksgiving week off — thanks to the fearless leader! So I’m home, and could finally work on the 
When I was working on a dance track yesterday, it seems a lot of time I spent chopping out things. Either removing track material, or even going on and taking out slices of the track to minimize the amount of energy going in.
Our kids got a Nintendo Wii today — after an early morning trying to find a store where the lien was short and they still had it. Anyway, I had to check out the sound solution — very impressed!
Maybe some of you know that MacOSX ships with a set of default AU audio plugins. If you enable Audio Units in Ableton Live you should see them in the plugin devices browser.
Let’s talk about other software I’m using in my studio (MacOSX). The main note taking tool, database system, I’m using is 
Here’s another nice and easy feature in Ableton Live 6.0. When you switch to MIDI map mode, and define controls, you could also specify in the MIDI mappings window the min and max values for the actual controllers.
If you drag over Ableton Live effects on a running system, by default the effect is enabled. This is not fun, as you suddenly have a big flanger effect running on let’s say the master channel. However, I noticed that if you keep the command (apple) key down while dragging over effects from the Live devices browser, the effect is then disabled by default.
I have a hard time using rotating knobs as the volume control, especially when doing DJ mixes… It seems I could never get a nice feeling of smooth changes, especially when pushing down one channel and up another one. It might also depend on my current Novation Remote 25 LE that I use temporarily as my controller — while waiting for the perfect DJ MIDI controller to arrive.
