I was working on rendering out a new 30-minute DJ promo with electro house using Ableton Live (more about that project later), and this really strange problem happened over and over. About 13 minutes into the mix the sound just disappeared for 20 seconds in the rendered version — this didn’t happen when playing back the same part in Ableton Live.

I tried all kinds of tricks, restarted the system, upgraded to 6.0.3 in case this was a known bug, re-warped the track, moved the problematic audio snippet to another track, even joined together the parts in case the clips stacked next to each other didn’t work. Nada, same problem.

My last attempt was the surgery tactic, as this problem happened when one track ended and the other started, I cut out four bars of the starting sound as a timeline operation. This fixed it. So something odd was recorded into the actual project at that point. I double-checked all the envelopes in case the mixer was off, or something else, but they all looked fine. So it was something internal.

That, or the combination of one track ending and the other starting caused a problem somewhere in the sound chain — it could have even been the Izotope Ozone plugin that was running in the background as a mastering chain. Anyway, as I run out of time, the surgery trick was the best I could do.

Lesson learned, learn your tools inside out so you could do all kinds of strange and quick operations to get results out in case mysterious problems appear.

Long time ago, in our own universe, the way to mix down whole songs was to be very quick with your fingers and move lots of sliders and pots around, or hire a couple of extra hands and tell them how to move them. That, or bouncing half-way done tracks to another track, leading to more noise in the analog world.

Today, with automation, you could record all the minute details of each track changes, volume, filter frequencies, amount of delay, and so on.

For a long time, the only way with the modern DAWs was to draw such lines by hand, and I got used to it, even down to just changing the track volume values by typing or using up/down buttons on the screen.

Then along came all the new nifty MIDI controllers, so you could record all the automation movements as long as the parameter was mapped to a MIDI knob or slider. Anyway, I tried it for a while, and I don’t know. The issue with the hand-controlled envelopes, for me, is that the actual changes are jerky and not clean. It has to do with most MIDI CC messages only allowing values between 0 and 127 — sometimes that’s enough, not not always. Also, a change using fingers is always not that linear. Finally, the biggest problem I had was that if I had to go in and redo the sequence, it was a matter of re-recording all the changes.

So. For me, I’m mostly just drawing envelope parameters by the computer — been used to it now for a long time, and it works just fine for me. I understand those who like the instant changes by tweaking a MIDI knob, and for me it takes a couple of mouse clicks, but that’s fine. As an example, in the picture above I’m changing the high pass filter frequency up and down for two back-to-back samples. If the frequency is too high, I just drag down the middle point and the job is done.

Any of you dealing with books knows about the ISBN standard. It’s really neat, you could do generic lookups of books and find the data on amazon. Or, if you use bookmooch, a nice service I recommend, when you place out books for the service, you just type in the ISBN number and you get all the relevant info from Amazon and similar services. Wikipedia also has a similar nice integration system for listing books based on the ISBN number.

So, what about songs and music tracks? The only official standard I know of is the ISRC standard. If you run a record label and don’t have an ISRC base number, get one now, it takes a short time and is free, and you could then use your record label identifier to create more ISRC numbers. After this you could identify each track by the ISRC number.

There are some commercial distribution sites that use ISRC (even enforce using it), but it’s not that common. This is a shame, as if ISRC — or a similar system — was widespread, Web 2.0 developers could write all kinds of really nice services. For example, if review blogs had the ISRC number listed, a smart system could find places wherefrom to purchase or download the music based on scanning through the blog entry. Just now such systems have to do intelligent data scraping and trying to identify the source based on artist and title, an even harder job as many titles and even artist names are reused over and over.

Something even more interesting would be if the ISRC number was embedded inside the mp3 or other digital formats, maybe even part of the audio track info, so removing or messing with the ISRC number would cause severe audio hickups. At least, if MP3 files had a default id tag with a unique identifier and enforced data entry — so they are valid — it would be a start. Alas, I don’t know how many burn in the ISRC number into their digital audio files.

Some CD audio tools such as wave burner makes it possible to burn in the ISRC value into the audio track itself.

Various performing rights organizations such as BMI also have their own special coding systems for registration of songs.

Anyway, my point is that if the book industry managed to standardized on a uniform way to identify books, the record industry should at least try to do the same, as the benefits would be huge. Until something like this happens, I’m trying to place ISRC numbers on all the releases.

I’ve tried to save nearly every single audio track I’ve used for production material, since four years back or so. Usually when the track is finished, I dump out the audio material as 24-bit audio AIFF files, and stuff them into my main sound bank. Then later I could go through and find things for re-use.

Recently I had to go in and look through a lot of material. As I did a lot of stuff in the pre-complex warp mode days of Ableton Live, the default warp modes were not optimized. Complex warp mode close to really good — you could hear artifacts, especially with low energy bass lines, but it’s the best we could get just now with the Ableton platform. So I’ve been painstakingly opening audio file after audio file, adjust the gain settings and switching warp modes.

The other thing I didn’t do in the early days — always learning along the way — was to encode the key of the melodic audio tracks, major/minor and so on. I actually found out when going through tracks that I tended to make a lot of synth tracks not major/minor, rather dorian major/minor and similar scales that could be used for either major or minor work. Interesting. Somehow my mind was thinking about re-use while doing the actual arrangements.

Anyway, by encoding the key in the file names and the clips, I could quickly scan in the browser for various audio material with a specific key, or close enough as in complex mode I could change the key.

This will be handy soon as I’m preparing for a live event at a local art gallery. I was thinking about composing something new, half-fast ambient music, but then I realized that instead I could just use all the material in my ever-growing sound bank for live improvisations. So I’m now telling the organizer that I’m not composing anything, instead using old material for new songs. Hehe.

I was listening to Holger Zilske/Dave DKs Rainshower EP, especially the MIDI Shower track. It has a lot of bursts of MIDI notes going here and there - I really like it.

I just wondered if this didn’t happen by mistake, i.e. there was a sudden burst of MIDI that happened on the track… Or then it was a deliberate production, if so very nice.

I had a similar mistake happening recently, Logic has this ancient bug with buffers — if you don’t clear them out, when you export a track as outside information, a lot of existing data buffer material is still in the buffers, causing all kinds of odd artifacts. It happened with an electro lead I was exporting to Live. But actually, the initial burst of 1/32 notes sounded really good, even better than the original one, so I just used it.

Similar things have happened before. Again, in Logic if I had plugin compensation enabled, sometimes the initial MIDI note was not played or exported. So if I had a steady quarter note run, the first one wasn’t exported. Anyway, I was in a hurry — and didn’t know the workaround (turn off plugin compensation), so I just exported the tracks and wrote songs with the first MIDI note not happening. Made it easier for the kick to show up in the beginning of the four bar loop, and also made the composition sound very different.

I suspect this has happened to many other producers. The one I’m thinking of just now while writing this entry is the famous erasure of the first minutes of the drum tracks by Steve Winwood in “While You See A Chance” — and this track became a hit, especially as the beginning part was so different by him replacing the beginning of the song with a keyboard introduction.

You need a unique label whether it is your artist name, record label, group name, or your own alias. This is a very important marketing decision. The name will then later be the brand that defines what the label sound is, or what the artist produces — no wonder some producers have multiple aliases to separate their artist works from each other.

It’s quite OK to use your own real name as the artist name. Others like a proxy name, that’s fine.

To get a good name, first do a search based on your candidates. It’s not good to take an existing artist or label name. Use Discogs and any big online music distribution system to find out if the name is already taken. Even a small variation — let’s say Prinse — is not considered Ok. It might even lead to a law suit. The only way to really legally protect a name is to get a trademark on it, and this across multiple markets/countries, so it’s very expensive. Maybe that’s one reason why using one’s own name is somewhat legally valid, as they can’t take that from you.

The other way to find out about names is to do a web search and see what comes out. If the name is associated with something negative in a language, or even in English, then don’t use it. I recently saw a spam email about a perfume called Fracas, which was funny, as fracas means a brawl, a noisy fight….

The other input from the search is to see if you get any valid hits pointing back to your site or if you get generic hits. The more unique a name is, the better chance it will point at just the material associated with the record label, artist, or group. So that’s why it’s good to take a name and somewhat twist it, style Curve becomes Currve. Or combine the words together, such as what we did with PlanetoidPark, to make it unique.

Personally, in this internet age, I do think unique names will be more and more important, for quick lookups and finding material.

Let’s say you have this really nice snare sound, but no original MIDI information, and you want to make rolls and other variations with this loop. You could cut and paste the loops and put it together, but with Live and loop points this is so easy and trivial.

Just cut the beat where you want the roll to happen, and play around with this new loop setting, make it shorter, start on odd beats, and so on.

You could even use envelopes, volume or pitch, to make the drum sound different.

I use this technique quite a lot to spiffy up kick, snare and various drum loops, and break up the monotony around the eight or sixteen bar places.

You could even go to the extreme to make really short loops by moving the original warp points closer to make that — maybe overused by now - stuttering effect.

Ok, here’s another trick I used tonight, kind of found it by mistake, but I’m sure many producers have figured this one out and used it.

I made a separate track in Ableton Live with a very strong autofilter that cuts off a lot of the low end, to make the sound high-sounded. Then I started to drag in various loops that already played in other tracks, and let the same loop play in this auto-filter track, with this other radical setting.

This sounds really nice, it double certain melodies or themes, or then they could continue with this other setting even after the original one has faded out. Makes it possible to reuse various parts and make the track more dynamic with the same material. You could also put in automation with filter changes so it sounds more dynamic.

Actually, recently I’ve used a lot of automation with the AUHighpass filter (MacOSX default plugin), they are already assigned to the tracks to cut off any low end not needed, but I play with the frequency values and sweep up and down to make the sound more dynamic along the way. Or, you could also automate the Ableton autofilter sweeps, as well.

As promised I really want to dump any insights and lessons learned about starting a record label, in my case PlanetoidPark, stay tuned for releases out soon.

But first, about the motivation. Why should you start one? There are many excellent record labels out there, and believe me, most of them really want good material, if they get it, they are happy. And I don’t think they are out to squeeze out every single drop of money from the starving artist. Most labels are really tight operations, and the work for the love of music, a specific domain they want to promote and cultivate.

So if you don’t have a strong motivation, just go out there and find a good list of record companies and give them quality material. Also, remember, if you start a label, reserve at least 20% or more of your spare time to work with non-music work, that’s just how it is. If you are not prepared for this, don’t start a label, there’s nothing worse than a good intent that is just put aside and it slowly dies over time.

So back to the motivation. You need have a strong motivation or two to start a label. Money? Well, I don’t think most dance or electronic music labels are exactly enterprises that result in you becoming a millionaire, sorry. Fame? Try to list record label owners… Sex? Heh?

Here’s maybe a couple of more meaningful and realistic motivations.

You really feel that the dance music is moving with the speed of a glacier, and most music you hear is a variation of something else, and you want to create a future new path with music. Good. You know of many excellent artists that you would like to cultivate and bring forth, and let them do the music side. Yep, good motivation. You think that acid house still has a chance, just needs another angle and some new blood. Yes, good. You want to promote good music for the consumers, and you have a good plan how to do it. Excellent. You want to have musical control of the sound and music produced. That’s something I suspect is a very common motivation, and it also a good one.

Such pure motivations usually help a lot concerning kick-starting a label and getting attention. Being honest through the whole process also helps. The labels, distributors, artists and everyone are very much interconnected, so if the motivation is negative — let’s say something nasty such as stealing artists from another label — the reputation is very quickly tainted. There’s enough business for everyone, so it’s better to help each other out. So just share the resources and good results will manifest.
More later!

Here’s another Ableton Live trick that I’ved used a lot recently. You could make short one bar, or even shorter loops and get that repetition loop sound that is popular in electronic house music, or what DJs do with beat repeaters. But what I wanted was to then also change the envelopes of those loops, such as the pitch values going upwards or downwards.

So what you could do is to loop a section, drag it out until you have four or eight bars (or what you need) and then do consolidate (Command-J) of the clip. This makes the loop a self-contained audio snippet. After this you could go in and change the envelopes, such as pitch or volume settings. For example, you could have a short repeating loop, and make the pitch go upwards after four bars or so.

YouTube is really nice as it has now a lot of video clips from the eighties, especially music I listened to and got inspired by. The early to mid-eighties was great time concerning music and new ways to use synthesizers, instead of progressive rock use (melodies, solos), synths now became a real part of the whole system, drum machines, et rest. And musicians explored this inside out. And you didn’t need to be a concert pianist or trained jazz musician to make synth music. That was liberating.

Cabaret Voltaire - Sensoria, while now listening to it again I’m amazed how they already did a lot of electronica tricks, drum programming, samples, repeats, and so on. The video is wacky and refreshing, too. I’ve yet to see a contemporary video, with the exception of Beck’s productions, that are as interesting, especially with the budget they most likely had.

Freur - Doot Doot, took me ages to get this song on 7″ vinyl long time ago. They had a very different take on music and how to use synths. Freur then later became Underworld and the rest is history. They also invented the whole idea of a symbol as a name (sorry Prince), Freur was closest to how to pronounce their symbol.

Heaven 17 - Penthouse & Pavement — yes, Heaven 17 become more and more commercial at the end, but before that they really mixed drum machines and pop music together into all kinds of funny versions. Amazingly, this track could be played for the dancing audience at that time…

The Human League - Being Boiled, yes synths sounded gritty long time ago, so electro house is nothing new. As with many similar bands, they became more and more commercial, until the original audience had deserted them. I even forgot that this song had a Buddhist theme! And no quantization, just plain finger playing.

When listening through these songs, I realized that they all had catchy tuned, or at least there was an attempt to write melodies. But what I now also found striking, in hindsight, was that these bands started with a pure intent, and later became more and more commercial (Human League, Heaven 17), but some stuck to their core (Cabaret Voltaire), and Freur just evolved into Underworld, and as Underworld it is still changing. Maybe the third alternative is the best.

I still think the original Linndrum kick was the best electronic kick sound I ever heard.

Anyway, I went through my collection of kicks tonight — every time I finish a project, I just stuff aside the sounds used into my sound bank, and it becomes after a while very non-organized. I wanted to classify them and also go through with Ableton Live and check the sound qualities.

The classification was interesting, I ended up with just four sub-folders, one with house music kicks, one electro/techno ones, one with experimental kicks, and then a dedicated folder for any non-steady four-beat bars. The techno kicks were mostly synthetic, dry, or otherwise dark kick sounds, for example.

When going through the samples, I noticed that the kick sound was in many cases very different between Ableton beat and complex modes. Since the early days we always warped drum sounds with beat mode, complex was not around, and beat worked just fine with non-tonal material. Anyway, I was really surprised to hear that complex warp mode (introduced in Ableton Live 5), actually made some old drum sounds much better, more subtle parts showed up. In other cases the beat mode made the kick sound punchier. Sometimes just one or the other sounded wobbly. So that was another operation I had to do, anyway this is good to know in future.

I also put aside twenty kick drum sounds, they are here in a zip archive format (right mouse-click), and actually in Ableton Live 6.0 project format, but in case you don’t have 6.0, you could get the samples from inside the folder itself. Permission is granted to freely make excellent music with them (but not to redistribute them as a package). I added a set of normal and also experimental kicks for more fun with your music productions. The samples are 24-bit 44.1Khz AIFF and WAV files.

No, this is about Propellerheads’ Reason, not about reason in general — not that reasoning makes sense.

I think I purchased Reason over three years ago. At that point it was an interesting package to try out, a self-contained studio. Over the years I used it less and less, mostly as I got more involved with Logic and Ableton Live use, and had less use of Reason of many, eh, reasons. In addition, I didn’t like the 3.0 version, the value with that upgrade was not that sensational.

But I always kept it around, recently on my wife’s iBook. I wanted to start working on electro house tracks — a combination of gritty synths and really clean house drum loops, so I just fired up Reason while watching TV. I added Subtractor and Matrix editor pairs, up to 12 at the end. And in the Matrix editor I used 32 bars and hit command-R to make initial random patterns, including velocity, and then even out so most of the tones hit about the same key, but not always. Matrix is neat in the sense that it really munches MIDI information around in the random mode, and you could get very unexpected and interesting sound patterns.

Then I just dumped out all the material as 24-bit AIFF files, and now I’m in the middle of taking the stems into Ableton Live and do more middle-level programming to fit things together, and then of course roll in those clean house drum loops. It will be interesting!

Anyway, Subtractor has that nice gritty electro vibe sound that I was looking for, so I got the job half-way done now. It’s also neat to have a system that works on a 1GHz iMac, just like that. So I have renewed hope to use Reason even more in future.

Long time ago, MIDI sequences were all we had. But with all the new cool tools, starting with Acid and Ableton Live, suddenly it was quite handy to just use plain audio loops for various purposes. I had my initial share of excitement using Acid and acidized loops, until a month later or so I realized that the same loops were use in commercials and tons of other places.

So the whole idea of using loops went for me to the back burner. Many, including me, felt that it was just plain cheating to use pre-fabricated loops, instead of sweating at the keyboard and doing the hard work oneself. If nothing else, the tracks and songs were fresh compared with using already made loops that were most likely used in many other songs.

But those pesky loops started to crawl back in. It started with the pre-installed Apple Loops in Logic — it was just so handy to drag in an audio loop from the Apple Loops browser as a starting point.

So far I’ve only used drum loops, and that’s where things will stop in my case. I’m not using any melodic loops, synth loops, and so on. I have a big pile of both my own create drum loops, as well as other synth loops from past projects that I collect in my own sound bank, and from time to time I reuse these in other projects.

But I will get a set of house-music based drum loops soon, this as I could anyway import them via Ableton and tweak the loops into tiny pieces using alternate starting points, use volume envelopes of all kinds, change pitch envelopes, and so on. So it’s quite OK, in my mind, to use such pre-defined drum loops, as long as they are processed and made unique, again.

I should also start exporting my loops for others to use, as it’s good to give back anything you have made for others to use and make successful music with, I don’t mind about who gets credits, as long as someone thinks the material is useful.

The music production realm has changed so much, including how music is done, so the whole idea of mixing and matching various audio parts is just how things are done today, and that’s fine, as long as interesting music is published.

I got the taste of drum machines back in 1983, I think. We had a gig in a local TV program with a band long time ago, and somehow I got the local Linn distributor to borrow us a Linn Drum machine for the TV session. I picked it up from the company, went straight to the TV recording room, put the machine up, did a loop, and used it live when we played.

Me and a friend had great fun with the Roland TR-808 back in the late eighties, we used to sit on the floor with the TR-808, a Jupiter-6, a mike and a Portastudio and lots of beer, and write 12-16 songs a day.

Going forward in time, a lot of my drum parts were done initially using Reason, it has a nice pattern drum machine, then LinPlug LMIV and the built-in drum kits in Logic such as Ultrabeat and various EXS24 kits. It was matter of punching the midi keyboard and put together kicks, snares, hihats and various combination loops.

Which leads to today. Nowadays, in Ableton Live, I’m just reusing old loops and drum samples I’ve saved from former projects, import them in, and change the loop points around, pitch shift, different volume envelopes, and so on.

For example, for a kick, I just take in a single kick sample, and I could quickly make a four-bar loop out of it by just making one single two-bar version, and drag out the loop. Or change the loop frequency to get a stuttering kick. So it’s like painting with drum sounds. Makes it all very easy and interesting.

I could also layer drum sounds, such as kicks, and with envelopes define which one starts and which one ends. Or quickly make reverse cymbals, or very second clap reverse.

It might be that I’m getting nostalgic next month and will get a used drum machine, who knows. Meanwhile, the paint-drum loops approach works really well, and who would have known long time ago how one could make drum sound today by direct audio snippet manipulations. I have not even explored Specrasonics Stylus RMX, which seems to be very much in use by other producers.

Maybe it would be worth talking about loop uses next.