More about volumes. The obvious, first though when you can’t hear a certain instrument in the mix is to increase the audio level of this instrument. Then others are not heard, those are raised. At some point everything is clipping, and even if modern audio engines are 32-bit (soon maybe even 64-bit) resolution engines, too much clipping and overdrive will just cause a big mush. So the final mix does not sound airy, rather harshly compressed, especially if a limiter is in place. If you look at such mixes, the tops are chopped off, rather than having nice waves that reach the upper part naturally.

So here are some more tricks how to get everything heard. This one is about how the loudspeakers work, especially with big systems. The low end has a slow frequency, so it takes a while for the cone to move in and out. The more material is pumping down there, the more movements the cones have to do, and instead of having a nice pumping movement that will move the air and get the feeling into the stomach of the dancing audience, it’s mostly a quick rumble with no emphasis on anything particular.

So. Let’s narrow down what’s operating down there. To start with, any other instruments and kicks and bass (with some exceptions) does not need to go down to below 120Hz. So just filter it all out with a high pass filter. The mix gets airier, and less volumes to drive the mix. Most other instruments don’t really have any interesting frequencies that low, anyway — with some exceptions, of course.

Secondly, and this trick could be used from time to time, just let the kick drive, nothing else. If you have a bass line, chop out or leave out any bass tones moving while the kick is doing its thing. With MIDI it is easy, but even with a pre-existing loop, with for example Ableton Live you could draw a volume envelope (see picture above) where the bass is not driving the cones while the kick is doing it.

I must again state that this technique will flavor the track — if you really want the bass line to follow the kick, which used to be common in ancient dance music, go ahead. Anyway, in many trance projects, this is a common technique, as well.

You could extend this to any other instruments, too. Ultimately this technique is heavily used in combination with a side-chain compressor so that when the kick is operating, most if not all the other tracks volumes are down via the compressor, leading to this hypnotic pumping sound that comes in and out of flavor from time to time.

To continue with this theme, Ableton Live has an amazing set of features for handling such a simple and obvious thing as volume. Each clip has a volume level (see above left), so you could control the volume per clip, in addition to the audio track volume. If you duplicate the same clip and change the values per clip, you have another dimension of volume control!

Even better, see picture, right side, each clip has a volume envelope that controls the volume during the time-line of the clip. You could then do operations from simple cleanup of unwanted snare hits to staccato effects, slow fade in/outs at the beginning/end of the loop, and much more.

The third part is volume automation, you could automate the track along the time line for total fade in/outs or specific volume changes.

To be complete, the last way to control the volume is the master volume slider. However, if you change this from 0dB to something lower, it means that the final rendered track will also be below 0dB and then you need to normalize it back — or better not touch this volume slider in production work, rather the computer or DAC volume controls.

All together, there are so many ways in Ableton to control the total volume settings, so you seldom run out of features in order to control the output. Next, how to take down volume levels without even touching the volume knobs!

This is one posting of a series of issues related to volume and gain control with Ableton Live and music production in general. Funny, it’s the most obvious thing, but there’s lots to talk about it.

One of the unfortunate facts of Ableton Live is that one of their best 6.0 features is not visible by default. If you resize in the mixer section the view for the volume sliders, suddenly you could see the additional info fields as shown in the picture above. You now have a peak max field showing how high the max peak of the track is reaching, as well as longer volume sliders and a field where you could type in directly the values.

I learned my way that having the default 0dB values for starting tracks is not good — even if the internal audio engine is supposedly 32-bit and has some over head, it’s easy to overdrive the combined output of all the tracks, especially if there are many, causing the known mush that is not pleasant. So to avoid this, my new production template has all the tracks by default -3dB so there’s plenty of overhead.

My mastering plugin, Izotope Ozone, will then maximize the output to the brickwall waveforms that we all have to produce nowadays, but at least it also has some headroom to operate in. Again, I think it’s never good to feed in multiple tracks with loud values to the final mixdown inside the actual audio engine. Subtle digital distortion is nasty.

Also, the nice thing with the peak value indicator is that you could see along the track how high the track reaches, let’s say it goes peak-wise up to +3.6dB. That means that you should either take down the track -3.6dB down to the zero level, use a limiter that takes the peaks to 0dB, or do something else to take down the signal.

Remember that in Live there are so many ways to control the volume, even on the clip level, so more about this three-dimensional volume handling in Live next.

A friend of mine wanted me to play some music at her book party, she’s an author. So I said I would take my MacBook Pro with Live and do live music on the spot. This is in downtown San Jose.

So I spent most of last night and this afternoon to prepare for the gig. It was a strange preparation — I just went through my huge sound bank and marked various files with the key values so I know in what key they are. Then I downloaded a lot of strange audio voice material from the web.

So it will be a combination of on-the-spot techno compositions and voices talking. I should hit the record button and save it, in case it’s worth saving for the future.

What I learned when going through my sound bank is that boy I tend to use certain keys for composition, A major and minor was the dominant one, second was D minor/major. There was an odd F# loop here and there.

The bass sounds were interested to analyze in Live. Alas, even in complex mode the warping effect could be heard, but that’s how it is with the current Ableton Live warp algorithms. I learned also that I could quickly do a bass line by taking an arpeggiator pattern and duplicate this clip and then take down the pitch 24 points or so — instantly a double arpeggiato line that could be used as a bass line.

Anyway, I will play it safe/crazy by having sections with just drums, effects and voices.

If this works out well, and if people like it, I might get on tour here in the Bay area playing my laptop at various coffee places!

We are talking about compilation mixes of tracks mixed together, and those could be downloaded from the web. If you have visited various underground dance music forums, such as protonradio.com forums, Global Underground and so on, you can’t miss seeing dozens or more postings of such mixes every day. We are drowning in them!

Long time ago, and should be still today, the idea with mix tapes was to promote songs, artists and labels. Even if uploading music without permission for others to download it is not legally OK concerning copyright laws, the labels tolerate this, especially if it’s a form of promotion. So if someone uploads a mix with not listing the artist, track and label, that promotion is not happening. So it’s not fair. Please always include this listing, so the information is then later gathered via search spiders, or is a form of web advertisement for the artist and the label.

Also, I think nowadays that the classical back-to-back mixing of tracks is not that exciting. Using Ableton or any other decent tool, any tracks could be beat-matched together, so it’s nothing special, really.

I’m usually excited about mixes where the mix artist has taken time to put together a really strange, beautiful or strong combination of material where the mix is suddenly something bigger than the parts. That means that you use your own loops to annotate the mix, and do all kinds of interesting cuts and changes in the flow. This is what Ableton and the other tools are for — not just to beat-match.

I do listen to mixes, either to check out new upcoming producers, or find out what’s happening in the big underworld dance world, where trends come and go like the morning newspaper. I also sometimes check out ‘live mixes’, recorded on the spot, to see how the DJ is doing the show — been listening to a live Speedy J techno mix recently which was very, very interesting.

Anyway, if someone wants to bubble up from the myriad mixes every day, they really need to do some homework and make sure that it’s something special. Sorry, so many mixes, so little time.

Just to continue a little bit more — in case there are other Ultrabeat current and future users (it’s really great for electro/techno tracks!). One important button in the lower left corner (see image) is the pattern button. If you drag this pattern image into the logic track, then the pattern created in the track is copied over! This makes it easy to go in later and edit the patterns in the Logic MIDI editor, or otherwise reuse the patterns with other drum machines.

Don’t forget then to turn off the sequencer button (see the blue button just above). If you copied over the MIDI track info into the same track, and you use both the sequencer on and the track, the sequencer overrides — it means that even if you have parts in the track with no midi information, Ultrabeat will continue playing the current pattern.

I like systems where you could copy over patterns from a drum system into any other track (Reason has a similar system). This makes it possible to use drum patterns with any other drum machine. Or, sometimes I even use the drum machine patterns with any other synth as one way to make interesting and odd arpeggiator sequences. A lot of my composition model is to try out unexpected things and from that forward. I like random pattern generators as well (more about that later).

Recently I’ve started to use Ultrabeat from Logic Pro as the main drum machine system for minimalist/techno productions.

It takes a while to figure out the UI, but this quicktime movie at the Apple web site would help someone getting started with this drum machine (assuming you have Logic Pro, of course).

The reason I like Ultrabeat, and I have many other drum systems available, each having their good points, is that in addition of simulating the TR808/909 sound that is needed for a lot of this modern electro/minimalism techno movement we have just now, you could tweak the sounds further quite a lot.

In addition, it has random pattern generation that I like using from time to time, as well as envelopes tied to the pattern, so I could make for example the drum kicks sound differently depending on the bar position.

It also has a recording mode, I could build a set of patterns, and record the order while hitting the keyboard and the track is playing.

I’ve read about problems related to adding your own drum loops, the UI is not that easy to grasp. For me, it’s not that often I add in drum loops — I start from an existing set or using the synthetic ones, and then modify them further so they sound fresh.

But what I often do is to have multiple Ultrabeats running, one with just the kick, and others with just the snare, then one with hihats, and one with percussions, and so on. By separating these elements I could run different kinds of compressors on each one of them, or adjust the balance from the UI, instead of tweaking stuff inside Ultrabeat itself.

New mix out: Pretty Gritty Strange January 2007. Electro house as its prettiest, grittiest, and strangest. New series, collect them all!

This mix is more of a collage of material, others and mine, trying to take existing material and just go beyond the normal mix tape format, own loops, cutting things into pieces and rearranging them, adding effects here and there, sometimes just plain wildly.

Anyway, just wanted to take the art of mixing one step forward, or something like that.

I went up to the city (San Francisco) Friday evening to check out the DirtyBird Records event at Mezzazine. Dirtybird Records is this really cool new SF-based label, headed by Claude VonStroke. I really liked the music played, especially songs like Puck Hertzblut03 by Stephan Bodzin (check out his myspace account, the song might be there for a while). Claude VonStroke played this over a big PA system, wow! Speak of air wobbling.

Anyway, it’s good to go and check events like this, you get influences. For me, it will be a period of more Berlin-inspired music, most likely. Compare this with the scene in San Jose, lounges where if lucky someone is playing piano-based house music, ack. Fortunately culture is 50 minutes away with the car.

Techno music is fascinating, for me. Each time I think it will just die a miserable death due to overproduction and cloning, it morphs into something else. Especially in Berlin, they seem to always get a new angle to it all.

Here are some more mumblings from me about an important topic — promotion. You make lots of cool music, but if nobody knows about it, that’s sad, as music is to be enjoyed. This is a big planet, there’s always one individual somewhere, or many many, that would like to listen to your music.

Anyway, about web sites. To start with, get a good domain name, if possible part of your artist name or record label. The more unique and easy to remember, the better. If it is unique, the right site will quickly show up in any web searches. Compare “Cool Music Records” versus “ZharkMusic”. If you have not yet registered your artist name or label, do it ASAP. Also keep it alive, if you forget to keep the domain up and running, most likely some odd person selling snake oil will pick it up and use it for viral marketing.

Secondly, make it easy to find stuff on your web site, spend a lot of time making sure it’s easy to navigate.

It seems more and more artists and record labels use Flash-only sites. They look cool, but they are not that easy usually to navigate. Even worse, web search spiders usually can’t traverse the information at such sites, so you lose all the cool info that could point back to you from Google/Yahoo/Live, ack! If you know about site maps, make one and export it, the spiders will love using that one.

Put links from your site to any place where the customer could find or purchase your music, the easier the better. If possible one click away! Link to other interesting web sites, even the competition. It does not hurt, and if you help others, they will notice you and help you back. Also, if you want a higher hit rate with search engines, such as Google, the best is to get cross-links from other sites pointing back at your site, especially high quality ones. This is why it’s so important to put your URL in any promotional material, especially at digital download sites.

Update the look of the site at least once a year. Like a house, it needs a fresh cover of paint from time to time. Also update the contents at least once a week. The really good sites even have an RSS feed that shows any new changes, but usually those are tricky to put in place.

Hook a blog or a forum to the site. Blogs are easy. Forums are usually tough, as it really requires a lot of people to take part in the discussions, and you need to really make sure that the spammers don’t take over the forum. But blogs should not take so much effort, and it will get those interested to show up at the site over and over. A way to subscribe to a general email mailing list is also something very good.

So in general, refresh and get new content. A well-designed and maintained web site is the facade nowadays for the enterprise you work with. If it looks good, it’s a good marketing image that will help with the rest of your promotions, too.

Many artists and labels also use MySpace, or Myspace exclusively. It’s kind of OK, I like the free streaming of max four songs from Myspace and the social networking, but boy some of the pages look really over-the-top. Sometimes I wonder if that’s a good image for the brand…

I like Eric Prydz productions, quite original and interesting. Just noticed with his latest mix, the Transitions Guest Mix 2006-12-17, that he prefers more minimalist productions, similar to a lot of his fellow swedish producers.

A lot of the underground dance music is becoming techno/minimalist in nature, even with progressive house productions, so maybe that’s the way it goes.

As for why there are so many excellent Nordic producers out there, compared with the amount of people living up there. My guess is that internet + not much to do at wintertime + high level of education especially in arts has something to do with it. Also, with the social system in place, there’s a better chance to do art than having to worry about getting food on the table every single day. Here in USA, if you don’t have any private support system in place, it’s just plain tough to live on music.

Who knows, I’m from a Nordic country myself, and when I lived in Finland and Sweden many years ago there was nothing like this happening concerning producers such as Eric Prydz, Axwell, Luomo, Steve Angello, Trentemoller and many more… Yes, we had A-ha, and it was actually a very indie-music based band that was forced into a commercial role, initially, but that’s another story.

Here are a couple of other interesting ideas of using the built-in AUHighpass and AULowpass AU plugins that are part of the default MacOSX installation.

I was using them one night to test out the frequency ranges of my near-field monitors, it was interesting to hear how low and high the monitors could reproduce frequencies — this by filtering upwards or downwards audio material.

Then I wanted to also find out if my hearing has decreased, a constant worry when dealing with music business. Fortunately, I could still hear up to 18.5KHz, after all these years, so I’m happy.

You could also sweep down to various frequency ranges and see how much energy is present, or isolate problematic frequency areas. There’s also a band pass filter — AUBandPass — that you could use for this purpose.

These filters don’t take much CPU cycles. The only issue I’ve had with them so far is latency delays, but by placing the same filter on all the tracks it seems to handle the compensation automatically.

Here’s another trick I’m using sometimes quite a lot, good to share in case someone else would like to do something similar. Progressive house, especially, makes a lot of use of backwards cymbals just before a break or other section starts. It’s very easy to turn any sound clip in Ableton Live backwards with the reverse button.

But what I’m also doing is to change the pitch of the cymbal when the backwards cymbal is triggering. The pitch envelope does not always need to be linear, it could also change, even going up and down from the zero baseline. This way the same cymbal sound could be used many times, and each case sounds different and interesting compared with the standard backwards cymbal that is close to a cliche nowadays.

In addition, I sometimes put a ping-pong delay on the cymbals, so they ring out with the pitch changes a bit further down the time line. Experimentation like this will produce many new kinds of cymbal hits that are not ordinary.