It’s actually good modern DAWs have a lot of functionality — never a dull moment. Anyway, I’m usually falling into the trap of reading the manuals inside out, and trying to learn it all in one big session. It seldom works.

It’s better to learn one thing at a time, one feature a day or so. For example, you could go through Logic’s feature set, for example the key bindings, and use control-P for a day until your brain is programmed to realize that: “Hey it’s nice that I could switch on the left side between control strip mode and normal mode.”.

Or with Ableton Live, use command-option-B for a while until your brain gets the message that this is for opening and closing the browser view.

It is true that you need to start from somewhere, but just get things up and running with simple projects, and then learn the complexity one thing at a time.

It’s been a while since I uploaded free music at this site, anyway, here’s something, Mental Beats. It’s a 45 minute composition consisting of many parts and themes, minimalist and techno, and something similar. I’ve never done a bigger body of minimalist music, so that was one reason I wanted to put this together. I also wanted this to be a long mix, so all the compositions are my own, but it’s a 45 minute long Ableton Live project.

The compositions and most of the work was done during a Sunday in January 2007 with some stems pre-composited on Friday, that was a busy Sunday, indeed. I did some post production on parts of this mix last week.

What’s the title about? Oh, just having weird thoughts about investigating beats inside a mind, having dreams about music, just the strange concept of how mentally you could do a lot of stuff, without the need of any physical sound waves, spooky or what. Yes, this is one of our two cats, photo tweaked with Aperture and Key Note. A mental cat!

I don’t know how long this will be available, so please download it in case you are interested.

Maybe some of you know that I’m somewhat active on the Ableton Live DJ forum. Check out the forums in case you are interested in Ableton Live for DJ purposes, a lot of issues and new tricks are discussed there every day, and this forum is actually quite clean and fun, no big religious debates.

Anyway, one idea we came up with recently was to take tracks from the Tracks section where various producers are listing links to their new productions, and make this to a showcase mix. Here’s the link to the first showcase mix, ALDJ Mix Showcase 001. Actually mix showcase 002 is already in the works.

Now, if you want to contribute material, check out the forum postings about the 002 showcase mix, here’s one of the threads.

It was fun, but also a challenge, to mix this one, as the music is eclectic from slow chill up to drum and bass, in the same mix, or, from 118 BPM to 175. Also, there are many different kinds of styles. But that was also the fun part, to see what could be done with such widespread material. Anyway, check it out, for me it’s fun listening to a wide domain of electronic music. It was the first time I mixed drum & bass as well, and it’s not easy, I learned the hard way.

The other thing that happened was that I got another interesting idea about working with new electronic music artists and net labels, more about those plans shortly!

Found this via a posting on osxaudio or BigBlueLounge that it’s called nowadays - Sounds Good podcasts. These are audio podcasts with images included, talking about music production, focusing on Logic. They are a little bit hokey because there are ads here and there, but I actually learned a couple of cool modulation tricks with Logic’s EXS24 sampler, for example how to have a drum track modulate the volume and filter settings on a loaded sample which I will test out shortly.

Seems today has been a day of watching videos. Here’s a good set of videos about Logic use, from the Seattle Logic Pro User group, presented by John Silverman (toysun). It covers a lot of Ultrabeat, how to rearrange material, creating Apple loops, and much more. The presenter even showed how the mysterious HyperEdit makes sense — I got an ahaa experience concerning making 1/64 note drum roll sequences in drum MIDI edits.

It was also fun listening to another content fanatic about creating tons of material as audio loops. I do this myself, everything is saved as a pack rat, and reused from time to time. He said a good point, if too many options, such as keeping the project as pure MIDI and plugin data, too many choices… Also, if the plugins are outdated, the project might not work. With all these new time-stretching algorithms the quality of re-used 24-bit audio is quite OK.

Here’s a cool video about the famous Amen sample. It’s also a documentary about how the sample has been used, how it started the Jungle drum scene, and at the end of the 18 minute video there’s a really good discussion about copyright laws, and how this sample is now used in a commercial sampling package for commercial reasons, why most of the music today is locked down for any similar use.

Personally, I never understood how to dance to jungle music… When I think of it, I’ve never used the Amen sample as I know. It was fascinating to hear how the sample has been tweaked, pitched down, and so on, to make tons of variations of the same 6 second sample recorded in 1969.

I also liked how the video was put together, like an album playing from beginning to end, very creative.

I think a lot is happening concerning consumers and audio just now. Many of you know of last.fm, pandora.com and now slacker.com. The idea is roughly the same — you create an account on these systems, define channels of music you like based on either artists or general genres, and then the service will stream similar kinds of artists and music. You have a chance to vote if you liked it or not, so the stream is constantly fine tuned.

I’ve been using an account on pandora for a day, and I made a very eclectic set of channels spawning from Todd Rundgren to Michael Mayer. I could combine your channels to a QuickMix channel where various tracks emerged. Due to my eclectic channel setup I got everything from New Faces (60ies) to very contemporary techno. It was fun listening, constantly surprised, but I had to vote out some of the more plastic trance music that bubbled up from time to time.

Slacker is very similar, you could signal what you like and what you don’t like. You could read more about their big plans about satellite-provided downloads to original hardware at their web site.

Personally, as a consumer I like this model, as I could pick up interesting artist and music. As an example, the Todd Rundgren channel suddenly played Feist - Mushaboom (Postal Service Mix) which was a fun idea of taking contemporary singer material and make an electronica mix around it.

As a producer and label owner, this is tough. last.fm at least has a way for smaller labels to provide music for their service. pandora expects CDs, and many of us new labels are not into CD distribution, so it means that we need to make compilation CDs from time to time. It’s also hard to bubble up in such services due to the massive amount of material they are most likely receiving. slacker.com I don’t even know about how they handle label relations — I suspect again that the big labels have high priority.

I would not be surprised if any of the existing underground dance music channels online would start with something similar — actually I blasted off emails to certain parties about possible opportunities here.

Anyway, we are drowning in music, and something like this makes it possible for consumers to find new music, so I’m all for these kinds of new services. They are also free for the basic service, and 128kpbs streaming is OK for work, so I can’t complain.

Going through dance tracks, it’s sometimes very obvious if a DJ has produced a track or not. In one sentence: they make tracks that are easy to mix together with other tracks.

Going through details about this. Such tracks have a long intro with just plain drums or material with no strong melodies, making it easy to mix it in. Similarly, at the end there’s a long section where it’s easy to mix it out.

The format is very 16 or 8 bar centric, the breaks start at such parts, are multiples of 8 or 16 bars. Same with any other known sections in the track. It’s seldom the tracks have an odd thing thrown in, causing problems mixing other tracks in, or even for someone dancing getting back to the pace.

The track has long sections of repetitions, makes it possible for the DJ to use filter sweeps or other effects to put in their own touch to the track.

The track as no sudden surprises, such as abrupt volume changes, tempo changes, empty spaces with nothing suddenly happening, and so on.

The track is also of decent length, not just barely three minutes, rather at least five minutes or more. It has a smaller breakdown in the beginning, and a bigger breakdown around four minutes or so. The breakdowns are not mandatory, but it’s just one of those standard patterns most tracks have today.

As a nice bonus, such tracks have here and there a nice repetitive pattern, such as a singer pattern, that could be used as a acappellas somewhere else.

Now, producers could indeed do anything they want with their tracks. With Ableton Live and other similar tools the DJ could put together a DJ-friendly track, as well. If you really want both, make two versions, one is your artistic representation, and one is a remix that is suitable for DJ purposes. Also, if you never DJ:ed, but are producing dance music, it’s worth trying it out so you learn all this in a real-life scenario.

The latest Ableton newsletter had this URL with new YouTube video where Robert Henke shows Simpler in action. It’s really worth checking out, as you will get a lot of ideas how to incorporate Simpler into all kinds of projects. Also, Henke talks towards the end about the design philosophy behind Live — simple tools build more complexity, such as a brush for a painter could create complex results.

Samplers are actually sometimes tools that are, at least for me, considered old-fashioned compared with all the new synthesizers available. But they could really be used for all kinds of music sample triggering, like the video shows.

Also, Logic’s EXS24 is really nice, as it has a lot of vintage synth samples. I really miss my old Jupiter-6, and Logic has many Jupiter-8 sounds incorporated. With EXS24’s filtering unit, more effects, and layering, I could even create more complex patterns from the base sample sounds.

EXT24 also has many nice drum sets mapped in, such as default 808 and 909 samples, as well as others.

OK, this is an odd posting! See this blog entry about Edison cylinder music, vax cylinders, that is available as free downloads. This is from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project over at UCLA, Santa Barbara. They are also in the public domain, so you could use them as samples for your next steam punk techno track, or something similar.

This music goes back to 1890 (1890-1929), so it’s really cool to take a time trip back that far into the world of audio.

I’m going to download a couple of WAV files of these — would be interesting to see how those would play out during a DJ gig!

Let me know if you also know of similar really odd public domain sites with music that is copyright-free.

I was thinking about this today when I was driving to work. Recently there have been two skills that I have tried to cultivate for better production work. They are not fully developed for me. For a musical genius such as Mozart, I think he had it perfected, but for us mere mortals…

The first is to develop a highly critical ear. It means that you could quickly spot mistakes, wrong levels, odd sounds, wrong keys, something is not heard, muddiness, and everything that is not making the production perfect. This takes a lot of introspection skills. It’s so easy to get excited 4am in the morning after an all-night creativity session. But the next morning, it’s important to be critical about the material and go through it carefully.

Two things help. One is to give it time. Go back to the work later, you have a fresh mind then and could hear nuances you never thought about earlier. The second is just to hear over it, over and over again, if possible using different kinds of audio environments. If you can’t stand hearing it after ten takes, the customer won’t like it either, most likely.

The second still is to memorize and internalize music. Concerning the earlier skill, it means that you remember exactly where the problems are in the track you listened to in the car, and then when you get home you could just go in and fix each problem! The other nice thing with this skill is that you could work out rearrangements in your head, while you are driving, or doing something else, and then when you are ready, the plan is in place and you could execute it.

I do think most successful producers have these two skills highly developed. Someone like Quincy Jones could sort out any kind of problem just by listening to tracks, as well as arrange music in his head. As I said, these skills are not developed in my mind. But as a funny story, when I was a kid, we didn’t exactly have iPods or even Walkmans to take music with us everywhere, so what I did was to memorize tracks I liked on albums, and listen to them in my mind while working outside the house, or when taking the bus to school.

It’s a very good exercise to try to memorize songs, as well as analyze songs into parts and learn all the small things that are going on with music.

Here’s another trick I used when producing Genietronix track called Nanotec — should go out on the promo circuit later today.

The common pattern for house productions, including tech house, is that classical syncopated hihat, you can’t miss it, any house track has it as its basic element. See picture to the right, this will trigger the syncopated hihat over and over again. The astute reader might also notice that I’m using a loop from a bigger drum loop, this way I could reuse various elements if needed inside the track, but in this case I was interested in the classical open hihat house sound.

However, what I did was also to make a slower version of this pattern where the open hihat triggers every second time. I use this pattern in the beginning of the track. When moving to various ‘climax’ parts in the song, such as just before breakdown, and just after breakdown, I use the faster version. And in the beginning of various parts I use the slower version. This makes it sound like the overall track is getting faster with more energy — even if it’s just the same BPM! This is one of those audio illusions it’s good to use from time to time, to make things faster and higher energy, just make the loops trigger 2x the normal pattern. It makes the overall production also sound more interesting.

As the final decoration, I use the same loop with an even more accentuated loop setup at various eight-bar endings — it’s like using cymbals but instead the accentuated hihat is indicating that a new section is starting.

Now, to be fair, in certain productions like minimalist electro, variations are not there, maybe you even need to have the same hihat pattern repeat across the whole song, and that’s fine, that’s a production decision that makes sense from time to time. I’ve just noticed how the drum patterns for the last year or so have indeed been very sparse, with little variations. If the style changes, tricks like these are in fashion again, and that’s fine, too. Personally I prefer more production work behind tracks, but in the spirit of the punk movement, too much polish will make things sound too constructed. Good taste rules with a lot of production work. But I’m a big fan of ‘think different’ — not even minimalism needs to sound like a formula, so using hihat techniques as discussed before might make a minimalist track more personal and intriguing.

This is a good posting from Create Digital Music about creating names for music projects. I read their blog I read every day. Names are important, they are a brand.

Some other notes from my side. I tend to create project or pseudonym names with a story behind it. Genietronix is for example a tech house name I use for tech house productions. The story behind it is that the venture capitalists here at Sand Hill (that’s where most of them reside here in Silicon Valley) is providing millions and millions of dollar to this startup biotech company they believe are working on new bio technologies. While all the money is actually used for music productions done in a secret studio inside the startup. This way you have a feeling for what do do next, or inspiration about new songs (like Nanotec that I will release today out for the promo circuit).

The Nanotec track was actually inspired by reading a collection of Nanotech short stories — NanoTech edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, if you have a chance, it’s fun reading, mind inspiring what one could do with tiny machines crawling everywhere. There’s a huge universe on the microscopic scale, we sometimes forget that — hey, that might be another starting point for a new track…

Many of the ideas and names that bubble up in my head is from reading books and watching movies and other TV programs. So don’t just get stuck in the studio for days, open up the mind and do a lot of reading, watching programs, or attend all kinds of non-music events, as well.

You could create a lot of good names by taking one or two existing names, and change the spelling just a little bit, like the Genietronix name, but the main idea was that the Genie is out of the bottle, and its tech centric. “nix” is also very techie, Unix and so on… So figure out what you want to achieve, and the project name will soon bubble up from the subconsciousness, as long as there’s a good idea driving it all.

I recently opened opened up an over three-year-old Ableton Live project, and remastered and otherwise redid the contents. It was interesting, and I was very pleased I could open up old Ableton Live projects without any issues.

Which leads to the topic of preservation. It’s good to save projects for later use, remastering and so on. Today it’s even easy, if you want to read about problems and issues, check out how much hard work it’s to go through the archives of Frank Zappa, tapes belonging to old tape recorders no longer in production, analog tapes slowly getting worse, and so on.

Depending on your work flow you might have a DAW project with a combination of MIDI and audio tracks. Most modern DAWs nowadays have a feature of self-contained projects, so always use this. You could then save the project on a hard disk, DVD, and so on, and not worry about broken content links.

In my work flow it’s common I do a lot of initial work in Logic, and I just export the final audio material as 24-bit AIFF files that I then assemble together in Ableton Live. I still save the Logic projects so I could go back and redo or re-edit various MIDI sections. I might even start exporting the pure MIDI tracks as those are good to have around.

One worry is that if you just keep the DAW projects around without any audio dumps, the plugins such as the software synths might not work years in future — we saw already issues with the MacOSX to Intel transition where various plugins, especially VST ones, have not yet been ported over. Or, the public domain synth is no longer actively developed.

You could also use freeze tracks to save the information. Also, both Logic and Live has a feature of dragging freeze tracks into audio tracks, and this way they are saved as pure audio tracks. Anyway, just always preserve your audio projects, if nothing else your grandchildren will have great fun discovering ancient material while they dig through the attic.

I had an intuition today, just wondered what happened to Goodwrench and his radio show at a local college radio station — KFJC — here in the San Francisco Bay area? I used to listen to his programs nearly every Friday evening between 1994 and 1999, and then the show ended. And what a show it was, he played Detroit techno, the latest/greatest, Autechre, Mouse on Mars, early day trance and progressive house, and anything interesting electronic-music wise.

I still have boxes of cassette tapes recorded from those sessions I think under my bed or somewhere in the house.

Anyway, just for fun I went to the www.kfjc.org web site and found to my astounding surprise that he’s back, since summer 2006. His new show is on Saturday nights, midnight to 3am. But that’s fine, I could use WireTap Pro or something similar to pre-record it, as this radio show is now also broadcast:ed over web, see this link, and it should also show up in iTunes Radio, Eclectic subsection. KFJC is a really wacko radio station in case you are interested in alternate music. But I look forward to listening to Goodwrench, might even send him a couple of promo CDs this time. Here’s also a link to his latest track listings — seems to be an eclectic collection of old and new, indeed.

Follow-up. Ok, listened. It was fun! I never realized how much more interesting a program is if the MC talks about the background concerning various artists and labels. I think he also heard that he will do special programs about for example the Cologne techno movement, goodies!

I took the playlist and header over to eMusic to get samples of artists I’ve had not sampled yet: Atropa, really wicked Japanese glitch electro, Reinhard Voigt (good to hear someone could have fun with techno, i.e. Sex Mit M. Mayer), good techno, Pablo Bolivar’s Simulated Physics, Natural Frequency by Irresistible Force, and much more. This is another reason why I think a directed radio show with information about artists and music is good, and eMusic plus the artists now earned money by such radio show marketing.

Which leads to stupidity such as this, sometimes I wonder if RIAA and the big record labels *really want to make money*, or just want to keep their company BMWs.