Something/Everything

In case you are intested, I uploaded 22 effects from my own sound library, here in a zip archive format (right mouse-click). They are in 24-bit 44.1kHz AIFF format (40Mb), in an Ableton project folder, but you could get access to the files inside the project folder, too.

It’s a bunch of effects I’ve used in various songs (and some of those effects are wacko). They are released under the Make people happy with these effects license. Its also a thanks to you all who read and support this blog, so I will upload more material. Use them for strange DJ transitions, starting points in mixes, your own new music — but I’m always curious so in case you use it somewhere and it’s audio, let me know and I could check it out.

In case you missed, I also gave out a set of kick samples — the info about that is in this posting.

Here’s a good link to examples of so called loud mastering and what happens when such mastering is done. This was written by Chris Johnson at Airwindows, a mastering engineer.

Whether we want or not, this is what we have to live by today, the loudness levels have to be extreme, to the point where dynamics are squashed out.

It takes a while to learn the art of pushing up the dynamics and control it with tools such as various limiters and special compressors. Even if some might disagree, I do think a good starting point is using PSP VintageWarmer to get half-way there, the reason is that this plugin colorizes, but in a nice way, the tube-like saturation, so the effect is not so massive from a digital point of view.

Just now I’m mostly using Izotope’s Ozone for the final mastering to get to similar levels, with PSP VintageWarmer kicked in from time to time in case the middle-range is weak, as this is where I think VintageWarmer is also very good. A lot of my original track material is already heavily compressed based on the original source (drums and so on), the actual sub-tracks are loud by themselves.

DJs do have tools to push up levels, and I wish in future we lived in a world where the final output had more dynamics, and the end users could control the final loudness. However, just now we all have to play the game of sounding equally loud, otherwise any tracks pop up as weak in a set, and that’s not fun.

One case where the combined mixing/mastering pays off is when analyzing what tracks work together in specific parts of the song. If multiple tracks compete about the same frequency ranges, for example mid-range, it will sound very muddy and its hard to hear the individual tracks. If possible each track should operate in its own well-defined frequency domain. Even then, too much is just too much, the listener can’t separate all the instruments playing.

This is typical for the producer, as we could hear all the nice parts we added together, as we know the track inside out. While for a new listener, they don’t have that background, so the layers of sound will just confuse them. Usually two-three main musical lines is most what they could easily separate — it also depends on the level of musical interest and talent to separate lots of various instruments playing together.

Now, there are sometimes cases where layers and layers of reverb/delay-heavy tracks is exactly what it needed. Ulrich Schnauss is a good example of a producer who could pull of such walls of sound. Even so, there’s a lot of careful planning that needs to go in already in the mixing stage in order to avoid a big mid-range mush of sound that just confuses.

Anyway, check out Ulrich’s web site – he has downloaded material for free there, too.

Here’s another case where mastering yourself is a nice deal. You have full access to all the tracks as well as the effects on each track. A mastering engineer has to use tools such as multiband compressors and fine-tuned EQ curves to balance out the levels and the frequencies. While you have access to all those elements and you could address problems in the mix itself.

There’s a new trend of stem-based mastering, where the mastering engineer will get stems of the various components of the mix, such as the drums, the bass, and so on. However, even with this, they have a limited way of addressing and fixing problems, not that they could do miracles with good ears and tools, but it’s still a struggle compared with going in and addressing problems in the mix itself.

This is why many of us do a combinational mix and mastering at the same time, build the final product organically. I do have the mastering tools on since the early days of the track, and I could go in and adjust settings while doing the mix, or figure out what parts of the mix that needs to be eq:ed in good time before the final product is done.

With such combinational mixing and mastering the final product will bubble up after a while, and in some cases I didn’t even bother to do a final mastering step, as mastering was done all along working with the song.

Blogs actually stand for web log, a log that is updated by the author about what is happening. Just to show that I’m not sleeping on the sofa in my studio, not that I have a sofa installed there, I will do weekly updates to let know what I’m working with at this point of time.

I have not been able to do much work due to a nasty back problem that manifested in March. It’s still hard, but I learned that not doing anything is worse with the recovery versus moving around. The other thing I did was to elevate the space where I work (soon even new table legs) so I could work standing. This helps a lot, and it’ best in the long run, anyway, as the back is not compressed as when sitting. Recommend it!

Otherwise, I finally warped the tracks for a new series of electronic music I was hoping to launch in April, and it looks more like May. It’s a periodic podcast with really interesting music, as what I think is interesting, from various netlabels and new producers. The tentative name is Biowaves. This way I hope to promote good electronic music that is available out there, just need to go out and hunt for it.

The other thing was that I put together a new track for PlanetoidPark release, called DNA Tone, something about music coming out from DNA or something similar. The title came from this nice band generator web site, check it out. This track is a combination of techno meets old-time progressive music meets wacko melody short loops with tons of reverb that I like to do with Ableton Live just now. I need to go through it a couple of more times, clean it up, and send it out on the DJ promo services later this week. Contact me if you want to remix it, as I need a couple of variations, like one that is more techno/Berlin/mechanical in nature.

That and read more science fiction! And yes, I have a backlog of label work that I need to get through this incoming week.

Something I hear and read on forums from time to time is the issue if someone should do the final mastering oneself, or send it to an external mastering engineer or site. Some services, like the new Sony one, are also not that expensive.

Well, my take is, if you are interested, do it yourself. You will read about all kinds of objections such as the mastering site having a decent monitoring equipment and the right engineers that hear tiny decibel changes, as well as it’s good to have an external reference for critical listening.

So, to go through my own points. If someone is interested to learn to master, they should go ahead and learn it. It helps all across audio productions to know how to do a final product. What you learn from such critical listening will help you anyway to grow as an artist and producer.

Secondly, yes, big studios have fine-tuned listening environments. Anyway, you could achieve quite a lot by rendering temporary audio files to CDs and take them on a tour across various listening environments, car stereo, boom box, computer monitors, 5:1 stereo system, and if you are a lucky one, a club setup. Few listen to music in such perfect environments, anyway.

Nearfield monitors could handle a lot of the issues with wrong acoustics, and there are plenty of articles about how to make your studio sound better. Some new nearfield monitors have even built-in correction software to compensate for odd environments.

Finally, if you know your monitors inside out, you know their sweet spot and bad spots, and you could compensate based on this.

As for an external reference, I’m always worried that they would not understand let’s say the need of the extensive brick-wall compression that is needed for modern underground dance music, and instead master it based on the huge amount of work they get anyway from guitar-based music, and so on.

Finally, a lot of the postings are FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) postings from existing mastering services, in order to get more customers. Such marketing is for me very ugly, so why would I trust them if they have such negative attitude about someone who wants to do their own mastering? If someone really wants an external mastering job, they know when they need it, and then usually we know which mastering engineer we trust, anyway.

Device drivers are critical of many reasons. They sit between the operating system and an internal or external device. They have to operate inside the operating system itself, unlike applications. If the driver is flaky, the whole system will crash, unlike application crashes.

This is the reason why I think when shopping for external gear such as external audio devices, the quality and support of the device driver is as important as the quality of the DAC (digital to analog conversion), or the ADC (analog to digital conversion) circuits.

One way to check this out is to do a web search and find out if a certain vendor and product is mentioned a lot, either positively, or negatively. Another thing is to stress-test the device connection. One way is to put the laptop or computer to sleep mode, and restart it, and see if the device is still talking to the computer. If this is a problem, you need to constantly restart the laptop for live performances — actually if possible this is good to do, anyway, so that any issues with broken device drivers might not happen during the show.

I’ve written six entries about computers and audio now, so I will switch to write a set about mastering.

You could read more about the actual specifications of Firewire and USB at Wikipedia.

Anyway, with the advent of the new USB 2.0 spec, both protocols have about the same speed, if we exclude Firewire 800. USB 1.0 is mostly used for keyboard and similar devices that don’t need fast connections.

For me, the biggest selling factor for Firewire is the star-based protocol, versus the client-server protocol for USB. This means that you could hook together multiple Firewire devices. With USB, you need to have hubs between in order to have multiple connections working.

The other thing good to remember is that in both cases the protocols provide charging via cable — you just need six-pin Firewire connectors (some PCs only have four-pin connectors). However, the amount of power trickled via the ports could drain the battery fast, or even worse, cause problems with external firewire devices due to sudden blackouts of power.

So, if you use Ableton Live or something similar with external Firewire or USB 2.0 audio boxes, always provide external power to avoid problems during live shows. You could also get hubs that provide external power, but it’s just best to plug the external devices with their own power supply.

The application preferences are stored in the MacOSX home directory, or ~/Library/Preferences. Why is this good to know? Well, there are some few cases where an application suddenly won’t start, or if it starts, it has weird values that causes problems. One way, if possible the last one, is to remove the preferences and start fresh.

The preference file should have an indication of the actual application name. You could also double-click on the preference file, and the so called plist editor will open up with information about the preferences. Anyone who knows could even change the values via the plist, but it’s usually good to make a backup of the preference file so you could restore things back in case the application stops working.

The plugin components, AUs, are placed in either /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components or ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components. The ~, or tilde, stands for the home directory.

The reason there are two possible locations is that the /Library level is global for all users, while the ~/Library is local for the currently running user. In most cases it’s best to install the plugins globally. Hence most installers will place the AU plugins into the ~/Library location. It’s good to know this location in case you have to install the plugin by hand, or remove it of some reason. It’s also good to maybe do backups of this directory from time to time, even if I personally have backups of all the install program for specific plugins, as the plugins might install patches, documentation and other data files.

Logic will actually run a program called AUVal to validate any AU plugins installed, it will make sure that the plugin could properly run, as a lot of supposedly DAW related problems could be a result from a badly working plugin. AUval is a command line tool, so if you are interested, you could also run this by hand. Ableton Live is not running AUVal.

As for where the patches are possibly installed, this is not a standard. Usually you could find them installed in the /Library/Application Support/, somewhere inside there, or then use Spotlight with a known patch name to find where they were located. Fortunately, most plugins save the patch directory as a preference, so next time you open up patch files, you could quickly find the rest. I’ve even seen some installers placing documentation inside the ~/Documents folder, not in the /Documentation folder which I would think is the most obvious place for system-wide documentation. Or, Ableton Live has its PDF documentation file inside the main directory that you download when installing Live.

Today with MacOSX (and Windows) you could have multiple applications running multiple processes on the system. If the processes are not active, they are in sleep mode. This means they will not take any CPU resources, and any memory they are using is purged out via virtual memory if they are in the background.

The problem, however, is if the processes are trying to do something. Examples of this is any kind of network activity, such as polling a web address. With JavaScript today, there’s more and more web pages that constantly check for updated data. Same with email services, they could go out and look for new mails, for example from mail services that are slow to respond.

So if possible, if you worry about not having enough CPU cycles for audio work, just quit any applications that might run and cause unnecessary CPU load: Safari, Mail.app and so on.

Some think that Spotlight is stealing cycles when it does an index. The biggest hit is really if there’s a brand new installation, or a big set of new files that Spotlight needs to index or re-index, otherwise Spotlight is not taking that much concerning CPU traffic, so there’s no need to turn it off (there’s a secret way of doing it, but I will not mention it).

Another thing worth disabling, especially with Ableton Live in live situations, is WiFi. Otherwise the WiFi service is constantly checking for networks that could arrive and disappear, sometimes quite frequently in case the network signal is weak.