Ok, just finished DNA tones, Part three, there’s a sample of the track over here. This third one was a very interesting project, it had acid lines, electro bass lines, strange techno-like loops, and heavy-metal like constructs. Phew, took a while to tame the whole beast. Maybe it’s worth writing a little bit about some of the problems.

One big problem with massive tracks is that there’s so much, and it’s easy to overload the mastering section so that for example Izotope Ozone and similar stages to build the final compressed product sounds far too mushy. I ended up going through all the tracks and decreasing each level with one dB to tame it. Also, unlike Logic, in Ableton Live you cant’ just select all volume levels, and drag one down and the rest comes along. You need to do each one separately. Also, if there’s automation concerning mixing levels, you need to go in and edit those by hand, again. Sigh. But it was worth it.

I also encountered interesting MIDI clip bugs that I should report to Ableton. If I edited one clip that I had copied from another part, both clips changed, very annoying. Anyway, it’s done and sent out to the promo sites, and so on.

Next, I will take a vacation, sorry if there are not so many postings during the next 19 days. I will spend time at a small cottage by the sea with my MacBookPro and a MIDI controller, and have audio fun. There’s a lot of work when I get back, we just switched to a new aggregator for our label, and I need to redesign the label web site, and send out more music…

Here’s another technique that I used in the track just to be finished. There’s a common base line shared with other synths, but it’s not always used across the tracks. Instead, it’s accentuated, sometimes in the fourth bar of four bars, or more often, or more seldom.

It’s a nice technique to provide more emphasis on the endings of bars, or provide a difference across the tracks, instead of a monotonic fat sound across everything.

With MIDI tracks this is easy, cut out the part you want to have accentuated, and place it into another MIDI track and key in another synth. But you could also do this with audio tracks, chop and place the same audio part in another track, and then place effects that changes the sound. I would use for example CamelPhat to make it pleasantly distorted, or use something strong that changes the sound. You could even use reverbs and delays, but it muddles the next part, so the accentuated effect might not be as profound as with no delay and so on.

This is another example how classical composers used forte fortissimo here and there, not everywhere…

Hmm, I think I wrote about this some time ago, but why not again. I really make use of the envelopes with kick loops from time to time. Usually I shorten the envelope, the decay part, so the kick is more punchy. Or, in this case, I changed the decay section where I was in the track.

In the slow sections I wanted a more punchy kick, so the envelope shortened the kick, see above. Then, when all the instruments kicked in, and I wanted a more massive sound on the bottom end, I opened up the end of the kick so it could decay all the way to the end.

This technique is also very useful when layering instruments such as kicks or other ones, one part could provide the initial sound, and the other section could play out the end, so there’s a nice overlap, and neither side muddles out the other one.

Ok, what fun did I do the last hour? While working on DNA Tones, Part Three, I had a set of tracks playing the same MIDI clips — it’s one of those power-techniques to have multiple instruments playing the same lead, bass, and others. Heavy rock bands have known about this trick since the early day power chords.

Anyway, what I started doing, see image, is to deliverately shift the notes in the various same MIDI tracks, some would play now and then a couple of semitones above, or below.

This made a very interesting arrangement, sounds like some of the instruments are jamming now and then, and then falling back into line.

I just had to remember to cut the midi clips here and there — they were looping, so if I pushed one note up, it could have caused problems earlier in the total mix of the tracks playing.

You could also place one of the arpeggiator plug-ins into one of the tracks with same midi info as let’s say a bass line, with pushing it up one octave, and this way also get all kinds of interesting variations using the same MIDI data.

Something that is not just a problem with Ableton Live is the end of a song in a DAW environment. What happens, if the last tracks have effects such as reverb and delay, there’s a sudden clip of the final parts of the reverb or delay when rendering the exact amount of track info.

What I usually do is to place a small dummy clip at the very end, with a zero volume setting. Now, when I select all the tracks, this end part will define how much of the tracks will be rendered. And now when rendering I get the final parts of the tracks rendered out thanks to this buffer clip that does nothing, but actually does something.

Now, you could do something similar by selecting a little bit more than needed, but I’m lazy and I like Command-A to just select everything as I define, instead of spending time scrolling back and forth and finding the right buffer at the end.

Ok, what’s going on… I finished DNA Tones, Part two, in a trilogy where I try to do biological dance music of some odd reason… Bio-acid music is the last one in this trilogy, and I’ve done half of it. This was kind of bumpy electric house or something similar, the first part was more elevated techno, or progressive techno. Usually I have a hard time describing styles, as I try to mix and match, and invent as much as possible instead of listening to the top-ten and copy the styles.

I have a snippet preview of Part Two over at the label web site.

I also spent a whole night remastering a very old 23 minute long track that I still don’t know what to do with it, an attempt long time ago to make symphonic musical pieces using electronic dance music elements. That’s the curse of material, it’s either a style you don’t know you could push out any longer, or not yet. Or, is very different. It might go to a possible LP collection of some kind. But it was indeed interesting to look at old stuff and do a new take of it. I need to learn and get back and redo material, or clean it up, instead of always starting with something new…

Anyway, I will get DNA Tones Part three done, and then off for a vacation!

Most of us use Ableton Live’s EQ8 instead of EQ3, as it has more control, and less colorization. However, EQ3 is also quite usable. I like the way is smears out frequencies during eq.

One tough thing to get sounding nice is noise used as a snare drum pattern, it’s very effective, but it’s easy that it sounds very harsh and tough. In one project I’m just now finishing with such an accented snare, I ended up using EQ3 (see parameters above).

Just use the 48k setting, the 24k one is usually too rough for EQ work. You could also get nice effects with Automation and EQ3.

Ok, here’s what I talked about in the earlier post concerning placing crazy warp points in drum loops.

In this case the original loop was a classical clap sound, but I placed two warp points close to each other, before the clap itself decays.

In addition, in the actual use i loop around this place four times, at the end of a four-bar section. It does not sound like a drummer would do it, and yet it sounds like what a drummer would do with syncopation.

So feel free to drag those warp points anywhere in the loops, they don’t need to reside at natural places by default.

Here’s a snapshot of an Ableton Live project that is maybe over two years old that I opened up tonight, just for fun. Lots of edits and loops, or what… And only 15 tracks in the whole 23+ minute track. I used to reuse tracks all over the place at that time.

This is from the period when I did over twenty minutes long tracks, or songs, kind of experimenting how a symphony was put together with tons of loops.

Some of the loops had crazy edits, like fast loops and deliberate warp point to make things slow down, or speed up. I think I will try to use that in new productions — forgot about that trick. Move the warpers around in tracks, to crazy places, and see how it sounds.

This project was even so old that Complex warp mode didn’t exist then, so I switched over everywhere to use complex mode with non-drum material.

It was fun and icky looking at the mastering done then. I changed a lot of settings to make it more crispy, good old Izotope Ozone and Hi pass filters everywhere. It’s good to always go back and see what was done long time ago, you always learn every day if you work with audio.

As for what should I do with these tracks, I still don’t know. Maybe release an EP with the material later this year. I need to think about it.

Ok, it seems like Beatport now only will allow new labels to be included either if they are big sales-wise, or are using an aggregator. An aggregator is a company that sits between the distribution and the label, making specific distribution deals to various distributors. Big companies like iTunes and eMusic already has had this system in place for a longer time.

What it means for smaller labels is that it will get harder to get into distribution rights with various big digital distributors, unless they just bypass the aggregators and use TuneCore, CD-Baby and similar services where there’s no need to have an aggregator. Or, make deals with aggregators. But, as I know Beatport does not have contracts with CD-Baby or TuneCore.

The problem with making deals with aggregators is that they usually also want the big fish, labels that have a large sell volume, to justify their administration costs. So for a new label it’s a little bit like the chicken-and-the-egg; you don’t get a deal with an aggregator unless you have sales volume, or are well-known of some reason or another. But to get to that point you need distribution so the sales will increase. The other problem I’ve seen with aggregators is that they are still very CD-release centric. For many of us producers, we and consumers like the model of releasing individual tracks, instead of CDs with filler material. But the aggregator models, in the cases I’ve looked at their contracts, favor CD-centric releases.

I don’t personally see any big changes with the current digital music business model — it’s common with evolving markets. In the early days it’s all fair game, any new game players have a chance to get into the club, later companies and markets consolidate and it’s again hard to enter it, unless someone jumps into a new ‘disruptive service’, let’s say ad-generated market sales using YouTube content.

So, if you want to start a record label — do it, it’s never been easier. But set realistic plans, expect to release quality material on a monthly basis, on a long term, and things will be fine as you get the reputation and the sales to get into the aggregators’ cone of interest. Success on a very short time frame is very rare, I’m afraid.

Sorry no postings for a while, but I just didn’t have anything to write about, and better not waste bytes by meaningless chatter. This weekend I will go through more Ableton cool features, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, as producers, it’s kind of fun to hang on to something at the end of the product. It used to be a plastic platter, single or LP, then a CD. Now in this modern age of releasing tracks one by one over digital distributions, it’s mostly bits saved on a separate hard disk. Such backups are easier to do than constantly burn CDs, not that I do CD burns and take releases to a location outside this house from time to time.

Anyway, it would be fun to have something tangible as a result from the release, I must confess. I was thinking for a while to burn a CD, and use a bigger sized case, and start lining up the book case here in the studio with entries. It’s kind of fun watching a wall of releases slowly materialize over time. Then, if I ever move, what a drag to pack down lots and lots of things.

If anyone has a good idea how to memorize work, let me know. I’ve also been thinking about the lack of anything physical in this new age of digital releases, and maybe even consumers will again demand something that is tangible, or something else than just a digital file with audio — more about that shortly.

I installed last night a WordPress plugin called Live that in real-time lists requests to the blog, where they came from, search strings, referring sites and so on.

It was fascinating watching this in realtime. To show one odd example: someone was querying for “Biggest hits on Something/Anything”, the Todd Rundgren LP this blog was actually named after, and got here.

Also, I posted an entry about Reason 4.0 when I saw it was released, and immediately due to the magic of Google and my fast sitemap generation, many queries about Reason 4.0 ended up here.

Of some interesting reason, the studio image is something that ends up being queried via image searches, the image file name is studio_2.0.jpg, wonder if that has to do with those queries?

I’m happy to see a lot of RSS feed hits, so people use RSS feed services (if you don’t know, click on the info on the right side for bloglines and similar tools to read blog entries without the need to always poll this site).

I didn’t see much traffic with commenting, hmm, need to make sure more readers comment, that’s half of the fun with blogs. To start with I need to change the template so the comments are on the same level as the postings. So, who knows what that globe is in the picture, where is it located?

To summarize, I think I now know of all kinds of less ethical ways to drive traffic by using keywords and titles people search for. However, I don’t like that kind of marketing, myself.

Maybe you already heard, but Reason 4.0 was announced. If you go to the PropellerHeads web site, and click on the top level image blurb, and then click on the image itself, you get more info about the new features in Reason 4.0, including movies showing how it all works.

For me, 3.0 was not exactly what I expected, but 4.0 finally has the things I wanted to see, like a revised/updated sequencer. The ReGroove Mixer is also an interesting approach to make loops sound more human. They also seem to really like arpeggiators, the new Thor synthesizer has it built in, and there’s a new monophonic arpeggiator, RPG-8, that has cool ideas.

Reason is really like this big monolithic synth rack that you control via Rewire, or then write whole compositions using it only. For me, the later part is somewhat problematic, as I like to work in a more traditional DAW, and getting stuck inside Reason sometimes is limiting. But it’s also a very productive environment for quick-and-dirty work, for example writing game music where the clock ticks…

I placed myself on the beta list, so in case I get a chance to test it, I could write more about the first impressions concerning this promising release. Thanks Propellerheads, I think you are back on track.

Something I’ve noticed for a while is the lack of using different keys in the same track. This is especially true of minimalist music, I guess it has to be minimalist on all levels. But it’s true of a lot of underground dance music — staying in the same key.

Hmm. There’s always something dynamic about switching keys in a song. The old pop-trick was to go up two semi-tones at the last chorus, it kind of elevated the chorus and gave it a more dynamic expression.

In classical music, the way playing with scales and especially keys is always fun, there’s no limit sometimes what composers did concerning even switching between minor and major keys across the whole composition. And speaking of Debussy, that’s a challenge concerning finding keys that are constantly in motion.

Anyway, I think contrasts are good, they are another spice to be used and not keep it hidden in the closet. Just now I’m working on DNA Tones, Part Three, and the the latter part of the track will have a key change that is six semitones up from the original place. I even use another bass line and sound in that part, just to have fun when composing tracks.

PS: This is yet another picture in my ‘blue cat’ period of photos…

I’m myself a big fan of tiny variations, even if maybe the listener won’t hear all the details, the variations and small edits will build up the whole that sounds more interesting than the same thing over and over again. This is a technique that for examples composers of symphonies have used over and over again. There’s plenty of instruments, everyone is doing a little bit, and the whole fills everything in.

Above is an example of what I’m doing with DNA Tones Part 2 that I hope to send out to the promo services soon — just need to get it to the point where I’m happy first. Anyway, I had originally a basic house drum loop, but I didn’t like it so I added another longer clap-centric loop from my sound library. Usually my loops are very long, so I could make variations of the loop (more later about this), in this case eight bars.

Anyway, the busy clap-centric loop also sounded too mechanical, same pattern over and over again. So what I did was to chop it into four bar sections, sometimes two bar sections, even one or half bar ones. Then in each bar I chance the loop points so that the patterns changed from time to time. Now it all sounds more organic — a drummer would do all kinds of variations here and there, but this all was done big a longer loop.

Sometimes I also increased the individual volume for the loop to make accentuations — another technique to make static loops sound more interesting by temporarily raising the levels.

You could do the same technique with any loop used in Ableton Live, there’s really no need to keep the same one going over and over again. Power to the variations!