I’ve been planning on doing this for weeks, and I pushed it forward and forward, until tonight… Anyway, now the blog and the main web site are the same. Easier for me, and I think for everyone.

If you have existing RSS subscriptions, they should work, thanks to the magic of Unix symlinks, if not, email me and complain, same if you encounter anything odd…

I think some other links might also be broken, but the duct tape of symbolic links should fix that along the way.

Anyway, in other words, WordPress is both my blog software as the main asset service for everything on my site just now.

This is a good thing to know, as it could happen easily to anyone working with audio clips and tracks in Ableton Live, especially for DJ or performance purposes.

There are two levels of quantization in Ableton Live — with quantization here concerning audio loops we mean when there’s a certain time interval when a loop should start, 1/16, 1/2, one bar, four bars, and so on. Four bars is really the easiest way to start loops when DJ:ing, you can’t go wrong with starting a loop, and the system waits until four bars have played, and then the selected loop starts.

Now, there is a global quantization level that you set either via the menu/keyboard shortcuts and/or the player toolbar on the top. And there is also a loop-specific quantization level.

The loop-based one, see image above, overrides the global one. This means that if you deliberately, or by mistake, have this set, then the loop you start will not honor the global values. Most likely, as in the image shown, with a 1/16 bar quantization you could easily go out of sync when starting the loop.

You could change the loop-based quantization level to global, then the global value is always honored. I use this, as I rather specify on the fly what quantization I want when doing DJ work, rather than hard-wire it into each loop. There are exceptions, if you want staggering effects or something similar, you could select loop-based quantization for specific loops. Otherwise, best still to a global value across all loops. Less mistakes this way.

Oh, there’s another interesting twist of using those two audio tracks with crazy beat repeat parameter in the track called Luminary Ubic from the first podcast. The chance parameter was set to 100%! What that means that every time there’s randomness to the way the patterns were shuffled around.

In real life, each time I did a render of all the material, I didn’t know exactly how those tracks would sound. And also, even if I didn’t like the outcome, and I did another render, I would not know how this new rendered material would sound like.

Pretty interesting, or what? It’s one of those things, if you dare, go for it. Same in a DJ session — it will not be a dull moment as not even you know how it will really sound.

In the latest Podcast SE-001 I used two tracks across the whole 27 minutes with very wacko beat repeat settings using the Ableton Live Beat Repeat plugin.

You could hear it in the beginning on the Luminary Ubic track, the modem-like odd sounds, as well as here and there, where you have strange sounding wobbly melodies.

Usually beat-repeat is used for variations in drum loops, or to get that glitchy-IDM sound (I think too much used by now). But in this case I just wanted to use it to make odd melodies sounding choppy and unexpected.

Then, during working on this longer track, I sometimes dragged in loops into either one of these highly choppy plugin tracks, and if it sounded interesting — hey, it stayed there. Towards the end I became more and more conservative. It’s like using chocolate for everything, first it taste good, but after a while too much is just too much.

Anyway, this is another creative trick of the in-the-moment studio work — create a couple of odd special effect plugin tracks, drag material into it, and keep it or leave it out, but it certainly sounds different.

I wanted to redo most of the graphics in the podcast series I just announced. I wanted each track to have a unique image, similar to the old tradition of artwork with album covers. Extended postcasts makes it indeed possible to do this now.

Anyway, my graphics talent is close to zero, but I have lots of photos. So what I did was to use KeyNote from Apple. It’s a presentation program, but actually you could define the size to anything, in this case 300×300, as that’s the preferred PNG size for extended podcasts.

After this all I had to do was to drag in the photo, and drag in the small new Something/Everything logo my son did for me tonight. And then type in text, use a fat font with shadowing, and that was it. I did all the ten custom track images in about 40 minutes.

Yes, I know it sounds again like a marketing blurb, but the price for iWork is now $79, so it’s a very good price, and you could get so much artwork done with just KeyNote, so it’s for more than just presentations.

PS: Anyone dare to guess where from that photo is?

PSS: If you already subscribed to the podcast, delete and resubscribe, as it might be that you don’t get the new images in the extended podcast unless you resubscribe. Sorry, but finally the stuff is locked down.

Ok, here’s my new channel to export music from my studio — Something/Everything. Follow the link and you get instructions how to subscribe to the podcasts.

I will update this web site with the same info soon, as well.

I will write more about the ideas behind this podcast series soon. Shortly:

• It’s a way for me to export a lot of music. that is just now on the hard disk.
• I wanted to experiment with an ‘album’ concept, but using podcasts.
• Another reason why to work in the studio and create more music, hehehe.
• Also a reason to fix my microphone voice, ouch.

PS: I just did changes in the graphics, and noticed that just deleting and reloading the podcast didn’t update with the new version — at least with my system — so the workaround is to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the podcast, and this way get the new version.

What’s happened recently. Oh, I had to figure out a strategy concerning releasing material and mixes for the next 12 months or so, and finally have this figured out. The first part of this all should come out tomorrow, as a bigger download. I’m a big fan of downloaded free material from artists, and I have so much stuff on my hard disk that needs to go out. As a good example of a similar artist that exports his material, see the Royal Sapien web site — a place I’ve done constructive commercial spying on for a couple of days’ time, and I really like his site and how he handles it.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about something that has not been released yet, but stay tuned as they say — the whole thing should go out tomorrow. All I could say that this is the channel I will use for exporting a lot of my crazy music that’s just now on the hard disk.

Hmm, Royal Sapien has a twitter account, maybe I should add one. At the same time, my wife and I did one of those evening walks/talks, and we discussed how artists nowadays are so scattered due to all the the interruptions from Internet, cable TV and other similar sources. For example, Franz Schubert died at the young age of 31, but he produced over 600 pieces of music. If he had access to Internet and DVDs, hmm, I would not think he would have focused on producing all that music…

And… His music was scattered all across his friends’ pianos, but they were collected and released. I think this is the problem many of us producers have on another scale — i.e. we have tons of material, but due to various reasons we can’t release it all commercially. And it’s a shame it gathers dust, as music is to be listened to. Anyway, stay tuned!

Yes, I’m the first to admit that I’m no professional microphone voice user. I barely did singing long time ago in the bands where I played, and it’s been a while since I last used a mike for voices. So I noticed during my video podcast work that my mike handling was lousy. And as usually I learn how to do it properly after the first three sessions were posted. Well, it’s never tool late to learn.

Here are some good sites with videos showing how to use the microphone. I liked this site with the Australian gentleman showing how to use the mike, without any pop filters — which he considers just colorizing the sound. Scroll down to the end of the page.

Here’s another web site where Adam Weiss shows how to place the mike in the right position to the mouth, and some other techniques.

Finally, I watched again the Apple seminar about podcasting; the first movie with Joe Cipriano shows how he handles the mike. You need to subscribe to the Apple seminars, but they are worth watching, lots of good info.

I use a Samson C01U USB condenser mike for the voice work — for a couple of reasons: it’s easy to plug into my laptop and use it anywhere, it’s a nice sounding mike, and I got it cheap long time ago for a different project. It’s a cardoid microphone, so it takes a while to figure out the sweet area of the mike. You need to find info on the web showing how to wire it into GarageBand and Logic, it’s not that straight-forward.

A mike pre-amp might be a good thing to get, or I should test how to colorize the sound with VintageWarmer to get a more warm tone.

Here’s another video showing extreme Ableton Live warp point techniques in loops, as well as how to work with sample offset envelopes. This last one is sometimes a technique that is not that well understood, or used.

Here’s a video showing basic techniques with loops and loop envelopes in Ableton Live.There’s a part two arriving soon, showing more esoteric ways to manipulate the loops, too.

In case things happen too fast in the video, I’m using command-B to switch between paint mode and linear editing mode in the envelope window.

PS: The reverb in the voice track was an experiment. Alas, I will not use that in future :-).

My wife and second kid arrived back from Finland yesterday, so I’ve been somewhat busy with my home life. Hence no big postings. Anyway, some quick notes about this and that about podcasting plans.

I had a definite plan about podcasts as of yesterday, and here comes the Apple .Mac announcements about 10Gb space and 200Gb of monthly data transfer, so my plans about hosting two forthcoming series of podcasts changed. 10Gb is a lot of space. I saw that a 27.30 minute episode of 192kpbs AAC is about 38Mb, so I could host over 260 episodes up on my .mac account of this size, if my calculations are right. Let’s say some meta data and variated sizes, and it’s about 240 episodes or so. That should cover a couple of years, and then I’m sure the size will be upgraded, again.

I could still announce the podcasts on any server, but the storage and actual podcast xml files would be stored over at the .Mac service? Why, because it’s so super-easy to update the podcasting info using GarageBand and iWeb. I’ve tried it out the last three days, and poking in text into XML files compared with doing nice editions in GarageBand and publishing it all via iWeb makes a big difference — at least for someone like me always running out of time.

Now, this requires a .Mac account ($99 year) and GarageBand, $79 unless you have iLife installed as part of a new Mac system purchase. There are third-party solutions to edit podcasts, for sure, but the GarageBand timeline to edit track info, or the simple drag-and-drop images as the main podcast image is so neat. Yes, I sound like an Apple salesperson…

Anyway, I have another Ableton Live Youtube video halfway done, hope to have it finished and published tomorrow, about the joys of clip envelopes. After that I really, really need to go back and do music, again…

I had to switch to a new theme as I upgraded WordPress to 2.2.2, and the old theme stopped working. That happens, but this new theme I found today is better as it handles widgets and so on, and I’m in the middle of customizing it.

However, I noticed that the img tag paddings don’t work unless I go in and edit them via the editor, seems that the image padding is now saved in the database rather than picked up from the css. That means that I need to go through each entry and update the information. Just now the padding between images and text is not honored, so it’s too close, and I’m a perfectionist concerning easy reading of web sites.

This all means that for any of you who subscribe, and you don’t have ‘ignore modified postings’, you will later tonight get a listing of 266 or so modified entries. Sorry, but it’s better to do this today than postpone it.

It’s always a challenge to keep up to speed with software changes, indeed. But it’s better to do it early than later, I’ve learned the hard way.

Here’s a video I uploaded to YouTube showing how I usually warp dance tracks in Ableton Live. There are many ways how to do basic warping, but this is how I usually do it with tracks that have a fixed and easy-to-warp beat.And remember, the arrow keys are your friends when moving around with a loop point in Live.

I’m just now working on a set of Ableton Live demos to be placed up on YouTube. I was hoping they were ready tonight, but it’s important that they are good, and I think I need to redo the whole operation tomorrow.

A couple of notes. I’m using Ambrosia Software’s Snapz ProX that is now a universal binary. It’s a great program, but the provided kext module crashes now and then… But otherwise it’s very easy to put together video presentations, after you get the right settings in place.

It’s also a matter of rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. First I thought I would do a separate sound track and add this into the video, but it’s more natural to talk and show at the same time. But to do this requires that everything will work out, and I’m no actor. I need to speak far more slowly, especially with an accent that might distort the words. Also, it’s important to tell exactly what I’m doing at each step.

Fortunately my son had an unused USB headphone/mike setup, the mike is decent, not good, but it’s handy when working with my laptop.

Anyway, I will try to publish something tomorrow evening!

I was hoping to start looking into new Ableton Live betas, but they seem to have broken their nice tradition to release something each summer. I should write more about Live, in general. Meanwhile, here’s a series about music and money — it’s good to see where we all are heading. I would expect any musician at some point would like to be compensated for some of their work, not that releasing free music is nice, anyway.

This just posted article is a good summary of the oddnesses with the performance fees here in USA concerning radio versus net streaming. Basically, radio performances will not generate any royalties to the performer, only to the composer. The concept is that radio play is PR for the artists. Most of us would argue that those times are over by now with the advent of Internet.

It’s indeed time this is changing. In the electronic music world, it’s not that common to have separate composers and performers, usually it’s the same person or band. Anyway, I think the more clear trend is that the labels will have less and less to operate with concerning the royalties from performances. Another reason why big labels are in big trouble, as their business models were based on selling plastic platters and trying to sneak in with contract issues related to publishing rights.

What could you do just now? Well, to start with, if you create music, join any of the royalty companies, BMI and ASCAP are the big companies here in USA, and each country in Europe has their own specific royalty groups. There are some rules, but usually it’s something like that the person or band should have N songs available for public consumption. And remember, MySpace entries should also count.

The reason I recommend this is that these big royalty companies are the ones that will take care of all the lobbying, politics, administration and so on. It’s easier to let them handle it, than you get specialized in royalty legal issues, that might even differ from country to country.

It’s hard to know how much you could earn, but in some European countries radio play could generate more money than you expected.

I’m a member of BMI, as long time ago I liked their online registration system, but ASCAP is also good and they also have online registration now, Frank Zappa belonged to ASCAP, for example. Usually it does not cost anything to belong to these groups, but it could take some effort to justify that you are a performer with published material. You also need to show your social security number, tax id, and similar things.

After this you need to be very diligent and register any of your compositions on the service. Just now, at least with BMI, it asks for basic info such as title, artist, and additional info about the released product, length of time, and so on. Usually it takes me about 3-5 minutes to fill in the needed information.

As a result your song will also get a so called ISWC song identification id that are sometimes used with download services, and might play an even bigger role with future net-driven royalties and so on. Note, this is different from the ISRC id which is a track-based ID system, and usually the ISRC number ranges are provided to record labels, but anyone who has a label should get access to your private range.