Something/Everything

On a sad note, Joe Zawinul passed on from this life. Anyone who was involved in the early days of synthesizers in jazz and popular music, he was one of the main influences. And he was doing gigs and music up to the last moment — so if there’s one inspiration taken from this, it is to just continue day by day, and don’t stop.

If you don’t know his music, visit iTunes, or get a CD from your local store with him, or his band, Weather Report. And get inspired to get up to the same musical level as he achieved.

I think you read by now everywhere that the new Logic Pro, or Logic Studio kit is out. I ordered my upgrade five minutes after reading the web site info.

I’m especially interested in the user-friendly time-stretching capabilities, that will make it really easy to integrate audio and midi material left and right. Anyway, when I get my kit I will post more updates about my findings. I will switch over all my music production from Logic Pro 7 to this one — if I find bugs I just file them.

Anyway, the price is just amazing, you get a lot for the bucks.

By the way, here’s the link to all the Logic Pro 8 manuals available from Apple as PDF files.

I felt really stupid today when I had to take the car to work (I always bike if possible). And in addition, I had to do one of those few ‘drive around checking two new mixes’ trip with the car tonight. At least it’s a small car.

Anyway, we stopped subscribing to the daily newspaper, and otherwise we have tried to be minimal with trash. I’m trying to minimize the need for burning CDs, iPods and memory sticks with material work just fine.

This is also the reason I don’t mind about the digital download future we are heading towards. It’s fun collecting vinyl and CDs, until you have to move, or otherwise get lost in tons of stuff in the book shelves. And one day all that will end up in nature, whether we want or not, unless some future generation has invented a perfect trash destroyer.

There’s the problem of hardware, I have a bunch of old hard drives, waiting for a time and place for the next time some organization of company offers to pick them up for recycling. Can’t do much about electricity use in the studio, but each new generation of computers use less power. Otherwise, it’s best to let the nature heal, and not misuse it so it will be around.

I’ve been using the PSP VintageWarmer plug-in now for many years, and the secret about this great plug-in has been out for a while, which is good. For me, what VintageWarmer is good about are two things: making the digital domain sound more soft as with analog circuits, and to push the middle range up without making the mix too muddy.

Here’s a typical setup that I have in the master section of either Logic or Live. There are a couple of things good to know when using VintageWarmer.

First, the mix should be set to 50% or so, if you go all the way to 100%, it’s seldom I’ve been able to get a nice sound, it usually overwhelms the final mix.

Secondly, I keep the ceiling at 0, this is like a limiter, this will limit the outgoing signal. I seldom key the drive over 2 (unless I use it on individual tracks as a compressor). I set the knee between 20 and 50 in most cases.

As for the speed, this could be between 0 and 80 or so. I don’t use the multi-band settings in most cases.

By listening to the final master using on/off, I could hear the difference, and adjust it. In general, for mastering, it’s better to be more gentle with VintageWarmer, than push it too hard. Anyway, this is my secret trick to get the middle range up without making the whole mix too muddy, and as a bonus I could remove harshness of digital tracks.

Is that it takes so much time when something is wrong, and I need to switch to engineering mode to fix it, rather than spending the few hours I have writing music.

Like today, I have this nice Tranzport device for controlling various DAWs, Logic and Pro. And of course it stopped working for Pro Logic, after all the upgrades and OS upgrades. Just nothing worked properly wit Logic Pro, while Live and iTunes worked just fine with Tranzport.

So I went hunting around on the web, and finally found this posting. So that explained it all, I remove Tranzport from the current control surface settings, rescanned, and got it finally working.

Well, next time it’s best to do something similar if a control surface is not working, in other words remove it, and rescan to get it back to pristine settings. Otherwise, this is not fun. We are talking about singularity and multiple world cosmologies, but still we have a hard time making musician-friendly hardware-software combinations… Maybe we really need singularity after all to get to a point where the studio just works.

One of the cool DJ techniques with Ableton Live is to trick multiple clips using keyboard keys. You could in principle ‘play the keyboard’ and constantly trigger various clips, resulting in interesting (or not) combinations.

Now, how to map this with a keyboard, that’s the organizational issue. Some are looking into so called POT USB keyboards — these are matrix-style keyboards with rows and columns of keys, and you could program these to any key values. The problem with these are usually the price, as well as driver availability for MacOSX. But you could then create any kind of triggering system you want.

Now, there’s the lofty standard keyboard… I tried to experiment tonight with this kind of mapping. For the first audio column I mapped the cells as Shift-1, Shift-2, Shift-3, and so on, with Shift-0 being to stop the clip. The new row was Control-1, Control-2 and so on up to 9, and the third, Option-1, Option-2…

Now, I really like four tracks when doing this, but you can’t find another control key, and the Apple (Command Key) is used by Ableton Live, so I used the numeric keyboard, 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Then I also renamed the column headers so I knew what control key controlled what row.

I could get pretty far with this, it was indeed like playing an electronic accordion with material! Note, I didn’t check if a default key binding was overridden, but Ableton Live didn’t complain when I did this…

Now, I don’t mind the mouse, if I use four-bar Global Quantization, I have four bars of time when I could turn on and off various clips. The problem with the number scheme is that you could just have a range of 0 to 9 with number keys, and if you reserve 0 as stopping the clip (good to have) then you are down to just nine rows of clips.

I tried to map the keys using rows of alphanumeric keys, a, s, d and so on, but it just didn’t feel natural.

Maybe a combination of this kind of mapping and the mouse is a good combination. Anyway, with some training you could achieve very complex arrangements, provided you have tracks chopped into clips, or other clip material. Make a test version, save it, and make it read-only as a file, and you could then later just open this template and use it for specific DJ purposes.

Episode two of the new BioWaves podcast series is now available. The idea, as mentioned before, is to present really excellent music from net labels, as well as unsigned tracks from various producers.

Click here to get info how to subscribe to the podcast series, and there’s more general information available there.

Feedback highly appreciated so this podcast series could become better and better. Place comments below, or email me. Also, I like surprise emails about references to good net labels, or emails from producers with very interesting music.

BioWaves 002 Track Listing:

1. Brandon Plank - Brandon Moves to Cali [DigiLog]
2. ToyGUN - StrangeWays [EXPOSED Audio]
3. Laura Palmer - Somewhere There [Insectorama]
4. Flann - Keine Zeit (Sturmfrei extreem entspannt Remix) [Labil Recordings]
5. J-Lab - Eastbound [After-Dinner]
6. John Lagora - Stay Tune, Boy [Alquimia]
7. Herve AK - Total Contrast [Indigo Magenta]
8. Reii - Drops [Bump Foot]

Download
Download by right-clicking (Mac users, control-click) on this link.

Ok, I guess I’m bored, or just pushing ahead important work to be done. Anyway, drag an Apple Loop into Logic Pro and an instrument track — a green one so it has MIDI info.

Then, have fun with the Audio object settings, especially the transposition and velocity settings.

After that, switch the drum set to something unexpected, let’s say Ultrabeat’s Berlin Techno set.

You should have by now something really radical and interesting sounding, or not…

This should work with any other MIDI DAW environment. Take original material, transform the MIDI to something unexpected, and see what happens.

Another system I’m using as part of my project work — learned from my programming day job, is to keep a separate README text file inside the project folder. This README file has anything important related to the project that I would like to know without the need to look around inside the Logic or Live projects.

Examples of such small snippets of info are: bpm, key, title suggestions, ideas how to remix it, and so on.

In the case of the podcasting stuff I’m doing, I also need to keep everything consistent, so I need to keep track of the title naming system, meta-data, and so on. Especially in the case of the podcasts, I just option-drag over the README file to the next project folder, and start modifying the already existing material, thus keeping the format and style in place.

The file itself does not need to be a fancy, formatted Word document. It’s so much faster to open and edit a plain old text file…

I just read this longer NY Times article online about Rick Rubin and his position over at Columbia Records. It was indeed a long reading, but very interesting.

About half-way in the article he finally talked about his solution how to solve the problem with today’s big labels that are indeed totally out of sync with business realities. And that is to provide a subscription service where all music is available, so the end user could just pick up anything he or she likes.

The record companies are indeed worried about this solution, as they can’t really control the outcome of such a big change in their business models. But as he said himself, if this won’t happen by the companies, their stock prices will go down, and then someone else will pick up the companies for cheap and launch this idea.

We who work with smaller labels, we have very little to say about this, but I don’t see anything else than good appearing from such a business paradigm shift.

Rick Rubin, by the way, is quite a fascinating character, if you read the whole article. I must salute to him, as he was one of the key players, the owner of Def Jam, to get hip-hop out to the big world.

I also liked his views about music production, where his key focus is good songs, or tracks, timeless pieces. So true.

Sorry for the late posting, I’ve been away on a mini vacation to San Luis Obispo, one of our favorite cities in California, all kinds of micro climates, fun downtown (has even a record store, wow), lots of things to see. This time we climbed two peaks, Bishop’s Peak and Valencia Peak at the Montana De Oro State park.

Anyway, over at SLO (as the locals call the place) I picked up the latest Future Music magazine, or latest as we get it here in USA, the August #190 edition. The magazine was OK, but the video material on the DVD was outstanding!

There was this 120+ minute reportage of D. Ramirez working on a remix in his studio, using Logic Pro and various tools, and he showed a lot of really interesting techniques that I want now to try out, like using various Reactor plugins to take tracks and make various really odd variations of them, and then re-introduce those parts in breaks, and much more. I also liked his idea of always routing all the drums to a specific bus with compression, so the drum sounds were kind of ‘merged together’ with one compress to make the drum part more uniform.

Anyone interested in arranging electro house tracks should see the videos, as he shows inside out how it’s done.

There were also ten videos with various really cool Logic Pro tricks, such as how to side-chain the ES1 synthesizer, and how to do more interesting tricks with the EVOC vocoder, and much more.

I ended with reading the magazine in about 30 minutes or less, and watching the videos for hours!

I used to purchase every Future Music magazine for years, until I just felt that they started to repeat the articles, and there was little new. And I was never that keen on using their samples, were nothing special, and most producers make our own samples, right?

Anyway, the new DVD video sections are really the main reason I will get more FM magazines in future. It’s pretty expensive to get a monthly subscription from US, $140 when I looked at the exchange rate minutes ago — but one could always make a tax deduction of this magazine, as it contains a lot of information music producers would like to know about.

PS: Yes I do think D. Ramirez is one of the really cool electro house producers, he’s very original.

PSS: I started to look through DJ material I have here, and actually I had many D. Ramirez tracks, hehehe.