This is what the waveforms look concerning importing and autowarping George Clinton’s Atomic Dog.  This was a huge hit for George Clinton back in 1982 and it’s a good representation of the P-Funk sound, not to speak it’s pretty hilarious, too. I think I even DJ:ed that track once very long time ago, like in the early eighties.

Anyway, this is a good example of the dynamic range of tracks up to about late nineties when the dynamic range wars started.

What I do across all my DJ tracks, now covering from obscure funk 45 rpms done in the sixties to whatever today is to make sure that the gain level is the same across all the tracks. I defined 7dB headroom as a nice compromise — seven is a lucky number and it does not really matter as long as you keep a standard. The dynamic wars tracks I just decrease the headroom so it’s in the 7dB range.

The tool I use is Sonalksis FreeG plugin. It’s a free plugin and it monitors the levels. I place this plugin on my master track and set a nice loop of 24 bars or more in a place that seems to be the loudest part in the track. Then I observe the RMS values, this is the average mean that is more interesting than peaks here and there. Looking at the existing values I could decide how many dBs to increase or decrease in the clip view (don’t use the plugin itself to increase the value.) When done I just save  this information as part of the .asd file saved for the track/clip. 

I might have written about this before, but my iTunes and Ableton integration has evolved over time, so here’s the latest work flow. The reason I’m using iTunes with Ableton Live is that even if Ableon Live’s browser has evolved over time, it still does not have a lot of features that are really good to have when working with multiple tracks, especially when scaling up to hundreds and hundreds of tracks.

To start with, you could select a specific iTunes library when you hit the option key as part of starting up iTunes. This will give you a dialog box to either create a new library or select an existing one. This makes it possible to have a separate DJ music library. I have actually two as I changed my playlist to have old seventies/eighties funk and good disco tracks, but I keep the other one around in case I suddenly want to play tech house and so on. Anyway, this is not necessary, you could have one huge DJ library, or even use the one and only library you use for iTunes. Anyway, it also makes it possible to keep the DJ library on an external disk, only copy this library to a laptop and so forth.

Secondly, you could just drag and drop audio files from iTunes to the Ableton Live browser. I wish they will fix the issue of using the clipboard for copy/paste between the applications in Ableton Live 8. Then this would be even easier, including copying over multiple entries.

Next thing to remember is that Ableton Live picks up the .asd files with warp info from a corresponding .asd file with full same name as the original audio file. If you have already warped your audio file and drag this file into iTunes, iTunes does not know anything about this dependency so it does not copy this file over. If a future Ableton Live embedded the .asd information inside audio container formats that support meta information, such as MP3, CAF, AAC and so forth, then this would not be an issue.

Anyway, what you need to then do is to select the audio file in iTunes, and with a right-click or control-key click get the context popup menu. One of the entries there is to Get in Finder. This will get you a window with the location where the iTunes managed file resides. You could now drop in your .asd file and things are fine. Just remember that iTunes sometimes renames the audio file so double-check that your .asd file has the exact same starting file name including any extensions such as .mp3 and that the .asd is added to the end.

Now, another approach is to first just get the audio file into iTunes. When you want to warp, drag this file into Ableton Live. When you save the .asd file via the clip panel it will save the .asd file into the location where iTunes has the audio file.

There’s even a third approach, iTunes could refer to audio files outside it’s library folder, see iTunes documentation for more information in case you don’t want iTunes at all to manage your audio files.

So now we are at the point to discuss what is so good about iTunes… To start with, as part of warping I figure out the key, major/minor and so forth. I also register the BPM speed after the initial  auto warping. I then add this information into the file info inside iTunes. Again right or command-click and select Get Info. You will get a dialog box such as the in the image above. BPM has its field. I use the Grouping field for the key information as there’s no default key field in iTunes. Also add or modify any other information as you wish, including creating your own Genre by just typing into the Genre field (in case the pre-existing ones are not your liking.) If you don’t like to register BMP for a lot of existing tracks inside your iTunes library, check out Tangerine.

When this is in place you could do sorting in the iTunes view based on these values, provided you activate any missing columns — again right or command-clicking in the column header section is your friend. You could sort based on key, or bpm, or artist, genre, date added and many other values.

I even use the rating star system; my approach is to register the level of ‘energy’ in the track from one star (ballad), two (moderate dancing), three (normal), four (sweaty) up to five (energy-drink level.) This way I could also do sorting or searches narrowing down the style so I don’t place a slower paced track in the middle of a sweaty section.

What else? I could make play lists with recommended sets and save those in the iTunes database, do all kinds of interesting searches, just by typing a couple of letters I could quickly find all my Isley Brothers tracks and so forth. I could even make smart play lists that find things based on key, style, date added and many other values.

Also, it’s fun scrolling through the entries using the cover flow and see covers… Data backup of the file to DVDs spanning multiple DVDs is also easy. And that’s just a tip of the iceberg when you could do all kinds of interesting things inside iTunes itself before you get the track to Ableton Live.

Now, if Ableton Live in 8.0 could synchronize to iTunes libraries in forms of showing playlists and smart playlists there might not even be a need to drag-and-drop any longer…

I’m sure there’s even more to it. Yes, it takes a little bit time to add tracks to the database including registering meta information, bu I see more benefits from this all from this work. Feel free to add your own comments in case you have other cool ways of using iTunes and Ableton Live, I could always pick up a new trick or two.

Here’s another technique I’ve used when not being sure where to place fixed Ableton Live warp markers. In this case it is Janet Jackson’s What Have You Done To Me Lately. First time I heard this track was at a huge club in London when I visited the place while taking company courses in Birmingham… That track over a huge and good PA system made a big impression, indeed.

Anyway, the actual warping of this track should be very straight-forward, as there’s a very definite beat and Jimmy Jam&Terry Lewis as producers definitely has the beat locked down.

There are, however sections, where’s this big reverse cymbal at the end of the fourth beat, and it will make the waveform look very muddy and unclear concerning where the border beat for the fixed warp marker should really reside.

What I’m doing in such cases is just to make sure that the previous line, here 118.4 in the image, is aligned to a visible transient. By the help of that the next section, 119, will naturally align at the right position.

Remember that the warp markers in Ableton Live are like rubber band knots, if you move something around, the rest between the fixed warp markers will stretch and re-align, so you could always see how it all fits together looking at all the transients. Some of them will make visible blocks of audio, and if those block fit well into  the lines, then the warping should be OK.

Old tracks have very different problems concerning warping with Ableton Live. To take a test case; Chic’s Everybody dance is a very famous disco/dance track. I purchased the 12″ extended version (from Amazon’s MP3 download site) and thought that this would be a 10 minute job concerning warping.

After two hours or work spanning two evenings I think I got it nailed down, for the time being. There were many issues.

To start with the rhythm section, the drum and bass,was tight but not so tight concerning the beat. When you listen to the track it sounds tight, but when analyzing it all with Ableton Live you start to see all kinds of misses and hits here and there. This was especially true at the end of the track. I assume the rhythm section got tired after playing the patterns for over six minutes.

The other interesting thing I learned an evening later is that the downbeat for specifying warp points was masked by a early triggering clap sound. I put warp markers on the kick sections, and usually the kick and snare/or clap aligns nicely. However in this case the clap was far too early (see the image). Even more, the early clip triggering variated across the track.

I could finally figure out where the kick was happening, there was this very thin peak that repeated itself in all these problematic sections, so I placed the fixed warp marker on this spot and got it all under control.

Warping electro house tracks and techno is easy. It takes a lot of effort to warp old tracks, indeed.

Recently I’ve been purchasing and warping a lot of dance tracks from the late seventies and early eighties, Chic, Jackson 5, Sister Sledge and so on. Why is another story. Anyway, I tested with the latest version of Ableton Live (7.0.7) in case auto-warping has improved since the last time. The test case was Jackson Five’s Can You Feel It.

The initial check using the built-in metronome actually sounded like auto-warping did a proper job, to my positive surprise. The second taste case was another Jackson 5 track, however after three minutes the auto-warping got out of whack.

Going back and listening to the first track critically I noticed that the alignment of drums was not that perfect, after all. So we are back on the same state as before, Ableton should really focus more on auto-warping and make it more robust. I do believe that it’s possible to design a proper auto-warping algorithm as it’s not rocket science to analyze various bandwidths and figure out where the drums align. It might be one of those cases where before it took too much CPU power, but with Intel cores sitting idle with the new chips this should not be an issue.

Anyway, when doing warping by hand it was really interesting to see how things were aligned. The track Get on the Good Foot by James Brown was super-tight, his background band was so on the pocket it was incredible.

When warping a special 12″ version of Chic’s Good Times, the drummer and bass player at the end part, after seven minutes, kind of collapsed and the beats were not aligned at all. Now, this was in the age of no copy/paste of loops, rather having musicians play the same thing for up to nine minutes, so it’s understandable but interesting to notice now afterwards.

When I warp old tracks, there’s the issue of swing taken into account or not. A lot of old songs are performed with a lot of swing. However, personally I think for DJ performances it’s good to warp the tracks to be very tight, makes it possible to mix the track with any other track that is also warped in a tight matter, as well as introducing other contemporary loops and so on.

Next more about my new DJ musical direction concerning dance music.

Many of you Ableton Live users might have seen this article over at the Ableton Web site concerning follow actions. Anyway, it’s worth repeating, it’s a short and to the point article. This article is especially good for anyone who wants to set up an Ableton Live system for personal jamming purposes, guitar playing for example, hint hint.

For me, I was really looking seriously at maybe getting the Line 6 Spider Jam system, but realized that: hey, I have Ableton Live, I could write any kind of jam setup I want.  So even if the new Line 6 Spider Jam is elegant, as well as the new LM4 Looper system from Line 6 (not yet shipping), you have a lot of flexibility using Ableton Live to create similar setups using the follow action model and lots of loops. You could even emulate the guitar loop processing part itself in case someone is interested.

Then all you need is the laptop hooked to the amp via the CD3/MP3 input, or just feed it to the PA via a mixer and the job is done. The last part is to control the start and stop. For a guitar player, the only real good option is to get a cheap midi foot pedal controller, but you could get those for $100 or below. I’ve even seen those who take an old mouse and convert it to a cheap start/stop foot button. Anyway, if someone else has good ideas how to control Ableton Live via a cheap foot pedal, let us know.

I just finished another BioWaves episode (010) using Ableton Live and I used a couple of non-standard transitions that I thought would be fun talking about.

To start with, BioWaves the podcast is not done live, of many reasons. I’m always running out of time to get the episodes done, there’s a lot of work, selecting tracks, doing artwork, finding urls to the tracks (sometimes that takes a while as the MP3 files or web sites don’t have enough information.) There has been many cases where I’ve pulled out one track and added a new one, a day before release. There’s a certain pattern I try to keep concerning track selections (more later.) And I try to play each track three or four minutes without any editing. To do the actual episode live would just add another level of complexity. Anyway, I will mention how these techniques could be done in a real live situation, and if I play live, I indeed play live, no cheating there. Anyway, enough excuses.

The first one was to just suddenly stop one track and keep the other one up, in other words no what-so-ever fade-outs. This is a very dramatic and cool effect, especially if the ending is a big reverb washout or something that ends with a big band. To do this in a live situation, either use a reverb on a bus and let it ring while you quickly take down the volume for that specific track — and meanwhile the other track is playing.

In my case it was just pure luck that the first track ending I’ve selected randomly had a nice washout sound, while the other track then continued happily with its beat.

The second technique has to do with how to handle very dramatic BPM changes. In my case it seems I have nailed down a certain pattern on the one hour shows where there’s a build-up to the 50th minute. From that forward I want to take the pace down, play various chill and otherwise non-standard dance music tracks, and those are usually down to 110BPM or below. While the build-up was up to 130BPM or higher.

What to do? Well, my standard trick is to take down the bpm levels as part of the ending track where there are no drums, and hopefully no fast patterns such as arpeggiators. Slow melodies are the best. By taking down the BPM levels — sometimes even 20 BPM or more — few would notice it. If there’s still something unnerving about that dramatic BPM drop, I could add in ping-pong delay och a big reverb effect that further masks out the big drop.

You could also easily do this in a live situation, just find the right spot. If you don’t have one handy, make a loop or a clip with something that could be used to taking down the BPM levels and loop this around.

Which leads to the third trick I use from time to time. I really want certain tracks to play together. Usually it’s easy, but there are always some problem cases. The trick I use in those cases is to make a short four-bar or so loop of the ending track, and let this one loop for a while. Meanwhile I fade out this track and let the other come in, either via a filter, or just by plain volume fade outs/ins. By finding a good loop point that works across the whole fade makes this much better. This is especially useful for tracks with very complicated endings, and where you even can’t fade out/in as it starts to suddenly sound strange at some section.

Again, in a live situation you just loop a part, or have a handy Ableton Live clip around and use this one when fading out one track. You could also use a loop for fading in a starting track. Or loops for both cases. As you see in the picture above, I even used two very short loops for the fade in case and two longer loops for the fade-out.

I’m afraid someone might protest about all these artificial transition techniques. That’s fine. Ultimately it’s really the audience that should make any judgments  if they like the mixes or not. Actually my hidden agenda with this posting is to inspire other producers and DJs to use non-standard transitions — the fade in/out is so boring and predictable nowadays…

One of the really easy and cool things with Ableton Live loop handling is that you could munge the loops to nearly any configuration you want. There’s absolutely no need to keep the original 4/4 loop structure in place, you could do just any kind of musical craziness with the loops.

For example, drum loops (see picture). I took an ordinary sounding 808 drum loop, and the placed fixed warp markers in very unexpected places. The end result is something that does not sound the normal kick/snare/hihat beat, rather something that has odd accentuations in the beginning, and a quick sudden burst at the end.

And that was just touching the tip of the iceberg, you could go through bass lines, pad lines, nearly anything, and make it sound very different from the original purpose. Still, there’s a need to make sure it sounds musically interesting, so it’s not yet-anther fun-with-effects-release.

This is another trick how to handle loop cross-overs in Ableton Live. What typically happens with pad-like loops is that when the loop starts again, you could hear the transition from the end to the beginning. And Ableton Live, still in version 7.0, does not have cross-over handling.

One technique I’ve used from time to time is to insert a ping-pong delay at the end of such pad loops. Jut when the loop ends, I will increase the wet level with automation. Thus, when the pad ends, you get this filler that feeds into the next round.

You could experiment with reverb as well to get such a fill effect to avoid hearing the obvious loop cross-over points.

Another nice thing with such a delay or reverb is that it sounds very psychedelic, like mind-expanding, here and there! Anyway, this is another reason I prefer mouse-based automation loops, instead of using a controller, you could be far more exact with such settings, not that using a controller will make the production sound somewhat more human.

Another new feature in Ableton Live 7.0 is so called side-chaining of plugins, the new compressor, gate and auto-filter has side-chaining options now available. This is nothing new, Logic has had this for a while, same with other DAWs. There have been ad hoc solutions with third party compressors to get the same effect in Live, but it’s good it’s built into some of the basic plugins now.

So what is side chaining? Basically you tell the plug-in that it should use another audio source and by the audio source changes the plug-in parameters will change. The classical example is compressor side-chaining. It’s been around for a while, but bands like Daft Punk finessed it into now the classical pump effect, and producers such as Eric Prydz seems to use it nearly everywhere. John Holden is another producer who has used compressor side-chaining in delightful unexpected configurations.

As for Live, the setup is easy, all you need to do is to remember to open up another view with a tag button, and you get the settings (see image). You define the extern source, and if you want to put in the side-chaining before or after the effect. Then it’s a matter of keying in various values to get the effect, from subtle to very pumping. A typical side chain source is a kick drum track, resulting in a classical pulsating dance floor sound.

Similarly, the gate has a similar control. In this case it’s the opposite, when the other eternal source triggers, it will open up the gate for this channel, leading to classical uses such as making sure that the kick and bass lines are together.

The auto-filter chaining works so that sweeps will trigger based on the external source. So all three have specific uses.

I tried them out, loaded in a couple of loops from a remix of Genietronix Skyflower that I’ve been trying to finally push out through the door, and hey, it sounded really interesting! So I need to make yet another remix, this time using the new side-chaining effects. So I’m all for it, even if it means that there will be even more and more side-chaining material out there, leading to a state where it’s cliche.

I think moderation is in order for side-chaining. It’s a good effect, useful for the dance floor, but too much sugar and cream destroys cakes. I’ve been in club events where the DJ played five-six or so side-chain tracks, and I swear I could not hear a difference, just this pumping low sound wave pulsating through the crowd for an hour. Maybe if you are in a different state, it makes sense, but for a listener it’s boring. Moderate use, for example not across all the tracks, makes sense.

My wife also claims she gets nauseated when she hears heavily side-chained compressor productions — which is also something I find fascinating, music that makes someone feel physically ill.

Anyway, as for Live 7.0 features, this is a big plus, or a ‘finally-there’ feature, depending on how you look at it. I’m not sure if third party plug-in vendors could hook into the side-chaining channels, maybe it’s available, so we need to wait and see if third party plug-ins will also have use of side-chaining.

Most of you know about the announced Ableton Live 7.0 by now, and you could visit their site to get all the details. I’m just now beta testing it, and I will post now and then findings about my tests.

One feature they announced, actually on the top of their announcement page, is an enhanced audio engine. According to the blurb they have precision 64-bit summing at all mix points through their program, POW-r dithering, optimized sample rate conversions and other advances.

Live has had a bad reputation about their mixing engine, it was not that bad, but all kinds of things out-of-control made the final sound not as clear and airy as with for example Logic Pro. Some things were not that obvious, for example, using warped audio clips caused dullness and less clear transients. Another issue that many have reported, and I noticed myself, was that Live was less forgiving about running hot tracks. Usually by keeping things below -3dB fixed the quality issues (bulky sound). And having no dithering support was not good, but I’ve used dithering tools separate from Live, such as Ozone, to fix that issue.

Anyway, what I did was to render out the same track with both Ableton Live 6.0.10 and 7.0b1. This is a new track from Genitronix called Funky Music, Up and Down (Level 5 remix), released very shortly, and it’s been a notorious production on my hard disk for a long time. The reason is that it has many dense tracks, and until a couple of weeks ago I could not tame it, until I did massive eq:ing across all the tracks. So I think this is a good example of a typical massive dance track, could it sound more airy with Live 7 compared with Live 6? Another possible test would have been a track with a lot of reverb, that usually also shakes out issues about clarity.

Anyway, I took the two exported 16-bit WAV files, and opened them up in QuickTime. This is at trick of mine to do A/B testing, I start and adjust the playback in the QuickTime player, and by switching the focus between the two tracks I could easily do A/B testing.

The verdict? Well, I had a hard time to hear the differences. I think with a full blind test I could have not heard any differences. It felt like Live 7.0’s rendered output was somewhat more clear, but it was so marginal. This all requires more testing, but I didn’t hear a big, huge difference. So anyone who has published tracks with 6.0, you didn’t miss out on anything big.

Some other thoughts, even if the mixing engine in Ableton Live is now fully 64-bit, there are all kinds of external plugins (might still be 32-bit or worse) and original sounds that will not benefit from this. The weakest links is still the weakest link. So this all is always marketing talk, so you need to be a little bit skeptical about all the talk about 64-bit sound engines. I might write something about the whole idea of sound quality, bits, floating point, and similar things shortly, as it’s a fascinating world, and musicians should know about it so they don’t fall for snake oil.

I will still release this track and some other Live-based tracks using Live 7.0, as the beta is stable, and maybe there are some small transients here and there that sound better, not to speak of improvements in the plugins, especially the built-in compressor and EQ8. Oh, the purist inside me.

Here’s another trick that I use from time to time, and might be applicable, but you need to test it out. I’ve noticed that if the headroom is tight before all the channel are fed to the mastering plug-ins, i.e. you see the signal going over to red quite a lot. Especially with Ableton Live the mastering plugins tend to do odd things with the clipping with hot signals. It’s not natural, rather a kind of chopping of transients and it all will otherwise make it sound very boxy.

What I do in Logic Pro is to place a Gain plug-in just before the mastering plug-ins and this way take down the signal. Usually between -1db and -3dB will make a nice difference. The plug-ins then operate with a lower signal and could do better adjustments. This is really how each one perceives it — you need to test this out yourself.

What about Ableton Live? Well, there’s this FreeG tool from Sonalksis that does the same thing. Here’s the link if you want to download this free plugin.

FreeG is nice to have, anyway. If you ever do Ableton Live warp work, and you want to adjust the volume levels between various tracks, use this tool, and look at the average values, not peak, and try to make each one close to 0dB average.Then when you do DJ work later, the volumes are balanced.

Maybe this is old news for some of you, if so sorry. But I think sooner or later someone using Ableton Live for DJ use will ask the standard question: how do I set a specific loop point during playback of music with N bars (N being 1, 2, 4 and so on)?

Well, the thing to learn are the two Set buttons below the bigger Loop button in the envelope view (see image).

When you press the position set button during playback, the current location is recorded and the Loop is automatically enabled with usually a default length to end of track.

When you hit the Length Set button after a while, the length is recorded and the loop point is now looping around this length. To progress, just disable the Loop button and the loop is again non-activated, until you again trigger the next one with the Position Set and Position Length buttons.

The actual resolution, assuming you have global quantization in the loop, will be rounded to the quantization levels. If you have 1 bar quantization, you could hit the length set button immediately after the position set, and it will be a one-bar loop. Same if you have 2-bar quantization, the default resolution will be 2 bars, so you can’t go wrong and define a bad quantization loop range this way.

Now, in real DJ life, you could bind these buttons to your controller so you have one button for loop enable/disable, one for the position set, and one for the length set.

I’ve been recently cleaning up old tracks for the next podcast of my own productions, and usually the first thing I do is to place an EQ on each and every track before even starting to clean up the mix.

With Logic Pro it’s so easy, just click on the eq area and you get an instance of the EQ plug-in. With Live, you need to drag in the EQ8 to each track, but it’s doable.

One of the biggest enemies as a mixers we have is muddiness. It happens easily when you have lots of tracks playing at the same time, frequencies battling about the same range, ending up as a mush of sound, and you can’t really hear anything interesting. There’s a reason why minimalist dance music sounds so clear, few tracks!

Anyway, just be like a sculptor and sculpt out various main frequencies for each track. Sometimes even the dreadful 2k range will make sense (this is the metallic range) for certain instruments, so they are popping out from the mix.

This is very similar to what ancient composers had to do, they had to learn inside out what the range and tonality was of each instrument, so then when they composed (in their head!) they could figure out the balances, and that’s why a symphony orchestra sounds so massive, and still so clear.

We working with electronic tracks have an even harder time, as each synth and sample is its own new world, so we just need to go in and carve out the frequencies, and take out others so that the total balance will make it sound clear and interesting.

I sometimes even suspect that one reason many subscribe to using external big mixer boards is that they immediately have access to eq for each tracks, and they could quickly balance the frequencies, not that solid state analog circuits also give warmth compared with digital harshness that we in the fully digital world always have to try to minimize.

I just read the latest Remix magazine, October 2007, and it had a couple of really intriguing articles. One was about the techniques DJ Moldover is using, the customized Novation SL keyboard with ribbon controllers was just plain amazing, as well as the custom 4-bar chopping Reaktor plug-in that is available as a download — I need to test that one out. If you have a chance to check out Moldover sessions on YouTube, try to see what he’s doing, he’s one of the bleeding edge controller DJs out there.

Anyway, the other thing he mentioned — and to remember, he is the ultimate mashup of clips — is that he deliberately saves the pitches for clips in only the following keys: A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Can’t be simpler. With complex mode it’s also a no-brainer. This makes his choices much easier than to try to remember to pitch some parts down, and others up. I will most likely re-save my clips into this simplified format, as well.

The other technique he is using is to colorize the clips based on how well the keys work together, for example, B and D keys don’t work together, so they have very different colorization, let’s say pink and dark blue. While B and E will work well, so those are pink and red.

I would most likely extend this to use another shade for major and minor keys. Just now I’m just registering the key somewhere in the clip, so that works for me — I visualize a keyboard in my head to see if that works or not when mixing together tracks. Anyway, these techniques were worth mentioning.