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.

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.

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.

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!

Sometimes when I do the final mixes in the arrange view, and change the tempo settings in the time line, the values are not as exact as I want, for example change from 127bpm to exactly 128bpm.

What I do then is to go in and define the min and max bpm range. This way the resolution is much, much better, and I could key in exact bpm values, for example.

It also works as a natural min and max value, unfortunately these values are not honored in the session view.

Speaking of bpm values, I guess most electro house tracks nowadays operate around 128bpm, where 128 is the magical number many producers key in when doing tracks. Those could be easily pushed up to 135bpm or so, for example with complex warp mode.

As for other interesting tidbits about BPMs, my aerobics instructor wants mixes that start with 125bpm, and builds up to 135bpm after ten minutes. I also tend to push it up a little bit at the end, to 138bpm or so, to make the people sweat at the gym in the last minute :-). For kickbox sessions, she wants 150bpm, and that’s a tough number for a lot of music I’m involved in — not hard house or fast techno.

For running purposes, that seems to also be very personal. My wife prefers tracks around 85-87bpm, and that’s a challenge as well, as many tracks in that range are soft ones, not aggressive ones. But there are tricks, for example taking a really fast track, and speed it up somewhat, and even if it’s 2×85bpm, it will work due to the twice-as-much counting, anyway. Now, you could even do 128bpm dance tracks that are actually half the bpm, or 64bpm, but I’ve not seen many examples of those, even if it’s quite doable.

I’m just back from the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco (a 50 minute drive), and I’m mentally tired, but just wanted to write an entry that yes I’m still alive and will post more entries this weekend — with an Ableton Live focus. Don’t worry, this will not become a Twitter-like site!

Usually I try to attend audio sessions, but this time I was just over for a day, and attended the Aperture export plugin presentation that an engineering buddy of mine gave, and he did an excellent job — never seen so much code written on the screen that worked just fine while he presented how to write such plugins.

I also went to some other non-audio sessions, mostly related to new features in Cocoa and the compilers — got to know that kind of stuff in my job… So sorry, nothing audio-wise to report. But I’m sure various companies are busy working on new audio software using Leopard.

Oh, one last thing! Check what happens in the Ableton Live browser if you select various audio files and hit the return key… Wouldn’t it be better that all the files selected and hit return (our double-clicked) would go to the selected audio track instead of creating new ones? Or if you select another row, they go to that row instead of always to the first one… If you don’t like that behavior, send Ableton a bug report about this to raise the voice. I think for DJ session cases it would be nice if we could control where the audio tracks are sent from the file browser in this case, instead of the need to drag them over with the mouse to specific locations…

PS: No, that’s not me sleeping in my bed…

Sometimes you learn new tricks by mistake, hitting keys around, or, as in my case, figuring out why this happened all the time and turn the mistake to a tool.

I was sometimes wondering why I got multiple splits when hitting the split function (Command-E) for splitting one single track.

Well, this happens if you have a range in the arrange view selected, if you hit a split, all the tracks in the same range will be split. This could be a nice feature in case you want to copy the same parts to another location. Or, what I did in the example above, I option-dragged the same parts three times to the left, so they were copied over the existing tracks, and the same short section was repeated.

Anyway, the important trick was to make sure that the selection bar, the blue part above, was highlighted by selecting it first.

I don’t know if this is documented, maybe. Anyway, one trick to find undocumented features is to select something, and hit key combinations, and see what happens. Many productivity apps have features that are either not documented, or are not fully enabled yet, but something is there available. Just beware, sometimes undocumented features could also trigger nasty crashes.

Here’s my recipe how to make one of those huge, long sounding reverbs that sometimes I think are over-used, but oh so nice and fun when placed in strange places in productions.

The main trick in my case is to put a ping-pong delay in front of the reverb effect. This way there’s plenty of bounce, and when it hits the reverb unit, those additional delays will increase the total amount of reverb, resulting in one of those bombshell reverb effects.

I’m also placing a hi pass filter (AUHighPass) after these two effects, as I don’t want to have too much low-end rumble in the final output.

I’m sure there are other combinations, as well, but this is one fun way to get that big reverb sound on cymbals and other hits.

Maybe most of us agree that space is at premium when looking at files and clips inside Ableton Live. There’s not much screen estate. Having long names, even with meaning, is tough.

Here’s my current solution to encoding information to both files and clips.

The first part is the key and BPM, the second is artist, and the third is name.

Let’s look at each part, using d#25 Lucine-Slur.

d# means d sharp minor. If it would be major, I would use D, that way I don’t need to put in another word or character into the encoding. Thus, lower case is minor, and upper case major, and if it’s a sharp, I put a # after the key.

25 means 125 BPM, 90% of my tracks are in the 100-200 bpm range, so there’s no need to put in the lonely 1. If I have ballads, I just add a 0, as in c#090.

The next is the artist or group name, if it has more than one word, I use camel caps notation (any programmer would know this one, at least those doing Macintosh programming), hence MatthewDear.

After the dash I have the name of the track, again using camel caps notation if needed, to save the space, as in DrEiff.

All this is to save screen space, as you see in the screen shot I could see much more info in a small audio track view. Some might want to place the artist name first, for sorting purposes. The reason I like the key and bpm first is that I could quickly look at combinations in a listing.

Anyway, this is just a suggestion, you could build your own personal encoding systems — but try to stick to it, if you modify it along the way, you could easily get confused, and it’s tedious to recode hundreds of files/clips.

Now, if you make a lot of MIDI clips you could encounter short term and long term problems. Short term is that you have a lot of software synths operating, and even with today’s multi-core Intels, you could get into trouble, not to speak of older computer systems. Long term problems is that you might upgrade you computer to another setup (don’t we all get a new computer every three years and we think this will last for a decade). Then when you are running your new system, the plugin you used is no longer supported, or has strange problems the originator has low priority to fix.

Or, medium level problems is that you want to collaborate with someone else, but it’s not clear that they have the Ableton Live Operator license, for example.

This is where the freeze function makes sense. You could select a clip and from either the Edit or the right-mouse popup menu select Freeze. This will render the current MIDI clip into a 32-bit WAV file, it’s even stored in the project folder, under Samples/Processed/Freeze.

In my test, see image, I rendered a preset from an amazing but amazingly as well CPU-hungry software synth that starts with the word Massive. When playing this patch with a 2x 2.0Ghz G5 PowerMac, just that single clip took 75-80% CPU power, not that good. After freeze it was down to 2%.

There’s also the flatten command, this will really make it a true audio file, but then you loose the MIDI information. You could also just drag the clip into an audio track, and flatten will automatically happen! Anyway, I think it’s good to keep the MIDI information around, as you could unfreeze and edit the parameters.

Going back to projects with MIDI clips, I do think it’s good to remember to freeze MIDI clips, even if you have plenty of CPU power. This to avoid any issues long term if you are on another platform with the plugins not operating the same way any longer.

I must say, of all the audio sounds I use in Ableton Live when warping, bass lines are the hardest ones to sound good.

The only practical way where I can’t hear artifacts is if I import bass audio lines and warp them in re-pitch mode, which would make sense as there’s really no direct warping happening in this case. Then again, I can’t easily change pitch, and I need to keep all audio material in the same BPM range.

You could hear warp artifacts especially in the other warp modes, maybe much less in complex mode. But in complex mode, the bass lines lack punch, an important ingredient with bass sounds. So I end up layering tracks, adding even more compression, eq:ing, and it gets more and more artificial and muddy. Sigh.

The other approach, maybe the best if someone is trying to release material with a good bass line, is just to avoid bass loops and create the bass sound via MIDI clips and software synths in the final production. That way you have full control of the quality, and you could change BPM, pitch, and other parts without loosing quality. It’s easier to modify MIDI information, as well, compared with audio loop cut/paste operations.

Which leads to another important issue about using MIDI clips in Ableton Live (to be continued…).

By the way, all those images in this blog? Well I work in a group that develops software for professional photographers, so I have tons of my own photos floating around every day when I develop SW and test it out, of which this blog is one way to export them out to the public.

Sometimes when your warp tracks in Ableton Live, you encounter this track that has no real definite starting point, let’s say an Ulrich Schnauss track that is just a slow buildup of material, or a long intro with no real percussion.

What I do in all those cases is just to scrub forward until I find a proper place where the first kick or some kind of percussion is heard, or a bass line starts. Then I set this as the 1:1:1 starting point, and check the warping from this point forward.

When I’m sure the warp points work all the way to the end, I go back to the 1:1:1 point, and with a four or eight bar loop go again backwards in the track to a point where I feel it’s the start point, and now again reset the 1:1:1 warp point to this location.

This technique has saved me lots of time when warping really hard tracks.

What I also do is to save a four or eight bar loop as part of saving the warp information, so if I load the file, I could immediately play this thing over and over again, without worries, and then lift up the loop point and continue when I want. So it’s a quick insurance to have something playing the first time the track is loaded without getting into big trouble.