I suspect every producer has their own pet idea, or production part, that they want to include, whether it works or not, but it’s just something that they want to have in there. In my case it’s multiple bass lines.

Oh, I know the voes of balancing those out, making sure they work together, having a cohesive track, and it would be much, much easier to just use one single bass line, one bass sound, and get the job done.

But no, something in my brain forces me to just sit another night up and tweaking and tweaking until I tamed the three or so wild bass line horses so they work together from beginning to end. Usually one starts, and there’s two at the end, I’m not so crazy to overlap them (unless I use a doubling track to get the bass lines sound better.)

Maybe one reason it happens for me is that I seldom hear production with multiple different bass sounds and lines, and it just sounds different. Or then, the Blue Monday virus is stuck in my mind forever. To make things interesting, in today’s techno-flavored dance music, the bass lines are somewhat abstract, FM-sounding, with no clear lines, so then it should not even be an issue if I’m working on such tracks.

Anyway, if you never tried to put in three or even four bass lines, check it out: it is an interesting problem, as someone from the East would say.

Here’s a technique I’ve used from time to time, especially when I’m traveling, as it’s an easy and interesting way to create new compositions while you don’t have a lot of tools and focused time available. I will use this in a week as our family will take a short trip to southern California, so that’s why I reminded me of this technique.

Start with spending an evening or two and generate lots of audio material, atmospheric sounds, melodies, bass lines, drum loops, mashed loops, effects, patterns and so on. Classify those with type and key, and also place them in specific folders on the disk. 20-50 entries in each should be fine. Remember to export them with the best possible audio quality, 24-bit. If you use Logic, make Apple loops, otherwise, with Ableton Live, just dump them out. Or export Logic audio and use Live for the second phase.

Then, when you are traveling or starting to work on the second phase, drag in various parts into Logic or Live, just pseudo-random, build tracks, and see what happens. If you have audio material consisting of drum sounds, melodies, patterns (sequencer loops), atmospheric stuff, odd loops, effects, you should always be able to get together something that has enough content to become a track. If you have voice tracks, or snippets of singing, even better or more intriguing.

With Ableton Live you could easily change the pitch if needed, or you could try to only write in phase one material in few keys, let’s say a minor/minor and e minor/major. With Logic it’s also doable for changing the pitch, but you need to use the built in tools to achieve this.

Sometimes these tracks evolve over time, I add new kick drums, replace the bass lines, and so on, but it’s good to have something to start with. And if this does not work, just start another experiment!

Sight, now I gave out another secret so others could be very productive…

Something that I’m a big sinner of, and I suspect many other producers, is that we tend to rely a lot on the compressor/limiter plug-ins in the master track, and let it just limit and clip long peaks of loud material. See picture here. This is an example where the limiter did it’s job and tried to clip a loud peak, but for a very long time. What happens is that the resulting output, let’s say in 16-bit mode, has all sixteen bits set for a longer time period for that sound wave.

There are two things that will happen with the result (if not more). First, depending on the digital to audio converter, it might cause all kind of strange artifacts when dealing with such long full pulses of digital info. Secondly, the loudspeakers won’t move. Those dealing with dance music will know this, it means that the kick will not pump in and out, less air will move, as sound is really pushing air molecules around. The end result is actually less energy, and duller dynamic sound.

So what to do? First, after you finished your track, take a graphical look at the output to notice if this is happening, accepting the facts is really the first and most important step — based on that you could go in and fix it.

What I use now from time to time is the X-Ism free plug-in from Solid State Logic. It’s really a very clever plug-in (even if it takes CPU cycles), it shows if the bits for the 24-bit recording are all used, resulting in this huge bloat of sound. Then I key in the values in the master plug-in section until there are blinking lights, and I could see that there are gaps here and there.

What I also do nowadays is to control the level going into the master plugins, I could use plug-ins such as the really badly named Utility plug-in from Ableton Live, but I’m using the FreeG plug-in from Sonalksis, as it shows RMS values which are more interesting than peak values, even with numbers. This way I restrict the signal going into the master-ing plug-ins very quickly instead of decreasing the individual track levels. The plug-ins then will again raise the levels so I compete within the realms of the loudness wars, but I could avoid the nasty blobs of full bytes going into the DACs and ultimately the loudspeakers.

Now, I’m going through a lot of netlabel material, and usually this is the biggest problem I see when including material for my next podcast, the track is good, but the signal has such blobs everywhere, resulting in a very loud/dull sound.

You could read more about this issue and problems with the documents that are part of the X-Ism download.

One of the most important tools you have in your studio is your reference monitors. If the monitors are muddy, your mixes are muddy. If they colorize your mixes in a strange way, your productions sound strange.

When you are looking for purchasing reference monitors, try to spend as much as you could, close to hurting the budget. There’s a reason good monitors are expensive, they sound and work well. Also, you will have this set of monitors for a very, very long time. The reason is that you need to learn how the monitors work, and based on that you know how they behave. Then, while mixing and mastering, you know how the characteristics, and you could compensate when you intuitively know from past experience how it will sound in other environments, a car, iPod, TV and so on.

You should never purchase reference monitors via mail-order, unless you have already listened to them, and know how they sound. One of the best ways is to purchase them from a store where you could do A/B testing. Burn an audio CD with material you really like and know inside out, and use this one to hear how various monitors sound. Some are very accurate, but it might sound tiring, others colorize the sound so you could work for a long time without ear fatigue, but then that impacts the exactness of the sound. The nice thing with a store with a decent return policy is that you could always return them back in case they don’t sound that well in your studio environment (more about that later).

There’s a lot of advice out in the forums about what monitors are the best. My only advice is, listen yourself and do not just assume. There are so many parts in a monitor, where some might like a certain sound, others not.

I would read qualified reviews online for particular monitors I’m interested in. Any source that has a decent to good test environment and tools would be good resources. For example, Sound on Sound has very good reviews, and they could point out if a certain monitor has flaws, or if the marketing info is from — let’s say they claim the monitor could go down to 40Hz, while in a lab test it was clear that the monitor could only handle 60Hz.

I would look for the following additional features in a monitor. As I work with dance music, the low end is important. The reference monitor should be able to go down to 35-40Hz so I could check out the bottom end. That means that the main cone should be 8″. Some claim sub-woofers are the way to go, but I prefer not to add that in, as it’s hard to over or under-compensate with different setups. For hip-hop where the sub-woofer in a car environment is a must, then that’s a big exception.

Balanced inputs! In this world of more and more electronics causing all kinds of nasty electrical fields, that is becoming a must. It’s also good if the front has a volume knob and power buttons. You might want to adjust the volume on the monitors in order to avoid those sudden huge volume peaks in case your computer setup wants to suddenly have max volume (happens now and then). As for the power button, it’s good to save energy today.

Some of the new reference monitors today have built-in DSP electronics to figure out the acoustical environment and adjust the output based on that. It’s a good idea, but usually such monitors are expensive. At least the monitor should have some kind of adjustment for the environment so you could do fine tuning of the output — however, this usually requires external tools so you could see on a computer screen how settings change the output, don’t just trust your ears.

As for placement of the monitors. There’s a reason they are called near-field monitors. Unlike the old-fashioned way of placing huge, expensive monitors in the wall in front of the mixer, these should be placed as close to the ear if possible. It means that you need to go with practicality compared with how it looks like in the studio. Sometimes you could find the sweet spot by moving around with your head, or placing the monitors around until it feels you are inside this huge world of music only.

Unless the manufacturer states that the monitors should only be placed standing, you could place them standing or lying by the side. This is how I have it just now in my studio. Whatever you do, don’t place them straight to the desk, the vibration will cause all kinds of subtle odd sounds. You could purchase somewhat expensive loudspeaker isolation mats, but you could get creative by checking out what’s in your kitchen and use similar material that is very cheap.

I would neither place the monitors on anything wobbly, such as high stands, this as I live in earthquake country, or if you have small kids navigating through your studio, or dogs…

The acoustical environment in your studio plays a big role in how the monitors sound, even with near-fields that try to eliminate some of these issues. This is often why the monitors sound good in the store, but nasty back home. I give you an example of the worst possible environment: a square room, with no damping material in the walls, no book shelves, sofas or anything to dampen, and a wooden floor. The square part means that the sound waves will bounce back and forth creating all kinds of funky new sound waves.

Remember that the total chain of audio has a weakest spot. If your monitors are excellent, but the D/A converters are not good, that’s where the quality levels will decrease. Fortunately most of the Firewire-based audio interfaces are very good today. Even the audio output from a Mac sounds really good, too. Also beware of too-long audio cables, or home-made audio cables with weak soldering. I would not go and get platinum-plated super-expensive cables, but it’s good to have something very solid cable-wise.

Some wonder if they could use studio monitors for private parties, sure, most modern reference monitors handle a lot of high volumes for a long time. However, party people tend to do odd things when they are intoxicated, so I would not risk to use expensive monitors in a party.

So what about the Yamaha NS-10 monitors? Well, long time ago the trick to get a balanced mix was to use those, as the mid-range in those sucked big time, and if you got the mix sounding good in those, they sounded good in most other places. The problem is that it’s a drag listening to production work with NS-10s day after day. You want to enjoy the music you are working with. You could set them up as an additional monitor, or use any old stereo monitors you have back home, or a set of computer loudspeakers. It’s always good to have a second set of monitors for A/B listening purposes. I still think that you need to do tests with iPod-like ear-buds, as the majority of music is listened to through such environments today.

This posting might be updated and annotated now and then, as I will start using it as my contribution on forums on postings where someone asks what monitor to purchase, and what to look for.

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.

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’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.

I’m just now working on mixing together the first ten tracks from PlanetoidPark releases, the reason is that I was told that it’s good to provide as part of an forthcoming label collection also a mix with the material. So those who want individual parts could get them, and those who want to get it all as a mix, could purchase it. So it makes sense.

It’s both fun and annoyance going through old material — why didn’t I do that, and how was that done, but best to keep the sound as it was, and not tinker at this point of time.

Anyway, I did a normal mix of the tracks up to 50 minutes, and it was OK, but reminded me of a radio program from beginning to end. I didn’t add any loops and other odd productions, just using the original material.

Tomorrow I will have a new ear, and actually chop the ten tracks into small clips, and then do a real live session mixing and matching together parts. This would be the other extreme end, instead of doing a secure mix, it could just be anything.

After that I need to make a decision, should I release a controlled mix of the material, or this live lets-see-what-happens mix? It will be interesting. If the live-crazy mix works out, I would rather use that one, as after all it’s like a new track rather than using existing tracks one after another… So that’s my dilemma for this week.

I wanted to write a song about Boltzmann brains – an odd topic — and needed odd sounds. It’s been a while since I last used Absynth, and the natural inclination when making strange sounds is indeed to first use this remarkable software synth.

And yes indeed, it’s not just odd spectral sounds you get, also odd sounding bass lines, as well as even rhytmic patterns that are not from your standard drum machine setup.

The thing I’m usually struggling with Absynth sounds is that they are so right in the high end, so many harmonics — even with taking down some of the track levels, it still cuts through.

As for the track, it didn’t take long to compose and finalize. This was one of those cases where I did the composition in Logic, and exported 24-bit AIFF files out to Ableton Live, and then reassembled it in a mix-like environment in about one hour. I still need to do a proper mastering and final check-down.

The other technique worth mentioning when exporting from Logic to Live is that I then use the re-pitch mode if I key in the exact same BPM as in Logic. This means that the quality is very much the same, no warping artifacts. I also do this with the drum loops exported.

As for the release, I doubt this could be released as an underground dance track, it’s 120bpm, and has too much oddities happening. Anyway, another reason I have the podcast channel in place to release material that can’t be released through normal channels, anyway. Meanwhile, check out about Boltzmann brains and see what the cosmologists are struggling with just now…

I just checked out SoundSnap, and created an account, as well as uploaded a bunch of sound samples to this place.

Basically it’s very similar to Flickr, but it’s sound related. You could download all kinds of sound effects, loops, single-shot instruments for samples and so on. And you could also upload your material, as long as you own the copyrights for that material.

Just read the fine print carefully, basically if someone else is using your material, you will not be compensated for this. Then again, it’s nice to be altruistic and give material for others, anyway. Usually, what I do with such sites is that if I use material from such sites, I also contribute, to keep the karmic balance, or even better, make it on the plus side.

One issue with similar sites is to maintain the quality, as the more its open, the more less quality material will be present at such sites. Then again, Flickr seems to work just fine, based on the tools there, so you could find really good quality material based on user feedback placed on entries.

We live in a really interesting post-modern world, where even high-quality sound samples are now available for everyone. It will most definitely increase the amount of music published, and I don’t think we are so far away any longer from the state where every consumer could make their own music — the truth is not so far away, already.

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.

Hooks are these small patterns of music that gets stuck in the listener’s head. It’s always been the trademark of good songwriters to write hooks that become memes, spreading like a mind virus, resulting in more people purchasing the songs, of course.

Recently, the whole notion of hooks have changed with contemporary electronic music. It’s no longer a matter of writing an interesting small piece of melody, a guitar riff, or a three part chord that sticks. It’s becoming a matter of finding an interesting/odd loop that is the hook. As an example, a lot of Acid music is really trying to figure out interesting hooks in forms of acid loops.

That’s fine. My problem is that such hooks don’t stick as well into the mind compared with melodies. I myself have a hard time remembering odd non-musical hooks. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s a bigger problem.

Some classical composers, such as Claude Debussy, just ignored the whole notion of a memorable hook, and did their own thing. A lot of contemporary techno is also going along this road. Then again, most of the population would recognize any of Mozart’s most famous compositions, while fewer might recognize Debussy’s works — Clair De Lune being of course the big exception.

There are some interesting exceptions in the electronic world, Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers being those I think of (and of course Kraftwerk, Underworld, and the electronic music by New Order, of which Blue Monday is one of the biggest electronica memes ever). Hmm, what’s in common with these acts? Memorable hooks?

Most of us working with audio projects have lots and lots of leftovers. There are few I know of that will release all the material they have put together, of many reasons. For example it simply does not sound interesting, or is such a different style so it’s hard to release it for many reasons.

It’s usually easy to know when something is not working out; if you work on the track for a longer time period, days, weeks, and is still sounds dull or not interesting, that’s such a track.

One school of thought is to just delete the material and go on. I think it’s a little bit drastic, but the idea has some merit. Time is short, and if you can’t rescue such a track, the statistics is against you. There could be a small possibility that later the track would work out. But if you have a long list of unreleased material, psychologically it kind of wears you down. So put them aside, into a separate folder or something similar.

The other option I use all the time is to reuse any samples, loops, drum material, and so on from unreleased tracks. I just export them to my sound bank, and there has been many times such recycled material shows up in unexpected configurations.

Another option is to export selected stems as possible raw material for something else, let’s say just the drums and bass. You could always later reuse it in combination with other samples, or as a starting point for a remix.

Finally, if you still really like the material, or can’t publish it of some reason, use it as parts of a personalized mix in combination with outside material, or then as exclusive private releases with published tracks. I do think such cases will be more and more common in future.

I should maybe go next and show my project folder setup for others to get ideas how to organize unpublished or published material.

Something that I use from time to time in mixes, and also in live DJ cases with Ableton Live, is to put in a very fat house dance loop on top of material that really does not have any strong beats, let’s say world music.

I really like the Kaskade Sound Library Volume 1 that is available from various places, and I saw that Volume 2 is now also available. The only drawback I have with those loops is that they are 16-bit, but they still sound brilliant.

Anyway, with those loops, the drum ones, you could get anything to swing really well, even when doing DJ work.

Yes, I could build my own drum programming, but it takes a while, and it’s not always that interesting to do yet another classical house drum loop. Doing odd drum loops is another story.

Now, if you still want variation, use various settings in Ableton Live with these loops using Beat Repeat, especially with the variation parameter (use small values, though). Or the chop it using envelopes and other effects, to make them sound unique.

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…