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…

Ok, what fun did I do the last hour? While working on DNA Tones, Part Three, I had a set of tracks playing the same MIDI clips — it’s one of those power-techniques to have multiple instruments playing the same lead, bass, and others. Heavy rock bands have known about this trick since the early day power chords.

Anyway, what I started doing, see image, is to deliverately shift the notes in the various same MIDI tracks, some would play now and then a couple of semitones above, or below.

This made a very interesting arrangement, sounds like some of the instruments are jamming now and then, and then falling back into line.

I just had to remember to cut the midi clips here and there — they were looping, so if I pushed one note up, it could have caused problems earlier in the total mix of the tracks playing.

You could also place one of the arpeggiator plug-ins into one of the tracks with same midi info as let’s say a bass line, with pushing it up one octave, and this way also get all kinds of interesting variations using the same MIDI data.

Sorry no postings for a while, but I just didn’t have anything to write about, and better not waste bytes by meaningless chatter. This weekend I will go through more Ableton cool features, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, as producers, it’s kind of fun to hang on to something at the end of the product. It used to be a plastic platter, single or LP, then a CD. Now in this modern age of releasing tracks one by one over digital distributions, it’s mostly bits saved on a separate hard disk. Such backups are easier to do than constantly burn CDs, not that I do CD burns and take releases to a location outside this house from time to time.

Anyway, it would be fun to have something tangible as a result from the release, I must confess. I was thinking for a while to burn a CD, and use a bigger sized case, and start lining up the book case here in the studio with entries. It’s kind of fun watching a wall of releases slowly materialize over time. Then, if I ever move, what a drag to pack down lots and lots of things.

If anyone has a good idea how to memorize work, let me know. I’ve also been thinking about the lack of anything physical in this new age of digital releases, and maybe even consumers will again demand something that is tangible, or something else than just a digital file with audio — more about that shortly.

Something that most of us battle is the creative spirit. The common problem is that we set aside a weekend or so to make two-three great tracks, and then we watch the screen, do some work, and the end result is disappointing.

While — at least in my case — most of the good ideas happen spontaneously, when I’m not planning on doing anything special.

So. What to do? One approach I have is to put together a 40-50 minute long track! I just do all kinds of interesting experiments in Logic, export the loops, open up Ableton Live, create 20+ tracks, and drag in material left and right, and see what happens.

There’s no pressure, no deadlines, or goals, just having fun. Then later, I could go in and chop up the parts, and refine and remix things, and export it as a track. Or, if it does not work, just forget it.

Now, I even exported those 50+ songs earlier on this web site. I just got chicken recently, as it’s good to keep a high standard on a lot of material, so I’ve been hesitant to export these out. I have one just now, but most likely I will chop out parts and export them as tracks along the way.

Also, if you have old songs you never got far with, just export the audio material. Then, reassemble it all together again in a new combination with other parts, and see what happens. This is where it’s so fun to work with Ableton Live, as the elasticity of tracks makes this possible. You could do the same in Logic if you create Apple Loops from the material, as well.

Anyway, the idea is to not establish high goals and expectations, just that will cause distress, and that’s the least we need when dealing with creativity.

I think it’s good to have a side line project as a lightweight hobby, something that is not so serious and requires a lot of polishing and thinking. This way you don’t feel so much pressure, and could even have fun in the studio. Sometimes I think all those aliases with known producers are for the same reason — to do something fun without worrying so much about either commercial or social acceptance.

One thing I’ve done for a while is to make various mixes for a friend for aerobics instructions, and similar mixes for my wife when she goes to the gym. Usually my friend is so nice that she accepts any kind of music, even experimental strange stuff, wonder how it would be to take an aerobics class with some of the material I’ve given her.

With my wife I’ve recently done mixes that try to be as eclectic as possible, mixing together as many possible music styles as there exist, from one extreme to another within five minutes. Again, I don’t know if I would like to release those publicly. They are rough, and I don’t spend hours cleaning them up, but they are indeed strange-fun stuff, and it’s great spending 2-3 hours just having great fun and doing crazy plugin experiment with let’s say acapellas mixed with ambient music mixed with drum&bass loops.

There’s another form of musical experiments I’ve done for a while that is also I think creative and opens up a lot of musical ideas, more in the next posting about that concept.

I’ve been using 24-bit 44.1kHz for any audio material since the first MacOSX computer running audio applications (a 2 x 867MHz PowerMac). I never had any performance problems, and it’s really good I didn’t go down the road of creating and using 16-bit samples. The additional 8 bits give far more dynamics range.

The upper end, whether 44.1kHz or 48kHz, or even higher, is a big topic of discussion, especially in the mastering side. Some think it’s good to have more higher end for especially software synths so that any filtering will happen far beyond the hearing range. Others think it’s overkill. I could live with 44.1KHz, it maps nicely down to CD and MP3/AAC release versions, so there’s one less sampling I need to need or worry about.

Anyway, with most of the material as 24-bit or MIDI instruments, the output needs to at some point be rendered down to 16-bit for CD, MP3/AAC and so on products. This is where you really need to do dithering of the 24-bit material down to 16-bit in the the final rendering. Logic Pro has excellent dithering algorithms you could select. Of some reason Ableton Live still does not have any. I’m using Izotope Ozone for the final dithering from Ableton Live, myself.

So what is dithering, really? The Dithering with Ozone Guide over at the Izotope web site has excellent explanations what is happening. But shortly, if you take down 24-bit to 16-bit, the software needs to approximate values, so it doe something like average, and it makes the transition points very digital and harsh — believe it or not, adding noise up there will make the digital curves smoother, so the ear hears the final result more pleasing.

While you are at that web page, download and read the Mastering with Ozone Guide as well — even if it’s using Ozone as the example, it has tons of excellent advise about mastering, I try to re-read this document every three months or so to keep my mind fresh about mastering issues.

OK, enough mastering posts — marketing next!

While driving yesterday in the car, and I had a compilation of concurrent Berlin techno music playing, my wife said that this kind of music was designed for partying and going out, but not for listening purposes.

It was just one opinion, but it might have some truth in it. A lot of electronic underground music produced today is really for the dance floor. Just the format of the intros an exit parts, with extended drum parts, are designed for DJs so they could easily mix in and out tracks.

Hmm. Actually I would prefer to compose for listening purposes, too, where dancing is one element. One way is to release multiple remixes of the same track, but in the long term that’s also a drag.

However, something that is more and more common with contemporary DJs is that they don’t really need the extended intros and exit parts. With CDJs, Ableton Live, Traktor, Torque et rest, it’s not so hard to set loop points and make your own intro and exit sections. It’s really for the vinyl and non-computer DJs where they need such parts. So in the long term there is really no need to make really extensive mixes.

So what I will actually do with my productions from now is to just make them more listening-centric, and not worry so much about the remixing live, as more and more DJs know how to do it, and I should not worry about that part. So I think this compromise from now will work out just fine with my production work.

Going through dance tracks, it’s sometimes very obvious if a DJ has produced a track or not. In one sentence: they make tracks that are easy to mix together with other tracks.

Going through details about this. Such tracks have a long intro with just plain drums or material with no strong melodies, making it easy to mix it in. Similarly, at the end there’s a long section where it’s easy to mix it out.

The format is very 16 or 8 bar centric, the breaks start at such parts, are multiples of 8 or 16 bars. Same with any other known sections in the track. It’s seldom the tracks have an odd thing thrown in, causing problems mixing other tracks in, or even for someone dancing getting back to the pace.

The track has long sections of repetitions, makes it possible for the DJ to use filter sweeps or other effects to put in their own touch to the track.

The track as no sudden surprises, such as abrupt volume changes, tempo changes, empty spaces with nothing suddenly happening, and so on.

The track is also of decent length, not just barely three minutes, rather at least five minutes or more. It has a smaller breakdown in the beginning, and a bigger breakdown around four minutes or so. The breakdowns are not mandatory, but it’s just one of those standard patterns most tracks have today.

As a nice bonus, such tracks have here and there a nice repetitive pattern, such as a singer pattern, that could be used as a acappellas somewhere else.

Now, producers could indeed do anything they want with their tracks. With Ableton Live and other similar tools the DJ could put together a DJ-friendly track, as well. If you really want both, make two versions, one is your artistic representation, and one is a remix that is suitable for DJ purposes. Also, if you never DJ:ed, but are producing dance music, it’s worth trying it out so you learn all this in a real-life scenario.

I was thinking about this today when I was driving to work. Recently there have been two skills that I have tried to cultivate for better production work. They are not fully developed for me. For a musical genius such as Mozart, I think he had it perfected, but for us mere mortals…

The first is to develop a highly critical ear. It means that you could quickly spot mistakes, wrong levels, odd sounds, wrong keys, something is not heard, muddiness, and everything that is not making the production perfect. This takes a lot of introspection skills. It’s so easy to get excited 4am in the morning after an all-night creativity session. But the next morning, it’s important to be critical about the material and go through it carefully.

Two things help. One is to give it time. Go back to the work later, you have a fresh mind then and could hear nuances you never thought about earlier. The second is just to hear over it, over and over again, if possible using different kinds of audio environments. If you can’t stand hearing it after ten takes, the customer won’t like it either, most likely.

The second still is to memorize and internalize music. Concerning the earlier skill, it means that you remember exactly where the problems are in the track you listened to in the car, and then when you get home you could just go in and fix each problem! The other nice thing with this skill is that you could work out rearrangements in your head, while you are driving, or doing something else, and then when you are ready, the plan is in place and you could execute it.

I do think most successful producers have these two skills highly developed. Someone like Quincy Jones could sort out any kind of problem just by listening to tracks, as well as arrange music in his head. As I said, these skills are not developed in my mind. But as a funny story, when I was a kid, we didn’t exactly have iPods or even Walkmans to take music with us everywhere, so what I did was to memorize tracks I liked on albums, and listen to them in my mind while working outside the house, or when taking the bus to school.

It’s a very good exercise to try to memorize songs, as well as analyze songs into parts and learn all the small things that are going on with music.