ableton live tips and tricks part 5

5TipsTricks Tutorials

T his month we’re adding a bass part, ideally one that somehow fi ts in with our beat from the last tutorial. Refer to the example set included with the issue – it’s called TUGTAL4. The set includes all the steps from the last tutorial as well as a

couple of samples you’ll need to complete this one.Bass sounds change considerably across genres;

you’ve got classic electric bass played with pick or fi ngers,

analogue and digital synths, and LFO-driven wobble sounds. They’re all good and they’re all readily available to us these days,through real or software instruments and Live Packs. We’re going to build our own bass sound and program our own part. This is because the Simpler instrument we use is included in every version of Live. If I was to do the tutorial using the Operator synth, you might not be able to follow the steps. You should try Operator, though – it’s my go-to synth for bass parts. I’ll move on to others only if I can’t fi nd what I want in there.

We’re spending more time working with instrument racks as this is a great way to build deep synth sounds that would otherwise require complex routing across several tracks. In many ways they’re similar to drum racks, which we’ve already encountered. We’re using two chains in our rack – that’s two instruments playing together – but you can have up to 128 chains in a rack. Impressive enough, but then bear in mind that you can have

128 racks inside another rack, so you can quickly end up with thousands of chains buried deep within your rack.

When you connect a MIDI keyboard or use your computer keyboard to play those sounds, you’re going to get a massive sound because all of the chains will play at once. This can be a bit overbearing, but we’re only using two today, so we’ll deal with that issue another time, and there are various tactics we can use to specify which sounds play at what times.

We’re using a transposed sine wave to create a sub bass – a low bass fundamental tone which fattens up the bottom end. It can be almost inaudible in the mix at certain times. For reasons of simplicity, we’re pairing it with our square wave sound, but there’s no reason why a sub couldn’t be on a track of its own and subject to a whole other round of editing and effect processing.

After drawing in the notes in our bass clip, we went back to shorten the bass note in our sliced drum rack from last time to make sure it didn’t overlap with the new bass part. When you’re working with MIDI programming, a lot of mixing problems can be fi xed at the programming stage. It’s the same reason we set the Simpler instruments to 1 voice each, to avoid overlaps that will affect the bass part.

Simpler samplerSimpler is a very powerful sampler, although it has a user-friendly interface. It makes it possible to build long, sustaining notes by loop and crossfading short samples, but on this occasion we don’t need those controls. Lucky

us! Maybe we’ll come back and use them later.As I mention in the tutorial, it’s important to

resist the temptation to make a huge bass sound right now. This is because we plan to add other instruments, and sonically there won’t be any room for them if we have a bass sound that’s riddled with

effects and covering a huge frequency range.We use clip envelopes to create repetitive

movement of the Auto Filter controls; it makes our bass sound a bit more evolving and interesting. It

depends on what genre you’re working with, but automated fi lters can be a huge factor in the mix. If

you don’t like the restrictions and mouse-work of drawing these envelopes, be aware that you can record them in real time if you’re using a suitable hardware controller. Also I can’t stress enough the importance of unlinking clip

envelopes from the clip length. And remember:

Let’s make some bass

On the disc On the disc

Accompanying project file included

on the DVD

Martin Delaney thinks it’s time to add some bass to our beats, doubled up with a little sub to make it bounce. Here’s his guide…

FOCUS ON… REAL BASSThe best thing you can do if you want to program good bass parts is to get your hands on a bass guitar – it’s a great way to try ideas against your drum tracks. You don’t have to learn to play properly, it doesn’t even have to be a good bass and it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, because 99 times out of 100 it doesn’t even get plugged in. This is my most common way to create bass parts, noodling away while the drums loop. To get a bass vibe…play bass. It’s pretty obvious!

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 4

Resist the temptation to make a huge bass sound because we plan to add other instruments

his month we’re adding a bass part, ideally one that somehow fi ts in with our beat from the last tutorial. Refer to the example set included with the issue – it’s called TUGTAL4. The set includes all the steps from the last tutorial as well as a

couple of samples you’ll need to complete this one.Bass sounds change considerably across genres;

you’ve got classic electric bass played with pick or fi ngers,

analogue and digital synths, and LFO-driven wobble sounds. They’re all good and they’re all readily available to us these days,through real or software instruments and Live Packs. We’re going to build our own bass sound and program our own part. This is because the Simpler instrument we use is included in every version of Live. If I was to do the tutorial using the Operator synth, you might not be able to follow the steps. You should try Operator, though – it’s my go-to synth for bass parts. I’ll move on to others only if I can’t fi nd what I want in there.

already encountered. We’re using two chains in our rack – that’s two instruments playing together – but you can have up to 128 chains in a rack. Impressive

128 racks inside another rack, so you can quickly end up with thousands of chains buried deep within your rack.

When you connect a MIDI keyboard or use your computer keyboard to play those sounds, you’re going to get a massive sound because all of the chains will play at once. This can be a bit overbearing, but we’re only using two today, so we’ll deal with that issue another time, and there are various tactics we can use to specify which sounds play at what times.

We’re using a transposed sine wave to create a sub bass – a low bass fundamental tone which fattens up the bottom end. It can be almost inaudible in the mix at certain times. For reasons of simplicity, we’re pairing it with our square wave sound, but there’s no reason why a sub couldn’t be on a track of its own and subject to a whole other round of editing and effect processing.

After drawing in the notes in our bass clip, we went back to shorten the bass note in our sliced drum rack from last time to make sure it didn’t overlap with the new bass part. When you’re working with MIDI programming, a lot of mixing problems can be fi xed at the programming stage. It’s the same reason we set the Simpler instruments to 1 voice each, to avoid overlaps that will affect the bass part.

Simpler samplerSimpler is a very powerful sampler, although it has a user-friendly interface. It makes it possible to build long, sustaining notes by loop and crossfading short samples, but on this occasion we don’t need those controls. Lucky

us! Maybe we’ll come back and use them later.

resist the temptation to make a huge bass sound right now. This is because we plan to add other instruments, and sonically there won’t be any room for them if we have a bass sound that’s riddled with

effects and covering a huge frequency range.

movement of the Auto Filter controls; it makes our bass sound a bit more evolving and interesting. It

depends on what genre you’re working with, but automated fi lters can be a huge factor in the mix. If

Resist the temptation to huge bass sound

add

MT Technique The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 4

46 | May 2015 MAGAZINE

MT146.TUT live4.indd 46 20/03/2015 10:20

Let’s make some bass

MT Step-by-Step Making some bass

01 Open our example set, which follows on from last time. Load an empty Instrument Rack into a new MIDI track. Drag the

clip ‘square’ into the rack and it’ll automatically appear inside a Simpler instrument.

02 Arm the track and play your keyboard to audition the sound, in a low-ish range. Drag the clip ‘sine’ into the rack’s drop area,

creating another chain. Now you’ll be playing both sounds together.

03 In the ‘sine’ Simpler instrument, set the Trans (transpose) value to -12 semi-tones, that’s one octave down. We’ll use this as our sub

bass and the saw as our more immediately characteristic tone.

05 Refer to the screen shot. It’s just E1 then D2 at 1.1.3 then E1 again at 1.3, D2 at 1.3.3, and A2 at 1.4.3 and E1 at 1.4.4. Match the note

lengths to what you see in the picture.

04 You might want to rename the chains now, for visual reference – Cmd-R. Good, now let’s draw in some notes. Double-click in an

empty slot to create a new MIDI clip, as we’ve done before.

06 There’s a bass sample in the drum kit; our bass clip leaves room for that. But, find the controls for the bass note in the drum rack

and reduce the Release to 1.00 ms, shortening the note.

each envelope can be a different length. You might notice that the sine wave part of the bass sound doesn’t react much to the filter, but that’s normal – sines are not so responsive compared to other more complex waveforms.

We finished off the bass track with Live’s Compressor. This is perfectly adequate as a clinical compression tool,

although that’s one area where I think third-party plug-ins or even hardware can step in and do the job better, for those times when you want a compressor that purposely adds some character to the sound. If you have the Glue Compressor from the Live 9 Suite, that’s a good place to start…

The Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live Part 4 Technique MT

MAGAZINE May 2015 | 47

MT146.TUT live4.indd 47 20/03/2015 10:20

MT Step-by-Step Making some bass… cont’d

07 While we’re shortening, set the Sine’s Sustain to -7dB. This makes it shorter against the higher, square sound; when you play the

clip, it keeps the punchy low bass hit without cluttering up the mix.

08 Because we’re using short punchy notes for this, we don’t have to play with the other Simpler settings for loop/fade, release time,

and so on. Our samples are long enough that it won’t matter.

09 Our simple bass part will be monophonic – only one note at a time – so we can set the voices for each Simpler to 1. This means

we can’t play or program any overlapping notes by mistake.

11 Let’s raise the sine volume inside Simpler to 0dB – Simpler and Sampler always default to -12dB, I guess to protect us from

ourselves! You can keep tweaking the levels as you go on.

10 We could add effects to each chain and use the Spread control to make a monster bass sound, but it doesn’t leave much room for

other sounds in the song if the bass is too big.

12 Let’s add Auto Filter for some nice filter sweeps. Drag it right after the rack so it applies to both chains and set the filter cutoff to

170Hz, and the Q (resonance) to 2.00.

As we’re adding more elements to our track, we’ve got to make sure everything sounds good alongside everything else. While working with the bass sound, I was starting to feel the Resonator settings were a little bit too abrasive. To fix this you can go to the Resonator in our percussion track and tame it a bit by resetting all of the fine tuning values to

0 using the white boxes under each Pitch control. That should sound better!

That’s all for now. Next time we’ll be working on a keyboard part to layer over our bass and beats. Once again we’ll take a shot at building our own instead of loading a preset. MT


48 | May 2015 MAGAZINE

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MT Step-by-Step Making some bass… cont’d

13 Sweep time. Inside the MIDI note editor, click the envelope arrow and choose Auto Filter and Frequency from the pop-up choosers.

Click the Link button and type a value of 4 bars next to that.

14 Click the left end of the red dotted line in the editor to anchor it. Drag the right end upwards to 1.50 Hz (Cmd-Click-Drag for finer

resolutions). Now the frequency changes as the clip plays.

15 Choose Resonance now, unlinking it again, anchor it, then draw an envelope that ends at 2.90. You’ll hear that as well. Look at the

Auto Filter and you’ll see red dots marking the automated controls.

17 When you’re repeating these nice envelope sweeps, don’t use the same values every time either – it’ll sound more

organic if you vary them a bit. You will hear the difference especially with the Resonance.

16 What sounds cool is if you create different length sweeps for different parts of the song. Once you’ve clicked that Link button,

you can set envelopes to any length, even with simple one-bar clips.

18 Drop in Live’s Compressor/Classical Compression preset. Make sure it goes right after the entire rack so it applies to both chains.

If you’ve got Glue Compressor from the Live 9 Suite, try that instead.


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59

The Ultimate Guide To Additive Synthesis | Technique

1 Operator is Ableton’s bread and butter FM synth but unlike traditional FM synths it has the ability to create and customise waveforms with

additive synthesis. Load the synth up on a MIDI track, and click the Oscillator button at the bottom of the envelope display.

3 Let’s edit the oscillator’s waveform by adding some energy to the third harmonic. Play a note and drag up on the third column to about three-

quarters of the way up. You’ll see the visual representation of the waveform at the bottom right change slightly, and the sound becomes more organ-like.

5 By combining Operator’s additive synthesis and FM capabilities, we can create some useful sounds. Click User under the Wave parameter

and select Saw 64 from this list. This gives us a 64 band sawtooth wave. Noise up the waveform by increasing the volume of some arbitrary bands.

2 In default mode this displays all of the oscillator’s 64 available bands. Currently the oscillator is set to a sine shape and as such only the first

band is active. The additive display is pretty small, so click the 16 button at the right of the display to zoom in to the first 16 bands.

4 Continue adding odd-numbered harmonics that get quieter. Our waveform begins to sound and look more like a square wave with each

one we add. This is additive in a nutshell! In some synths it’s possible to vary the levels of these harmonics over time but in Operator they’re static.

6 Click operator B, set it to 0dB, and its attack time to 1.38 seconds. This causes operator B to frequency modulate our sawtooth, with the

complexity of harmonics increasing as its amplitude level increases during the attack stage. This gives us a filthy sweep, ideal for a grungy bass sound.

Basic Additive With OperatorOperator might be a predominantly FM instrument but it’s ideal for getting to grips with additive synthesis too

Getting to grips with additive synthesis at its most basic level is straightforward and, because quite a few synths have additive capabilities, you don’t even need a dedicated additive-based instrument to get started. We’re going to use Ableton Live’s Operator, which while essentially a frequency modulation synth also boasts a useful additive waveform editor, handy for making waveforms from scratch, and editing the synth’s library of included waveform shapes.

Operator’s implementation of additive synthesis is quite straightforward and doesn’t allow for modulation of partial levels in real time, but it’s adequate for demonstrating the fundamentals of the technique. Building up harmonically complex waveforms is easy with the Oscillator editor page, and these can be used to create rich, evolving sounds when modulated by another of the synth’s operators. In fact, modulate one additive waveform with another and you can create filth to rival the likes of FM8!

N ovation’s Launchpad has become the go-to clip launching device for Ableton Live users – it’s amazing how often you see it, on stage, in the club, or in the studio. It’s simple, mobile and practical. From the original Launchpad to the

Launchpad S and Launchpad Mini, it’s… well… ubiquitous, is probably the best word. But there are times when you might want a different type of controller. The Launchpad has it covered for Live clip and scene launching, and for a certain level of simplistic mixer-type control, but sometimes you still need faders and knobs to take care of business. This is where the Launch Control comes in.

Our expanded walkthrough should fi ll you in on what to expect from the Launch Control, and how to get it going with Live. If you don’t have Live already, that’s cool because the Launch Control includes a free copy of Ableton Live Lite, so you’re ready to go straight out of the box; it’s a really nice little bundle.

When you’re deploying the factory and user templates, remember that you can switch between them at any time during a performance or recording; you can fl ip from launching clips in Live to sending MIDI to other devices and hardware without missing a beat.

A bonus feature is that the Launch Control is iPad-compatible. As usual, you’ll need an iPad Camera Connection Kit to attach it, but then you’re good – it gets its power from the iPad. You can use it with Novation’s iOS apps, or any other app that’ll receive MIDI messages.

If you’ve visited the Novation website, or you’ve been paying attention generally, you’ll be aware that the Launch Control is part of a wider range of launch-type products. It began with the Launchpad, which continues to thrive as the Launchpad S, and as the dinky little Launchpad Mini – and of course there’s the Launchpad Pro, which has been

announced and you never know, may be released by the time you read this. There are also the excellent Launchkey keyboards, in 25, 49, and 61 key varieties, as well as a Launchkey Mini version for the dedicated mobile diehard. I guess what they have in common is pads – they all have a certain number – but also a clean, focused, design ethic, which makes them very straightforward to set up and use.

If using the Launch Control doesn’t satisfy your control itch, you might be a candidate for upscaling to the Launch Control XL, which includes more buttons (adding track solo and record arming, among other things), extra rows of knobs and pads, and importantly, eight faders.

On the customisation front, each knob is backlit; the default arrangement is red for the top row, yellow for the centre row, and green for the bottom, but through the Launch Control XL Editor software, you can change these colour assignments, using red, yellow, green, or orange. What’s also cool about the XL is that Novation has added the extra while keeping it to the same size as the Launchpad itself.

Whatever you use it for – whether you’re using it to control your DAW, plug-ins, iPad, hardware – the Launch Control is a very versatile and capable little thing. No installers necessary, no mains power needed, and it doesn’t take up much room in your bag or case.

You can’t do it all with touchscreens, and you can’t do it all with pads. Sometimes those two rows of knobs, and some faders – a MIDI mixer, basically – are just what you need… MT

Getting started with the Novation Launch Control



on the DVD

We’ve been offering a fantastic Novation Launch Control as a special gift to subscribe to MusicTech. If you have taken us up on the offer – or are tempted to! – here’s a special tutorial on using the Launch Control, written by our Ableton Live expert Martin Delaney…

FOCUS ON… JOINED UP THINKINGNovation’s Launchpad and Launch Control hardware controllers function perfectly well individually, but combining them makes a lot of sense for Live users. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the Launch Control and Launchpad are the same width, hmm? Locate them on your desk for a well-appointed setup that doesn’t take up much room, and packs easily for gigs. The layout works well if you position the Launch Control directly below the Launchpad - the USB port is on the side, out of the way. If you need more ports, Novation’s Audiohub 2x4 has enough to connect up to three devices simultaneously.

Ableton Live Subscriber gift tutorial special

it all with pads. Sometimes

The layout works well if you position the Launch Control directly below the Launchpad - the USB port is on the side, out of the way. If you need more ports, Novation’s Audiohub 2x4 has enough to connect up

those two rows of knobs, and some faders – a MIDI mixer, basically – are just what you need… MT

The layout works well if you position the Launch Control directly below the Launchpad - the USB port is on the side, out of the way. If you need more ports, Novation’s Audiohub 2x4 has enough to connect up

MT Technique Subscriber gift tutorial special

52 | June 2015 MAGAZINE

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MT Step-by-Step Launching Launch Control

01 Connect the Launch Control to your computer using the supplied USB cable. It’s one of Novation’s neat right-angled ones – but

don’t fret if you lose it, any USB cable will do. No mains power required.

02 If you’re running short of USB ports, you can connect via a hub. I can tell you for sure the Launch Control works with Novation’s

own Audiohub 2x4 – but then you’d expect it to.

03 The Launch Control is plug and play – you don’t have to install any drivers on Mac or PC, but it will be useful to download the free

Launch Control Editor software – more on that later.

04 Now launch Live, and open the Preferences MIDI Sync tab. Choose Launch Control from Control Surfaces at the top, and

from the Input and Output lists next to that. Close Preferences.

05 To get you off to a quick start, we’ve provided an Ableton Live set to use for this tutorial. It’s on our DVD, and it’s called ‘Launch

Control’ (self-explanatory title alert) – open it now.

06 Before starting, let’s check the Launch Control has the correct factory template loaded. Hold down the top right Factory button

and press the bottom left pad. There are other templates – we’ll discuss them shortly.

07 We’re in Live’s Session View for this one. For now, use your mouse to start some clips playing. This is a mix that needs work, and we

can use the Launch control to tweak it.

08 The volumes and pans are all over the place. No need to assign any controls manually. Use the top row of knobs to adjust pans,

and the lower for volume. The pads toggle tracks on/off.

Subscriber gift tutorial special Technique MT

MAGAZINE June 2015 | 53


MT Step-by-Step Launching Launch Control… cont’d

09 We have two return tracks in our set. ‘A’ contains Ping Pong Delay, and ‘B’ hosts a Reverb. To access the sends, press the ‘down’ pad

to control Sends A and B with the knobs.

10 Live Intro has only two sends available, but the full version of Live has 12. You can access all of your sends by simply using those up

and down buttons.

11 Don’t worry about losing track of where you are. As you use the Launch Control’s knobs and buttons, the Status Bar at the bottom

of the screen lights yellow, giving you a helpful read-out.

12 Factory template 2 provides clip launching. Press the Factory button with the second pad to get a micro Launchpad. The down/

up arrows provide scene navigation, the left/right gives you track selection, and the pads launch clips.

13 In true Launchpad style, the pad LEDs light with one of three colours. Yellow means there’s a clip available on that pad, green

means the clip is playing, and red means you’re recording into it.

14 Moving on to template three, the first two sets of four knobs from each row, correspond to the first eight controls in your rack or

device. The other knobs remain freely assignable.

15 The down/up arrows select devices within the track, and the left/right buttons select tracks. In this mode, the pads select further

banks of eight controllers, going deeper into the selected device.

16 The Launch Control doesn’t create a pop-up red box in Live to show you where you are, but again, the Status Bar – plus the

usual highlighting of active tracks, scenes, and devices – is enough.

MT Technique Subscriber gift tutorial special



MT Step-by-Step Launching Launch Control… cont’d

17 There’s no limit on how many tracks, scenes or devices in Live the Launch Control can access. Once you’ve used it for a while you’ll

be skipping around the screen like a skippy ninja.

18 There are eight factory templates ready to use – the others aren’t intended for Live specifically. They contain various

combinations of MIDI control messages and notes, and you can view these in the editor software.

19 Those templates are worthy enough, but there’s also that User button. That gives us access to eight user templates, which we

can edit as we desire using the Launch Control Editor software mentioned previously.

20 The Editor software is a free download for Mac or PC, and is a breeze to use. This lets you configure MIDI notes, CC messages

and channels for each control on the Launch Control.

21 Thanks to the Editor, the Launch Control can take command of your DAW, software instruments, Max for Live devices, and even

hardware synthesisers and drum machines… anything that’ll take MIDI through your computer.

22 For controlling plug-in instruments and effects inside Live you might need to use the Device Configure mode, where you can

assign controls inside Live to specific controls within the plug-in.

23 To control external hardware, you’ll need to create an empty MIDI track and load the External Instrument Device. Choose the MIDI

input and output corresponding to the LC and the hardware.

24 Your messages go straight through Live and out to the hardware. You can also configure that device to receive audio back in from

the hardware, if relevant. I’m using it with Elektron’s Octatrack here.

Subscriber gift tutorial special Technique MT



THE BLUFFERS GUIDE TO ACOUSTICS

Your room can make or break your sound. It’s all about its acoustic. Rob Boffard explains all…

T he most important piece of equipment in your studio is not your computer. It isn’t your DAW or your monitors or your MIDI controller. The most important piece of equipment in your room has zero moving parts, probably looks a little bit ugly, and is something you will almost certainly never actually notice.

We’re talking about your acoustic treatment. The acoustics of a room where music is made, mixed or mastered is the single most important thing in the entire production chain. It doesn’t matter how good your ears are or how expensive your equipment is: if your space isn’t treated right, then what you’ll be hearing won’t be accurate, and you won’t get a good sound.

In this guide, we’ll go into exactly what acoustics are. We’ll talk about what sound is, how it behaves, and how you can tame it. We’ll also detail a short construction project that you can undertake to make your own acoustic panels. Trust us: it will improve your sound like you wouldn’t believe.

Ride the waveThink about sound for a minute.

Very obviously, it has a source, like your speakers, and a destination – that would be your ears. But in-between the source and destination, that sound is doing some very interesting things.

Sound, as we hope we don’t have to explain, consists of pressure waves in the air. When those pressure waves hit something, such as a wall or chair or desk or coffee mug or bookshelf, they are either reflected or absorbed. We’ll admit, that’s

MT Feature Music Technology

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MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to acoustics

Although a purchased full package is the minimal fuss solution (such as the London 12 Room Kit pictured here from Primacoustic), your room may benefi t from the more custom treatment when building your own solution. And, yes, we know there’s no door.

MT147.Bluffers Guide.indd 106 15/04/2015 15:33

THE BLUFFERS GUIDE TO ACOUSTICS

Music Technology

putting it a little simply, but the point is that the sound you hear is dramatically affected by the environment it’s in. You’ve almost certainly experienced this: think of the last time you were at church, or a massive concert hall. There is a heavy reverb to the sound, which comes not only from the walls and floor and ceiling, but also from the distances between them. Likewise, step into a cupboard very quickly (go on, we’ll wait) and say a few words. Chances are, your voice will sound muffled and stripped of character.

These are not ideal conditions for music making. It’s less important at the actual production stage, when sound quality and balance take a backseat to musical creativity. But when you’re starting to mix, you want as little environmental interference as possible. You need an accurate picture of what’s coming out of your speakers in order to make informed mix decisions. Plenty of songs have been recorded in a cathedral, but very few have been mixed there.

Assuring that the environment you are in is as acoustically neutral as possible is absolutely key. Let’s have a look at how to make that happen.

Foam pitWe’ll operate on the principle that you have a room at home for your music making. Furthermore, we’ll operate on the principle that you can do things to that room. If you are a renter, or otherwise unable to change the room too much, this may not apply. That being said, it’s still worth reading, as it will help you understand the principles of how noise treatment works.

Chances are you’ve got a room with regular furniture. A table, chair, maybe a couch, perhaps a couple of bookshelves, too. Stand at the centre of the room, and clap. Listen to what happens to the sound. Try to analyse where the echoes (or reflections) come back at you from, and what they sound like. Don’t worry if you find this difficult – it’s just a crude test, meant to illustrate that most rooms don’t treat sound that well.

There are a couple of things we can do to this room to make that sound better. The first has nothing to do with acoustic treatment at all.

It’s all about positioning. Every room will have a ‘sweet spot’, where the sound is at its most honest. This can be quite difficult to find, but fortunately, there is a very good general principle you can use. Assuming you operate at a desk, set that desk up so that when you sit at it, you’re facing one of the short sides of the rectangle. Make sure you are at least three feet from the wall.

Now: your monitor speakers. Imagine that you and the speakers form a triangle. It should be an equilateral triangle – that is, one where all three angles are equal. Don’t worry about getting it too exact for now; just make sure that you are roughly the same distance from the speakers as they are from each other. In addition, try to arrange things so that your speakers are each the same distance from the wall on either side. Even if you can’t get it exactly right, or if your room is a weird shape, don’t worry. What we’re going to do next is to treat your room.

Look at your walls and ceiling. Right now, they are almost certainly flat. That’s not good for sound waves, which will be reflected back into the room,


A bluffer’s guide to acoustics Feature MT

Tech termsO�SOUND WAVE: The way sound appears in the environment, as a pressure and displacement wave that travels through air, as well as solids and liquids.

O�STANDING WAVE: What happens when two sound waves get trapped between two flat surfaces facing each other, common in untreated rooms. Causes unpleasant artefacts in the sound.

O�ACOUSTIC FOAM: A thick, dense, open-celled foam designed to attenuate sound waves. You’ll want to invest in some of this stuff.

O�BASS TRAP: A piece of acoustic foam of above-average thickness, that’s designed to be placed in corners to corral errant low-frequency sound waves.

MT Step-by-Step Building an absorber

3

4

1Frame

Back

2

StapleStaple

01 Using 2 x 3in pine, make a frame that’s 1,199 x 650mm in size. Use screws to

connect the timber together. Staple in some Cara fabric or attach a hardboard back. This will keep the Rockwool in place.

02 Turn the frame over and insert a 60mm-deep mineral wool fi bre slab

snugly within the frame. A tight fi t will help the material to stay in position.

03 Cut enough Cara fabric to wrap around the front and to be stapled to the rear of

the absorber. You may want to place tape over your staple heads to prevent marking on your walls. Alternatively, make a wooden frame to face the absorber. Use picture mounts to hang it.


messing with your mix. You might think the way to solve this problem would be to blanket all flat surfaces in acoustic treatment, but if you did, you’d end up with a room that sounded completely ‘dead’. We don’t want that. What we want is something between the two, where some surfaces are covered. That will ensure that you don’t have too many reflections, while allowing your room to retain its acoustic character (and remain pleasant to work in).

What we’re going to use to cover them is acoustic foam. This is very different to regular foam, in that it’s a lot more dense, with a ridged or textured surface. It is specifically designed to absorb sound waves, trapping them before they get to your ears. Plenty of companies sell acoustic foam, and in its most common form, it comes in slabs that are a couple of feet square. Eggcups, by the way, don’t work, no matter what you’ve seen on TV.

The goal is to put these slabs at key points on the walls and ceiling. Again, this will depend on the

dimensions of the room, but a good rule is to position them adjacent to your speakers, covering the walls with a roughly nine-foot square section of foam. In addition, you’ll need to put it on the wall directly in front of you when you are sitting at the desk, and the wall directly behind you. You would be very wise to attach it to the ceiling as well. Don’t worry if you can’t hit all the spots. Even a little bit of acoustic proofing will immediately benefit the sound of your room.

While you’re at it, isolate your speakers, either with specially-designed stands or by placing them on acoustic foam. Several companies actually sell angled chunks of foam for this purpose. This will ensure that the surface your speakers rest on doesn’t

Even a little bit of acoustic proofing will immediately benefit the sound of your room

108 | March 2015 MAGAZINE

MT Step-by-Step Building a bass trap

01 We’re going to look at a corner broadband trap here. Take some timber

– 12mm plywood is ideal – and cut two right-angle triangles (300 x 300 x 424mm). These will form the top and bottom of your trap. The backs will be 300mm by the height you can accommodate in your room.

02 Connect the parts together, either with screws or fixing blocks on the inside.

Using a saw, cut Rockwool slabs into triangles slightly smaller that can stack up snugly inside the frame. These will provide a very deep absorber essentially, but work well for trapping bass and other frequencies.

03 Complete the corner trap by facing with Cara fabric or a perforated wooden

panel of some description, ensuring it is acoustically transparent.

MTM Pro Technique Studio ergonomicsThe ergonomics of your studio is something to consider both for your comfort as well as its impact on your room acoustically. Naturally, it is important to ensure that all the equipment you use is well within your reach and doesn’t require stretching for, something that perhaps later results in injury.

Ensure that your chair is up to the job and that you’re comfortable when you’re working. Your desk needs to be at the right height and should be suitable for the kind of work you’re doing. Placing your most often used equipment within your ‘arc of reach’ will therefore prevent you moving your arms in repetitive movements that can cause injury.

Also it’s worth considering installing your equipment in racks built within your desk or having them in a desktop rack. However, spare a thought for reflections that may be caused by such devices and how you might tackle them if they cause unwanted reflections. For more details, see last month’s Ten Minute Master, in which we explored ergonomic considerations for the studio.

bounce too many reflections back at you. You’re not done yet. You need to deal with the bass frequencies. Low-frequency sound waves have less power than high-frequency ones, and traditional acoustic foam slabs can’t deal with them adequately. In addition,

MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to acoustics



bass has a nasty habit of accumulating in the corners, and letting it do so can really muddy your mix. To fix this, you’ll need to invest in bass traps, which are thick, chunky pieces of foam designed to fit right into the corners of a room.

Again, please note that these are general principles. You don’t treat a live room as you would a vocal booth, and acoustics can be a detailed science that experts will charge a lot of money to get right. But as a general guide, this should get you going.

DIY styleAcoustic foam panels differ from other audio equipment in one crucial way. You can actually make your own without any specialist knowledge.

We’re not going to go into the exact step-by-step procedure here, as it’s relatively simple, especially if you’re a dab hand with DIY. What you need to do is construct a solid wood frame. Cover one side of the frame with fabric, making sure it fits tight around it (you can staple-gun it into place). What you’ll need to do then is fill the interior with a substance known as Rockwool. This material, readily available from hardware stores, is very sound absorbent, and is easy to work with. Once you’ve filled the frame, all you have to do is close the back – we suggest using another piece of fabric, perhaps with a wooden bar placed across the middle of the frame to keep the Rockwool in place. Congratulations: you’ve made an acoustic panel. If you want more detailed instructions, you’ll find hundreds of them online.

But how do you go about hanging these on the wall and ceiling? Many companies sell an adhesive spray that you can use to attach the foam directly to the wall. We’re going to speak from personal experience here: avoid this stuff. Not only is one can not sufficient to prove an entire room, but it doesn’t last very long, so your panels are in danger of falling away. Despite that, the substance itself is absolute murder to get off the wall.

What you can do, however, is attach each section of acoustic proofing to a pre-cut wooden panel – chipboard will do. You can try using the spray, but a better option might be to use metal brackets to hold the foam in place. The panels can then be hung on the wall like a picture. The real advantage of this is that if you move studio, you can simply take down the panels and take them with you. MT

This feature is endorsed by SSR which has been providing professional education training in the audio engineering industry for over 30 years. With campuses in London, Manchester, Jakarta and Singapore, SSR has gained a healthy reputation within the music industry for producing well trained, professional graduates across the globe.

MT Step-by-Step Building a diffusor

01 Building a diffusor is perhaps the most diffi cult task presented here, partly

because there’s a bit more maths involved, but also as it takes a little more skill in the workshop. The prettier of the two is perhaps the blockwork Quadratic (Skyline) Diffusor, but both varieties are pretty diffi cult. The best starting point is to download a diffusor calculator from the net and consider how it should perform.

02 Cut the blocks of wood into the appropriate lengths. Purchase some

hardboard or 9mm MDF and cut to the required frame length to support the blocks. The next step is the tricky bit: arranging the blocks as per the grid provided by the calculator. As you arrange you’ll need to glue each block to the back and to any adjacent blocks it comes into contact with.

03 Leave the blocks to dry overnight (or longer, depending on the adhesive).

Next, turn the whole diffusor over. Using a drill, pilot four holes through the rear hardboard to the longer lengths of block. Screw together to aid adhesion. Make two holes through the ‘0’ sections (no blocks) in the sequence to connect the diffusor to the wall or ceiling.

There are some products that are diffi cult to DIY. Vicoustic’s

products are both elegant and highly effective, such as this

WaveWood Bass Trap.


A bluffer’s guide to acoustics Feature MT


52

Technique | Beat Loop Processing

we’re going to take a step back here and examine some ways of processing whole beats on their own, getting a little creative along the way.

Layering beats togetherSome of us like to get perfectionistic, performing miniscule surgery on our beats and getting them just right – adding a sub layer onto kick drums, some extra attack to snares, and whatever else. But layering two or more whole beats together can be the creative antidote to this mindset for those looking to take a different approach. So what considerations are to be taken when slamming two unassuming beats together?

Mixing whole beats is fairly commonplace already, usually appearing as a percussion layer added to throw some rhythm onto a stiff kick-and-snare beat.

A s producers, working with beats brings us closer to our roots, safe in the knowledge that we’re following in the footsteps of our

distant ancestors and their noble traditions – no, we’re not on about the caveman banging on his animal-skin drum; we’re talking about the dinosaur on the turntable, making his breaks dirtier than a sewer-worker’s kecks!

Today’s cutting-edge technologies let us slice and dice on the atomic level, beefing up our beats with single hits, and that’s got a huge place in the art of production. But

Never mind cutting, chopping and layering with individual samples… Let’s look at the beat, the whole beat, and nothing but the beat

53

Beat Loop Processing | Technique

1 When layering beats, most of them won’t go together. If two beats have different rhythms, grooves and frequency content, there’s not much you

can do about it! Finding two matching beats will take some trial and error in auditioning, but it should be quicker to do than forcing two together.

3 But it’s more likely you’ll end up with a pair that almost goes together. How can we make them work? Try some filtering of one or both layers

– one high-pass, the other low-pass. This may help with chalk-and-cheese layers, but it’s not a solution if you’re trying to stick similar beats together.

5 Try retuning/pitchshifting one of the beats as a whole. This could make it sound better or worse. You could also try shifting just one frequency

band, eg the snare, by copying the track twice, band-passing the copies in the area you want, inverting one and pitchshifting the other.

2 Some beats go together easily. For example, a kick/snare loop gels with a percussion loop – the low-end of the kick, the impact of the snare

and the high-frequency rhythm of the percussion stay out of each other’s way, and even enhance each other. You can enhance the effect with EQ.

4 If two beats have a slightly different groove, time-stretching is a simple answer. Get a good look at the two waveforms’ transients, make sure

you’re in a percussive time-stretch mode, and line ’em up.

6 Then, create a subgroup and experiment with compression and saturation to glue the beats together. Use the compressor’s Attack

time to control which transients are emphasised or reduced. Saturation and reverb can help in giving the two bussed beats the same character.

Layering Beats TogetherSome beats just work together, but most of them simply don’t, and sometimes you’ve got to apply some processing…

INCLUDES VIDEO lHere we’ll explore a few simple rules for getting two beats to sound good together. The ‘done thing’ might be layering breaks onto beats for a crusty top-end, but we’re going to delve into lining up two or more whole beats. Most often these days, beat processing is done by layering in individual samples, but trying a ‘whole-beat’ approach can increase your creative potential. Watch how we go about it in video form on the DVD.


5454

Layering anything can lead to phase issues, and it can be especially bad when it comes to beats – they’re whole tracks of multiple instruments working together. If the waveform of one beat layer is heading upwards while the other’s heading down, they can cancel each other out and you can end up with a reduced impact of the hits and a not-so-perfect stereo field.

The old-school way to try and sort this was to invert the polarity of one channel – often done for multi-mic’d sources like guitar amps or snare drums. It wasn’t always guaranteed to work, mind. There are some software analysis tools to help detect and/or fix phase issues (like Sound Radix Pi), but if you don’t have the time to use an

electron microscope, you’d be wise to check out track delaying.

By taking one of your beat layers, disabling your DAW’s ‘snap to grid’ function, and moving the track by a few samples (not milliseconds), you may be able to knock out most phase issues. Zooming right into the waveforms and making sure a hit’s initial transient’s ‘ups and downs’ coincide will help but, when layering entire grooves, you could also cause problems to other hits.

The best way to approach track delay may well be to use your ears – if slight movements in position make your signal’s transients more powerful, or give it a better stereo impression, go with it – at least at the creative stage of your production.

Layer In Phase

However, in addition to classic compressors, there are multiband set-ups for almost every effect you can imagine. Check out the MeldaProduction range for a huge amount of choice, and options like FabFilter Saturn for some refined ideas. When it comes to full beats, it can be helpful to add overdrive to key snare frequencies, or light modulation to hi-hats, so make sure you check out these simple options.

You can even get custom by crafting your own multiband chains to add in any of your plug-ins for some dedicated processing on any band you like. It’s a good idea to

save these empty processors in a rack/macro for when you need to call them up again later. Check out the third tutorial for a quick how-to.

As well as full set-ups, we’ll also show you how to create a quick one-band processor with

some clever routing tricks. By duplicating a track and filtering the band you want to process, then phase inverting the copy, you’ll remove that band from the signal. Then, by taking another duplicate track, you can apply the same filter to add the sound back in again on a dedicated channel.

So, however you like to process your beats – whether you’re a rough-cutter or a micro-surgeon with robotic laser eyes – check out these three tutorials to get some creative ideas and a new approach to processing any track!

Breakbeats are often also used as a ‘crusty top layer’, providing the vibe at the higher ends of the frequency spectrum. So dual-layer beats are there to complement each other’s qualities – for breaks and percussion, it’s the feeling and energy of the top-end, and the aim becomes to enhance those qualities.

Once you’ve discovered what a certain loop is adding to the overall feel, it’s that contribution that you need to keep. This could be as simple as opposing EQ boosts and cuts, or using high- or low-pass filters to emphasise or de-emphasise the quality on different tracks.

Groove shadowsSometimes, just adding reverb to a beat is enough to give it the qualities you want; but if you’re after a different sort of atmosphere, and your mix is begging for some extra character, you can try using a heavily reverbed signal from another beat altogether. When placed very low in the mix behind the main beat, this can be the

difference between a bland and an interesting sonic scene.

When it comes to groove shadows, considerations to bear in mind include the level of the shadow, the frequency content of the shadow, and the rhythmic makeup of the shadow. These properties can be controlled, of course, but sometimes finding the right beat to use for a shadow is the best policy to take from the start. There are even sample libraries dedicated to groove shadow sounds, which aren’t a bad place to start looking, but if you’re seeking out the unorthodox, you can create one from the most unlikely of sources.

Band processingMultiband processing was previously the preserve of the mastering engineer, but working in the box has made plenty of multiband plug-in effects available. Dynamics are the most obvious things that spring to mind when it comes to multiband set-ups – the stalwart de-esser often manifested as a multiband compressor itself. These devices can be a great way to claw back extra headroom from one track, beating a flatter frequency spectrum into it, but only when it starts to peak.

For extra character, try using a heavily

reverbed signal from another beat

MeldaProduction’s MMultiBandDynamics is a powerful tool for tweaking complex loops

These two hits’ peaks and troughs line up as much as is possible, especially at the crucial front-end impact.

Use track delay, polarity inversion, or manual waveform dragging to get the most powerful sound – trust your ears above all else.

Out Of Phase?

Line It Up

55

Beat Loop Processing | Technique

55

1 Set up one channel for your main beat, and another to create your shadow. On the shadow channel, set up a reverb, fully Wet, and bring

the level down. Audition shadow beats alongside the main beat and see what catches your attention. You don’t even have to use a beat; get creative.

3 Gating the shadow can provide a bit more rhythm. Set up a large reduction amount, a quick attack and crank the Hold up. Getting

the Threshold setting just right is crucial if you’re auditioning a lot of different candidates.

5 As the shadow is a reverb effect that adds a sense of space, try delaying it further, having the beat pop out over the top more

obviously. This can be done using the reverb’s predelay control, or with a simple delay processor set to 100% wet. Start at about 50ms and move up.

2 Let’s get the beat and its shadow sounding better together. Pitchshifting the shadow reverb signal up or down can give it energy

where it didn’t have it before. Choose whether to match the main beat or to separate beat and shadow, depending on the effect you’re after.

4 So we’ve got three crucial processes – reverb, gating and pitchshifting. The ordering of these can make a big difference. Keep an eye on the

relationship between the gate and reverb modules; if the reverb’s smearing the beat’s transients, the gate may not have anything to detect.

6 Try throwing some effects on the shadow signal to push it even further. Modulation effects such as chorus, phasing and flanging are one way

to go, as is distortion, or any other creative effect.

Groove ShadowsHere’s how to liven up or add atmosphere to one beat by using the reverb signal from another beat

INCLUDES VIDEO lA groove shadow is a heavily reverbed signal from another beat (or any sound source) that sits behind your main beat. We’ll show you the basics and the most vital processors you’ll get help from if you’re up for making a groove shadow. Check out the video on the DVD to hear and see it in action. Try this one next time you’re about to reach for a reverb plug-in.

56


To make a single-band processor, duplicate the track twice, filtering both the duplicates with the exact same settings, and phase inverting one of them. The non-inverted track should now control the band you’ve filtered off, which will be missing from the original track when combined with the phase-inverted copy. You can use return tracks or channels instead of track duplicates, depending on your DAW. You can continue the process to arrive at a multiband set-up.

Before you run off and do it, avoid filter settings with any resonance or Q settings that create boosts – use filter cuts only. Also, make sure your DAW is compensating for the latency of any processors you’re using to filter or process your bands. Check your DAW’s settings and manual.

You can phase-invert your entire multiband set-up against a duplicate of the original track, and check that there’s no output, just to make sure your set-up is a perfect replication.

Band Caveats

Here’s a quick and dirty method for isolating one band for processing. The original track is copied twice.

DIY One-Band Processing

Both duplicates are filtered, and one is phase inverted to cancel out that band in the original track.

Duplicated Waves

1 Multiband plug-ins let you make changes to different parts of the frequency spectrum in different ways. The traditional multiband

processor is dynamics; multiband compressors affect different frequencies in different ways – good for clawing back headroom while mastering.

3 To get even more custom processing done, you can create your own multiband devices by setting up some clever signal routing. Bypassing

the processing of multiband devices and only using their crossovers, on returns, new tracks or rack chains, lets you add your own effect to any band.

2 But there are plenty of other multiband processors too – distortion and saturation might work better applied to different bands by different

amounts, just like the response of well-driven analogue tape; and all sorts of other multiband effects like modulation, delays and reverbs.

4 You can make your own single band isolator to process a specific part of the frequency spectrum. This could be useful for de-essing duties

(using a standard compressor), or collapsing the stereo field to mono in the bass region, for example. Watch the video or see below to find out how.

Band ProcessingUse multiband processors to make easy work of whole loops, or set up your own multiband or single-band signal chains

INCLUDES VIDEO lWhen it comes to quick processing of full-band tracks, getting good (and fast) with multiband processing will help you out. We’ll look at some common multiband effects, and show you how to make your own. Then, we’ll do a fly-by of a rough ‘n’ ready one-band processor, perfect for adding an effect to a select band of the spectrum in a busy mix (see below for a more in-depth explanation). As usual, check it out in the video version, too.

W e continue our Ultimate Guide by adding a simple keyboard part to our ongoing project, following on from the bass last time. You like the project? Good. You don’t like the project? That’s fi ne too as it’s

merely a vehicle for us to introduce the core techniques of using Ableton Live.

Once again we’re using the Simpler instrument device, with a sample that you can load from the provided example Live set. This works for us because there are a few different versions of Live out there – Suite, Standard and Intro, not to mention older versions counting from 9 backwards – so using a synthesizer instrument device at this point could cause compatibility issues with some folks reading this. We’re on safe ground with Simpler because it’s in every version of Live – it has to be, because drum racks in particular won’t work without it!

Either way it’s good, partly because we can now say we’re using sample based synthesis, a form of sound design that uses audio samples as well as waveforms generated by the synth instrument itself. Many synths let you combine these techniques in one preset, which really opens up the sonic spectrum.

As well as adding a new sample to our set – which again, incorporates the steps from the last tutorial – I’ve taken the opportunity to reorganise, rename, and colour code the tracks and clips. Not only do I get a kick out of organising everything, it helps me recognise what I’m looking at faster and it avoids accidentally triggering or selecting the wrong clip or track. I made a ‘spare’ group track for unused tracks, and put the original beat in there. We mentioned this before – Shift-Click to select the tracks you want to group, then type Cmd-G. You can also drag additional tracks in later.

Our keyboard part doesn’t have to be too demanding. All we need for this project is something basic that doesn’t take up too much room, sonically speaking; we’ve got enough going on already. We’re just using one note, then making it move with some sidechaining instead.

Whenever we talk about creating instrument sounds, make sure you’re using a keyboard to audition the sound constantly as you work on it. If you already have a MIDI clip and notes in place, you could just keep that playing and rolling round. But if you’re working on a sound that needs to have some velocity sensitivity – some responsiveness to how hard you hit your keys or pads – it’s better to use your keyboard or pads in real time while you’re testing. As I’ve said before, I like to use the computer keyboard as well, and when I’m doing that, I’ll keep tapping on the c and v keys to change through some different velocity settings if relevant – they’ll take you up and down through the velocity range from 1 to 127 in increments of 20. Don’t forget to keep an eye on your track and master volume levels as well as we don’t want to see any red peaks!

We don’t use any notes other than E4 for this clip, because we want to start with a drone and then fi nd a way to make it sound a bit more interesting. If you’re not great at music theory, Live has a whole bunch of tools to help you make even a basic

Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it…



on the DVD

Anybody can load a synth preset but it’s fun to build your own. Connect your keyboard and Martin Delaney will show you how it’s done.

FOCUS ON… THE HARDWAREIn this tutorial we’re building a keyboard sound based on a sample from a Waldorf Pulse Plus, a hardware, rack-mount synth fi rst released in 1997 (the range is still going strong in a tabletop format). I used the Pulse for two important reasons: one, because it would give a different texture than resampling a plug-in, and two, because it was nearby! One of the great things about Simpler is that it makes it easy to use almost any sound as a source. Hardware instruments seem to be on everybody’s mind at the moment, so the Pulse it is.


If you’re not great at music theory Live has a whole bunch of tools to make parts sound busy


48 | July 2015 MAGAZINE

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Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it…

MT Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining

01 Be sure to use our updated example set for this tutorial. I’ve added a new sample, ‘synth note’. This is a synth playing a long C

note (sampled from the Waldorf Pulse Plus hardware synth).

02 Load the Simpler sample-playback instrument into a new MIDI track, and drag the ‘synth note’ sample into Simpler’s drop area.

Double-click the top empty clip slot in the track to make a clip.

03 This should sound familiar, because we’ve done this step before when we made our bass part. Click the Dupl.Loop button in the

MIDI Editor’s Notes box twice, creating an empty 4-bar MIDI clip.

05 Draw an E4 note across the entire length of the clip - launch the clip and then it’ll play just like a drone over four bars. Keep the

velocity to around 100 or 110 – it doesn’t matter precisely.

04 When you arm your track and play your MIDI keyboard, you should be hearing the sampled synth tone playing across the range. We

used a C so it’ll be correctly in pitch with other instruments.

06 To edit the note velocity, unfold the MIDI Velocity Editor (click on the little triangle) below the MIDI Note Editor, then drag the

velocity marker up or down until you reach the desired range.

programmed part sound busy i.e. the MIDI Effect Devices. We’re using the Chord device a little bit here, but don’t be surprised if we come back and look at MIDI effects again.

The other thing we do to make it sound more active is to sidechain it, taking the timing of the drum track (or parts of it) and applying it to the keyboard sound to create a

‘pulsing’ quality. After you’ve loaded the Compressor into the keyboard track, you can choose any sound as a source, digging deep into drum and instrument racks to find the exact trigger you want. However, from a workflow point of view I find it much easier to work with a separate track as a source for a sidechain, that’s why we’ve copied the drum


MAGAZINE July 2015 | 49

MT148.TUT live5.indd 49 29/05/2015 15:00

MT Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining cont’d

07 So far we have a pretty dull synth part so let’s jazz it up a bit. At this stage if you need to do any volume management for this

sound, use the Volume control in Simpler.

08 Let’s make some changes inside Simpler. Start by turning Loop on and set it to 40%, then turn Snap on and set the Start to

0.30%. Set Length to 14% and Fade to 70%.

09 Set the Volume envelope Attack to 500ms so there’s a bit more to the tiny little fade-in at the beginning of the sample (as you can

see, it starts quite gradually already).

11 Set the Chord device’s first two Shift control knobs to +3 and +5 semitones. As the clip loops or as you play your keyboard, you’ll

hear the extra notes. Set Simpler’s Spread to 50.

10 Now let’s add some interest: because we’ve been lazy with our programming, let’s expand the part with one of Live’s MIDI effect

devices. Add the Chord MIDI effect to the track, it’ll go before Simpler.

12 The extra notes make it sound very full – too full, in fact. So drag an EQ Three audio effect to the end of the chain and set the

GainMid to -12dB. This thins it out nicely.

track here. Not only do I then have something that visually helps me keep track of what’s going on, outside of the drum kit, a separate track for sidechaining, it enables me to program a totally different kick pattern to trigger the compressor if I want to, or even to keep the sidechain feed going when the drums drop out. You could even automate

that sidechain track and do very weird things with it, without disrupting your drum beat. As it says in the tutorial, remember that the sidechain source can be silent – mute the track and it still works!

If you’re a musical type of person, who can play keyboards and who understands musical theory, Live is a



MT148.TUT live5.indd 50 29/05/2015 15:00

MT Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining cont’d

13 Now we need to add some movement to this keyboard part – I guess you’d say it’s a pad sound; duplicate your MIDI drum track

by clicking on the track name and type Cmd-D.

14 Inside the rack, solo chains 1, 3, 5, 9, and 13 and deactivate the track by clicking on the yellow track number. Launch the clip,

though. Yes, that’s right. We have a plan.

15 If you can only solo one item at a time, check your Record/Warp/Launch Preferences and make sure Exclusive Solo is off.

Otherwise, temporarily override the preference setting by Cmd-Clicking on each item.

17 Click on the small triangle in the Compressor title bar, turn on Sidechain and choose the sidechain drum track from the Audio

From box. Leave the other settings alone.

16 Click on your copied drum track and use Cmd-R or the Context Menu to rename the track ‘Sidechain’, then load the Compressor

‘Brick Wall’ preset into your keyboard track after the EQ Three.

18 Bring the Compressor Threshold down to -50.0dB and set the Attack to 0.30ms. Play your keyboard and sidechain clips and you

should hear a new rhythmic pulse to your keyboard part.

great tool for you anyway, especially with ‘alternative’ input devices like Push and the new Novation Launchpad Pro.

But if you’re really confident or even conscious in terms of theory, Live can really give you a boost with the MIDI effects we’ve mentioned here. It’s about as novice-friendly as it gets, and it doesn’t fail to deliver once you get more

knowledgeable. We’re making good progress through this project. Next time we’ll be adding our final element – a speech sample – and processing that in a few interesting and different ways. MT This tutorial is one of the all new tutorials available in the MusicTech Live 2015 Focus on sale now.



MT148.TUT live5.indd 51 29/05/2015 15:00

A BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO MIDIGet your head round MIDI and you’ve got your head round music

production. Rob Boffard explains the ins and outs…

MIDI can be one of the most mystifying parts of music production. Although its basic purpose can be intuitive with a little bit of practice, unlocking its hidden depths often takes a lot of time, especially if you’ve never encountered it before. But it is crucially important to know how it works, especially if you want to

produce anything involving software instruments. That’s because all manufacturers of DAWs – from Apple to Avid to Ableton to

Propellerheads rely on it. It’s the Rosetta Stone of music production; a common language that enables any device and any software program to talk to each other. If you can master MIDI, if you can work out how it functions and make it part of your toolkit, then your production will become much faster, and the results will be as slick as they come.

MIDI MagicMusical Instrument Digital Interface: that’s what MIDI stands for. We don’t really want to go in-depth into its history (there’s plenty online if you’d like to find out more) – this is a Bluffer’s Guide, after all – but what you need to know is that it came to fruition in the early 1980s as part of a collaboration between engineers Dave Smith and Chet Wood, and several synthesiser companies such as Korg, Moog and Roland. Smith and Wood initiated this, because the market had just got far too complicated. There were too many protocols, and too many devices, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to talk to each other. MIDI was the solution.

MT Feature Music Technology

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MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to MIDI


A BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO MIDI

But forget the history. The best way to understand MIDI is to talk about what it is now. We’ll get to the complicated information that a MIDI sequence can contain in a minute. For now, we’re just going to talk about the basics.

The easiest way to understand this is to pull up your favoured DAW, and load up a software instrument. I’ll use Reason, but you can use any one you like. Once you’ve queued up your instrument, you’ll need to go into the sequencer, where you’ll see a virtual keyboard (or equivalent) running vertically. Running horizontally along from that keyboard should be a line-up of rigid blocks.

Find the pencil tool, which is usually located in the toolbar, and click one of those blocks. You’ll notice it will fill in. There: you’ve just drawn a MIDI note. Now, if you press play, your software instrument will play a sound when the marker reaches the note. You can play these back at any tempo you like, and they will stay in time.

At its most basic, a MIDI note is an indication for an instrument to play a note. A much-used analogy is that of an orchestra. If the instruments are the violins, horns, woodwinds and the like, then the MIDI notes are the sheet music. They tell the orchestra what to play. By arranging MIDI notes in sequence, running up and down the chords on the keyboard, you can create complex melodies. This is why MIDI notes are so popular in electronic music production.

It’s worth remembering that MIDI notes, beyond just being sheet music, are a way the different instruments are able to communicate with each other. It enables you to play a note on a physical keyboard (called a MIDI controller) and have it appear as MIDI data on your screen. That’s important, by the way: MIDI is not sound. By itself, it can’t do a damn thing. If you draw a MIDI note without an instrument connected to it, nothing will play. It’s just data, and it relies on the context it’s being used in for the outcome.

Up a levelBut of course, MIDI programming is a lot more complex than simple instructions for an instrument to play a note.

Let’s start with one of the most common ways of treating a MIDI note: velocity. If you hit a piano key hard, the sound it plays will be much louder than if you just pushed it down gently. MIDI has the same principle encoded in it. The higher the velocity, the louder the note. The advantage of this is that you can tweak the volumes of individual notes on a particular track, instead of having to automate the track fader.

Velocity gives you a hugely versatile way of controlling your sound. You could, for example, set your instrument to only trigger certain effects at certain velocities. Try doing this with a filter that has the MIDI velocity as its source, and get it to activate only when the velocity crosses a certain threshold. Velocity is usually measured from 0 to 127, so it’s easy to set an exact value for it. This particular trick has endless applications. One we really like is setting different samples to trigger at different velocities, which can really bring some life to a track. At this point, we need to stress that not all techniques will be available on all instruments, and it’s crucial that you spend time getting to know your favoured software instruments before playing around with this.

There are other ways of controlling the character of a MIDI note, but they are largely restricted to the software instruments themselves. You can apply envelopes to the notes, changing their attack, decay, sustain and release settings. You can apply filters to them. Some DAWs even let you adjust the fine pitch of


A bluffer’s guide to MIDI Feature MT

A single MIDI note. This one is perfectly in time, locked in place on the grid.

Tech termsO�NOTE: a single piece of MIDI data, usually expressed as a slim rectangle and displayed on a grid. Instructs an instrument to play audio.

O�VELOCITY: a method of simulating the perceived loudness of a given MIDI note. Measured in units from 0 to 127.

O�QUANTISATION: the process where MIDI notes are snapped to their nearest spot on the grid in order to compensate for human playing, and retain timing.

O�CONTROLLER: a device that’s used to input and sequence MIDI notes. Usually this is a keyboard, or set of pads.

By having your software instruments respond to properties of your MIDI notes, you can put together interesting effects.


the MIDI notes, adding a human element to your compositions. But really, once you understand how MIDI notes and their velocities work, you’ll find it extremely easy to start composing.

And since we’ve got onto composing, there is an additional concept it’s worth giving your head around: quantisation. Essentially, all MIDI notes are displayed on a grid – but when they’re being recorded, particularly if you’re using a MIDI controller, perfect timing is often elusive. By switching on quantisation, you essentially ‘lock’ each note to its closest segment in the grid, resulting in perfect time, every time. Quantisation is always desirable (it can sound a little robotic if applied too heavily) but it’s a real boon when you’re recording.

Fine tuningThere are a few advanced applications of MIDI that you can use once you’ve got the hang of things. We’re going to go into a few of them now, although we’re

not going to spend too much time on the individual steps to pull them off. This is because they’re largely dependent on individual DAWs.

One of the most fun ways of employing this is using the MIDI notes to trigger external instruments, not just software ones. In this way, you can use the data to get a MIDI controller, like a set of pads, talking to another instrument like a hardware synth, and using one to play the other. It takes a little bit of work to set up, but if you find yourself with a lot of different instruments and one preferred control method, then this is a neat way to streamline your work.

As we mentioned earlier, you can also use MIDI data like velocity and note on/note off to trigger certain aspects of the software instrument. This gives you very fine grained control, and allows you to come up with some seriously wild effects. Also, because you can draw multiple MIDI notes into one track, including on top of one another at different octaves, it’s easy to create complex chords and layered effects.

One of the lesser-known ways of creating MIDI is to extract it from audio information. DAWs such as Ableton are known for enabling users to do this. Essentially, it means that you can input a piece of recorded audio and extract pitches and note locations from it. This is a great way to create accompanying parts to a recording.

In addition, one of the big pluses of MIDI composition is that it is highly portable. What we mean by this is that because the notes are simply bits of data, and contain no actual audio information themselves, it’s really easy to port them over to another computer and continue working on it there. As long as you’re using the same DAW, and using the same instruments and effects, you will easily be able to move back and forth between the two.

In fairness, this is less important these days now that even the smallest flash drive has multiple gigabytes of space, but it’s a useful tool to illustrate what MIDI is and how it works. It’s data, and nothing more.

Every DAW will treat MIDI slightly differently, display it differently, and enable you to do more with it. So experiment, and switch between them until you’ve found one you like. MT This feature is endorsed by SSR which has been providing professional education training in the audio engineering industry for over 30 years. With campuses in London, Manchester, Jakarta and Singapore, SSR has gained a healthy reputation within the music industry for producing well trained, professional graduates across the globe.

Once you understand how MIDI notes work, you’ll find it easy to start composing

108 | March 2015 MAGAZINE

MT Feature A bluffer’s guide to MIDI

Here, we are adjusting the note’s velocity. This will control its perceived loudness.


You can layer your MIDI notes to create complex chords.


So far we’ve used MIDI and we’ve used existing audio samples, but we haven’t covered how to record our own audio material. Instead of jumping in at the deep end and attempting to record fully-blown vocal or instrument takes,

let’s make it easy on ourselves by recording a short speech sample that’ll also work inside our ongoing project. To be

honest, this is more frequently the type of recording I do with Live anyway – capturing short snippets to use in the Session View. We aim to record one short sample, then use it to create three different clips. Note, because this is such a variable exercise, and I can’t hear what you’re doing from here(!), I’ve included an ‘after’ voice track to make it clear what kind of result you’re shooting for.

It might not sway Pro Tools snobs, but Live does a great job of recording audio. It has the advantage of two views, so two distinct approaches. As a rule of thumb I record short clips like speech samples and effects into the Session View, and anything like a full vocal track for a song, rhythm guitar parts, and so on, goes into the Arrangement View. In either View, you can record into multiple tracks at the same time, and Live has very

thorough and immediate routing options, so you can send and receive audio freely throughout the application. There’s also the lovely Resampling input option which provides post-master, post-everything, capture of Live’s output, straight back into the Live set. Live works with audio samples at different sample rates, mono or stereo, and combines .aiff, .wav, and .mp3 fi les in the same project. Despite what some say, there are no audio quality issues with Live; you’re more likely to experience problems through user error – choosing the wrong Warp mode for time-stretched material or stretching a clip way beyond what any reasonable person would do (we’ll be coming back to that later).

Although Live isn’t an audio editor, it covers some of the basics. Crop Sample, which we use in this tutorial, discards unwanted portions at the start and end of an audio clip; and Consolidate – available only in the Arrangement View – combines two or more audio clips to create a new one. These functions are non-destructive – you’ll fi nd the new samples in the sub-folders inside your Live project folder.

You probably already have the necessary equipment to record a voice sample – most computers have some kind of built-in microphone. Then it’s a matter of scaling up from there with a dedicated microphone and soundcard (as far as we’re concerned, a ‘soundcard’ and an ‘audio interface’ are the same thing). You can get excellent affordable USB soundcards – look at the Focusrite Scarlett range – and a basic microphone for not much cash at all. There’s an ever-growing number of good USB microphones, too, although you lose the fl exibility of a soundcard. There’s also

Recording and manipulating speech samples



on the DVD

Time to do some audio recording and get mic’d up. Martin Delaney shows you how to add some speech samples to our ongoing Live project.

FOCUS ON… THE MICROPHONEIt’s nice to use expensive microphones and recording hardware but you should be willing to work with what you’ve got. It’s easier for us because we’re recording a simple speech sample here so we’re not tied up in the complexities of recording a sung vocal against backing tracks and creating a headphone mix. What I will say is that unless you have a very specifi c idea of what you want, you should always try to get a clean voice recording, without distortion or baked-in effects. Other than that limitation, anything from your computer’s built-in microphone upwards will do fi ne.


I record short speech samples into Session View and anything longer goes into Arrangement View

of a soundcard. There’s also


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Recording and manipulating speech samples

MT Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech

01 For this walkthrough we have to make some assumptions about your microphone and soundcard; read our main text for more

details. Connect your mic and soundcard, launch Live and go to the Preferences Audio tab.

02 Choose your soundcard in the Audio Input Device and Audio Output Device lists then close Preferences. Connect your

headphones to your soundcard (watch your volume) and turn your monitor speakers off to avoid feedback.

03 Open our example Live set. Make sure you’re using the updated ‘part 6’ version and use the shortcut Cmd-T to create a new audio

track. We’re still working in the Session View, of course.

05 Below that is a list of available audio inputs – click to view the list. As you talk into your microphone, you’ll see a level displayed

alongside one of those inputs. That’s your microphone. Click it.

04 Use Alt-Cmd-I to open the In/Out View. This will display the audio routing options at the bottom of your tracks. Click on the Audio

From chooser to select your input – Ext. In.

06 Set up your microphone and mixer so you get a manageable volume level. Exactly how this works will again depend on what

equipment you’re using but please avoid red peaks anywhere in the signal chain!

the Apogee One, which is unique because it has connections for a microphone and instrument, but also boasts a built-in microphone. It’s a cool tool for the travelling musician. I’m not going further into this discussion now, because it’s a whole other tutorial… Well, a whole other book, actually!

I’ve suggested that you set the track’s Monitor switch to Auto, which means you’ll hear the mic input when you arm the track, but bear in mind that your set-up might enable

– or require – you to monitor somewhere else along the signal chain. As I said, we’re not singing along to a backing track with this exercise, so frankly, accurate monitoring is not so critical.

There are different ways to initiate recording: you can use a mouse or trackpad, your controller, or even your iPhone. You can go into record while Live is already running or enter record to start Live running. Record start and stop are quantised so that means if you’re using the default


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MT Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech (cont’d)

07 Set the track’s Monitor In switch to Auto, and arm the track – click the small circular button in the mixer, it goes red. Stop your

other clips – you’re not singing along to anything for this one!

08 As you arm/disarm the track for recording you’ll see the square stop buttons in each empty Session View clip slot (in that track)

transform into circles; that means you can record into these.

09 We’ll record a short phrase to use as a one-shot sample and a rhythmic loop. Click a slot button to start recording. Wait a beat or

two, then record yourself saying ‘Please be aware’.

11 Before you launch your other clips again, listen to your voice recording on its own, checking for distortion and also checking

that you haven’t chopped the start or end off as it’s very easy to do.

10 Press the space bar to stop Live when you’re finished. Note the clip length is cropped to the nearest bar. Disarm the track so you

can’t record anything else by mistake and always save after recording.

12 Double-click the clip to view the waveform if necessary. Let’s discard some of the silence around it. Position the loop brace

around the ‘keeper’ part and the start marker at the front of that.

global quantization of one bar, recording commences on the next bar. It’s important to remember this and not start talking too soon, otherwise you lose the beginning of your sample. Record ending is also quantised which is great as it gives you ‘pre-cut’ loops, rounded off to bars and more likely to loop in sync with your other content straight off.

The most important thing when recording is to avoid overloading and distorting your input levels. It’s very ‘rock’ to record to tape with everything in the red, and it sounds cool, but sadly it stinks when you do it with digital recording. Live has some great distortion effects, so why not save that fun until later? If you’ve erred on the side of


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MT Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech (cont’d)

13 The Loop Brace is that bar above the audio waveform. You can drag to reposition it and grab either end to change the length. FYI

the Loop Brace dimensions and coordinates are MIDI-mappable.

14 Make sure the Loop Brace is an even bar length, though. Right-Click inside the area contained by the loop brace and

choose Crop Sample. Duplicate this clip to the slot below using Cmd-D.

15 Select the first clip. From the Sample View at the bottom of the screen, deactivate Warp so it’ll play just once at its original

speed. Now you have a one-shot, plus a looping version.

17 Make sure you adjust the length of the Loop Brace to accommodate the stretched waveform. Experiment with Warp

modes – the difference between Beats and Complex is very noticeable (but let’s stick with Beats).

16 Use Cmd-D to duplicate the second clip. Double-click above the right end of the waveform to add a Warp marker. Grab it and drag

to the right, doubling the length of your original sample.

18 Quantize the audio-click inside the waveform and type Cmd-U. Watch the waveform peaks snap to the grid; you’ll see Live inserts

yellow Warp markers to achieve this.

caution and recorded at a low level, use the clip Gain slider to boost the volume. Do this while the clip’s playing, so you can check for the distortion that arises if you go too far!

We’re touching on Warping and audio quantization during our walkthrough; it’s fun to over-stretch audio samples and tweak the Warp modes; I can’t resist it with

vocals, which is why we’re doing it here. A bit of quantization also adds to the unreal effect, but it can also make a looping speech sample sit more neatly on the beat.That’s it for now. I hope that over these six workshop parts I’ve given enough tips to inspire and help your music making – happy producing! MT


MAGAZINE August 2015 | 47

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INSTANT

Grab all the videos and get the !iles to do it yourself at

vault.computermusic.co.uk

DOWNLOADWhile some tinker with music-making simply as a hobby, the majority of

computer musicians ultimately want to convert their musical ideas into !inished tracks. Yet, no matter how many issues of

you read, knowledge and skills alone aren’t going to get your music completed: a large dose of hard graft, time and e!fort is also essential.

But what about those times when your creative reserves are running low? Perhaps you’re stuck staring at a blank arrange window. Maybe you’ve got an overwhelming number of ‘sketch’ projects that you can’t seem to arrange. Or your tunes might be 90% !inished, but you can’t seem to draw a line under them and move on. Often, trying harder only makes things worse, and plugging away ad nauseam doesn’t get to the root of the problem, leaving you even more frustrated. With most technical issues come a de!initive solution, but a lack of creativity is a more abstract problem to solve.

So, to tackle these problems head-on, we’ve compiled the best advice you can !ind to achieve inspiration, overcome writers’ block – wherever it might occur in the music-making process – and get your music-making muscles into shape. We’ve pooled the collective

experiences of our in-house writers to come up with over 60 techniques, methods and things to try – all picked up from years of music-making experience, accumulated wisdom, and pure trial-and-error.

You’ll probably notice that we’ve rejected our usual step-by-step tutorial format in favour of snappy tips and techniques. Inspiration is an intangible entity – di!ferent states of mind call for di!ferent types of inspiration, and every producer is unique, so one very speci!ic way of working isn’t applicable to everyone. Instead, think of the next few pages as a big ‘creativity toolbox’ of useful ideas, inspirational advice and alternative points of view from which you can cherry-pick the most applicable to your working methods. If one of our tips doesn’t get you frothing at the mouth, simply move on to the next one and see if it can help you out.

To watch the video versions or download tutorial !iles, just head over to our online Vault at vault.computermusic.co.uk on your PC/Mac, register this issue of the mag (221), and download. Plus, if you’re reading this via our iOS app, just tap the play button for each entry to immediately stream its video. So, without further ado, it’s time to get inspired, speed up your work!low and boost your creativity!

Your music deserves more! Step into that creative frame of mind and get it done, with this massive guide to starting, !inishing, and everything in between

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October 2015 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 37

20Track Starting TacticsStruggling to get rolling on a new track? Here are 20 inspirational ideas to give you the jumpstart you need

Picture the scene. You’ve set aside a chunk of time for music-making, your other half/

kids/dog/phone are all locked out of the studio, and you’re !inally sitting down at the computer, bursting with enthusiasm. It’s the moment you’ve been building up to for days: it’s time to get a new track underway! Visions of label interest, Beatport No.1s and A-list DJ-play brie!ly !lash through your mind as you !ire up the DAW. You have a good feeling about this one – after all, you’ve spent su!!icient time and e!fort learning the right tools and techniques, so why can’t this be your best track yet?

Yet, when greeted with an empty arrange page, it’s almost impossible to transfer that enthusiasm into anything resembling a good idea. Every sample you audition is greeted with

a weak “meh”. The drum beat you’ve laid down is bland and uninspiring. You have a few parts working, but it’s nowhere near good enough to even bother arranging. You !lit between projects and plugins, but to no avail. De!lated, you stamp the session with an almighty ‘fail’.

This scenario is one that every producer has experienced. Even with no distractions, the perfect studio setup, and buckets of talent, it’s all too easy to !ind yourself staring at a blank screen. The passive solution is to attribute this to an inevitable lack of inspiration, cross your !ingers and hope that your next session will be more productive. The proactive solution, as we’ll explore over the next few pages, is to roll up your sleeves, analyse your weaknesses and try out new approaches for starting tracks.

38 / COMPUTER MUSIC / October 2015

> make music now / instant inspiration

02

Find a collection of bass and synth samples or loops – the more varied,

the better – and import them into your DAW. Quickly sift through the sounds and chop out small chunks and phrases, setting them aside for later. Aim for a mixture of short cuts and longer notes (or even longer loop sections). Again, contrast is good.

1 Import your chosen cuts and chops into a drum sampler, making sure that

each slice is on its own drum pad. Play through the pads, auditioning the sounds to !ind suitable interactions and ri!f combos. Use the sampler’s tuning functions to transpose individual pads, ensuring the slices are in tune and work musically together.

2 Now have fun jamming with a pad controller. Try punching in potential

ri!f combos, alternating between di!ferent pads to create stuttering, crazy, chopped ri!fs and, ultimately, a Frankenstein ri!f made from all those individual cuts. Note that this technique works great with vocal slices too.

3

Many producers choose to start a track with drums. While this does get your rhythmic foundation down straight away, drums in isolation aren’t always that inspiring – and you might inadvertently !ill up your groove with too many sounds, leaving less space in the mix for other elements. Instead, aim for character and ‘vibe’ from the get-go: consider beginning with interesting, organic soundscapes, FX, weird vocal snippets, strange noises, subtle soundscapes, vinyl crackle, tape noise and so on. These can all form interesting beds of sound. Also, try and give this foundation some kind of rhythmic element, to help visualise how the groove of your track could progress. Once you have something cool down, the ‘vanilla’ sounds such as beats and bass should slot into place, and you may !ind you don’t need to make those elements as elaborate.

03 MPC-style drum pad choppingLoad di!ferent synth or vocal sections across a drum sampler’s pads, tune them so they all work together, then play/record the pads live to create stuttering vocal ri!fs or complextro-style bass chops. Here’s how it’s done…

01 Start with a soundscape

Find a track or idea you’ve previously worked on, bounce out interesting chunks of ri!fs or sounds, then mangle them up beyond recognition for a completely new starting point. Or, you can even use creative plugins to resample one of your completed tracks. Tools such as Elastique Pitch 2, Paulstretch and our own XFadeLooper CM can all mash up an existing !ile and deliver plenty of new starting points to the inspiration-starved producer.

Remix yourself



05

MIDI data has burst the banks of the simple piano-roll editor that it once !illed and has become a part of the

creative process itself. Many DAWs now feature some kind of ‘Extract to MIDI’ function, which can turn a musical audio !ile into MIDI data to feed another instrument. Begin with a chord-based musical loop that you like, extract it to a MIDI !ile, then delete the original audio; use this MIDI to trigger a synth or instrument, ideally playing a di!ferent type of sound from the original loop for contrast. This new part can now be used as a springboard to start a new track.

Almost all DAWs now feature MIDI plugins, which take incoming notes and process them in interesting ways. These can be used to further develop a new melodic idea. Start by duplicating the previous MIDI part to a new channel, and load up a di!ferent synth sound on this track. For variation, head into the MIDI and remove or change a few notes. Now use your DAW’s arpeggiator device to turn the chord notes into a monophonic sequence, and even use other MIDI plugins to further tweak the notes.

Finally, don’t be afraid to use MIDI plugins in unorthodox ways – an arpeggiator can become a super drum sequencer, for example.

Coming up with inspirational melodic or bass hooks can be tricky, and it’s easy to fall into creative ruts. Next time this happens, try converting drum loops to a melody line. There are a few ways to do this. Here, we’ve used Live’s Convert Melody to New MIDI Track function to extract note information from our drums and apply it to an overdriven electric piano sound. If your DAW doesn’t have a pitch-to-MIDI function, try an automatic tuning plugin (such as Computer Music’s very own vieklang 2 CM). Even if you end up changing the notes, the grooves are often much funkier and more syncopated than you might otherwise play. You could also try using MIDI e!fects to create chords and arpeggios from the notes; or how about simply slicing the loop to MIDI and using that to trigger a synth, giving a nice ascending rhythmic ri!f as a starting point?

04

06 Drums to melody

MIDI trickster

We’re not all natural singers, but many electronic tracks feature processed spoken

vocals. Hook up your microphone – even the most basic will produce usable results – lay down a few words or noises, make it sound cool with e!fects if needed, then let the words and their rhythm guide your sound choices, so you end up with a piece of music that complements the vocal.

Spoken vocal



We use a version of the kick tuned high and processed to create a

metallic top end. A strong low-cut !ilter then gets rid of the original signal so we’re left with the metallic tapping – that’s our o!f beat hat. A similar instance (but tuned higher and heavily distorted) is our crash cymbal.

2

A bitcrushed version with chorus, distortion and very narrow band-

pass !iltering provides a crunchy snare, while a syncopated version of our o!!beat hat is treated with a Frequency Shifter for some percussion. We also shift the sample start point much later to create a clicking sound.

3

A fantastic way to build up an original but convincing and authentic-sounding loop is to comp together other loops. Take between !ive and ten loops of one-to-four bars in length (most should be beats but one or two musical and vocal loops can be great), line them up in your sequencer and slice each one into its constituent hits, mapped to a sampler. Before

slicing, it’s worth using a sampler-style repitching mode to get them to the same tempo and then render before slicing. Now play all the loops together and listen for a groove, then go through each loop, looking for the individual hits contributing to the groove you hear and muting the rest. Often you might only take one noise per loop – or delete some loops altogether. In this way, you’ll quickly build up an original groove. Be sure that repeated near-identical samples (kicks, snares and o!!beat hats, for example) are using the same notes.

Kicks are ideal for this task, and we’ve used a tonally rich one. We

tighten it up using envelope controls, then use a version pitched down an octave with a softened attack to play a bassline, and another version an octave up to fashion a tom-style sound.

1It’s easy to stagnate in the studio. For most of us, the !irst port of call for creative inspiration is some new sample packs or virtual instruments, but the world around us is full of sounds. Get out and about for half an hour with a !ield recorder (or just your phone), record everything you hear and try bringing it back to the studio and manipulating it into something cool. We took to the streets of Hackney and recorded everything from keys and trains to sirens and people – check out the video to see us transform our found sounds pitchshifting, sidechain pumping, modulating and more.

Dance music used to be made with hardware samplers, and each time you loaded a project, you had to make sure the corresponding sampler banks were loaded. If they weren’t, you’d end up with, say, a MIDI !ile designed to trigger drums instead triggering a chopped up vocal, a bass part or sometimes totally di!ferent drum sounds. Sometimes this actually sounded great, and such ‘happy accidents’ are easy to reproduce today. Check out how we approach it in the video, and to get an idea of the kind of unexpected results you can get.

07

08

09

Deliberate accidents

The sounds around

Stack ’em and pick ’em

10

This creative sound design challenge is a truly awesome way to make a loop that sounds nothing like anybody else’s

Build a loop using only one sample



a pile of bespoke, royalty-free sounds to call on, all neatly categorised.

15. NATURAL MIMICCopy one aspect of an existing track, then make it your own. In light of Pharrell’s Blurred Lines lawsuit, this may seem risky, but if it’s done correctly, the !inal result will bear no obvious relation to the original. A good example is to program a bassline to match a track you like, then edit the notes and/or rhythm until you’ve got an original bassline.

16. KEYWORD SEARCHChoose a keyword, then search your synths for sounds that contain it. Inevitably, many of the sounds won’t inspire you at all, but it only takes one sound to capture your imagination, and you’ll be up and running. Try the same technique with samples and loops, where you’ll often !ind musical key, instrument, genre and style used as !ile tags. Your DAW’s browser may help make this process easier – Studio One 3, for instance, has a ready-tagged sound library, and these tags show up in its search results.

17. RANDOMISE FOR FRESHNESSMany plugins include randomise options. Play from your MIDI keyboard, or set up a MIDI loop, then head for the Randomise

controls. Basic ‘full patch’ randomisation will give rise to results that are rather hit and miss, requiring patience and repeat button-clicking; however, in the video, we’re using MeldaProduction’s MPowerSynth, which allows you to randomise individual parts of the instrument – oscillators, envelopes, e!fects modules, etc. Starting with one oscillator, we’ll add two more oscillators, then start to add in some !ilters and e!fects, randomising and tweaking as we go. Don’t settle – keep hitting that randomise control until you get something that works or can be tweaked a little to your liking.

18. NOTE DOWN THE CHORDSCompile a list of progressions from songs and tracks that you like, focusing on the order and scale degree – I"V-vi-IV, for example – rather than a particular key. When inspiration is short, grab the list and work your way through until something inspires you.

19. RESTRUCTUREStep away from regular eight-bar structures, choosing a di!ferent cycle length, then write a melody to match. Start with a simple ten- or 12-bar structure, or try seven, nine, 11 or 13 bars for more interest. Or go all-out and experiment with odd time signatures and unfamiliar scales.

20. TRY A NEW INSTRUMENTRecord yourself playing an instrument you don’t know how to play – often innocence and naïvety result in the simplicity you’re after. You can always use time- and pitch-correction to improve the performance, or treat it with e!fects to create something completely fresh.

11. TRAWL YOUR BACK!CATALOGUEMany DAWs allow us to import individual tracks from project !iles, including MIDI parts, audio, automation and channel strips. This

means that all those unused ri!fs, melodies, chord progressions and other leftovers from your previous sessions are a potential starting point. Choose one or two tracks and parts from another session, or mix and match from a couple of sessions – beats from one and keys from another, say. And to make this approach even smoother in future, get into the habit of rendering out cool-sounding parts as they occur during your sessions, labelling by key and BPM. Do this and you’ll have a stack of awesome ready-made custom loops in no time!

12. MAKE A CHANGEIf you usually play MIDI using a keyboard, try instead arranging and pitching sampled notes as audio on the timeline; if you usually draw drum patterns in the piano roll, try a sequencer plugin or drum pads. Get away from the screen entirely with Ableton’s Push or NI’s Maschine software/hardware hybrids.

13. START WITH A RHYTHMGet something rhythmic down straight away, even if it’s not drums. Plenty of sounds in your palette can be played rhythmically, good examples being bass, guitar and percussive keyboards such as piano. Use a click track to stay in time, and loop a four- or eight-bar section the same way you would for beat programming. Map the results to beats once you’re happy, or use the rhythms for melodic hooks or basslines.

14. BUILD YOUR OWN SAMPLE PACKSGetting sidetracked programming synth patches, hunting for samples, or designing sounds from scratch can get in the way of those inspirational moments… so why not create your own sample and preset packs? Set aside time to do this as a task in itself, without actually trying to write music. Give your packs a theme or title – eg, 100 Ultimate Synth Stabs, 50 Stripped-down Breaks, 80 Electrifying Guitar Loops, etc – and stick to it. This will give you an achievable goal, and when you do come to start a track, you’ll have

10 more ways to get a track started

Try randomising the individual modules of your plugins, one by one, until you come to something fresh

Many of our VIP Series artists use the sounds in their own tracks – so why not make your own sample packs?



01 MIX AS YOU GOIt can be productive to quickly throw your track elements together roughly at the composition stage,

then address the mix later once your ideas are down. This does mean that the incomplete mix may lack the professional sheen of your favourite releases, which may cause you to lose heart. In this case, try the opposite approach and mix as you go, adding basic processing to each sound as you slot it in the track. Having pre-prepared plugin racks or channel strips are invaluable. Try both approaches and discover which works best for you.

10 workflow accelerators

Spend a little time organising your plugins list to your preference, so everything’s in easy reach later on

02 RTFM!Getting stuck on a DAW feature or synth parameter is a work!low killer, so become a ninja at your

chosen software by reading the manuals of your DAW and plugins. Also, follow software-speci!ic tutorials/guides such as our own How To Use… series. Time is limited for all of us, so keep learning time to a minimum, and restrict yourself to only a handful of tools you can learn inside out. Make your own notes if necessary – compile a list of useful features, menu functions etc. You can even print your ‘crib sheets’ out and keep them to hand if needed.

03PREPARATION IS KEY As the old saying goes, fail to prepare… and prepare to fail. So take heed and do as much of your plugin and DAW setup

ahead of time as you can. Have a variety of template sessions and racks ready, catering for elements such as multi-out instruments, channel strips, creative plugin chains, mastering chains, and outboard gear.

04 CUSTOM PLUGIN LISTIf your DAW’s list of plugins is an endless mine!ield to navigate, speed up productivity by

categorising them into relevant folders - perhaps by processor type or ‘most-used’. See The CM Guide to Plugins in issue 217 for details on how to accomplish this in many major DAWs.

To take this concept further, prepare custom racks or devices for things that you do all the time – from basic workhorse gadgets like a ‘bass roll-o!f’ tool, to inspiring banks of sweeps/FX. You can even have your own pre-prepared ‘track !inisher’ sample pack full of sweeps, crashes, noise textures, or useful ‘instant FX’ return e!fects loaded up for quick results.

05 DISABLE DISTRACTIONWe’re all passionate about making music, but external in!luences always get in the way to some

extent. Be fully prepared for this. When you’re ready for a studio session, minimise potential distractions. Log out of your social media accounts or disconnect yourself from the internet, put your phone on silent and out of reach, have food prepared, tell your partner or friends to leave you alone for a few hours… then focus your full attention on the DAW.Like many DAWs, Cubase lets you save common template setups as starting points, saving you tons of time

Try and comprehend the full music-making power, convenience and potential of the modern computer. Mind-bending, isn’t it? But with more options comes more choice, and an abundance of choice can be overwhelming. Too many variables and decisions to make can sap your creativity, disrupt your studio !low, and kill o!f your productivity. So, to

prevent you getting bogged down in technicalities, battling DAW options, or generally doing things the hard way, we’ve put together ten key tips to help you release and realise your musical ideas quicker than ever.



Compare your track to commercial releases early on – visual analysis tools can really help with this

09COMPARE AND CONTRASTEver got a track ‘!inished’, only to !ind that it doesn’t stack up next to your favourite commercial mixes? Start

comparing it early on rather than right at the end, and then continue to do so with every vital change.

Also, hitting Save each time will overwrite your previous stages; instead, when you’ve made a few signi!icant tweaks, Save As, and create numbered versions. Render a mix out whenever you do this so you can easily compare to your current version – sometimes, you might decide to revert to an earlier, better mix.

06KEYBOARD SHORTCUTSSending your mouse pointer up to a !ile menu every time you

need a particular DAW command may seem quick, but these frequent movements all add up. While keyboard shortcuts aren’t sexy, they will accelerate your work!low immensely and help you to !inish tracks quicker, so try and memorise your most used keyboard shortcuts. Functions like quantising MIDI, slicing audio at the playhead point, looping sections and muting regions are just a small handful of commands you should know. Every time you reach into a menu for something, see if there’s a shortcut command for it, and use that instead next time.

Furthermore, many DAWs allow you to create your own keyboard shortcuts – see Shortcuts to Success in 186 for more on this. Some DAWs even let you make your own chain of keyboard commands (‘macros’) and de!ine custom processes to do things like muting all clips that are less than a bar in length, for example.

07 SITTING COMFORTABLY?Is your studio chair comfortable? Can you wear your headphones

for hours at a time with no discomfort? Is everything within easy reach? Are your speakers positioned for the best sound? It’s easy to focus on what’s going on inside the computer to help speed up work!low, but if your studio setup isn’t ergonomic, comfortable and set up for optimum playback, your work rate will su!fer, and you may even develop long-term problems.

08 TIME TO TIDYIs your project getting out of hand? Too many tracks? Loads of ideas and alternative

arrangements knocking around on the timeline? Bypassed plugins sitting around “just in case” you decide to revert to that old EQ setting? All of this can hold you back, making the project slow and confusing to navigate, and eating system resources. Work out a strategy to deal with it: save the project, then delete unused tracks, render parts to audio that you’re happy with, go through all those unused ideas and delete any you can’t see yourself using in this project. Now Save As to save this tidier project – most DAWs have some kind of ‘Collect All and Save’ function, which will save the whole project, samples and all; but don’t retain any large, unwanted takes of audio from the bloated project.

10QUALITY SAMPLESHaving a large, diverse sample collection is all very well, but rummaging through thousands of

samples on your hard drive can be a massive buzzkill when you’re trying to focus on music-making. Instead, make a highly organised samples folder that’s all about quality, not quantity – reduce the bloat and keep only the best sounds that are unique to you and your

Tidy your project up! Place everything in a sensible order, get rid of the cha!f, and use colours for ease of navigation

signature sound. The same goes for old, abandoned projects, too. Harvest these for parts, then archive them in an organised fashion or just delete them for good.

In terms of how you should organise your chosen samples, that’s up to you! Some prefer breaking it down by instrument (‘hats’, ‘kicks’, etc); while others prefer to go by genre or sample collection. When you do choose a structure, make sure you stick to it.



10

Spruce up your chords and snazz up those scales with our ten simple methods

Easy Music Theory Tips

Music theory has always had a slight whi!f of the uncool about it, conjuring up images of

dry, dusty, bewigged baroque musicians from centuries past, the nightmare of childhood piano lessons, or ba!!ling overheard discussions in jazz clubs concerning the superiority of augmented 13ths over Neapolitan sixths or the joys of soloing in the Mixolydian mode. This bad rep is entirely unjusti!ied however, since regardless of whether you’re a composer, songwriter, producer or DJ, shoring up your musical knowledge with a smattering of grassroots theory can have a profound e!fect on the quality of your output.

Here at , we never underestimate the importance of a good grounding in music theory – hence our long-running regular Easy Guide feature found in every issue. After all, how music actually works is the key to

everything we do when we’re creating a project. The idea is to think of theory as a framework to support and inspire your musical endeavours, rather than inhibit and rule them. The best part is that you don’t have to plumb the murky depths of the subject to be able to use it to your advantage. When a crippling loss of creativity strikes – and this can happen to any of us at any time, let’s face it – having a few tried, tested and theoretically proven techniques in your back pocket can be a lifesaver.

Over the next few pages, then, we’re going to highlight ten of our favourite, most practical theory-based tips that can help to kickstart the creative process next time your inspiration well runs a little dry. Every tip includes a video walkthrough, so you can see and hear exactly how to make them work for yourself. Time to knuckle down and get theory-ous!



02

Let’s illustrate by looking at a piano part playing a repeated rhythmic C

minor chord sequence over and over… and over. It sounds pretty boring, as the chord doesn’t change. Instead of thinking up new chords, though, let’s try injecting freshness by using a more animated bass part.

1 For the !irst two bars, we stick to a C bass note, as it’s the root note of the

chord. After two bars, however, we shift the bass note down from C to A, forming a completely di!ferent chord with the piano – an Am7!5, (A"E!-G"C) in fact.

2 Keeping the piano chord the same, we next move the bass from A to A!,

making an A!maj7 (A!-E!-G"C) chord. Then down to F, up to G and back to C again. If you’re not sure what bass notes will !it, try picking notes that are already in the accompanying chord(s).

3

Should your keyboard parts naturally tend towards the clunky side, things can be improved by employing a technique known as broken chords. This involves breaking chords up into their component notes and playing these as short arpeggios (runs of notes). The technique doesn’t just add rhythmic interest, but it can be a great way of coming up with ideas for cool melodies that work naturally with the chord progression, since the notes you pick out are taken from the chords themselves. In our illustration below, on the left, we have a four-bar progression of simple block chords. To the right, we have the same progression, but played using broken chords. Like !inger-picking on an acoustic guitar, instead of playing all the notes on the same beat, each triad is split into individual notes. See 201’s Easy Guide to arpeggios for more.

03 Change the bass noteThe notes a bass part plays can assume the role of root note for the chords played by parts above it. Sticking di!ferent bass notes underneath can radically alter the sound of a static chord sequence.

01 Broken chords

Moving the order of notes around within a chord can take a progression in new directions without changing the actual chords. This is easily done by selecting notes and shifting them up and down an octave – most DAWs have a shortcut key for this, such as Shift-Up/Down. Here we’ve taken a simple C, D, E!, F progression and completely altered its shape by swapping the note order around in the second half. These ‘rearranged’ chords are known as inversions.

Animating chords with inversions



05

If you’ve never encountered modes before, this one tip could change your musical outlook forever. Scales are a basic component of music theory – most people know one or two of the major scales, the most commonly known being C major (C D E F G A B). But what if we told you that you could unlock a secret world of evocative alternative scales simply by playing any scale from a di!ferent starting note?

Try it by playing C major in the conventional fashion, from C to C on a MIDI keyboard. Now give your ears a few seconds’ rest to forget the sound of it, and play the same scale again, but without starting on C. Try going from D to D. Or F to F. Notice how they have a di!ferent quality to the major’s happy, kindergarten sound? What you’re playing are di!ferent modes of the C major scale, and they sound di!ferent because of the di!ferent sequence of intervals between the notes that happens when you start somewhere other than the root note of the scale. Underpinning each new mode with a bass note the same as your new starting note will reinforce the e!fect. That’s enough to get you started, but when you’re ready for more info on modes, check out 207’s Easy Guide on the subject.

Diatonic means “in key”, and diatonic chords are formed using only notes taken from a particular scale. So a C major scale containing the notes C D E F G A B – the white notes on a keyboard – would give you the diatonic chords C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and Bdim, formed by stacking alternate notes onto each note within the scale. These are the basic triads you may already be familiar with; however, a palette of only seven chords can be limiting, so why not borrow chords from other keys?

Borrowed chords are most often taken from parallel keys – keys that have the same root note as the original key. In the case of C major, the parallel minor key is C minor, so we have a whole new set of chords to choose from – Cm, Ddim, E!, Fm, Gm, A! and B!. 214’s Easy Guide has more tips and advice on using borrowed chords.

04

06 Borrowed chords

New flavours with modes

Melody-writing can be tough, but sometimes, if the rhythm is hooky enough, sticking religiously to one note is all you need for a melody. Try using a monotone melody in a verse part, and slowly add small variations through the bridge section to build to a chorus hook. This approach also gives you an opportunity to focus on rhythm and sonic variety, rather than just melody alone, for adding interest.

Monotony rules



We can then give these degrees numbers, from 1 to 7. To make the

scale pentatonic, we need to remove degrees 4 and 7 – in this case, that’s F and B, leaving us with C, D, E, G and A, the C major pentatonic scale.

2

For a minor pentatonic scale, omit the second (D) and sixth (A!)

degrees. For the C minor scale, we’re left with C, E!, F, G and B!. Pentatonic scales sound great, and they’re fun and easy to use, but if you need more information, check out our Easy Guide to pentatonic scales in 192.

3

Extending regular major or minor triads by adding extra notes can radically transform your track. For instance, in C major, a Cmaj7 is made by adding the seventh degree of the C major scale (B) to a C major triad (C!E!G). If we extend

the scale up the keyboard beyond the octave, we get into the extended range, where a ninth is essentially the scale’s second degree played up an octave. So an easy way to play a ninth chord is to play a root-position triad (for example C major – C!E!G) and add in the second degree between the root and the third (C9 – C!D!E!G). If you want to learn more, 200’s Easy Guide is focussed entirely on extended chords.

While a conventional major or minor scale contains seven notes, a

pentatonic scale only contains "ive. E"fectively, they’re regular scales with a couple of notes removed. If we look at a normal C major scale, we can see that it contains the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B.

1To give things a kick when putting together a melody, try making a dramatic leap up the keyboard. A good interval to use for this is a minor or major sixth. You "ind these intervals by using the scale degree numbering system outlined in Tip 10. With major scales, the distance between the root note and degree 6 of the scale is a major sixth, so in the case of C, a major sixth above would be A. Jump up from C to A in the course of a melody, and it’ll take you up into a whole di"ferent area of the keyboard.

For an exotic sound, try combining regular major or minor triads together to form polychords. For a classic polychord combo, let’s use C major as the "irst chord (C!E!G). For the second, we need to "ind the major chord that has its root a perfect "ifth above the root of the "irst chord. In this case, this happens to be G major (G!B!D). Play the two chords together and you get a Cmaj9 chord (C!E!G!B!D). If you’re stuck for which chords to combine, go for ones that already have a note or two in common. For an in-depth look at polychords, check out

219’s Easy Guide.

07

08

09

Layer chords together

Take some giant leaps

Build an extension

10

Limiting yourself to notes from a pentatonic scale may give you a smaller choice, but it can give rise to some memorable melodies.

Go pentatonic



01 TOOLS OF THE TRADEWhile DAWs are thought of as strictly linear sequencers, most now o!fer features geared towards

arrangement experimentation. Ableton Live’s non-linear Session View, Cubase’s Arranger track and Logic Pro X’s Arrangement markers allow you to concoct and ‘perform’ multiple arrangement ideas on the !ly, the best of which can be printed onto the timeline at your leisure. Studio One 3’s new Scratch Pads o!fers an extra timeline for trying out ideas independent from the main arrangement. Take time out to learn these features and reap their rewards.

Time yourself working, and set yourself time-limited sessions to get tasks !inished under pressure

02 TWO’S COMPANYMany of your un!inished track ideas probably consist of one concept or ‘theme’ (ie, a chorus),

leaving you listening to the same sounds over and over. If you’re bored with the same old loop, try making a completely contrasting section, or even concentrate on making two sections work well together – for example, a verse leading into chorus, or a breakdown building up into a drop. Once you have two di!fering sections working well together, it’ll be easier to branch o!f and make a third, fourth and !ifth section.

03COPYCAT If you’re making music in a genre that adheres to ‘DJ-friendly’ arrangements, drag a commercial track into the project,

and check out exactly how it’s arranged. How long is the intro? When does the bass come in? How long before the second breakdown? Is there a long outro? Copy the track’s structure in your own arrangement, using it as a template, and no one need ever know.

04 AGAINST THE CLOCKWho says a great track needs to take hours and hours to !inish? If you endlessly !iddle with an 8-bar

loop without getting an arrangement down, you’re probably working too slowly; after too much time listening to the same idea, you’ll likely get bored of it, no matter how good it is! Instead, focus upon working fast. Pull out all the stops and try turning your loop into a full arrangement as quickly as possible – perhaps even to a strict time limit – so you don’t lose interest and focus. If anything seems to be slowing you down during this process, identify what it is, and look for a solution. You can even time yourself, giving yourself a deadline to !inish a certain task, and once time’s up, it’s done.

05 DUB IT LIVEBack in 209, we explored the ‘modular mindset’, which involves recording long passages of synth/

e!fects tweaking live to audio, then selecting the best bits to chop up onto the timeline. This will help prevent endless tweaking of ‘live’ plugins, forcing you to commit to audio via a dedicated record channel, freeze and !latten feature, or ‘bounce in place’. By responding and reacting to your track in a live fashion, you’ll often end up with cool FX and transitions that make your arrangement seem more natural and !lowing.Scrutinise a well-structured commercial track and nab its arrangement – just make sure you use your own music!

10 arrangement methodsIn our Creative Concepts articles, Features Editor Joe Rossitter has often discussed the notorious ‘loop land’ that all producers !ind themselves in from time to time. It’s relatively easy to lay down a few decent ideas, but turning them into fully-!ledged arrangements is, arguably, the hardest part of music production. If you’ve got a hard drive

full of cool 16-bar loops crying out to be assembled into songs, then read on for ten loop-busting arrangement approaches that you can put into practice right away.



09SUBTRACTIVE ARRANGINGBegin with a short 8- or 16-bar loop of a track idea, which should contain all the core elements you’ll need, then

duplicate the idea throughout the project for !ive or so minutes. This should help you visualise the completed track, and you’ll set yourself an ‘ending’ to work towards, as the original loop will probably be the ‘climax’ of your song. Now, start from the beginning and form rough sections (intro, breakdown, chorus, etc) by removing, muting or !iltering parts as you go.

06SEND/RETURN TRACKSA track idea will often need additional ideas or sounds adding

to progress the arrangement, but throwing in new sounds can sound disjointed and messy, especially if your aim is minimalism and groove. Instead, run parts of your track through extreme reverb or delay e!fects, then render results and mangle further. Or grab any outboard gear you can – a cheap cassette deck, an old 90s mixer, some guitar pedals – and run sounds through them. Sending portions of track elements to creative return tracks (such as eccentric delays, long reverbs and mangling, glitchy e!fects) will generate plenty of extra material that can be printed to audio and processed further – and as these sounds derive from existing elements, they’ll !it the tone and timbre of the track.

07 ENJOY THE SILENCEWe’re all guilty of creating overcomplicated ideas and dense loops, and you can easily end up

trying to cram everything you’ve got into an arrangement – especially if you’re basing it on a busy loop that you’re already expecting to be the “climax” of the song – which may lead to a messy, convoluted track idea. Instead, use silence and contrast to your advantage. Remember that dynamics are an essential part of music. Take away expected sounds, or even fade them to silence. As well as contrasting quiet against loud, set o!f low bass with sparkling treble, subtlety with intensity, and so on. Filter or fade parts in and out rather than having elements just stop and start; or identify sections where the listener could get bored, and hammer them with a startling sound out of nowhere!

08CLICHÉ CLUBDon’t be afraid of using clichés. They’re used time and time again for a very good reason: they

work! Every genre has its own, but a few dance music examples include four crashes on the last bar of a phrase, 16th-note drum rolls, a white noise sweep, an ever-doubling kick drum build-up, or a ‘trance-gated’ sustained vocal. You can use them to lead the listener comfortably through a track, or if that sounds a bit too safe, surprise the listener by using clichés in an unexpected way. And, if all else fails… drop everything out for a bar or two and throw in a cheesy sample!

10 SWITCHED OUTLooped parts can become stale and repetitive, but instead of throwing them out or elaborating on them,

simply change the accompanying parts instead, to ‘reframe’ them. Change the chords used beneath a repeating melodic phrase to create variation; switching the beat up to double- or half-time to vary the pace throughout the track; pitch material up or down by an octave or

Get your guilty pleasures from audience-pleasing chlichés like snare rolls, crashes and white noise sweeps

transpose the key of all musical material for add interest or to develop the theme. You could try experimenting with MIDI data, through stretching or compressing regions to alter their timing, or using MIDI plugins in di!ferent parts, creating arpeggios or chords that weren’t there before. All of this can help maintain a sense of cohesion throughout your track, as well as helping you get the most out of your track’s main hooks and phrases.

To create an arrangement, duplicate the main groove through the track (as above), then strip bits away (as below)



Clear out the clutter It’s easy to get used to a mix with layer upon layer of sound, but unnecessarily busy tracks

can be unlistenable. Often, this clutter exists in the low-mid or high frequencies from multiple instrument layers. Use or adjust high- and low-pass !ilters on individual tracks to create more space, or revisit your arrangement, removing elements one by one to re-assess their impact on the overall mix. Less is often more!

Kick/bass relationshipThis vital aspect usually needs a !inal check. Listen to the

balance between the two to assess whether either is too dominant, and if necessary, notch a space in your bass sound for the kick, using an EQ and/or a spectrum analyser to hunt the precise kick frequencies. Try putting a 100Hz low-pass !ilter on your master bus to monitor bass levels and spot low-end clashes.

Check the sub level Following on from the previous point, excess sub bass can be problematic on

big systems, and it’s easy to unwittingly accrue when mixing on smaller near!ield monitors. If you’re mastering your own mixes, use all available tools to check this – including headphones, bass heavy systems such as car stereos – and do some spectrum analysis, comparing your mix to similar tracks. The low-pass !ilter trick in the previous step can help.

Overall vocal levels If your track has vocals as a focal point, their level has to be right. Take time to get the

levels right in speci!ic sections using automation, riding phrases and words if necessary. As a !inal test, listen at di!ferent levels, on di!ferent systems and in mono to make sure the vocals are neither smothered nor too prominent. If you’re still unsure, opt for the slightly higher vocal balance, or run o!f an alternative ‘vocals up’ mix.

Listen to transitions These are usually delivered naturally by live players but can

require more thought for programmed tracks. If you’re lurching from section to section and lacking an overall ‘!low’, transitions may be badly balanced or just missing. Remedies include sweeps, crashes, stops/silences, impacts, bends and slides. If a transition still sounds too abrupt, adding a touch of long reverb helps smear transitions without dominating the mix balance.

Check it in mono If the mix balance changes a lot when played in mono,

“phasey” stereo sounds/e!fects (such as) reverbs may be too dominant. Narrow or rebalance them so the mono and stereo mixes are consistent, ensuring a solid mix that’s compatible with mono playback systems.

Listen on different systems Monitoring on multiple alternative listening systems can be confusing,

so it’s best used to highlight signi!icant problems rather than as an additional monitoring setup. Car stereos, in-ear headphones and consumer devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones are all useful, particularly when judging lead instrument balance. Make notes on anything you think needs attention, then return to the studio and work through each point.

Pops, clicks and artifacts Clicks and pops sound like digital errors and have no

place in your !inal mixdown. They can be caused by poor or missing crossfades, level overloads, audio !ile errors or badly edited audio comps. Listen for any strangeness, zoning in on problem areas and resolving these issues at source. Often the best tool for this task is a pair of headphones.

Take your mixing hat offBe as objective as possible, ‘hearing’ the track as would a !irst-time listener. Techniques

include coming back to the track after a break (be it minutes, hours, days, weeks… or more!); listening from a di!ferent position or outside your room with the door open; A/B-ing with commercial tracks you rate; listening to the track as background music while doing other tasks; and sticking your mix in a shu!!led playlist.

Push it into a limiter Output limiters are a key aspect of mastering and

can highlight balance issues, particularly excess low and high frequencies. Insert this last on your master output and see how loud you can make your mix before distortion gets too audible. A good, balanced mix will “go loud” quite easily; if yours doesn’t, it likely needs more work. Study an RMS meter – an RMS peak of -10dB is plenty, though higher is possible by tailoring low frequencies.

Track-Finishing ChecklistDon’t call it !inished until you’ve ticked o" these ten simple pointers



Y ou are probably at the stage where you have recorded or used audio in Live. In this series we specifi cally use a voice sample to use in our project. That’s the last clip element we’ll be adding; in this tutorial we’ll add some audio

effects to our audio and MIDI tracks, return tracks, and the Master Track itself. Don’t worry if you don’t have the last tutorial as you can make sure you’re using the latest version of our example set included on the cover disc.

When it comes to browsing and loading devices, it pays to be keyboard-friendly. Sure you can mouse around, but it’s faster to use your computer Arrow keys. Inside the Browser, Left and Right Arrows move between columns, while Up and Down will scroll, obviously, up and down through the listed items. If you’re on a folder in the right-hand column, a Right-Arrow will open the folder so you can keep moving down through its contents, while a Left-Arrow will close the folder. When you’re on a device or a preset, tapping the Enter key will load it into the currently selected track. When you load an effect name, like Auto Filter, you’re loading the default settings for that effect device (actually that’s true of all Ableton devices), and when you go below that effect name in the Browser, inside what appears to be a folder, and load something

like ‘Cut-O-Move H’ or ‘Elastic Band’, you’re loading a preset for the relevant device. There’s also the Hot Swap button on each device – the little circle next to the Save File button. Click that to jump straight to the relevant Browser section for your current device, and remember to use the Arrow keys to navigate and load fast. Your saved presets go directly into the relevant category in your Library, although you are free to move these and create new folders to contain them.

You might be wondering about which effects go where. Generally, if you want to process something that only occurs in one track, you add the effect to that track (I should state explicitly that you can use audio effects on MIDI and audio tracks, but only MIDI effects on MIDI tracks). If you want the same effect to apply to a selection of tracks, group them and put the effect on the group. If you have an effect that you want to blend by different degrees over a number of tracks, that’s a job for Return tracks. Using a single effect on a Return track instead of duplicating it across many tracks can also save CPU if it’s a particularly power-crazed plug-in. Finally, if you want to process the entire song – everything, including the signal from the returns – you need to be adding that effect to the Master Track. You’ll fi nd that effects behave differently according to what order you place them within the chain (you can drag freely to reposition them later). I don’t personally feel there are ‘rules’ for this as such, it’s a matter of what combinations work for the track. There are times when I

Working with audio effects



on the DVD

Things can sound a bit dry without audio effects. For stage or studio, Martin Delaney shows you how to add some ear candy to your Live projects…

FOCUS ON… RETURN EFFECTSWithin this tutorial I talk about the value of Return Tracks and their Send controls as live performance tools. A good selection of return effects, combined with a knob-rich hardware controller, makes a great interface for dynamic live performance – in addition to, or instead of, any effects you might have added at the production stage. Sometimes you’ll see somebody playing with a set that doesn’t look too busy, almost like they’re faking it, but check their controller and their hands. Maybe they’re keeping the on-screen stuff simple while they work with the controller and some carefully confi gured effects…


When browsing and loading, it pays to be keyboard friendly. You can mouse around but it’s much faster to use your Arrow keys

There are times when I


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Working with audio effects

MT Step-by-Step Working with audio effects

01 Let’s find some effects to add to our tracks, ideally a combination of ‘helper’ and more ‘showy’ effects. Open the example set on the

disc, TUGTAL7. This’ll keep you up to date with our progress.

02 Open the Browser. Don’t forget to use the keyboard shortcut: Alt>Cmd>B. Click on ‘Audio Effects’ in the left-hand column, but

from then on use your computer Arrow keys to navigate the presets.

03 We can load effects in different ways. If you’re using the Arrow keys to navigate, hit Enter when you’re on the device or preset

that you want, to load it into the currently highlighted track.

05 Let’s compress the drums. Load the Compressor/Brick Wall preset. Lower the Threshold to -12.0dB. Lower it further if you

want to hear some drum smashing sounds, but put it back when you’ve finished!

04 Alternately you can use your mouse to drag the effect across to the target track. We’re going to use a combination of some factory

presets and our own tweaks to the ‘vanilla’ default settings.

06 Add Redux to the keyboard track, and set Downsample to 4. This gives the sound a slight edge without pushing it too far. Redux is

great at extreme settings if you like chip tune sounds.


MAGAZINE September 2015 | 57


would put a delay after a compressor, and there are times when I’d flip that round; it does make a difference.

In the walkthrough steps, I mention turning effects on and off with their individual little Power switches. You can do this dynamically; you don’t always want every effect active all the time. What’s cool is that when Live’s in Record mode, those on/off actions are recorded as automation, so it easily becomes part of your performance and then part of your production. The switches are mappable, so you can

use MIDI Map Mode (Cmd>M) to assign them to your hardware or, more regularly for me, use Key Map Mode (Cmd>K) to assign them to letters or numbers on your computer keyboard. The good ol’ keyboard makes a very useful source of buttons for jobs like this. We’re not hitting it too much this time, but sooner or later you’ll encounter screen space management issues; you can use keyboard commands like Alt>Cmd>S and Alt>Cmd>R to show and hide Sends and Returns respectively, and also double click

MT Step-by-Step Working with audio effects… cont’d

07 On the voice track, add EQ Three and click the L switch, killing the low frequencies. Then add the Vinyl Distortion/Awfull preset –

you’ll hear it does a funny pitch thing as well as adding grunge.

08 Effects can be toggled on and off with the Power buttons left of their names. You can remove an effect from a track using your

Delete key, and they can be copied and pasted.

09 If you’ve created a sound you want to keep and reuse, save it as a preset using the Save Preset button (disk icon). Live

automatically locates it in the correct place and lets you name it.

11 Use Alt>Cmd>R to view Return tracks, and Alt>Cmd>T to create them. If you can’t see any, it’s because you haven’t made any yet!

Use Alt>Cmd>S to show/hide the sends.

10 We can also use effects on Return tracks. These let us share a common audio effect over many tracks, while the Send controls

let us mix the amount of the effect applied to each track.

12 You can have up to 12 Returns in Live 9 Standard and Suite, although Live Intro is limited to just two. A new Send control is

added automatically when you create a new Return.




MT Step-by-Step Working with audio effects… cont’d

13 Create two Return tracks, adding one effect to each – Ping Pong Delay on A, and Reverb/Large Hall on B. Set their Dry/Wet

controls to 100%. We’ll use the Sends to mix the levels instead.

14 Set the keyboard and vocal track sends A to around 3 o’clock and 12 o’clock respectively. You can see the dB values displayed in the

status bar at the bottom of the screen.

15 Send the tracks to the reverb effect on Send B. Try it like this: drums -19 dB, percussion -9, bass -53, keys -9, voice -9. Set the

percussion A Send to -10 dB while you’re there.

17 Let’s add Beat Repeat, set like this: Interval 1/4, Grid 1/16, Variation 5, Pitch -12, Pitch Delay 100%, turn on Ins. Practice

turning it on and off; you won’t want this on continuously.

16 The final location to add effects is the Master Track; again, we might be using practical effects like compressors and limiters or

more obvious types of effect, like filters, and disruptive time effects.

18 As a practical thing: add the Multiband Dynamics preset ‘Multiband Compression’. This will make your track sound shinier,

beefier, and louder. If your levels are going red, add the Limiter/Upper Ceiling preset after it.

on the title bar of an instrument or effect to fold it up – very useful with long chains of instruments and effects.

You can use up to 12 return tracks in the full version of Live. If you need more than that, maybe you need to start experimenting with group tracks, as I mentioned earlier, or with routing to and from audio tracks. When you open Live’s In/Out View and look at the Audio To tab, you’ll see that each track can be routed to Sends Only, which means you won’t hear any dry output at all, and nothing until you

bring up at least one Send in the track.The tutorial ends with the addition of the Multiband

Compression preset. Mastering is a whole other subject, and there just isn’t room here, so we’re shamefully throwing in this preset, which is not ideal but at least it gets us started on the topic. There’s so much more to cover with effects, including MIDI effects, and mastering – we’ll be coming back to all of this in time. Next time we put our raw material into some kind of structure. MT




FM | PRODUCER’S GUIDE

57

A bleton Live is the DAW of choice for loop-loving musicians and live performers, providing the antithesis to traditional left-to-right sequencers with its Session View: an environment where

cyclical clips (individual audio or MIDI loops) and scenes (horizontal rows comprised of these clips) are triggered and mixed. By firing off combinations of clips and scenes, the electronic producer is able to experiment with multiple arrangement ideas within a non-linear structure, while a DJ can remix and re-edit any audio on the fly.

As you’d expect from such performance-oriented software, ‘plug ‘n’ play’ integration with MIDI hardware has always been a big part of the Live experience. Most third-party Live-centric controllers allow you to fire off clips and scenes via grid-based interfaces that mirror the Session View, whereas others include faders and rotaries for live parameter adjustment and automation – but these usually require you to pre-prepare and edit the contents of each clip to some degree, keeping you chained to the mouse and computer. With this in mind, Ableton enlisted the expertise of pad hardware gurus Akai to help develop the first ‘official’ Live controller, Push, designed to not only integrate with Live 9’s underlying code to a degree

unparalleled by other third-party offerings, but also to provide the immersive and tactile experience of composing with a physical instrument away from the screen.

While its appearance borrows from other popular Live controllers, it’s clear that Ableton have set out to differentiate Push from its peers through sheer craftsmanship: the unit’s 64 velocity- and pressure-sensitive pads, 11 touch-sensitive encoders and 49 buttons are luxurious and responsive, while the rubberised matte-black finish and bulletproof build quality make other Live controllers seem cheap and cheerful. In operation, Push does do the usual clip-launching and rotary assignments, but goes much further, enabling you to construct clips from the ground up. Live 9 is the brains of the operation, running everything behind the scenes as Push is switched between roles as an MPC-style groovebox, step sequencer, MIDI compositional tool, multi-coloured clip-triggerer, device browser and editor.

Push demands a level of competency from the user, so throughout the next few pages we’re going to help you get up and running with Ableton’s hardware/software duo. You can download the accompanying audio and video content from vault.futuremusic.co.uk.

Ableton PushPart 1: Push Essentials

INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK

Producer’s Guide To | Ableton Push

58

The Push user experience begins with the Browser: hit the Browse button, then use the top encoders, buttons and screen to peruse and load one of Live’s instruments, effects or preset Racks – although third-party plug-ins must all be wrapped and mapped ahead of time into Live’s Rack format if you want to fully browse and control them with

Drum Rack is loaded, the 64 pads are divided into three sections, so you can simultaneously play the pads live, step-sequence notes, and set the current clip’s length and loop length. If the current track isn’t a Drum Rack (ie a regular MIDI instrument), Note mode calls up Push’s unique MIDI ‘keyboard’, whereby the pads trigger MIDI notes in a user-defined key and scale. Melodies and chords can also be step-sequenced by pressing Note again.

Once you’ve laid down a few clips, you’ll want to re-order and arrange them. Press the Session button, and the 8x8 grid now changes to display the available clips and scenes in the Session View (triggered by tapping the appropriate pads). The bottom-right arrows move the selection square around the Session View, while holding Shift accesses Session Overview mode – useful for navigating large sessions.

Finally, after assembling a collection of clips and scenes that you’re happy with, it’s a good idea to print your live performance (non-destructively, of course) into Live’s linear Arrangement View. To do this, head back to Live 9 and hit the Arrangement Record button before using Push to ‘perform’ your track.

the hardware. Once loaded, the encoders map to the currently-selected device’s parameters and can be tweaked accordingly. Playback, record, undo, delete and most other menu functions are executed using the various menu buttons on either side of Push.

After you’ve called up an instrument, enter Note mode. If a

Push In Use

> Enter Note mode and the 8x8 grid becomes a melodic instrument on which you can play in MIDI notes and chords. In the default In

Key mode, blue pads represent the root note in a given key, ascending in octaves from low to high, while white pads are notes in the current scale.

> Hit the Scale button to choose a key and scale. When In Key mode is active, Push’s pads filter out any notes that aren’t in the

current key and scale. Switch to Chromatic mode to show all notes of the current key, with notes in the scale appearing brighter.

> Pressing the Note button again will call up the melodic step sequencer. Use the upper row of pads to set clip and loop length, then

tap sequencer steps to enter notes at a division set by the right column of Scene/Grid buttons. Light up steps vertically to create chords.

Composing Melodies And Chords With PushPush is designed to make composing a breeze, even if your knowledge of music theory is limited. Here’s how to get going…Press the Note button once you’ve loaded any instrument that isn’t a Drum Rack, and the 64 pads turn either white or blue: white pads are notes in the current scale, with the blue notes representing the root note at various octaves. When in In Key mode, notes outside of the current scale don’t appear, so you can happily tap away on the pads to create musically-’correct’ riffs and chords with no prior knowledge of music theory.

By default, playing the pads sequentially from left to right will ascend to the next note in the scale, while the next vertical pad up will play a 4th higher in the scale. This configuration, along with the current key and scale, can be changed via the Scale menu.

1 Punching a Drum Rack pad selects that pad for

editing, but it also triggers the sound. If you’re recording, hold Select and hit a pad to select sounds silently.

2 Several buttons (eg Accent, Note and Session)

feature a ‘hold’ modifier. Press the Repeat button to toggle the effect on, or hold it down to punch it in and out on the fly.

3 When in Drum Rack mode, Live 9.2 users can

hit Note to switch to 64-pad view – perfect for, say, auditioning the multiple sections of a sliced loop.

4 Fully integrate your favourite third-party

plug-ins, effect chains and presets into the Push workflow by saving them into Live 9’s Library as Racks.

5 Use Push’s Note Repeat function with Note mode

to drop in choppy note stutters and rhythmic variations as you play.

QUICK TIPS

59

Ableton Push | Producer’s Guide To

> Let’s compose a beat using Push. Begin in a new project: set the global tempo to 122bpm and global swing to 20% using the

top-right two encoders, then hit Browse and navigate to the Drum Racks folder to load a TR-808 kit (hit the Browse button again to exit the browser). In Drum Rack mode, the yellow 4x4 grid mirrors a Drum Rack’s 16-pad layout; tapping a pad will play the corresponding drum hit, and also select that sound for step-sequencing.

> When Push’s MPC-style Note Repeat feature is active (either toggled or punched in via the Repeat button), pressing and

holding a Drum Rack pad will repeat that note at a division determined by the Scene/Grid buttons. Try switching the repeat speed live to create trap-style hi-hat rolls, and vary your finger pressure on the responsive pads to change the level of the repeats. We record in notes to capture a cool 16th-note closed hi-hat pattern.

> Select the kit’s kick pad (hold Select while tapping a pad to select that sound without triggering it), then tap the upper

8x4 pads to enter kick notes on the sequencer. Step length is set via the right column of Scene/Grid buttons, while clip and loop length is set via the bottom-right 4x4 grid, with each pad representing a bar: double-tap a pad to loop that bar, or hold the first pad and tap another to loop the selected area.

> When in Device mode (activated via the top-right button), you can tweak currently-selected Drum Rack parameters

and effects with the top encoders. We add a clap to every 2nd and 4th beat before pitching it up to +3 semitones. After ensuring the clap is selected using the top two Selection Control buttons, hit Add Effect, then load a Reverb device; use the encoders to tweak the reverb, and deactivate a device/s with the lower State Control buttons.

> Let’s record some live pad-playing. Punch the Record button then tap a yellow pad (in our case, the rimshot) to overdub notes in

the clip; hit Record again to turn off recording. Our timing is off, so we tap and hold the rimshot pad while punching Quantize to lock the part to the 20% global swing setting. A sequencer note’s brightness indicates its velocity level: tap and hold a blue note, then adjust timing, note length and velocity settings via the top encoders.

> Once the red Automation button is toggled, punch Record in and out while sweeping an encoder to print these movements within

the clip. Try using this technique to add motion and variation to repetitive patterns: for example, we’ve automated changes in the closed hi-hat’s decay time, plus the clap’s pitch and reverb decay time. Finally, hit Double to copy the contents of the two-bar clip, creating a four-bar clip within which we can alter our pattern further.

Drum Sequencing With PushLearn how to sequence beats using Push with our step-by-step guide…

Next Issue: Roland JD-XAGet to grips with Roland’s new analogue/digital hybrid. Available September 24th. Look out for Push part 2 in FM298.

Last time, we worked on applying audio effect devices to our Live project. That was the fi nal step in the process of creating and compiling our content prior to organising it into some sort of structure for a more ‘traditional’ production

routine. Right up to the point of getting everything into a workable timeline, and setting everything in stone, Live gives us options, we can always rethink structure, try new ideas, and introduce new instruments and effects.

And that’s where we’re up to. We have a small number of clips, a few audio effects, and now we need to knock them into shape. As I said, Live gives us options; if you really want to – or if for some technical reason, you have to – you can use Live in a totally linear fashion. You can spend all your Live time working in the Arrangement View, laboriously dragging clips around on screen, and perhaps working with your eyes more than your ears. Used in this way, Live behaves more like other DAWs, such as Cubase and Logic. However, it lacks the refi nements and focused user interfaces of those applications. I’d go so far as saying if you don’t aim to use Live’s Session View, it’s not really worth using Live at all – it’s all about the Session View! So, for this tutorial, we’re looking at how we can use Live’s Session View and global recording functions to totally short circuit that old-school way of

working, creating our arrangements in a way that’s more like recording a live take – Live is an instrument, after all!

So we’re launching scenes and individual clips to build our structure. You don’t have to do it this way – you don’t have to use scenes at all. You can just hit record and start triggering those clips; a technique which works better with Push and Launchpad-type devices, although they do scene launching as well. The ideal is to create a hybrid method where you’re using scenes for the ‘big picture’ changes, and clips for other, less global, activity.

When you’re using scenes to switch song sections, you can create more organic transitions by employing the Clip Stop buttons. If you have a long clip that you want to continue playing across two or more scenes, click in the empty slot below the long clip, and use Cmd>E to remove the clip stop button. Now, when you trigger the following scenes, the clip in the fi rst scene continues playing. This sounds good because it’s no longer just the sound of eight clips going on or off simultaneously, there’s a bit more ‘bleed’ between parts when you want it. Use Cmd>E to restore these buttons, too. You can also help expand that organic vibe by playing

Build a musical structure in real-time and capture it to the Arrangement View



on the DVD

Martin Delaney explains how to use scenes to organise clips and then capture them into Live’s Arrangement View, ready for editing…

FOCUS ON… HARDWARE LAUNCHLive is very spontaneous to use, that’s why we’re working with the Session View here, to jam and capture everything we do. You can work wonders using just your computer keyboard to control Live, with a combination of keyboard shortcuts and the Key Map Mode, but for advanced (and fun) clip launching, you’ll be better off using a hardware MIDI controller. For the tasks in this issue’s tutorial, I’d recommend something like Push, Launchpad Pro, APC40, or TouchAble on iOS. All of these let you trigger clips and scenes, and control effects, and they all show correct clip colours too.


that organic vibe by playing


42 | October 2015 MAGAZINE

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Build a musical structure in real-time and capture it to the Arrangement View

MT Step-by-Step Clips and scenes

01 Let’s begin as usual by loading the up-to-date example Ableton Live set from this month’s DVD. I’ve included all the steps we went

through in the last tutorial. The set is called ‘TUGTAL8’.

02 You already know about clips; now we’re using scenes as well. A scene is a horizontal row of clips, across any number of tracks.

We trigger scenes with the Launch button in the Master Track.

03 Scenes are awesome because they give us an easy way to create dynamic musical structures in Live’s Session View,

without having to make the more permanent commitment of working in a timeline.

05 We can create scenes by dragging clips up and down. Copy and paste them with Cmd>C and Cmd>V, and duplicate with Cmd>D,

where they’ll automatically be placed in the next row down.

04 As far as launching and navigation are concerned, scenes are quite like clips. We can launch them in any order, using those

Master Track buttons, or MIDI messages, or assignments from our computer keyboard.

06 Should you need more empty scenes, use Cmd>I. However, this way of building scenes is not very spontaneous – there’s a better

way. Click the Stop Clips button in the Master Track. Launch your beat.

around with the various clip launch modes, which we talked about in part 1 (see MTF Ableton LIve 2015).

Scenes can be triggered with the triangular launch buttons in the Master Track, or mapped to MIDI control, or the computer keyboard. They don’t have overall launch or quantisation characteristics; that’s still set at clip level.

Scenes can re-ordered by dragging them up and down

in the Master track, and you can also delete or copy them from there. You can use the Context Menu to rename and colour-code your scenes. Renaming is interesting – as well as helping you label your song sections, it gives you a way to make more dynamics changes. You can use scene names to tell Live to change project tempo and time signature throughout your set. This is good for small tempo


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changes, and equally awesome for mad speedups and slowdowns. It doesn’t matter if you use ‘bpm’ or ‘BPM’ or if you insert a space after the digits. The ability to embed tempo changes within scenes is one of the greatest features in Live and is a great asset for live shows.

We want to move our Session View clips into the Arrangement View, so we’ll have a linear timeline to enable

the last stages of song arrangement and mixing. We use the Session View and Global Record to do this, so we can create a song structure in a spontaneous way, that also includes audio effect and mixer changes, which will be recorded as automation that we can edit afterwards.

Recording begins in different ways according to your settings in Live’s Preferences. If count-in is enabled, you’ll

MT Step-by-Step Clips and scenes… cont’d

07 Now type Shift>Cmd>I – the Capture and Insert Scene command. Your beat’s copied to a new scene, without interrupting playback!

The new scene is placed on whatever row was highlighted at the time.

08 Drag the scenes up and down after creating them, or choose where you want the new one before capturing. Play the Beat and

Bass clips; Shift>Cmd>I for a new scene containing both clips.

09 Get it? Keep going until you have made six scenes in total. Choose any combinations of clips that sound good to you. After that, use

the Context Menu to rename and colour-code your scenes.

11 Now we have a basic structure that we can explore by launching scenes, in any order. Along the way we’re still free to launch

individual clips, and change settings on instruments, effects, and the mixer.

10 Rename a scene with a BPM value, like ‘121 bpm’, and Live’s tempo changes to that BPM when the scene’s launched. Time

signatures work too, or both together – i.e. name a clip ‘5/4 121 bpm’.

12 We’ll start recording by clicking the Arrangement Record button at the top of the screen. When we do, everything we do inside Live

will be recorded – scene and clip launching, effects control, mixer moves, everything.



MT151 p42-46 TUT live8.indd 44 01/09/2015 15:19

hear a count-in of your chosen length before the transport begins rolling. If not, it’ll just go straight into action, unless you right-click on the record button, in which case it waits until you launch a clip or scene before recording starts. You can also enter record at any time, when Live is already running. It’s a good habit to get into double-clicking the ‘stop’ button before recording, which sets the counter to

1.1.1 and avoids you getting any bars of silence at the beginning of your take.

Now that we have our arrangement mapped out, next time we’ll go on to look at our editing options. In the meantime, I suggest you keep playing around with Scenes, explore Live’s automation recording, and experiment with your hardware controller. MT

MT Step-by-Step Clips and scenes… cont’d

13 Make sure the Automation Arm button is yellow, to ensure control moves are correctly captured as clip and track automation. Push

users have a dedicated button for this on the hardware.

14 You can stop clips by launching others in the same track with the Stop buttons, or by putting them into Toggle Mode if you’re using

hardware, so they go on and off when tapped a second time.

15 Shift>Click on the Arrangement Record button; it’ll go into actual record as soon as you launch your first clip or scene. Make sure

you use your controller to be creative with device settings.

17 You can also use your Tab key to switch between Views, again, while still recording. You can watch everything drawing into the

timeline, including automation. There are no rules about how long to play – that’s up to you.

16 Feel free to experiment while recording. You can even drop in new devices during recording, and Live won’t flinch. Use the Overview

(Alt>Cmd>O) for a heads-up of what your tracks are doing.

18 Stop Live, and save your set immediately. In the Arrangement View, click the orange Back To Arrangement button, and use the

transport controls to review your jam. Not perfect? Don’t worry as next time we’re editing!



MT151 p42-46 TUT live8.indd 46 01/09/2015 15:19

6 WAYS TO GET INSPIREDInspiration is essential to musicians, but it can be an elusive and

fi ckle beast. Rob Boffard brings you his six tips to make sure your creative well doesn’t run dry…

Writers often talk about their muses. Stephen King’s muse, according to him, is an old guy who sits around all day, smoking cigars and doling out nuggets of genius for King to make into stories

(judging by King’s track record, this must happen quite a lot). While it’s not often put as explicitly as that, musicians have muses as well. We might not have a personified imaginary friend, but we do have places from where we get inspiration… except when it refuses to come. Inspiration is a very fickle thing, and it’s easy to find yourself without any at a crucial moment. Here are six ways to get that inspiration back.

01 Listen to something elseSeriously, anything. At all. As long as it’s not the genre you actually create music in. If you spend your time creating drum ’n’ bass, then turn off your regular playlist and bump some hip-hop instead. Or rock. Or classical. Doesn’t matter – as long as it’s something different to what you normally bump. The science behind this is that your brain needs to switch off to make the right connections. Harvard scientist Dr Shelley Carson calls this ‘divergent thinking’, and it’s about the

MT Feature 6 Ways To…

mind defocusing from the current project and being allowed to just drift, letting it make the connections it needs to. And on that note…

02 Capture itYou don’t get to control when inspiration strikes. It can happen in the shower, at the shops, as you’re falling asleep; and if you forget the details, you’ll have lost it forever. So you need – absolutely need – something to capture it on. Since the inspiration is musical, that means something that can record sound. With smartphones and their assorted apps, there have never been more ways to jot down an idea. There are dozens available, most of sufficient quality to put down a quick idea, even if it’s a hummed melody or beatboxed beat. We like Apple’s Garageband (free on iOS), Propellerhead Figure (also free) and FL Studio (paid, on Android). They aren’t as fully-featured as most DAWs, but they’re fantastic for putting down bare-bones ideas.

03 Get outFollowing on from that: sometimes, you need a change of scenery. It sounds so obvious – and that’s the problem, because it’s a trick that can often be

01


MT Feature 6 ways to…Get Inspired

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6 WAYS TO GET INSPIRED

overlooked. Do whatever you have to do: go for a walk, go for a run, go watch a movie, go play an XBox, go kick around a football. As long as it takes you out of the studio for a bit. It gives you distance from the material, lets your mind wander a little and gives those overworked neurons a break. If you’re really clever, you’ll find a way to make your brain perform different creative tasks. Video games are perfect – the benefits of playing them have been well documented, and as much as it might not look it, taking down a tricky boss or beating a particular area is a creative act. Yes, we’re giving you permission to go gaming. It’s work. Totally.

04 Show upInspiration doesn’t always appear from nowhere like magic. Sometimes, it can come simply because your brain is primed to give it to you. If you can train your

brain to be in a regular creative space, then you’ll find that inspiration comes that much more easily. A simple way to do this is simply to work on music production at the same time each day – difficult if you have a day job/significant other/children, but still very possible. And by doing this, you’ll very quickly find that solving difficult problems or getting that much-needed inspiration becomes easy. Your brain actually has a process known as neuroplasticity, referring to the ability to form new connections between neurons – and if you make a habit of taking the time and space to form those connections, you’ll be sorted.

05 There are no bad ideasWe’ve all been there. You start a session bursting with creative energy, and within an hour you have something that sounds like a cat being put through a combine harvester. You hate both it and yourself, and you close without saving, wanting to expunge the thing from your brain. Next time that happens, hold up. Save it. Put it somewhere – hell, put it in a file called Terrible Ideas. When you’re stuck for inspiration, months or years down the track, dig into that folder. You’ll still probably go “God, what was I thinking?” but you’ll have the benefit of distance, and you’ll be able to see what made you make those production decisions in the first place.

06 CollaborateYou know what makes inspiration happen? Other people. Even if you’re a total introverted loner, getting together with someone for a pint or on-line can spark ideas – especially if that someone is a fellow producer-friend. Better yet: get together in-studio, and work on a track together. This comes back to the Terrible Ideas folder – forget how it sounds, just enjoy the back-and-forth. You’d be surprised at the great ideas that can come out of sessions like this, and it works even better if there are more than two of you. Another mind can take you in directions you’d never have gone in by yourself. MT

Do whatever you have to do: go for a walk, watch a movie, play an XBox, kick around a football…

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6 ways to… Get Inspired Feature MT

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Last time, we concluded with a recorded jam – a spontaneously-created structure, laid out along the timeline in Live’s Arrangement View. The purpose of this was to show how Live’s Session View relieves you of the pressure of making

commitments and working out your songs intellectually. Instead you can start record, start playing and improvising, and just see where it takes you.

After you tap the Tab key to view your recorded tracks, you’ll see they’re greyed out. This is because Live prioritises the Session View clips. To restore Arrangement playback, click the orange Back To Arrangement button above the top right of track 1, to enable all tracks (this button disappears when not needed, which is confusing/annoying until you get used to it). You’ll also notice separate Back To Arrangement buttons for every track, so you can specify individual tracks you want to drop back in to from Session View. This provides a very powerful and dynamic way to work with the Views; useful if you’re running a complex live show that might need both planned and spontaneous elements. Understanding the relationship between the Views is an essential step to mastering Live. You’re seeing the same tracks in both Views, laid out vertically or horizontally; if you delete a track from either View, it’s gone from the entire set! But if you delete a clip from, say, track 1 in Session View, it doesn’t affect any clips in the same track in the Arrangement view.

Our aim now is to edit the structure that we created through jamming; everything is up for grabs, everything can be tweaked. You can keep working with your set from last time, or you can use the up-to-date version on the

disc, which includes all of the steps from the last tutorial. (There’s a good chance we’ve started to diverge as we’ve made different recordings, so these walkthrough steps might not make sense unless you use our example set.)

When you’re working with a lot of tracks, you will need to manage your screen space. Folding and unfolding them helps, and you can zoom in and out, but you can also expand individual tracks by mousing over the bottom of the track and dragging downwards. If you hold Alt at the same time you can expand all your tracks simultaneously.

Editing automation is easy in Live – just click to add or remove breakpoints. Mouse near an envelope so it turns blue, then you can drag it around, or copy and paste it, delete it, whatever you want to do. Hold down Alt while you do this, and you can draw curves as well as straight lines.

Editing your composition in the Arrangement View



on the DVD

Previously we captured our Live jam into the Arrangement View timeline. Now Martin Delaney shows you to how polish that and create a fi nished structure…


FOCUS ON… MONITORSYou can get quite a long way into the composition and production process without high quality monitoring - I’m sure many of us begin sketching out tunes on mobile devices or laptops, where we’re either listening on tiny built-in speakers, or on cheap headphones. As you progress towards fi nishing your track, though, you need to hear what’s going on more clearly, and across a wide frequency range. You will need some high-quality monitoring headphones, and some monitor speakers as well. You can’t be applying critical processes like equalisation and compression when you can’t really hear what effect they’re having.


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MT152.TUT live9.indd 42 30/09/2015 11:28

Editing your composition in the Arrangement View

MT Step-by-Step Editing in Arrangement View

01 I’m using my recording; naturally this will differ from yours. You can either apply similar steps to your own project, or load the

completed part 8 set from our disc.

02 Tap the Space bar or the Play button, to hear the recorded arrangement. If any of the tracks are greyed out, use the Back To

Arrangement button to restore them – read more in the main text.

03 Also be aware that if you now pop back to the Session View and launch any clips, they will affect the arrangement playback, so

avoid that unless it’s really what you really want to do!

05 You can also zoom using the + or - keys. Manage vertical space by folding tracks – click the small triangle at the end of the track.

Hold Option/Alt and every track unfold/folds simultaneously.

04 Zoom in and around the timeline by clicking and dragging above it, where you’ll see a magnifying glass icon, or in the black

rectangle in the overview. Double-click there to view the arrangement.

06 If you move any on-screen controls during recording, these are captured as automation, depicted by red lines that go from left to

right in the Arrangement View tracks – these are called envelopes.

Caution! When you’re deleting an envelope, make sure you have it selected properly, otherwise you’ll delete the entire region that it applies to, clips and all. If you want to view multiple lanes of automation in the same track, use the little + and - buttons that appear when you unfold the track.

In the walkthrough, we edit the beat in the first MIDI clip, to remove the noisy sample hits from the beginning of the song. If you remember, we created this beat by using

Live’s Slice To New MIDI Track command. Each note represents a slice of the original sampled beat, so when we drag the notes in the clip around, we’re choosing to play different slices at that point in time. By choose Slice 5 each time, we’re substituting the slice that doesn’t contain the noisy sample.

We shorten some of the sections to the typical bar counts that you see in music – everything happens in fours! I’m just getting you to do that to practice editing, I’m


MAGAZINE November 2015 | 43

MT152.TUT live9.indd 43 30/09/2015 11:28

not suggesting you always have to use such regular bar counts. Of course, you’re free to do it how you like.

Live is quite intelligent with its handling of automation, when it comes to copy and paste, or to moving clips around. When we copy and paste the bass clips in the tutorial, you’ll see the filter envelopes for those clips are copied as well. Also, if you copy and paste a clip between

Session and Arrangement Views, the envelopes are preserved, converted to clip envelopes – or vice versa – to track automation.

We briefly touch on the topics of locators – these are very useful for identifying and labelling sections in longer songs. The arrows at the top right of the screen let you skip through your locators, while the Set button can be used to

MT Step-by-Step Editing in Arrangement View… cont’d

07 If you can see a red dot on a control, that means there’s automation present. Use the pop-up boxes in the Mixer at the

right of the screen to view the envelope.

08 Let’s tweak the example set as discussed. Unfold track 1 by clicking the triangle left of the name. Choose ‘mixer’ from the top

chooser. It has a red dot by it, indicating there’s automation present.

09 Sometimes you need to dig to find the envelope. Click the lower chooser, and you’ll see Track Volume listed, with a red dot. Select

that, and you’re looking at the track volume automation, in red.

11 Let’s automate the bass track’s filter. Unfold the track so you see the automation for Auto Filter/Resonance. Use single-clicks to

delete each breakpoint between bars 46 and 54.

10 At the beginning, I increased the beat volume. Right-click on the Track Volume box at the end of the track, and choose Delete

Automation, to straighten out the entire volume envelope.

12 Unfold the Frequency lane and do the same there. What this does is create a unique longer filter sweep for that part of the song.

Fold the track afterwards if you want to be tidy.



MT152.TUT live9.indd 44 30/09/2015 11:28

insert them dynamically and all three of these controls are MIDI-assignable. If you’re studying song structure,sometimes it’s good to load a song you like, and use locators to map out all the parts. Then delete the song and build your own tune using the structure! It’s not stealing – you’re not taking any samples, melody, or anything, it’s just a good learning and experimentation tool.

Be warned, creating a piece of music in Live doesn’t truly end until you render and master it. Even after recording into the Arrangement View, you can drag in, or record, more audio and MIDI parts, add new tracks, or add new effect devices. As with a lot of music production you have to be clear about reaching a cut-off point otherwise you’re working on the same tune forever! MT

MT Step-by-Step Editing in Arrangement View… cont’d

13 Double-click the first MIDI drum clip, revealing the notes. Drag the notes for slices 1 and 9 vertically to align with Slice 5. Now

they’ll all play the same sound, without the noisy sample.

14 The second ‘section’, starting at bar 37, is 5 bars long; let’s remove one, just to keep everything even; click and drag to highlight bar

45, then use Shift>Cmd>Delete to delete the time.

15 Likewise, cut out bars 9, and 33-35. After that, click and drag to highlight bar 16, and tap the Delete key. Drag the ends of the

percussion and bass tracks to fill the gap.

17 Unfold the bass track. Click and drag from the start of bar 55 for 2 beats. Copy with Cmd>C. Paste with Cmd>V at bar 53 and 54.

Check out the automation!

16 Cut the last long section to 24 bars. Make a 2-bar break at bar 65. Drag the percussion and bass across, but also drag the beat back

two beats so it resumes earlier.

18 Sometimes it helps to label song sections using locators. Right-Click above the timeline, choose Insert Locator, then

rename it something helpful. Repeat as desired throughout the song. Use the Arrows to navigate the locators.



MT152.TUT live9.indd 46 30/09/2015 11:29

With its Warp capabilities and swift workflow, Ableton Live is a smart choice for creating edits

30

Feature | Ultimate Edits

Back in the days of magnetic tape, there was one way to edit: you got a scalpel, sliced that tape up good, then stuck it back together. All very hands-on, but it must have taken an age compared to the practically instantaneous results delivered in the digital realm. What’s more, in a DAW you can change the tempo of a track without affecting its pitch, and vice versa – tremendously useful for creating mashups. This is known as ‘time-stretching’, or ‘warping’.

Most DAWs will automatically warp the audio for you, making editing even speedier and presenting us with all kinds of possibilities for mashups. In fact, most DAWs use the same family of time-stretching and pitchshifting algorithms, zplane’s élastique Pro, including Ableton Live 9 and PreSonus Studio One 3. These DAWs implement zplane’s algorithms in different ways, and offer disparate

through and make sight timing adjustments. Another great thing about Live is that it has the ability to load practically any audio file: WAV, AIFF, MP3, M4A, even FLAC and OGG. This makes it a simple process to drag music straight from your media player onto an audio track without having to convert it first.

modes. The general consensus is that Ableton Live offers the best choice of algorithms and workflow for this kind of work. Its warping features are well established, and the program’s transient detection identifies a track’s tempo quickly and easily. It’s usually pretty accurate, though with older material you’ll often need to go

As Ableton Live is the de facto DAW for this kind of work, we’ve used it in the following tutorials (if you don’t own it you can follow along with the demo version from www.ableton.com), but it’s not flawless. Digital time-stretching is analogous to the musique concrète technique of ‘micro-editing’, where short,

millisecond slices of tape were edited together to create new textures. DAWs time-stretch by slicing the audio into many tiny pieces, and adding or removing these tiny slices as

needed to make the tempo slower or faster. This affects the audio signal in an audible manner, and the artefacts created will depend on the particular time-stretching algorithm used.

All of Live’s warping modes are compromised in one way or another: Beats mode makes sustained notes sound jagged and unnatural, and the Complex, Tone and Texture modes aren’t great at preserving transients. This leaves us with Re-Pitch, which preserves transient effectively and works well with musical material. The downside is that Re-Pitch doesn’t correct the pitch of the audio, so the faster you speed it up the higher the pitch will get, and vice versa.

If this bothers you, a workaround is to keep your re-edits at the same tempo as the original version. If you’re putting an acapella over the top of an instrumental, the optimal solution is usually to work to the instrumental’s original tempo, ensuring it doesn’t need to be time- stretched. Because vocals’ transients aren’t as crucial as the instrumental, you can get away with using Complex Pro to warp it. This gives us the best of both worlds, and Complex Pro mode even has a Formant parameter which allows one to set the level of formant compensation and prevent so-called ‘chipmunkification’ when pitchshifting vocals up.

Things get trickier if we want a mashup of two tracks that are at different tempos and a compromise has to be made somewhere; though if the tracks sound acceptable together when Re-Pitch mode is used, you can get away without time-stretching or pitchshifting anything.

> Load up Ableton Live and press Tab to bring up the Arrangement view. You’ll find a track to work on in the Tutorial Files folder:

Cubs – Vortex.wav. Drag the file onto the start of an audio track, and Live will automatically warp the track.

> Double-click the audio clip, and zoom in on the end of the clip by dragging down on the timeline. You’ll see that by the first beat of

the track’s final bar (193) Live’s tempo detection has slipped out of sync. Double-click the transient above the waveform to create a warp marker.

> Drag the warp marker to the right – it’ll snap onto the start of the bar. The Segment bpm value in the clip view says the track is

130bpm, so set Live’s Tempo to 130. Activate the metronome and play the track back – you’ll hear that it’s now sync’d up.

Basic Warping In Ableton LiveTaking a few moments to warp a track makes it easy to edit it up in a flash. Here’s how to do it in the DJs’ favourite DAW, Ableton LiveIf you’re unfamiliar with Ableton Live’s approach to warping tracks to fit the project tempo, it might look intimidatingly complex, but in reality it’s a very straightforward system that’s extremely quick to use once you’ve got the hang of it. In the following tutorial we’ll show you how to warp up a track in three simple steps. This is useful because it means, once a track is slaved to Live’s project tempo, we can adjust the tempo and pitch of the track independently, and can quickly select specific bars and edit them as we see fit.

In the next tutorial, we’ll start slicing away at our freshly warped track, creating an extended intro and a shortened breakdown to make the tune easier to mix. There’s even a House banger in the Tutorial Files folder to cut your teeth on, so chop chop!

Most DAWs will warp audio for you,

making editing even speedier

TOOLS OF THETRADE

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Ultimate Edits | Feature

> If you haven’t completed the previous tutorial already, load up WIP edit.als to get up to speed. Vortex’s intro isn’t very long – a

mere 16 bars before a 32 bar breakdown. Unfortunately, the intro features a pad with a gradually opening filter on it.

> This edit won’t sound too incongruous in the mix, so let’s roll with it. While we’re at it, let’s cut that big breakdown in half.

Drag over bars 33 to 49 and press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Backspace to ‘delete time’. Now the intro goes straight into the second half of the breakdown.

> We need to find a section we can loop without it sounding too unnatural. Drag over bars 1 to 9 on the clip, and press Ctrl/

Cmd+L to loop the section. Play the project back. This loop doesn’t segue very smoothly: the filter movement on the pad is too obvious.

> This sounds okay, but we miss the big booming crash at the start of the breakdown. We can smooth the transition

using Live’s fades. Select Fades in the Track Title Bar, and drag the Fade In Handle at the top right-hand corner of the intro clip, and drag it to the right so that it sits at about 33.3.4.

> Let’s try a shorter section instead. Move the loop start to bar 5 instead. The four bar section doesn’t sound too shabby! Drag over

the clip from bar 5 to bar 9 and press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+L to duplicate it four times, giving us a 32 bar intro.

> This is a long enough fade for us to hear the crash, but short enough so that we don’t hear any of the spoken word vocal that plays

shortly after it. We’ve completed our simple re-edit; now all we need to do is highlight the entire track and select File > Export Audio/Video to bounce it out.

Re-Edit A Warped Track In Ableton LiveOnce you’ve warped your track you can re-arrange and tweak it to your heart’s content. Here’s how to get smooth-sounding edits…

Specialist applications can help extract a vocal, but these tend to be expensive and time consuming

34

Feature | Ultimate Edits

A common question asked by newcomers to the world of music production is “how do I extract a track’s vocal?”. It is indeed possible to isolate a piece of music’s elements, but you will experience various degrees of success depending on the nature of the source material and the techniques used.

The trouble with vocals is that they occupy such a wide frequency range that EQing isn’t usually a viable option. Specialised audio isolation software does exist, for instance Sony’s SpectraLayers Pro 3, but these are aimed at high-end users such as movie studios, and are priced accordingly. What’s more, they’re time-consuming to use, so they’re not a practical solution for most of us.

A relatively cheap and reliable way to obtain an isolated vocal is to get your hands on an acapella

version (ie, without instrumental accompaniment). iTunes and discogs.com are great places to hunt for acapella and instrumental versions of your favourite tracks, but the rub comes when these aren’t available. In this case you’re down to hunting on sites of dubious legality such as acapellas4u.co.uk for a rare

rip, or even a DIY acapella. DIY acapellas are something of a last resort, and their quality can range from acceptable to unusable. If you’ve got access to both the vocal and instrumental versions of a track you can use some simple audio processing trickery to make your own DIY acapella – see below for more.

> Drag your vocal and instrumental versions onto separate audio tracks in Live. Ensure that both clips’ Warp modes are deactivated

by clicking on the clips and inspecting the Clip View panel. When they’re both unwarped, ensure their start points are roughly aligned.

> Turn snap to grid off (press Ctrl/Cmd+4), then zoom in to the start of the waveforms by dragging down on the Beat Time Ruler.

Keep aligning and zooming until you’ve zoomed in as far as you can. Before you play the tracks back, turn them both down to -6dB.

> If you’ve correctly aligned the track, you should hear the track sound normal, albeit with a vocal that’s been reduced in volume

by a half. Put a Utility from the Audio Effects folder on either track and activate its Phz-L and Phz-R buttons to invert the signal’s polarity.

DIY Acapellas In Ableton LiveIf you have both a vocal and instrumental version of a track, it’s possible to create your own DIY acapella with a little phase cancellation…The simplest way to create a DIY acapella requires you have both the full vocal and instrumental versions in your possession. The theory is that the only difference between these versions will be the vocal. Therefore, inverting the polarity of one of the tracks’ waveforms will cause everything apart from the vocal to disappear thanks to the magic of destructive interference. Unfortunately, there will often be subtle differences between the vocal and instrumental versions, and they may have received different treatment at the mixing, mastering and encoding stages, further complicating matters. The proof is in the pudding, so let’s give it a whirl. Here we create a DIY acapella with vocal and instrumental versions of Cassie’s 2006 R ‘n’ B banger Me & U, but you can use any song you like and the process is exactly the same.

DO… try out unusual combinations of material – as long as the music fits together, the more sophisticated audience loves surprising juxtapositions of styles. Re-editing familiar tracks into unusual new arrangements can help re-invigorate them too.

DON’T… go overboard on the processing. If you’re using already mastered tracks they almost certainly don’t require further gain reduction. EQ can be useful to help two tracks sit together in a mashup, but won’t usually be necessary otherwise unless you’re working with a particularly poor or vintage recording.

DO… make your intros as DJ friendly as possible. That don’t have to be ridiculously long and beat-centric, but a few clues to a track’s tempo during its intro can make all the difference in a stressful mixing situation.

DON’T… layer two different vocals on top of each other if you can avoid it. It almost always sounds horrendous, makes vocals less intelligible and your mix feel messy. If you’re struggling to make an arrangement work, try looping the previous part rather than proceeding to the vocal section.

DOS & DON’TS

GOTTA KEEP ‘EM SEPARATED

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Ultimate Edits | Feature

> Load the Edit.als project up in Live, and put Voxengo’s excellent spectral analyser SPAN (a free download from www.voxengo.com)

on the master buss. Play the project back and hover the mouse pointer over where the kick peaks in SPAN – you’ll see this happens at 67Hz, or C2.

> Drag the sample onto Simpler to load it up. It’s already tuned correctly so we don’t need to worry about transposing it. Turn up

Simpler’s Volume to -4dB, and play the project back. You’ll notice that, while the new kick drum is providing us with more character in the mids, the extra headroom it’s eating up is causing our project to clip the master.

> We can double check the key of the track by loading up a synth and tapping along with the track, and this confirms that C is indeed

the key we’re working with. Let’s find a compatible kick drum sound to supplement the track with. Add a MIDI track, and put an instance of Simpler on it.

> We can remedy this by ducking the original track when the kick plays. To do this put a Compressor effect on the audio track, and

set its sidechain input to the Simpler track. Bring down the Threshold to -9dB, set the Ratio to 4.00:1 and set the Release to 20ms.

> Sequence a four to the floor kick pattern like so, and loop the clip so that it plays for the entire track. Now we just need to find a

suitable kick drum. You’ll find an appropriate candidate in the form of Solid kick.wav in the tutorial files folder.

> Our mix is still clipping, so put a limiter such as iZotope Ozone’s Maximiser on the master. We can now get away with pushing

the mix a bit. Add Live’s Saturator to the Simpler track, and gradually turn up the Drive level until the kick is banging enough for your taste. 4dB gives us a good balance of solidity and presence.

Enhancing A Kick Drum In Ableton LiveIf only the biggest and baddest beats will do for your re-edits, you’ll need to do a little surgical drum replacement. Luckily that’s easier than it sounds

FM | PRODUCER’S GUIDE

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Back in issue 296’s Producer’s Guide, we took you on a three page whistle-stop tour of Push, Ableton’s feature-laden MIDI controller instrument designed to control multiple aspects of their Live 9 DAW. After covering the basics – such as step-sequencing in Drum Rack Mode, Note Mode and general workflow – it was clear that we’d barely scratched the surface of Push’s capabilities. So, with that in mind, we’re now going to build upon our previous foundations and delve deeper into the Live-Push experience to explore further features and concepts. Many of the following tips, tricks and techniques come directly from one of the masterminds behind the controller’s development, Ableton Push Product Owner Jesse Terry, who has kindly offered his expert insight to help take your Push skills to the next level.

As you’d expect from an advanced guide like this, we’re going to assume you’re already reasonably acquainted with Push and Live 9; be sure to check out our Part 1 guide from issue 296 if you need to get up to speed. Plus, as usual, audio examples and video can be downloaded from vault.futuremusic.co.uk.

Ableton PushPart 2: Essential Techniques & Workflow Tips

INCLUDES VIDEO AND AUDIO VAULT.FUTUREMUSIC.CO.UK


76

FM: Firstly, what’s your role in the development of Push?JT: “I’m the Product Owner for Push, which means I define the vision for the product, and try to translate this vision along with a really talented team of designers and developers.”

How should users organise sounds, sample libraries and Racks for use with Push? Are there considerations when building Racks and devices?“If you want to have a set of device parameters that are specific to your workflow, make your own Instrument and Effect Racks in Live, then save these presets. Take note of where you want the most important parameters to be – obviously the 1st and 8th encoders are the easiest to grab quickly in a performance scenario.

“When you save presets to Live’s library, move them to the right folders – for instance, if you make a reverb

can always get to the subsequent parameters via the Edit view.

“There’s a great trick for drum hits not many people know about: if you keep a folder called Drum Hits in the User Library and you have folders in there that correspond to the folder names Live uses, eg Kick, Hihat, or Snare, put your drums in those folders – they will show up mixed into Live’s samples when you browse a drum pad from Push. Plus you can share these drums with all your Live sets, without needing to copy them into each new Live Set.

“Finally, the most important thing to do is have a good strategy for your User files, called Places in Live. This is where you can organise your samples or loop libraries. As a Hip-Hop guy, I have a folder for samples that

contain drum loops, a folder for samples that contain drum hits, and a folder for general mixed samples I might want to work with – but how you organise your sounds depends upon what you want to do and what style of music you make.”

preset, put it into the Space folder so you can always find your reverb presets together. I always put a [j] before presets I make, so they rise to the top and I can quickly find them.

“For VSTs and AUs, Live has a ‘configure’ button, which allows you to rearrange the parameters of your effects and instruments. This is a great way to make sure your top eight favourite parameters show up when you load a particular plug-in, but you

Push PreparationAn efficient Push workflow requires a certain amount of pre-preparation, so we asked Ableton’s Jesse Terry for a hefty helping of expert advice

> With Fixed Length deactivated, the length of a recorded clip will extend until you deactivate recording. When Fixed Length is

active, Live will record for a predetermined length and then loop. Hold the Fixed Length button to set a value of between 1 beat and 32 bars.

> With Fixed Length deactivated, hit Record and begin jamming away. As expected, the length of this new clip will continue to

extend as you play. As soon as you’re happy with a section, punch the Fixed Length button to loop the final take.

> Fixed Length is great for generating multiple clips and variations too. Activate Fixed Length, set a length, then record in an idea.

Press New, come up with a variety of loops, then switch to Session Mode to move between or launch the different ideas you’ve made.

Fixed Length RecordingOn-the-fly recording is an essential part of the Push workflow. Let’s see how the Fixed Length function can be used to capture the perfect takeAbleton’s Jesse Terry offers a handy tip for using the Fixed Length function when recording ideas into a new clip. “I generally keep this off, but there is a cool trick when making a long recording. With Fixed Length off, press record, and start playing and working on a riff – I generally practise with Record on, and once I feel I’ve got it right, I press the Fixed Length button, which ends the recording and loops the last few measures of the long recording (depending on the Fixed Length setting). It’s a good way to practise until you get it right, and then loop the part when you’ve finally nailed the perfect take.”

1 When step-sequencing drums or melodic

material, you can use several fingers to enter or delete several notes at once, or hold down multiple notes before adjusting note or automation values simultaneously.

2 nativeKontrol’s free ClyphX is a MIDI Remote

Script that allows you to save Push’s current key and scale settings within a clip. Download the script at http://bit.ly/ClyphX

3 Create quick loop variations when working

with the step sequencer: use the Double button to copy your current clip’s contents over, make a few variations, then tap on the loop length pads to jump the loop markers throughout the clip on the fly.

4 When in Session Mode, to see a scene’s name

appear on the display, hold Select and tap that scene’s Scene/Grid button.

QUICK TIPS

Have a good strategy for your User files, called

Places in Live

77


04 >Busy sessions can be confusing to navigate, especially live; in this case, use Session Overview mode, accessed by holding Shift. Each individual clip slot now represents an 8x8 grid: tap a pad to zoom in on that section.

Navigating clips and scenes with Session ModeLive’s Session View is great for sketching out ideas. Here’s how to navigate it with Session Mode

03 >To stop a clip, tap an empty slot on that track; alternatively, hit the Stop button to activate Stop Mode, then press a track’s red State Control button. Note that Stop Mode won’t be accessible if you’re in Device or Browse mode.

01 >When in Session Mode, the 8x8 ‘frame’ in Live represents the clips displayed on Push’s pads. Use the bottom-right arrows to move this frame around by one scene/track; hold Shift and press (or use the Octave Up/Down buttons) to move by eight.

02 >Currently-playing clips pulse green, recording clips white, and others their respective colours. Tap a clip to launch it and launch a horizontal scene using the right column of Scene/Grid buttons. Hold Delete and tap a clip to delete.

05 >When in Note Mode, press and release the Session button to ‘permanently’ switch to Session Mode. Hold the button to temporarily switch over to Session Mode, then release the button to return to Note Mode. The reverse applies when jumping from Session to Note.

Jesse Terry is particularly enthusiastic about the topic of controlling outboard via Push, and he tells us how to go about it: “I have a largish collection of old synthesizers and effects, and I play them all with Push, as I’m not such a great keyboard player. First, set up External Instrument presets to work with your external synths: set the External Instrument device to send MIDI out to the same channel as your synth, and set the input to bring the resulting audio back in from your audio interface, so you can treat your external gear kind of like a plug-in and utilise Push’s scales and step-sequencing.

“Once you’ve saved these as presets, simply browse and load them easily from Push. You can also use Max for Live to create editors for your synths (or find premade ones on maxforlive.com). I have most of my synths sitting around the edge of my studio, and I play and edit them directly from Push – so my focus is in one place, even though I’m using a huge variety of synths and effects.”

Push control isn’t confined to Live – it’s great used with hardware too

How to…Pimp Up Push’s Functionality

> While Push offers plenty of control over Live straight out of the box, several third-party

developers have sought to expand upon the default functionality via MIDI scripting. PXT-Live by nativeKontrol, a $19.50 MIDI Remote Script for both Windows and OS X, adds a wealth of extra features such as Arrangement View navigation and editing, the ability to edit one track while navigating through others, APC40-style device control, and heaps more. PXT-Live’s additional features are only accessed when in User mode, so you can easily switch back to Push’s ‘regular’ mode at the touch of a button.

> If two hands aren’t enough when composing or performing with Push, hook up a foot

pedal. Two connections are available: one for sustain and one for recording. Ableton recommend using a footswitch with normal polarity, rather than those which are inverted. Push Product Manager Jesse Terry: “I play guitar and bass, so Push’s footswitch is a really great way to record hands- free. The first press starts recording, the second press loops the recording, and double-tapping the pedal makes a new slot to record into. I also use the footswitch when I am recording samples from my vinyl collection, so I can have it near my record player.”

How to…Use A Footswitch With Push

> Push’s main 64 pads respond well to variations in velocity and aftertouch, facilitating

expressive, nuanced performances. If you’re designing your own Instrument or Drum Racks, hook up velocity or aftertouch as mod sources to maximise the amount of timbral variation you’ll be able to inject into your live playing. Hold down Push’s User button to access User Settings, where you can customise the unit’s Pad Threshold (how hard a pad must be hit to trigger a note), Velocity Curve (the gradient between strike force and velocity), and Aftertouch Threshold (how hard you must hold a pad before aftertouch ‘kicks in’).

How to…Incorporate Velocity And Aftertouch Effectively

> Once you’re comfortable with basic composing and navigation in Push, try

combining several techniques in quick succession: for example, start off by step-sequencing the bare bones of a riff, then quickly switch back to Note Mode and punch Record to enter additional notes in the gaps between. When performing in Note Mode, there are plenty of different techniques you can combine: vary pad velocity and aftertouch, punch in quick Note Repeat variations, use the touch-strip to add subtle pitch bends and wobbles, tweak parameters using the top encoders, and so on.

How to…Become A Push Ninja

Controlling Hardware


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Next Issue: Sequential Prophet-6The revived brand has produced arguably the synth of the year. Take a tour of its capabilities. Available November 19th.

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06 >Finally, hit the Double button to copy the bar’s contents over to the next bar, add variations, then tap the bars to jump between them. You can also stack notes vertically to enter chords, as we’re doing here with an added piano part.

04 >Step resolution, set to 1/16th notes by default, is changed via the right column of Scene/Grid buttons. To lengthen the first note, we tap and hold that note before changing its Length to three steps using the top menu/encoder.

Melodic step-sequencing and step automationPush’s step-sequencing capabilities are highly useful and inspiring when composing melodies

05 >It’s also possible to add parameter automation for individual steps. We’ll tap and hold a note of our riff, hit the Automation button to reveal our device’s automatable parameters, then change various macro values. A square block in a parameter’s name shows it’s being automated.

02 >Enter Note mode on the bass track, then hit the Note button again. The 8x8 grid turns into a step-sequencer: in our default In Key mode, the blue line represents our root note of F, while the white pads are notes in the current scale.

03 >The top row of pads set loop length. Double-tap a pad to loop that bar, or hold a pad and tap another to loop those bars. We’ll loop the first bar, then tap pads on the sequencer to enter notes. Use the touch-strip to navigate up or down through the octaves.

Watch the video here: http://bit.ly/fmpg298

01 >Let’s explore melodic step-sequencing by composing a basic riff. In this session, we’ve put together a drum beat before calling up an electric-style FM bass patch from Operator. We’ll set the project’s key and scale to F Minor via the Scales menu.

You’re making music on a computer, right? Well,video is just as easy to do on the same machine.If you’re a video virgin, don’t worry – if you canunderstand how to use audio clips in Live, youcan handle this. It’s a good skill to have – you

might be asked to soundtrack a movie, you might want tomake your own music video, or you might want anhour-long visual set for your own live show.

Live can open any QuickTime-compatible movies (beadvised that you can’t import video into Ableton Lite orIntro, though), so you have many solutions as far ascontent goes. There are websites that provide copyright-free movies, and while they have restrictions oncommercial use, if you squirt them on a wall during a liveset, that may not be such a problem. There are alsobrowser plug-ins and applications that let you downloadYouTube movies. A more rewarding way to add visuals is tomake your own. In my sets I’ve used video from cheapdigital cameras, DSLRs, iPhones, HD movie cameras, andGoPros; if you mix and match you get a better texture, it’slike sampling audio from different sources. For most uses,video from a phone is easily good enough. I like to usebright colours, and close-ups of small objects as they getreally trippy when they’re blown up big on a large screen.

When it comes to digitally-created images, and keepingit within Live (read about VJ software elsewhere on thesepages), Max For Live users have options in terms ofvisually-oriented devices, such as Ganz Graf Mod X,Vizzable, and V-Module. This tutorial is all about usingactual movies, but there’s no reason why you couldn’tcombine techniques throughout your set. And you knowwhat? Whatever images you use, somebody will usuallytell you that they suit your music perfectly!

Live works great as a brutally simple movie editor.

You can stack multiple tracks, or place different clips on a single track – any section not covered by a movie clip will make a black screen. You can split movie clips using Cmd>E (you can’t join or reverse them, though), loop them, and choose which portion of the clip to play.

Live’s greatest video tool, though, is the ability to warp video, which it does by warping the audio – the attached movie simply follows along. Add warp markers and drag them around to slow down or speed up your movie clip. Even if there’s no visible audio waveform, you can still insert warp markers above the ‘fl at line’ where the audio should be.

As well as being a fantastic visual effect, I’ve used this a couple of times when syncing audio to video as I’ve sneakily expanded or contracted the video to fi t the music. For those more ‘pro’ timing moments, Right-click in the time ruler below the Arrangement View timeline and choose to view different frame rates in FPS, instead of the default minutes and seconds.

You can also load jpegs, dragging their starts or ends to change their duration within the timeline. Try to make sure your jpegs have the same proportions as your movies, so you don’t get black bars, or unwanted glimpses of movie, appearing behind your top-most image. Jpegs would also let you add text titles to your Live video projects; you never know, there’s probably a Max For Live device out

GetsomevideoinyourLiveset


on the DVD

If you’re creative musically, you’re probably creative visually. Martin Delaney reveals how to add movies, either to make a music video, or pimp out a live show.

FOCUS ON… VIDEO APPSFor more sophisticated visuals,you’re probably better off running avideo application alongside Live.I like Arkaos Grand VJ – it’s beenaround for years but it’s still going strong.It’s MIDI-controllable,soLive can control it;all you need is a separate MIDI track,sendingnotes to launch movie clips,and sending clip envelopes to changeeffect parameters,so Arkaos will always load the right image for thatpart of the set,even when you’re improvising.For timeline use,Arkaos also has a record mode so you can capture everything andrender it to pair with your mix afterwards.



42 | December 2015 MAGAZINE

MT Step-by-Step Video in live

01 Start by opening your Live set from last time or, if you prefer, usethe up-to-date version supplied with this issue of MusicTech. I’ll

be referring to that version throughout the tutorial.02 We’ve also supplied a folder which contains the movie clips

needed for the tutorial – ‘Live movies’.You can navigate to thatand drag it into your Live Browser, to save it as a shortcut.

03 Drag ‘sky.m4v’ to the area under the current Arrangement tracks,at the start of the song. It’ll behave just like when you load audio

clips, creating an audio track to host the clip.

05 Double-click in the middle of the video window to enter or exitfull-screen mode. Start Live running, and the video will start too,

it’s pretty simple. But the movie clip is very short…

04 If you look closely, you’ll see the clip has little movie frames alongthe edges to differentiate it. Live should have opened the Video

Window automatically. If not, use Alt>Cmd>V to show it.

06 Remember I said it’s like an audio clip? Go to the end of the movie clip, and drag the end back so the clip is exactly 8 bars long – we

can ‘sync’ video cuts to our beats.

movie titles for Live. If there isn’t, somebody probably needs to make one.

We’ll discuss final processing and rendering of audio files another time. For movies, if you’re working on your own material, you’ll probably only use one or two settings,

but the other controls are valuable if you’re working with clients who need files in specific formats. If I just want a ‘take away’ render to watch on my phone or computer, I use the iPhone preset. When I’m delivering video to publishers, I’m following their stated requirements for


MAGAZINE December 2015 | 43

image size, frame rate, and so on. If you’re impatient,remember that video takes longer to render than audio,and the more you’re compressing it, the longer it takes.

Everything we’ve discussed has related to theArrangement View; there’s a simple reason for that. Drag amovie onto Session View, and you’ll be advised that Live

can’t handle video in Session View. But it’s not all bad – it’ll give you a chance to ditch the video content but retain the audio which is a fast way to extract audio samples from movies! If you really need video coming out of the Session View, it’ll have to be via Max For Live devices like the ones I mentioned earlier.

MT Step-by-Step Video in live… cont’d

07 Now go into the Sample box and turn on Warp and Loop. Grab theend of the movie clip and drag it out so it loops to fit the entire

length of the song.

08 This all makes more sense if you have a second display or video projector connected. Drag the video window to the display/

projector window, then double click it again for full screen video.

09 Drag in ‘flower.m4v’, once again creating a new track. Shorten it to4 bars. Set it to warp and loop. Drag it to 8 bars length. Place it at

bar 9 on the timeline.

11 Load ‘synth.m4v’, but put it in the previous track at bar 32 andagain at bar 53. Don’t warp or loop this yet.Yes you can put many

movie clips in the same track.

10 Now play through that section. You’ll see that the video in the lower track takes priority. That’s how it always works with video

tracks in Live. Hmm, this is getting to be like video editing!

12 Double click it to see the audio waveform – it’s some speech. Try dropping Live’s Ping Pong Delay on that track, set the dry/wet to

whatever sounds good to you. We can process movie audio!



Although Session View is a no-no, you can have atimeline full of movie clips in Arrangement View, and flipback to Session View to launch clips in real-time likealways. Your video output isn’t affected, as long as you’renot launching clips in the same tracks that contain videoclips. Sometimes it’s safer to remove the clip stop buttons

in the video tracks as they appear in Session View, so you can’t accidentally stop or launch anything in them.

This is an easy route into movie editing if you’re curious about that, and most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. You already have Ableton Live and a computer, and probably a phone with a camera. So what’s stopping you? MT

MT Step-by-Step Video in live… cont’d

13 Warp and loop the second instance of the clip. Add a Warp Markerto the end of the clip. Drag that left until it reaches the end of bar

1. Shorten the loop brace to one bar.

14 Now play that section. Not only have you made the audio play faster, you’ve made the video loop and play faster with it – isn’t

that cool? This is an awesome Live feature! So much fun…

15 With these techniques, you can use Live as a basic movie editor,and the video warping is a nice extra trick.You can even warp

‘silent’ movies by placing warp markers on the clip’s ‘flatline’ waveform.

17 To render the movie with audio, open the Export Audio/Video, andmake sure video is switched on.There are many available export

formats;what options you see will depend on your computer and OS.

16 Be aware that if you execute the Collect All And Save command, the movie clips will be collected as well as the audio, so you will

get larger than usual Live projects.

18 See more in our main text about video formats. As far as more detailed audio rendering goes, we’ll be talking about the more

final stages of finishing and exporting your completed tunes next time.



ableton live tips and tricks part 5

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