Ableton Live Tips and Tricks Part 3

Tips Tricks Tutorials

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Showing and Hiding Views

Loop Brace and Start/End Markers Macintosh

Macintosh

Toggle Full Screen Mode

Move Start Marker to Position

Toggle Session/Arrangement View

Click

Nudge Loop Left/Right

Toggle Track/Clip View

or

Move Loop By Loop Length Halve/Double Loop Length

Hide/Show Detail View

or

Shorten/Lengthen Loop Select Material in Loop

Click Loop Brace or

Hide/Show Info View Hide/Show Browser

Session View Commands

Hide/Show Overview Hide/Show In/Out

Macintosh

Hide/Show Sends

Launch Selected Clip/Slot

Hide/Show Mixer

Select Neighbouring Clip/Slot

Open the Preferences

Select all Clips/Slots

Close Window/Dialog

Copy Clips

Arrow Keys Drag

Add/Remove Stop Button

Adjusting Values

or

Insert MIDI clip Double-Click Slot

Macintosh Decrement/Increment

Insert Scene

Finer Resolution for Dragging Return to Default

Insert Captured Scene Move Nonadjacent Scenes

Type in Value

without Collapsing

Go to Next Field (Bar.beat.16th)

Drop Browser Clips as a Scene

Abort Value Entry Confirm Value Entry

Arrangement View Commands

Browsing

Split Clip at Selection

Macintosh Macintosh

Consolidate Selection into Clip

Scroll Down/Up

Create Fade/Crossfade

Close/Open Folders

Loop Selection

Set Selected Folder as Browser Root Load Selected Item from Browser

Insert Silence or Double Click

Pan Left/Right of Selection

Preview Selected File

Unfold all Tracks

Activate Browser Search Mode

Scroll Display to Follow Playback

Unfold button

Jump to Search Results

Commands for Tracks Transport

Macintosh

See also editing commands

Macintosh

Insert Audio Track

Play from Start Marker/Stop

Insert MIDI Track

Continue Play from Stop Point

Insert Return Track

Play Arrangement View Selection

Rename Selected Track

Record

While Renaming, Go to next Track

Back to Arrangement

Group Selected Tracks

Activate/Deactivate Track 1..8

Ungroup Tracks Show Grouped Tracks Hide Grouped Tracks Move Nonadjacent Tracks

+ arrow keys

Without Collapsing Arm/Solo Multiple Tracks Add Device from Browser

+ Click Double-Click

By holding down an additional modifier key, some of the

Editing

commands across can also be applied to: Macintosh

Macintosh

Cut

Clips and Slots Across all Tracks

Copy

Time Across all Tracks

Paste

The Selected Part of the Envelope

Duplicate Delete Undo

can be used to move from one track or scene to another while renaming.

Redo Rename Select All Original manual @ http://www.ableton.com/de/pages/downloads/manuals

Commands for Breakpoint Envelopes

Grid Snapping and Drawing Macintosh

Macintosh

Finer Resolution for Dragging

Toggle Draw Mode

Enable Dragging Over Breakpoints

Narrow Grid Widen Grid

Key/MIDI Map Mode and the Computer MIDI Keyboard Macintosh

Triplet Grid Snap to Grid

Toggle MIDI Map Mode

Fixed/Zoom-Adaptive Grid

Toggle Key Map Mode

Bypass Snapping While Dragging

Computer MIDI Keyboard

Zooming, Display and Selections

Global Quantization Macintosh

Macintosh

Zoom In

Sixteenth-Note Quantization

Zoom Out

Eighth-Note Quantization

Drag/Click to Append to a Selection Click to Add Adjacent

Quarter-Note Quantization

Clips/Tracks/Scenes to Multi-Selection

Quantization Off

1-Bar Quantization

Click to Add Nonadjacent Clips/Tracks/Scenes to a Multi-Selection Follow (Auto-Scroll) Pan Left/Right of Selection

Clip View Sample Display

Working with Sets and the Program

The shortcuts for zooming and loop/region settings also

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work in the Sample Display.

Macintosh

New Live Set Macintosh

Open Live Set

Quantize

Close Live Set

Quantize Settings...

Save Live Set

Move Selected Warp Marker

Save Live Set As...

Select Warp Marker

Quit Live

Scroll Display to Follow Playback

Hide Live

Move Clip Region with Start Marker

Export Audio/Video Export MIDI file

Clip View MIDI Editor

Working with Plug-Ins and Devices

The shortcuts for zooming, snapping/drawing and loop/region settings also work in the MIDI Editor.

Macintosh Show/Hide Plug-In Windows Open Second/Multiple Windows with

Macintosh

Plug-In Edit Button

Quantize

Open Mac Keystroke Plug-In Window

Quantize Settings...

with Plug-In Edit Button

Scroll Editor Vertically

Group/Ungroup Devices

Scroll Editor Horizontally Copy Note Change Velocity From Note Editor

Drag

Activate/Deactivate All Devices in Group Click to Append Devices to a Selected

Drag

Device

Add/Delete Note in Edit Mode

Double-Click

Move Insert Mark to Beginning

home

Move Insert Mark to End

end

Load Selected Device From Browser

Device Activator

or Double-Click

Scroll Display to Follow Playback Move Clip Region with Start Marker

Original manual @ http://www.ableton.com/de/pages/downloads/manuals

Ableton Live | Technique

One Way Or Another

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Too Much USB

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Notes Plus

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The Effect Treatment

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VIDEO ON THE DVD Watch the tutorial movie on the DVD

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Technique | Ableton Live

apply Live’s MIDI effects to the track; once again, it’s just like working with any software instrument. Check your synth’s manual to find out which messages it will receive. Most manuals are online now, so if I’m wondering about a particular piece of hardware, I’ll grab the manual and read the MIDI info. And after shopping, I keep the PDF manuals on my computer and iPad, so they’re always to hand during sessions. Another benefit of PDF manuals is that they’re searchable! The audio comes back into the same track that the MIDI is leaving, thanks to some neat routing from Ableton. This is a great way to organise your hardware for performance, but if you want to record the incoming audio, you’ll have to set up another audio track, and record into that one, either directly from your audio input 8 , or by using the In/Out View to route audio out from your MIDI track into the ‘recording’ track. You can also Freeze and Flatten the MIDI track, to permanently ‘print’ those synth parts to audio files. This works in the usual way, but it takes longer because Live has to play through the song in real time to capture the audio 9 . You can add any of Live’s audio effect devices, or third-party plug-ins, to the track, to expand on the synth’s original array of effects. An interesting development with synths that connect through USB is that they usually have some kind of supporting plug-in or standalone editor that gives you access to their deeper features and preset management, directly from the computer. Vyzex have produced a few of these editors for different hardware synths, including the Dave Smith Instruments Evolver, and M-Audio’s Venom synth. The Venom editor is particularly useful, because the control panel on the actual synth is so bare!

Versatile boxes Control issues get interesting in other ways, too. Once your synth is hooked up, you can play it from another connected keyboard, or even the Live Virtual MIDI Keyboard – the computer keyboard, in other words. You could use the knobs and faders on a MIDI hardware controller to reach out to your synth. A lot of modern synths also send MIDI out from their controls, so you can use it as a hardware control surface for Live; very versatile. A modern synth can be a soundcard, a controller, even an audio processor, if it lets you run external audio signals through its onboard effects… some of those synths have fantastic filters! Where this will go in the future, nobody can say, but it looks like things are pretty

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MIDI-to-CV Converters There are older, analogue, synths out there, that pre-date MIDI (the MIDI spec was published in 1983). Before that, CV/ Gate signals were used for communication between hardware. Companies like Kenton still produce MIDI-to-CV converters, meaning you can include analogue gear in your digital rig.

healthy for hardware synths, even with all the great software examples. The iPad is getting called on more as a control surface for them, and perhaps soon we’ll see wireless connectivity become common. What I really want every synth to come with is a plug-in editor that runs as an AU or VST inside Live – that would be a real boost to the workflow.

Sounds On Demand

There is deeper integration available. An obvious one to start with is getting Live to tell the synth to load specific sounds on demand as you launch the clip that needs the sound. This is quite easy to do, although you’ll probably need the synth’s manual handy! Make a MIDI clip if you don’t have one already, and go to the Notes box. There you’ll see choosers where you can enter Program, Sub Bank, or Bank changes, which are sent when the clip is launched. Refer to your synth manual to find out which messages you need to send. Soft Synths

The effect treatment

If you don’t own any hardware synths, none of this concerns you much, unless you work with somebody who does use them. Software synths are so advanced now that hardware models aren’t the essentials they used to be. A soft synth and a controller might do the job!

One last thing… Most of what we’re talking about goes for hardware effects units as well. Look under Live’s Audio Effects category in the Browser, and you’ll see the External Audio Effect Device 10. This device routes audio to and from your hardware, but you could also send MIDI from a separate track to load patches or change parameters on the hardware. You may or may not be a synth-head, and truthfully I’m not, but everybody should have a couple of nice pieces to expand on their sounds and create a different mood – and Live will make this as seamless as possible.

Ableton Live | Technique

Hook Up Your Favourite Synth To Live

Get your synthesizer working with Live, receiving MIDI, and sending audio back in

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Connect your synth to your computer; how you do it depends on what connections your synth has. If it’s a relatively recent one, it probably has a USB connection, which makes things easy, handling audio and MIDI with one wire. For older hardware, with MIDI ports, you’ll need either a MIDI-USB cable, or MIDI cables into your audio interface, as well as connecting the synth’s stereo outputs to your soundcard.

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Once you’ve connected everything, launch Live and open Preferences. Under the Audio tab, make sure you’ve enabled the soundcard inputs that you’ve connected your synth’s outputs to. Under the MIDI Sync tab, select your MIDI adaptor or interface ports as MIDI Output destinations. Turn on Track and Remote, and Sync, if you want to sync your synth to Live’s project tempo.

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Create a new MIDI track in your Live set. Go to the Browser, and from the Instruments category, drag the External Instrument Device onto the track. The MIDI To and Audio From pop-ups will show the audio and MIDI connections you just made in Preferences, so choose them. You don’t need to configure the track inputs because the device does it all.

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Play a few notes on your synth, and you should hear its output coming back through the track in Live. Draw a MIDI clip in the track, with some notes, and they should trigger the synth as well, with the audio coming back in. It’s like a hardware plug-in! You can even use Live’s virtual MIDI keyboard (the computer keyboard) to play the synth.

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Now have fun applying Live’s MIDI and audio effects to the synth! This is good for playback, but to record the incoming audio, you still need to set up an audio track, just like recording from any other source. Once you get a set-up you like, save it as a preset so you can recall it quickly in future projects.

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MT Technique Audio & Instrument Racks

Ableton Live Become a Live Power User

UsingAudio & Instrument Racks New Series Part 5

Many people will recognise a Rack as they are used extensively in Live’s library content, but learning to build your own is essential for fluid workflow. Liam O’Mullane shows you how.

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bleton Live has quite a few features not found in other DAWs, and Racks is one of them. At the most basic level, Racks are containers that enable you to ‘rack’ together MIDI, instrument and audio devices. A Rack containing internal/ external instruments is called an Instrument Rack; a Rack of standalone audio processing devices is an Audio Rack. However, Racks are more than an easy way to bundle multiple elements into one easily saveable – and therefore recallable – package. Racks give you the option to run their internal signal paths in parallel or in series, which offers a

Accompanying project file included on the DVD

Racksaremorethananeasy waytobundlemultipleelements intoasaveablepackage FOCUS ON… USING EXTERNAL HARDWARE Live’s External Audio and Instrument devices enable you to create default presets for your outboard processors and sound sources respectively.A sound being triggered by MIDI or passing in and out of your computer as audio will always incur a little delay time.However, you can offset this for instruments by setting them to play something percussive on the beat,then enable Live’s metronome and change the Hardware Latency value to get both playing in time.This is set to milliseconds by default but you can click the ‘ms’ box to switch it to sample increments for a higher resolution of detail. The same technique can be applied to External Audio Effects by playing a percussive audio clip that matches up with the metronome, and the majority of external sources will need some housework

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huge range of options. In fact, the only real restriction you may encounter will be maxing-out either your CPU or RAM, but this isn’t anything that any computer user hasn’t had to factor into their workflow before. In this tutorial we’ll be using Live-only devices that are quite economical in terms of CPU requirements. It’s only when you start stacking large numbers of third-party, resource-hungry instruments and effects that you’ll perhaps need to be a bit more conscious about what you use and why. If processing power does become an issue, make use of Live’s Freeze feature to render the live processing as temporary audio. When you’re ready to commit to ideas, we encourage you to then Flatten them into newly rendered audio files. You can then perform any additional editing in these audio files while freeing up computer resources (both of these functions are accessed from the Edit menu). Racks can be used at any point throughout the production process, and typical uses include stacking layers of synths for huge, epic sounds, applying go-to parallel processing such as compression and distortion, mid-and-side processing, and building interesting musical tools for new ideas or exploring intricate audio-processing chains for sound-design tasks. As you can see, there are multiple uses for these tools and we’ll now go on to explain some of the most important aspects of Rack design. If at any point you get lost or are stuck for inspiration, we recommend that you have a look through the Live library for Audio, Instrument and MIDI Racks. From here it’s easy to explore and modify

Audio & Instrument Racks Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Audio Racks: advanced control

Create a Rack by either dragging a preset from the Live Browser or using Group from the Edit menu when an existing instrument or effect(s) is highlighted. Each internal audio channel – called Chains – will now be visible.There will be only one by default, but more Chains can be created by clicking in the empty space below and choosing Create Chain or Duplicate a Chain from the Edit menu.

There are two reasons for parallel processing, the first being to audition various approaches for processing audio.This approach lets you try out different techniques/processors and generally explore the possibilities for each element in your mix. Use Solo to move between each Chain; when you’ve decided which treatment to go for, delete the other Chains to avoid unnecessary processing.

Reason two is for parallel processing, with typical uses being for compression/saturation.This is set up by keeping the first Chain as-is and adding a second Chain to process in parallel. Chains can also be used to split a signal into its components: by frequencies using multiple Multiband Dynamics devices; by mid-and-side components using the Utility device’s Width control at 0% and 200% respectively.

Chains can also be used to create different sonic states to move between, such as a lighter verse and heavier chorus treatments. Create the two treatments, using Solo to focus on each one like before, then open the Chain Selector Editor by clicking on the box labelled Chain. Looking like a sampler’s key-range editor, this allows you to move the assignment of each Chain to a different area horizontally.

If you move the Zone Blocks for each Chain so they aren’t overlapping, the Chain Select Ruler above them (in orange) can be moved from one sound to the next. When using Zones in this way, effects with tails – like reverb or delays – will die out naturally.To blend between the two, drag the Zone Blocks across the full range, then drag the Fade Range shapes so they oppose each other to create the fade.

All Racks have Macro controls that you can assign most parameters within a Rack to. If you right/[Ctrl]-click (PC/Mac) on the Chain Selector Ruler it can be assigned to a Macro and then assigned to a MIDI controller. Multiple assignments can be made to one Macro, so explore different combinations of assignments, ranges and the directions in which they move.

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Audio & Instrument Racks Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Instrument and Drum Racks

Instrument Racks work in a similar way to Audio Racks and are useful for stacking sounds for density and depth, or setting up different sounds to move between dynamically.To create something big, take the same approach of using multiple Chains and layering contrasting sounds.The MIDI Pitch device is useful here for quickly finding the best octave or harmony for each new Chain.

Instrument Racks have more options than Audio Racks when it comes to using Zone Blocks and fades. Use Velocity to create layers with expressive control from a MIDI keyboard, or Key to create tonal changes up and down the keyboard. Here we’ve added a bass layer to the lower keys of a melody line; the fade enables it to blend in at the bottom of a descending passage.

Macros can be very useful for creating consistency in an instrument performance. For instance, if you want to use drastic effects such as a high-pass filter that removes the bulk of the body from a sound, you can offset any loss in presence by increasing the volume of a Utility device as the filter cutoff is increased.

Drum Racks have the added bonus of an internal Sends and Returns setup.This is great for achieving polished production sounds within your Rack. First enable the Show buttons for Sends and Returns (at the very left of the Rack). Drag the required effect to the area labelled Drop Audio Effects Here – a Send amount will appear on the Chain List that can be used to feed the effect.

As these effects are internal, you can sub-process all your drums as one, helping you to achieve a cohesive sound by processing both the drums and reverb with tools like compression. If you want to drive an effect that’s already set up in Live’s main Return Tracks, right/ [Ctrl]-click in an empty Chain area and select Create Return Chain.This can then be routed to the relevant Return Track.

A hybrid approach can be used to combine steps 4 and 5 by initially using Return Chains within the Drum Rack. When you’ve decided on your choices, drag-and-drop the internal Return Chains to the main Return Track area in Live.This won’t carry across the Send amounts, which you’ll have to reapply from the main Sends section of the Drum Rack’s channel in Live’s mixer.

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MT Tutorial Producing authentic drum & bass

Powered by

Technique Genre focus

Authentic and original drum & bass Part2 Following on from the creation of drum beats and bass lines in Part 1, Liam O’Mullane turns his attention to the vital elements of melody, atmosphere and arrangement techniques.

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his second instalment builds on the knowledge gained in Part 1 for creating original-sounding drum & bass tracks. But while the drums and bass are at the heart of D&B, it’s also important to consider the melodic – and perhaps not so melodic – parts you’ll need to create. Depending on the direction you want to take your work, you may need to create huge atmospheric soundscapes for a dark, techy, sci-fi movie-like track; if you’re creating a more musically driven piece, you will need decorative melody information in the

Accompanying project file included on the DVD

We’rearmingyouwiththetools you’llneedtotakecreativeideas andmakethemworkasasong form of arp synths, pads and so on. Even the most minimal forms of the genre have elements that sit in the background behind the more obvious foreground sounds, and this is where your mixes can gain a sense of depth. First we’ll look at the approach (and perseverance) you’ll need to take when it comes to sound-design. Using a multi-layered approach of processing, rendering, editing,

FOCUS ON… PERSEVERANCE & NEW SOUNDS Sound-design is an integral part of D&B and there are many approaches to creating something unique and engaging for your tracks.Although sound quality is important in all aspects of music production,sometimes the audio quality of your source as a trigger for heavily processed audio.In fact,it’ll often you’ll need to take:starting with a selection of sounds,tr applying automation and exploring what’s possible.If yo processing live and in real time you can always swap-out the source sounds to see how they are affected by the processing as you go. The example audio for this tutorial employs various stages of processing and should give you an idea of how you can approach this technique. Starting with a few randomly chosen bass guitar slide samples, the source material is processed three times to create three contrasting results. These include a combination of reverb, saturation, frequency-shifting and white-noise vocoding. Certain parameters are automated and edited to try to gain the most tonal change for each sound within the phrase. EQ is used to re-balance the sound and reduce unwanted frequencies, then all three results are rendered into a new audio file to be treated as a new source sample.This is then chopped-up and edited into something of interest. By listening to this audio you can hear how these techniques can yield surprising results that are drastically different from the source.

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reprocessing and re-editing, it’s important to remember that although this may bear no fruit to begin with, pushing forward past poor initial results is the only path to creating something genuinely interesting. Creating perfect and unique sounds through sound-design and mix-processing as well as re-sampling techniques can be slow at times, so keep an open mind as you work and be patient – it can take anything from 20 minutes to over a day of trying out ideas until you stumble on that golden nugget! When you’ve got your ideas together, start to think about your arrangement; here we’ll be exploring a few ways in which you can take your ideas and work them into a playable structure. There’s no strict form that a D&B song must take, but do keep in mind that the majority of your audience will hear your music in a DJ-mixing context, so it’s important to make it suitable for both club and radio play as well as maximising on the moments when the song might be present in a mix alongside another track. But as we stated in Part 1, we’re arming you with the tools you’ll need to take creative ideas and make them work as a song – not how to churn out yet another bandwagonchasing club-banger. So turn on that sub, shut out the daylight and do whatever else you need to do to get into a creative headspace. MT This tutorial has been endorsed by ACM, The Academy of Contemporary Music, world leaders in music industry education. ACM’s Audio Production School provides Diploma (one-year) and Degree (two-year) courses in Contemporary Music Production, Electronic Music Production, Creative Sound Design and Tour Production & Management. www acm ac uk

Producing authentic drum & bass Tutorial MT

MT Step-by-Step Decorative sounds and melodies

Depending on the vibe of your track, you can choose to fill the background with melodic pads, pitched FX, drones, atmospheres or a mash of the lot. We’ve chosen to create a sinister pad as a tension layer for the intro by playing discordant notes, layering sequenced sounds underneath the louder synthetic strings (for movement) and automating the pan position of the quieter layers for stereo interest.

For atmospheric sounds you can’t go wrong with long doses of reverb, with a mostly wet balance to achieve a diffused tone. Anything goes for the sound source. We used pitched percussion in the main section and a saw synth for the intro to create a huge, horn-like sound. We automated the reverb’s Freeze function to extend the tails and changed the room size, all of which adds detail for the listener.

For radio-friendly styles, melodies usually require straightforward synth sounds.These are readily available in many synth libraries and can be customised through layering and editing. For deeper styles, try working with less conventional sounds. We’ve layered a blend of bells, cowbells and claves and added a tom underneath for continuous punch and weight throughout.

Once you’ve created a few background sounds, render them down to audio for further editing.This is a simple way to create the much-needed variation within a track and is an economical use of the sounds you’ve already spent a lot of time perfecting.These can then easily go through further generations of manipulation without taxing your computer too much.

Stabs are useful for announcing new sections or to insert sporadically to create tonal contrast when everything else drops out. Stabs are easy to make as they require just a good dose of layering, spreading of pitch and creative panning if you want stereo width. Again, explore the most unexpected sounds in your library and use mistuned layers to give denser, moody and less-musical tones.

As your mix builds up, use a fine-tooth-comb attitude to justify each and every part to avoid unnecessary clutter. Remember to replace sounds if needed as you develop the mix to give everything the space it needs to breathe. We went through various bass sounds, kicks and snares to maintain clarity as we developed our ideas. If it helps, save a new project version before making drastic changes.

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MT Tutorial Producing authentic drum & bass

MT Step-by-Step Creating arrangement dynamics

When you want to develop an idea into a good 16 bars or more, a balance between creating an interesting sonic tapestry while being sensible about your approach needs to be struck. By this we mean not keeping hundreds of tracks running with live effects and automation throughout the project. When you have the sounds you need, render them down to audio to make your project easier to handle.

Breaks and pauses are needed not only during full breakdowns. These are great dynamic tools for momentarily throwing the flow in a groove, creating lifts before a new section, and adding durations of space to break up a busy track. Focus on short sections to figure out how many elements can be removed for a drop in energy. Mute send FX such as reverb and delay through automation to achieve digital silence.

A high-pass filter will lift the low end from single sounds, groups or the entire mix before a new section to make it seem heavier. This technique can also be applied to parts in full song sections to create more space in a mix for busier sections. For example, a lead synth might have its full frequency content allowed in a breakdown, but is high-pass-filtered on the drop to accommodate new content.

A D&B track’s arrangement is not set in stone, but the basics of intro, breakdown, drop, counter sections, 2nd breakdown, drop, alternate sections and outro is a guide if you’re unsure. If you make the intro rhythmic it will be useful to a DJ for mixing, but a more important feature is a unique sound or melody.This acts as an audible signpost for an audience to know that your song is currently being mixed-in.

There are many ways to continue an idea after the first main drop: exploring bass tones over time; melodic progression; drum sound switch-ups (switching from one tone to another); stripping back to a more sparse section or a completely different style to push the song in an unexpected direction. Explore a few options, save them as different projects and do some trial arrangements to see what works.

The outro serves the same purpose as the intro but in reverse. While it’s tempting to simply copy and reverse the parts in the intro, try to use it as another dynamic tool.This part of the track will be the last piece heard as it’s mixed over someone else’s intro, so create excitement by using a different combination of previous parts and re-editing or introducing a new element to sign-off with.

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MT Technique Clip experimentation in Session View

Ableton Live Become a Live Power User

Clip experimentation in Session View New Series Part 7

Session View has numerous uses in Live 9 , both practical and creative. Liam O’Mullane explains how you can use and abuse the properties of audio and MIDI Clips to make music in a different way...

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o far in this series we’ve looked at the various different tools for creating music in Ableton Live, most of which can be used in either Live’s Arrangement or Session Views. This instalment, however, focuses on tools that are available only when using Clips in Session View. Arrangement View is a linear overview showing tracks running vertically in rows, while time goes from left to right. Session View, on the

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

For higher levels of interactive control it’s worth investing in a dedicated controller other hand, takes a different approach, displaying tracks vertically like channels on an audio mixer. Slots are placed vertically down each track, which can be used to launch MIDI or audio Clips. You can choose to trigger an entire row of Clips at once – referred to as Scenes – or launch them individually. We’ll first look at how you can interact with one or more Clips for experimentation, then explore how to develop ideas so that Scenes can be expanded into potential new song sections. Scenes or individual Clips can be launched using the mouse, mapped keys on your computer keyboard, MIDI keys or buttons. Mapping manually

FOCUS ON… EXPERIMENTATION The majority of this tutorial focuses on modifying individual Clips to create variation. Although some of the techniques will yield a degree of randomness, they are mostly concerned with making precise changes through editing. If you want to take a different approach to achieve new results – or, indeed, you’re looking for a different way to sequence Clips – Follow Actions are worth exploring. Follow Actions are essentially a rule system that you can apply to any Clip in Session View to dictate how the playback of one Clip will lead into the playback of another. They can be applied only to Clips residing on the same track, therefore only one Clip can play at any one time. The positioning of the Clips will determine how they are grouped if they’re placed on the same track and in consecutive Slots – ie, if there are 20 clips running down a track, an empty Slot between the first ten and the second ten will result in them being grouped into two lots of ten, and the Follow actions will only ever communicate with the other Clips in the local group of ten.

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this way is set up using either Key Map or MIDI Map modes respectively. When enabled from the Options menu, you can then assign Scene Launch or Clip Launch buttons to a fixed mapping. This is a good approach for quickly trying out new ideas or for triggering specific assignments within a prepared performance, though you’ll usually delete the assignments when they are no longer needed. When either Map Mode is enabled, four new assignable buttons appear below the Scene Launch area on the right-hand side of Live’s display. When mapped, these allow you to select Scenes using either assigned up and down controls or a rotary encoder to scroll up and down. You can then use a special Launch button that simply triggers the scene currently highlighted. This approach is open to anyone with a standard computer keyboard or a MIDI controller, but for a higher level of interactive control it’s worth investing in a dedicated controller. Ableton’s own Push is the Rolls-Royce of options as it controls Session View and plenty more, making composition, sound design and mixing all feasible with minimal computer interaction. Other candidates include the Novation Launchpad or an AKAI APC-type product, which offer different levels of control but still let you navigate Session View for Clip/Scene launching. But irrespective of how you want to interact with Clips and Scenes, the techniques here will enhance your ability to jam in Session View. MT The first parameter to understand is the Follow Action Time, which, like loop length, determines the length of a Clip’s playback until the Follow Action is implemented. This measures in bars, beats and 16ths and will then move to the Follow Action chosen from the A or B dropdown menu below. Underneath the two Follow Action menus is a Probability setting that by default is 1 to 0 – meaning that for every use of A’s Follow Action, there will be zero uses of Follow Action B; 1 and 1 will make them alternate between each other. The next setting to explore is the Follow Action itself. There are too many options to go into here, but there are two simple ways to achieve unique results. The first is to set all but the last Clip to play the next Clip using the Next Action, then set the last Clip to play the first. This will create a playback loop from top to bottom of all Clips in the group. Experiment with the duration of the Follow Action Time for changes to rhythm and time signature. The second approach involves the Any Follow Action, which sets up your Clips for random interaction. We like to use this on sound layers that sit further in the background of a mix for ever-changing layers of detail.

Clip experimentation in Session View Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Experimenting with Clips

One way to interact with Clips is by changing their Launch mode behaviour. Unsync the Clip’s Launch quantization from Live’s Global quantization – this gives you more expressive settings, such as 16ths, without affecting Live’s global setting. Open the Launch box in Clip View by clicking on the small L symbol, then select from the Quantization menu.

There are four Launch modes to choose from. Trigger is the default mode, simply launching a Clip. Gate gives momentary launching while you hold the Clip’s Launch button; Toggle flips between playback being on/off with each launch. Repeat creates a stutter effect during playback while the Launch button is pressed, which then reverts to normal playback (like Trigger) when released.

Experiment with Launch modes to determine which one works best. If more than one sounds good, duplicate the Clip and give them custom modes to move between. The next way to manipulate multiple instances of a Clip is to explore Start Marker positions. These are the small markers above the waveform/MIDI grid in Clip View and they too can be customised for multiple instances of the same Clip.

You can immediately rework ideas when three or four duplicated Clips are set up with different Start Marker positions. The next level of manipulation comes from experimenting with loops on certain Clips. With the Loop Switch enabled, resize the Loop Brace above the waveform by dragging its edges or using the numerical values below the Loop Switch button.

Start Markers take on a new life here as they can be placed before a Loop Brace’s position or at any point within it, so explore letting normal playback run into a short loop later on in the Clip. In this way, short plays of this Clip will sound normal; longer runs into the loop create a sound effect.

If you want to keep the relative Clip playback position as you move from one Clip to the next, Legato mode can be used in much the same way that a synthesizer will use legato to move from one note to the most recent one hit, no matter how many are being held. For instance, launching a new Clip on the second beat of the bar will resume playback in the next Clip from the same position.

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Clip experimentation in Session View Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Developing Scenes into full ideas

You can extend the duration of MIDI or audio Clips for developing ideas, but they need to be approached in different ways. A MIDI part can be duplicated using the Dupl. Loop button, then you can manually edit your new MIDI data to create more interest. Because audio Clips are single audio events that are played back, a different approach needs to be taken to create variation within Session View.

To vary audio over a longer duration than the audio itself you need to create automation loops for variation that can act independently. By opening the Envelope Box (press the small E symbol in the bottom left of Clip View), you can choose a parameter to edit from the Device and Controller dropdown menus. Each envelope can be given its own loop length by changing the Linked button to Unlinked.

Regardless of an envelope’s duration, rounded loop lengths will allow you to create predictable changes to your Clips. This means that the envelope’s loop will stay in sync with the musical phrase of the Clip’s audio. Start by creating a gated sequence – select Clip from the first menu, then Volume Modulation. Use Draw mode (Options menu) to edit the envelope and turn the sound on and off rhythmically.

A modulation envelope uses the current minimum/maximum range available from a parameter’s current position. Because our Clip volume is at 0dB, our envelope can control infinity up to full volume, but if the Clip volume is lower, we’d be limited to its maximum setting. For other effects automation, Absolute makes more sense as each edited envelope will control the parameter.

Warp Markers are a useful tool for adjusting the timing within an audio loop. These are created after double-clicking above the waveform display in the Clip View window and can then be dragged around. Automation that is linked to the original audio’s duration will follow Warp Marker manipulation. Explore this for interesting ways to edit audio and effects processing at the same time.

For less-sync’ed changes to your ideas over time, think of envelopes as looping LFO. Create an envelope with a less musically related duration so that it overlaps in different ways every time the audio loops. For instance, automate the movement of a notch filter for five beats to create a sense of constant movement in a sound as it plays.

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MT Technique Collaboration in Ableton Live

Ableton Live Become a Live Power User

Collaboration in Ableton Live Power Series Part 9

So much can be done with one computer these days that you can forget that other humans are around to collaborate with. Liam O’Mullane shares various ways to get social with Live…

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ne of the strengths and weaknesses of today’s all in-the-box, computer-based studios is that you can do it all by yourself. Composing, producing, DJing, remixing and even jamming with yourself are all possible, but in this workshop, we’re looking at working with others and how Live can be set-up to do just that. Even when collaborating in the studio, it’s easy to overlook the various ways you can both work at the same time, rather than taking it in turns to hop on and off the computer. In its most basic form, you can assign two different MIDI controllers to control an instrument each. This gets better when there’s more than

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

It gets better when two of you can jam out ideas with one of you taking an engineering role two of you as you can collaboratively jam out ideas together while one person takes the engineering role and tweaks the sounds. You are then also geared up to immediately record any ideas as they arise. The next level of collaboration is to work with someone else running Live. This can work great in both the studio and live environments, and it’s a situation when you’ll usually opt for sync’ing two or more bits or gear together so they lock together by tempo and, when required, playback positions. Our Sync Between Two Machines walkthrough shows you how to sync two computers running Live. This can be done via 5-pin MIDI cables if you

FOCUS ON… MANUAL SYNC As automatic sync can be less than ideal in certain situations, there may be times when you’d just prefer to manually beat match with another Live user – just like a DJ would beat-match one record to mix at the same tempo with another. If you’re jamming with other musicians who are playing without a metronome, you may also need to manually sync to their current tempo to take advantage of Live’s tempo sync’d effects, or to capture a recorded loop on the fly. The main way manual beat-matching of Live to another electronic source differs to working with more freeform tempos is that you’ll have to micro manage your tempo for the latter, whereas electronic source work will be more of a ‘set and forget’ situation. When matching to another Live user, the simplest option is to run at the same BPM and after launching the second computer to sync with the first, use the forwards and backwards nudge buttons to perfectly align both computers. These are located to the right of Live’s tempo readout and can be mapped to MIDI for easy control in a live situation.

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have the interfaces available, or you can use an ethernet or Wi-Fi based network. We’ll show you the basics of making a network function as a MIDI interface for OSX as well, but you’ll need additional software to perform this task on Windows and this is beyond the scope of this workshop. Help can be found however at the following link http://www.tobiaserichsen.de/software/rtpmidi/rtpmidi-tutorial.html. Just download the rtpMIDI software which pretty much mirrors the OSX interface and follow the instructions. The final option is to use a manually-controlled form of tempo sync which will really test your rhythm skills. Some people will use these manual syncing techniques to beat match machines, but in most cases it’s reserved for working with human performers whose timing can be much more freeform. On the topic of sync again, the quality of automatic tempo matching can vary depending on the gear being used and the way they are hooked up. Although Wi-Fi is the simplest method, it’s also unpredictable and has a less than ideal performance – we’d only use this when caught short of other options in rehearsals or the studio. Working with 5-pin MIDI has worked fine for us so far and the best results come from running both computers from an external MIDI clock. But this is an additional investment, so we’d only recommend going down this route if you are not satisfied with the results using the techniques discussed. If you’re new to the world of sync, try out Wi-Fi first as it comes at no cost – you can then explore the finer syncs in life! MT

When you want to try and sync with someone else’s tempo which isn’t known, the first option to try is the Tap Temp (TAP) button to roughly set Live to the correct BPM. This alone will be enough to use tempo-based effects if you’re using Live as a creative mixing device. If you want to run Live to launch clips in time with the other performers then you’ll need to either then take over in terms of tempo by introducing something with a beat for them to follow, or you could capture part of their performance to loop via recording a clip in Session View or using Live’s Looper device.

Collaboration in Ableton Live Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Sync between two machines

Regardless of how you’re connecting up your MIDI data from one computer to another, the basic set-up of routing MIDI clock from the master computer to the slave is the same for running between two instances of Live. Open Preferences on the master computer and select the MIDI Sync tab. The data will control the slave so enable Sync from the Output of the MIDI port connected to the slave.

The slave is set up in the opposite way so, under its MIDI Sync preferences, Enable Sync for the MIDI input to receive the MIDI clock data from the master. The Clock Sync Delay allows you to offset the timing of the slave so it can be aligned with the master. Playing the metronomes on both makes it easy to judge when you’ve got the timing right, using a loop like a breakbeat to make it easier to hear.

Two different types of MIDI clock can be chosen for the output: Song will give out the tempo along with a current position in the Arrangement View. Pattern gives out tempo and beats which means changing your playback position on the master won’t affect the slave. Use Song mode so you can move around an arrangement on both computers. Use locators from the Create menu for easier launching.

The master computer should have an on-the-beat light flash in the Sync Out indicator. Then after enabling the EXT button on the slave, its Sync In indicator should flash when pressing play on the master. Now your two computers should sync. It takes a few seconds to truly lock together, so sync playback first with no clips playing, then launch your first clips in unison for a clean sounding start.

MIDI information will appear in Live when using a 5-pin cable, but you’ll need to set up MIDI when using Wi-Fi or ethernet. Go to Applications/Utilities Audio MIDI Set Up. Select Show MIDI Window. Double-click the Network box for the MIDI Network Set-up window and click the plus icon under My Sessions. Enable this session in the top right, then repeat the process on the slave computer.

When the slave is ready, you can connect to it from the Directory window of the master. You’ll know when they are connected as the computer will appear in the Participants window to the right. The latency can be adjusted from here as well but it’s slightly limited as you have to enter numeric values rather than having the option to click and drag for easier control like in Live.

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Collaboration in Ableton Live Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Live jamming and processing

If you’re in sync with other people either through a manual or automated sync set-up, you will be able to take advantage of Live’s tempo sync’d Session View and Devices. The first level above simply cueing clips in Session View is to capture someone’s else’s audio as one or more clips to play with. To do this, first create a new Audio Track and name it to be relevant to the source it will record.

Set up this audio channel to record the correct input from the In/ Out settings which you can reveal from the View menu. If you don’t want to hear this input signal until you’ve recorded it into a clip, set Monitor to off. But if you’re using Live as a mixer you’ll need to set the Monitor to Auto so the live input is always heard until a clip is recorded and then played which then overrides that input.

When recording external sounds, capture a sequence and then modify it. The other option is to record the sound across a few clip slots so you can then immediately re-work it to creatively trigger them. To trigger the slots quickly you’ll need to set the Global Quantization setting to a higher resolution like 1/4 and then hit record on each clip slot one after the other running downwards.

Another way to re-work a freshly captured piece of audio is to use time manipulation device effects like Beat Repeat. In the Audio Effects library folder, under Performance and DJ, the Knob 1 Super Looper is a great device for controlling loop length with a single dial. The default Live library doesn’t have a great range of performance tools like this so it’s worth searching online for devices other people have made.

If you need to rehearse before everyone hears it, you can use Live’s Cue function. Set an output on your interface for the cue output. Then click the Solo mode button to turn it into Cue mode. Now press the headphone icon for the track you want to preview and disable the track’s Activator button so it’s muted from the main master output until you’re ready to play your work to the world.

If you are using Live as a mixer you can be part of a jam by processing effects in real time. EQs, compressors etc can be left to their static settings, but Auto Filters, Auto Panner, Redux and delays are all great tools to manipulate on someone else’s sound. If you want to capture these for use later, set the Monitor to In so the live input is always heard while you record in the background.

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MT Technique Mixing tools and techniques

Ableton Live Become a Live Power User

Mixingtools andtechniques Power Series Part 10

When it comes to mixing, Live offers both classic and contemporary mixing tools for a variety of sonic options. Liam O’Mullane walks you through his main choices of devices and editing tools to make your mixes shine…

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ixing is a process that can happen in one or two stages of the music production process. The first stage is creative and composition based, where people may mix as they go. Here they’ll solely concentrate on mixing as the track comes together with possibly a separate tweaking stage at the end. The second stage is after the composition is complete and sounds are in place, to then mix with a subjective outlook. Some people will ignore major mix decisions until this stage as it gives them the most mix options as possible while they only have their mix engineering hats on.

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the VD

Itisagoodideatotryand separateyourmixingstage fromyourcreativestage… Although mixing has creative sound design aspects, it also has many practical tasks and assessments that need to be carried out. With your creative hat on, you can find this difficult to do, so if you stop to take care of these matters, it can have a negative affect on your creative workflow. So

FOCUS ON… EXPANDING YOUR GO O TOOLS The library of audio effects in Live’s browser offers a good range of funct onal and creative mixing tools to choose from.EQ Eight and Compressor/Glue Compressor are the most obvious choices for frequency and dynamics control,but there are many other devices w ich are worth exploring for frequent mixing tasks. Alt ough you can use a low- and igh-cut EQ to bracket a sound’s frequency range using an EQ Eight,a Cabinet dev ce can ac ieve a similar effect with much more added character.This is partially due to its narrower frequency bandwidth that creates a telep one ike effect.But this ca be balanced wit t e orig nal s gnal using the dry/ we control to return a sense of fidelity.The ra ge of the bandwidt estric ion,or brac et, s selecte through the spea er setting.Transient smear ng is at its mos affect ve when you se ect a dyna ic mic from t e micropho e list and exp ore its posit o . Cabi et ad s a element o ynamic control as part of its processing as wel ,bu other options ike Saturator and Dyna ic Tube ev ces can do this w i e of eri g a di feren character. se a careful balance o drive and out ut – you can eit er go for a ully-processe an clipped soun , or balance t e dry/wet amount or a balance o t e origina signa to re a n some ynamics. Re ux’s Bit Reduct o ca be used to red ce a soun ’s ynamic range,but it wi l

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there is a good reason to separate these two mixing processes if you can. To help commit to this separation, it’s worth rendering out all of your tracks to new audio. This helps you decide when you’re truly ready to mix, while also removing the temptation to tamper with compositional aspects during the mixing stage. Rendering out your audio also frees up computer resources which means more processing power for plug-ins. Finally, if you intend to send your work out to be mixed by an engineer, this process will create files that they can use. To export your project’s tracks to new individual audio files, highlight the duration of the whole song and then select Export Audio/Video from the File menu. This opens up a large range of options and we recommend you remain at Live’s native bit-depth of 32-bits, and stay at the same sample rate you’re working at. The sample rate you’re currently using is signified by having a small speaker icon next to it. The only other option that needs configuring for this task is the Rendered Track menu (all other options should be disabled). Select Individual Tracks for rendering and then select a new, clean, mix project folder to put them in after clicking the Export button. You will now have a new file for every track which can be imported into a new project. Until next time, happy mixing… MT

create a dir ,lo-fi c aracteristic.T is ca be usef l or g v ng o e or wo sounds disti ct to e of the r own i the ix.Harmonics can also be intro uced usi g Downsample when set o se ts Sof mode.Use a very s all amount to ntroduce a gl ss so nding top-en for d l sou ds. Wh tever tool end up e ng your favo rites,save some time nd c eate a efa lt processing c a n by Rig PC] / Ctr Mac] + c i i g o a track’s name. ere you can save de u open ng state or future e IDI or a di tr c s.A ter loa i g in yo r pre erred m x-too s o track,se ec S v As De u IDI or A io ra respe t vely. o al new trac s wi l e reated wit t is chai of ev ce pre- oaded.

Mixing tools and techniques Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Processing, side-chaining and automation

Although Live’s Compressor Device is perfectly functional, Glue Compressor can be used to add some character for dynamic processing. Glue is a great channel, group and mix buss compressor with its SSL-like smoothing effect. Enable the Soft Clip function and explore driving the signal using the Makeup gain for a hot sound.You can always then use the dry/wet dial to make this a parallel effect.

If you need to remove unwanted sounds, try editing the unwanted portions out rather than using a gate device.This offers a higher level of individual control to tidy up audio over a more ‘set and forget’ approach used with a gate. After highlighting the portions you don’t want, delete them, then select Show Fades from the Create menu.You can now drag these start and end fades to suit each audio event.

As compression is the process of level control, you can also control dynamics using Live’s editing functions.You can automate volume, but this limits you for making level adjustments down the line. Instead, add a Utility Device at the end of the Track’s processing chain, then automate its gain parameter. For more natural automation changes, hit Alt on automation lines to drag and create curves.

Use an EQ Eight before any processing to remove unwanted frequencies. Add another at the end of the chain for re-balancing the frequency curve of a sound. Check unnecessary bottom-end that needs removing using the analyser on the first EQ.The second EQ’s analyser monitors how your processing is affecting the frequency content – useful when trying to fill out holes in your mix.

Many devices have the ability to be side-chained, so respond to the amplitude levels of an external signal. Most people only use these on single or grouped sounds, overlooking the option to dynamically control ambience effects.Try adding a compressor to each Return Track and set them to take Audio From the drum group. This make your mix move with a pumping, rhythmic sound.

Those with Live Suite can get creative with side-chaining using its Max For Live based Envelope Follower. Place this on the track to be the source sound for side-chaining, then click map before clicking a parameter you wish to control.This moves in time with the audio events on the track with the device on. Use a multimap device to multiply and started mapping this source to various destinations.

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Mixing tools and techniques Technique MT

MT Step-by-Step Advanced and unique processing

An Overdrive device is useful for thickening up the harmonic content of a sound. First, find the right frequency area and width of focus using the device’s bandpass filter.Then control the density of distortion using drive and its brightness using tone. Finally, compress the signal as required using the dynamic amount, then dry/wet can blend the processed signal to taste.

Another option for thickening up specific frequencies is the Vinyl Distortion Device.The tracing model graph can be used in much the same way as the bandpass filter on an overdrive device. It’s the pinch graph below where things get interesting as harmonics are distributed across the stereo plane, making it useful for also enhancing its stereo width.

We discussed setting up mid and side processing using Audio Racks in Part 5 of this series.This simple process lets you add different processing to the middle (mono) and sides (stereo difference) for a higher level of control.To get used to how these sound, after setting-up, solo each one and play with their respective balance to hear which part of the sound each chain represents.

If you have a stereo signal, a good way to enhance how stereo it sounds is to compress both the mid and sides of the signal separately.This way you can reduce the dynamic range of the sides so the stereo aspect of the signal is more consistent in volume. Raising the level of the sides will then make the sound more stereo than mono.

Another good place to consider processing mid and side signals on their own is for ambience effects.Try using a different reverb device, or Max For Live Convolution Reverb on each signal with unique settings.This creates a much deeper and engaging ambience soundfield. A shorter decay time on the middle and longer on the side works well for an enhanced sense of stereo spread.

Live’s Vocoder device can function as a noise based exciter. With the carrier set to noise, the reverb-like noise effect can have its decay time altered using the release value. After setting the device to 40 Bands for the best fidelity along with a maximum frequency range, explore the depth and formant controls to tune its noise to best suit the source sound and EQ it to taste drawing into the filter bank.

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> drum programming essentials > Step by step

3. Programming a drum ’n’ bass beat in Ableton Live

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Launch Live and press the Tab key to switch from Session to Arrangement view. We don’t need to use the default setup’s audio tracks, so select them all and press Backspace to get rid of them. Enter 174 into the tempo field at the top left-hand corner of the interface.

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Drag over bar 5 on the MIDI track and press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+M to create a MIDI clip, then Ctrl/Cmd+L to loop the region. Doubleclick the MIDI clip to bring up the MIDI editor.

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Double-click the title of the second MIDI track to select it, and this time drag Snare 1.wav onto the channel strip. Add hits on 1.2 and 1.4 that last until 1.2.3 and 1.4.3, as shown. This kind of kick-and-snare rhythm is the foundation of most DnB beats, but it needs the addition of a few more elements to make it fuller and faster.

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In the Tutorial Files/Drum programming essentials/ Programming a DnB beat in Ableton Live folder you’ll find some DnB-ready drum sounds. Select the first MIDI track and drag Kick.wav into the empty device chain pane at the bottom of the interface to automatically create a Simpler instrument that we can trigger via MIDI to play back the sound.

Double-click C3 on the first beat of the bar, and drag the right-hand side of the note created so that it runs to 1.1.2 – this may not be visible depending on your zoom level, but it’s half way between the start of the first beat and 1.1.3. Create another beat of the same length starting on 1.3.3. When combined with a snare on beats 2 and 4, this creates a 2-step pattern.

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T to create a new MIDI track. Drag Hat.wav onto it to call up a Simpler instrument, and create a new MIDI part. Put a short note on the first beat of the bar that lasts until 1.1.1, then press Ctrl/Cmd+4 to turn off snap to grid.

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Hold Alt and drag the note over to just past 1.1.2 to make a copy of it. Again, you can drag vertically on the ruler at the top of the editor to zoom in and out. We want this hi-hat to be quieter than the first one, so drag its velocity level in the panel below down to 40 or so.

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The hi-hats are quite loud, so turn the Track Volume down to -3dB. Now our beat is rolling along nicely, let’s funk it up a little bit. Add another MIDI track, drag Snare 2.wav onto it and create a new MIDI clip. We’re going to use this new sound to play some ‘ghost notes’.

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We want this snare to be much quieter than the main one, so turn its Track Volume down to -7.5dB. We can use this ghost snare part to provide variation to the beat and help it sound less repetitive. Click the arrow at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen to hide the MIDI editor. Drag over all the clips created so far and duplicate them.

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This timing and velocity variation will give us a more natural, rolling hi-hat pattern that will complement our rigid kicks and snares. Press Ctrl/Cmd+4 to turn snap back on, then drag over the area between beats 1 and 1.1.3. Now Press Ctrl/Cmd+D to duplicate the hats and copy them out so that they last for the whole bar.

A ghost note is a quieter hit on the snare with a different timbre to that of the main hits, used to make the rhythm more syncopated and ‘involved’. Double-click the MIDI part to bring up the MIDI editor and add 32nd-note hits on 1.2.3, 1.2.4 and 1.3.2.

Now click the first of the two ghost snare clips and press 0 to mute it. This very quickly turns our one-bar loop into a two-bar loop that’s easier to listen to for extended periods. Select the entire sequence by dragging on one of the tracks, and press Ctrl/Cmd+L to loop it. Another way to keep a dance music beat involving is to add and remove elements as the track progresses.

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> drum programming essentials > Step by step

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3. Programming a drum ’n’ bass beat in Ableton Live (continued)

Duplicate the two-bar section out three times to make an eight-bar sequence. Add a new MIDI track and drag Ride cymbal.wav onto it. Create a new one-bar-long MIDI clip at the start of the second half of the sequence and trigger the ride cymbal sound on eighth-notes. Turn the Track Volume down to -9dB.

Grouping the tracks enables us to edit them as a single entity. Zoom in on the bar before the ride begins, then drag over the sixth eighth-note on the group track and delete it. Highlight the fifth eighthnote and duplicate it.

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Drag the right-hand side of the clip out so that it lasts until the end of the sequence. To make the transition between the sections more exciting, let’s create a fill. Select the kick and ride tracks (hold Shift) and press Ctrl/Cmd+G to group them.

This creates a fairly subtle variation on the beat that indicates to the listener that something is about to happen. Another useful tool for accenting particular parts of a beat is the crash cymbal. Create a new MIDI track, drag Crash.wav onto it and trigger a single note at the start of the ride section lasting for an entire bar so that the whole sound can play. (Audio: DnB beat.wav)

Pick and mix In these walkthroughs, we’ve focused purely on sequencing drum sounds rather than processing them. The resulting beats might be relatively simple, but they’re solidsounding and consistent with what you might expect from their respective genres. An important element of this is sound selection. For each tutorial we’ve specified that you use a particular set of sounds, and it’s easy to hear how differently things can turn out – just load the EXS24 or HALion Sonic SE with a different kit after you’ve programmed the beat. Sometimes the results will be interesting (for example, the Goa Remix kit makes a surprisingly cool substitute for the EXS 808 one), but more often than not they will be less than satisfying. Trying to make a particular style of beat without the right sounds is often frustrating, 14 / COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL

and it takes time to learn what kinds of sounds work in any particular context. It can be tempting for new producers to always pick the biggest, baddest-sounding sample or kit, and then make it sound even more extreme by heavily processing it in ill-advised ways. If you find yourself falling into this trap, practice your beat programming with the pre-programmed kits from sample packs or your DAW’s included library. These will offer a sonic consistency that makes it easier to concentrate on learning how to use each sound and the tricks that you can achieve with variations in velocity and timing.

Once you’ve got to grips with creating beats using preset kits, you can take things to the next level by selecting each sound individually and processing it. Get your hands on high-quality versions of tracks that you

“Practice your beat programming with the pre-programmed kits from sample packs” consider to have decent beats – preferably ones where the beat plays on its own during the intro or outro – and load them into your DAW, where you can loop the relevant sections and study them more easily.

sampled beats < > Step by step

3. Applying swing to loops in Ableton Live

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Because not all loops have exactly the same groove (see Timing Is Everything on p9), you may need to tweak a loop’s timing to work with its accompanying material. There are a couple of ways to do this in Ableton Live. Drag Shuffle house.wav and Straight castanets.wav onto separate audio tracks in the first bar of a Live arrangement.

We can adjust the castanets’ timing by double-clicking the waveform to bring it up in the Clip View. Double-click the ruler above the third castanet to add a yellow warp marker. We can now adjust the timing of the second castanet without affecting the rest of the loop. Press Ctrl/Cmd+4 to deactivate Live’s Snap mode.

This is where Live’s Groove Extraction capability comes in handy. Double-click the warp markers you’ve created to delete them. Right-click House shuffle.wav and select Extract Groove(s). Live will take a few moments to analyse the audio. When it’s done, click the wavy button on the left of the interface to bring up the Groove Pool.

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Press Ctrl/Cmd+L to set up a loop around the samples. Drag down on the ruler over the arrangement to zoom in on the waveforms. Look at Shuffle house.wav. You’ll see that the closed hat of the first beat plays a bit after 1.1.2, but Straight castanets.wav has much more rigid timing, sitting perfectly on 1.1.3. (Audio: Unaligned beats)

You can now drag the castanets into exactly the right position. Changes that are made in the Clip View will be reflected in the waveforms on the arrangement – move the castanets to the right until they sit perfectly under the closed hi-hat. This technique works well for small jobs, but it would take quite a while to tweak the rest of the beat in this manner.

You’ll see House Shuffle in there – this is the groove we just created. Drag the groove onto Straight Castanets and its timing will automatically be adjusted to fit the groove. Finally, turn the clip’s Transpose parameter up to 3 so that it sits more comfortably with House shuffle.wav. (Audio: Aligned beats)

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programming percussion < > Step by step

Percussion is a prime candidate for the extreme application of effects. Take our conga part, for example. It’s pretty groovy as it is, but adding an Auto Filter set to a 2-beat LFO cycle gives it even more rhythmic motion. A compressor is called for next in the chain, though, as the movement of the filter introduces some serious volume variation. (Audio: Conga filter)

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Slowing our agogo bells down to 70bpm and treating them to some ping-pong delay creates an ethereal, monastic-sounding pattern. Live’s timestretch algorithm introduces a weird ‘sucking’ effect to the dry signal, while the delays fill the stereo field. ‘Transient’-style algorithms are best for percussion, but it’s always worth trying others, of course. (Audio: Agogos delay)

POWER TIP

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3. Creative percussion processing

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AUTOMATION SITUATION When automating effects plugins on percussion tracks, it’s essential that any movements are kept in line with the rhythm being played, unless you’re after deliberately off-kilter timings. Equally, setting LFOs and delay times to sync with your DAW’s project tempo is usually the way to go. However, none of the above necessarily applies to single-hit spot percussion.

Live’s Beat Repeat is a glitch plug-in to be reckoned with, and it’s worth trying on all manner of material (non-Live users could substitute Smartelectronix Supatrigga or Livecut). We’re not sure what we’d use our processed triangle part for, but we’d imagine the adventurous electronica producer could get some mileage out of it. (Audio: Triangle Beat Repeat)

We reverse our cabasa part, and its more-or-less ‘symmetrical’ attack/decay envelope means it still sounds quite cabasa-ish when played backwards (but with percussion that has a ‘tail’, such as congas, the difference can be dramatic – try it!). We then go modulation mental, inserting chorus and tempo-synced flanger plug-ins. Much more interesting. (Audio: Cabasa modulated)

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To finish, we treat the timbales with Soft downsampling (good for introducing extra treble frequencies), modulated frequency shifting (unlike pitchshifting, this shifts low frequencies more than high ones, so it’s also great for retuning percussion) and a Filter Delay, which transforms our rather thin solo timbale part into an enthusiastic trio. (Audio: Timbales bonkers)

COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL / 45

mixing beats <

> Step by step

1. Mixing a full-on DnB beat in Ableton Live

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Begin by setting the project tempo to 174bpm and dragging Kick. wav, Snare.wav, Closed hat.wav, Ride.wav, Crash.wav and Angry break.wav onto separate audio tracks. Set up a cycle loop around the bar containing the parts, and turn all of them down to -6dB so that they don’t clip the master.

Drop the level of the snare track down to -13dB. We can see from the ‘uneven’ level meters on the kick and snare tracks that both are in stereo. We want the kick and snare to sit at the dead centre of the mix, so drag Live’s Utility effect onto the kick track and set its Width parameter to 0%.

Do the same on the snare track, but this time set the low-cut filter to 130Hz. The snare could also do with some more high-end crack – we could layer it up with another sound, but using a high-shelf EQ to boost 2dB at 4kHz works too. (Audio: EQed kick and snare)

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In their raw form, these elements sound like a big mess! The easiest way to get a handle on what we’re working with is to mute everything apart from the kick and snare. When we do this, we can hear that the snare is way too loud for the kick.

Do the same on the snare track. Next, add an EQ Eight to the kick track. Set the first band to 12dB low-cut mode, and bring up the Freq knob until you’ve removed the excess weight from the low end. A setting of about 80Hz gives us a lighter, less stompy sound that won’t interfere with a bassline as much.

Unmute the closed hi-hat track and add another EQ Eight. Use a 12dB low-cut band at 1.6kHz to take out the messy lows. The top end of the hi-hat is a little harsh, so use a bell shape to take off 2dB at 10kHz, and a 12dB high cut to take out everything above 18kHz.

COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL / 55

> mixing beats > Step by step

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1. Mixing a full-on DnB beat in Ableton Live (continued)

The hi-hat is a bit too loud, so turn it down to -10dB. Next, unmute the ride channel. This is clearly way, way too loud, so turn it down to -24dB. Add an EQ Eight, and use a 12dB low-cut filter set to 2.9kHz to tame its lows. This lets the ride’s mid character through, but stops it from clogging up the mix so much.

This spreads the ride across the stereo panorama, but the default settings are far too extreme for our purposes. Turn the Feedback down to 0.55, then set the Amount to 45% and Dry/Wet to 60%. This stops the Flanger effect from being so obvious, but still provides the stereo feel we’re after. (Audio: Stereo ride)

The addition of reverb makes the snare – and indeed the whole beat – start to sound a lot more natural and polished. Live’s default reverb send settings aren’t perfect for this sound, so bring up the Reverb effect on the Send A channel and set the Decay Time to 2.25s.

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We can see from the ride channel’s level meter that the part is in mono. Earlier, we put our fundamental sounds – the kick and snare – firmly in the middle of the mix. Less solid sounds like rides can be moved to the side signal to give the sounds in the middle more room to breathe. Add Live’s Flanger effect to the ride channel.

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The beat is starting to take shape, but it still lacks character. A good way to give a DnB beat a more organic sound is to add a breakbeat. There’s one among our tracks, but let’s see how far we can take our one-shot sounds before we resort to using it. Let’s add some snare to the reverb – turn the Send A level on the snare track up to -10dB.

This gets the reverb closer to the sound we’re after, but the tail is too long. Add a Gate after the Reverb and set its Threshold to -45dB. Because this parameter is volume-dependent, adjusting the send level will change how it responds. Therefore, the most practical way to control the level of the reverb now is to use a Utility effect.

mixing beats <

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Add a Utility after the Gate and set its Gain to -5dB, then use an EQ Eight to low-cut the signal at 2.5kHz. Now, let’s simulate an overhead mic to get a more cohesive, organic sound for the whole kit. Add all of the tracks apart from Angry Break to a group. Delete the default Simple Delay effect on the Send B track, and add Overdrive, Reverb and EQ Eight effects.

Unsolo the send. Now we’ve got a decent sound out of our oneshots, let’s try adding the break to the mix. Angry Break is very loud, so turn it down to -20dB before unmuting it. The break has lots of rumbling lows, so use EQ Eight to low-cut it at 220Hz. We can get a cleaner sound if we sidechain the break with the kick and snare.

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Set the Overdrive Drive to 87%, the Reverb Decay Time to 410ms and the Dry/Wet to 100%, and use the EQ Eight to low-cut at 1.5kHz. Turn the drum group’s Send B level up to -18dB. Solo the Send B return channel to take a listen to what this adds – it’s just a smeared, dirty reverb with no lows, but it helps the drums sound more authentic. (Audio: Overhead simulation)

Add a Compressor to the Angry Break channel, and set its sidechain input to the kick channel. Turn the Threshold down to -19.5dB and set the Release time to 12ms. Duplicate the effect and set the new instance’s Source to the snare track. Set the Threshold to -1dB and the Ratio to inf:1. (Audio: DnB beat)

Making the most of mid/side technique In this walkthrough, we’ve used the technique of placing the kick and snare dead centre in the mix by reducing their stereo width, and having the ride sit out on the edges of the stereo panorama by running it through a flanger. We call this kind of trickery mid/side processing, and understanding it is pretty much essential for getting contemporary-sounding drum mixes. How does mid/side work? Usually, we think about a stereo signal in terms of left and right channels. We can ‘encode’ both channels into a mid signal (the information that’s present in both the left and right channels, and thus what you hear at the centre of the mix) and a sides signal (the difference between the left and right channels, and what you hear at the very edges of the stereo panorama). In mathematical terms, we can express this as

Mid=Left+Right, and Side=Left-Right, but a more practical way to get your head round it is to download Voxengo’s excellent freeware mid/side encoder MSED (www.voxengo. com). Create an audio track in your DAW, put a piece of music that you think has a good mixdown on it, add MSED as an insert effect, and try muting the sides signal. The sound will go into mono. Then unmute the sides signal and mute the mid signal – you’ll hear that the mono signal disappears, leaving just the sides. The advantage of dividing drum sounds between the mid and sides signals is that it gives us more headroom to work with. When we use flanging to make the ride stereo, it reduces its presence in the mid signal, making our kick and snare both sound clearer and thus allowing us to turn them up.

Voxengo MSED is a fantastic freeware plugin for exploring the mid/side technique

By studying the mid/side profiles of greatsounding mixes with MSED (or other width control effects such as Live’s Utility), you can get clues as to how to use the mid/side technique in your own tracks which should help you to produce bigger and bettersounding drum tracks and mixdowns. COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL / 57

Technique | Ableton Live

Ableton Live Gesture Based Control

them is that there are so many of them around. They’re cheap and available, and there are lots of brave people who have already done the dirty work of getting them to function with Mac OS X or Windows. The Guitar Hero and Rock Band guitars and drum kits work very well with Live, but to me the Nintendo Wii Remote Control 4 , the Wiimote, is the archetypal game input device that works brilliantly for music production and performance, in a way that most other controllers don’t. It has several buttons, the d-pad on the top, and the all-important x-y-x orientation, each of which can be assigned to a separate MIDI CC message. If you add the Nunchuk accessory, which plugs into the bottom of the Wiimote, and takes its power from it, then you’ve got more buttons, a little joystick, and another set of x-y-x orientation controls – too much information! The Wiimote is a great controller for synths, for example if you use it as a basic type of theremin controller for Operator 5 , using the buttons to turn the Filter and LFO on and off, and using the left/right rotation for volume, and up/down tilts for pitch. An obvious use for the Nunchuk is for effect control, while the main unit is dealing with The Expert the instrument; the Nunchuk has worked Martin Delaney, very well for me with effect devices like Performer, Producer Artist and Auto Filter and Beat Repeat 6 . The instructor, Wiimote is incredibly sensitive, and watch Martin, aka out, because it can be a bit of a handful if mindlobster, has produced Live you assign too many parameters to the training material and orientation; it keeps sending all the time, was one of the UK’s first certified Ableton even when you put it down, so it’s essential Live trainers. to plan for an ‘off’ button in your set-up! More recently, the game control scene is still healthy, with Kinect from Microsoft taking broad-gesture control a little bit more mainstream, although it’s not as usable in every day situations as the more console-like hand-held devices. There are also controllers that aren’t game controllers, but have been designed to evoke that old-school vibe while being functionally more suited for live performance and for MIDI set-ups – the MIDI Fighter from DJ Tech Tools (www.midifighter.com) is probably the best example of this.

Hardware controllers that you can wiggle, swipe, stroke and squeeze – and some you don’t have to touch at all. Martin Delaney gets shakin’ as he explores some of the ways to get gesture control

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or electronic musicians, piano keys, pads, and buttons work perfectly well for triggering notes and turning things on and off, and we have knobs to let us incrementally change values like reverb or delay levels 1 . But that’s not always enough – sometimes we want controls that expand the interface, to give us different types of expression and articulation, responding to movements we make with hands, arms, or our entire body if necessary.

Let’s get physical It makes perfect sense – if you look at more established instruments, they usually have something that adds a little flourish to the basic sound. A piano has pedals, a guitar’s strings give you a whole catalogue of bends and slides (never mind the fact that it might also have a tremolo arm), Hammond organs have their drawbars, Wurlitzer electric pianos have tremolo controls, and of course synths and keyboard controllers have their pitch and modulation wheels. That’s enough examples, you get the idea – just turning things on and off isn’t enough. We can use other tactics and change settings inside our software instruments, such as velocity sensitivity, portamento 2 and aftertouch, but we still want more physical ways of affecting what we play and how it sounds. With hardware synthesizers there have been many attempts to provide different ways of interaction, as the needs of electronically-based musicians departed further from the traditional demands of players: joysticks (like on the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS – even the rack-mount version has the joystick, which might be annoying), ribbon controllers (as I used to enjoy on the lovely old Yamaha SU700 hardware sampler 3 – and by the way, you can buy standalone ribbon controllers such as the Doepfer R2M if you really want to add one to your set-up), theremin type devices like the Alesis AirSynth, and the Roland D-Beam deployed on the classic MC-505 groovebox, as well as on their AX-7 and AX-09 keytar style synths. All of these were, or are, cool in different ways, and they still work! Here I’m focused on these ‘other’ types of input device, and how we can get some of that action for our MIDI control set-ups.

Use Your Computer’s Trackpad

Your trackpad is a control surface that lets you swipe and click and (in many cases – certainly with the MacBook) recognises hand gestures according to direction and number of fingers. The simplest way to use it with Live is to apply it to the XY area that appears in most of Live’s audio effect devices. Click and hold it down at the left corner with your left hand so it stays ‘clicked’, and swipe around with your right hand.

Take control

Beam me up

What were the first similar interfaces for computers, designed to work with software instead of hardware, to give us some of that gesture control? Collectively, we turned on to game controllers quite early; the great thing about

Moving to the other extreme in terms of cost and complexity, we have the Sound Beam. This is a system of hardware focused on a ‘brain’ that connects to a computer via USB, then uses a set of up to four sensors, usually arranged in a

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Ableton Live | Technique

1 VIDEO ON THE DVD Watch the tutorial movie on the DVD

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Let’s Get Physical

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Technique | Ableton Live

circle, to detect body movements. Up to four foot switches can be added. A full set-up will cost you around £4,000 but it is a very unique way of working, equally popular with dance groups, performance artists, and organisations for people with physical disabilities (www.soundbeam.co.uk). This is gesture control on a big scale; you’ll be waving your arms about more than your fingers! A joystick-style device I haven’t had the chance to try yet is the 3D Space Navigator (www.3dconnexion. com) 7 . This expands on the basic joystick concept, bringing with it user-assignable buttons and on one model a screen as well. It’s expensive though, and I would guess it takes some work to get functioning with music software. It doesn’t advertise any compatibility at the outset – you’d have to use something like OSCulator to get it talking (www.osculator.net).

There’s Always Lemur iOS

Liine’s Lemur is incredibly usable as a controller for Live, not to mention any other MIDI/OSCfriendly applications and hardware. Lemur on an iPad should be a candidate for your desert-island controller, if you have to choose only one. It doesn’t offer the same physicality or game controller-like vibe you can get from some of the other gadgets we’re talking about here, but it has enough interface objects to keep you swiping that screen all day long.

The Nintendo Wii Remote Control I think of the Wiimote as a classic MIDI controller, game device or not. It’s powerful, portable, and cheap. It’s easy to set up, as well – pair it via Bluetooth and then use a helper application such as OSCulator to configure the controls. Unquestionably one of the best synth controllers around.

part of your performance. IK Multimedia’s iRing gadget currently only works with iOS devices, and doesn’t talk to DAWs running on a Mac or PC, but hopefully the time will come 9 ! The most ‘everyman’ gesture controller that works with music applications without hacking is Leap Motion (www.leapmotion.com). This is a cheap device that you can buy on almost any high street. Its availability is probably related to its flexibility – instead of being limited to a few basic functions, or tied to certain apps, Leap Motion has its own online store, Airspace, where you purchase apps to add the desired functionality. Have a look at our walkthrough for the basic steps in setting up Leap Motion.

Push it

Ableton’s Push includes a control strip, and I was happy to see this, being a fan of those Yamaha hardware samplers I mentioned earlier. As things stand, however, the control strip options are limited – when Push is in drum rack mode, the strip merely navigates up and down through the available pads in the rack, and when it’s in note mode, the strip acts as a pitch bend, or more specifically, like a pitch wheel, returning to the original pitch at the centre of the strip when you release it. If you want to assign it to anything else, you can enter User Mode, and then the strip sends a MIDI CC, which you can assign to Controller apps anything using Live’s MIDI Map Mode. When you exit User Mode, the strip iOS apps like Lemur 8 give you bouncing balls and all kinds of other doesn’t retain your mapping – you have to return to User Mode to use your swipeable interfaces, and apps like MIDI Designer let you assign MIDI CCs to assignment, which is not ideal. your iOS device’s accelerometer, so you really can gesture with your iPhone as You can get a more useful expansion of Push’s control strip if you use a software instrument that lets you assign incoming pitch information to another parameter – Operator will do this! The Skoog If you have Push around, and Operator installed, try it (if you The unique Skoog is haven’t got either of those, you can still fake it with a regular primarily a musical toy/ MIDI keyboard’s pitch wheel, and any instrument plug-in that interface for users with disabilities that might does the pitch remapping). Open Live and load Operator (we otherwise stop them from also have an Operator track already configured for Push in our enjoying an instrument. example Live set). Click on Operator’s Global Shell, at the Based around a bunch of pressure sensors with an bottom right of the display, where it shows controls for Time, accelerometer, contained Tone, and Volume. The central display now updates to show within an almost bombproof rubber casing, Operator’s global settings, including Pitch Bend. To the right of it connects through USB that is a Pitch value setting, which defaults to +5 st and uses an intermediate application to send MIDI. (semitones); set that to 0. This tells Operator to ignore the pitch bend information, so when you swipe the control strip, Operator’s pitch is unaffected. Now, next to the Pitch Bend setting, click and you’ll see a list of every parameter in Operator that pitch bend can be reassigned to. For our example set choose F Freq (filter frequency), and set the pitch bend amount next to it to 100%. Note that you can also set this to a minus value, which would invert the way the strip works.

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Ableton Live | Technique

How To Control Live Using Leap Motion

It’s not air guitar, it’s more air… finger. Use Leap Motion and a couple of apps to control Live

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In Geco, moving representations of your hands appear as you move them over the Leap Motion. The bottom of the screen displays hand icons, and settings for each recognised gesture. Reading across from the column at the left, you’ll see that you can assign MIDI channels, CCs, and other more advanced settings to each individual gesture.

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You’ll need a Leap Motion, and you’ll also need to buy the Geco MIDI application, which costs £7.99 (there are others available, including Aeromidi, which costs £23.99 – each specialises in different functions, so you might want to get both). Connect the Leap Motion via USB, launch Geco from inside the Airspace application and launch Live.

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Use the left hand for Track 1 and the right hand for Track 2. Assign CCs from 1 upwards, to these gestures: 1) left hand present fingers spread; 2) left hand present fingers closed; 3) left hand roll; 4) right hand closed up/down; 5) right hand closed roll. The gestures have solo switches, so you can send CCs individually.

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Configure Geco in MIDI Preferences, for Track and Remote inputs. We have an example Live set ready if you have a Leap Motion – open it now. Track 1 Beats contains audio clips, Track 2 Simpler contains an instrument preset. Track 3, Push, is an Operator preset for use with Push’s control strip; ignore that for now.

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Assign the CCs like this: 1) scene launch; 2) track 1 filter on/off; 3) track 1 filter resonance and frequency (map it twice); 4) Simpler pitch; 5) Simpler volume. Try it with Live – your left hand launches scenes and controls Track 1’s filter, and your right will control Simpler’s volume and pitch!

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> make music now / reverb: the > Step by step

guide

1. Exploring basic reverb parameters

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We fire up Ableton Live, program a drum pattern (1 Dry drums.wav), then insert Live’s Reverb plugin into its channel. We turn off everything that can be turned off, so that it isn’t filtered or modulated at all, and set the plugin to a 50/50 mix of drums and reverb. Any typical reverb plugin will do, and your DAW almost certainly includes one that has very similar features to the one we’re using here.

In the real world, early reflections are the very first echoes to arrive at your ears, before all the echoes aggregate to form a more smoothly decaying tail. The Shape control on Live’s Reverb sets the ‘prominence’ of the early reflections, while the Reflect dial sets their volume in the mix (Diffuse does the same for the tail). Check out audio of the different settings for all steps in the Tutorial Files folder.

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Rather than a set of specific room algorithms, Reverb sports a single room Size control. At its lowest setting, the drums sound like they’re in a bathroom; at max, they’re in a stadium. The Decay Time sets the duration of the reverb tail, from 200ms to 60s – that is, how long the reverb takes to fade away to silence. These two knobs set the character of our reverb tail (late reflections), along with…

The time it takes for the first early reflections to appear is called the predelay, and it can be used to give transients a bit of space before the reverb kicks in, and add to the impression of size with large spaces. Live’s Predelay, found in the very lower left of Reverb’s interface, is typical, ranging from 0.5ms to 250ms.

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…the Diffusion Network controls. Different reverbs will offer different controls with which to adjust the density and smoothness of the tail – here, we have the Density and Scale parameters in the Diffusion Network section. Your reverb may well let you modulate the tail to impart a bit of ‘wobble’, too – Reverb’s Chorus module gives control over the speed and depth of its LFO.

Our reverb spans the frequency range, but in a mix, you may want to rein in the highs/lows. Some reverbs have filters for this – Live’s has them on the input and in the Diffusion Network (the latter acting as reverb damping controls, to control bass/treble tail length). Your reverb may also have a stereo width control for narrowing/widening the signal. Again, hear it all in action in the Tutorial Files.

Four of the best algorithmic reverb plugins

2CAudio Aether

156 » 10/10 » $250 2CAudio are true masters of reverb design, and their flagship, Aether, is surely a contender for greatest reverb ever made, hard or soft. With its extensive control array, under-thehood randomisation and lush, scintillating sound, it simply doesn’t put a foot wrong. www.2caudio.com

Eventide Blackhole

181 » 9/10 » $199 A powerful reverb for creative sound design rather than the emulation of anything even approaching realworld spaces. It sounds truly unique, and the morphing Ribbon Controller and Hotswitch enable smooth or sudden transitioning between two complete parameter setups. www.eventide.com

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UVI SparkVerb

200 » 8/10 » $199 A beefed-up version of a reverb algorithm from their UVI Engine instrument, SparkVerb might put its novel Preset Voyager patch generation system at the top of the marketing blurb, but the real draw is its fabulously musical sound and ease of use. www.uvi.net

eaReckon EAReverb

164 » 8/10 » €129 Beautifully laid out and packing seven size variations on its core algorithm, EAReverb is at its best generating small-space ambiences, which it does supremely well. A max decay time of 3.8 seconds does make it something of a specialist proposition, but advanced early reflection controls make up for it. www.eareckon.com

W orldmags.net

> make music now / modern mastering

12 mastering tips HANDS-OFF MIXING We’ve gotta say it again… Don’t expect mix problems to be solved at the mastering stage! EQ clashes, dynamic issues and other errors are all best addressed from within the mix project. If you’re applying drastic amounts of processing, revisit your mix – or if you’re mastering for someone else, explain the issues and see if they can remix.

KEEP IT FRESH Don’t over-listen to a track! John Paul Braddock explains: “What I don’t want to do is to listen all the way through the track for six minutes, because as soon as I’ve done that, I’ve got used to how it sounds, rather than being objective. It’s crucial that we don’t spend too much time listening to the music. This might sound counter-intuitive, but we’re not mixing it any more. We’re not trying to listen to the detail; we’re trying to get an overview – to sample the overall tone of the song.”

CONSIDER IT

Try distributing a plugin’s workload over several stages for a potentially more transparent effect

DOES IT CANCEL OUT?

STAGED LIMITING Several gentle stages of limiting or compression can help take the load off one single plugin. For example, three limiters with a gain reduction of 1dB might sound more natural than a single 3dB limiting stage. It depends on the plugins used, so give it a try, and listen objectively.

MAKE IT UP

Use ‘sum difference’ testing (also known as a ‘null test’) to hear if a plugin is ‘passive’. Get to know which plugins add gain boosts or frequency changes in their default state. John Paul Braddock discusses: “Many plugins will actually apply a tonal or level change even before any settings are dialled in. I‘ve noticed that, after analysing several types of plugins, you’ll load up a plugin with ‘no processing’, but the actual output might be louder. Perhaps those plugin manufacturers know what we now know – that ‘louder sounds better’ – or maybe that’s just a side effect of the plugin’s design. The important thing is that you analyse the tools you’re using, and don’t make assumptions. Be critically aware of your own tools.”

For transparency, try to use as few EQ or excitement stages as possible. So, if a track has too much bass and not enough treble, try using a single broad shelf to cut bass, then re-level by increasing the EQ’s makeup gain. This will shift the track’s weight towards the treble more naturally than two EQ bands.

Remember to compare your final processed master with the unprocessed session mix – at equal level – to see if you’ve actually achieved the outcome you intended. If not, don’t be afraid to start again from scratch.

Once you’re ready to master a track, don’t just dive in and start processing. The aim is to gently improve, not ‘mix’. Take a more considered approach. Briefly compare the mix to a reference track at equal level, plan exactly what correction or enhancement the mix needs, try it out, re-level, then evaluate.

ON THE KNOBS Type in parameter values and use stepped plugins (with fixed 0.5dB-1dB ‘notched’ controls) where possible. It’s easy to just crank up a knob, but typing in values makes you think about what you’re entering. Stick to 0.5/1dB steps at a time, as half a dB will make a significant difference when mastering.

REFERENCE WITH EQUALITY

MID/SIDE DIY A plugin with an unlinked left/right mode can also be used to process in mid/side. Simply load Voxengo’s free MSED on the channel and set it to ‘Encode’. Now load your plugin after MSED and unlink the left and right channels. Place a second MSED last in the chain, and set it to ‘Decode’. The left side of your plugin now processes the mid (mono) part of your signal, and the right affects the side (stereo).

MORE THAN AVERAGE Regular downwards, full-band compression can clamp down on peaks and transient detail, ruining dynamics if not applied carefully. If your track needs extra average weight, consider blending it in through the use of parallel compression – you can bring up the average level of your track while keeping the detail intact.

COMPRESS GENTLY A touch of downwards compression can pull (or ‘gel’) the overall mix together, but keep attack times slow so you gently clamp down on the mix’s sustain and not the transients. A low ratio and around 1-2dB of gain reduction should be all that’s necessary.

LIMIT LAST

Evaluate your mastering success by comparing your processed master with the unprocessed version – remember to set both tracks to equal loudness for a fair comparison

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Many think of limiting and loudness as the main staples of mastering, but this attitude often leads to amateur results, flattened mixes and distortion. Final peak limiting should only be tackled when a track’s overall tonal, dynamic and stereo balance are in order. So leave limiting till last!

Technique | MIDI Effects

From speedy timing solutions to creative compositional devices, MIDI processing tools are the overlooked weapons in your plug-in arsenal. Learn how to correct, enhance and expand your performances with our guide to MIDI effects

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he invention of synth manufacturer Dave Smith in the early ’80s, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the industry standard data type sent back and forth between various electronic musical instruments, enabling devices to communicate ‘trigger’ messages and control signals relating to musical notation, timing, level and more. It’s a standard protocol that you’ve almost certainly used already – whether it’s to connect and control outboard gear, or to trigger software instruments with your MIDI keyboard or DAW’s piano roll – and is still a hugely important (and often misunderstood) form of musical communication.

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As MIDI is a collection of commands sent between devices, we can easily manipulate this data with dedicated software tools before it reaches its destination (usually a synth or sampler). Just as a traditional audio effect plug-in takes an audio signal and alters it in some way, a MIDI effect receives MIDI information, processes it in real time, then outputs the result – and, as with audio effects, it can be tweaked, re-ordered and bypassed at will.

Musical assistants MIDI data is synonymous with electronic music performance, and we use a MIDI keyboard to input musical notes into a computer, so it’s no wonder that many MIDI effect processors act as musical ‘assistants’. A plug-in can instantly take in large amounts of MIDI notes, then funnel that data into specific musical scales, effectively preventing the entry of ‘wrong’ notes’. Chord processors, triggered by only a single input

MIDI Effects | Technique

Generating Percussion Patterns We all recognise ’80s-style arpeggiated synth riffs, but modern MIDI devices can take the concept much further. Let’s take an unusual route to sequenced beats Arpeggiators divide up a chord’s notes into a single stream of ordered notes. Once fixed within a synthesizer, we can now take the concept and apply it to any MIDI data stream. Here, we’ve assigned several drum hits across a drum sampler’s pads. By stacking chord notes, then arpeggiating them, we create a ‘round robin’ sequence of percussion hits, automatically cycling through the multiple drum samples. The arpeggiator’s are then adjusted, providing speed and timing alterations that would take ages to draw in by hand. It’s a technique that’s great for the buzzing closed hi-hat repetitions heard in Hip-Hop and Trap, or even for robotic drum rolls and pre-drop build-ups. We’ve used Ableton Live 9’s Drum Rack and Arpeggiator here, but you can use any DAW, drum sampler and arpeggiator plug-in combination to achieve a similar result. Download audio examples from vault.futuremusic. co.uk, or find them on the DVD with the print edition.

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A variety of percussion and noise samples have been loaded into a drum sampler. We’ve programmed the samples’ MIDI notes on top of each other – this ‘chord’ plays back all of the samples at the same time. Touches of delay add character and rhythm.

An arpeggiator divides up the individual notes of incoming chords into a monophonic sequence. Live 9’s Arpeggiator device is added before the Drum Rack in the chain – it’s listening to our stack of incoming MIDI notes and triggering each sample in turn.

Changing the arpeggiator’s Rate parameter will speed up or slow down the sequence, cycling through more or less of the percussion hits to create different rhythmic patterns. Slower speeds mean less samples are triggered; a rate of 1/16th gives us a rolling Techno-esque groove.

The arpeggiator’s Offset value shifts the start note of the sequence, changing the playback order of the percussion hits; in this context, this can be used to choose the first sample in the pattern. It’s now easy to try out various rhythms and percussion combinations at the current speed.

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By retriggering the sequence from the start (via the Retrigger section), odd repetitions and interesting patterns can be discovered. Faster settings create short loops for build-ups and rolls; 3/16ths and 3/8th settings offer more interesting broken sequences.

The various arpeggiator styles define note order, changing the feel of the pattern. Gate shortens or lengthens each note – lower values give a stuttering feel. Get creative with quick pattern variation and improvisation by sequencing percussion patterns on a single arpeggiator interface.

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Technique | MIDI Effects

Your DAW’s Stock MIDI Effects Most software workstations are bundled with a decent collection of note-processing effects, so you should already have access to a heap of MIDI-mangling tools. Being ‘hard-wired’ into your host’s architecture, they can usually just be inserted directly on a MIDI or instrument track in the same way as audio plug-ins (though often loaded in their own dedicated MIDI effect ‘slot’ or position at the beginning of the signal flow, located before the channel’s instrument in the chain). Logic users have traditionally had access to a configurable audio and MIDI routing network in the form of the enormously powerful Environment, but even basic routing configurations could be laborious to set up.

Luckily, Logic Pro X users have been rewarded with a new bundle of MIDI effect plug-ins, loaded in their own MIDI effect slot with a few simple clicks. Cubase still houses an array of flexible and functional MIDI plug-ins, many of which remain from the program’s SX days. Ableton Live’s MIDI effects are also highly regarded, and feature a distinct advantage: chains of MIDI, Instrument and Audio Effects can be grouped together into a composite Rack, and the grouped devices’ parameters can be mapped to the Rack’s global Macros. Once assigned, multiple parameters can be altered simultaneously along every stage of a channel’s signal path, expanding sound design and live performance opportunities.

note, can output the multiple notes of a chord (which are either entered manually or chosen from pre-existing chords), giving the less musically-gifted access to plenty of musical progressions. It can be thought of as ‘cheating’ for the musically-ignorant, or can provide the trained musician with extra flexibility and performance control. MIDI processing also grants you the ability to generate riffs and patterns at speeds and complexities impossible to play by hand. Usually associated with ’80s electronic music, an arpeggiator takes the multiple notes of a chord and sequences these notes into a repetitive (and usually monophonic) stream. The user then defines the characteristics of this sequence, such as speed, pattern order and note length. Previously found only within a synth’s architecture, there are now plenty of plug-ins that allow you to arpeggiate incoming MIDI notes before they hit your instrument of choice – and, as you’ll find out, they aren’t only useful for musical sequences.

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We’re not going to outline each host’s MIDI plug-in selection here, as there really isn’t a whole lot of variation

from DAW to DAW. You’ll find ‘bread and butter’ effects that correct MIDI timing, pitch and velocity; chord and arpeggiator

Cubase’s MIDI Plug-ins MIDI effects bundled with Cubase include workhorse plug-ins like Quantizer and Transformer to keep stray MIDI data in check, and more creative tools such as Chorder, StepDesigner and Beat Designer, which handle sequencing.

Live’s MIDI Effects Live features basic Pitch, Velocity and Note Length devices, plus Scale, Chord and Arpeggiator tools. These can all be collected into a MIDI Effect Rack to create custom MIDI processing combinations.

Performance enhancers MIDI data also communicates information relating to the velocity, timing and swing of a performance, and these parameters can all be altered with plug-ins before they enter a synth or instrument. Quantise tools lock incoming notes to a specified grid; MIDI ‘compression’ restricts (or even expands) the velocity values of input notes to within certain ranges; MIDI echo tools can repeat notes for unusual delay effects. Although this data is traditionally manipulated destructively within the piano roll, an insert plug-in can be bypassed or changed,

The Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 was the first commercially available MIDIequipped instrument

plug-ins; tools that process and modulate other MIDI parameters; humanisation devices; plus much more.

offering a quick way to experiment with various parameter settings and outcomes. MIDI effects aren’t just for existing performances, either: they’re just as useful at the composition stage, and can generate exciting performances that would never be discovered through traditional means. You can use a MIDI effect to modulate the CC parameters of multiple synths with LFOs, envelopes, sequencers and other control signals. Several MIDI plug-ins can be placed in series, so the output of one can feed into another. ‘Randomising’ effects take incoming notes and spit out unpredictable MIDI data streams, which can be printed to a new MIDI file and applied to other instruments in your project with ease. But why not just program data into a MIDI event? Well, insert plug-ins promote a different approach, especially if you’re used to drawing in MIDI data straight into the piano roll. You end up with results that would take far longer to program by hand, while still being able to tweak the destination instrument in real time. They speed up your compositional process, improve your workflow, and force you to approach the music-making process from a different angle. Over the course of this feature, we’ll show you just a few tips and techniques for getting the most out of your MIDI – whether you choose to use stock devices or third-party tools.

You can generate riffs and patterns at speeds impossible to play by hand

MIDI Effects | Technique

Time-Efficient Composing Whether you’re a musical maestro or a novice to notation, MIDI effects can be called upon to speed up your music-writing While there’s no replacement for a solid knowledge of music theory, ‘chord generator’ plug-ins are fantastic for starting off a track idea or musical progression, especially when time is tight. Load one before a synth, fire up an interesting patch, and find something that hits the right notes. We’re using Xfer Records’ Cthulhu – a tool jam-packed with both preset chord progressions and detailed programming features. After finding a suitable sequence of chords, we’ve recorded the effect’s output to a new MIDI region, rendering the notes as you would bounce an audio signal. By doing this, you can easily alter individual notes, duplicate the part over to other tracks in a project, then create accompaniments in a flash. Again, take a listen through the audio examples for each step, found with this month’s download/ DVD content. You’ll hear the initial preset chord sequence, our note adjustments, then further musical developments.

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To begin, we’ve loaded Xfer Records’ Cthulhu on a MIDI track, then routed this track’s output to the MIDI input of a software instrument. After selecting one of the preset progressions, a string ensemble sequence is arranged using only single MIDI notes.

The third chord in the sequence could do with a little adjustment, so we record Cthulhu’s output to a new MIDI region, printing our chord sequence to its own new MIDI file. We now adjust the notes of this chord to better suit the progression.

The corrected MIDI file is now duplicated to a new instrument channel, and a second part is layered over the first. It’s a washy, evolving synth pad from Sylenth1, adding melodic character and movement over the static string chords for thickness and interest.

Our MIDI progression is duplicated to a third MIDI channel, and we delete the majority of chord notes to create a monophonic bass part. Rob Papen’s SubBoomBass is used to generate a weighty Reese bass, underpinning the other chord elements for solidity in the low-end.

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For an interesting arpeggiated riff, we return to our original Cthulhu channel and route its output to a new MIDI channel containing an instance of Synapse Audio’s Dune 2 synth. Cthulhu’s flexible arpeggiator generates a fast riff sequence from our original chord progression.

The arpeggiated notes are too predictable, so we delve into Cthulhu to add variation to the pattern. Steps are shortened via the Gate section, injecting rests into our synth sequence. We can again print Cthulhu’s output to a new MIDI region for more detailed MIDI adjustments.

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Technique | MIDI Effects

Corrective Note Processing Workhorse MIDI tools, like the older MIDI plug-ins that remain in Cubase, are ideal for fine-tuning a performance in real time Many of Cubase’s older MIDI plug-ins are no-nonsense tools that can tidy up inconsistencies directly on the channel itself. To correct the MIDI information directly inside the event itself would be a destructive process, requiring several undo steps to revert back to the original performance. By applying real-time MIDI processing, you can bypass and re-order plug-ins, with the original MIDI file still intact. It’s also easier to experiment with different quantise/ swing settings, velocity variations and note length adjustments.

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Here’s a basic chord progression that’s been recorded to a MIDI file. As you can see, the notes’ timings and velocities vary wildly. While some natural expression is often a good thing, we need to correct the notes of this sloppy performance.

Now we use a Compressor effect to even out the notes’ differing velocity values, in exactly the same way as a regular audio compressor would. Our notes are now more consistent, with each having a more even level in comparison to one another.

In Cubase’s first MIDI Insert slot, we’ve loaded a Quantizer effect. As the name implies, this device quantises MIDI notes to a user-defined timing – although, unlike applying quantisation settings destructively inside the piano roll, this effect is working in real time.

Our performance has been corrected, but in a non-destructive way, so we can mute or change the MIDI inserts’ settings to fine-tune our adjustments. Now we’re happy with the alterations, we’ve arpeggiated the chords’ notes using Cubase’s Arpache SX effect.

Third-Party MIDI Plug-Ins While there isn’t as plentiful a selection as with their audio processing counterparts, commercial third-party MIDI plug-ins are available, providing more in-depth features than your DAW’s stock solutions. Xfer Records’ Chluthu, dubbed “the chord and arp monster”, combines two MIDI processing concepts. The first, a chord generator and programmer, lets you assign chord combinations across MIDI keys to create complex progressions from basic one-note

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patterns. The second is a feature-rich arpeggiator with tons of step sequencer functions. If you’re an arpeggiator fiend, check out Kirnu’s Cream, a highly-regarded plug-in with chord memory slots, pattern sequencing, multiple outputs and more. For a different kind of MIDI programming, investigate Cableguys’ MidiShaper – a device that can modulate any MIDI CC (or MIDI Learn-enabled device) via its customisable LFOs and breakpoint envelopes.

Cableguys MidiShaper

Kirnu Cream Kirnu’s Cream is crammed full of useful notesequencing features such as four independent tracks, per-step parameter adjustment, 16 chord memory slots and more.

While your host may offer some kind of MIDI modulator, MidiShaper gives you even more scope for complex routing. Its four LFOs and four envelopes can modulate any MIDI CC parameter.

MIDI Effects | Technique

MIDI Tips Shake up your patterns, progressions and sounds with these MIDI effect tricks MIDI experimentation

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Once you’re accustomed to the flexibility of MIDI plug-ins, you can begin to use them for less common purposes. As they transform note data before it reaches a synth or sampler’s input, it’s fun to play around with unusual sound triggering and pattern sequencing. In our earlier walkthrough we sequenced beats, but you can just as easily use this method to quickly scan through FX or vocal samples. For crazy buzzing effects, unlock the arpeggiator’s speed from the host tempo and adjust its rate in Hertz.

enough to add space throughout the sequence. As an alternative, try setting the rate to a completely different time division.

Record your MIDI

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We’ve discussed this a couple of times already, but it’s worth repeating again: if your MIDI plug-ins are generating an interesting sequence or chord progression, remember to record that channel’s MIDI output to a new region (in the same way that you’d record audio to a new track). This saves the output of your MIDI plug-ins to a permanent MIDI file, which can then be easily adjusted or copied to other tracks in your project.

Back to basics

Spice up sequences

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The traditional ‘up-down’ arpeggiated sequence is somewhat tiresome these days, so don’t stick with a standard setting. The more flexible arpeggiator plug-ins allow you to fine-tune note lengths, velocity, transposition, harmonies and other CC values on a per-step basis. Often the simple removal of a few notes is

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MIDI effects are brilliant at creating complex melodic elements, but remember that you can also perform very basic functions with ease. Instead of transposing a synth’s multiple oscillators up or down an octave, slap a simple MIDI pitch-shifter on its channel and adjust the pitch that way. Instead of adjusting multiple velocity values inside different regions, use a single device. The benefit to this method is that plug-ins have a one-click bypass function, helping you A/B changes quickly.

Remix Tricks

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iOS Sequencing

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While plug-ins are convenient, a tablet’s touchscreen is the perfect interface for arpeggiation and sequencing, providing instant visual feedback as you send MIDI data to your DAW (or hardware) and back. Genome, MIDI Pattern Sequencer and Thesys are just three examples of iOS apps devoted to this task, taking MIDI programming away from the computer screen and putting it firmly back within the realm of physical control. Combine to succeed

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Combine ‘chord generator’ devices with an arpeggiator, to create impressive musical sequences with a

When putting together a remix, try taking a key melodic audio part from the original and converting it to MIDI. Once you’ve got the note data in front of you, hook up a few MIDI plug-ins on the channel and seek out a new hook or phrase. You’ll maintain the vibe and character of the original track, but likely come across a whole new direction to base your remix around.

single key press. Use a chord generator plug-in to map chords to single MIDI notes, then load an arpeggiator next in the chain. The chord device’s output will feed multiple notes into the arpeggiator’s input, which sequences these notes into an ordered monophonic pattern.

MIDI accidents

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Often the most inspiring moments are created through accidents, so be prepared to abuse your MIDI effect chain. Interesting things happen when you place two or three arpeggiator plug-ins in series, each feeding varying sequences into the next. Quickly turn your effects off and on, causing gaps in the MIDI data stream. Steep, short automation curves can twist MIDI changes in strange ways, causing glitches and odd occurrences.

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Technique | Minimal Beats, Maximum Impact

When it comes to making your beats bang on systems both big and small, less is definitely more. We show you how to trim the fat from your sounds and get your biggest mixdowns yet

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common mistake made by new producers is to try and cram as much as possible into a mix. This might seem like common sense (more sounds equals a better tune – simple!) but sadly there are two very important things wrong with this approach. Firstly, having a large number of sounds playing at the same time means our ears have to work harder to pick out individual elements. Generally we don’t like to have to strain to hear things: it makes listening to

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music too much like hard work. Good mixdowns do that work for us, making the important elements easy to hear and enjoy. Secondly, adding too many elements eats up headroom, resulting in mixes that sound muffled and messy rather than loud and proud. In fact, the trend in commercial electronic music over the past few years has been to get rid of anything extraneous. Take the drop in Martin Garrix’ Animals – it’s just kicks and a synth lead. As both elements have so much room to breathe, it sounds huge on everything from laptop speakers to its native ‘big room’ environment.

Nowhere to hide The lesson we can learn from young Garrix doesn’t just apply to balls-out big room bangers, although it is particularly important in pared-down Dance music styles. The trick with minimal music is the paucity of sounds

Minimal Beats, Maximum Impact | Technique

Processing Your Kick If your bassline and kicks don’t fit together your track will suffer, particularly on bigger sound systems. We show you how to strip the fat from your kicks INCLUDES AUDIO l A solid-sounding lowend is an essential element of a Dance music mixdown, and this is particularly true for minimal styles because there’s less going on in the mids and highs to cover up inadequacies in the bass frequencies. Getting the lows right can often be the hardest part of a mixdown, but you can save yourself a lot of headaches by simply preparing your sounds sensibly in the first place. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to make your life easier at mixdown time by trimming the fat from your kick. Once we’ve got rid of the excess low-end, stereo information and even a little dynamic range, our kick is leaner, punchier and sits more happily in the mix. A particularly important technique we use is tuning the kick to the same pitch as the bassline. This is a simple thing, taking just a few seconds, but it instantly makes a mix sound better. Getting these fundamentals right will only take you a few minutes, and will improve the sound of your music more than any expensive mixing plug-in!

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Here’s a minimal synth bassline (Minimal bass.wav) that plays between each beat. The bass plays between the kick of our 4/4 kick part (Big kick.wav) but its tail is so long the sounds overlap. And the kick isn’t tuned to the same note as the bass, which makes the overlapping sound worse.

Setting the kick’s sampler patch to -2 semitones makes it sound much better, but it will be improved further if we prevent the sounds from overlapping. So we turn the sampler patch’s Sustain and Decay down. Here we’ve opted for a Sustain level of -inf dB, and a Decay of 206ms.

Ableton Live’s Sampler has a Decay Slope parameter, which allows us to fine-tune how quickly the kick’s volume level drops. A setting of -23% works well here. Despite curtailing the kick’s subby tail, there’s still a lot of low-end energy, so we use an EQ Eight to hi-pass the signal at 40Hz.

The kick sound uses up a lot of headroom; we can scrape a bit back with a little saturation. Add Live’s Saturator effect and set its Drive to 1dB. Set the mode to Waveshaper, and click the triangle at the right-hand top of the effect’s interface to bring up the waveshaper’s parameters.

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Set the waveshaper’s Lin parameter to 80% – this gives us around the same perceived volume at the raw signal, but it doesn’t peak so loudly. The left and right sides of the signal peak at different levels – this kick is stereo. To make it mono add a Utility effect and turn its Width down to 0%.

We can squeeze more headroom out of our mix by compressing the bassline with a sidechaining input fed from the kick. This will imperceptibly duck the bass’ volume when the kick plays. We’ve used a Ratio of 4:1, a Threshold of -22dB and a Release time of 20ms.

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Technique | Minimal Beats, Maximum Impact

Making Space In The Mix With Modulation Effects Modulation-based effects such as choruses, flangers and phasers don’t usually get a look-in when it comes to beat processing. Typically these effects are employed to imbue synth sounds with dramatic sweeping movement in the case of phasers and flangers, or warm fuzziness in the case of choruses. Neither of these qualities is ideal for drum sounds in a contemporary Dance music mix, but when used with a little finesse these effects can subtly enhance the stereo width of your drums, and give you some added headroom to boot! The key is to use low feedback values: feedback is the parameter that really makes the textural movement created by these effects stand out, and by

reducing this we get the same stereo enhancement, but without the undesirable, obvious movement. It also helps to use slower modulation speeds, smaller ranges, and carefully balance the wet and dry signals so that you get the perfect balance of solidity and width. Try this technique on hats, rides and percussion sounds – it’ll move them into the side signal, making more room in the mid signal for your kicks, claps and snares, and giving you that essential extra bit of headroom it takes to make your mix loud and punchy. If you’d really rather not have any kind of movement on your percussion sounds then there’s always the old standby of the Haas technique, where one side

© Flanigan/FilmMagic

means that there’s nowhere for mistakes to hide: poor sounds are easier to spot, and mixing mistakes will be more glaring. Therefore, it’s very important to get things right from the ground up. This philosophy of only using what’s absolutely necessary isn’t just confined to entire tracks, and extends to individual parts themselves. These days most of us have access to large numbers of well-produced, super-fat samples and patches, but this can be a curse as well as a blessing. The amazing kick sample you’ve picked for your track might sound incredible on its own, but is its huge subby tail going to work with the pattern you’ve created, or fit with the big, bad bass sound you’ve chosen? Getting low-end sounds to work together properly can often be the hardest part of making a Dance track, as these are the

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of the stereo signal is delayed by around 10-20ms to create width. Alternatively, you can try detuning either side of the

signal to get a similar effect. It’s important to remember that many devices and club systems sum to mono, so

Phaser These effects use LFO modulated all-pass filters to create a sweeping movement that sounds great on pads, but applied more subtly can work wonders on hat and percussion parts.

Chorus Some choruses won’t give as much control over rate or depth as flangers and phasers, but they can still be useful when applied subtly. Use the Dry/ Wet mix parameter for an exact amount of stereo width.

frequencies that less than perfect monitoring set-ups can struggle to produce effectively. Unfortunately getting them right is super important because it’s the low frequencies that give a track its weight, and it’s the lower frequencies that help give the listener an idea of pitch. Both the kick and bass are hugely important drivers – especially in minimal tracks – so getting the balance right is essential.

Less is more in a mix, as Martin Garrix proves with his big room banger Animals

whatever technique you use it’s sensible to test your mix in mono to hear how the phase cancellation sounds.

Everything in its right place For each sound to have its own place in the mix a compromise will be necessary and it’s important to understand which part of each sound needs to be preserved, and which parts can be discarded. By knowing where and how to trim the fat, we can get an ideal balance of sounds with plenty of headroom left over for a nice loud master. Specialised tools and complicated, drawn-out procedures aren’t required for this kind of processing, and you can use your DAW’s stock plug-ins to follow along with all of the techniques demonstrated in the following tutorials. We’ll also look at how you can use these familiar effects in unexpected ways, including using a stock compressor to enhance the transient of a drum sound. By getting the most out of each sound in this manner you can avoid adding extra layers, which avoids phasing issues, saves headroom, and makes your mixdowns easier. We’ll also see how stripping sounds to the bone can be used to create interesting new percussive noises, perfect for minimal House and other abstract Dance music styles. Although we’re focusing on minimal House in this guide, no matter what kind of music you make, taking the time to consider what’s important about each element you add will help improve your sound design, composition, mixdowns, and help your tracks sound better all round.

Getting the low-end sounds right is super important as they give a track its weight

Minimal Beats, Maximum Impact | Technique

Rework An Over-Processed Clap Sample libraries are packed with sounds that have been processed to death, but you can breathe some life back into them with these cunning tricks INCLUDES AUDIO l We’ve all felt the frustration of stumbling upon a sample that would be perfect if its creator hadn’t gone over the top with their compressor or reverb. While it makes a lot of sense that the developers of soundware libraries process their material so much – it makes them sound more impressive and polished – this often renders the samples less usable. However, all is not lost: it’s possible to use some very standard effects to perform simple audio restoration on these sounds. Believe it or not, simple dynamic processors have the power to strip away the excess processing these sounds have been subjected to. In this tutorial we’ll see how you can use the humble gate to remove excessive reverb (which can then be replaced with your own effect), and how over-the-top compression can be countered with some remedial compression of your own. By using these effects in conjunction you can turn flabby samples into tight, punchy sounds that will fit into your minimal mixes much more easily.

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Our clap sound (Reverb clap.wav) sounds great, but it’s got a huge, noisy reverb tail. This doesn’t really work with the minimal vibe we’re creating, so let’s get rid of that reverb, and replace it with our own effect. Start by adding a gate as an insert on the channel.

Here we’re using Live’s stock Gate with the Threshold of -24.7dB. This reverb tail is too quiet to pass through the gate, so we’re left with just the dry clap sound. We can take this opportunity to process the dry signal on its own, using a compressor to enhance the clap’s transients.

With a low Threshold value (-inf dB), adjusting the Attack time controls how hard the transient hits. With automatic make-up gain mode activated this can result in very loud output – be careful! Use the Dry/Wet knob to balance the processed and unprocessed versions of the clap.

Now it’s time to add our new reverb. This shouldn’t be too big as we want to just stop the clap from sounding so dry. With Live’s Reverb, a Decay time of 1.2 seconds and a Dry/Wet level of 12% is enough. You may want to change the Quality mode to High to get a more pristine sound.

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To control the tail of this new reverb, we add another Gate. Turning down the Threshold until you’re in the right ballpark for the amount of reverb you want to let through, then bring up the Release to stop the reverb tail from ending so abruptly.

Our clap is still basically mono. Let’s move it into the sides of the mix with some chorus – Togu Audio Line’s TAL-Chorus-LX (downloaded free from kunz.corrupt.ch). Add it after the final Gate, and turn the Dry/Wet knob down to about 8 o’clock. Check out New clap.wav to hear it.

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Technique | Minimal Beats, Maximum Impact

Turn Toms Into Minimal Percussion Sculpting sounds into new shapes can have creative applications too. With some basic repitching and envelope processing we can make unique minimal sounds INCLUDES AUDIO l Typically 4/4 styles of Dance music have a familiar lexicon of drum sounds, but to get the minimal feel it helps to throw in some abstract percussion that’s not quite as recognisable. There are plenty of sample libraries catering to minimal styles, but making your own sounds is quicker and more fun than trawling through endless loops. The secret to getting authentic minimal House and Techno sounds is probably easier than you think. Use material that has a good solid transient, then use a fast envelope to isolate this part of the sound. You can then adjust the pitch of this to take it out of its usual range, and this combination of truncation and transposition results in a new, more abstract sonic character.

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We start with a very straightforward low tom sound sampled from D16’s excellent TR-808 emulation Nepheton: Low tom.wav. This is a very recognisable sound, but by tweaking its amplitude envelope and pitch we can turn it into something else. Turn down the sampler’s Sustain to -inf dB.

Sequence a pattern to accompany our existing beat (Minimal beat. wav). Here we’re playing a very simple rhythm on G6 that gives us a bit of interplay between the kick, the bass, and our new percussion sound. The percussion sounds unnaturally dry, so let’s add some reverb.

Try playing the sound on the upper reaches of the keyboard – this gives us punchy, tonal percussion sound. Turn down the Decay time to between 20 and 50ms – this just lets the transient through before the volume diminishes completely.

Here we’re using Live’s Reverb with a Decay Time of 360ms, and a Dry/Wet level of 18%. However, the reverb is too wide, so we need to rein it in with an instance of Utility. A Width setting of 22% helps the percussion sit with the other elements in the mix.

Spicing Up Your Hats With Delay A quick and convenient way to add a funky human feel to your hat and shaker parts is to use a little delay. While simply slapping a delay preset on these type of sounds is a recipe for a messy mix, more judicious application can work wonders. Start by turning the feedback level all the way down, setting the Dry/Wet mix to 50/50, and unsyncing the timing from the host tempo. If your delay has multiple taps ensure that they’re linked and, assuming you’re working at around 120bpm, set

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the delay time to 120ms or so. This delay will turn a straight 8th note hat part into a 16th note pattern, with the delay time controlling the level of swing. Play your track back and turn the delay time up gradually until you get the groove you're looking for. You can set the balance between the original 8th notes and the swung 16ths with the delay’s Dry/Wet knob – you may find that turning the wet level down slightly helps, especially if you’re going for a more natural sound.

Delay Turn down the delay Feedback level so each hat is delayed only once. Use a delay that can be unsynced from the host tempo so that you can fine-tune the level of swing that the delay imparts on the hats.

Straight 8ths Programming a straight 8th note pattern in your DAW and then using delay to swing it for you can be quicker than fiddling with your software’s groove settings.

Technique | Ableton Live

Ableton Live Lifelike Live MIDI Programming Live is full of tools to help you get a realistic vibe with programmed tracks – a few tweaks make a big difference. This month Martin Delaney gets his groove (and velocity) on…

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ooner or later you’ll want to program MIDI parts of your own, and you’ll want them to sound realistic. Even if you work with purely ‘electronic’ productions, there might be times when you want a more organic part for the mix and you can’t find a sample that fits, or you can’t get somebody to play it for you. I’m not really talking about programming tips as such – the placement of notes inside clips. I’m talking about what comes afterwards, after you’ve conceived a basic MIDI part for your drums or bass or piano, and added more clips containing the little breaks and fills that a real musician adds. Because, even if you’ve diligently programmed the notes that make a great part, they won’t sound like they belong to a performance until you work them a bit harder. They’ll be too consistent and predictable, too clean – they’ll sound more like an old game soundtrack, or a karaoke backing track. Go to the example Live set on our DVD and you’ll see we have four MIDI tracks in a ‘before’ group: a drum track, a percussion track, an upright bass track, and a piano track. These are all completely ‘flat’, with no effects apart from limiters, and no velocity variations at all. Then play the same clips in the ‘after’ group – these are the same clips, after being processed further to make them sound more ‘real’. Hopefully you can tell the difference! Live has all of the tools we need to make our programmed parts more organic. There are the multi-sampled instruments and drum kits, Grooves (look under Swing and Groove in your Core Library), the Velocity MIDI effect device 1 , and the Reverb effect devices 2 .

Are you sensitive? The single most important thing in this process is to use velocity-sensitive instruments. If you’re using instruments like Simpler or Operator or Electric, this means locating the instruments’ velocity-sensitive controls and raising them up from zero. For drums, pianos, and other complex instruments, ideally you’ll be using multi-sampled instruments – made from many samples that reproduce the tonal changes over a range of velocities. This is the most accurate way to recreate the vibe of playing a real instrument. With one of these, you’ll really get the benefit of dynamic changes in the performance. Load a Sampler multi-sampled preset, and unfold it so you can see the multi-samples, then play some notes from a keyboard or trigger a clip with velocity changes – you’ll see Sampler selecting different samples according to the changing velocities 3 .

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The little things Grooves are like presets that contain small variations in note timing and velocity. There’s a long history of groove templates in hardware drum machines as well as in software. In Live, we can extract grooves from audio or MIDI clips, and apply them to either, editing them along the way 4 . If I have a number of tracks that I want to share a common groove, so it feels more like a band playing together, I’ll copy the groove between them all, so they all have the same basic vibe, but I still use the Velocity MIDI effect device to tweak the settings slightly for each, for a bit of extra variation across the tracks. The Velocity effect has a different level of control, and creates a different result because, unlike the grooves, it doesn’t affect note placements. There are also times when I use a groove but leave the velocity setting at zero, and use the Velocity effect instead – see our walkthrough.

Keeping It Real(ish)

The most important thing in making a MIDI The Expert programmed part feel Martin Delaney, ‘real’ is velocity. If you’re Performer, Producer trying to replicate the vibe Artist and instructor, of a real instrument Martin, aka mindlobster, performance, played by an has produced Live training material and actual person, you need to was one of the UK’s first certified Ableton use this. Velocity is MIDI’s Live trainers. way of expressing how forcefully an instrument is played. This equates to a change in volume, but also in tone, and a true multi-sampled sound, or a software synthesizer that’s emulating a real-world instrument, will allow for these variations. Convolution revolution Reverb can be used to create lush sounds that have no connection whatsoever to the real world but sound fantastic, but it can also be used to recreate the atmosphere of particular types of space, or even sometimes very specific locations. Live has the Reverb audio effect device, which provides many presets and is a handy tool for general reverb duties, adding a bit of depth to your sound. I do have other options that I prefer, however. I use the PSP Audioware EasyVerb and 5 PianoVerb plug-ins; I find they are better than the standard Ableton one for simulating ‘real’ tools. I also use a hardware reverb, a Lexicon MXL400 – not a particularly high-end piece. I wouldn’t say the MXL sounds ‘better’ than plug-ins, but it sounds different, and some of the presets are better than some of the plug-in presets. It’s just another flavour of reverb. However, the most important reverb tool for making programmed parts sound more real is the Convolution Reverb (and Pro version) that’s included in the Live 9 Suite. As well as a lot of weird (good weird) effects, it has a great collection of real ambiences, including bathrooms, yards, rooms, chambers, churches, and houses. Convolution reverbs are the business if you want ‘real’ spaces. They’re made by ‘sampling’ the original space – usually by firing a test

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Are You Sensitive?

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The Little Things

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Convolution Revolution

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Analogue Filth

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VIDEO ON THE DVD Watch the tutorial movie on the DVD

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Take A Dip In The Groove Pool Groove templates, which you find in most hardware sequencers, are another way to ‘humanise’ a programmed performance, as they combine velocity and timing variations. Live has grooves in the Library – they have .agr after the name. Top tip: use the groove pool controls to customise the settings for better results.

Bass guitar usually stays in the middle with drums – those are instruments that just sound wrong if you pan them. I don’t like to use stereo effects with toms in a drum kit; it sounds more fake to me, and the average listener in front of a drum isn’t really going to hear that much of a difference as the drummer plays across his toms. Also, it’s a sound that I associate with drum machines from the ’90s. To me they sound more fake than anything… I hate them!

Stereo Panning

Most real-world instruments are ‘mono’, but Live’s track pan controls can organise the different instruments virtually across the stereo field. Think about when you’re watching a band. The drums are central, the vocals are coming out of the PA, the bass and guitar, in most typical band formats, are going to be left and right physically, but where should they be in the mix? You don’t want all of your bass coming out of just one channel! Analogue filth

You can take this further and distance your sounds even more from the original clean MIDI programming. This is good if you want to fake a dirtier, lower quality sample mood. There are a few tools you can tone sweep and recording back the incoming signal – the impulses. An use. I usually start by grouping the tracks that I want to process – that way it’s important thing to remember with Live 9’s Convolution Reverb is that you can easier for me to apply common effects across all of them, and it binds them drag your own samples into it to create really unique sounds, and with the together sonically, as well as making it easier to control their levels with one included IR Measurement Device 6 you can create a true custom convolution fader. This procedure involves combining effects, you can’t just do it with one. reverb based on the sound of whatever space you’re in. One of my favourites used to be Izotope’s VInyl, a free brilliant vinyl simulation Our example set has a regular Reverb on return A, and the Convolution plug-in. It’s still available but is 32-bit only, so frustratingly I can’t use it with Reverb on return B. Stereo imaging has a role to play in this, although how my 64-bit versions of Live 9 or Logic Pro X. Live has its own Vinyl Distortion much of a role depends on what instruments you’re programming, and what effect device, which can be useful but isn’t as deep as the Izotope version; I’m genres you’re working with. For a lot of classic band type situations, I keep it still holding out for a 64-bit version one day! very simple: drums in the middle, different percussion sounds with a bit of I have been doing this recently in real-world mixing situations. For one stereo width, as if the percussionist is moving round a big set-up; and guitars project I had a speech sample I wanted to ‘age’, so I used EQ Eight, Glue and synths I usually pan either left or right, wherever there is room in the mix. Compressor, P&M Vinylizer 7 , Waves’ RS56 EQ, and PSP’s MicroWarmer. All of those together got me in the ballpark. I automated the Vinylizer’s on/off where needed so I didn’t get Recording fake crackle through my whole tune. On another project I was MIDI In after a similar result with strings – I used Waves’ NLS Buss Real Time plug-in, Compressor, EQ Eight, Waves’ PuigTec EQP 8 and The best way to begin CLA-76, and another EQ! In the past on other projects I’ve with a realistic MIDI resampled, rendered as audio and reimported and warped, piece is to record it in, instead of using a mouse. captured to other devices and played back in, even recorded Use a MIDI keyboard, from my studio monitors to an iPhone and then imported that drum pads, Push… you can even use your – anything that gives that little bit of sonic distance and computer keyboard, distinction from the original clean sound. although it won’t capture the note velocities. I wouldn’t use this process with every track in a song, and Experiment with different not on every song, because it’s just going to make the whole record quantisation thing sound rough, but used in balance with other more settings before you start! polished sounds, it’s a great textural tool. I know it’s adding another level of stuff you have to deal with, but no matter how harmonically or rhythmically refined your programming is, and no matter how good the source sounds are, you will definitely raise the level of your finished programming by putting some effort into getting away from the ‘MIDI file playback’ syndrome. It’s one of the biggest and best changes you can make when you’re creating your own programmed parts.

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Liven Up Your Programmed MIDI Drums

You’ve programmed a bunch of MIDI drum clips but they’re still not rocking. Start from there…

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Over time you’ll be able to hear the kit’s velocity changes clearly. Let’s add a Groove as well – try the MPC 16 Funker 55 in the Core Library’s Swing and Groove folder. Live’s grooves contain both velocity and timing information, but as we’ve already loaded the Velocity effect, leave the Groove’s velocity setting at 0.

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Use the MIDI drum beat in the ‘before’ group in the example Live set on the DVD. We’ll try a few techniques to make this sound more like real drums. There are three other MIDI tracks in there for you to practise on as well – percussion, upright bass, and piano. Experiment with all of them.

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Our example beat has a constant velocity of 127; not realistic for an acoustic kit. You could draw velocity changes, but that won’t sound right either, because the variations simply loop around. Load the Velocity MIDI effect’s Add Some Random preset, set the Out Hi control to 110, and the Random value to around 12/13.

One thing with grooves is that you can’t edit the controls for individual clips; changes apply to every instance of that groove in your set. This is another reason why I use the Velocity effect device, with slightly different settings for each instrument track – for example 110 drums, 113 percussion, 101 bass, and 80 piano.

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A good reverb transforms drums, putting them in a realistic space. Live’s Reverb device has some good presets; try Storage Space. If you have Max for Live, you get much better results with Convolution Reverb; try Real Places/Wood Room Small. Our example set contains both reverbs on separate return tracks.

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Dr Beat with Ronan Macdonald #02

The flam

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It’s time to give your drum fills a shot of rudimental power Ronan Macdonald Having previously served as Editor of drummer’s bible Rhythm as well as Computer Music, Ronan is clearly the right man for this particular gig. He’s been playing drums for over 30 years and making music with computers since the 90s.

>Step by step

The humble flam. Surely the most elementary of all drum rudiments, yet also probably the most frequently deployed – and cetainly the most hard-hitting. Nothing more than a pair of hits, the second a little bit louder than the first, so close together as to almost sound like a single stroke, the flam is easy to play, easy to program, and makes an effective tool for accenting and adding emphasis. Perhaps the most famous example of the flam in a rock drumming context is the intro to Guns N’ Roses’ Paradise City, in which drummer Steven Adler nails the backbeat to the floor with both hands. At first, the flam is used simply to lay down beats 2 and 4; but they continue to crop up

See it in video and get the tutorial files on your PC/Mac at vault.computermusic.co.uk

throughout the track within fills; and we’re going to look at just that: how flams can be used to make drum fills more interesting and dynamic. Flams are mostly played on the snare drum. The key to realistically emulating flams is making sure the hits don’t sound identical – ie, avoiding the machine gun effect from using a sampled sound source with no ‘round-robin’ multisampling. If your drum kit ROMpler suffers from this, find a secondary snare sound similar in tone and pitch to the main one, and use that for the first hit of the flam. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of getting your positioning and velocities right, and making sure you don’t double your flams up with anything else that would require the drummer’s hands.

Using flams in drum fills

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Here’s a four-bar programmed drum groove triggering Battery 4 (the Session LE Kit, specifically). I’m going to use flams as the basis for a simple fill at the end of bar 2, and to greatly increase the impact of the three climactic snare hits at the end of bar 4, which are currently sounding a bit half-hearted.

The snare hits at the end of the phrase will sound much more powerful as flams. Repeating the process described in steps 2 and 3 for all three hits does the trick, and shifting their timings separately ups the realism. Simultaneously struck hi-hats need to be removed again, although the hats in between can stay.

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Placing a hit immediately before the last snare hit in bar 2 creates the basic flam. The first stroke of a flam is slightly weaker, so I lower the velocity of the newly added MIDI note a touch. This kit doesn’t feature round-robin multisampling, so I use a different (but similar enough) snare sound from another note.

Hitting the kick drum a 16th-note after a flam is always a winner (Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit stands as definitive proof), so I move the kick drums in between the snares around – and add a few more. A final kick at the very end of the bar tops off what is now a muscular, driving fill.

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The placement of the two hits on the timeline can have a huge effect on the groove, so play around with their spacing and positioning until you get a feel you like. A flam requires both hands, so deleting simultaneous hi-hat hits is essential for realism. Adding a couple of snare hits after the flam finishes off this intermediate fill.

Flams can sound awesome split between two drums. Moving the first stroke in each flam down to the floor tom and maximising the velocity adds even more weight. Moving all of the hi-hats in that section down to the floor tom replicates the way a drummer might ‘ride’ the drum in this kind of fill.

NEXT MONTH Programming linear drumming for clear, mixable beats

MTF Technique The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 1

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live, Part 1

Ableton Live: the inside track

Ableton Live’s popularity continues to grow, and if you’re a recent convert and want to get a quick handle on it you’ve come to the right place, as Martin Delaney is here to demonstrate its power…

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bleton Live has been around for over ten years now, but sometimes it still feels like the new kid on the block, remaining fresh, innovative and deceptively simple to use. The Session View and warping are what make Live truly unique – the competition has had a decade to try and catch up, but still hasn’t really managed to. Live keeps growing in popularity, too, with new users coming on board every year, so now seems like a good time to go right back to the start and write a guide that unearths the reasons for the software’s popularity while exploring its hidden (and not-so-hidden) depths.

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

Live can be easy to learn, and is a fully functional tool for music creation and performance Live can be easy to learn and it’s a hell of a lot of fun, but it’s not a toy – this is a fully-functional tool for music creation, production and performance. You’ll see Live on stages and in studios around the world, and this series will explain why it has become such a force in the DAW world.

All in one Live’s single window design contains all of the elements that you need to get going, and most of them can be shown/hidden by keyboard shortcuts to make the best of your available screen space. (Live also supports dual displays, where you can view Arrangement and Session Views simultaneously.) The triangle at the top left of the screen toggles the Browser, which is where you need to be to load samples, instruments and effects. Other elements include the Mixer, the Overview, Sends, Return Tracks, In/Out View

(signal routing) and the Detail View, which is where you’ll see either clip contents or instruments and effects. The keyboard shortcut you need for all of these is alt-cmd followed by the appropriate letter for the element. So alt-cmd-m toggles the mixer, alt-cmd-i toggles the In/Out View, and so on (though it’s ‘l’ for the Detail View – I guess they ran out of letters!).

Just looking I’ve already mentioned the Browser, and on a day-to-day basis this is your one-stop shop for software instruments and effects and their presets, as well as audio sample content. Live will install with tons of content anyway, but you can add more at any time. Of course you can record and program your own content, but Live Packs are a great way to gather more material. (They’re like Ableton-specific .zip files, and Live Packs from Ableton or other suppliers will install their contents directly into your Library, appearing in the Packs section of the Browser.) You can also create shortcut links to your own folders outside of the Live Library, which is useful if you like to keep your full-length songs in iTunes, for example. Once you have a lot of material in there sometimes it’s faster to search for what you want instead of scrolling through huge lists and sub folders (as long as you have an idea of what it’s called). For those times you can use Live’s search function, the Browser doesn’t even have to be open, just hit cmd-f and begin typing the name of what you’re looking for – the Browser will open, and a list of results will begin to filter itself as you type. Then use your keyboard’s arrow and

FOCUS ON… VIEWS When you’re new to Live, the first thing that’ll trip you up is the Views. With other DAWs (digital audio workstations), there’s a timeline, where the music flows left to right from beginning to end, and that’s it. Live has that too – the Arrangement View – but the most unique thing about Live is the Session View, which is a vertically scrolling grid. This busts you out of the timeline constraints so you’re free to improvise with the material inside the grid, ie, your clips. Actually, you can use both Views at once, for ultimate power, but we’ll talk about that another time…

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The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 1 Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Set up your soundcard and controller

You probably have a MIDI controller and an audio interface (soundcard) that you want to use with Live. The specifics of setting them up varies according to which ones you have, but here are the basics.

Connect your controller by USB. Install any drivers needed (most controllers are class-compliant, though), launch Live and go to Preferences/MIDI Sync. Select your controller as a MIDI input source for Track and Remote.

Click on the Control Surfaces list at the top – if your controller’s listed in there it will have a certain amount of built-in control over Live without you having to configure anything further.

Close Preferences, and type cmd-m to enter MIDI Map Mode. Anything blue can be controlled by MIDI. Click a parameter then move a knob or fader on your hardware to assign it.

Use cmd-m to exit MIDI Map Mode when you’re done. Now when you move your hardware control the on-screen one moves too! You can assign one hardware control to multiple objects in Live.

Connect your soundcard while your speakers are turned off, and install any necessary drivers. Open Live’s Preferences and select it as Input and Output device in the Audio tab.

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enter keys to select and load the item you were looking for. It’s a very fast way to get around! As an Ableton Certified Trainer I spend a lot of time dealing with buying advice to do with soundcards and controllers. I don’t want to be a party pooper, but usually my advice is to wait as long as possible before choosing a controller, because your ideas about what’s right for you

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will change fast as you get to know Live. So for now, if you’ve got an old MIDI keyboard lying around, work with that to get started.

Switching sides Live isn’t only picking up new users, it’s gathering converts from other DAWs such as Logic, Reason and Pro Tools. If FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 1

MTF Step-by-Step The basics of launching clips

Open the example Live set on the MusicTech DVD – it’s called TUGTAL1. Make sure you’re looking at the Session View with the grid – use the tab key to move between Views.

Track 1 contains a white clip called Beat, which is a drum loop. Click on the small triangle at the left of the clip to launch it. Now it’ll loop forever unless you stop it!

Stop it by clicking the square in any empty slot below that clip, or on the track stop button at the bottom of the track. Control the volume by moving the volume fader up and down.

You can change the clip’s launch behaviour from the Launch box. If you can’t see it, double-click on the clip and click the small black L button near the lower left of the screen.

Experiment with different Launch Modes as you launch and re-launch the clip. Mix and match with different quantization settings from the box below that and you start to see how clips can be quite organic!

Change the project bpm at the top left of the screen, and your loop speeds up or slows down without changing pitch or tripping over itself as it loops round. This is warping (timestretching) at work.

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you’re coming to Live from another application, you’ll need to undergo a period of adjustment. Live is like those programs in some ways, but very different in others, and it can be frustrating at first. But be patient, it’ll be worth it! Live comes in three flavours: Intro, Standard and Suite (currently at version 9). Increasing in price, each version has

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different features, so check the handy comparison chart on www.ableton.com. There’s an upgrade path, so if at any time you want to step up you needn’t pay to start all over again. Prices are also lower if you purchase the download versions rather than boxed discs. Occasionally you’ll find other versions of Live bundled with third-party hardware

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The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 1 Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step How to program a simple beat

Live also enables us to work with MIDI, programming our own parts as well as using audio from other sources. Let’s add some more electronic-sounding drums. Track 2 contains Live’s Core 808 drum kit.

Double-click the clip slot at the top of the track to create an empty one-bar clip. Launch this, even though it’s empty. Your Track 1 clip will play too, unless you stop it.

Double-click the clip to view the MIDI Editor. The left side of the editor displays the names of the sounds in the kit. The grid is numbered with beats and 16th notes.

Preview the 808 kit sounds by clicking the preview button (headphone icon) at the top of the list, and clicking in the boxes next to each sound. Turn off preview when you’ve done this, though.

Let’s add a kick part. While the clip’s playing, double-click in the grid on 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 in alignment with the kick on the left. The notes will trigger as the clip loops.

Draw a snare at 1.2 and 1.4, and cowbells at 1.2.3 and 1.3.3. Scroll if you can’t see the entire kit. Click the Dupl Loop button in the Notes box, then draw another snare at 2.4.3.

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such as keyboards and so on and branded with the manufacturer’s logo, so be aware that they might have different features as well. This is mostly a thing of the past, as I believe Ableton has standardised these bundled editions. If you can’t decide which version you want, or whether you want to buy Live at all, download the demo and give it a spin – it’s fully functional for 30 days,

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effectively making it the Suite version. Our walkthroughs take you through the simple process of configuring your controller and audio interface, launching your first clip, and programming your first beat. Have fun with these first steps – you’re entering an exciting world! MTF Martin’s Ultimate Guide To Ableton Live continues over the page. FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 2: Beginning a Live project with drums

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live, Part 2

Beginning a Live project with drums Ableton Live is fantastic for drum programming; it has all the tools you need, and it’s easy to get started. Martin Delaney counts you in…

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ast time round we gave ourselves an introduction to the basics of Ableton Live – the interface, key commands, clip launching – before programming our first little MIDI drum beat, using Live’s Core 808 kit. Now we’re moving on to a new project, one that we can work on over a few simple instalments, building it into a self-contained set that will include all the tips and material referred to in the tutorials. We’ll begin by going back to drum programming, to create a beat that’ll be the foundation of our new project. Most music projects begin with a beat, even if it’s simply

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

No matter how focused you are on electronic beats, you’ll still work with acoustic sounds acting as a glorified click track for the recording of live instruments. We’re going to use an acoustic drum kit, in the shape of Live’s Kit Core Session Dry. No matter how focused you are on electronic beats, you’ll still be working with acoustic sounds, and their playing and programming techniques. A clean acoustic kit is also a better way to illustrate MIDI programming tweaks and audio effect usage, instead of one that loads with a lot of effects in place before you start. Our tutorial will skim through the fundamentals of Live beat production – including creating clips, programming beats, customising drum racks and adding audio effects. For this, we’re working in Session View because the loop-based workflow is ideal for programming beats – at times like this you just want the part in focus to keep looping round while you edit it, which makes things a lot

more simple by freeing you from thinking about structure at this early stage, so you can concentrate on the job in hand: making the best beat possible. A benefit of working with MIDI is that you don’t really have to commit to a fixed tempo until a long way into the production process – and with Live, even when you’re working with audio, you’ve got a lot of freedom with tempo changes thanks to the wonders of warping. It’s also important to remember that you can automate BPM changes in the Arrangement View if you want your music to breathe a bit.

Get kitted out In the interests of compatibility, I’m using one of the standard Live library drum kits for the tutorial, but there’s no need to limit yourself to this as there are many more Live Packs available which feature great sounding kits, whether you’re looking for acoustic or electronic sounds – you’ll find some on the Ableton website (the Session Drums pack is a good example), as well as through third-party providers. When you’re browsing the Library drum kits, you can audition each kit without loading it; either click the Preview button that sits just below the Browser, or simply right-arrow on your computer keyboard to hear a brief sample of the kit sound (this only works with the Live factory sounds). Along the way we’ll be adding two little samples – just to let you know that this is possible! We set Record Quantization to Sixteenth-Note, though you’ll change this on a project-specific basis depending on the part you’re recording. If you forget to enable quantization, you can use Cmd-U to quantize the recorded notes, so you

DO YOU REALLY NEED DRUM PADS TO PROGRAM BEATS? In a word, no! But a sensible answer takes longer – you can program MIDI beats perfectly well using a computer mouse or trackpad, but that doesn’t always get you in the mood. We can play in drum hits using Live’s computer MIDI keyboard for starters, then the options ramp up after that: from MIDI keyboard to MIDI drum pads, culminating in a more dedicated device such as Ableton’s Push. Never mind the funny keyboard-in-a-grid gimmick, if there’s one thing Push is good for, it’s creating drum parts! Velocity-sensitive pads, step sequencing, device control… it’s all there.

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Part 2: Beginning a Live project with drums Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Making a beat with Ableton Live

Open our example set – TUGTAL2. Look at the Session View: a timeline gets in the way when you’re building beats (we want them to loop indefinitely) and there are some clips there!

Enter a bpm value in the tempo box near the top left of the screen. We could use any value from 20-999 bpm, but let’s agree on 126 for now – a little bit upbeat.

Type Cmd-F to search, and start typing ‘Kit-Core SessionDry’. When you see the kit in the ever-updating list, navigate to it with the computer keyboard’s down arrow and hit Enter to load it.

This is an acoustic drum kit, as you’ll hear when you audition the sounds from your MIDI controller (arm the track first), or from the triangular preview buttons in each cell in the drum rack.

We want to add one electronic sound now, so drag the audio sample we’ve called ‘Noise’ on to the Conga cell in the drum rack – that’ll replace the original sample. Drum racks contain 128 cells.

Double-click in the top clip slot in your drum track. This automatically creates a 1-bar MIDI clip. Turn on the metronome as well. Launch the empty clip. All you’ll hear is the metronome.

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don’t have to record them again, with an Amount control that lets you blend in the amount of correction. When you’re working in the MIDI Note Editor, you can navigate note pitches by simply clicking and dragging up/ down on the piano roll at the left, and you can zoom in and out by clicking and dragging left/right at the same spot. You

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can also expand the editor upwards by mousing over the border at the top, where you’ll see the pointer icon changes into a dragging tool – and you can scale the editor upwards so it fills the screen, which makes it easier to work with. The way I like to work when I’m creating a drum track is to add variations and breaks in the programming of the FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 2: Beginning a Live project with drums

MTF Step-by-Step Making a beat with Ableton Live… cont’d

You should now be viewing the MIDI Note Editor grid. If not, click the device view selector at the bottom right. Time to draw the beat. Enter the notes by double clicking in the grid.

As the clip loops around, draw kicks at 1, 1.1.3, 1.3, and 1.3.3. Refer to our screenshot – draw the hi hats, noise and snare as you see there. That’s a 1/16th note grid.

Now we have enough activity, we don’t need the metronome – turn it off. Drag our ‘Tambourine’ clip onto the Cowbell cell in the rack. Let’s record the tambourine in real-time, just for the practice.

to the Edit menu and find Record Quantization. Set it to 10 Go Sixteenth-Note Quantization. This will tighten up the timing when

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Arm the track (the red button lit at bottom), then find the key or pad for the tambourine. Click the Session Record button in the Control Bar, and playback begins; the clip play button is red.

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notes, but to use the Velocity MIDI Effect Device for dynamic variations – this keeps them randomising across the length of the track. We’ll offset the snare hits a bit, which is what real (good) drummers do to vary the feel of what they’re playing. This is part of what Live’s Grooves do as well – you can find them if you look under Packs/Core Library/Swing and Groove. If you use these carefully you

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we play in our live tambourine part – it saves editing time later!

Now you’re recording! As the loop plays, add a tambourine hit on each beat. They’re overdubbed over the other parts, nothing’s overwritten. Because Record Quantization is on, the timing of your tambourine is corrected automatically.

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can impart a ‘human’ feel in your beats. Most of us will probably be working in 4/4 time, but don’t forget that Live can easily handle more complex time signatures, and even time signature changes can be automated, so don’t limit yourself to the ones that feel safe. Live’s drum kits are usually based on drum racks, but it’s worth remembering that the good ol’ Impulse drum

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11/02/2015 15:37

Part 2: Beginning a Live project with drums Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Making a beat with Ableton Live … cont’d

Press Stop or the spacebar. Now we have a 1-bar beat, but if you click the Dupl Loop button in the Loop Box, you get an instant two bars! Add some more kicks at the end of bar 2.

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We can tweak the beat’s timing, to take the edge off the tempo. Drag the snare hits to the right, but only a tiny bit, so they sound like they’re dragging behind the beat.

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sound flat unless they’re located in some kind of room 17 Drums space, so add the Audio Effect preset Reverb/Room/Ambience to

the track after the rack. Set the Dry/Wet mix to 30%.

sample player is still there. This is a basic beat-making tool, but it’s great if you’re building your own electronicallyoriented kits and you want to limit your options.

Making tracks Next time we’ll be treating beats more aggressively – taking audio samples of drum loops and slicing and

For live-sounding drums you need velocity changes. Find the MIDI Effect preset Velocity/Add Some Random, and drag to the drum track. These variations are too extreme, so raise Out Low to 110.

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the Simple Delay from the Audio Effects Browser straight on 16 Drag to the drum cell that contains the ‘noise’ sample. Set the Dry/Wet

to 20% – this gives a little extra rhythmic value to that sound!

We can use a compressor to fatten up our beat (we’ll be coming back to compressors later). Find the preset Compressor/Mildly Aggressive and drag it on to your track. It should sound punchier…

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processing them, and laying that on top of the beat we’ve created. In part 4 we’ll then be adding bass and keyboard parts to the project to create an entire track. And don’t forget to look at our example Live set on the DVD this issue, which contains the raw material that we’ve used in this tutorial plus the remaining four tutorials coming up! MTF FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 3: Processing your beats

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 3

Processing your beats

In Part 2 of the Ultimate Live Guide we built a nice, clean MIDI beat with a few realistic variations, but now Martin Delaney explains how to dirty it up!

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n our last tutorial, we began a new Live project and created a beat using one of Live’s more acoustic, natural-sounding kits. All good but now we’re going to cannibalise that beat in two different ways - we’ll duplicate and process it to create a new tuned percussion part that plays over the top, and we’ll also convert that original beat to audio, before slicing it up for yet more processing, removing some of the slices

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

There’s no right or wrong with the beats you use as long as they are right for the project completely and replacing them with totally different sounds. There’s no right or wrong about the type of drum sounds you use; what matters is they’re right for the project you’re working on at the time. Truthfully in most genres these days, you’ll be working with many drum tracks playing in parallel, combining acoustic and electronic sounds. Dance music tracks are typically based on core drum kits derived from the classic drum machines of old, the Roland TR-808 and TR-909, but these sounds will be customised, processed with audio effects, and often layered alongside more realistic percussion sounds for a richer texture. As well as mixing and matching source kits, there’s a lot of leeway with sample resolution and sound quality; you can build a kit that includes nice high resolution drum hits alongside grungy little samples that you’ve grabbed from an MP3, YouTube, or you’ve resampled from a little dictating recorder. Mix and match - that’s what it’s all about. During the tutorial we talk about freezing and flattening tracks - this retains each separate clip within

the track, which is incredibly useful. Just be aware that Flatten is destructive - your original track is gone! What I usually do is duplicate the track, then create a group track called ‘Spare’ which I use to contain all of the original versions of my frozen tracks. You’ll notice that every clip in a flattened track is double the length of the original source clip - this is a feature not a bug(!), designed to accommodate effect tails at the end of loops - this makes sense because it’s quite annoying to hear a reverb tail cut off and begin again as a sample loops. If you’re obsessive about house-cleaning, which I am, you can use the crop sample command to put your clip back to its original length. We added the Resonator effect to our new percussion track. I love the Resonator, it has quite a distinctive sound, although that means that sometimes you have to tweak it somewhat to get something different. It’s very important to use that Note control though, and make sure it’s pitched correctly to fit in with your other parts - things can get a bit discordant otherwise. Having programmed and customised a beat earlier, we’re now converting it to audio and beginning the process all over again, slicing it up and adding different sounds and effects. We’re doing this because I want to show you the very cool ‘Slice to New MIDI Track’ command, and also because it’s another interesting creative step you can take. Even when you’re working with something you’ve programmed yourself, you can give it more of a ‘sampled’ vibe by converting it to audio and slicing it up. It makes you use different tools in different ways. ‘Slice to New MIDI

FOCUS ON… QUANTIZATION Sometimes Live treats audio and MIDI in similar ways. An example of this is quantization. We discussed this for MIDI already, but we can also do it with audio samples – a very powerful feature. Try the sample in our example Live set, Loose Beat. Double-click the clip to see the waveform – you’ll see it’s not exactly in time and we can fix this. Right-click inside the waveform and type Cmd-U. You’ll see the peaks in the waveform snap to the grid. Cool! To change the quantization values, use Shift-Cmd-U to access the quantization settings.

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12/02/2015 12:22

Part 3: Processing your beats Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Processing your beats

Open our example set - TUGTAL3. Select the drum track and type Cmd-D to duplicate. Right-click the new track, choose Freeze Track, then right-click again and choose Flatten, creating an audio version of the track.

Freeze and Flatten makes double-length audio clips – this helps handle effect tails and the like. Use the Loop Brace, Start Marker, and Crop Sample command to cut the clip back to the original length.

Set the new drum audio clip to Beats Warp mode if it isn’t already, then go down to the bottom of the Warp controls and choose the top arrow icon, pointing to the right only.

This deactivates the Transient Loop mode, which determines how the gaps between slices in Beats mode are handled. While the loop’s running, click and drag downwards in the adjoining box to reduce the decay between slices.

It sounds cool, yes? It’s gating the waveform’s transients. Drag right down to 0 for a delicious clicky part, then use the Transpose knob at the left to raise it by 24 semitones or two octaves.

Go to the Audio Effects category in the Browser and add the Resonator preset called Berlin to the track. Set the Note inside Resonator to E2, then try setting the Dry/Wet mix at 35%.

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Track’ is great if you have a beat from another record, and you want to edit the arrangement, or tweak or even replace some of the sounds in the sample; putting a compressor on the kick in a sample loop is a good example. I also like to use lo-fi effects such as Redux, Erosion, and Cabinet to dirty things up a bit. The correct technical term for the

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slices made by this command, as they’re created and placed in a rack, is ‘chains’. Dragging samples or instruments to replace slices is a big thing; you can take a loop from an old record and totally replace the kick or snare with another sample. Or as we touched on here, drag in an instrument. The slice will be replaced, and the FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 3: Processing your beats

MTF Step-by-Step Processing your beats... cont’d

Now you’ve created a melodic percussion part by tweaking your original beat. Live is great for recycling your audio and MIDI parts! It is definitely possible to make an entire tune from one source sample.

Uh, maybe we’re getting bored with the original beat now – it sounds quite flat against the Resonator percussion track. Let’s put it through the wringer taking it on a gratuitous journey of sonic dismemberment.

Right-click the track containing that original beat and choose Freeze Track. Right-click again and choose Flatten. The MIDI track’s disappeared! Freeze/Flatten is destructive – that’s why we copied the track when we did it before.

This is just a fun way to mess with your parts as we want a different vibe. Crop the new clip down to only two bars. Rightclick on it and choose Slice To New MIDI Track.

Choose the 1/8 Slicing option from the new window. Now you have a new MIDI track and clip. Perverse, isn’t it? Launch the clip – it should sound pretty much the same as the original.

This operation has sliced the audio clip, and made a new drum rack, with a different instance of Simpler for each slice. It’s also automatically created a MIDI clip, with a note for each slice.

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instrument will play as the clip loops. You can build really interesting loops by adding soft synths, audio effects… really taking it on to another level. If you’re ever following a drum rack tutorial and you’re not seeing everything, make sure to click on the black buttons at the bottom left of the rack – these will show

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and hide the various elements that make up the rack, including input/output routing, effect sends and returns (yes you can have these in a drum rack), and of course the macros, chains, and devices. If you really want to go big with elaborate evolving beats, you can start using automation as well. This is a real

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12/02/2015 12:23

Part 3: Processing your beats Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Processing your beats... cont’d

Audition the slices from your MIDI controller, or from your computer keyboard (Shift-Cmd-K to activate that), or enable Preview for the clip (the headphone icon) and click on each note to hear it.

Effectively we’ve sampled ourselves. Experiment with dragging the notes around the editor grid, to see what happens; you can take any beat and reorganise it to fit your song, this is one of Live’s top features!

Not only can we reorganise the notes, we can tweak each slice. Give the kick a little bump by dragging the Compressor preset Brick Wall onto slices 1, 5, 9 and 13 in the clip.

Now we turn our attention to the snare. Drag the Ping Pong Delay onto slice 3, the first snare in the clip. Wow! That’s too much. Dial the Dry/Wet control down to 30%.

Delays are a great way to change the rhythm of your beats. Onwards. We have another sample, called ‘bass note E’. Drag it onto slice 7. It automatically creates a Simpler instrument to contain it!

Doing that automatically replaces the original slice – now you have a bass note hitting alongside the beat. Click on the track name, type Cmd-R, and rename the track ‘Sliced beat’. That’s it for now.

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opportunity to go nuts, because you can automate every device in every chain in the rack, and that can be hundreds of parameters. And of course you can separate the length of the automation loop from the clip length (with the Link button), and do that individually for each parameter, so warn your friends and family that you’re going to disappear

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for a few weeks! That’s all we have room for now and we haven’t even mentioned the totally awesome ‘Convert Audio to Drums’ command. That will have to wait for another tutorial. Turn to p34 where we use the Simpler instrument and MIDI Effect devices to add some bass to our beats.. MTF FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 4: Let’s make some bass

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 4

Let’s make some bass

On the disc

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…

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oday we’re adding a bass part, ideally one that somehow fits 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 fingers,

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

FOCUS ON… REAL BASS The 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!

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Accompanying project file included on the DVD

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 fixed 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 sampler Simpler 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 filters 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:

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11/02/2015 15:46

Part 4: Let’s make some bass Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Making some bass

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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,

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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… FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 4: Let’s make some bass

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let’s raise the sine volume inside Simpler to 0 dB – Simpler and Sampler always default to -12 dB, I guess to protect us from ourselves! You can keep tweaking the levels as you go on.

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.

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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

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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. MTF

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11/02/2015 15:47

Part 4: Let’s make some bass Technique MTF

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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MTF Technique Part 5: Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 5

Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it… 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.

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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 fine too as it’s merely a vehicle for us to introduce the core techniques of using Ableton Live.

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

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

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 find 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

FOCUS ON… THE HARDWARE In this tutorial we’re building a keyboard sound based on a sample from a Waldorf Pulse Plus, a hardware, rack-mount, synth first 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.

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Part 5: Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Keyboards and sidechaining

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 in the near future. 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

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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 FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 5: Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it

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

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.

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%.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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a source for a sidechain, that’s why we’ve copied the drum 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

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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

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Part 5: Make your own keyboard sound & sidechain it Technique MTF

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

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.

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.

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 CmdClicking on each item.

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.

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.

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.

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keyboards and who understands musical theory, Live is a great tool for you anyway, especially with ‘alternative’ input devices like Push and the forthcoming 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

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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. MTF FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 6: Recording and manipulating speech samples

Ableton Live The Ultimate Guide to Ableton Live Part 6

Recording and manipulating speech samples Time to do some audio recording. Get mic’d up - Martin Delaney will show you how to add some speech samples to our ongoing Live project.

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o 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

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

On the disc Accompanying project file included on the DVD

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 files 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 find 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 flexibility of a soundcard. There’s also

FOCUS ON… THE MICROPHONE It’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 specific 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 fine.

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Part 6: Recording and manipulating speech samples Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Recording and editing speech

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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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

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– 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 FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Technique Part 6: Recording and manipulating speech samples

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

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!

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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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Part 6: Recording and manipulating speech samples Technique MTF

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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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

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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! MTF FOCUS Ableton Live 2015

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MTF Feature A bluffer’s guide to EQ

MTF Feature EQ Guide

A BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO EQ This is what a boost in the highs looks like. Our node is at about 5kHz, and we’ve got a very high Q. Expect seriously snappy snares here.

The first step in becoming a mix master is getting to grips with the simplest of tools at your disposal: EQ. Rob Boffard shows you how to bring balance to your musical force…

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he Equaliser, or EQ, is the Tetris of audio effects. You’ll figure out how it works in seconds, but it takes an age to master. No other effect, if used subtly, can make such a dramatic difference to your sound. If you know what you’re doing with an EQ it’ll make your mixes sound as if they’ve popped out of a top-of-the-range studio. Conversely, there is no other effect that, when mishandled, can screw up your mixes so badly. A heavy or badly managed hand with EQ can wreck a good song. Don’t stress, though. EQ may sound intimidating but in practice it’s not difficult to get the hang of. Give us a few minutes with this guide and we’ll show you exactly what you need to know about this powerful effect.

What’s the frequency? Let’s start with the basics. Sounds have frequency, right? It’s the part of sound that is measured in pitch. A high pitch, or high frequency, means that the sound waves are packed closely together and hit your eardrum more frequently than sounds with a lower pitch. A low frequency is the opposite, where sound waves are spaced further apart. That means your eardrum hears those sounds as low-pitched. If that sounds hard to handle, think of it this way: a violin has a high-frequency sound; a bass drum has a low frequency. An EQ enables you to boost or reduce those frequencies. You can make the

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A bluffer’s guide to EQ Feature MTF

bass louder, the highs higher. You can also cut that bass, or remove some of the high frequencies so things don’t get too sharp. In a full song where you have any number of different sounds, all with their own frequencies, this is an exceedingly important technique. You’d be hard-pressed to find a music session that didn’t have some EQ Your basic paragraphic EQ. Note the individual nodes (each of them draggable), the frequencies along the top, and the decibels on the left. in it somewhere. Frequencies are measured in Hertz (Hz), named for Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, who was the first to Tech terms identify electromagnetic waves. Humans can hear only a certain range of FREQUENCY: The frequencies, from as low as 20Hz to as high as about 20,000. Dogs, obviously, can vibrations in sound hear much higher, but since they aren’t great music fans the 20-20,000 range is that determine its what you’ll see on most EQ displays. This range is known as the frequency pitch. You can also spectrum. Again, instruments such as bass drums are down low, violins up high, use this as a distinct measurement – as in, it the human voice somewhere in the middle. has a low frequency, or a Instruments can possess more than one frequency. Indeed they have ranges of frequency of 50Hz. their own. Think of a kick drum. Sure, you’ve got the big, bassy boom which will show up at around 200Hz, but you’ve also got the ‘snap’ as the beater hits the surface, which registers much higher in the spectrum at around 2,5kHz to 4kHz. What you’re trying to do is lower or raise the volume of these frequencies to bring out, or reduce, a sound’s desired characteristics. Here’s a pro tip for you: when talking frequencies and EQ, don’t talk about bass or treble. Talk about highs, mids and lows.

Revert to type So what exactly are you going to see when you bring in your EQ? Well, that depends. There are a few types of equalisation, some of which are more useful than others, and it’s worth going through them all. First, you’ve got your fixed EQ, the most basic of all the types. Essentially it gives you a bunch of controls – knobs, usually – each set to a specific frequency. You can’t change that frequency, but you can raise and lower the gain (read: volume) for each one. Then you’ve got your graphic EQs. Instead of the few controls you’d get in the fixed EQ you’ve now got dozens, usually appearing as faders instead of knobs. Each one of them is still locked to a specific frequency and you can still raise and lower the gain as before, but what this EQ does is enable you to create ‘curves’ by setting the faders in increments. You usually see this sort of EQ on an old HiFi, and frankly, they’re a pain to work with. Paragraphic EQs are what you want. Now you don’t have fixed frequencies; instead, your EQ display will have nodes, each of which can be dragged to any frequency you want. You can raise or lower each node to change the gain, and (this is the clever bit) adjust its ‘Q’ to change the shape of the curve. The lower the Q, the more space there will be under your EQ curve, which means more frequencies will be boosted or cut. It’ll look like a hump. Raise the Q, and you’ll get a spike, with far fewer frequencies affected by the boost or cut.

Instruments can have more than one frequency. Indeed they have ranges of their own

HERTZ: The unit used to measure frequencies. Named for Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Most EQs go from 20 to 20,000Hz, and it’s not uncommon to see the latter abbreviated as 20kHz, or KiloHertz. GAIN: Simplified, gain is volume. It can be raised to boost a frequency or lowered to cut it. It’s measured in decibels, or dB. Q: The width of the space under an EQ curve. No, we don’t know why it’s called Q. Doesn’t matter. You’ll want to pay close attention to it.

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MTF Feature A bluffer’s guide to EQ

When it comes down to it that’s all the controls you ever need worry about with EQ: frequency, gain, Q. Go try it out now. Load a track into your DAW and start playing. Like Tetris, you’ll figure it out straightaway. We promise. OK, there are one or two more things to bear in mind. Most of the time EQs will include what are known as high- and low-pass filters. A high-pass filter is a specific type of gain cut that removes all frequencies below a certain point. In other words it lets you eliminate the lows. The opposite is true for a low-pass filter, which gets rid of the highs. This is useful when you’re doing things such as EQing vocals – with so few bass frequencies in them there’s often no need to have any lows at all, and so a high-pass filter will get rid of them for you. Handily, this can also help eliminate background hum. You also get shelving filters. Essentially they’re a stripped-down version of the high- and low-pass filters, which cut or boost the frequencies in far less dramatic fashion. Some EQs provide a subtle colour or warmth to the sound when used. It’s pretty cool. If you don’t want that then consider investing in a linear or transparent EQ, which will do nothing but boost and cut your frequencies without colouring your sound.

A high-pass filter. Any and all frequencies under about 700Hz will be cut. This is very useful for elements such as vocals or strings.

have all sorts of other noises to play with. Sounds share frequencies, they don’t exist in a vacuum. Your kick drum and your bassline both have low frequencies, and when they combine one will mask the other. When your sounds start masking each other you’ve got problems. You’ll end up with a muddy, disappointing mix. How do you fix this? You use the EQ to carve out a space for each sound. When your vocals start there shouldn’t be anything else dominating those frequencies, so you can use your nifty paragraphic EQ on instruments that conflict with the vocal and lower the gain in their middle ranges. Now, we can’t teach you how to do this. We can

Make room So you’ve got your EQ. You’ve loaded it up, you understand how Q and gain work, and you’re ready to go. What exactly do you do with it? On an individual level, when applied to a specific, solo’d sound, you’re going to use it to make things sharper. You’re going to use that EQ to take the sound from where it is to where you want it to be. You will boost the frequencies that bring out the sound’s best qualities and cut the ones that muddle it. A big, booming bass drum will not suffer – indeed, will be improved – if you use a shelving filter to remove some frequencies above, say, 15,000Hz. But that’s not difficult. The tricky part is what happens when you un-solo a sound because then you

The only way that you get good at using EQ is by doing lots and lots of mixing

See that greyed-out mountain range? It’s a frequency analyzer. It gives you a visual representation of your sound, showing you the dominant frequencies – useful for EQ.

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teach you how it works but the only way you get good at Tetris is by playing, and the only way you get good at EQ is by doing lots of mixing. You need to learn how different sounds work together and which cuts and boosts you need to bring out their best qualities. You need to listen to a sound – really listen – and discover where its most important frequencies are, as well as the ones which you can cut. That being said, there are a few principals to abide by. Cut first, boost later – often, things can be improved just by dropping the gain in a few places. And be gentle. You don’t need big Q spikes; and if you’re boosting or cutting over -3dB, then you’re going too far. Most of all, remember that EQ doesn’t exist in isolation. You’re going to be using a whole whack of other tools to help you along, such as compression, which we’ll deal with another time… MTF

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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 1: Dubstep bass

Technique A track from scratch: Part 1

Dubstep bass Liam O’Mullane and Christopher Pearson begin a massive tutorial to guide you through the process of creating the harder edge side of this contemporary genre, their first point of call being the fundamentals of bass design…

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ubstep is a genre that’s morphed from its dubbed-out form over the years and since splintered into two distinct camps. For the more meditative and deeper experience, artists such as Burial, Phaeleh and Mala fly the flag, sticking to the genre’s original principles of a mix with depth, space and general musicality. Over the years and more recently in the mainstream, a louder and more aggressive influence has taken hold. The driving force behind this new breed of dubstep include Skrillex, Zomboy, Excision and Flux Pavillion to name a few. Although terms like EDM and brostep are often frowned upon due to their buzzword nature, this is the musical style we are focussing on in this five-part feature.

On the disc Accompanying example audio files included on the DVD

Set your tempo to 140bpm and let’s explore the components of the dirtiest of basslines Like any bass-orientated electronic genre, there are rules that apply across the board in terms of composition and production. These aspects will be highlighted when relevant, but our real aim here is to educate you on the standard tools for crafting a heavy dubstep track, whilst offering a variety of techniques you can use to create

something original. It would be pointless to give you a full how-to on today’s sound as the leading artists will have moved on by the time you’ve learned your trade. Although today’s sound is of importance, do try to keep an open mind and fully explore our suggested practice in your own way. This is key, as a lot of the best ideas and sounds will come from happy accidents and a pursuit for originality. So set your tempo to 140bpm and let’s begin by first defining the essential components for the dirtiest of basslines.

Bass: defined The word ‘bassline’ when used in bass music may differ to your own definition, so it’s important to understand what it means in the context of a dubstep track. Although a sub bass is used to pin various instruments and sounds together – so they have an even sense of low-end weight – what people consider to be the bassline can be a large range of musical, noisy, discordant and SFX sounds. If we break down the elements that form to make a dirty bassline, there are no set rules and this is why experimentation is so important. Though less common in use today, a single bass sound can be the singular feature of a track, but this does require a huge amount of creative programming to give it the variation it needs to hold the listener’s interest. The more common approach today is to work between at least three separate sounds with contrasting timbres, then after

FOCUS ON...GUIDE DRUMS

Though we’re starting our track off from bass-design onwards, it’s good practice to get some basic drums in the mix for a guide as you go. The basic requirements are a kick and snare with some form of cymbals/percussion to add a further sense of rhythm. Anything busier than this could be too much information at this stage and influence your choice of sounds, so remember to try to keep it simple Though your first drum sounds can be sparse, they still need to be appropriate for the genre. Keeping things simple we’ve used a quick double layering technique with an acoustic sounding drum kit from BFD edited to add a sense of space and texture. We’ve then layered synth drum sounds for that much needed weight and impact using Tremor. Our hi-hat has been chosen simply to be clean and minimal. This is all we need to then start creating our first bass elements.

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A track from scratch part 1: Dubstep bass Technique MTF

MTF Step-by-Step Vowel bass foundation with FM synthesis

Not all FM synthesisers are equal and some techniques might translate differently from one to the next. The fundamentals however, are the same. Sytrus is one of our preferred options because it allows control of individual partials (harmonic frequencies above the fundamental).

establishing an initial idea, use internal modulation and automation to twist and take their tone into different areas for maintaining listener interest. Though dirty bass might be fierce and in your face, a constant barrage of a singular distorted synth will lose the listener’s interest quite quickly through monotony. Bass design is about building the right sounds, but before you lay down a single note, you need to be thinking ahead for how you’ll create bass dynamics.

Our first oscillator begins its life as a sine wave-based sub. Sines are a clean source meaning frequency modulation is easy to hear and therefore control in finer detail. The sine is pitched to E1 or 41.2034Hz – this will sound much higher when we apply frequency modulation. The second oscillator’s pitch is the same as the first, but slight detuning can be used to create movement.

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Dynamics When designing a bass sound, asides from the technical starting points we’ll discuss next, be mindful of your options for twisting and turning a sound. When balancing parameters of a synth or subsequent creative audio processing, take note of parameters that create either a subtle or severe timbre shift. These can then be either internally modulated within your synth or sampler so they respond to MIDI note information as you play, or you can program them within your sequencer through automation or MIDI CC data.

The more common approach now is to use at least three sounds for you bass In the interests of workflow, make use of macro options within the instrument itself or your DAW so multiple parameters can be controlled at once. If you don’t decide on the best parameters to modify, or group them up in this way from the start, you’ll soon find yourself swamped with confusing movement data. This will always cause problems when it comes to arrangement and further editing of your track, so do treat this as an essential part of the initial creative process. As the parameter combinations of synths and audio effects are infinite, let’s look at the standard options we always consider when creating a bassline sequence. The first choice is what register you want a sound to live in. Even though the sub bass may stay in the same frequency area, a lot of dynamics can be created by

Our second oscillator is set to modulate the frequency of the first oscillator using a triangle wave. This imposes new harmonics which thicken up the sine wave. If you can control oscillator partials, raise the 32nd to add a new fifth octave pitch to the triangle’s shape. Otherwise, add a 3rd triangle oscillator up by five octaves to modulate the 2nd.

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Moving the modulation amount for the second oscillator will now create a basic vowel sound. Next add another oscillator to create high information for a sense of air. Pitch a different oscillator (we’ve used a square) up by 64 semi-tones and add modulation depth to taste.

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MTF Technique A track from scratch part 1: Dubstep bass

synthesis are used so much in today’s production for dirty-sounding bass. Uneven clusters of harmonic content that are static or move over time are all used against each other to create the type of textures the older generation often dismiss as noise. But it’s this contrast of tuned and none-tuned sounds that are essential in creating aggression, abrasion and a generally up-front energy that still retains a sense of movement and depth.

FM design

Bass Processing

There are two different categories you can put audio processing into when it comes to bass: creative and mixing. Creative processing can be a fundamental part of a sound or punched in on occasion to create a timbre shift for dynamics and variation. Amplitude modulation is a popular choice at the moment and can be achieved through a tremolo effect or LFO controlling a synth’s amplitude. At slower rates you’ll hear a detectable rhythm, but get the rate above 20Hz and you’ll hear a distortion that creates edge with a soft characteristic As long as you’re processing the mid to high frequency part of your bass sounds (i.e. not processing the sub-bass) the options for creative processing are endless. Dry/Wet reverb control, strong phasing, guitar distortion and glitch-like effects are tools which feature in dubstep on a regular basis. So the more you experiment with the less common options, the better. Mix processing involves the use of EQs and dynamics processing to balance each sound to fit comfortably within the track. We generally used multi-band processing that also includes an element of saturation. FabFilter’s Saturn, Image-Line’s Maximus and iZotope’s Alloy 2 are good examples for their sonic quality and

uniqueness in character. This allowed us to firm up certain areas of the frequency spectrum and add harmonic information per-band or mid and side plane as required. For EQ balancing you shouldn’t need to do any major removal work to remove brash frequencies. If you’ve got too much grit, go back to source and find what element of your synth or plug-in chain is creating it and tone it down! Wherever possible we like to group ‘types’ of sound together. Not just for aesthetics and housekeeping but mainly to give groups of sounds their own identity and colour in the mix to help them stand out as a unit. For example, all bass sounds will go to a bass group and be compressed, EQ’d and mastered as a unit. This solidifies its range and defines its space, allowing other groups to cut through around these main bass elements. Bear in mind that it’s always good practice to pick out similar sounds. So rather than grouping everything musical to a single ‘music’ group, think about dividing them by their transient and timbre nature. For example, we wouldn’t group pads and guitars together as they’re so different sonically. If picked instruments are grouped, we can then accentuate frequencies that are plucky with EQ and add transient processing if required.

The sub is essential as it carries the weight of the track and frequencies you want… alternating between a low- and high-pitched instrument. For instance, one sound can be very low-end orientated which leaves space in the mids and top-end of the mix. Another sound can have lots of mid and top info so it’s a fuller-sounding part and the third sound could be scooped in the mids by being a sub with a thin sound that plays towards the top-end of the mix – very much akin to classical music. The nature of each sound’s frequency content is another element to explore for dynamics. Fundamental waveforms – sine, triangle and saw waves – are pure, slightly and very harmonically-based respectively. The harmonics are even so they create a pleasant, defined musical pitch. Square waves also carry pitch clearly, but they consist of odd harmonics which means they sound big and hollow. These waveforms can be used in modern dubstep, but they will be a point of contrast against other, much less musical components. These instruments are a counterpart by being non-musical and noise like. This is a big reason why FM and additive

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To start with a solid foundation, we use a sine wave based oscillator. A pure sinusoidal waveform is the most clean, and therefore most powerful wave we can create and being infinitely smooth, it has nothing but its fundamental frequency to impart. The sub is essential as it carries the weight of the track and the frequencies you want from sub woofers to rattle the audience’s nose cartilage. On its own, a sub instrument can be nice but our examples throughout the article contain sub, mid and high range information. Sometimes we’ll achieve each bass instrument with more than one layered source, but it’s entirely possible to create large and complex patches within a single synthesizer. In this particular genre, FM synthesis seems to be the main staple for

Experiment with different processing on your grouped bass sounds to fill or create space to all sounds as a whole. This will help unify them and put them in their own space within the mix.

When experimenting with audio processing, or any onboard synth modulation, it’s worth trialling a sound to see if it works better when re-sampled into a sampler or kept live. Playback speed alters when playing a sample higher or lower and this adds a character of its own to a bass idea.

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A track from scratch part 1: Dubstep bass Technique MTF

Re-sampling and Slip Editing

A good way to get creative with an existing idea is to re-work it as a new sample. This can be done in various ways depending on the tools available in your DAW. All DAWs can bounce audio and this is the simplest way to re-sample. Once bounced, you can chop and re-edit the sample, or use slip editing to move the start position of the audio within the audio clip. This changes the content but the clip itself stays in place on the grid. This is good way to encounter happy accidents and is most commonly used on long pieces of audio recorded when jamming with a synth and its parameters.

Though we’re focussing on FM synthesis for most of our bass design, additive synthesis is a great option for different textures. It allows complex waveforms to be built from many sine waves just as real sounds are in the natural world. But it’s the unique approach it takes to synthesizing sounds and its interface that will encourage unique results.

Food for thought

bass creation. Because of how FM synthesis works, it becomes very simple to create complex, warped sounds. In fact, even when basses are created in other types of synthesizers, it’s usually an FM technique that will make the sound fit the genre. For instance, NI’s Massive, although subtractive, uses phase modulation to create similar-sounding effects.

FM synthesis allows us to create warped tones – a sine wave adds more harmonics… FM Synthesis allows us to create very warped tones by using oscillators to modulate other oscillators. A sine wave set to modulate another will impart new even harmonics which in turn create a new waveform at the synth’s output. But detuning the modulating oscillator, or changing its wave type, it will venture into noisy and unpleasant timbres. Sweeping the amount of modulation being applied is key to achieving the FM bass sound used countless times in this genre. So be sure to explore tuning, waveform choice, waveform phase and additional oscillator routing to move away from the norm. For example, a few of our bass sounds use ImageLine’s Sytrus with internal modulation amounts being used for movement. After exploring some strongsounding parameters to automate, we then mapped them across an X/Y controller within the synth. These X/Y parameters are then mapped to our host software as two automation lanes to keep life simple. To find the sweet spots of where the X and Y best overlap, we started with random automation data, then fine tuned the automation until we achieved a groove and interesting timbre shift against our varied drum track. To underpin an FM instrument with a clean sine wave to emphasise bass, we can simply enable another operator, set to sine and keep it modulation free. This means we have all elements of the sound available to play in one instrument.

Musical keys

In this first instalment, we’ve covered the very essence of what this genre is about – bass! You should have the tools and basic understanding of FM synthesis to explore or use to try and mimic our example sounds. You can explore different styles of guide drums at this stage to help expose new potential vibes, but let’s not get too committed at this stage. After all, we haven’t explored musicality or thought about song structure and flexibility is a gift at this stage in the process. We’ll next explore where our bass ideas can go while also designing our principle drum sound. MTF Turn over the page for part 2 of Liam and Christopher’s dubstep guide.

Due to the sound-design biased nature of the more extreme end of dubstep, musical keys are difficult to decipher and follow. Pitching sounds, re-sampling them, pitch-bending etc can result in the end result, often venturing into non-western scales and microtuning. But an important factor is the choice of root notes that you base your sub bass around and its closest harmonics. Most club sound systems have a bass roll-off of around 40Hz which means pitching your sub bass any lower than this can cause a less than universal translation from one venue to the next. In some cases this means you’ll hear no sub at all if your choice of key is too low. On the opposite

side of this, going too high can leave your track lacking in any low impact information when compared to other music in the mix. Also bear in mind that sound systems are EQ’d to sound pleasant for their environment and genre; boosts and cuts will be applied in the expected sub area, kicks, snares and even where cymbals are expected to fall. For all of these reasons, bass genre artists have naturally fallen into using the keys of around E, F and G. You can test this phenomena by running reference tracks through a spectrum analyser to study where their keys lie. Even individual sounds are becoming standardised to frequency so mixes tend to have a unified and equally musical sound.

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