Yeah, heh. I actually managed to take some time away from <insert other uninteresting but timeconsuming stuff here> to do a little videotutorial thing for a freeze verb. If you don’t know what that is, think squarepusher snare-tail.

You’ll see  what I mean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS5V2vDEjkU

Have a pleasant day.

- gbsr.

Yeah, I apologise. I managed to get superbusy and in turn never updated this godforsaken blog as promised.

Again.

With that said, here’s another post for you to ponder upon.

Quickie 2: Hearing beyond the sound.

Ok, so in my last Quickie tutorial I talked about utilising Live’s warpengine and follow actions to create percussion sounds for further audio processing, but what if you want to get more indepth with soundlayering and design? Layering sounds takes time and practice and is not generally associated with a quick way of getting a prototype up and running.

Unless ofcourse you know what you are looking for, which is what we will talk about today; Hearing what’s beyond the sound. As you may well know, all sounds can easily be separated and processed via multiband processing and all of that magic, but how in the heck do you know what to do and how in the heck do you know what you are looking for?

Personally, when I start to look for a sample to manipulate I don’t pay much attention to what the sample is at all; I pay attention to the other details, things such as the rhythm, the texture, transients and so on.

Let’s take this shitty break underneath here for example; bland, boring and completely normal. It sounds just like everything else and it generally pretty uninteresting (rightclick, save as..)

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/break_normal.wav

However I do like the rhytm off it, but the actual sample sounds like shit IMO.

So what do we do with it then?

Well, the first would be to apply a bit of an eq curve to get that fancy lo-fi feel to it, like so (and add an limiter to stop the occasional peaks for now):

a little eq goes a long way..

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/break_eq_curve.wav

Sounds better already, although it’s pretty much the same still.

So that rhythm I was talking about, those are the attacks on the percussion hits; I like those, so let’s apply a little gate to taste:

what the title says, pretty much.

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/break_gated.wav

Yeah, got rid of some excess crap, but now it sounds even worse. Fear not, for there is a plan with all this.

What we have now is just the rhythm of the sample and some of the texture (eq’d to taste), so now we have picked out the two most important parts of this particular sample that we liked. Now it’s time to get down to the actual processing stage.

For this particular sample we want some grit, so we make an audio rack with two chains; one dry chain, and one chain with a reverb followed by an overdrive, and finally a compressor after that (click for fullview)

fancy eh.

Sound like this: http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/break_reverb_chain.wav

Slowly getting there, yes?

Let’s move on. The second chain of that reverb rack, let’s place a pingpong and a compressor in there instead and make the delay really really short, for a metallic feedback sound instead, then automate that a bit shall we?

pingpongplongchorusphaserlazersounds.

This sounds as follows:  http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/break_delay_chain.wav

Yeah, this is shaping up pretty nicely, isn’t it?  We should probably do more processing, no?

don't stop the music, etc..

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/break_delay_synth.wav

Did you see what I did there (or hear, as it is heh)?

We now have almost like a synth-sound based upon that rhythm. Infact this is what we were going for the whole time, since the thing that was most interesting for us was the rhythm and the percussive texture. So, let’s add another audiotrack, copy the beat over with the Eq-curve intact and edit that beat a bit, and we end up with this here:

all good things comes in numbers, just look at the number of snares in your typical breakcore song..

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/2_tracks.wav

Of course this is way to similar to the original, but we now have a very solid foundation to work on based entirely upon that rhythm, which inturn set the entire feel of the track. But, hey it’s me, and I’m not done yet

Here’s a particular sample that seems to provide a good basis for the next part; take a good listen to its texture: http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/stupid_melody.wav Reversing it, pitching it up 7 semitones and setting the warpmode to transients (with segments to off) at about 40-ish envelope and the loop to 4 bars results in this fancy little noodle here:

wow, sounds like.. well. crap, really. fun, but crap heh.

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/stupid_melody_4bar_loop.wav

Now. If we add a redux to the drumtrack we edited a bit earlier (the one with only the Eq-curve applied to it), add a flanger, one utility to sum to mono and a gate like this:

Oh, SHIT!

We end up with something sounding like this (with all tracks played back): http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/hearing_beyond_1.wav

Mhm. Definitively getting there.

Adding some more percussion, and a couple of more layers and some other stuff and you could easily end up here:

http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/quickies/hearing_beyond_the_sound/hearing_beyond.wav

See, that wasn’t so hard at all was it?

You just need to know what to look for/listen for.

Have a nice day and keep turning them knobs to see what happens! – gbsr.

(apologise for the long delay, been busy)..
Yeah, figured I was gonna start posting shit again, so I’ve decided to do some quickie series.
Basically, a way to quickly get down ideas and start working (not neccessarily quick tutorials though).
First up is the all-elusive glitchdrum tutorial we all like so much.  I’ve been asked alot of times how i get my drums and edits the way i do and I though I’d share a tip to quickly get some good ideas down for further abuse..

Have you ever taken a good look at Live’s “Follow Actions”?
It might seem like a simple thing at first and only slightly useful (the probability settings are really useful), but used correctly, Follow Actions can be your number one source of idea.
Today we are going to make some percussion that will seemingly take ages to create using follow actions and texture beatwarping modes.
It’s pretty simple actually but the end result is quite astonishing at times.

Let’s start with a blank new project; put it at a relatively low bpm (I’ve choosen 77 for this tutorial), and drop some randomly selected beats in the sessionview like so:

Then select all of the clips, and set the follow actions to 0.0.2, at “any”, “other”, and click the Legato and already you should be hearing what appears to be a lazy man’s idmstyle percussion thing.
Here’s how it looks like:

It should sound something similar to this:
Meh, Such shit
I know, you must be thinking “WOW” by this point (or rather “meh”), but now we start to get into what makes this technique so great, so bear with me on this one.
Reselect all your clips and change the Warp mode to texture, set the flux to something low (in this example mine’s set to 4.69), and play with the grain size while you are playing it back.

Hear that?
Yeah, thought you would. The higher the grainsize is, the more bouncy-feel you will get, the lower the faster the grains will retrigger.
Suddenly it sounds like this instead:
Getting there (slight delay before it starts, my bad)

Aye, starting to get a bit better already, and we’re basically doing nothing.

Neat!
Let’s raise the clips 3 semitones and see what happens, shall we?
Getting there, still
Let’s record a long pass of these,  place it out in the arrangement view and raise the tempo (to say, 210 bpm) and do some basic editing:
Edit pass 1

Yeah, but it still sounds pretty damn random, no?
This is where this technique will shine:
We now have a part of our percussion track. Not all of it, but a part.
Add a gate, a reverb and a compressor after it to get that really choppy feel to what we just did:

Here’s what it sounds like

Then we restart the process again, with another selection of beats/breaks whatever.
Believe it or not, but this is just 3 tracks thrown together really quick using the same method (one was just cutup really fast):
Follow-me example – 3 tracks

Here’s the same thing, but with each track after each other so you can clearly hear what is going on (the middle track is the cutup one):
Follow-me example – 3 tracks separated

Now then.

Add some synthesizers and stuff and hey presto:

Follow-me example – song idea

Simple, easy and effective. A great way to quickly get some ideas down for further tweaking.

Have fun! – gbsr.

yeah. i know, i havent posted anything in ages.
weve had summer, ive had virtually no inspiration for anything at all + ive been busy with other things. sorry, people :p
that live set will sitll happen though, but since we never made the gig we never finished the actual template, but i will eventually. i am actually reworking it completely right now.

with that said:
more phase inversion. some say cowbell, i say phase inversion.
why?
because its so incredibly easy to do, thats why.
you can use it to create magic sends. it just so happens that i did a video demonstration about magic sends for a guy at a chatroom i usually sit in (thats #IDMF at irc.mibbit.net incase you wanna say hi or whatever), so i figured id post it here too then.

Magic Sends: How they work.

then ofcourse, i had to play more with phase inversion, again. i saw a video on the youtubes about frequency specific processing, but this was basically 3 chains of a multiband processor with one band active per chain. not entirely optimal i thought, so i set out to make one that you can re-use to make up as many bands as you want.

the idea is simple:
make a rack with two chains. phase invert one of them. place an eq before the phase inversion happens. rack it up into its own rack. make another chain, which is your dry chain. any effects placed on the phase inversion rack (note, the phase inversion rack, as in the chain it sits in in your master rack, not the chain that performs the inversion) will affect the frequencies you select the the eq. anything above 0db will peak, so not only can you isolate frequencies for processing, you can peak the input of them aswell, so you can make peaking granular drops and shit. its really sexy.

heres how you do it:

nope, im not gonna give you any downloads this time. its time you learn how to do it yourself

have a nice people.

ok so. ive seen alot of forums posts and blog posts lately about glitching and how to manipulate your sound in a realtime setting with minimum effort for extra candy. i also remember the incredible fuzz about the native instruments “the finger” plugin created by tim exile. back then i decided that i wanted to see if i could figure out how to make my own “the finger” setup and i did it (sortof), except that i didnt have the modular routing the finger had, mine was linear but incredibly fun to play with nonetheless and 100% native at that.

aaaanywas, when i did this i had to figure out a way to gate audio rather then to trigger effects on and off like your standard midi effect sequencer (see fx root, for example), and so i sat down and rubbed my two braincells together and came up with a solution. the solution isnt 100% perfect, (10ms latency due to the note lenght device (damn you ableton!!)) but it is native and it works very good too.

the idea is to use an IAC midi driver (windows users, midi yoke will sort you out), send a note on event, then directly after that send another one.

why would you want to do that really? send the same message twice?

when you map something up with a midi note, you map note on. press it once and you say “turn it on.”, press it again and you tell live “turn it off.”, this is the same for chain triggers, mutes and everything. i have no idea why, but thats the way it is. you simply cant map note off, rather then note on. atleast i dont know how (if you can, please let me know :p)

according to the manual you cant tell a parameter to trigger at note off, and the manual says that the note length device should be used for this so naturally, thats what we will use..

..but we will do it via a midi feedback track.
why would we do that?

because that way you can still have your midi keyboard as normal and play instruments etc as you wish and only affect your gate effects bank when your midi track is active. nifty.

for this you need a midi rack with two chains, one without anything on (normal send) and another one with a note delay set to the lowest possible settings and note off, like this:
you also need to set the output of this track to IAC driver, and you need to have your IAC drivers setup like this (or midi yoke for you windows users):

what that means is that you receive remote input from IAC driver 1, while you have track output sending to 1, so you can have a track send its output to the IAC driver you want to have as a remote controller. one important thing to remember is that your keyboard can not be set to remote, because that will override the IAC remote (as remotes are global and not per-track basis).

wow, isnt that extremely simple then?
yes. yes, it really is that simple.

all you do is make a midi rack with two chains, one with nothing on and one with a note off set to retrigger at the shortest time possible (or longer if you wanna delay your retrig hah) and that is it. if you wanna make your whole keyboard, just make one per key and set them up accordingly in the keyzone editor.

ok. so, thats all good. we got a midi retrigger, now what?

now, we make the midi trigger into a gate-mode awesome effects device of doom.

take an audio track, make an audio rack with two chains on it. one of them is dry, and the other is wet. the wet is your effect slot so drop anything you like in there, and if you want true gate mode set the dry to muted so audio only comes through when its playing through an effect; then you map the chain ruler to a knob and map that knob to your keyboard (say, c4). map up your chain ruler so that 0 is dry, and 1 is wet. go into your midi map mode and set the knob map to 0 -1. if you have your IAC midi track set to input (select your midi port in the drop down then) and the “send midi to” to IAC driver 1 and you press c4 you will notice something very special; rather then to toggle on and off it will toggle on on press down and toggle off on key-release. that is what we want, and that is also the only thing thats needed to make it work!

to not make any confusion about what i just said i made a little template here with c-4 to b-4 (white keys only) mapped up, currently beeing triggered with midi clips. all you need to do is to select input on the midi track to play it live. as an added bonus, the midi track has an already made toggler for every key available.

here it is:
http://nwrecords.com/storage/route_it/templates/gater.zip
and heres a brief video of how it works heh.

oh, and ignore the arpeggiators, as they are not needed. my bad :p
have a nice day! – gbsr.

yeah. you know the deal. everywhere you go everyone is always saying how live doesnt have a good dj eq. eq3 colours the sound, some say. eq8 is to much hassle to setup so it sounds good, yet is transparent, usually resulting in several nested racks and so on and so forth.

well, have you ever listened/took at a look at the multibander in live 8?

no? then its about time you do that. see, if you make two chains inside a rack and place two utilities on each chain and invert one of them you get silence (obviously). now thats not so interesting indeed, however if you place a multibander on each chain infront of that utility and map the bands to a macro you have an incredibly easy, simple to overview and very transparent dj eq, and it takes literally not more then 2 minutes to setup. the good thing about this particular dj eq is that its a compressor at the same time as an eq. you just have to match the settings on both chains (or you can *not* match them and use it in a more creative way).

yeah, its that simple. oh, and it sounds great aswell. now i didnt map the crossover because im quite happy with the default settings but if oyu want to map the crossover filters you have to map them on both chains so the settings mirror each other; remember the only that is not supposed to mirror each other is the gain on the compressor bands. simply map the gain from 0 to -24 and thats it.

simple, efficient and lightweight. just the way we want it.

heres a stupid video showing how its done: