Thanksgiving, N.I. style.

Native Instruments is running a short promotion for the Thanksgiving holiday, one can purchase Absynth, Massive, FM8, or Reaktor, each for $99.99.

Hmmmm….. What to do…

…I see Absynth 5 in my future…

working quickly (letting the tools do the work)

I find that most of my best and most cohesive work comes from tracks that come together really quickly. Most of my compositions that take long periods of time end up sounding stale (as I’ve listened to them for far longer) and uninspired. For this reason, I find having a quick workflow is essential to have an unobstructed path for getting from point A to point Song.

For years I used a combination of Reason 2.5 and Cubase to write songs. I know many complain about the “Reason Sound”, but I assure you, having released an entire album using Reason nearly exclusively (I mixed down in Cubase), that if you toss the preset synth patches and the sample library, you have quite the capable set of tools at your disposal.

Reason was a great common platform for Jason (my then music partner) and I, it was a common set of tools and swapping file ideas was super simple. Having worked with Reason as long as we did, we were able to quickly bang out ideas and keep things flowing. This was essential to the way we worked, if we got stuck on an idea or a track, we simply saved it, closed the session, and started another.

When Ableton Live came about Jason and I both jumped at its promise of making our computers “live performance instruments”. Ableton only handled audio in the first versions, so we weren’t writing music with it, but were bouncing loops and one shot samples from out Reason sessions to perform and mash up live. This was FUN (compared to loading hardware samplers full of time compressed loops writing sequences etc). We had a great platform for composing (Cubase/Reason) and an excellent application for performing those compositions (Ableton) in a dynamic and more improvisational manner.

After many revisions and additions to the application, Ableton Live began moving away from strictly a performance based application and more of a full on Digital Audio Workstation, adding MIDI support, VST instrument support, more routing features.

At this point, I write all of my music in Ableton Live, and for one reason, workflow. I know the key commands, I know how to quickly get around it and everything just feels like its in the right place. Ableton has also included many MIDI and audio tools that allow for quick compositions. I still go back to Reason 4 for synthesis and sound design from time to time, any application that allows for modular functionality is OK in my book ,but alas, i digress.

Recently I wrote this track, composing it took less than 6 hours, start to finish (usually a song from start to finish takes days). Normally I struggle with melodic content, as its difficult for me making technology driven music sometimes to “switch gears” and go from left brain programmer mode to right brain creative composition mode. So i kept working in left brain mode, and used a series of Midi effects and probabilities to generate the melodic content for this track.

First off, I programmed the percussion by hand, midi editors and clip envelope tricks; nothing fancy there, just elbow (er, wrist?) grease and a little time and effort. For composing the melodic content though, I took a different route.

All 3 of the melodic elements in this track are all FM synthesis based (I used Ableton’s excellent FM synth Operator), one is a Bass part, one harmony part (the blippy thing that has a lot of movement) and a track of chime-y sounding chords that fill in some space. The melodies came from plugging in single notes (E3 in this case, but any will do) into clips and allowing Ableton’s Midi tools to do the rest of the work.

(this is where it gets interesting)

For my “Lead” and “Bass” tracks I have used a midi rack i put together from some of the Midi Effects patches in the Ableton’s User Library. I first created a blank “Midi Effects Rack”. The first plugin in the chain I used was “Random” so each time a note is triggered, a random note is spit out. I then followed “Random” by an instance of “Scale” so that those random notes get shifted to the nearest note in a specific scale (i chose C# pentatonic scale, I’ve always liked the way it sounds). If you are following along, your Midi Effects Rack should look like this:

For the rhythmic content of the melodies I created several midi clips per track, each having different note values, some were quarters, some eigths, some sixteenth notes, and some containing patterns made all 3 note values. I then copied and pasted all of the clips to additional free cells, so I have twice the clips to choose from. With the copied clips I went in and used the clip tempo multipliers making some double time and some half time adding to the options of midi note patterns on a given track.

At this point i could go about writing in the session view by clicking various midi clips and allow them to loop, selecting others and doing the same but that is going to get boring pretty quickly (especially if you are as scattered as I am) So lets get these clips moving!

I utilized Ableton’s “Follow Actions” to create movement and automation amongst these midi clips, creating a constantly changing and ever moving stream of midi notes. Follow Actions in Ableton allow one to designate an action to take place after a specific duration based on the parameters that are set. For example, if you know that when you click a midi clip that when it ends you want Ableton to launch another and you don’t have a free hand to do it in realtime, Ableton has your back!

Note the middle, “Launch” section. Under The Follow Action section of “Launch” you have a value. This is going to tell Ableton how long you would like this clip to play before it performs an action. My example is set at 0:1:0 The far left box indicates measures, the second quarter notes, and the third sixteenth notes. So having my Follow Action duration set to 0:1:0 means that after a quarter note it is going to perform an action.

In this case I have 2 actions selected with a probability. there is a one to two chance that this follow action is going to trigger any other clip (the asterisk icon) on this track and a two to one chance that it is going to re-launch the same clip (the “play” triangle icon).

It can be time consuming (an rewarding), but for each of the midi clips I created, I made changes to the duration and to the action that is to take place. Each clip gets its own Follow Action parameters and set of probabilities. What you end up with is what I like to call a little bit of “Organized Chaos”

Feel free to explore using Follow Actions in creative ways, I’ve been able to create great “Glitch” effects using several copies of the same drum beat, some Follow Actions and Clip Envelopes (which I will get into in a later post). Its nearly endless what can be done with the tools Ableton gives you!

In the meantime, here is an Ambient composition i made using the same methods. I rewired the midi out of Ableton to trigger synths and samplers in Reason 4, but the same concept applies!

Enjoy a little Organized Chaos of your own!

Released!

A few weeks back I was asked about doing a remix for Brim Liski, a project that my buddy Justin (Cacheflowe) was collaborating on with a gentleman named Ryan (from A Shoreline Dream) and some other shadowy characters whose identities have still been un-announced.

Having really enjoyed the original track I said, “Sure” and they sent me the mix stems. I put together a somewhat typical (for me) remix, I made the ambience bigger added delay, reverb and grainular processing, I programmed new percussion rendered it, made lots of edits, rendered again, put the vocals further back into the mix, and MADE THE AMBIENCE BIGGER.

It was well received and they decided to put it on the album.

Well, it was released to the world 11/10/09! Hooray!

search “Brim Liski” @ Amazon.com and/or Itunes for the full release.

my remix can be streamed right here!

influence.

Sometimes its tough to get past the music one listens to when writing. Such is the case with the current project I’m working on.

I’m currently writing percussion and drones for use in the next performance @ Textures, Bios+a+ic’s (Wes’) monthly ambient series. This month should be a good one, as the show will be a 2 hour long improvised (well not completely improv, this is still electronic music) ambient excursion featuring Wes, his wife Jewel, Mike Stacey (Circle Six Mike), and Myself.

While working on some skeletal beat ideas this collection of sparse percussion and dubbed out delay ended up sounding like an early 2000’s Monolake track. I can’t say I’m particularly upset about this, Monolake’s work and bulk of material I have listened to and picked apart for sound design ideas ever since I was first introduced to to it in 2000. But it is strange how quickly one finds something familiar then runs with it…

for comparisons sake:

my beats.

Monolake @ LastFM
http://www.last.fm/music/Monolake

Liveset.

I played @ Beta last night, and actually managed to get a recording out of it.

here it is.

DJ gig!

I am please to announce that after a largely successful guest DJ spot, yours truly will be DJing Lipgloss @ La Rumba every second Friday of the month. For those of you that aren’t in Denver please understand that this is a pretty big deal. Lipgloss has been a regular Friday night in Denver for over 8 years. Consistently, Lipgloss sees between 350-500 people a night, and is an all around good time.

I thought I would go ahead and post a mix from last week for you to get an idea of what I will be playing (dancey synth-pop love songs… im a total sucker for that stuff!)

contact me if you’d like a copy of this mix for download!

dropping bass bombs.

new material from last night!

cant wait to hear this on Beta’s Funktion One soundsystem….

updated.

so yeah, its been awhile…

Life got hectic there for a little while. New home, new decade of my life, no relationship to speak of… meh, enough excuses.

I’ve been working on tunes, Djing here and there, booking gigs and (but of course) making weird sounds.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m playing upstairs @ Beta, in the Beatport Lounge, opening for MiMosa. Also playing will be S.P.E.C.T.R.E., Citrus, and my homie Jason Roth (The Juice?? i guess thats what we call him these days)

I’m playing first as I have the least amount of people drawing power, and my stuff will be much more abstract (weird huh?) than the rest of the fellas playing. so 9-10pm, August 14th. Be there or Be [ ].

some new material (and some old reworked stuff too!)

working draft.

i posted an early version of this asking for some opinions as to where to go with it. Thanks to those who responded, this is the new working draft, it needs some mixing help, but this is the tentative arrangement. I’ll let it sit for a few days before having a go at a proper mixdown.

Looking forward to debuting this track live @ Transistor Fest next month!

glitch hop jam

Just a little Glitch hop/Dubstep thing i started messing with this morning. I’m really liking how crazy the bass is. Zebra 2 is a monster for bass!!!

(sorry for the rough audio quality, i wasn’t shooting for pretty)