ILM music making thread for techno and other Ableton/Reason/Reaktor/whatever based questions and chat

SIO offers a relatively simple way of accessing multiple audio inputs and outputs independently. It also provides for the synchronization of input with output in a way that is not possible with DirectSound, allowing recording studios to process their audio via software on the computer instead of using thousands of dollars worth of separate equipment. Its main strength lies in its method of bypassing the inherently high latency of operating system audio mixing kernels (KMixer), allowing direct, high speed communication with audio hardware.

for starters, you don't master an mp3.

for seconders: http://www.tweakheadz.com/mastering_your_audio.htm

for thirders, compression and mastering might make your final mix louder, but if the mix is crappy then it won't help it sound clear/clean/etc.

4therz

Spend time learning how to EQ. That is how you make things sit in the mix

5therz

don't work with pre-mastered audio when you are just starting out. It is a bitch you make all that sit in a mix correctly and then try to master it again.

Make some of your own loops and try to get them to sit in a mix with nothing but EQ. Don't mess with compression and limiting just yet.

Don't worry about making it huge or loud, just make it sound decent in the first place and go from there.

EQ in the master channel is for mastering engineers trying to deal with something that's already mixed down IMO. when I've got every part of all my signal chains two clicks away in live I just go back and adjust the filters on things etc etc.

my mastering channel usually just has the Apple AU multiband compressor with some custom tuning, preceded by a very dry Saturator with barely any drive at all.

Anybody else ever stick their hand out in front of their monitors' bass ports to check if the drums are doing what you want them to? My speakers are too close to me to really be able to hear the long wavelengths right

the correct volume of air displacement being very necessary for proper jacking of the house obv

I have done that a bit but it doesn't really help that much. The thing that really helped me the most was making friends with the people that run the local dance club and a set of DJ with their own rental sound system.

There was a time where I used to wait outside of Plush and walk through the doors the second they opened. The staff was very cool with letting me play a few different mixes of my stuff on the system full blast before people showed up.

I recently played my first live set off a laptop through a set of 1500 watt mackies and that was a nightmare. The last time I did a set was in the 90's and I was using hardware through a mixing board and there was a great deal more control. I made the mistake of rendering and mastering my loops ahead of time and dumping them into a playlist. This really hamstrung me because I did all my mixing and compressing on a set of alesis monitor speakers and I lost a lot of control over the sound because of this.

I also did not have a decent set of monitors and this made doing a live mix a hell of a lot more difficult.

If I have learned anything from the experience it is to not even mess around with multi-band/single band compression. I think my life would have been a lot easier if I hadn't compressed the shit out of everything.
It sounds great at home, doesn't sound so great through a system. That is the big thing, learning how your music reacts to big systems. Your studio monitors are not an accurate representation of what will happen in the real world.

I think the real key is a residency at a club and weekly refinement of your material.

i dunno bout that. club systems are rarely accurate. club rooms normally sound pretty horrible when they're empty. the 1500 watt mackies you're talking about were probably those active pa speakers, they make most music sound shite.

to everyone talking about compression and crap like that, unless you're using it as a special effect, why bother with it? if stuff is coming out too quietly, especially if you're working with soft synths, it'll be your synth programming and layering thats rubbish, work on that. a quiet weedy kick drum won't become big and fat with some compression, you need a new kick drum! or two!

i don't even think about eq and compression until i've mixed everything down to individual audio tracks. and even i'd only use them very carefully. the only time i'll compress something is when i want it to sound warmer, so i stick it through an external valve compressor and record it back in.

the only way you'll get that big studio sound is if you go to a big studio and work there with the outboard equipment. it *is* possible doing it all digital but you'll need a fairly flat room and a decent amount of controllers to play with. you really need to be hands on, ears on, eyes off when doing that sort of thing.

for monitoring i use some studio monitors and a sub. this is also the system i use for listening back to any music. if you can listen to, and enjoy good sounding music on your system, you should be able to mix to that same standard. i used to mix on a pretty average hifi that i knew had this sweet spot where if i turned it up enough it would distort in a pleasant way and i could hear everything and it sounded nice. so when i mixed i just made sure my tracks did the same thing

use as many outputs from your soundcard as you can. route into a mixer.

...when playing live, don't do any mastering or mixing, use raw material and mix it live.

(pressed submit too early!)

CHALLENGING OPINIONS

I have to admit I love the idea of compression as a "special effect" in 2008. this is what happens when you raise kids on Justice

Anybody else ever stick their hand out in front of their monitors' bass ports to check if the drums are doing what you want them to?

describe to me what wavelength means, subwoofer man

or maybe you just mean people who make music in bedrooms shouldn't post here

i dunno if i get what you're on about, need some sort of lol/zing filter on ilx. but the justice sound you refer to surely does use (over) compression as a special effect. earlier i was on about people using it on all of their sounds to make them louder/better. its like what happened when reverb went digital. 'just stick some reverb on it'.

well, the wavelength is the length of the soundwave. most decent pa systems can reproduce 35hz fairly okay which'll be about 10 meters.

challenging opinions, listening with your hands

I suppose you could say in that case that I use compression as a "special effect" but when you're saying "get a new bass drum if you need to compress your current bass drum" to me that's just two completely different ways to skin a cat, both perfectly valid.

I can't imagine how many tracks I have that sound absolutely dire compared to modern production that still sound just fine on a house sound system. You can mix most things just fine without a lot of heavy effort in the final mastering and polishing process and they come out okay as long as you don't have OCD.

listening with my hands is easier than walking out of the room with the loop playing to see how much boom vs punch is coming through

I mean I still eventually do the latter but work smarter not harder right

yeh, but with a lot of modern music volume and impact of sound are important, i was just trying to say that jumping for the compressor isn't necessarily the best first step. now that mixing is such an integral part of the writing process the old 'fix it in the mix' idea needs even more careful attention.

yeh re: house systems, and big pa systems in general. when mixing at home i struggle with blending old and new music, dong the same mixes out, it all sounds alright.

sometimes I wonder if the biggest problem with pro monitors, esp. the bi-amped super-fine-tuned models most people use now, is that they inspire tinkering and twiddling beyond what's necessary because they're TOO flat and accurate.

i never got that walking out of the room thing, works for getting levels between stuff okay, but surely you're just hearing the characteristics of your room? like yr room will be acting as a big sub?

i don't really worry too much about kick / bass stuff really, sometimes there are disasters but you can filter and listen or spectrum analyser and watch to see whats going on down there. i just want all my kicks to sound more crackly and warm. nice trick i learnt recently was to stick an envelope follower on the kick and have a pitched down turntable rumble follow the envelope of the kick. filter the turntable sound it till you get the nice bits.

recently set up a pa system with a kick stage, subs designed to cater for the kick drum which was really interesting. managed to get a nice balance between the bwoooommyyy sub freqs and the rattle yer bones kick drum.

(every post is a xpost)

yeh, i guess if yr a sound geek you'd want to tinker forever. like ooh, i'll just modulate this little 10Hz band on the hi hats to give them more life.

whereas if you were listening on an old hi fi, you'd be all like lets run this shit through another distortion pedal.

ever since i bought my studio monitors my sound has gone more villalobos and less loosefingers or whatever.

i never got that walking out of the room thing, works for getting levels between stuff okay, but surely you're just hearing the characteristics of your room?

A really deep familiarity with how other people's music sounds when you leave the room tends to work as your control group / triangulating point with this

I figure carl didn't exactly run the secret tapes of dr eich through any THX-compliant rig, if you get my meaning

So I've gone on a bit of a gear spree over the last couple years, and I can say with certainty the piece of gear that I like the least and that I'm now considering selling is the Ableton Push 2. When I started getting back into Ableton, I found it all very awkward clicking around on the screen and I thought I'd be well served by getting away from that with the Push. A couple years later and I'm still clicking around and barely touch the Push. Pretty much the only thing I use it for is banging out little synth melodies, and I could do that just as easily on a cheapo midi keyboard. It's a beautiful piece of gear but has always felt very unintuitive, and the more proficient I get in Ableton, the less purpose it serves.

Uh oh, now there's a Push 3, including a standalone version with its own processor, RAM, storage, and battery that you can get for a cool $2K. The non standalone is about half as much and looks nice with pitch bend and expression built into all of the pads and a few other neat add ons. I'm not rushing out to get this but it does seem like a solid upgrade, so maybe someday.

Oh hell yes, been waiting for this since Live 4.

waiting for what? ableton in a box?

Ableton 12 is coming, looks pretty nice. They are finally putting big faders in the arrangement view and making some other nice workflow improvements. Very excited!

Have you heard the Good News about our Lord and Savior, Bespoke Synth? It's not just a synth, it's a whole-ass modular DAWstrument and it is all I want to play with anymore

https://www.bespokesynth.com/

(the fact that it's free doesn't hurt)

Interesting, will check it out :)

This looks neat, I'll have to give it a try. Reminds me a bit of a free version of the grid in Bitwig.

So is Meld the Ableton answer to Mutable Instruments Plaits and the Arturia Microfreak?

Just reading about it, it sounds a lot like Pigments?

The thing that reminds me of plaits is that you have a list of synth engines to choose from and then each one has 2 macro knobs. The knobs control tone in different ways based in the engine you select. Then there's a big modulation matrix, though not a huge amount of individual modulators, not unlike the microfreak (which is based off the plaits architecture).

They call it a macro oscillator synth, that was Mutable’s description of Braids (and probably Plaits) IIRC.

Holy crap! That bespokesynth looks amazing, thanks for the tip zchyrs...
Reminds me a bit of the old Jeskola Buzz... still might be the most fun I've had making music on a computer...
Looking forward to diving in...

I adored Buzz. Wrote so many crazy tunes with it been 99 and 2004

Gonna have to check out that bespokesynth now too

Although I was happy with the quality of tracks I made this year, I was less happy with my low output overall. Lately I've been falling into the trap of laying down some cool sounding parts and then trying to mix as I go, before I have a proper arrangement. Inevitably, I dump a bunch of plugins on everything and my computer then grinds to a halt. I'll have a half-finished track, but everything runs so poorly that I get frustrated and move on to the next one.

Anyway, as I have some time off and I'll have the house to myself for a couple weeks, I've decided to challenge myself to doing a track per day. I'm splitting the days into 2 sessions. First, I work on building the base parts on the Digitakt II. My goal is to fill all 16 tracks of a pattern. I really love working with the Digitakt, it feels like endless possibilities at by fingertips and is so quick and so easy to fine-tune everything.

In the 2nd session, I record all the Digitakt parts into Ableton and shape them into a full arrangement, also adding any extra parts from other instruments if needed. Any mixing and polishing I'm going to leave until I have enough arrangements ready, then I'll mix them all together, maybe in a week or so. Forcing myself to do the arrangement first is very important because it's the part I struggle with the most. I can always add or swap out sounds or move things around later, but as long as I have a fairly fleshed out track, I'm ok, as that's the place I keep getting stuck.

I've already finished 2 arrangements and have a 3rd ready to work on tonight. Forcing myself to shift to this workflow has made the whole process much easier for me even though it forces me to focus on the less fun parts first.

Also, for anyone interested, here's a couple tracks I made earlier this year.

Back To Back

Secrets In The Dark

focus on the less fun parts first.

I absolutely hate hate hate writing lyrics so today I'm forcing myself to write lyrics first. It's a real 'eat your sprouts' approach but the alternative is that I procrastinate by doing everything else first and then can't finish anything because I still haven't written the lyrics.

Do you have the melody first?

I don't have a problem structuring tracks, but I am trying to find the balance between "mix as you go" vs getting out of creative idea mode because I've gotten bogged down in mixing or sound design. Honestly it kinda helps me to go back and forth, because it's more inspiring to keep working on the track once the sounds are great.

I totally agree with it being more inspiring to work on a track when it sound great, unfortunately my computer does not also agree

I've been loving life ever since getting a new music-only (desktop) computer two years ago, highly recommended

Am I the only dork who still uses Reason Compact on my phone? I love it to death but I am worried about it having been unsupported for a number of years and bugs becoming more of an issue as iOS versions and hardware continue to evolve.

Do you have the melody first?

Usually I have bits of the melody but I try and avoid having the entire backing track done before writing the words. I've only once been able to complete the lyrics to a song where the rest of it's already been done.