what is going on in your musical life

Punching walls is gross — you don’t want to be that guy imo. I have seen people do it and it’s never agl. I have faith you can do more effective performance art!

i have busted a few walls and have never felt good about it. it's not wise.

I just make the wall feel bad about itself by bringing up its shortcomings.

same. really give that wall something to think about

thank y'all for the kind words btw it's intense right now!! appreciated

You'll be grand, JCLC. I recognise the mania/cliff-dive thing (even though I have never toured anywhere near as much as you) - it's a lot of work keeping the old brain stable, but it is worth it to do that thing you love.

And good luck, Z!

amazing how much irregular sleep patterns just tear through all the defenses you've built up in your head, brain just wants to consume itself, it's rad. i have never been on tour and fear it for this reason, as much as shows are objectively awesome. psyched you're going back on the road jclc and i hope maybe the stability you've reached had home can be exported to the tour somehow

my band is playing our first show next month and we got one of my favorite bands to hop on the bill and not only do i love playing shows, i love playing the best shows ever with bands that rule

our first show since the pandemic* i mean

Good luck Steve Ty. I was talking to a friend who's band tours Europe a few times a year, he was feeling anxiety because he's become extremely attached to his daily routine over the last year and a half. It definitely seems like a wild leap to go from being home all day every day > going on tour, compared to going back to the office or whatever.

BradNelson is the other band the Buff Boys competition

I've got a cute gig next week for a friend's mom's 60th birthday party. Apparently she's super into yacht rock, David Benoit, Steve Winwood, Go West, etc and we're playing a corresponding set. Her taste makes sense given that her two sons are bass & piano virtuosos along similar lines.

I used to play with them a ton in college, so I can't wait to play with some excellent musicians without any backing tracks, lol. Looking forward to the rehearsal as much as the gig. It's been fun to learn the tunes even if I hate most it (looking at you Steely Dan), lol.

BradNelson is the other band the Buff Boys competition

― not up to Aerosmith standards (Neanderthal), Tuesday, July 13, 2021 7:54 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

sippin' mai-tais at the rochambeau

(currently superstitious that if i name the other band they'll abruptly drop off the lineup)

lol understood - no need to namedrop!

jordan that gig sounds like a blast!!!

good luck everyone! i am confident that you will all RULE

(i don't have a gig or anything planned. i do have the idea that i would like to be one of the many who attempt to carry on laurie anderson's torch in some way. so i've been thinking about that. i could probably skip the work and just get myself a gig at the ren. faire as the buffoon who gets dropped into a tank of sludge if you can throw a tomato into his face)

km let me know if you want to collab on something. i love laurie anderson and while i don't really have the energy to spearhead my own projects at this point, i could probably handle being a mysterious contributor to someone else's project.

yeah that sounds fun! it would be great to get together in LL's basement again if she's up for it!

i have a bunch of other (non-drum) equipment that i would like to play with, too

I’m still learning to play the piano. It’s still hard. Probably nobody has ever done it.

Agreed I'm pretty sure it can't be done

Catching up, that backing track gig sounds like a nightmare, Jordan. Why was it necessary to play to a backing track in the first place?

Oh nm, I just realized you probably meant that there were backing tracks audible to the audience that everyone had to be in time with, not just that you had to be synchronized to a track in your ear.

Yeah exactly, all the Prince drum machine parts, plus half the keyboard parts & backing vocals that the band can't be relied upon to have covered/execute depending on who's there, lol

It will forever haunt me

you could take your mind off of it by undertaking the unbearably tedious and dull task of composing a DJ mix in ableton, as i have!

i'm gonna finish this, eventually, but i swear i will never do another mixtape in a DAW again. god i need to get some new decks, this sucks.

I doubt I'll go back to doing them, but I feel like I got a pretty good workflow going for ableton DJ mixes after a couple tries a few months back

i'd be curious to hear if you wouldn't mind elaborating a bit. all i'm doing dropping files into 2-3 audio channels with EQ and time-fx on the sends. getting the automation just right has turned out to be a slog... i should probably setup a controller and map it, duh.

i also realized just a few minutes ago that it's even more of a slog because the mix i'm working on isn't the vibe. i've been planning it for a while and think it'll be good when i finish it, but it's just not the vibe for this moment. gonna put it on the backburner and work on something more joyful.

Big thing for me was getting everything warped and set to similar gain levels first before trying to mix them together.

I added EQ 3 to both of my tracks for the mix and use a lot of the parabolic curves for bringing EQ and volumes up and down.

Those are the main things but could possibly answer other questions.

thank you, moodles, for the nice reply. our workflows are very similar! i check gain levels thru a meter as i add tracks into the mix, and automate volume to adjust. maybe i'll reconsider that. drawing in all the automation curves is what takes a long time for whatever reason (probably overthinking), and that gets frustrating when i know i could feel the fades out very easily with a proper DJ mixer & decks. working in the DAW lets me overthink the track sequencing, too.

one rly cool affordance of this fiddly way of doing it, though: having multiple tracks let me make quick/EZ edits to shorten tracks or program mixes better. probably what's killing me is that i'm overthinking the sequencing a lot. i want to top my last few mixes, which i think are my best in 20+ years DJing, and that sets the bar perhaps unfairly high for myself.

moodles, how do you go about measuring gain for yr tracks? i'm just looking at... i think it's RMFS, or the measurement for perceived loudness, at a few points in the track

Make sure track faders are always set to the same position and then either use the visual cue of the track volume control meter or you can look at the track peak dB, which can be reset to 0 at any point by clicking on it. Then adjust the clip gain until the track is hitting your preferred max dB.

As far as drawing curves, you can highlight an automation lane, right-click and then get a menu of curves. For DJ mixes, the parabolic curves will almost always suit you best. I'll typically put a curve on either track volume or a particular eq band on one track, then put the opposite curve on the same eq band on the other track, then adjust as needed.

ty ty

DAW mixtape workflow just feels so... unnatural. i DJ'd out for the first time in like 18 months, tonight, and i think it was a personal best. and it would've taken me probably several long days to do it in Ableton to my satisfaction, so probably i'll take a shot at recording a mix proper on CDJ decks. if i can find them. my studio-mates were supposed to provide a DJ controller/mixer for our space. so i'm gonna harangue them to follow through with that, and i'll come back to the DAW if it doesn't work out.

Yeah, despite all of my advice, I'm getting better results with a DJ controller and it's less of a pain in the ass and slow process. I'm less experienced, so there will inevitably be fuck ups in there, but I'm still happier because I have so much more control over stuff like EQs and filters, so I can do more interesting stuff on the fly.

learning to mix on a controller/mixer is worth the time. all the little old-school fader and FX tricks i was doing to would be stupid hard to do in a DAW, and it is just flat-out faster.

i'm not using a controller's sync function. it eliminates the attentional overhead of beat-matching and lets you focus on other stuff—but that's IF and only if you have carefully set up the grid of all yr tracks to be on the beat, and i've found rekordbox rly counterintuitive in that regard so i just use my ears. (btw i despise the Pioneer DJ brand for a number of reasons, but that's a rant for another thread.)

anyway i kinda like hearing little slip-ups and imperfections in a DJ mix, even in pre-recorded/studio mixes. DJ mixing can definitely to be too smooth and a few slip-ups are rly kind of endearing if the DJ is good enough to fix them live in the mix.

^^^ i'm not *against* ppl using the sync function

I have a cheap Pioneer controller, working on getting more accurate with beatmatching, but using sync on recordings, and probably would do the same at a gig for now. It's very helpful to have max time for tweaking EQs and nudging tempos. I've actually had pretty good experience with grids in rekordbox, but I'm doing mostly 4 on the floor beats, so that's probably easier to nail down. Maybe 20% of tracks need small grid tweaks, but that's way better than the performance of warp in Ableton, which is always super fiddly.

Good luck tech-heads

My beloved acoustic trio is no more, as the singer has moved to Austin.

I have made some solo appearances here and there, and some side projects. One of these (a country-rock duo) has to fill 2.5 hours at a pub on Saturday, and this is a decided shift from my usual 20 or 30 minute gig. We have worked up like 40 songs, and it is fun but tiring.

break a leg! 40 songs is a nice big repertoire.

Thanks

One thing I'm trying to do is play the bouzouki more. It's fun but weird - jangly and loud. There are some keys/chords that I just can't really play comfortably because of the scale length, so I revert to the mandolin.

I don't like it alongside guitar (too much of the same sonic territory), but it pairs interestingly with bass and percussion.

i work on songs so slowly now that i'm generally working on one song (at the most) at a time. what that means is that from inception until completion, i have that one song in my head most of the time. like a persistent earworm that lasts for a week or two (or longer). not a humblebrag "man my songs are SO catchy!" just the process of thinking about this one song and playing it/recording it/listening to it over and over, while rewarding, can also be very annoying.

I've been feeling increasingly frustrated with Ableton and my current setup. My main gripe is that I spend too much time pointing and clicking and trying to scroll through endless menus of sounds, while I'd rather feel like I'm playing an instrument. I do like some of Ableton's instruments, especially Operator, Wavetable, and Collision, but even with those, it seems like you have to jump through endless hoops to get an acceptable sound. By the time I get there, my enthusiasm is just not enough to get anything completed.

So I'm trying to figure out how to revamp my setup to be more user friendly, get me away from the mouse, and feel like I'm actually jamming. My current setup includes one of the original Akai APC40s and a generic 49 key midi keyboard. I think I could probably replace both of those with something like the Novation Launchkey 25 and free up tons of real estate on my desk without losing much functionality, but I don't know if that would add much either. Would this be a worthwhile change? Does anyone on here have experience with the Novation keyboards?

Once I do that, what then? I've pondered looking into analog synth rigs and drum machines, and just bailing on Ableton instruments for the most part, but I'm not convinced that's necessary or worth the cost and time to learn. Are there other steps I could take to build a more intuitive and interactive experience?

I'm not an Ableton user but what's really helped me in REAPER is having track templates for basic synth/piano/organ/DI guitar/drum machine. That way I can insert a template, play what I want immediately with the minimum of configuration, and then go back and change the sound later.
Even though I'm not much of a keyboard player, I wouldn't swap a 49 key controller for a 25 key one. My current keyboard is also 49 keys, and I've got it under my desk with two A4 file boxes under each end. So not ergonomic at all but I can bring it forward enough to play it and push the keyboard back out of the way the rest of the time. Depending on your desk you might be able to retrofit a sliding keyboard shelf. I've considered doing this but a combination of laziness and being fairly tall (I'd probably be hitting my knees on it) has put me off.

The thing about the keyboard is that I'm not really much of a piano player. I use it only to either dink out little melodies or bang out drum patterns.

Anyway, after all this bellyaching, I started digging into lots of Push 2 videos on YouTube, and realized it does most of the things I'm looking for: it's fairly compact, can be used as drum machine and keyboard, can lookup patches and effects, edit samples, tweak parameters clearly, etc. So I snapped one up on ebay that is supposedly in mint condition. Guess we'll find out soon enough!

re: Ableton workflow

I've been really enjoying the All You Need is Live YouTube channel, his focus is mainly on Techno, but he does many tutorials about how to use racks to streamline your workflow that I think would apply to any type of music. Here's a couple that I'm planning to try out, the comments have links to download the racks.

This shows how to build a master drum rack that holds all your favorite samples for each common drum voice (kick, snare, hats, etc), which you can than very quickly swap in and out with the turn of a knob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuPHTaG_4LE

This shows you how to build a rack for Operator that randomly generates new cool sounding patches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMcWEy2xLY

Thanks, those look super useful!

If you've got the money I'd strongly recommend getting a Push for Ableton. Making music using that is so much easier and more fun than using the mouse and keyboard.

https://www.ableton.com/en/push/

Can confirm, even after a couple days, it feels like a massive improvement.

glad to hear :) besides the audio interface, Push is the only hardware i fw anymore