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

That sound on sound article is really good, although like my witterings above, it is aimed at live recorded stuff. If you're using all electronic instruments, it's a LOT easier, or at least the difficulty is making it sound great, not just in stopping it sounding awful. (Although you can create some wild synth noises that need taming)

Is there any free equivalent to that Synth 1 for Mac? All these free synths (and plug-ins generally) are for windows, it seems.

You can do a search here for free Mac synths (and effects):

http://www.kvraudio.com/

I don't know if there are many though as I don't use a Mac.

KVR is worth a general poke around for anyone who makes computer music, if only for links to hoover up freebies.

I've searched before (although I'm not sure if it was there) and drawn a blank, but thanks.

There are some:

http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php?mode=results&st=adv&soft=i&type%5B%5D=0&f=0&fe=0&osx=1&free=1&sf=0&receptor=&de=0&sort=1&rpp=100

Crystal is good!

free synths I enjoy using:

- Green Oak Crystal (very complicated, but still fairly intuitive. as with any synth, studying how the presets are set up is the key to learning your way around it, and once you do that, you can make some pretty interesting sounds.)
- alphakanal Buzzer2 and Automat (I think these may be only available as Audio Units. they sound good, though. Buzzer2 is a pretty straightforward subtractive synth. Automat I haven't really gotten into yet, but it seems to have lots of modulation possibilities, which I'm a sucker for.)

oh man, I forgot about u-he's Zoyd. that's a weird one, kind of a pain to work with IIRC... but Urs makes good stuff, so I'm sure it's worth a shot.

Cool!

I have to say I am amazed how enjoyable this all is.

Hi Ronan, no problems. I remember learning how to use electronic music software 3-4 years ago, and it was really confusing! And it really helps to have people explain things, as opposed to tutorials, as inevitably something weird occurs, and the article glosses over it.

Quickly on frequencies--mixing is all about energy and how much energy a frequency sucks up. The more energy is used, the less energy you have for other sounds. Energy is volume in my head (which I'm sure is totally wrong--this post is from a user's, not engineer's, perspective.)

Usually, your goal, after aesthetics, is to make sure that the aeverything is clear to hear, preserve dynamics, then make it nice and loud. (Many will disagree.) In general, my shorthand is, usually I make a track, and it's kind of muddy, so I'm frustrated. What I'll think about is, after having divided the frequencies into 4 buckets (high, middle, low middle, low)--ok, high frequencies (like cymbals, tambourines, high pitched synths) suck up not too much energy, so I can have those, and sometimes I like to pan them left or right.

Then I get into the middle range of the curve, where vocals are, and I def want to make sure I don't want to have too many things competing there.

Then I get into the lower middle range, where things usually clump, so I'll listen to each sound and make volume adjustments, 'cuz panning doesn't always help there, and then I'll do eq adjustments.

And usually the culprit is having like a really deep bass drum and a deep bass synth, which drown each other out, and so in order to hear them, I end up turning both up waaaay too high. There are some solutions that are normal, like making trade-off's and/or using very very sharp EQ (an EQ that only affects a narrow band of frequencies) to make sure that the "key" frequency of the bass drum and the bass synth are not sitting on each other. Otherwise, you can almost always cut some of the superlow frequencies from your bass drum or bass synth, synthesizers are "perfect" and will generate some low-ass frequencies that suck up volume despite being nearly inaudible unless you're in a club. Then you can also use a compressor across both (don't ask how to do that with Ableton, but you can if you look online)--a compressor can allow you to "balance" both.

Panning is great to make sure that you have the ability to hear everything clearly, but if you have too many things in the same frequency, panning won't help. Also, general rule for me is, kick drum and deep bass should be down the middle for mixing and dj playback reasons, everything else is up to you.

Btw, there's sometimes no rhyme or reason to why things work--some tracks we make are nice and clear and sound great, others' mix is like crap. I kind of assumed that I need lots of great equipment to make music when I started, but you really don't, necessarily. When we finished our album, which, granted, may still be panned when it comes out (no pun intended,) but it was pretty amazing to see our producer, who's quite seasoned, and his friends, cut up and remix our stuff on Cubase 3, which is about 7 years old, along with an old tape delay, a 303, two non-built in synths and a set of old speakers. He did an edit for the Int'l Pony single that literally was just Cubase and the original track, and it was totally different--so it really is more about just getting comfortable with the tool and then imagination. Ok, no mo ramblin'.

Sorry, that should be some tracks we make are nice and clear and sound great, other songs mix are like crap

I feel like I'm just starting to get an ear for eq, even if it's just basic stuff like cutting some low end out of hi-hats and snares where it's not really necessary, just taking up sonic space. I have a book at home that has some good basic advice on frequencies for different instruments, can't remember what it's called but I'll check.

I'm not sure if this counts as "making music" but I think I spent upwards of an hour today in Live tweaking knobs while running a repetitive Glass-style electric piano arpeggio through a couple delays

so incredible (and I didn't even take any drugs)

Try it again with drugs and report back.

Also, part of what Jubalique was getting at is often called "complementary EQ." The classic example is with a bass guitar and kick, you might decide to bring out the kick at 90 Hz, so you want to cut the bass equally at 90 Hz, then boost the bass somewhere higher like 180 Hz and cut the kick there (or vice versa).

so I've made a track over the last week or so, in ableton with absynth as a vst and one or two other vsts. yet when I render it it keeps popping and sounding weird, seemingly in various different places each time it's rendered.

is there any reason for this or way to fix it?

My favorite thing to do with Ableton now, is to have it warp all sorts of different files to the same tempo, and watch what mistakes it makes as it tries to line up two things that don't really match. I've gotten some really interesting results.

ronan, you may need to increase the size of you audio buffer. sounds like latency issues.

how do I do that?

i don't know, i've never used ableton. it's usually in the preferences for whatever program you're using.

ronan
in ableton
options >> preferences >> audio.

there's buffer size that (in my case) was detected automatically
and there's the input latency that is adjusted in your audio interface.
and lower there's the cpu usage simulator that will let you test the different settings of audio buffer.
increase the cpu usage to like 70% and put up the buffer until the tone sounds passable.

so yours might be the case that
a) buffer is not big enough
b) (as i had) some version of abfuckingsynth that was handicapped in some way so that it refused to work ok with ableton and i had to remove it at all.

(more likely than no the buffer size is adjusted in your audio interface, not in ableton)

Over the weekend a friend and myself finally got together this weekend to jam on ableton but nothing really materialized. No inspirato :(

Can anyone share some things you do to jump-start a track making session or break out of a creative funk? We tried beer fyi.

Take a walk.

I tried changing to ASIO to reduce latency and it seemed to work for a while, the track rendered without errors. But in general ASIO seems slower and stuff is popping more within Ableton.

I'm using the sound card that came with my laptop so probably not great quality, does that have a bearing?

an external (firewire probably, or usb2) sound card, or i guess PCMCIA as well, would definitely cut down on latency and clicks

plus you'll probably get better (cleaner) sound

its win win really, except for the cash yr gonna shell out to get a good one

Ronan, the track will always render without errors, since it's just processing at its own rate, not playing in real time -- the latency errors you're getting come from slip-ups in getting the sound processed, converted, and fed to your speakers/headphones at the proper rate, so they're just a playback/recording thing.

this is true

My GF went out of town this weekend so I had lots of time to spend working on production and I had some really positive results that I thought I'd share with you guys. The track isn't finished yet, it's around eight and half minutes long and needs a better 3rd act, but I had a mini breakthrough about how to use follow actions to arrange a track in the session view.

Previously I would write some basic progression and a beat and then run into a road block of how to make a song out of it. I could click loops on and off or write a new part but it tended to create all these dissimilar sounding pieces that didn't really work together. Everyone always says "just keep at it and you learn arrangement" so I did and have a good 30 attempts at tracks that ended this way.

So this time around I did something different, admittedly it's very linear, and produced something that follows a more traditional format for dance music. The key to whole thing was using Ableton's legato mode (follow actions) to turn session very into a very powerful step sequencer.

Roughly, the layout is dividing the session window into groups of 4 or 5 rows skipping a row to separate clips so follow actions don't accidentally trigger new sections prematurely. On the far right of Live I have labels for INTRO, PART 1, PART 2, BREAKDOWN, BREAKDOWN 2, FILL A, FILL B. For my main drums I have a 15 bar part that triggers 1 of 4 1-bar fills that return to the top of the section which is where I keep the main loops. The same technique of is repeated with other instruments like bass and lead. With everything laid out this way I hit record, fired the intro line and worked my way down through clips and when I was ready fired the next part of the song.

On the very bottom of each section I could have transitory clips that are set to do something (change the midi note pattern, hit a delay, go silent) and then flip down into the next section. Hmm, I just thought of that while writing this... I'm glad I posted this and hope it helps you out!

It's a lot of left-brained preliminary work setting up follow actions and that's sort of distracting from the "fun" part of making beats and melody lines. It's tempting to save the layout for future use but that might lead to very cookie-cutter sounding tunes.

loling at my bolded typos, btw

I'm getting a lot of problems with channels just going haywire and making loud earsplitting high pitched noises.

Is this (a) the fault of the pirates (b) memory/latency problems (c) individual programmes/vsts a bit faulty (c) all of the above.

I'm making stuff of headphones and once or twice I've had to scream in pain from these noisy glitches.

i can't diagnose that problem because i've never used these programs but maybe you could mitigate it by setting up everything to run through a clipper right before the digital to analog conversion. set it to clip at 105 or 108 decibels or something like that and use your eyes by watching the level meters. instead of your ears.

i will venture a guess and say that earsplitting high frequency noise is typical of uncontrolled positive feedback loops.

Well so I sprung for a Behringer BCD3000, which is the new "mac compatible" version of the BCD 2000. It's a little wonky but after a few hours I finally can make sound & cue stuff with it in ableton, which is totally great! Just thought I'd post about my accomplishment. There's a lot of weird stuff about this mixer -- you get the feeling that the mac drivers are very primitive (The wrong lights come up on the hardware for one, i.e., when pressing buttons I've assigned to, say, killing an EQ frequency the light for, say, FX 3 comes on, etc. I suppose I can work around this by just paying attention to what I'm doing.)

Behringer stuff is fairly well known to be extremely cheaply made in China with a fairly high failure rate - but somehow they always manage these extremely attractive feature lists. I guess like any other cheap or less-than-touring-quality equipment, you'll get good at it and then be amazed at how fantastic you are when you finally get your hands on real performance gear, like an Allen & Heath Xone:3D or something.

SwitchSpeedXP

This is a handy shareware utility for you folks running XP on a laptop. Those Microsoft bitches didn't bother to code in direct controls for speed scaling/power management in XP. This app will allow you to have direct control over your processor in both AC and battery modes. Now that I have installed this, Reaktor ensembles that used to use 50% of my system resources now take about 20%.

here's my sub-girl talk mainstreamish mash-up happy danceparty if anyone would like to hear that sort of thing, and maybe dance to it. it's kind of fun.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/x60n9g

does anyone know if i can add a midi keyboard to a Traktor setup? what i want to do is integrate FM8 (an NI product) with Traktor. The NI forums haven't been any use. Could I run them side by side? (would that get into soundcard issues? it sure would get into pain in the ass switching back and forth issues)

Question: I've been making tracks for some time on my now 6+ year old computer using Fruity Loops (FLStudio4) (using that as I got it for free) on my relatively small computer speakers, and have, in recent time have started taking things slightly more seriously i.e. making demos and stuff. My problem is, how can I get the tracks to sound like they, well, weren't made on an old computer with a low quality soundcard and encoded with fruity loops, which for some reason is incapable of exporting tracks at volumes that aren't incredibly low. Is there anyway I can possibly yield tracks that will be mastered properly, I'm totally lost with these sorts of things, or am I mad for having the audacity for trying to make music seriously with fruity loops on computer speakers with old computer speakers.

id like to know the answer to that too. do any well-known remixers or producers or music-makers out there use FLS?

Heh, I remember Dominik Eulberg once made a track entirely out of preset cheesy FL samples. I read once that Deadbeat uses it just as a basic sequencer, but then runs his tracks through something else.

I also hope that these tracks aren't unsalvagable, like, if wouldn't be able to get the samples (with effects etc.) without encoding them first. Hmmn.

I use FLS all the time in my music.

One of the ways Ive found to make it sound less corny or cheap sounding is that I don't use any of the stock sounds or instruments. For all the drums or percussion I usually slice up samples from rap songs or old rock songs and most of my instruments and effects are VST.

That and I often don't just use FLS. I'll sometimes save all the individual tracks and load them into Ableton and mess with them more, or more often, program a few basic things in FLS and then go back and record other stuff on top of that live.

But the type of music I'm making usually leans towards noise or experimental.

The beat slice is what makes FL worth having

what's the pc equivalent for logic 8? can logic 8 run on a pc?

fd, what does ableton enable you to do a track that fl cannot?

better interface, better workflow, better effects, better sound quality.

Use it and you will notice the difference in 5 minutes or less.

The effects and sound quality are both better in Ableton, although to be honest I prefer the interface of FL Studio.

Anyone tried Reason 4 yet? It looks lovely.

The problem with FL is that it's really really fucking awkward to string all the little parts together to make a song. Ableton, and most other sequencers, are better at this part. Sound quality should end up the same in either if y're using external samples/VSTs.

Logic is Mac only coz they bought the brand. Cubase is yr PC equivalent.

xpost
reason 4 is in the mail right now, can't wait for it to get here. i'm mostly excited about the new sequencer, i can take or leave the arpeggiator and groove thing. thor looks neat. hopefully there will be some decent new sounds in the factory bank, but it looks like it will be worth the price for vector automation, tempo/time automation, virtual tracks, tools panel, etc.