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

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.

FL's rendering engine is garbage. It makes everything sound small and tinny. I was using Waves Platnum to massage the audio before rendering and I couldn't get passable results.

I switched over to Ableton and just used to built in effects and with enough work I was able to get decent results. Good enough to have a lot of people assuming that I was rocking a hardware set up. It takes a lot of work to make it not sound like ableton, but it can be done.

The real secret is to stop rendering your mixes in the first place.

Also, don't think I am just hating FL because it isn't a "real" audio program. There are a lot of things that I did like about it. I used it for a long time, but I had to give it up because I could only push that engine so far. I wasn't having any problems actually getting my ideas into the program.

I couldn't get those ideas to *sound* the way I wanted them to sound. It was the program itself that was the problem, it wasn't my lack of skill.

The real secret is to stop rendering your mixes in the first place.

Eh?

which for some reason is incapable of exporting tracks at volumes that aren't incredibly low

Not to get all Nick Southall on you, but it's too easy to get this feeling now with ANYTHING you're making, because the CDs you buy in the store have been mastered to be very loud. Before you fall into the trap of trying to make your mixes compare with someone else's masters, play them on decent-sized speakers with the volume up. Maybe they sound good like that. (If it makes you feel any better, I have seen a Renowned Electronic Artist send someone a remix to play out somewhere with that caveat: "this is straight off my computer and not mastered, so it's quiet, and you'll have to play it louder," etc.)

That said, there are loads of mastering effects for use with this kind of software -- compressors, limiters, and EQs -- so you can give your tracks the finished feel of a "hot" master. (You can use them on individual tracks as you're working, or just use them as global effects to master your finished mix.)

You also say you're mixing your tracks on small computer speakers, which would mean of course they come out tinny and quiet -- that's how you're mixing them!

I haven't used FL -- if it's particularly bad at rendering stuff, well then yeah, you might be better off switching to something else, rather than trying to bulk up your finished mixes with compressors and such. But don't necessarily imagine any other software is just automatically as loud as the hot-as-hell mastering you hear on people's albums.

Oh, PS: if you really like the workflow, etc., with FL, you can always build things there, then export each track/instrument individually as a sound file -- then import them and lay them all out in some other program, and use THAT program to do the mixing, adding of mastering effects, etc.

that is the bitch of it, Nabisco. I had the same bright idea but you can't polish a turd. If the loop sounds weak and tinny in the first place, processing the hell out of it isn't going to help.

Robt Henke of Ableton (and Monolake) did some tests on the rendering abilities of all the major sequencers and came to the conclusion that although some were slightly better than others, that the differences were so infinitesimal as to be not worthy of consideration. There's info about it on the Ableton site somewhere but I can't find it anywhere.

IIRC, Imageline, the company behind FL, did the same thing a couple of years ago and came to the same conclusion.

I think if people have sound problems, rendering is NOT where it's gonna come from.

x-post.

Yeah, basically -- "if the loop sounds weak and tinny" = this sounds like a problem with the loop, you know?

I've done that track-by-track outputting in the past, mostly because Reason didn't do plug-ins: I'd have to load the tracks and add all the mixing/mastering effects elsewhere. (These days, thankfully, I can just wire it straight into Ableton for plug-ins and mixing.)

sort of related -

If people talk about sound quality they should listen to, say Pink Floyd recordings from 1980. Even the cheapest low cost mixer nowadays has a more linear frequency response and even the cheapest soundcard today has more headroom and less distortions then the most expensive mastering tape recorder 25 years ago.

Robert Henke

The volume thing was the biggest source of problems, so hearing that that is common is a great relief. The problem for me is that I''m so used to using FL I could make a track with the sound off, I tried using ableton and reason demos and couldn't even know how to make any noise with them let alone work out the fine details.

That Robert Henke quote is a half truth at best. Robert Henke has a vested interest in promoting the idea that computer music is the end-all-be-all of music technology. If you want to talk about sound quality talk about a Pink Floyd recording from the early 70's. Using The Final Cut as an example of something we have progressed from is misleading. If I had to choose between that and the last Monolake album, I will take the old stuff.

I would be very interested in seeing his methodology for those tests that claim there isn't a difference. It doesn't jibe with my experiences. If there is no difference why did I see an immediate jump in the quality of my productions when I moved to Ableton? Why did I immediately hear the difference? It wasn't like I was using stock VST's and effects in FL, I was using NI and Waves stuff and still not getting solid mixes.

If there isn't a difference, why could I hear it? Why did my mixes in ableton sound instantly warm and full and my FL mixes from a month earlier sound tinny while using the same VST instruments and effects while mixing, programming, and EQ'ing basically the same way?

Also, if rendering isn't an issue why do a lot of dudes use analogue summing boxes for their mixes instead of just doing automation inside the box?

http://mixguides.com/consoles/product_features/consoles-strictly-summing-1204/

Why did my mixes suddenly sound way better when I stopped rendering and recorded my mixes in real time on outboard recording gear? Why was there a difference between recording the rendered mix and recording the song as it played back? I wish I didn't hear a difference, rendering is a hell of a lot cheaper, quicker, and more convenient.

I'm at work so In can't poke around the Ableton forum but there is a thread about it somewhere. (There's a thread on KVR about it too.) There's a press release as well but I dunno if it's on their site.

Obviously if you record to outboard gear then that gear has an effect beyond what the sequencer/computer is doing, esp. if you were going to tape or suchlike.

If there is a difference between recording a rendered track as a stereo pair and recording the actual output of ableton as a stereo track in real time on the same gear then there is something going on in the rendering.

When ableton renders audio it makes things sound like ableton. The first rule of recording is that you can't fix anything in the mix. If it doesn't sound good in the first place, it will not sound good with heavy EQ and dynamics processing.

You can avoid that distinct sound by capturing the audio during a live playback. If ableton doesn't have a characteristic sound, how come I can tell that certain records across different genres were made in it when I flip through the racks? How come I can hear ableton across a room when I am out at a club? I am not the only one who can do this.