Composing and Producing Electronic Music

Hey there everyone, I just started my new course Composing and Producing Electronic music, and I am totally excited. In preparing for the course I made a series of videos using Ableton Live, you may have seen them featured on the Ableton site. Well as a present for visiting me here you can download the live set and experiment with the sounds yourself, enjoy!

Tracks Interact Live Set download

And in case you didn’t see them yet, here is the series of videos, I suggest you open them in Youtube for the full HD viewing experience!

Have Fun. Make Music,

L-Don

Hey everybody, I have been wanting to try this out for a while, and I wish I did it earlier.  Took an old car speaker and wired it to a quarter inch jack, plug it into my audio interface, and play on the speaker with drumsticks. Sounds great! Awesome kick drum sounds. I have heard of people doing this and using the speaker to mic a kick drum, but hitting the speaker directly makes pretty darn good kick sounds. You can download my drum rack filled with 49 separate speaker hits: Speakerhits. Use them for whatever you like.

Have Fun. Make Music,

L-Don

Hey everyone, this one is a really quick video on editing audio in the arrange view:

Have Fun, Make Music,

L-Don

Hello everyone, I have created another YouTube video, this time it is about performing with the Live effects, specifically switching effects on the fly with MIDI mappings.  This technique uses effect racks, the chain selector, MIDI mappings, and some non-standard signal flow, but the result is great.  Check it out!

Since you are here, download the Live performance effects Project.

Have Fun. Make Music.

L-Don

Hello everyone!  This post is a little different—it is about pictures not sound. Live can act as a really easy video editor. All you need to do is drop your pictures and video into an audio track! Here is a video explaining some of the specifics.

and since you are here download the  Live performance effects Project.

Have fun. Make music.

-L-Don

I find myself moving to audio earlier in the production process.  When you get to the final mix and there are hundreds of clips all with their own envelopes and automation, it becomes impossible to work with.  By bouncing clips to audio you commit all the envelopes to audio, much easier and you are more likely to do more interesting modifications.

A similar thing happens with MIDI clips, in the final mixing stage, midi clips are just annoying, so convert them to audio. This also saves considerable CPU resources by playing back audio clips instead of running your soft synths.   And, having audio clips future-proofs your project; sometimes soft synths are no longer produced or their sound changes during an upgrade.

There are a couple ways to bounce to audio, but the freeze and copy method is fast and easy, so here it is:

Have fun. Make music.

L-Don

Hello everyone, welcome to the new semester! I have a fun video for you this time, more fun with Sampler, but there are a ton of Live techniques in here that I use all the time(using an unlinked envelope to find a good hit is a GREAT technique).

You can download my project files here:

ReverbSynthLite.alp

Have Fun. Make Music.

Loudon

Hello all, this is the first of a series of posts centered around Racks in Live.  Racks are Live’s way to handle all things parallel, and one of the major reasons why I choose Live over any other DAW.

Have fun. Make music.

-L-Don

Hello all, one of my students was asking about using white noise and filter sweeps to create dramatic transitions.  I started experimenting with the idea and had a ball playing with the possibilities and exploring sound.  So, here is how I responded:

Hey guys, the white noise sweep is a cool effect, here is my version.  I have attached the screenshot and the preset, you can drop it into a MIDI track and hold down any note to hear the sweep.

The noise generator is Operator, I have the first two oscillators set to create noise.

Noise Operator

Then the filter  in Operator is used to create the sweep, It is a band pass filter and its envelop is controlling the cutoff frequency of the filter.  You may want to adjust the Attack parameter of the filter envelope to control how fast the filter moves to the top, Resonance will change how obvious the filter is, and you may want to play with the Shaper and Drive amount, very cool.

Filter section of Operator

After the operator is a Frequency Shifter that adds a nice movement to the noise, notice the settings, I am using a tiny amount of shift, I find that is the best way to use the effect(it adds a nice modulating phasey quality, any more and it turns into a crazy Dr. Who effect), and Dry/Wet is set below 50%.

Frequency Shifter and delay

Next is a delay to add some lingering motion to help glue the sections and an EQ to tame the high end and boost the bass.

Here is the preset: NoiseSweepAdg

Drop it into a MIDI track and hit a key on your keyboard to hear it in action.
Enjoy, and thanks for the challenge I enjoyed building the patch, and I will probably use it in my future productions.  Feel free to use it yourself, and explore explore explore!
Loudon

Hello all, I have been meaning to put these videos together for a while.  Reason and Live work really well together, I think the folks at Ableton found the absolute best way to work between the two programs and the key is the External Instrument device, check it out:

and to take the idea even further:

And here are the template files that I used in the 2nd video, I am curious to know if all the routings are maintained on other computers:

ReasonLiveTemplate Project

Have Fun. Make Music.

Loudon