Copyright Concerns For Digital DJs. The world of intellectual property law is quite relevant to musicians, especially DJs and producers that sample other people’s material in performance and composition. In this article, we provide some general tips for navigating this confusing, potentially treacherous landscape, so read on as we explain the basics behind laws that apply when remixing in your bedroom or playing a mashup routine live. Please be aware that this article is written from the perspective of United States law. The spirit of most other national copyright laws is similar that of the U.S, but there are often important differences. The Basics of Copyright A copyright is an exclusive right, granted by the government, to the author of a particular work.
There are two “sides” to music copyrights: a master side and a publishing side. “Infringement” is the legal term for violating someone else’s copyright. This might take the form of (among other things) Production Official Remixes Your Rights When Making A Remix Related. Ableton Live Tips: Launch Properties and Follow Actions. This week we’ve got some cool tips for all you Ableton Live users; if you’ve been wanting to get a little deeper below the surface and find out how you can really customise Live into the rig of your dreams then you really should know how you can manipulate the Launch Properties of the clips you use, including Follow Actions.
It’s not that difficult to get your head around how to get these tricks to work for you, but it’s probably easier if I just show you. I’ve recorded a video to help bring you up to speed: To recap: To get more interesting behaviour out of Live, we can change clips’ launch properties. In the first example I take four drum loops that are each two bars long and put them all in the same track, which by default makes each cut the other off, inheriting the global launch quantisation when triggered. The clip switching itself can be automated with Follow Actions; upon launching the clip, something else can be set to happen a certain amount of time. So, here are the main points: DJing in Ableton: How To Warp Tracks with Drifting Tempo. In the first part of our series on how to get started DJing in Ableton Live, we took a look at the possibilities opened up by Live for DJs and learned how to warp an electronic dance track with a steady tempo. But not every track you’ll want to work into your sets will be as simple as that – what happens when you have a live drummer or a track with serious tempo changes?
Here, we look into warping more “difficult” songs with a non-constant tempo. As we’ve noted in the past, most current club tracks produced on modern DAWs, whether house, techno, dubstep, electro or hip-hop, are based on tightly quantized drum patterns. These songs will have a pretty much constant tempo all throughout, with minimal drift. Warping these tracks is very easy, and in many cases, will only require you to set 2-4 Warp Markers to have the song ready for a DJ set.
Live drumming takes more a bit more effort to warp in Ableton As with any process, making sure you’ve got the right workspace for the job is critical. How To Start DJing In Ableton (Part 1) For the past several years, we’ve seen Ableton Live establish itself as a popular and powerful DJ tool, with many top DJs routinely using the software in clubs and stages around the world.
While the switch to Live may be daunting for those accustomed to traditional DJ paradigms, the advanced performance capabilities offered can be very worthwhile. In this series, we explore how DJs new to Ableton can use Live 8 to unlock greater creativity in the booth, starting with an overview of Session View and a lesson on how to easily warp dance music for sets. Why Live? A Different Kind of DJ Live stands apart from other DAWs in that it has always been as much about performance as it is about production. The software was from the onset designed to be used on stage, with forward-thinking users taking advantage of Live’s noted clip launching and timestretching facilities to suit the particular needs of DJs. Songs stay perfectly in sync without manual beatmatching with track warping. 5 Free VSTs That Every DJ Needs. Happy New Year, TechTools readers! We wanted to start this year off right, by doing the thing that we love to do best- giving you the heads up on some awesome tools that could help you take your DJ and production world to the next level.
We’ve seen tons of examples of great ways to use traditional DJ effects in Traktor and Serato, but what about DJ programs that support VST effects, like Deckadance, Virtual DJ, Torq, and for the more production minded, Abelton? Our recent contributor Meatman has compiled a list of awesome effects that work best in the live DJ environment (although they may work great in the studio too!). And did we mention that they’re free? Glitch I’ll start it off with easily the most popular plug-in for live effects. Classic Chorus I’ve tried a lot of chorus plug-ins. Neat trick: Download Camel Crusher (below) and link up the distortion parameters to Classic Chorus’s modulation depth or the wet/dry knob for a gritty, spacy textured chorus. Tape Delay Camel Crusher Related. Remixing Without Stems. Swimming to the top of today’s hyper-crowded pool of talented Djs can be a menacing task.
Everyone’s grandma is now djing with auto beat matching software and music blogs are serving up endless supplies of hot tracks that everyone has within a few weeks. In this increasingly level playing field, one of the best ways to set yourself apart from the crowd is to produce custom edits and remixes of popular tracks. You are probably wondering how that might be possible without acapellas or stems (parts of a song). In this article we are going to look at one way to extract stems from a finished song you already have and use those stems to create a custom remix. Edits, Remixes, Stems Oh My! Outside of the production world most people think stems come with flowers attached. Take a look at the Frequency Chart above. The first step is to listen to the track very carefully and note anywhere there is a solo instrument cleanly separated from the group.
Scalpel please Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Step 4. Make It loud! DJ’s guide to Mastering Pt 2. You’ve just put together a killer re-mix and spent weeks making everything perfect but its still not bumping like the big club bangers. Don’t worry- You need professional quality mastering and we are here to try and help. Last month we brought you Part I of our DJ mastering guide, Pump up the Jam, which discussed the concept of mastering with industry experts. This month, we will take you through the process detailing what to look for in each step along the road to mastering perfection.
Finally, as if that was not enough, read on for a chance to win 2 of the top mastering plug-ins out there. Before you start. Never underestimate how important it is to get your mix as sonically correct as possible and to know what sort of overall sound you are trying to achieve before you start mastering. It is perhaps useful to think of the mastering process as analogous to a food condiment, namely salt. Ready to begin. Bus compress: EQ cuts: On to boosting: Perhaps your kick needs to come out more… Related. Pump Up The Jam – A DJs Guide to Mastering.
You’re a hardworking DJ, and have probably started to make a few edits and remixes that sound great in the studio, but in the club just don’t pump like the latest releases. Why is that? What secrets do the pros know that you don’t? Well in most cases the answer lies in one word—mastering. In order to shed some light on this often misunderstood art, I caught up with John Cuniberti, one of the world’s leading gurus in mastering, to shed some light on his mystic process.
With a discography and client list that reads like a Who’s Who of the music world (ranging from Stevie Wonder to DJ Shadow), heavy involvement in hardware and software development, and countless years of experience, perhaps he can give us a better insight… Can you tell us what mastering actually is? JC: Mastering is the last creative process in the production chain, and the final technical check before replication. Why is this not achieved at mix-down, and why is mastering the magic ingredient? SW: Yeah! SW: Yes, everything. Compress With The Best – A How-To. With the rise in availability of musical technology (DAWs specifically), more and more producers are surfacing, and more DJs are incorporating production techniques into their workflow. Compression is by far the most used (and therefore, abused) of these techniques, simply due to lack of knowledge of what a compressor does, and how to work one properly. These processors can truly make or break a track or live recording by either giving the music the extra thump it needs, or making it painful to listen to — it all depends on the knowledge the user has.
Let’s go through and break down different aspects of compressors, how they interact with each other, and how to integrate them correctly into a production or DJ workflow. The Concept is Simple A set amount of signal (threshold) passing through the compressor has its dynamic range (how loud or soft the signal is) lowered by a set amount (ratio), at a certain speed (attack, release, knee). First, let’s define some terms you will come across: