Mixing Music - The Science Behind Layering Drums. Layering kicks is a great way to create a unique sound or feeling for your beats and grooves. Taking a thud-like kick and blending in another one with more snap, or adding a grungy techno-oriented kick to a deep 909 are just two examples of how you can set your kick sounds apart from the rest of the crowd. But sometimes, getting the attacks of two (or more) kicks to "marry" can be tricky. The key to success is a mixture of knowing just a little bit of acoustic science along with the best judge of what sounds good - your ears!
01 - Coincident Volume Envelopes Depending on your zoom level, you'll see different things. In this view we see kind of an "overall shape" of the way the volume fluctuates in a piece of recorded audio. This is called the volume envelope. At this zoom level we can't see detail along the horizontal axis (left to right). 02 - Frequency Considerations What we can't see along the horizontal axis at more zoomed-out zoom levels is the frequency of the kick waveforms. AskAudio Magazine. You are probably used to creating your beats, bass and synth sounds, then creating a reverb bus channel, and applying some of that reverb effect to your individual instruments.
Sure, this is a nice way to create a room effect that is coherent amongst your instruments and sounds, but what about using some creative techniques with reverb? I am going to show you how to use reverb a little differently to create interesting processing effects with your tracks. I will be using Ableton, but these same principles can be applied in other DAWs as well. Step 1 – Side-chain Reverb An interesting effect is to create that side-chain “pumping effect” with the reverb. I have programmed a simple Kick beat.
Next I have created a MIDI Track (Shift-Command-T), and loaded up the Pad-Bowed-Square preset (Instruments > Instrument Rack > Synth Pad) under the Live Library. Next up I have added the Ableton Compressor. Here is what my synth sounds like: Step 2 – Gated Reverb Step 3 – Reverse Reverb Low Band: Mid Band: Your DAW Sucks. If you’re like me, you use a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) program to record your music. And like me, you occasionally visit various forums and blogs to aid with troubleshooting or operational support of your DAW. And if you do, I’m sure you’ve come across the oft-posted thread wherein someone opines that the DAW program you’re using “sucks!” For me, I’m a big fan of the Steinberg program Cubase.
Therefore, I’m always amused when I see someone post, “Cubase sucks!” Well, if it does, why is it the most popular DAW on the planet? Artists like Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Accept, Erran Baron Cohen, Hans Zimmer, Kraftwerk, Meshuggah, and countless others rely on Cubase (and its post-production variant, Nuendo) to produce their creative endeavors.
So I’m here to tell you: If Cubase sucks, then Pro Tools, Studio One, Reaper, Logic, Sonar, DP, Live, Reason, et al, also suck. Cubase is an extremely popular and capable DAW, but does it prove that a bad workman blames his tools? Summing up. Ableton Live: Chopping beats MPC style. The influence of the MPC sampler is hard to measure. It is widely considered to be the instrument of choice for sample slicing and has measurably contributed to shaping entire genres of music, most notably hip-hop, but also drum and bass and to a lesser extent house and techno. With this in mind we thought it might be fun to make an article on how to recreate MPC slicing techniques in Ableton Live. Live has all the tools you need, so if you’ve ever wondered if you can get that famous groove “in the box” then read on.
Slicing a beat First of all, let’s start with a drum loop. Here is an example drum loop that I’m going to work with in this tutorial: A slowish funk loop made in FXpansion’s BFD2 which we’re going to hip-hop-ify! It helps if your original loop is trimmed to exact bars although not 100% necessary. Any audio clip can be sliced using Live’s slicing tool. A dialog box will appear with two options. When you click the OK button a series of events will take place: Remixing the drum loop. Using Dummy Clips to Trigger Effects in Ableton Live. Ableton is a very interesting DAW/Sequencer. With its Arrangement and Session view, one can make use of different approaches to build up compositions. The nice things is that it doesn’t have to be in a linear approach either like other DAWs. Using the Session View you can trigger different clips to build up your arrangement.
I am going to show you how you can use dummy clips to trigger different effects, and how you can use these triggered clips to build up an interesting arrangement. Step 1 – Create The Dummy Clip The beauty of Ableton is that with each clip you create, you can assign different envelope settings. Make sure you are in the Session View. Make a duplicate of this track (Command-D) and rename this track ‘DUMMY CLIP’ (Command-R). On the LOOP track change the Audio To: DUMMY CLIP. On the DUMMY CLIP change the Audio From: LOOP, and make sure that the Monitor is set to In. Step 2 – Apply the Effects Step 3 – Use a Chain Selector On the right is the MIDI numerical value from 0-127. Creating Homemade Stutters in Ableton Live.
Lately, you can’t throw a brick without hitting one of the handfuls of ‘Stutter’ plugins that are out there. It’s an effect that has more than made itself at home in modern electronic music. And, though many of the ‘Stutter’ plug-ins that are out there like Stutter Edit, the Finger, and so on, are still new-ish, by a few years, the effect is far from new. Stutters, glitches and the like have been in electronic music for way over a decade. And, while often, stutters have been only a mild effect that may happen once on an album, another album may have used stutters and glitches with enough regularity that the stutters were almost instruments in unto themselves. Currently, you may be looking at implementing a few stutters, glitches and the like into songs of your own, but you may not feel that going out and buying, or even learning to use one of these effects has enough payoff for the time you’d spent. If this is the case, you’re in luck!
Step 1 - Determining the Area to Repeat making space. "Dude, Where’s My Data?": 6 Ways to Keep Your Audio Data Safe Always. You might think the topic of data management is boring. But once you lose your client’s data, watch the excitement begin. Be mindful that your client and reputation may vanish along with the data. Like a reformed smoker, no one backs up data better than someone who’s just had a drive crash the day before. Don’t wait to learn the hard way. Tip 1 - Send In The Clones Unless you have more than one copy of your data, it is NOT secure. When a client’s drive comes into my studio, I make sure it will run and make a digital backup before I go to work.
Retrospect is an incremental back-up system, which means once you back-up the initial session, subsequent backups only add the changes rather than copying all data every time. Tip 2 - Know your drive’s freshness date Unless I must work on the client’s drive directly, I use my own work drives that are rated for five year use, usually Western Digital Black SATA drives, 500 GB to 1 TB. Here is a reusable external drive enclosure from Macally.