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Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

Abletonlife.com is a great little site. If you’re into Ableton Live in any of its forms, be sure to check it out. But for now, just check out this great “screencast” done by the folk(s) at Ableton Life: an intro to DJing in Live.

If you need help building a Live DJ rig, be sure to check out my article about the subject here.

Part 2 after the jump!

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McDSP is extending their sale until May 2010 – that’s 30% everything. Single plugins, bundles, you name it. So if you’re looking for some new plugins to blow your tax refund on, then you’ve found the right deal.

The Retro Recorder iPhone app (review forthcoming) is also on sale in the iTunes Store for only 99 cents.

Links:

McDSP Store / Buy Retro Recorder

Sanjay and I wrote about iZotope’s newest mixing plugin, Alloy, after AES in October and it looks like they’ll be demonstrating it again at NAMM.

Alloy includes six different processors within the plugin: EQ, exciter, transient designer, de-esser, dynamics, and compressor. The plugin ships with 150 different presets, but you’re free to create your own chains and save them as well.

If you’re at all familiar with iZotope’s Ozone plugin, then you’ll be right at home with Alloy. Check out the video below for a demo. Also, read the press release after the jump.

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So the AASG staff took some time off, but we’re heading into 2010 full-steam ahead. The first order of business is to announce our new friend and editor, Andrew Levine. I asked Andrew to write up a small auto-biography so you could get to know him a little bit better:

Andrew Levine was born 1968 in NY city. As sun of a trumpet player he got into music at an early age, studying violin and singing, then detoured into pursuing an academic career. He received an M.A. in computational linguistics and cognitive psychology at the University of Trier and moved to Berlin in 1995, where he lectured university graduates in the fields of software development (lots of Enterprise Java) and digital media. Besides this occupation he developed multimedial CD-ROM’s, shot and edited several documentaries in the field of pedagogics.

At some point (around 2002) the music reemerged and “sound” became central to Andrew’s life. There followed intensive studies of the theory of recording and lots of ears-on experimentation with various musicians, tracking whatever he could lay microphones on. Organ recitals, choral concerts, tango sextets, live rock and oratorios. In 2004 Andrew released the 1st CD of his sonophile label “blumlein records”. In the following year he was excepted into the German Tonmeister Association and moved to Hamburg with his studio and family.

Fast forward to 2008: After recording many a concert in preparation for an enveloping remix the LevingRoom finally is upgraded to 5.1 surround. Several months are spent experimenting with surrounding renditions of sessions dating back to 2003. In the same year Andrew develops and tests the XYtri that is presented at the bi-annual VDT international convention.

Andrew also has a few websites you should check out:  http://mobile.blumlein.net/index_gb.html (recording), http://edition.blumlein.net/index_gb.html (label), and http://radio.blumlein.net/ (blog)

Andrew will be tackling the more hardcore audio topics and generally helping us out around the site. Be sure to look out for all our future reviews, articles, tutorials, and more!

Question: How do I get the other outputs on Ultrabeat to work when using the Multichannel version of the plugin?

So Ultrabeat is a monster of a plugin, but there are a few simple tricks to using that save a lot of time and make the plugin really flexible for something that comes bundled with a DAW.

Setting up a multichannel version of Ultrabeat allows you to group your samples and play them out of ultrabeat into different aux tracks.  I chose to have kicks come out of the main track, snares out of another aux, toms a second aux and cymbals out of a third. Basically I can put different compressors and EQ’s on the kicks than I do on the snares.  Then I can tweak the hi-end of the cymbals and gate the toms – all on separate channels.  Pretty cool, right?  Check out the video!